Holidays for Humanity's Future: Festivals at New York's Ethical Culture School, 1890–1920

Describing the religious challenges at the beginning of the twentieth century, Percival Chubb of the New York Society for Ethical Culture wrote that “culture is engaged in the endeavor to transcend regional, ethnic, and national differences and barriers; and religion must follow suit.” His words pointed to the increasingly cosmopolitan eclecticism of modern religious liberalism. Although the concept of cosmopolitanism fit well with liberalism’s emphasis on pluralism and unity, it proved more elusive to put into practice.
One arena where liberals sought to live out this ideal was in festivals at New York’s Ethical Culture School, under the leadership of Percival Chubb as the Director of Festivals. Festivals in the schools aimed at a careful didacticism intended to inculcate the values of shared humanity in the minds and lives of the children. Chubb believed that “the festival in a democracy may therefore become an agency to lift the people above those things which are sectarian and sectional, above class spirit, race, color, denomination, into the sphere of what is universal and common”—in other words, an apt vehicle for creating cosmopolitan citizens.
The school used festivals to inculcate the values of the “universal and common” in the school’s young pupils, but they also used festivals to serve the didactic purpose of turning the students into ideal democratic citizens of America.  In pursuit of these sometimes-contrasting aims, Chubb chose festivals that had supposedly universal origins or appeal, such as those dedicated to the changing seasons and celebrations of the lives of humanity’s greatest exemplars. This paper focuses on their treatment  and presentation of two festivals, Christmas and All Souls’ Day (a celebration of the achievements of great men and women) to examine how school festivals lived out these contradicting intentions of Americanization and the creation of citizens of the world.