Ethical Culture's creedlessness was a building program. Within two years of the founding address of 1876, Adler's society opened a free kindergarten for the children of New York's poor, among the first in the city; from it grew the Workingman's School, offering a full education, manual training beside academics, to families who could pay nothing, which evolved into the Ethical Culture Schools that still operate. The society organised district nursing for the sick poor, an idea that fed the visiting nurse movement; Adler served on state and national bodies against child labor, chairing the National Child Labor Committee in its formative years, and threw the society into the tenement house reform fights of the 1880s and 1890s, serving on commissions whose reports changed New York housing law.
The logic was explicit: if the worth of every person is the one indemonstrable axiom, then the test of a religion is what it does about conditions that degrade persons, and doctrine can wait indefinitely. Deed, not creed, was the movement's shorthand. Adler held a chair in political and social ethics at Columbia from 1902, and the movement spread to other American cities and to Europe, always with the same signature: modest congregations, disproportionate institutions. The schools, the nursing services and the child labor laws are the argument of his philosophy conducted by other means, and he would have accepted no other proof of it.