A merchant’s son in New York
Joel Elias Spingarn was born in New York City on May 17, 1875, the first of four sons of Elias Spingarn, a prosperous tobacco merchant who had emigrated from Austria as a young man, and Sarah Barnett Spingarn, who was born in England. The family was Jewish and comfortably upper middle class, and it produced two of the most important white allies in the early history of the American civil rights movement: Joel and his younger brother Arthur B. Spingarn, who would become the NAACP’s leading lawyer.
Joel attended the Collegiate Institute and City College before entering Columbia College, from which he graduated in 1895. That December he married Amy Einstein; they would have two daughters, Hope and Honor, and two sons, Stephen and Edward.
A critic who broke the rules
Spingarn stayed at Columbia for graduate work, spent time at Harvard, and earned his doctorate in 1899 with A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. The book established him as one of America’s foremost scholars of comparative literature and caught the attention of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, with whom Spingarn corresponded for decades; Croce had it translated into Italian in 1905 and wrote its preface.
Spingarn joined Columbia’s new department of comparative literature in 1899 as assistant to George Edward Woodberry, and rose to full professor by 1909. In a 1910 lecture published as The New Criticism, he argued that critics should stop judging works by rigid categories of genre, theme and period and instead ask what each work of art was trying to express on its own terms. The phrase would later be borrowed, in a different sense, by a whole school of American criticism, and his ideas were collected in Creative Criticism (1917).
Spingarn was also a poet and editor. He published The New Hesperides, and Other Poems in 1911 and further volumes of verse in 1924, and he edited a three-volume collection of seventeenth-century English critical essays (1908–09) and an edition of Goethe’s literary essays (1921). His correspondence with Croce, published in Naples in 2001, shows how closely he tied American criticism to European philosophy at a time when the discipline was still young.
Fired for independence
Spingarn’s outspokenness made him an awkward fit at a university ruled by its autocratic president, Nicholas Murray Butler. When Butler summarily dismissed a colleague, the classicist Harry Thurston Peck, over a public scandal, Spingarn offered a faculty resolution in Peck’s support. Within weeks he himself was dismissed, and by 1911 his academic career was over. He joined a list of distinguished progressive scholars who left Columbia during Butler’s long presidency.
Spingarn had private means and no intention of falling silent. He bought the local newspaper in Amenia, New York, near his country estate, Troutbeck; kept writing and editing; and turned to politics. He had already run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in 1908, and he served as a delegate to the Progressive Party’s national conventions in 1912 and 1916. In 1912 he tried and failed to have the party adopt a platform statement condemning racial discrimination.
Joining the NAACP
The cause that defined the rest of his life found him in 1910. Spingarn read a report about a Black tenant farmer in Arkansas who had killed his white landlord in self-defence and was then tortured and threatened with lynching. He sent money to the man’s defence fund and soon became involved with the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He later said that what disturbed him even more than physical violence was the contempt with which white Americans treated educated Black men and women.
He became one of the first Jewish leaders of the organisation and one of its most energetic. Nominated for the executive committee by Oswald Garrison Villard, with W. E. B. Du Bois seconding, he helped build the NAACP’s anti-discrimination programme and its network of local branches. In 1913 he launched what he called a “New Abolition” campaign, travelling and speaking to awaken Black and white Americans to the movement. He chaired the NAACP board from about 1913 to 1919, served as treasurer from 1919 to 1930, and recruited prominent Jewish figures including Jacob Schiff and Rabbi Stephen Wise to its leadership.
His activism was practical as well as rhetorical. Early in 1911, as an officer of the New York Vigilance Committee, he helped win a lawsuit against a theatre that had refused to sell tickets to Black men. He travelled to establish NAACP branches, argued for an organisation led by both Black and white members, and worked to strengthen its finances. Years later, as treasurer, he also pushed the association to hire more Black staff.
