Progressivism is a theology. It is a truth-claim. It is not a synonym for “good.” It belongs to catechists. It was the prevailing belief of the classical world that human nature was unchangeable, and that the historical process (as observed in nature) was cyclical. Christian scholars, having little hope for temporal improvement, subjected everything to the will of God. This changed during the Protestant Reformation with its challenge to ancient authority. Progress, simply put, was a doctrinal innovation within Christianity. At its core, the scaffolding of the progressive world-view is the belief in a unilinear passage of time, and that humanity develops through an inexorable process as it passes through gradual civilizational stages, (from an inferior society to a superior one.)[1] Presupposing the truth of a linear time (with a beginning, middle, and end,) it was the belief that it was by this process that humanity will reach the Eschaton, the Christian End of Days. “No single idea has been more important than […] the idea of progress in Western Civilization for nearly three thousand years,” observed Robert Nisbet.
With the advent of empirical science, greater value was subsequently placed on secular life.[2] This new conception of religion changed the moral standard, and the pursuit of wealth became an economic virtue expressed in the praxis of capitalism, the social counterpart of Calvinist theology.[3]
WHAT IS AMERICA?
When we talk about America, what are we really talking about? If we look at the thirteen original colonies, they were hardly united. More often than not, they were competing religious factions. Here’s a quick summary:
(Virginia) Established in 1607, the colony of Jamestown. Governed by the chartered London Company, this seed for the colony of Virginia, was the sight of the first representative assembly in America. (Massachusetts) The Puritans sailed for America on board the Mayflower in September 1620. Whether intentional, or not, they missed their destination (Virginia) by a wide margin, landing far to the north. The Puritans, a group of ultra-strict Calvinists who formed the Plymouth Colony, thus invalidated the limited privileges they had been granted. “Trespassers themselves […] they assumed to drive away or harass other settlers whose right was as good […] They would not tolerate the worship of the [Anglican] church of whose intolerance they complained.” They were absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629. “Of all New England states or colonies extant or extinct, Plymouth had least to do with the neighbor who has absorbed both her territory and her fame.” There was both a utopian and materialistic component to the Puritans enterprise in the New World. They were neither exiled from England, nor were they driven out by persecution. Rather they entered into a covenant with God to form a civil and ecclesiastical social body.[4]
(New York) The colony of New Amsterdam was founded in 1624 by the Dutch West India Company, becoming an extension of the Dutch Republic in 1626. While the Plymouth Colony struggled with hardships in its infancy, New Amsterdam flourished on the island of Manhattan. The Plymouth Colony had “neither the leisure, nor the power, to molest them.” In 1664, following the first Dutch War of Charles II, New Amsterdam surrendered without resistance to an English fleet.
(Maryland) The second of the Southern colonies, Maryland was established by the first Lord Baltimore in 1633 after obtaining a territorial grant from the King James. The colony was named Maryland in honor of Henrietta Maria, a Catholic Queen of England. Baltimore, himself a Roman Catholic, intended for the colony to be an asylum “for his persecuted co-religionists,” but absolute religious toleration was the fundamental principle of its constitution. Catholic influence was long prevalent, and its tradition still lingers. In 1689, a Puritan fanatic led a rebellion that removed Lord Baltimore from power. Rights were given back to Baltimore family only after publicly confessing to being a Protestant.
(Rhode Island, Connecticut, & New Hampshire) Religious disputes over the degrees of “purity” caused the colonists of Massachusetts to found Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1636. It was a similar case for New Hampshire in 1638.
(North Carolina) Founded in 1653, North Carolina’s first colonists were those of whom “nobody missed or mourned it,” pockets of individual adventurers who came settled where the law could not follow them. For years it was a disorganized, self-dependent, yeomanry. (South Carolina) The semi-tropical South Carolina, with its large plantations, and considerable slave population, was founded in 1663. The colony owed its growth to the repeal of the Edict of Nantes when thousands of French Huguenots, driven into exile, found freedom from persecution across the Atlantic. Though the Royalist and Anglican element was strong in the colony, it was never strong enough to “enforce its pretensions to supremacy,” and religious and civil disputes kept both the Carolinas in anarchy. The most influential aspect of the population of South Carolina derived from the Huguenot refugees, “in whom persecution had engendered a fierce impatience of all rule,” and “a spirit of inveterate antagonism to all authority formed.”
