The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today by Edwin S. Gaustad & Leigh Schmidt

Author:Edwin S. Gaustad & Leigh Schmidt [Gaustad, Edwin S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Cities and Social Gospels

The face of the United States altered radically between 1850 and 1900. Two forces especially drove that alteration: first, the massive growth of cities; second, the increasing industrialization of the economy and the workplace, epitomized in the mushrooming of factories. Such transformations, hallmarks of the modern order, were made rough, even jagged, by mounting antagonism between capitalist owners and wage laborers and by profound cultural ambivalence toward both urbanization and industrialization. Symptoms of the social stress came in the form of strikes, financial panics, riots, slums, sweatshops, poverty, bribery, and graft. Rural America, Jefferson’s land of the yeoman farmer, was rapidly disappearing. Many were uneasy about its passing and quite unsure about its successors, the modern city and the factory system.

Immigration doubled or tripled the population of the coastal cities, but urbanization was by no means a coastal phenomenon alone. Americans in the Midwest and elsewhere left hamlet and homestead for the city—any city. By 1900 Chicago had become the nation’s second largest city; it had grown from a mere 29,963 people in 1850 to 1.7 million at the end of the century. Similarly sharp growth was also evident in Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Kansas City, Denver, and Omaha. The city lured newcomers with promises of economic opportunity and unabashed freedom, with the bright colors of department stores and the carnivalesque pageantry of the streets, with grand churches and still grander hotels, with the latest entertainment and night life. And the city let them down, too, with scams, poverty, exploitation, race hatred, and ill-developed public services.

In this same half century, from 1850 to 1900, the Industrial Revolution reshaped the nation, especially in the North. The word revolution is no exaggeration, for changes transformed many areas of life: transportation (steam engine, combustion engine, and electric engine); communication (telegraph, telephone, transatlantic cable, typewriter, and linotype press); agriculture (binders, threshers, cutters, and improved harvesters); and domestic life (electric lights, sewing machines, phonographs, and gas stoves). The greatest revolution, however, occurred in the labor market itself, where thousands of propertyless men and women had nothing to barter but their toil and their sweat. They became workers in an economy of grinding hours and brutal sweatshop conditions.

To all the ills and pains of social dislocation and change, institutional religion could not long remain indifferent. Though many continued to believe that changing the individual heart was sufficient cure for all troubles, others found disease in the very character of the city itself, in the routinized and impersonal nature of the factory itself, or perhaps even in the greed and indifference of the capitalist order itself. Could religion offer any cure for diseases of this deep-seated sort? For some the question went like this: Should religion allow itself to become involved in political, economic, and social questions far beyond its own area of expertise and competence? Salvation of souls had been the traditional business of American Christianity. Did it now have any business going beyond that

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