Felix Adler, the son of a rabbi at Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El, grew up accompanying his mother as she visited and helped impoverished New York families. As a young professor of religious history and literature at Cornell University, however, he came to believe that private charity alone could not alleviate the position of the "perishing classes" driven to mob action by starvation and idleness. Adler believed that philanthropy had to "penetrate to the root itself and help the poor to help themselves." The depression of 1873 and the bloody riots that were its urban aftermath convinced Adler that "It is necessary to resort to radical measures, if we wish to help the poor. Education is the only accepted means of doing this, and therefore, all who have given the subject of human misery careful thought unite in the opinion that education—the best and most...