(Delaware and New Jersey) In 1638 Swedish colonists established the Delaware Valley Colony, and in 1660, the Bergen Colony. After the death of the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, the whole country was forcibly annexed by the Governor of New Netherland. The Swedes were treated with full equality, and the change was hardly felt. In 1664, after the surrender of New Amsterdam, England gained control of the colonial possessions of Delaware Valley and Bergen, which formed the new English colonies of Delaware and New Jersey. Though the English element “preponderated everywhere,” the Dutch inhabitants of New York, and the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, “were not without influence on the character of those provinces.”
(Pennsylvania) William Penn, and his fellow Quakers, purchased Western New Jersey from the original grantees. A democratic Jacobite, Penn was “devoted to the cause of religious equality, and the interests of his sect.” In 1682 he established an “ideal commonwealth where the Quakers should be free from the vexations that, in any civil community, must trouble the life and conscience of men who would neither fight nor swear allegiance, would pay neither church dues nor military taxes.”
(Georgia) In 1732, a group of proprietors obtained from King George II in 1732 a charter for the colony of Georgia. James Oglethorpe, first leader of the last of the thirteen original colonies “assumed and retained for many years a virtually despotic authority.”[5]
The conflicts that arose in early America were an extension of the conflicts that began in Europe. In fact a there is a throughline from the English Civil War to the American Civil War. “If [the Puritans] wished to worship God according to their own tenets,” it was said, “it was with that spirit which […] banishes freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, in all that pertains to religious toleration.” As for the South: “The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the South naturally hate, condemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs.”[6]
WOKE
The concept of “woke” is, without a doubt, a religious expression, and it is not without precedent. It seems, in modernity at least, to be cyclical set phenomenon that arises with regularity in America, a noetic agglutination that most typically develops in New England, and like the current manifestation.
The “First Great Awakenings,” (1730 and 1745) was a mechanism by which Puritan society prepared for a new form of social order.[7] Isolation and the hardships involved with survival initially served to maintain group solidarity. The challenge of adaptation and Calvinist work ethic also encouraged heightened instrumental activity. Through these activities New England Puritans developed a thriving commercial economy which all but ended their isolation, and rendering the theocratic government increasingly inapplicable. The more diligently they worked the field, frontier, sea, and counting-houses, the more successful they became, consequently producing the very elements that were the “decay of religion and a corruption of morals.” A similar event happened with the Calvinists in England who were motivated by anxiety over their state of “grace” into focused instrumentality. Coupled with extreme asceticism, this instrumentality became the catalyst for the industrial revolution.” For three decades, beginning in the 1640s, there was a constant lamentation in the Puritan sermons regarding “the waning of primitive zeal and the consequent atrophy of public morals.” A desperate “socio-emotional” reaction to the growing dissension within New England on the part of the traditionalists to recalibrate to the older moral order followed. What the divines failed to realize, was that these sermons (“jeremiads”) was one of the primary reasons for the heightened instrumentality which ultimately destabilized the form of social organization Puritan leaders sought to maintain. The Great Awakening was the response that sought to destroy the old order, which made it possible for the emergence of a “sectarian and denominational pattern more commensurate with democratic pluralism.”[8]
In the Venn diagram of the First and Second Great Awakenings, lies the years that saw the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. It was the latter of these two revolutions that gave us the terms “left-wing” and “right wing” for political discourse. It was based on the seating arrangements of the first French General Assembly in 1789, when supporters of the political ideas by the Enlightenment sat on the left side of the president of the Assembly, while those who supported the ancien régime sat to his right.[9]
The Second Great Awakening saw New England thought-leaders re-interpreting their community’s cultural influence in the history of the young nation. This paralleled the broader Federalist efforts that sought to “de-revolutionize the Revolution,” and find alternative formative events in the colonial past. A group of divines, the “New Divinity,” inspired by the American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, played a key role in this effort. It was during this period that the Puritan’s founding of Plymouth Colony was elevated to mytho-history, essentially transforming it into a major historical event from which the American republic originated. At the height of the Second Great Awakening, divines like Lyman Beecher pushed for a “filiopietistic interpretation” of New England, and the connection of the spiritual ideals of Plymouth Colony with American religious history.
