The Humanitarian Cult
William Wesley Young was a Monroe WI-native who became involved in espionage— “active measures”— in NYC during the run up to WWI. His involvement was varied as he worked for both foreign interests and at least one domestic fifth-column, which I’ll write about today. Will Young edited Humanitarian Magazine, the mouthpiece for The Humanitarian Cult, and was likely involved with this NYC-based political cult from its earliest days.
I’ve written about Young with respect to ‘beauty queen’ Edith May Leuenberger’s day-planner and her strange connection to Quaker political activists, and regarding his involvement with British Intelligence. Young ties into the Goetz story via a racy movie Leon made about Edith May’s Ziegfeld experiences; Young is connected with John R Freuler because he worked for Freuler’s business friend Benjamin B. Hampton and quite possibly Freuler’s investor Otto Kahn too, which will be dealt with in this post.
“The Humanitarian Cult” was started in early 1914 (according to its own propaganda) with a Russian immigrant, Mischa Appelbaum, as its public face. The first premises were provided by an anonymous “motion picture theater operator”. The cult existed to mobilize and contain socialist-leaning political currents in NYC by exploiting cult-members as a voting block. Appelbaum would shop his followers’ votes between the Republican and Democratic parties in pursuit of policies that were beneficial to the men who really set up his organization. To begin with, Appelbaum was a pacifist with good things to say about Imperial Germany, but by March 1918— with a “William W. Young” presiding over his meetings— Appelbaum beat the war drum as well as any Teddy Roosevelt supporter.
Appelbaum was good speaking to crowds, but when he founded his own magazine in 1917, the cult’s controllers realized Appelbaum needed help. They hired William Wesley Young to edit the cult’s mouthpiece, The Humanitarian Magazine, which Appelbaum had started the year before.
The Brooklyn Citizen, Brooklyn NY.March 26th, 1918
Young may have been involved with the cult as early as November 1915, when papers reported that a “William Wallace Young” would speak alongside Mischa Appelbaum at the next cult meeting as chairman. We can be sure that William Wesley Young edited The Humanitarian in 1918, but I cannot be certain at this point if “Wallace” was a mistake in the Nov. 8th 1915 New York Tribune advertisement in which it appeared. (Neither Young nor his friend Davis Edward Marshall ever worked for the Tribune.) William Wesley performed the same chairing duties for cult meetings in 1918 that “William Wallace” performed in 1915.
The first press mention of the cult I could find comes from the Binghamton, NY paper Press and Sun-Bulletin, from January 14th 1915. It describes an “Honorable Mr. Pinchot” as “advance agent for the Humanitarian Cult”. I’ve included the other editorial snippets around this announcement, because it shows the paper’s critical attitude toward neutrality in 1915— at this time Mischa Appelbaum was promoting pacifism and neutrality.
Press and Sun-Bulletin, from January 14th 1915, Page 6.
“The Honorable Mr. Pinchot” in the context of 1915 New York, is almost certainly Mr. Amos Pinchot or his brother Gifford, who were both partisans of Theodore Roosevelt. Gifford was a particularly trusted ally of Teddy, and lead departments dealing with forestry (natural resources) since the time of President McKinley. When President Taft succeeded President Teddy Roosevelt, Pinchot lost political influence and attacked Taft’s natural resource policy reforms through the person of the new Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger. This dispute is known as the “Pinchot–Ballinger controversy” and led to Pinchot's dismissal. The “Pinchot-Ballinger controversy”— the reversal of Teddy Roosevelt’s plans for controlling natural resources— was an important factor in the split of the Republican Party and the formation of the Progressive Party leading into the 1912 presidential elections. Pinchot was a Roosevelt-Progressive, meaning a progressive as long as it was useful to Teddy. History does not look favorably on Theodore Roosevelt’s involvement with the Progressive Movement nor his actions dividing the Republican party: he killed the former and crippled the later. Both Roosevelt and the incumbent Taft were defeated by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, an academic with little foreign policy experience.
We can learn something about Teddy’s motivation from his courtship of the Progressives, however. In 1915 Roosevelt supporter and pacifist Edward Aloysius Rumely used money from the Imperial German government to purchase the New York Evening Mail, from which Teddy could profess his Progressive views. Not only did Teddy write for this paper, but so did Samuel Sidney McClure, founder of the McClure Syndicate. Three years earlier, in 1912, a morning NY paper was also purchased for Teddy’s Progressive campaign by Frank A. Munsey titled New York Press. Both William Wesley Young and Davis Edward Marshall had worked for the Press, but only Young worked there since Munsey purchased it. To a certain extent, the NY newspaper end of Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” campaign was financed by the Imperial German government.
