A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America By Michael McGerr Chapter 3 Transforming Americans Free Press. New York, New York. 2003. Pages 77 117.
After breaking her engagement with Israel, the grocer, Rahel Golub was in poor health again. One day, as she lay weakly on the couch at home, she felt a hand touch her wrist. “It was a doctor’s touch, Rahel recalled. “I opened my eyes and saw a woman sitting beside the couch. Neither in looks nor in dress had I ever seen anyone like her in our neighborhood. She was also beautiful and distinguished. The woman spoke: “How do you feel[?]” She smiled, Rahel noted, “but her eyes remained almost sad. Speaking German to Rahel’s mother, the woman handed over a card and left. Rahel “spelled out the printed name on the card, Lillian D. Wald, 265 Henry Street.
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That touch began an effort to change Rahel Golub’s life. Like Jane Addams in Chicago, Lillian Wald was the founder of a settlement house -the Nurses’ or Henry Street Settlement in lower Manhattan. She too believed in the necessity of “association, of stepping across the social boundaries of industrial America. Determined to help Rahel, Wald urged the Golubs to let their daughter go to Presbyterian Hospital. Now Rahel, like Wald, had to cross the boundary lines of New York City. It was a terrifying prospect; hospitals were a place to die, a place to be feared. And Pres- byterian Hospital seemed far away from the self-contained neighborhood of Cherry Street. But Rahel agreed to go. “Late one afternoon then, with a change of clothing in a little bundle under my arm and a letter from Miss Wald in my hand, I started out for the part of the city we called ‘uptown as strange to me as if it were in a different country,” she would recall. “And now a great experience was to be mine. Never again could I look upon the life I was leaving in the same way, for I was to have a glimpse into a different world. As Rahel rode on the streetcars, it was as if she had never been in the United States at all. “Although almost five years had passed since I had started for America, she said, “it was only now that I caught a glimpse of it.”
Because of Lillian Wald and other social workers, Rahel caught many more glimpses of the United States in the next few years. She was in and out of the hospital. She went to programs at the Nurses’ Settlement. She stayed at White Birch Farm-” a summer house run for needy city children” in the country outside New York City. In all these places, she had new experiences. In the hospital, she ate “trafe cattle [that] had not been killed in accordance with Jewish law. She met what she called “Americans” -native-born, white, middle- and upper-class men and women. There were the doctors and nurses. They looked so different from us, the people I had been accustomed to see all my life, Rahel observed. “They were tall, healthy men and women, so well dressed with such fine quiet manners!” There were Protestant missionaries: one praised Judaism; another tried to convert Rahel to Christianity. There were other visitors whose mission was harder to understand: the “charming young girl, back from college, who asked “eager questions”; the “daughter of one of the biggest millionaires in the United States”; and the “beautiful woman” who “wore a bunch of violets tied with a purple cord” that made “the air about my bed . . . sweet. “I had never dreamed there was anything like her beauty, Rahel would recall, “her blue-black hair, her blue-gray eyes, her teeth, her smile. Rahel, “so ignorant of life, nevertheless “understood at once, somehow, that much of this woman’s beauty was due to the care she had received all her life, and her mother before her, and perhaps even her grand mother. But Rahel could not understand why she had all these visitors. “I did not know, she wrote, “that the part of the city where I lived was called the East Side, or the Slums, or the Ghetto, and that the face of the East Side, or the Slums, or the Ghetto was still new and a curiosity to the people in this part of the city, a sight to cheer any unhappy person. Of course Rahel was unhappy, too; and these educated, well-to-do women were “new and a curiosity” for her as well. She became friends with some of them. “They and their lives still fascinated me, Rahel admitted.
All these contacts were profoundly unsettling. Rahel left Presbyterian Hospital with “a feeling of dread” Having had “a glimpse of the New World, a revolution took place in my whole being, she confessed. “I was filled with a desire to get away from the old order of things. And I went groping about blindly, stumbling, suffering and making others suffer. Rahel felt much the same when she came back from White Birch Farm. “It was hard to get used to the old life again when I came home, she said. “It was all stranger than ever, the home, my people; their ways.
Rahel Golub’s encounter with “uptown” was one episode in the vast struggle over how men, women, and children should live their lives in the twentieth century. This struggle reflected the many differences over fundamental values, over the nature of the individual, the family, gender roles, work, and pleasure, that divided Americans. The conflict embroiled the whole nation – town and countryside as well as metropolis, south and west as well as north. It was not one battle but many battles, fought by different people with different beliefs and interests. But the progressives, driven by their project to transform relations between men and women, end class conflict, and make the nation more middle-class, were almost always in the thick of the fighting.
The progressives’ agenda required an impressive host of reforms. To reshape adult behavior, middle-class reformers fought to ban liquor, eradicate prostitution, and limit divorce. To change other classes, the reformers attacked the life-style and fortunes of the upper ten, tried to improve the living conditions of workers, and attempted to modernize the agrarian way of life. To ensure a better future, progressives sought to reconstruct childhood. Together, these campaigns added up to a bold effort to remake Americans, to create new people living by new codes of conduct. Just as the middle class itself had been remade, now other classes would be remade as well.
This effort was fundamental to progressivism. Traditionally, the struggle to control big business organizations has been seen as the quintessential progressive crusade. Almost inevitably requiring the authority of the federal government, the battle against corporate power thrust a flamboyant president to the fore and produced landmark national legislation. Yet, intense and sub- stantial as it was, the legislative and political struggle constituted only one phase of the effort to reform big business, and certainly not the entirety of progressivism. Progressives feared the upper ten not only for its management of corporations. “The plutocracy in politics, the plutocracy in business, the plutocracy in society, the plutocracy in the home – in its own homes – that is our ‘peril,” insisted the best-selling author David Graham Phillips. Progressives aimed at people more than institutions; they wanted to change big business men as well as big businesses. “It is idle to imagine that changes in our governmental machinery, or in the organization of our industries will bring us peace, Washington Gladden observed; “the trouble lies deeper, in our primary conceptions. What we have got to have is a different kind of men and women Walter Rauschenbusch, so strongly influenced by socialism, put more faith in state activism than did Gladden. But Rauschenbusch, too, emphasized the fundamental importance of transforming individ- ual human beings. The greatest contribution which any man can make to the social movement is the contribution of a regenerated personality, Rauschenbusch maintained. “Such a man will in some measure incarnate the principles of a higher social order in his attitude to all questions and in all his relations to men, and will be a well-spring of regenerating influences. Even Theodore Roosevelt, the president who did so much to focus attention on the struggle over big business, shared this fundamental progressive concern with the reform of individuals. “It is only by a slow and patient inward transformation such as laws aid in bringing about that men are really helped upward in their struggle for a higher and a fuller life, Roosevelt maintained. More than anything else, progressivism, “the great work of reconstruction, was the attempt to reconstruct the individual human being.
The various campaigns to reshape values and behavior sprang from an optimistic belief that heredity’s power was not absolute, that people were malleable. Progressivism drew strength from a
powerful current of environmentalist thought flowing through turn-of-the-century America. A broad range of social scientists argued that human beings responded to their environment: people changed when their surroundings changed. “The striking aspect of the recent development of thought is the changing concept concerning the part heredity plays in life, economist Simon N. Patten summarized. “[R]ecent discoveries in biology are establishing a new equilibrium between natural or inherited qualities and those acquired after birth. Many qualities are inherited, but the number is smaller than it was thought to be, and many of them may be readily suppressed by the action of environment in which men live. Reformers, among them settlement workers such as Jane Addams and preachers of the Social Gospel such as Josiah Strong, eagerly grasped the implications for the middle-class project. “It is found, observed Strong, “that there is an intimate relation between a bad environment and bad habits; that bad sanitation has not a little to do with bad morals; that bad ventilation and bad cooking are responsible for much drunkenness. Mainstream politicians such as Robert La Follette of Wisconsin accepted the environmental argument as well. As an aggressive county prosecutor in the 1880s, the future progressive leader held criminals individually responsible for their crimes. By the 1900s, La Follette thought differently: “I see that the individual criminal is not always wholly to blame; that many crimes grow directly out of the sins and injustices of society. Presumably, then, progressives could stop crime by stopping sins and injustices; they could end drunkenness by improving ventilation and cooking; they could reshape character by reshaping the environment. Armed with what Patten called “man’s power over heredity, the progressives set out confidently on their many campaigns.
Not all the contact across social boundary lines was as gentle as the touch of Lillian Waldo On the morning of June 6, 1900, in the town of Medicine Lodge in southwestern Kansas, Carrie Nation gathered up brickbats and bottles of Schlitz-Malt. With these “smashers” loaded in her buggy, she drove, nervous and praying, to the nearby town of Kiowa. A respectable Christian woman in her sixties, known as Mother Nation for her compassion, Carrie Nation was angry nevertheless. Saloons had been outlawed in Kansas since the passage of an amendment to the state constitution in 1880. But the “joints” and “dives” still flourished with the connivance of police and local government. Carrie Nation was going to Kiowa to do something about that. The next morning, armed with the brickbats and bottles, she strode into Mr. Dobson’s saloon. “I don’t want to strike you, she told the proprietor, “but I am going to break up this den of vice. She hurled her “smashers” at Dobson’s liquor bottles; she hurled some more at the mirror behind his bar. “Mr. Dobson, she noted with satisfaction, “jumped into a corner, seemed very much terrified. Leaving Dobson behind, Carrie Nation attacked three more saloons that morning in Kiowa. Passersby, she observed, “seemed to look puzzled. Dive owners, the town marshal, and the mayor confronted her. But these men were puzzled, too. When they decided not to arrest Nation, she stood in her buggy and lifted her hands to the sky. “Peace on earth, she called to the people of Kiowa as she rode out of town, “good will to men.