There were, of course, social components outside the realm of theological discourse, but this did not occur in a vacuum. The social organism, in conversation with the aria of theological debates, developed organizational apparatus that helped to give direction to people suffering from the social strains of a population veering into new political, economic, and geographical areas. The press (religious and popular) “swiftly became a sword of democracy, fueling ardent faith in the future of the American republic,” and decentralized religious authority. This effectually undermined the reverence for tradition, education and station, previous generations displayed, and elevated populist leaders to positions once only held by (authorized) learned scholars.[10]
The political party most closely linked to the sentiments of these New England religionists was the Whig Party, which emphasized “moral didacticism, self-discipline, and institutional reforms,” and was itself informed by the rabid moralism of the Second Great Awakening. It maintained that the state had a legitimate interest in controlling the boundaries around marriage, passing legislation to enhance marriage as a social institution. In contrast, Andrew Jackson, the first Democrat President, ran on a platform that stressed, in part, that marriage was a matter of individual concern.[11] (The press labeled him a “jackass,” but the Democrats embraced the title and used it as their emblem.)[12]
At the tail-end of the Second Great Awakening, the “hell’s-fire revivalism of western New York,” earned that region the moniker, the “Burned-Over District.” It was here where Joseph Smith and Mormonism began; where the Fox sisters inaugurated modern Spiritualism; where Shakers, Millerites, Swedenborgians, and other “charismatic Christian” denominations thrived. It was said that “Western New York contained a people extraordinarily given to unusual religious beliefs, peculiarly devoted to crusades aimed at perfection of mankind and the attainment of millennial happiness.” The reason being, scholars speculate, was the “distinctive combination of Yankee cultural predisposition and new economic imperatives that existed in this area.”[13]
It was also during this time, albeit an ocean away, that the notion of “progress” allied itself with the political philosophy of liberalism.[14] In 1840s Britain the term “progressive” and its connection with Liberal politics became more common place, being associated with policies such as free trade, etc. It was rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment and its inquiry into the historical phases of commercial society. The progressive state was a dynamic, rich, and happy state. The conservative state was stagnant, and impoverished. Agrarian capitalism was dethroned by industrial capitalism, Manchester Liberalism was ascendant.[15]
American religious authority may have been destabilized during these Great Awakenings, but that did not mean that American religiosity went away. The moral scaffolding remained, and so, too, did the institutional bodies of American religiosity, like churches and universities. What really changed during these revivalist movements was the way in which humans interfaced with the Divine, and calling into question the essence of the Divine. In other words, God was placed on a spectrum, and so, too, was humanity—some thinkers made humans more “god-like,” while others made God more “human-like.” At one end you have Mormons becoming Gods, and on the other you have civic institutions acting like a church.
Take for example the Children’s Aid Society of New York. In 1845 the Great Famine in Ireland caused a mass immigration from poor Europeans to America’s cities. (Between 1845 and 1854 it reached an influx that would not be equaled again until 1880.[16] The (mostly-Catholic) Irish immigrants were met with antagonism by openly anti-Catholic Nativists who discriminated against them in innumerable ways. These Irish immigrants lived in squalid conditions. 15,000 vagrant and destitute children lived in the Five Points neighborhood (of Manhattan) alone. The American Civil War would further leave many fatherless children and widows, accelerating the instability of families suffering in poverty. Children as young as five were arrested for vagrancy and truancy. A great many of these homeless children were placed in the poorhouse on Randall’s Island. Charles Loring Brace, a native-born “social reformer” founded the Children’s Aid Society to feed, clothe, and house the immigrant children.
Using the metric of his own religiosity, Brace was performing a noble deed, but therein lied the problem. It was the moral standard of his religion. It was the perennial question of the American experiment. Acceptance, tolerance, and pluralism are not synonyms. Acceptance means belief in something. Tolerance means that you disagree, but tolerate its space. Pluralism is the active engagement with things you disagree with. Brace considered the Irish to be “dangerous classes” and of “inferior stock.” The Catholics, for their part, objected to the Braces’s proselytizing shelters, Protestant Sunday schools, and especially their orphan train program. Started in 1853, the “orphan train” sent Catholic children into the American West and placed in the homes of Protestant families. The Children’s Aid Society changed the names of the children, making it nearly impossible for their families to trace them. Many of these children, you see, were not actually orphans, but the Civil Administrators of Poor Laws regularly invoked a limited “assumption of paternity” clause to end the parental rights of non-Protestants. This termination of parental rights severely undermined the family unit, directly threatening its economic survival.[17] This morality of such Civil apparatus was and is anchored to a religious tradition—it is not universal, it is not accepting, it is not tolerant, and it is only pluralistic in the most charitable of definitions.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE STATE?
