Adler was born in Alzey in 1851 and brought to New York as a child when his father took the pulpit at Temple Emanu-El. He was sent to Germany for doctoral study expressly to prepare him for the succession and came back unable to affirm a personal God; the sermon he preached at Emanu-El in 1873 ended the prospect. He became professor of political and social ethics at Columbia, chaired the National Child Labor Committee, and led the Society until his death in 1933. The movement declines to venerate him — there are portraits and no shrines — but every Ethical Society still runs on the arrangement he proposed at Standard Hall on 15 May 1876. This page files him as a teacher rather than a founder-figure for that reason.