It was a stunning episode. In unladylike fashion, Carrie Nation had crossed the boundary between respectable women’s place and men’s public preserve. This unusual act was the work of an unusual woman who had lived a particularly difficult life. From Kentucky to Missouri; to Texas, and then, in the 189Os, to Kansas, Carrie Nation had faced poor health, unhappy marriages, straitened circumstances, and the sad illnesses of her daughter. Forced to support herself and her family, Nation had taught school and run a hotel. Her first husband had been an alcoholic; her second husband, a failed lawyer and minister, had” deceived” her” in so many things. Driven by her powerful faith, Nation had served as a jail evangelist for the WCTU-and “learned, she said, “that almost everyone who was in jail was directly or indirectly there from the influence of intoxicating drinks. So she had become determined to confront the saloon, the cause of so much misfortune. In 1899, she had gone into Mort Strong’s joint and forced him to dose. Carrie Nation had found the calling that would take her to Kiowa in 1900.
Her confrontation with the saloon did not end there. Nearly seven months later, only days after Christmas, she went to Wichita with” a rod of iron” in her valise. There she smashed the bar in the Carey Hotel, the “finest” in town. This time there was no puzzlement: she was arrested, tried, found guilty of “malicious mischief, and packed off to jail. Her sanity questioned, Nation had to remain there for nearly a month before getting out. Undaunted, she continued her confrontation with the saloon: in Enterprise, a cow town, people threw rotten eggs, beat her, kicked her, and tore her hair; in Topeka, the state capital, she used a hatchet to attack the dives, raised her own “army” of “Home Defenders, and, predictably, went to jail more than once.
Nation’s violent encounter with the saloon had many consequences. Across Kansas, people attacked more than a hundred dives. At Winfield, the battle to dose the saloons led to mass meetings, the deployment of cannon, and a raid against prohibitionist women and children huddled for protection in a church. A column of ministers, businessmen, college students, and women suffered injuries but managed to reduce one of the town’s joints to nothing except the smell. These conflicts persuaded officials to enforce prohibition more seriously in the state of Kansas. There were consequences for Carrie Nation, too. Although her second husband divorced her, she felt happy for the first time in memory. “I have never had so light a heart or felt so well satisfied, she said, “as since I smashed those murder mills. Famous across the United States, she looked beyond Kansas. By altering the spelling of “Carrie” and using her middle initial, she turned her name into an adver- tisement of her new mission- “Carry A. Nation. To fulfill that mission, she went on to the lecture circuit. In the 1900s, Nation passed out miniature hatchets and got herself arrested from Coney Island to Los Angeles. She had become a spectacle of contradictory images, of violence and compassion, of Christian humility and blatant self-advertisement.
An odd figure, Carry A. Nation was nevertheless quite representative. Her “smashings” laid bare much of the logic and passion that spurred the progressive crusades to reshape adult behavior. Nations action may have been extreme, but the things that drove it were typically progressive: changing middle-class values and a profound sense of urgency. Like the scourge of the male- dominated saloon, the progressives wanted to regulate pleasure and alter masculine behavior. Like the traveling lecturer and professional reformer, the progressives accepted a new role for women outside traditional domesticity. Like the general of the Home Defenders, the progressives tended to wrap their worries about a host of problems in a consuming fear for the fate of the home. They went into battle waving the flag of domesticity. Fittingly, Rahel Golub’s experience with Lillian Wald began at home, because for the middle class, it was fundamentally the home that was at issue. This was a struggle, as a book by reformer Jacob Riis put it, over The Peril and the Preservation if the Home. “[B]rethren, upon the home rests our moral character; our civic and political liberties are grounded there; virtue, manhood, citizenship grow there, Riis declared. “For American citizenship in the long run will be, must be, what the American home is. And the home, as Carry Nation felt acutely, seemed to be disappearing. “[T]here is. said Josiah Strong, “an increasing population, which, though by no means shelterless, is really homeless. . . .
Carry Nation also displayed a typically middle-class religious fervor and an insistence on action. Like the Christian who prayed on the road to Kiowa, the progressives were inspired by an emotional, evangelical Protestantism. Like the partisan of the brickbat and hatchet, they had lost faith in attempts to convert individuals by exhortation alone. “Moral suasion!” Nation snorted. “If there’s anything that’s weak and worse than useless it’s this moral suasion. I despise it. These hell traps of Kansas have fattened for twenty years on moral suasion. Many reformers agreed. In the new century, they were increasingly interested in compelling, not cajoling, people to change and behave.
Nation’s obsession with the saloon was typical as well. Early-twentieth century battles over adult behavior touched on a number of suspect practices-card playing, gambling, horse racing, Sabbath breaking, pornography, dance halls, contraception. But the problem of alcohol outweighed
all these concerns in the 1900s. Liquor, said the moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, was “the open sore of this land the most fiendish, corrupt and hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit Many people believed that alcohol contributed to a second major problem – prostitution. Drink appeared to be a spur to illicit sex; the saloon was a venue for harlots. Together, liquor and prostitution, the saloon and the brothel, seemed to be the very heart of “vice” in the United States. A third issue, divorce, also commanded major attention. For many Americans, the legal dissolution of marriage posed an obvious mortal threat to the home. In large part, then, the attempt to reshape adult behavior centered above all on campaigns to remove the trinity of temptations – drink, prostitution, and divorce – from the social environment.
This was not an irrational crusade against a purely imaginary enemy. Alcohol, prostitution, and divorce loomed large in turn-of-the-century America. After some success in the 1880s, the war on drink had gone badly in the 1890s. Like Kansas, the handful of states with legal prohibition saw the law defied. As the new century began, the repeal of prohibition in Vermont and New Hampshire left only Kansas, Maine, and North Dakota with statewide bans on drink. In addition, the per capita consumption of beer and hard liquor was on the rise. Americans had drunk 590 million gallons of beer and other malt liquor in 1885; in 1900, the figure reached 1.2 billion gallons. The saloon, the public symbol of alcohol, was more visible than ever. In the twenty years from 1880 to 1900, the number of retail liquor establishments had nearly doubled, from 150,000 to 250,000.
The extent of prostitution was harder to judge, but the “social evil, as it was called in polite company, also seemed to be spreading. Despite vice crusades in the late nineteenth century, prostitution had become quite open, above all in urban “vice” or “red light” districts across the country – the Tenderloin in Manhattan, Hooker’s Division in Washington, Gayosa Street in Memphis, the Levee in Chicago, Storyville in New Orleans, the Barbary Coast in San Francisco. As medical science revealed the consequences of venereal disease, prostitution became a much more urgent issue in the early 1900s. Contemplating the horrors of congenital and tertiary syphilis, the specter of birth defects, paralysis, and insanity, many Americans feared for the home. Venereal diseases, declared a leading expert, Dr. Prince Morrow, in 1908, “are directly antagonistic to all that the family stands for as a social institution And prostitution, people believed, was chiefly responsible for the spread of these diseases and therefore for their introduction into innocent homes. Divorce, too, was still on the increase. In the 1890s, the middle class had read lurid tales about the divorce mills” of the West. Supposedly, such places as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Fargo, North Dakota, and Guthrie, Oklahoma, attracted married men and women who, after a short period of residence, received quick and easy “migratory” divorces. Progressives had noticed also that states were accepting more grounds for divorce; in particular, “cruelty, expansively defined, had become a popular justification for marital dissolution. And some religious denominations, notably Episco- palians, seemed more willing to sanction divorce. As a result, the divorce rate had risen from 3.0 divorces per thousand marriages in 1890 to 4.0 per thousand in 1900. At the start of the new century, the United States had the highest rate of legal marital dissolution in the world.
Although the increase of drink, prostitution, and divorce troubled a range of Americans, the crusades against these “vices” appealed more to the middle class than to others. Hoping to promote progressive values and practices, ministers, settlement workers, white-collar workers, and small- business men played prominent roles in the campaigns to reshape adult behavior. Reformers saw in vice the loss of self-control and the celebration of selfishness. Divorce represented, as Anna B. Rogers put it in 1909, “the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of Self. Although progressives regretted the consequences of such individualism for the drunkard, the divorcee, and the prostitute, now more than ever, the middle class deplored the impact of vice on innocent people. “The drunkard and the drunkard’s interests are not the chief consideration, observed a Southerner in 1908, “though these are not lost sight of. It is the drinker as a husband, a father, a voter, a worker, and a citizen-the man as a social factor, who is being considered.
As this identification of drunkenness with masculinity suggests, the attempts to regulate adult behavior also sprang from the progressive concern about the relationship between the sexes. To vice reformers, prostitution, alcohol, and other vices grew from male desire and victimized women above all. At the Carey Hotel in Wichita, Carry Nation attacked an oil painting of a nude woman, a typical bar decoration of the period. “It is very significant that the pictures of naked women are in saloons. she explained. “Women are stripped of everything by them. Her husband is torn from her, she is robbed of her sons, her home, her food and her virtue, and then they strip her clothes off and hang her up bare in these dens of robbery and murder. Well does a saloon make a woman bare of all things!” Some middle-class men also believed that vice sprang from what a professor at Oberlin College called “the sinister hypocrisy of men in their relations to women. “Observation shows that men are the responsible authors of these social crimes women the victims. said Prince Morrow. “The root of the evil is grounded in the double standard of morality. Not surprisingly, then, women played an especially prominent part in the struggle to reform adult behavior. The crusades against vice became in large part an assertion of female authority, one more element of the emerging treaty between middle-class men and women. Carry Nation decried “the idea that woman is a toy, pretty, doll, with no will power of her own, only a parrot, a parasite of a man. Standing outside the joints barricaded against her on lower Kansas Avenue in Topeka, she became a dominating mother figure for the infantilized men inside: “Arent you going to let your mother in, boys?” she called with a sneer. “She wants to talk to you.