The inevitable American Civil War began in South Carolina in April 1861. The war was about many things, including the ending of slavery, but what should ultimately be understood was that the appellation of “civil war” like most “civil wars” I suppose, is misleading. It was a war of different cultures, with different economies, different religions, and different views on governance fighting for what they believed to be the best course of action for their peoples. Though the English writer, Percy Greg’s, History Of The United States (1887,) has been described as more “polemic” than “history,” I think his summation of the North/South divide gives insight into the thinking of the time. It also reads like a pre-amble to the discourse of Red State vs. Blue State in America. Greg states:
There was in 1790 a marked distinction between the North and South, between the New England and the Middle States between the Border and Southern Slave States “Mason and Dixon’s line,” as it was called from the surveyors to whom the demarcation of the artificial frontier between Maryland and Pennsylvania was entrusted, was the boundary of two essentially different and constantly diverging civilizations. No phrase is of more frequent occurrence in American history, politics, and satire. It is used seldom or never in its strict geographical sense, as marking the State line commencing with the Delaware and ending on the Upper Ohio, but as the border between North and South, between slavery and freedom. It acquired this use while as yet slavery existed, legally and practically, in many of the so-called Free States. In this sense it divided nations of common blood and language, but in character, thought, social institutions, economy, and industrial organizations, more unlike than France and Spain, Germany and Russia.[18]
Following the Civil War, American Protestants grew increasingly anxious about the profound social disruptions that stemmed from rapid industrialization and urbanization. After a brief dip in immigration between 1861 and 1873 (owing to the Civil War and economic depression,) ships with new faces docked in the harbors of the major east coast cities.[19] The government did not seem interested in helping. It was 1874 that the twenty-year-old Republican Party was first lampooned as a slow and lumbering elephant in the political cartoons. (Like the Democrats, they adopted the symbol for the party.)[20]
The belief that women, children, and the elderly should be cared for in institutions under the control of the church to which they belonged, was a long-held belief. It was said that education in ethics and religion was “incomplete or impossible except where the church has authority, and that this prime consideration should take precedence of every other.”[21] The charitable relief work of such churches saw to the creation of cheap lodging-houses, or tenements.[22] This proto-public housing, was envisioned as public housing for “a semi-civilized class,” and a place where one could be “withdrawn from temptation and brought under moral and Christian influences.”[23]
THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC
Prosperity returned, and immigration swelled to enormous proportions. (At the end of 1879 the United States gained no less than 10,000, 000 citizens by immigration alone.)[24] The primary causes for immigration were: 1. The renewed difficulties in Ireland.[25] 2. agricultural distress in Great Britain.[26] 3. Heavy taxation and compulsory military service in Germany.[27] 4. Chinese laborers brought in by railroad companies.[28] 5. The pogroms in Russia.[29]
If nothing else, immigration was far from subtle, and social commentary from this period abounds.
