The Twilight Club

The Twilight Club was a venerable tradition of ethical activism originally founded in the late 1870’s as a “learned circle” of visionary thinkers from diverse disciplines. Inspired by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, the founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Edwin Markham, and several others. Their stated purpose was that of ethical and cultural renewal of their world.

The Twilight Club continued to grow well into the 20th century through the work of the artist-philosopher Walter Russell, the IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel, and others, involving many thousands of people. The Twilight Club was, among other things, an inspiration for the formation of the Boy Scout of America and England, of the Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis Clubs, and of the Better Business Bureau.
In 1949, Lao Russell, the wife of Walter Russell, established the Walter Russell Foundation, later renamed The University of Science and Philosophy, as a continuation of the Twilight Club ideals, founding the Man-Woman Equality League—a precursor to the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the International Age-of-Character Clubs.

The Twilight Club had two distinguishing characteristics that are of vital relevance and importance if a transformational movement of any kind is to be truly successful:
1. Vision was always united with action. The participants’ vision and action were indeed vision-in-action.
2. The participants were aligned without necessarily completely agreeing with one another philosophically or ideologically. The Twilight Club was not ideology based but commitment based, not agreement based but alignment based.