The campaigns against drink, prostitution, and divorce found less support among farmers and still less among urban workers and the upper class. None of these groups fully embraced middle- class values; none unequivocally welcomed government interference in private life. For all the drudgery in the lives of working-class and agrarian women, they never revealed the intense discontent that spurred so many middle-class women to demand changes in male behavior, including drinking. Given their views on pleasure, many agrarian men and women did strongly advocate prohibition or temperance. And, to be sure, there were some workers, like the Protestant Swedes of Worcester, Massachusetts, who supported prohibition as well. But there were more workers who believed in the freedom to drink and who defended their saloons against outside interference. The controversies over prostitution and divorce seemed to have still less impact on agrarian and working class communities. Prostitutes came primarily from the working class; vice districts flourished, thanks to the police, in poor urban neighborhoods. Yet, workers did not conspicuously lead or resist the attack on the “social evil Many workers, of course, were Roman Catholics, whose church condemned divorce, but the divorce crusade appeared not to arouse much support among the working class. For workers and farmers alike, divorce was a remote phenomenon, a luxury of the well-to-do.
Some members of the upper ten did play prominent roles in the campaigns to regulate behavior. There were still big-business men who wanted to encourage more temperance and self- discipline in the workforce. But some of the wealthy made a great deal of money by financing breweries and distilleries and by renting rooms to brothels and saloons. Rich women, increasingly well educated, certainly did share some of the unhappiness of middle-class women. Yet, the wives and daughters of the upper class, whatever they thought privately of male dissipation, represented and generally enjoyed a culture built on pleasure, on public drinking and easy access to divorce. The crusades against drink, prostitution, and divorce would be contested, then. But reformers pushed their causes aggressively. Combining the old Protestant fervor with businesslike efficiency, prohibitionists developed an especially strong network of pressure groups. The small Prohibition political party, formed after the Civil War, gave way to more effective organizations. The potent WCTU, to which Carry Nation belonged, continued to press legislatures for better liquor laws and “scientific temperance instruction” in the schools. The Anti-Saloon League, which began in Ohio in the 1880s, emerged as the great power of the prohibition crusade in the 1900s. Rooted in the
Protestant churches, the league envisioned nationwide prohibition. But rather than condemn all drinking, the group wisely focused attention on the saloon, the ultimate symbol of public vice. In the short run, the league also wisely concentrated on campaigns for local option, the right of individual communities to choose whether to close their saloon.
Well organized, the prohibitionists nevertheless confronted significant obstacles. The liquor interests were just as well organized; many people, workers in particular, resented the assault on the saloon; and the authorities, bribed or simply sensitive to public opinion, did not always enforce the laws. In Kansas, things soon went back to normal after Carry Nation’s campaign against the dives. Around the country, prohibitionists pressed for local option. Failing that, they harassed the saloons with a phalanx of laws restricting selling hours, forcing Sunday closings, banning side and rear entrances, raising license fees, and mandating one- and two-mile” dry zones” around schools, military bases, and crossroads.
It was hard going. Even politicians sympathetic to progressivism recoiled from so controversial an issue. With so many evangelical Protestants in their ranks, the Republican Party came under heavy pressure to back prohibition. But Republican leaders feared alienating the rest of the electorate. The politicians’ caution in the face of a divided country was most apparent at the highest level of government. The three presidents of the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, all sought middle-class support. But all three did their best to avoid taking a public stand on liquor. Believing such hideous misery does come from drink, Theodore Roosevelt said privately that “I cordially sympathize with any successful effort to do away with it or minimize its effects. McKinley’s successor favored local option but opposed broader prohibition laws as unenforceable. It was a sensible -and convenient- position for a national leader. Mostly, Roosevelt wished the whole matter would go away. “My experience with prohibitionists . . . is,” he confided, “that the best way to deal with them is to ignore them.
During the Progressive Era, however, it became harder and harder to do that. The prohibitionists began to demonstrate real political power. In 1905, the Republican governor of Ohio, opposed by the Anti-Saloon League, lost his bid for reelection. Around the country, the drive for local option went forward. In the South, an alliance of rural evangelicals and the middle class spurred campaigns for statewide prohibition. In 1907, Georgia and Alabama went dry. Oklahoma, with the help of Carry Nation, entered the union as a dry state that year. Mississippi and North Carolina adopted prohibition in 1908; Tennessee followed the next year. The South was, a writer declared, “well-nigh puritanized. Kansas also went emphatically dry in 1909, with even a ban on the sale of liquor in drugstores, a longtime loophole in prohibition. By then, 90 of Connecticut’s 168 towns had gone dry. In Illinois, over a thousand townships had banned the saloon. Responding to the increasing power of the prohibitionists in 1913, Congress passed the Webb bill, which banned the shipment of liquor into dry states. Taft vetoed the measure, but Congress voted to override the President.
Like the campaign against drink, the prostitution crusade also surged ahead in the 1900s. Never as imposing as the Anti-Saloon League, the American Purity Alliance and the Society for the Prevention of Crime, founded in the late nineteenth century, organized against the social evil. So did a newer organization under the leadership of Prince Morrow, the American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, which urged men to avoid sexual intercourse outside of marriage. But the most influential anti-prostitution group was probably New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, established by reformers, clergy, and wealthy men in 1900. The committee investigated prostitution and published the results as The Social Evil in 1902. In 1905, settlement workers and members of the Anti-Saloon League organized the Committee of Fourteen, which worked for better enforcement of New York City’s vice laws. The two committees became a model for similar vice investigations in cities around the country.
Nevertheless, the prostitution campaign did not make quite as much headway as the battle against the saloon. In one sense, that was surprising. Prostitution was far less controversial than alcohol; hardly any American thought of publicly justifying the “social evil. Theodore Roosevelt was much more willing to speak out against prostitution. And the federal government acted more quickly than it did on alcohol. By proclamation of the President, the United States joined an agreement of European countries promising cooperation to abolish the “White slave trade the alleged transnational traffic in women. The federal immigration acts of 1903 and 1907 put penalties on the importation of women for purposes of prostitution. The latter act not only made alien prostitutes liable to deportation up to three years after entering the United States; the measure also made the importers and employers of alien prostitutes subject to fine and imprisonment. But that was too much for the Supreme Court, which ruled in Keller v. United States in 1909 that the provisions against importers and employers were an unconstitutional assumption of police powers reserved for the states.
The prostitution campaign faced other, more serious obstacles. Like the liquor interests, prostitution had police and political connections. Moreover, the anti-prostitution forces had unique difficulties. While prohibitionists could condemn all impulses to drink as morally wrong and biologically unnecessary, prostitution crusaders could not make similar claims about sexual appetites: marital intercourse was still legal and necessary for the continuation of the species. The unwillingness to deny at least male sexual urges may have contributed, in turn, to a noticeable reluctance to penalize the men who patronized prostitutes. Most important, perhaps, the prostitution crusaders confronted public and private reticence about sexual matters. As the use of the euphemism “the social evil” suggests, many Americans were still uncomfortable with the open discussion of sexuality. “[S]ocial sentiment, Prince Morrow observed in frustration, “has decreed that the ‘holy silence’ upon everything relating to sex or its diseases must not be broken. That reticence made the campaign against prostitution much more difficult.
Nevertheless, the campaign made progress. Reformers won enactment of criminal statutes aimed at the pimps and brothel keepers who employed prostitutes. In Iowa in 1909, the legislature approved the Injunction and Abatement Act, an important innovation that allowed a permanent injunction against any brothel and an abatement closing the property for up to a year and permitting the sale of its contents. The law, a strong blow to landlords who rented to brothel keepers, appeared to be a promising means of wiping out red-light districts.
As the prohibition and prostitution crusades grew stronger in the face of resistance, the divorce movement, in contrast, seemed to wane. Anti-divorce crusaders never organized effectively. The leading divorce activist was Samuel W. Dike, a Congregational minister from Vermont who had lost his church in 1877 after refusing to preside at the wedding of a divorced parishioner. Inspired to make a study of divorce, Dike served as secretary of the New England Divorce Reform League, which evolved into the National Divorce Reform League in the 1880s and then the National League for the Protection of the Family in the 1890s. Never very powerful, Dike’s organization mainly collected statistics and lobbied Congress.
Dike and other reformers did not expect to wipe out divorce completely; they wanted only to limit it. But even that goal eluded them. Much as drinkers evaded local option by going to another town or city, men and women seeking to dissolve marriages traveled to states where divorce was easier to obtain. Under public pressure, states with renowned” divorce mills” increased the period of residence required before a couple could obtain a divorce. South Dakota, for example, imposed a one-year residency requirement that went into effect in 1909. Despite these restrictions, migratory divorce continued. The solution, reformers believed, was uniform state divorce laws or even a national divorce statute. But it was impossible to persuade state legislatures to accept a uniform code. In fact, it was impossible for reformers even to agree on such a code themselves. Meeting in Washington in 1906, the National Conference on Uniform Divorce Law could not arrive at a binding
list of grounds for divorces. Only Delaware, New Jersey, and Wisconsin followed the conference’s recommendations.
In light of these difficulties, reformers looked to the federal government. In 1906, Roosevelt warned against” dangerously lax and indifferently administered” state divorce laws and urged the federal collection of statistics on marriage and divorce. As a result, the Department of Commerce and Labor issued an extensive report two years later. But not much else happened in Washington. Observers believed that a national divorce law would be unconstitutional. And an amendment to the Constitution seemed unpopular and unlikely. Even Roosevelt, who advocated congressional authority over marriage, had to concede “how difficult it is to pass a constitutional amendment. The fundamental problem was that the divorce movement did not attract enough support. Not only did Dike and his colleagues fail to engage workers, farmers, and the rich; the anti-divorce cause also failed to win over much of the middle class. In part, the arguments for the cause were often unap- pealing and ineffective. Instead of ending their marriages, unhappy couples should content themselves, a writer advised in 1904, with the “purging, purifying influence of suffering. The cause also suffered when social scientists argued that stricter laws would not necessarily decrease the divorce rate. Above all, Dike and other reformers failed to convince middle-class women that divorce was as much a threat to them as the saloon and the brothel. For many wives, divorce offered the only refuge from male misbehavior. “Liberal divorce laws for oppressed wives, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had long maintained, “are what Canada was for Southern slaves. Progressive women were hardly enthusiastic about divorce, but they considered it preferable to the alternatives. “I do not favor divorce, said Carry Nation, “but it is better to separate, than bring up children of drunkards or licentious fathers. Some middle-class men felt the same way. “No one, said Prince Morrow, “can condemn a self-respecting woman for separating from a man who has dishonored her with a shameful disease.
