Joel Elias Spingarn (May 17, 1875 – July 26, 1939) was an American educator, literary critic, civil rights activist, military intelligence officer, and horticulturalist.

[1] There he argued against the constraints of such traditional categories as genre, theme, and historical setting in favor of viewing each work of art afresh and on its own terms.

Their correspondence was published in Naples in 2001 (Carteggio Croce-Spingarn, a cura di Emanuele Cutinelli-Rendina, Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, Napoli, 2001).

Things came to a head in 1910, when he offered a resolution at a university faculty meeting in support of Harry Thurston Peck, a Columbia professor who had been summarily dismissed by Butler because of a public scandal involving a breach-of-promise suit.

[3] He became part of a distinguished series of prominent academics who resigned or were dismissed during Butler's tenure as president, including George Edward Woodberry, Charles Beard, and James Harvey Robinson—all of them, like Peck and Spingarn, notable progressive scholars.

Without an academic appointment but of independent means, Spingarn continued to publish in his field much as he had before, writing, editing, and contributing to collections of essays.

An influential liberal Republican, he helped realize the concept of a unified black movement by joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) shortly after its founding and was one of the first Jewish leaders of that organization, serving as chairman of its board from 1913 to 1919, its treasurer from 1919 to 1930, its second president from 1930 until his death in 1939.

[11] He lived with his wife, Amy Einstein Spingarn, in Manhattan and at their country estate which later became the Troutbeck Inn and Conference Center[12] in Amenia, New York.