In William James’s essay, for the October 1880 issue of The Atlantic, “Great Men, Great Thoughts, And The Environment,” he makes reference to the “English Sparrow controversy.” The substance of that ornithological debate stemmed from introduction of the English Sparrow into the North America ecosystem in the 1850s by a member of the American Acclimatization Society. Within fifty years the sparrows displaced the native birds, and spread across the continent.[30] “The sparrows introduced a few years ago […] have become quite common in the adjoining country, and are driving away the robins, bluebirds, and sparrows,” it was said. “They increase so rapidly and are so pugnacious, that our smaller native birds are compelled to seek quarters elsewhere.”[31] The main theme of James’s essay dealt with Herbert Spencer’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” and of “social Darwinism.” James was particularly interested in the evolutions of the social organism of communities: “What are the causes that make communities change from generation to generation?” The differences, James states, were due to the “accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and their decisions.”[32]
Days after the October 1880 issue of The Atlantic hit the shelves, the infamous “Morey Letter,” appeared in the New York newspaper, The Truth. It was a letter allegedly written by Republican Presidential nominee, James A. Garfield, to one H.L. Morey which claimed support for Railroad companies and their unregulated importation of Chinese laborers. The letter was a fake, made to enflame the anger of American workers who feared the loss of jobs. Though never proven, many suspected the forgery to be the work of Democrat operatives as an “October surprise,” before the November elections.[33] This was one of many factors contributing to the growing social unrest, as James states: “The causes which operate in these incommensurable cycles are connected with one another only if we take the whole universe into account.”[34]
Despite the efforts of the Protestant churches, its increasingly empty pew showed they were hemorrhaging congregants. Church leaders recognized a growing feeling of alienation among their working-class parishioners who remained. The competitor for the church was the rising and vibrant socialist movement.[35] The stream of thought which arrived with the influx of immigrants, the Socialists from Germany, and Nihilists of Russia. “The disappointed people; the men with long hair and the women with short hair; the students who have not been able to get through college; the men who have been seeking office and couldn’t get it; those people who are disappointed, dissatisfied, and who think everything that is is wrong, because they are unhappy.”[36] They found allies with the “Liberal League,” of in the “Burned-over District” and New England, who, themselves, were described as “crackbrained spiritualists and free-lovers.”[37]
The changing demographics of the American people was noticeable. In an article titled “The Future of Harvard Divinity School,” in the September 1881 issue of The Atlantic, William Chauncey Langdon articulates a concern over growing division, both ecclesiastic and partisan. In prosperous times, Langdon states, a nation could support a “considerable waste of its resources and energies,” and divisions and the bitter strife of opposing parties could go on with comparative safety. “But in a period of invasion, or of any great national peril, there are times when the harmonious cooperation, if not the practical consolidation, of all parties, large and small, is the condition of the nation’s life.” [38] Langdon continues with a more explicit comparison:
The great mass of those who interest themselves in public affairs are divided into at least two great parties, the one conservative and the other progressive. The mere politician and the body of the adherents of either party hold, and perhaps really believe, that the well-being, if not the very life, of the country depends only upon its conservatism or only upon its progressive spirit, as the case may be. The true statesman, with whichever party he may associate himself, whether he be personally a conservative or a liberal, knows perfectly well that the maintenance of the nation al life depends upon the existence, and the well-being of the country upon the balance and virtual cooperation, of both parties; and that any serious impediment thrown in the way of the influence or activities of either would be gravely harmful to the public welfare […] The ecclesiastical statesman can never be a mere bigot or sectarian controversialist; but as little can he be found among those who hold that the questions which divide the churches and sects of Christendom are matters of in difference. It is therefore to neither of these that believers must look for statesman-like counsels, in a day when Christian unity has become essential to withstand the assaults of irreligious agnosticism, materialism, and infidelity. [39]
MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY
It was during this period of industrialization that the “Muscular Christianity” movement developed. Groups like the Salvation Army and the Young Men’s Christian Association endeavored to energize the churches to counteract the supposed devitalizing effects of urban living. Not unlike today, the focus on the body and its relationship with society was revaluated. It was in 1881 when the term “bodybuilding” was introduced by Y.M.C.A. physical culturist, Robert J. Roberts.[40] Connected to this was the “Institutional Church” movement, spear-headed by Rev. William Stephen Rainsford at St. George’s (Episcopal) on Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square.[41] It aimed to “represent Christ on earth in the sense of representing Him physically, morally, and spiritually, to the senses of the men and women who live in the present age,” by providing a “material environment wherein the spiritual Christ can express Himself and be felt among men as when He was here in the flesh.”[42]