So the anti-divorce movement stalled. Instead of falling, the divorce rate continued to rise. From +0 divorces per thousand marriages in 1900, the rate reached 4.5 per thousand in 1910. By then, divorce crusaders seemed to be losing heart. Even Samuel Dike agreed that “lax laws” had not caused the increase in divorce and that legal change would not likely bring much improvement. Going further, some social scientists suggested divorce was a good thing. To George Elliot Howard, historian and sociologist at the University of Chicago and perhaps the leading academic authority on divorce, the legal dissolution of marriage was a “remedy” rather than a “disease”; divorce was “a healing medicine for marital ills. Better education of young men and women before marriage, Howard contended, was more important than trying to ban divorce. Samuel Dike did not go that far, but he too began to feel that divorce reform might not be the answer to domestic problems. Instead he looked, in typical progressive fashion, to a broader transformation of the social environment. “The instructions of the church and the school, better industrial conditions and an improved social sentiment must be. Dike concluded, “our chief reliance for reform.
These were not the only second thoughts about the crusades to reshape adult behavior. The prohibition and prostitution campaigns also raised troubling reflections. To some reformers, the repression of human instinct seemed an impossible, self-defeating enterprise; fundamental drives had to be acknowledged. Realizing saloons catered to more than the desire for liquor, the Boston cleric Raymond Calkins contended that prohibition would not work unless reformers found “substitutes for the saloon. Alcohol-free clubs and dance halls were needed to fulfill people’s desire to meet and socialize; libraries and gymnasiums were needed to fulfill the desire for stimulation. In short, the transformation of individuals required a more sweeping transformation of their environment. Meanwhile, Jane Addams expressed another developing doubt about the campaigns against vice. “The love of pleasure will not be denied she declared. Accordingly, repression was ineffective and perhaps even counterproductive. In failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, Addams explained, “we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation,
but we throwaway one of the most precious implements for ministering to life’s highest needs. This would not be the last time that the middle-class ambivalence about pleasure made progressives hesitate.
The campaigns against drink and prostitution raised another troubling concern. Some progressives recognized that vice was at least partly the product of social class. Extremes of income seemed particularly to sustain the saloon and the brothel. The Social Gospel leader Washington Gladden traced prostitution in part to middle- and upper-class affluence. “Young men say that they will not marry until they are able to support a wife in good style. Gladden observed, “and as the wealth of the land increases and their neighbors live more and more luxuriously, the phrase in good style is constantly undergoing changes of meaning. Young women become accustomed in their parental homes to a certain amount of comfort and of leisure, and they do not relish the thought of beginning to live more plainly and more laboriously in a home of their own. When these people postponed marriage, Gladden affirmed, “one of the inevitable consequences is the increase of social immorality” young men, single for too long, would seek sexual satisfaction with prostitutes. The attack on the brothel, then, might not get at the real problem that threatened the home. “I do not believe that there is any remedy for this social disease but the restoration of a more wholesome sentiment concerning this whole subject of family life. Gladden concluded. The morality of what we call our respectable classes needs toning up all along this line.
More commonly, progressives recognized that poverty and economic constraint led to vice. Before the turn of the century, Frances Willard of the WCTU had already presented drunkenness as the result of economic hardship. Simon Patten offered the same conclusion in 1907. “Drinking and the new sedative pleasures of smoking and saloon card-games are, he wrote, “the vices of a faulty economic system The crusade against the brothel led to similar reflections. By the early twentieth century, most reformers no longer believed that women turned to prostitution because they were innately immoral. To some observers, it was plain that inadequate incomes, among other circumstances, led young working-class women to become prostitutes. In the short run at least they could make a better living from the “social evil” than from the low-paying, legal jobs typically open to them. Economic need, it seemed, produced prostitution. “The one most effective way to lessen the social evil. . . . said Anna Garlin Spencer of New York, “would be to make every young girl self- supporting with a living wage.
Even as progressives continued their campaigns against vice, not a few of them understood that the transformation of adults required more than attacks on the saloon, the brothel, or the divorce mill. To preserve and perfect the home, reformers had to confront the economic environment as well. They would have to address the particular needs and flaws of the different classes.
The effort to deal with the economic environment of the home underscored the essentially
middle-class character of the movement to remake Americans. Progressives seldom suggested that middle-class status-itself was problematic. Instead, the problems belonged to the other classes- wealthy, workers, and farmers. Progressives believed that the rich and workers led especially trou- bled domestic lives. “In the city, Josiah Strong observed, “the home is disappearing at both social extremes. “The American family is out of gear in two strata, in both of which pretty much everything else is out of gear, said sociologist Albion Small. “On the one hand is the stratum of the over-wealthed, over-leisured, over-stimulated, under-worked, under-controlled Only miracles could save this stratum from rot. Small found conditions little better among workers. “On the other hand, he continued, “is the stratum of the over-worked, under-fed, under-housed, under-clothed, under-hygiened, physically and morally, under-leisured, under-stimulated except by the elemental desires. Nothing in their lot is right.
The transformation of the rich was no easy matter. Progressives could not very well seek” association” with the upper class by starting settlement houses on Fifth Avenue. Lillian Wald could
travel to Cherry Street and straightforwardly offer to help a working-class girl like Rahel Golub; but Wald could not knock on the door of a Fifth Avenue mansion and make the same offer to help the household’s debutante. Instead, progressives most often had to wait for the wealthy to come to them. Some did. In Chicago, the heiress Louise de Koven Bowen, active in charity work, heard Jane Addams compare George Pullman to King Lear in a speech. Bowen visited Hull-House, then contributed some money, and eventually accepted Addams’s artful invitation to join the settlement’s Women’s Club. Drawn ever more deeply into the affairs of Hull-House, Bowen began to change and accept the importance of association. “To come in contact constantly with the people of that neighborhood certainly gave one a new impression of life in a great city, Bowen wrote, “and I began to feel that what was needed more than anything was an acquaintance between the well-to-do and those less well off.
Of course, most of the rich did not turn up at the doors of Hull-House or the Nurses’ Settlement. The progressives could reach them, then, only through public exhortation and public policy. Throughout the 1900s, the middle class leveled trenchant fire at the upper-class world of highly publicized divorces, lavish parties, and extravagant expenditures. That world was explored with insight and subtlety in the novels of Edith Wharton and the sociology of Thorstein Veblen and Simon Patten. It was exposed with sensationalist caricature in the fiction and nonfiction of the popular David Graham Phillips. In The Reign of Gilt a blistering nonfiction tirade published in 1905, Phillips surveyed the “mighty cataract of extravagant ostentation. The upper-class mansion was, he claimed, “a true palace – the dwelling-place, but in no sense the home, of people of great wealth. Family members, each wrapped up in “his or her separate social life, hardly ever met at meals. The millionaire’s wife fought so hard at “prolonging youth” that “you would not suspect from her looks or her conversation that she is a mother. The family’s college-educated son had inherited “his father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code. In all, Phillips concluded, it was” a sordid life.
In their crusade against the life-style of the upper ten, the progressives had a potent ally in Theodore Roosevelt. As his handling of the liquor question underscored, Roosevelt was a politician, ready to disappoint the progressives, if necessary, in order to maintain his popularity and power. And the President, born to wealth in a Manhattan mansion in 1858 and graduated from Harvard College in 1880, was certainly an upper-class man. But Roosevelt, in the course of his remarkable life, had broken free from the conventions of the upper ten and repeatedly remade himself. His stunning resume of vocations – naturalist, cowboy, author, hunter, state legislator, government bureaucrat, soldier, governor, and vice president – had awakened him to the diversity and division of turn-of-the- century America. Uncomfortably aware of the “very ugly manifestations of antipathy between class and class, Roosevelt wanted urgently to reform his own. A member of the cultured Faubourg-St. Germain set, proud of his Knickerbocker heritage, Roosevelt instinctively held back from the new money in big business and High Society. The namesake of a charismatic father renowned for devotion to charity and philanthropy, the President disdained mere moneymaking. And this impassioned advocate of the” strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, who turned himself from a “sickly, asthmatic boy into a tough, “rugged man, had only contempt for the life of the leisure class. “Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. Roosevelt declared in the 1890s. “There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses – whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter.
Many among the upper ten wanted to ignore the indictment leveled against them by Roosevelt and the progressives. Despite the example of the Bradley Martins, they could not learn to
tone down their public behavior. In 1902, Charles M. Schwab, the president of United States Steel, made a well publicized visit to the casinos of Monte Carlo. Back in the United States, lurid reports of gambling and debauchery earned him the private hostility of Andrew Carnegie and the public censure of The New York Times. J. P. Morgan came under pressure to remove the steel man from his post, but Schwab’s behavior was hardly the sort of thing that offended the captain of American finance. Still, Schwab had to learn his lesson. Returning to New York, he visited Morgan’s great house on Thirty-Seventh Street. “I did indeed gamble at Monte Carlo, Schwab confessed, “but I didn’t do it behind closed doors. That’s what doors are for, Morgan shot back. It was good advice for the upper ten, but not enough of them took it. The bad publicity continued. In 1908, The New York Times still had to deplore “the frequent evidence of the lack of discipline and respect for moral conventions among very rich Americans. The disregard of ordinary prudence in the conduct of their domestic relations, the willful neglect of the proprieties, among rich people tend to increase the volubility of the agitators against existing social conditions. Certain that “we have reached something like a social crisis in the United States, the paper lashed out at the wealthy. “Within a year we have had far too many marital scandals, and other results of moral turpitude in our ‘high life’ -that is to say, among the rich Americans – and there is not enough intellectual force, artistic appreciation, or public spirit among people of that quality to compensate the country for the bad influence of their misdeeds.