The same year that Rumely purchased the Evening Mail and with the European war underway, one of the Pinchot brothers busied himself organizing New York’s socialists, whose views were in some instances comparable with Progressive ideas. That November a“William Wallace Young” chaired a meeting of Pinchot’s new voting-block cult:
New York Tribune, November 8th 1915. The radical egalitarian stance of the Humanitarian Cult might have been inspired by the egalitarian organization of the Quaker religious movement. Of course, things were not as undirected as they seemed…
It would not be just to credit Teddy Roosevelt alone with the foundation of the Humanitarian Cult— other people with notable interests in natural resources were also involved. For instance, Mischa Appelbaum himself credited a “Prof. Seligman” with inspiring him:
New York Tribune, March 19th 1916. The Title of the interview is “Making the Poor a National Responsibility”.
Given the context of this article, the professor in question is most likely Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman of Columbia University and the Educational Alliance. Seligman was the son of prominent banker Joseph Seligman. Prof Seligman was involved in WWI finance and although attracted to some elements of Marxist thought, was an opponent of Socialism. His father, the banker, profited from the US Civil War, railway expansion, and partnered with the Vanderbilt family to develop New York public utilities. Joseph Seligman was the first president of the Ethical Cultural Society, which became entwined with Appelbaum’s cult. Seligman’s family were related by blood and marriage to partners in Kuhn, Loeb & Co (Otto Kahn’s firm) as well as other prominent NYC banking families, including the Guggenheims, who are known for their copper investments. When Appelbaum came as a penniless religious refugee to the USA, he quickly established himself as a successful copper merchant in the Guggenheim’s home base, NYC. Appelbaum’s copper trading concern took office space at 55 Liberty Street, which also housed the law firm of Franklin Delano Roosevelt starting in 1911.
Another key backer to the cult was Jacob Schiff, who was Otto Kahn’s partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Schiff is probably most famous for his work supporting the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War. His involvement with the cult was not known until shortly after the banker’s death, when a bizarre mercury poisoning incident brought Mischa Appelbaum to the verge of death himself— more on that in a minute.
Finally, the elephant in the room is Otto Kahn himself. Kahn wrote for Humanitarian Magazine, so he lent his person, if not his finances, to the organization. He most likely also lent his music-world connections, as the key attraction to Appelbaum’s meetings were the free concerts that always accompanied them. By April 1917, the cult could boast 97 free concerts given, all with leading classical music artists of the day. It would take someone of Otto Kahn’s wealth and stature in the music community to organize this in early twentieth century NYC.
Advertisement from The Standard Union, of Brooklyn NY. September 6th, 1917. This would have been after Appelbaum adopted a pro-war stance. See Kahn’s article “The War and Business” at the bottom of the ad, also Herbert Hoover’s “The War’s Food Problem”. Dr. Stephen Wise was a leading Reform rabbi and a Zionist, who was born in Budapest, Austro-Hungary.
Ploughskeepie Eagle News, December 4th 1917. Otto Kahn was president and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera from about 1908 to 1931.
The purpose of the Humanitarian Cult was not to destroy socialism in New York City, but mold it along lines acceptable to Roosevelt, Seligman, Schiff et alia. The cult wanted to establish a “Secretary of Welfare” in the President’s Cabinet who would oversee all charity and unemployment assistance. This new secretary would also oversee “social preparedness”, whereby the government would take responsibility for feeding, clothing and housing the working masses. Appelbaum compared “social preparedness” to “military preparedness”, Britain’s “active measures” propaganda watchword, and by March 1916 Appelbaum claimed each type of “preparedness” was equally important.
New York Tribune, March 19th 1916. Image from an article titled “Making the Poor a National Responsibility.”
Meetings of the Humanitarian cult were often held at Carnegie Hall, where notable speakers like Alex Del Mar (president of the Latin American Chamber of Commerce); Thomas Mott Osborne (an Franklin Delano Roosevelt confidant whose Quaker family had for generations overseen Harriet Tubman’s finances and who become a controversial reforming warden of Sing Sing prison); Samuel Untermyer (a father of the Federal Reserve System and Zionist); and Frederic C. Howe (associated with the far-left wing of FDR supporters), among others.
