page_title: Stanton Coit
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Stanton Coit / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Stanton George Coit (11 August 1857 – 15 February 1944) was an American-born leader of the Ethical movement in England.
context_page_description: Stanton George Coit was an American-born leader of the Ethical movement in England. He became a British citizen in 1903.
context_section_description: Stanton Coit was born in Columbus, Ohio on 11 August 1857. He studied at Amherst College where he "fell under the spell of Emerson", at Columbia University, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he studied under Georg von Gizycki and took the degree of Ph.D in 1885.
  Coit was an aide to Felix Adler in the Society for Ethical Culture which Adler founded in 1876, and it was Adler's suggestion that he study for a doctorate.
  In 1886, he founded the Neighborhood Guild, a settlement house in New York City's Lower East Side which is now known as the University Settlement House, following three months spent at Toynbee Hall, which gave him the idea.
  In 1888, he went to London as minister of the South Place Religious Society, and during his ministry it was renamed the South Place Ethical Society (SPES) at his insistence. He settled in the United Kingdom, later taking British citizenship.
  In 1896, he founded the Union of Ethical Societies, later the Ethical Union, later British Humanist Association, now known as Humanists UK.
  In 1898, Coit married Fanny Adela Wetzlar, daughter of a German industrialist Fritz von Gans, who predeceased him in 1932. It was Adela's money which purchased the former Methodist Chapel in Queen's Road. They had one daughter, Virginia Coit, assisted her father at the Ethical Church.
  He was editor of the International Journal of Ethics in 1893-1905, and compiled The Message of Man: A Book of Ethical Scriptures (1894), an Ethical Hymn Book (1905), Responsive Services (1911), and Social Worship (1913), and wrote translations of Georg von Gizycki's works on ethics. In 1906 and 1910, he unsuccessfully stood for Parliament as the Independent Labour Party candidate in Wakefield.
  In his thinking, Coit was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by Émile Durkheim, whose The elementary forms of the religious life Coit read late in his life in 1923. He also translated all three volumes of Nicolai Hartmann's Ethik in 1926.
  In 1908 he was sentenced to one month's imprisonment for the indecent assault of a male bus conductor in Kensington which was later quashed on appeal.
  As an American living in the United Kingdom Coit regularly travelled between the United States and Great Britain and he was a passenger on the Carpathia in 1912 when it picked up survivors from the Titanic.
  Coit retired as leader of the Ethical Movement in 1935 to be succeeded by Harold Blackham, who dismantled the "churchy" elements, paving the way for the later establishment of the British Humanist Association by Blackham and Julian Huxley.
  Coit later lived near Eastbourne, Sussex. He died on 15 February 1944 at his home in Birling Gap near Eastbourne.
caption: Stanton Coit
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