The rhetoric was all well enough. But translating the critique of the upper ten into results proved difficult, as the controversy over “race suicide” made clear. Naturally, Theodore Roosevelt took center stage in this debate about the falling birthrate among the well-to-do. “Surely it should need no demonstration, he told Congress in 1906, “that willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death; a sin for which there is no atonement; a sin which is the more dreadful exactly in proportion as the men and women guilty thereof are in other respects, in character, and bodily and mental power, those whom for the sake of the State it would be well to see the fathers and mothers of many healthy children, well brought up in homes made happy by their presence. Rather than settle the issue, Roosevelt’s statement provoked a round of finger-pointing. Some observers blamed selfish, college- educated women for the small families of the well-to-do; educated women refused to take the blame. “Men are more responsible than women for the decline in the birth-rate. insisted Marion Talbot, the home economist. “[Q]uite as many American homes are suffering from the incapacity of husbands and fathers to contribute their share to family life as from the attempt of wives and mothers to develop their individuality. None of this compelled the men and women of the upper class to become parents.
Even as they tried to shame the rich into behaving themselves and having more children, the progressives used their remaining weapon: public policy. If wealth made the upper ten behave so poorly, then perhaps government should take some of that wealth away. Public support for taxes on huge incomes and inherited fortunes had been growing for some time. In the 1890s, fifteen states instituted taxes on large inheritances; more than forty states had inheritance taxes in place in the 1910s. The federal government itself adopted a temporary inheritance tax to help pay for the Spanish American War. In 1894, Congress included a 2 percent tax on annual incomes over $4,000 as part of a new tariff bill. When the Supreme Court declared the tax unconstitutional, sentiment built for a constitutional amendment authorizing an income tax. In his annual message to Congress in 1906, Roosevelt called for graduated taxes on incomes and inheritances. “The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government, the President maintained. “Not only should he recognize this obligation in the way he leads his daily life and in the way he earns and spends his money, but it should also be recognized by the way in which he pays for the protection the State gives him. Roosevelt particularly objected to the inheritance of great fortunes. In his annual message in 1906, he justified
placing” a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate. Bowing to public opinion, Congress approved an income tax amendment to the Constitution in 1909. Easily ratified by 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment paved the way for Congress to enact the next year a modest but path-breaking 1 percent tax on annual incomes from $4,000 to $20,000, with an additional surtax on larger incomes. In 1916, Congress raised the income tax rates and enacted the first permanent inheritance tax, which included a maximum levy of 10 percent on estates over $5 million. Over the long run of the twentieth century, federal income and inheritance taxes would pose a serious threat to the wealth of the upper ten. Over the short run of the 1910s, these measures powerfully revealed the depth of popular hostility toward the rich.
The effect of taxation, condemnation, and association on the upper ten was difficult to assess. Certainly the wealthy did not become new people, with safely progressive values, in the 1900s and 1910s. Very few of the rich joined Andrew Carnegie in endorsing inheritance taxes. Hardly any of the rich could welcome the vituperative assault on their values and life-styles; but the upper ten surely felt the sting of the attack. “I remember, even in my own lifetime, a period when the people of this country looked up with admiration and respect to their wealthy classes, sighed Frederick Townsend Martin, brother of the exiled Bradley Martin, in 1911. “To-day how great the change!.. America has learned to hate great wealth public opinion is relentless. Frederick Townsend Martin and some of his colleagues did recognize the danger posed by progressivism. “I take it for granted that the wiping out of the idle rich is to be one of the first steps in a program of national advancement he said. “The idle rich are an obstacle in the way; therefore they must be eliminated or destroyed.
Martin believed that many of his class were at least waking up to their predicament. But, as before, they did not agree on how to proceed. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and some others still relied on philanthropy to win over the public. Yet, some of the wealthy, including Martin, doubted the philan- thropic strategy would work. Meanwhile, too many of the rich refused to accept reality. As Martin put it, “[S]till within the gates of gold there dwells a great host of people barely roused. Precisely because they had not become new people along progressive lines, the rich were fated for destruction, Martin concluded. “That grim truth is that we as a class are condemned to death, he lamented. “We have outlived our time. And only time would tell whether he was right.
Reformers took a less fevered, more creative approach to the problems of the working class. From Jacob Riis’s pioneering study of New York tenement life, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, to Robert Hunter’s Poverty, published in 1904, to a host of surveys, studies, and magazine articles, the literature on the poor was far more compassionate than the writings about the upper ten. As in the vice crusades, the older emphasis on individuals’ shortcomings had given way to a focus on the impact of environment. Reformers no longer quickly concluded that the poor were individually responsible for their plight. Simon Patten exemplified the new environmentalist understanding: the character flaws of the urban poor were, he wrote, “in reality a short lived product of the unwholesome food, bad air, debilitating climate, and other preventable conditions that rob men of vigor and of forethought!’ Urban “segregation” exacerbated the problem, Patten believed. “The poorer the family the lower is the quarter in which it must live, he observed, “and the more enviable appears the fortune of the anti-social class, which has found a way to easy incomes, to irresponsible extra-marital relations, and to glittering unwholesome pleasures. Moreover, the rigors of city life overwhelmed working-class mutualism, the attempt of the poor to help one another. If the poor could not save themselves, progressives concluded, then it was up to compassionate outsiders to remake the working class.
The first, crucial instruments of this effort were the settlement houses and church programs established in workers’ neighborhoods. Settlements multiplied rapidly: there were only six in the
early 1890s, over a hundred by 1900, and more than four hundred by 1910. Most numerous in the Northeast and the Midwest, the settlements covered urban America nevertheless from Andover House in Boston, Union Settlement in Providence, and Greenwich House in New York, west to Kingsley House in Pittsburgh and Hull-House in Chicago, south to Neighborhood House in Louisville, Wesley House in Atlanta, and Kingsley House in New Orleans, and still farther west to College Settlement in Los Angeles. Like Hull-House, the settlements offered lectures, classes, plays, pageants, kindergarten, and child care. Like Hull-House, the settlements tried to respond flexibly to neighborhood needs. So Lillian Wald, a trained nurse concerned about children’s health, found her way to Rahel Golub’s home on Cherry Street.
In addition to sponsoring some settlements, Protestant churches had their own programs in working-class communities. By the end of the late nineteenth century, the churches still employed a battery of tract societies, Sunday schools, revivals, settlements, and city missions to appeal to the urban poor. But the results were disappointing: the churches had not reached most nominally Protestant workers, let alone the entire working class. Organizations without direct denominational ties, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Salvation Army, fared better. The army, an English import, developed an especially effective program of soup kitchens, secondhand stores, and simple faith. At the start of the new century, many Protestants, especially advocates of the Social Gospel, felt a renewed commitment, as Washington Gladden expressed it, “to comprehend the full meaning of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, and to put forth the kind of effort in seeking and saving the lost which Jesus expects of his disciples. The “institutional church” movement, which had begun in New York City in the 1890s, seemed particularly promising. As Josiah Strong explained, the institutional church, much like a settlement, took on “educational, social, recreational, and charitable” functions. “It finds that the people living around it have in their homes no opportunity to take a bath; it therefore furnishes bathing facilities, Strong observed. “It sees that the people have little or no healthful social life; it accordingly opens attractive social rooms, and organizes clubs for men, women, boys, and girls They are ignorant of household economy; the church establishes its cooking-schools, its sewing classes, and the like. In their home the people have few books and papers; in the church they find a free reading-room and library. The homes afford no opportunity for intellectual cultivation; the church opens evening schools and provides lecture courses. By the early 1900s, there were enough churches involved in the movement to maintain an Institutional Church League. In all, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, and the institutional churches, like the Social Gospel, reflected a “social” vision of Christianity. They understood that environmental factors shaped individuals, that material conditions influenced the human spirit. As Josiah Strong insisted, these organizations “recognize the whole man, body as well as soul.
Along with Jane Addams, most progressive activists realized that they had to provide more than the programs of the settlements and the institutional churches. In addition to teaching and helping workers, reformers needed to reshape the material environment. The obvious place to start was the home itself. Beginning in the 1890s, the tenement house reform movement worked to improve the dwelling places of the urban poor. In New York City, Jacob Riis, Lawrence Veiller, and others were horrified by the squalor of working-class neighborhoods. Riis, a Danish immigrant and former police reporter, used pen and camera to dramatize, and even exaggerate, the overcrowding, darkness, and miserable sanitary facilities of the city’s tenement buildings. The tenement, said Riis, was” a cancer the enemy of the commonwealth. In 1900, Veiller, a former relief worker and city buildings official, helped persuade then-governor Theodore Roosevelt to support the creation of a Tenement House Commission. Named secretary of the commission, Veiller pushed the state legislature to enact a housing code that raised standards for light, ventilation, sanitation, and safety in existing and future tenements. As in the prostitution campaign, the New York experience became a model for the rest of the country. In Chicago in 1900, Jane Addams helped found the City Homes
Association to investigate and publicize tenement conditions. As a result, the city accepted a tenement house ordinance the next year. Elsewhere, there were investigations, conferences, and legislation. But the laws had the usual loopholes, and city officials did not always enforce the laws anyway. Nevertheless, tenement house reform was under way nationwide.