In 1915 and early 1916 men such as these were decidedly anti-war. Appelbaum speaks eloquently for them:
New York Times, October 13, 1915. Please note Appelbaum’s reference to “battleships” and “social preparedness”. Five years later, these tropes were incorporated into Edith May’s nationally syndicated column describing her Ziegfeld experience.
On Monday, February 28th 1916 Appelbaum even proclaimed the following: “Germany, on the other hand, has been victorious so far because eight years ago the Kaiser proclaimed that he would not allow capital to exploit labor. The future of every working man in Germany is safe.” Here’s the full article:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 28th 1916. The church where this remarkable speech took place is probably the Universalist All Souls Church in Brooklyn. See Edith May’s flick “A Romance of the Movies” for more on this Christian denomination.
At this time Appelbaum’s rhetoric had socialist overtones: he blamed manufacturers for starving children; sided with garment union strikes; and called on Thomas Edison to mediate labor disputes. Firemen were called to break up his riotous Humanitarian meetings. Pacifists too were attracted to Appelbaum: D. W. Griffith, the film-maker who profiled the life of German agent Pancho Villa with John R. Freuler, joined the cult; in May of 1916 Henry Ford did too:
New York Times, May 31st 1916
Brooklyn Times Union, May 30th 1916. Henry Ford and Colonel Teddy Roosevelt are on the same page with Mischa.
Then, in late 1916, something happened to radically change Mischa Appelbaum’s message. He had unsuccessfully tried to sell his platform to the Republican Party during their national convention, but he had been successful that June selling the 35,000 votes he controlled in NY to the Democrats. After this came a period of silence, there was little press coverage of his cult until that December, when it was announced that the Humanitarians had made an anti-capital punishment film alongside Universal Film Manufacturing Co. One month later, Henry Morgenthau, formerly US ambassador to Turkey, came out in support of Women’s suffrage with Appelbaum. In addition to women’s suffrage, Appelbaum praised the Russian Revolution, but was careful to let followers know President Wilson wouldn’t be next:
New York Tribune, March 28th, 1917. The “George Kennan” described is probably the American explorer, AP correspondent and critic of the Bolsheviks, not the Cold War diplomat, who was a distant cousin.
New York Tribune, March 28th, 1917. Second half of article above.
The Brooklyn Citizen, April 2nd 1917.
Over the course of 1917, Appelbaum started to be heckled by Bolsheviks and Socialists at his Humanitarian Cult meetings. He is reported to have hissed back at them “You wouldn’t know what to do with freedom if you got it!”. It was in late 1917 that Otto Kahn began writing for Humanitarian Magazine, and shortly thereafter, Appelbaum was implicated in a campaign financing scandal through which he had benefited by about $14,000. The following March William Wesley Young would take over editing the cult’s magazine. The address of the cult and magazine changed sometime in 1917 too— no longer housed at the humble Leslie Hall on Broadway and 83rd street, Appelbaum enjoyed plush digs at the US Rubber Building, 1790 Broadway.
The US Rubber Company was lead by Charles Ranlett Flint, a proponent of businesses' working with tractable representatives of the Socialist movement and government to support what he called “combinations”, epitomized by Carnegie Steel Corp and the Krupp Iron Works of Germany. Flint paired this industry/government/labor partnership with anti-nationalist sentiments and a global vision for his businesses, which included Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, now known as IBM. It is of note that Appelbaum’s more respectable premises were in Flint’s flagship building.
By March of 1918, Appelbaum was a staunch proponent of war.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 27th, 1918.
As Appelbaum’s star rose, and his loyalties became more complex, the wheels started to come off his cult-scheme. His first wife began divorce proceedings in February 1917, and by October she publicly accused the humanitarian of cruelty.
The Evening World (New York) October 6th 1917.
The next two years were spent promoting war and trying to recapture his Socialist credentials. It seems that Appelbaum’s shelf-life as a demagogue was coming to and end, and hence his value to his sponsors. In April 1920, after an 18-day courtship, Appelbaum married his second wife, a Pathe recording artist. The pair “accidentally” poisoned themselves with mercury tablets that October after Schiff’s death and in the face of mounting debts. Neither Appelbaum nor his wife succumbed, but the Humanitarian Cult vanished from newspapers. On the other hand, the same month that Appelbaum guzzled mercury pills, William Wesley Young (I allege) took a young Ziegfeld dancer from Monroe, WI under his wing and taught her all about the cost of battleships. Little good that did Mischa: by September 1921 Appelbaum had turned to a life on the Vaudeville stage in an attempt to pay off personal obligations. He disappears from history.