The Spingarn Medal and Amenia
In 1914 Spingarn established a gold medal to be awarded each year by the NAACP for the highest achievement by an African American. The first Spingarn Medal was presented in 1915 to Ernest Everett Just, the Howard University biologist. The award became the NAACP’s highest honour and has been given every year since to figures from scientists and writers to civil rights leaders; Spingarn’s will funded it in perpetuity.
Spingarn also opened his estate at Troutbeck to the movement. In August 1916 about sixty Black leaders and white reformers gathered there for three days at what became known as the Amenia Conference, to discuss the future of the struggle for Black rights. A second Amenia Conference met at Troutbeck in 1933, while Spingarn was president of the NAACP.
War, compromise and controversy
When the United States entered the First World War, Spingarn, who had trained at the Plattsburgh military camps, was commissioned and served as a major. Convinced that Black Americans would otherwise be shut out of the officer corps entirely, he pressed for an officer training camp for Black men. Largely through his efforts a camp was established at Des Moines, Iowa, and about a thousand Black officers were commissioned. Because the camp was segregated, the decision was sharply criticised within the NAACP and the Black press; his defenders, including the historian B. Joyce Ross, argued that the alternative was no Black officers at all.
Spingarn also served in military intelligence in Washington, and according to later research he passed information about the NAACP’s membership to the government at a time when the organisation was accused of radical influence. He went to France with the American Expeditionary Forces and remained in the reserves, rising to lieutenant colonel.
Spingarn also donated uniforms for a hundred Howard University students who enlisted. After the war he was a delegate to the 1919 convention that founded the American Legion and became the first commander of its post in Amenia. His wartime choices remain debated by historians, but his motive, as he saw it, was to force open doors that would otherwise stay shut to Black Americans, a step he regarded as leading toward full integration.
Publisher, gardener, president
In 1919 Spingarn helped found the publishing house Harcourt, Brace and Company and served for some years as its literary adviser. At Troutbeck he pursued a lifelong passion for gardening with scholarly thoroughness: he assembled what was described as the world’s largest collection of clematis, some 250 species, wrote on the history of landscape gardening in Dutchess County, and sat on the Board of Managers of the New York Botanical Garden.
In 1930 he succeeded Moorfield Storey as the NAACP’s second president. He tried to hold together integrationists and those drawn to Black self-organisation, and worked closely with W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, until Du Bois resigned in 1934 after a dispute over strategy. Their friendship survived; Du Bois later dedicated his 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn to Spingarn’s memory, calling him “scholar and knight.”
Their bond impressed contemporaries. The novelist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in 1943 that Du Bois had loved Joel Spingarn and had certainly been loved by him in turn. That a Black scholar-activist and a wealthy Jewish critic could form such a partnership, argue fiercely and remain friends was itself a quiet demonstration of the interracial cooperation the NAACP was founded to promote.
Death and legacy
Spingarn died of a cerebral thrombosis at his New York City home on July 26, 1939, aged sixty-four, after a long illness, and was buried in Poughkeepsie, New York. His brother Arthur succeeded him as president of the NAACP and led it until 1965. Spingarn Senior High School in Washington, D.C., bears Joel’s name, and in 2009 he was one of twelve civil rights pioneers honoured on U.S. postage stamps marking the NAACP’s centenary. The family name also lives on at Howard University, whose Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is named in part for Arthur Spingarn.
Spingarn’s story is part of a larger chapter in which Jewish Americans, among them Lillian Wald, Jacob Schiff and Julius Rosenwald, helped found and fund the early NAACP, and historians have long debated how far their shared experience of prejudice drew them to the cause. In Spingarn’s case the motive was plainly moral as much as political. A scholar who had lost his own job for defending a colleague, he spent the second half of his life using his money, his estate and his name to insist that Black Americans be treated with the dignity their achievements deserved. Every year, when the medal he founded is awarded, that insistence is renewed.
Sources & further reading
Joel Elias Spingarn, Wikipedia · Joel Spingarn, Jewish Virtual Library · Joel Elias Spingarn, EBSCO Research Starters · Spingarn Medal, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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