The shortcomings of the working-class dwelling made it all the more important that workers have access to public parks, baths, gymnasiums, swimming pools, and auditoriums. Settlement workers and other reformers campaigned for such facilities to help workers and to change them. There was no ambiguity on the last point. Bathhouses, insisted a New York State commission, had a “favorable effect upon character. Parks, said a reformer, promoted” desirable types of humanity. As they transformed old institutions and established new ones, reformers began to talk ambitiously about city planning. Worried by urban overcrowding, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Mary Simkhovitch of Greenwich House joined together in 1907 to help launch the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York. This body, dedicated to the dream of a more controlled, regulated urban environment, in turn aided in the creation of the National Association for City Planning at Washington, D.C., in 1909.
Certainly the progressives were taking tentative first steps on the road to the regulated utopia of Looking Backward. But we should not overestimate the middle-class commitment to crass manipulation and coercion in the first years of the twentieth century. The progressives had compassion for workers and at least some respect for their culture and values. In 1900, for instance, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr set up the Hull-House Labor Museum to preserve and commemorate immigrant handicrafts. Self-conscious about their relationship with the poor, some reformers set limits on their intrusion into working-class life. When Rahel Golub asked for a copy of the New Testament at the Nurses’ Settlement, Lillian Wald’s colleague, Mary Brewster, declined. “I am afraid we can not give it to you. Brewster replied. “You see your father would think, True, the nurses have been kind to my daughter but they have led her away from our faith. And that would never do for the Settlement. Do you see?”
Still, the settlement workers and other reformers intended to change working-class life. Mary Brewster spoke out of self-interest as well as compassion; she wanted to preserve the settlement’s influence on the neighborhood. She and her associates had a real impact. To be sure, many of their efforts were ineffective. Some were almost laughable: Rahel, barely able to read English, once sat through an absolutely incomprehensible lecture on Shakespeare at the Nurses’ Settlement. But the reformers, often unintentionally and unknowingly, transformed working-class people like Rahel Golub. Sometimes the smallest acts of “association” had unforeseen consequences. When Mary Brewster declined to give Rahel a New Testament, the settlement worker handed the immigrant “a sweet love story” instead. Of course, the idea of choosing a mate on the basis of romantic love was about as inflammatory as Christianity in Cherry Street, as Rahel’s rejection of Israel the grocer made clear. Along with the books, lectures, hospitals, and summer outings, Rahel observed middle-class values and living standards. That exposure began to tear her away from her own culture and her own people.
Rahel understood what was happening to her. “I was hearing good English, I was reading and with the trait of my race for adaptability I was quickly learning the ways of this country, she related. “But at home and in the shop life became harder and harder. The apartment on Cherry Street became more inadequate than ever. “The rooms seemed smaller and dingier than they had been, Rahel reported. “In the evening the lamp burned more dimly. And there was a general look of hopelessness over everything. The gap between working-class and middle-class life depressed her: “I saw the years stretching ahead of me, always the same, and I wept bitterly. I had never been so aware of it all. Rahel did not get along with her parents. Her father did not care for her reading. When he found the word Christ in one of her books, he threw it out the window. For her part, Rahel no longer accepted her parents’ authority. She and her father often refused to speak to each other.
“My only thought now, she said, “was of myself and the whole world outside of home and Cherry Street.
Work became intolerable as well. After discovering the fine manners of middle-class men at the hospital, the settlement, and the summer camp, she could not abide the behavior of working-class males in the tailor shops. “To the little insinuating jokes and stories I listened now, not with resignation as before but with anger, Rahel recalled. “‘Why should this be? Why should they talk like that? And I was filled with a blinding dislike for the whole class of tailors. At one shop, a male tailor “talked of the most intimate relations of married people in a way that made even the men exclaim and curse him while they laughed. We girls as usual sat with our heads hanging His eyes were on my face and they were hurting me. Furious, Rahel threw her work aside and denounced the men. “You have made life bitter for me, she wept. “I pray God that rather than that I should have to go into a tailor shop again I may meet my death on my way home. She quit her job that day.
Rahel Golub could not endure such unhappiness forever. Gradually, she found some peace. Staying at White Birch Farm, Rahel realized, to her surprise, that she could not stop thinking about Cherry Street. Back in the city, she discovered, “I felt strangely glad to be home and share the good and the bad with my people. Rahel was happy again, but she was no longer the same person who had felt the touch of Lillian Waldo Rahel never again fit easily into the world of Cherry Street; but she did not fit easily into “uptown” either. Wald and the reformers had created a new person, but not necessarily another member of the middle class. “I was able to see that the Old World was not all dull and the new all glittering. Rahel concluded. “And then I was able to stand between the two, with a hand in each.
Rahel Golub was unusual, most immigrant workers did not eventually publish a book about their experiences, and most did not have sustained exposure to reform in the early 1900s. The settlements and the institutional churches remained on the edges of working-class life. Typically, these institutions reached women and children more easily than proud men who held back from such seemingly feminized charity. “The social settlement here meant nothing to us men, said an immigrant. “We went there for an occasional shower, that was all. But clearly the reformers could stir some workers, especially those like Rahel Golub – curious, ambitious, young, and yearning for freedom. How many more Rahels were there? What would they become? There were no answers in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Almost reluctantly, reformers began to turn their attention to farmers during the Roosevelt administration. The middle class, wrestling with the problems of urban vice and inequality, tended to romanticize rural America. “The ideal, always in my mind, is that of a man with his feet upon the soil and his children growing up there, said Jacob Riis. “So, it seems to me, we should have responsible citizenship by the surest road. But reformers slowly realized that the rural road was no longer so sure. In the 1900s, they discovered the relative decline of rural America, the increase of farm tenancy, and the flight from the land. To preserve and improve the rural “ideal. reformers launched the Country Life movement.
The campaign to save rural America began in the cities, not on the land. The participants in the Country Life movement were mainly urban, middleclass activists, state and federal agricultural officials, and academics from land-grant colleges. The leaders were such men as Kenyon Butterfield, sociologist and president of the Massachusetts State College of Agriculture, and Liberty Hyde Bailey, writer, horticulturist, and dean of Cornell University’s agricultural college. Butterfield, Bailey, and the rest had a high opinion of rural people. Indeed, Butterfield bestowed the highest accolade on the “frank, virile, direct, clean, independent” men and women of the countryside. “Farmers are essentially a middle class he insisted. “In the country there is little of large wealth, luxury, and ease; little also of extreme poverty, reeking crime, unutterable filth, moral sewage.
Farmers had not, however, kept up with the changes in middle-class culture. As the countryside lagged behind the city, farmers clung to their old individualism. Kenyon Butterfield deplored “the intense individualism of the country, and the lack of co-operative spirit” that threatened the rural family and its members. There is neighborliness in the country, Butterfield allowed; “there is intense democracy; there is a high sense of individual responsibility; there is initiative; but this over-development of the individual results in anemic social life, which in turn reacts powerfully upon the general life of the family. Butterfield and other Country Life reformers did not attribute rural shortcomings to farmers’ character flaws. Instead, the Country Life movement focused on the influence of the rural environment. “Perhaps the one great underlying social difficulty among American farmers, Butterfield declared, “is their comparatively isolated mode of life. Isolation encouraged individualism and discouraged cooperation and institutions. “[R]ural isolation is a real evil, Butterfield concluded. “Present-day living is so distinctively social, progress is so dependent upon social agencies, social development is so rapid, that if the farmer is to keep his status he must be fully in step with the rest of the army. He must secure the social view-point.
That conclusion, with its echoes of Edward Bellamy and his utopian army, spurred the usual conferring, fact-finding, and organizing. Butterfield convened a conference on rural life at Michigan Agricultural College in 1902. Over the next several years, further conferences followed around the country. Soon there were such organizations as the Rhode Island League for Rural Progress and the Pennsylvania Rural Progress Association. Inevitably, Theodore Roosevelt became interested in the issue. In 1908, Roosevelt appointed the Country Life Commission, chaired by Liberty Hyde Bailey, to report on rural conditions. The commission, which included Kenyon Butterfield, articulated the emerging consensus of reformers. In addition to improved farming methods, rural America needed telephones, better mail delivery, and better roads to diminish isolation. Rural women, beset by drudgery, needed more appliances, more help from family members, and more organizations. In general, farmers needed to trade their individualistic ways for organized cooperation. The countryside also needed better sanitation and health care, more active churches, and, to safeguard the future, better education. Eager to exchange the one-room school for larger, consolidated schools with better teachers, the Country Life reformers also wanted a curriculum that would ennoble agriculture and persuade youth to remain on the land.
The Country Life Commission stimulated considerable interest. Rural organizations, such as village-improvement societies and “people’s clubs began to appear in the 1900s. But the Country Life movement seemed stronger in the Northeast than in the rest of rural America, and stronger among prosperous farmers than among the rest of the agrarian population. Rural people were not always receptive to an essentially urban, middle-class, Northeastern crusade to remake their lives. Farmers wanted paved, macadam roads, but they resisted paying higher taxes for the benefit of urban cyclists and drivers, and yielding their independence to government. “The tendency and drift of public sentiment and all legislation is toward centralization and consolidation, wrote “Hawkeye Subscriber” to a farm journal in 1904, “when it ought to be in the other direction, to distribute power and divide honors, and make the individual more responsible, instead of the township, the county, or the mass of the people.
The rest of the Country Life movement’s progressive agenda met similar suspicion and hostility. One agrarian dismissed the movement as “pure rot. Others felt that rural problems stemmed from a more fundamental environmental factor – the lack of money. “The reason [the farmer] does not provide for better sanitation, for better social privileges, a correspondent told Lib- erty Hyde Bailey, “[is] he does not get his due and cannot afford it. Farmers had no need for a lot of outside advice. “Give us a chance to make money, declared one of Bailey’s correspondents, “and let the spending to us. The movement to change rural America, to transform what The New York Times called the “whole soggy mass of rural conservatism, had a long way to go.
The Country Lifers’ emphasis on children and education was neither surprising nor unique. Confronting so many difficulties in changing adult behavior and transforming established social groups, reformers naturally found childhood an inviting target. Certainly young people should be more malleable than their elders. “A far-sighted policy, such as the training of the young, is, E. A. Ross wrote, “preferable to the summary regulation of the adult.
