New York Liberal Club Records

Biographical Note:

A small group of New Yorkers created the New York Liberal Club in September 1869 on the one hundredth anniversary of renowned naturalist Alexander von Humboldt's death. The club was a New York City based group founded to "procure the delivery of lectures, essays, and papers to compare views on questions of science, literature, and art, and promote education in those departments," according to the club's constitution. The club was located at Plimpton Hall at 30 Stuyvesant Place until 1876, when meetings moved to member G. L. Henderson’s Science Hall at 8th Street, near New York University and Washington Square Park.

Membership ranged from three hundred during its most popular years to less than a hundred near its decline. Members came from a variety of vocational backgrounds, including clergymen, lawyers, merchants, doctors, journalists, and professors, and a variety of religious backgrounds, including Christians, spiritualists, agnostics, and atheists, but all had the financial means to support their intellectual pursuits. There were female club members, and the club hosted female speakers. Club presidents included Horace Greeley, J. Wilson McDonald, James Parton, and Simon Sterne.

Founders intended the club to be a place where intellectuals could openly debate, under the presumption that all opinions would be respected. Meetings were organized to foster healthy debate. First, a speaker would give an hour-long speech about their chosen subject. Then members had 10 minutes each to refute the speaker. 15 minutes before the meeting ended, the speaker would respond to members' criticisms. 

In 1874, James Parton was elected President of the club. Parton's view that religion should be separate from politics and science caused discontent among some club members and outside observers. Parton lost the Presidency in April of 1877 to Simon Sterne, who campaigned against Parton’s anti-religious ideals. Following the election, members who disagreed with Parton’s dismissal and the growing trend of religious conservatism broke off from the group, forming the Manhattan Liberal Club. There was an unsuccessful attempt to reunify the two clubs in November of 1877 by members unhappy with the schism.

The original New York Liberal Club continued to face criticism. After hosting E. B. Foote Jr., a medical reformer who promoted the use of birth control in the medical profession, members of the medical community attempted to prevent future meetings. In response to the controversy and growing hostility between religious bodies and new scientific professionals, and in the wake of the failed reunification with the Manhattan Liberal Club, the New York Liberal Club disbanded in late 1877. The Manhattan Liberal Club operated into the twentieth century, turning their focus to social reform beginning in the 1880s.

Scope and Content Note:

This collection consists of the New York Liberal Club’s financial, social, and administrative records. These records include founding documents, treasurer's reports, vouchers related to membership dues, meeting announcements and minutes, lecture schedules, club correspondence, lists of members and officers, a legal summons, and the club Constitution and Bylaws. A poem written about the New York Liberal Club and a membership certificate are also part of the collection.

The collection additionally includes Manhattan Liberal Club records, including club correspondence, the Manhattan Liberal Club Constitution, and Resolutions to unify the New York Liberal Club and the Manhattan Liberal Club. Lecture schedules feature lectures such as “Carl [sic] Marx’s fallacies Concerning Surplus Values” and “Is Religion Useful to Humanity?”

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