Reformers saw danger as well as opportunity among the young; they were disturbed by just how far childhood in America diverged from the middle-class ideal. Jane Addams and other progressives worried particularly about rural and working-class children taken prematurely out of school and put to work. At the turn of the century, the middle class was stunned by the reality of child labor. “Walking up the long, orderly building, deafened by the racket reported a visitor to a Southern textile mill, “you become suddenly aware of a little gray shadow flitting restlessly up and down the ais1es – a small girl, and with bare feet and pale face. She has a worn and anxious aspect, as if a weight of care and responsibility rested already on her baby shoulders A thread breaks first at one end of the long frame, then at the other. The tiny fingers repair the damage at the first place and she walks listlessly to the other With a great shock it dawns on you that this child is working. Reformers refused to believe that any circumstances in working-class homes, any form of mutualistic family economy, truly justified sending such children out to wage work. “We know the curse of child labor, said Jacob Riis. “Experience has taught us that it is loss, all loss, ever tending Downward Child-life and citizenship are lost; for the children of to-day, are the men of tomorrow. To reformers, it was clear that all American children should have what Simon Patten called “the enormous advantage of prolonged childhood. Every working-class and agrarian child, that is, should have a more middle-class youth.
The same was true for upper-class children. Progressives relentlessly blasted the upbringing of the wealthy. Upper-class families, David Graham Phillips complained, “educate their children to folly and superciliousness and economic helplessness or at best give them a training not in business, in useful labor, but in the truly aristocratic chicanery of high finance. Elite colleges only made matters worse for the typical rich man’s son. “In place of a brain, Phillips lamented, “the boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations and poses. As president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson feared that universities were failing to educate the children of the upper class. “Colleges must not be mere country clubs in which to breed up a leisure class, Wilson warned in 1909. If the “sideshows” of leisure and pleasure were taking over for the education in the university’s “main tent, he said in a revealing image, “I don’t know that I want to continue as ringmaster
Worrying about other classes’ children and also their own, middle-class adults focused their fears on adolescence, the crucial period from the mid to late teens when middle-class children should be preparing for adulthood. In his influential book, Adolescence, published in 1904, G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, argued that youth recapitulated the stages of human evolution. Adolescence, corresponding to humanity’s transition from savagery to civilization, was accordingly a difficult period. Progressives fretted over teenage sexuality, especially because puberty arrived increasingly earlier. They feared the dangers of sexual experimentation for adolescent girls. And they feared for adolescent boys, so much more likely than girls to leave school for the streets. Once again questioning the wisdom of individualism, some middle-class observers wondered whether mothers and fathers had allowed their children too much freedom. “We have removed from the single pair and their children all the props and discipline of the patriarchal family, and now we are rapidly democratizing the family. said Anna Garlin Spencer. “[W]e are even afraid of controlling effectively our own children lest we check their growth toward self-government. Fortunately, a solution was at hand in the nature of adolescence itself This was, as reformers noted, “the period of childhood when character is plastic and can be molded for good or evil as clay in the potter’s hands.
To mold childhood “for good” and allow it to serve the progressives’ transformative purpose, reformers had to make sure children were out of work, off the streets, in school, and under control. That meant, first of all, the passage of laws limiting child labor. Naturally many employers, particu- larly Southern mill owners, resisted such legislation. Many working-class families, so dependent on income from their sons and daughters, also opposed this threat to their livelihood. But settlement workers and other middle-class reformers pressed hard for legislation. They had allies in organized labor, who believed that child labor forced down adult wages. In 1903, the child labor crusaders demonstrated their power. In New York, a child labor committee, formed by Florence Kelley and other settlement workers, led the drive for a model state law. In Illinois, settlement workers, women’s clubs, and the state federation of labor helped to push a child labor bill through the legislature. In Alabama, the state’s Child Labor Committee, sparked by Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal rector in Montgomery, won a law setting twelve as the minimum age for industrial work. Similar laws passed elsewhere, but loopholes and hostile courts limited their impact. Turning in frustration to federal power, Murphy, Kelley, Jane Addams, and Lillian Wald joined to form the National Child Labor Committee in 1904. But any kind of federal legislation faced strong opposition from employers, workers, Catholics hostile to state intrusion into family life, romantic defenders of the work ethic, and states-rights Southerners suspicious of Washington. In 1916, Congress finally enacted the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, a modest measure that applied to less than 10 percent of wage earning children. Ruling two years later in Hammer v. Dagenhart) the Supreme Court struck down the law as an unconstitutional violation of the limits of federal power over interstate commerce. Despite progressives’ efforts, child labor was still pervasive in rural and urban America. In addition to getting children out of work, reformers had to get them into school. Obviously education was crucial to any effort to reshape young Americans. “A child that came to this country and began to go to school had taken the first step into the New World, Rahel Golub affirmed. “But the child that was put into the shop remained in the old environment with the old people, held back by the old traditions, held back by illiteracy. Others put the promise of education more bluntly; E. A. Ross called it “‘breaking in’ the colt to the harness.
Around the country, progressives mounted a host of campaigns to improve public education and make it mandatory. Along with efforts to replace one-room country schools with” consolidated” schools, there were attempts to raise spending, lengthen school terms, increase attendance, improve school buildings, raise teacher salaries, strengthen vocational training for working-class children, and add high schools. In the South, where education lagged behind the rest of the country, the drive for education was especially fervent. In 1901, the Southern Education Board, with Edgar Gardner Murphy as executive secretary, formed to publicize the need for reform and for increased taxes and appropriations. Southern education became one of John D. Rockefeller’s favorite causes: from 192 to 199, the oil man put $53 million into the General Education Board, which in turn funneled resources to various campaigns in the South.
Many Americans rejected education reform. Farmers and workers resisted compulsory attendance for their older children; immigrants, wary of coercive attempts to “Americanize” their children, maintained their own private schools; white Southerners worried about high taxes, Yankee interference, and the specter of educated African-Americans. Agrarians particularly sniffed out and resented the progressive assault on their values. “Individuality will be lost a rural critic of education reform complained. The one room schoolhouse withstood the progressive attack. Nevertheless, the campaigns for education had a clear impact. From 1900 to 1909, the enrollment rate for children aged 5 to 19 in all types of schools rose from 50.5 per 100 to 59.2; public secondary-school enrollments grew from 519,000 to 841,000; expenditures per pupil in public schools increased from $14 to $24; and the average public school term lengthened from 144.3 days in 1900 to 155.3 days in 1909.
As Ross’s remark about the colt suggests, an aura of compulsion and coercion hung over the many campaigns for education across the country. There were the compulsory attendance laws, passed mainly in the North, that compelled children to stay in school at least to age fourteen. There was the increased centralization of authority in the hands of teachers and, above all, school boards. There was the obvious intent to transform pupils into dutiful, hardworking, loyal citizens.
The coerciveness of education reform can be overemphasized. As Southern whites clearly realized, a little education for blacks was a dangerous, liberating thing. Certainly some progressives wanted to encourage children’s independence and individuality. “The most precious moment in human development. Jane Addams contended, “is the young creature’s assertion that he is unlike any other human being, and has an individual contribution to make to the world. This point of view was especially apparent in the work of Addams’s friend, philosopher John Dewey. From 1896 until 1904, Dewey ran an experimental “laboratory” School at the University of Chicago. Through the school and such books as School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey helped to launch what would be known as “progressive” education. Believing that children should become full, individual participants in a democratic society, he wanted school to be a true participatory community for students.
Given the progressives’ condemnation of individualism, their support of the child’s individuality seems paradoxical. But there were limits to that support. Dewey did not think students should develop just as they pleased; they had to be guided. He warned against “the danger of the ‘new education’ that it regard the child’s present powers and interests as something finally significant in themselves. Moreover, the progressives supported the child’s individuality because it served their interests in the struggle to change the values and behavior of other classes. When they endorsed “the young creature’s assertion that he is unlike any other human being, they were encouraging the child to break free from his parents’ way of life. Working to reform the education of wealthy students at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson expressed the progressives’ intentions with particular candor. “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life, he told an audience. “Our problem is to make them as unlike their fathers as we can. Further, some progressives expected schools to teach values other than individualism. Arguing for educational opportunities for African-Americans, the reformer Edgar Gardner Murphy enumerated the four key “disciplines” of the Southern common school: “punctuality,” “order,” “silence,” and, beloved of progressives, “association.”
In addition to transforming children’s education, progressives knew they needed to transform children’s leisure. In the 1900s, reformers generally accepted what Addams termed “the insatiable desire for play. They realized that adventurous youth had to be diverted from dance halls, saloons, and brothels, from criminal and sexual experimentation. “To fail to provide for the recreation of youth, is not only to deprive all of them of their natural form of expression, Addams insisted, “but is certain to subject some of them to the overwhelming temptation of illicit and soul-destroying pleasures. This recognition led to the expansion of” girls’ work” and, especially, “boys’ work” in the 1900s. There were rural clubs, encouraged by county agents of the United States Department of Agriculture, for farm youth; Federated Boys’ Clubs for the urban working-class; and the junior departments of the YMCA and then the Boy Scouts for the sons of the middle class. Developing since the 1880s, the movement for urban playgrounds surged forward, with settlement workers in the lead, in the 1900s. The Playground Association of America, with Jane Addams as a vice president, formed in 1906. By 1909, 267 municipalities were managing 1,537 playgrounds. Adults also encouraged organized sports, particularly baseball. In New York City, money from Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan helped to launch the Public Schools Athletic League in 1903. Churches and settlements also sponsored ball teams.
In all these endeavors, there was an emphasis on combining release and control, freedom and supervision. Children were encouraged to play-and to change in carefully guided ways. The
playground movement stressed the importance of adult supervision; the progressives wanted professional playground supervisors who would schedule and regulate children’s activity. Reformers wanted working-class youth to learn middle-class rules of deportment or, at least, just to keep out of trouble. A playground supervisor, according to a Chicago handbook, “should praise every tendency of a boy or girl to sacrifice himself or herself for the good of the team. Show them that this is the only way to succeed-by unity of action. If you can develop this spirit, you have laid the foundation of cooperation, politeness, and good morals. Marion Lawrence, an upper-class woman of Boston, maintained the North Bennet Street Boys’ Club for “underprivileged, mainly Irish and Italian, adolescent boys; the club rules said that members “mustn’t get excited, chew gum, spit, swear, cheat or talk Italian. Catering to middle-class youth, the YMCA and the Boy Scouts emphasized the drive for individual achievement but also the necessity of team play.
Finally, progressivism addressed the special problem of orphaned and delinquent children. Here, especially, reformers blended compassion with a desire to transform young people. Opposed to the longtime practice of keeping orphans cooped up in asylums, progressives preferred to allow the inmates of orphanages to leave these “barracks” during the day to go to school and to participate in YMCA and other extracurricular programs that is, to enjoy the transforming experiences devised for other children. Similarly, homes for young, unwed mothers increasingly emphasized rehabilitation in the Progressive Era. Although the progressives articulated a clear critique of nineteenth-century institutions, they did not simply have their way. The managers of asylums such as the Chicago Nursery and Half Orphan Asylum resisted change. Moreover, the network of institutions in a city as large as Chicago grew so rapidly in the 1890S and 1900S that progressives could not readily control it.
Progressives achieved their goals more quickly in the courts. Passionately against the traditional treatment of young delinquents as criminals, they did not want youthful offenders tried in adult courtrooms. Instead, reformers wanted to create specialized juvenile courts. Yet one more progressive innovation with roots in Hull-House, the new approach emerged when Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and other settlement residents helped lobby successfully for an Illinois state law authorizing the creation of special courts for youthful offenders in 1899. By 1909, twenty- two more states had passed laws authorizing juvenile courts. Denver was home to the most famous juvenile court, presided over by the charismatic reformer Judge Ben B. Lindsey. Regarding youthful offenders as “the victims of environment, Lindsey and the juvenile courts sought to rehabilitate rather than punish. Typically, juveniles brought before the court for one offense or another found themselves placed on probation. To lessen the influence of unfit parents and a troubling urban environment, juvenile courts frequently prohibited young people from drinking, going to dance halls, and staying out late. To maximize progressive influences, the courts prescribed enrollment in an industrial school, participation in settlement-house programs, and, especially for sexually delinquent girls, placement in foster homes. “The old process is changed, Lindsey concluded. “Instead of coming to destroy we come to rescue. Instead of coming to punish we come to uplift. Instead of coming to hate we come to love.
The crusades to remake childhood took place largely at the local and state levels. Once again, the federal government was only belatedly and weakly involved. By 1908, Roosevelt was calling for better funding for the National Bureau of Education, but he conceded the primacy of state and local initiatives. Sensitive to the issues of childhood, the president listened to Lillian Wald’s idea for a federal children’s bureau. But he did not summon a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children until January 1909, shortly before he left office. Congress eventually established a Children’s Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1912. Its first head was Julia Lathrop, a former resident of Hull-House, who thus became the first woman to lead a federal bureau. Although precedent-setting in various ways, the Children’s Bureau was nonetheless a fairly weak instrument, charged mainly with collecting and disseminating information.
Like the other campaigns to remake Americans, the drive to refashion childhood was difficult to evaluate. By the 1910s, reformers had articulated a vision, established organizations, and launched campaigns. Although it was too early to judge the outcome, there were already clear signs of resistance. The pupils did not necessarily learn their lessons or like their teachers. In Worcester, an eleven-year-old boy declared, “I can’t go to the playgrounds now. They get on me nerves with so many men and women around telling you what to do. Once again, reform produced unintended results. After equipping her Boys’ Club for baseball, Marion Lawrence thought a game against the young gentlemen of the Groton boarding school would offer her Irish and Italian boys some useful lessons in manners and values. She demanded “one essential thing” of her team- ” a clean, sporty, gentlemanly game. But, to the” disgust and surprise” of the boys, the students from the boarding school cheated; the Groton first baseman purposely tripped a North Bennet Street runner. “So that’s what you call gentlemanly playing!” the boys told Miss Lawrence. Reshaping youth was not an easy business.
For that matter, the entire attempt to transform Americans was not an easy business. Nevertheless, Lillian Wald and other progressives had set in motion a powerful dynamic. In different ways, through different activities, they had begun to push other classes toward “the middle-class paradise. toward the imaginary Boston of the future and the real Chautauqua of the present, with more safety for the home, more justice and power for women, more uniform opportunities and experiences for different classes, more external control and regulation. That was a considerable achievement in so short a time.
Along with this progress went some troubling possibilities. Ironically, reform could destroy what it was intended to preserve. Crusading in the name of the home, reformers were supplanting the very thing they wanted to protect. As outside agencies supervised children in and out of school, ordered the material environment of tenements and parks, and regulated adult behavior, the family and the home became less important. “As in the human organism, when one organ fails, its functions are often undertaken and more or less imperfectly performed by some other organ, Josiah Strong noted; “so in the great social organism of the city, when the home fails, the church sometimes undertakes the functions of the home. A host of other “organs”-settlements, playgrounds, Boys’ Clubs, schools, courts, municipalities, state governments, the federal government – were undertaking those functions as well. But even the most reflective progressive activists appeared oblivious to the actual impact of their reforms on many homes.
Some observers did have second thoughts about the denigration of individualism that ran through so many reform causes. Watching the elaboration of regulatory laws and institutions, the occasional reformer worried about the diminished emphasis on individual self-control. Washington Gladden and E. A. Ross feared a Bellamyite society in which external regulation replaced inner restraint. “The entire stress of the demand for reform has been laid upon changing the environment, rather than upon strengthening the character, Gladden observed. The efforts of the great multitude of philanthropic laborers in this field have been concentrated upon the problem of getting temptation out of the way of men, rather than upon the problem of equipping men to resist temptation. . . . The impression made by the popular presentation of any of these reforms upon the mind of a drunkard or a gambler or a libertine would be that the community or the public officials or the purveyors of vice are to blame for his degradation; that he is a victim, more than a sinner; that there is no very loud call on him to be a man so long as there are opportunities of being a brute.
From the perspective of social Darwinism rather than the Social Gospel, Ross saw a similar problem. “Too much consideration for moral weakness would fill the world with moral weaklings, he insisted. “To abolish temptation is to deprive the self-controlled of their natural right to outlive and outnumber those who have a cotton string for a backbone. While Gladden worried about character, Ross worried about heredity. “If social pressure inhibits drinking, those born with the liquor appetite live out their days and plague our descendants with their ill-constituted offspring,
Ross predicted. “If society attacks prostitution by repressive methods that do not go to the core of the individual conscience, it simply poisons the family [T]he abnormal rear children in their own image. Fearing” race degeneration, Ross rejected the whole premise of the campaigns to remake Americans. “The shortest way to make this world a heaven, he suggested, “is to let those so inclined hurry hell-ward at their own pace.
A few did not worry about the decline of the old values. Simon Patten believed that the abundance of America would make struggle and self-discipline irrelevant. “In a society which is conscious of ample resources and is learning that cooperation can abolish poverty by saving men instead of spending them, the philosophy of the disciplinary values of hardship rings false, he suggested. “The opulence and triumphs of powerful young nations like America make hearts recoil from the barren energies of misery. Abundance, Patten argued, would bring the transformation of character and behavior that reformers desired. “In a rich environment men become idealistic, artistic, and moral, he proclaimed. Abundance would create “a new type of man.
Of course, abundance would also create a new type of question: How should riches be distributed? Here the fashionable environmentalist thinking could suggest unfashionable and radical answers. If material well-being shaped character and behavior, then a broad redistribution of wealth and income might be necessary to remake Americans. That was something most progressives refused to countenance. Ross, with characteristic sweep, dismissed any thoroughgoing transformation of capitalism in the Western or “Occidental” world: “If there is any means whereby the Occidental with his private property and free enterprise can escape acute economic contrasts, he has not yet discovered it. Gladden, the advocate of the” great work of reconstruction, declined to consider radical measures. “Society, he said flatly, “cannot be pulled down and rebuilt successfully. For all their interest in using governmental power to change society, reformers had firm limits in mind. “Shall the state, asked George K. Holmes, “treat the family as a child, enforce saving, invest its wealth, guarantee the deposits, establish postal savings banks, the solvency of which will be protected by the wealth of the nation?” Holmes hardly even wanted to ask, let alone respond. “These questions, he pontificated, “need not be answered in the affirmative until great social necessity requires such answers, and need not receive consideration at all until self-help, with neighborly encouragements, has failed.
Other people were already giving these and other questions a good deal of “consideration. Progressives were not the only Americans to see that income and assets had a great deal to do with culture and behavior. Rahel Golub “often got into arguments” with one of her middle-class friends. “She defended her people and I defended mine, Rahel reported. “She talked of refinement and culture. I was at a loss. What was refinement and culture?” Her friend answered, “When for generations you live in a beautiful home, you are surrounded by beautiful pictures, you listen to beautiful music, you eat good food, you are taken care of do you see?” Rahel “saw, but she was troubled. “It seems to me, she said, “that when a man, my father, works all day long, he ought to have a beautiful home, he ought to have good food, he too ought to get a chance to appreciate beautiful music. All day my father is making coats yet his own is so shabby, and my mother, if you ever saw her hands! Why should she know of nothing but scrubbing and scrimping?” Then it was the middle-class woman who was troubled: “her pretty forehead would pucker up; she moved closer to me, if we were on the couch, her hand would clasp mine. Yes, it does seem so, she would say thoughtfully.
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