Other “healthy living” reforms followed. John Kellogg, the Seventh-Day Adventist of cereal fame, successfully pushed for the normalization of male circumcision to prevent masturbation. “Eminent physicians have expressed the opinion that the practice would be a salutary one for all men,” wrote Kellogg (the year he invented “granola.”)[43] He added that “the operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment.”[44] The theory of “eugenics” next appeared on the scene, first posited in 1883 by Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin.) It was the “progressive” belief that “agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” It was racial “pruning,” for desired characterisitcs.[45]
THE SOCIAL GOSPEL
In June 1886, Walter Rauschenbusch began his duties as pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in Hell’s Kitchen, ministering to the tenement dwellers.[46] He would become one of the early leaders of the “Social Gospel” movement in America. It was the beginnings of another Christian eschatology called postmillennialism. This end-times theology latched onto Revelation 20:5, interpreting the Second Coming of Christ to be after the Millennium (Christian “Golden Age.”) The postmillennialists believed that society needed to create the right conditions for said return, and these conditions informed much of the ethics and utopian schemes of the “Social Gospel.” Rauschenbusch had his work cut out for him. A month earlier a bomb planted by Socialist activists exploded at a labor demonstration in Haymarket Square, Chicago. A fatal riot ensued.[47] Red flags with the words, “No Religion No Churches. No God,” were flown in the air.[48] Before the chaos at Haymarket, there was very little public sentiment against the Socialists in America. They were regarded as a “species of crank,” and “dogs with more lungs than teeth.” The horror of the Haymarket was an eye-opening event for the American people.[49]
LOOKING BACKWARD
Socialism of another flavor, inspired by a “Social Gospel” novel of another kind, would appear with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888,) a Utopian Rip-Van-Winklesque story set in the year 2000 and told “the progress of the last one hundred years.”[50] Highly influential, it inspired “Nationalists” clubs across America which aimed to create the semi-Socialist civilization portrayed in the book. Among the charter members of the first club in Boston was a Congregational minister named W. D. P. Bliss.[51] Bliss found the club to be too secular, however, and organized another club in 1889 called the Society for Christian Socialism.[52] His interpretation of the Social Gospel hinged on the belief that the political activity of labor was a crucial element of Christian ethics.[53] Bliss was noted for being the founder of Fabianism in America. Fabians Socialism was named in honor of the Roman general, Quintus Fabius, whose strategy against Hannibal’s Carthaginian army relied on a gradual victory through persistent harassment, gradually draining the enemy’s strength rather than climactic battles.[54] The Fabians wished to infiltrate all classes, from the top down, “with a common opinion in favour of social control of socially created values.” Realizing that other Socialist “denominations” encountered resistance when preaching “class-consciousness,” they understood that advocating for a sudden “revolution” of the working class against capital was nearly impossible, they urged, instead, for the necessity of “a gradual amelioration of social conditions by a gradual assertion of social control over unearned increment.” Fabians worked through Liberal “capitalists,” relying on the slow growth of public opinion over outright revolution. For their coat of arms they chose “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”[55] Though an Episcopalian, Bliss operated an interfaith mission parish, the Brotherhood of the Carpenter, where laborers could discuss practical social efforts.[56] As Bliss stated: “We especially invite those who do not believe in the Church, be they rich or poor.” As Bliss also noted, people called the movement “too socialist for the Christians and too Christian for the socialists.”[57] In 1895 Bliss published A Handbook of Socialism.
Around the same time, a preacher named George Davis Herron would make his contribution to the “progressive” cause.[58] Inspired by the Social Gospel movement, Herron delivered a provocative sermon, “The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth,” in 1890, which garnered him some attention. A wealthy parishioner named Elizabeth Rand subsequently endowed a chair in Applied Christianity for Herron at Grinnell University in 1893 so that he might extend his influence. Herron would later leave his wife for Carrie Rand, Elizabeth Rand’s daughter, in a highly-publicized divorce.[59] But public opinion was changing.
Theodore Roosevelt, who was then Police Commissioner of New York City, coined the term “Parlor Socialist,” in 1896 as an appellation for the new fashionable Socialist denomination. “Parlor Socialists,” according to Roosevelt, referred to those who “stay at home and criticize persons and measures,” and “were only a shade less objectionable and quite as much of a nuisance as the bar-room Socialists.”[60] Roosevelt would elaborate on this idea in the January 1897 issue of The Review of Reviews:
For the last two years there has been an honest effort in New York to give the city good government, and to work intelligently for better social conditions, especially in the poorest quarters. We have cleaned the streets; we have broken the power of the ward boss and the saloon-keeper to work injustice; we have destroyed the most hideous of the tenement houses in which poor people are huddled like swine in a sty; we have made parks and playgrounds for the children in the crowded quarters; in every possible way we have striven to make life easier and healthier and to give man and woman a chance to do their best work; while at the same time we have warred steadily against the pauper-producing, maudlin philanthropy of the free soup-kitchen and tramp lodging-house kind. In all this we have had practically no help from either the parlor socialists or the scarcely more noxious beer-room socialists, who are always howling about the selfishness of the rich and their unwillingness to do anything for those who are less well off.[61]
Francis Greenwood Peabody, the Dean of Harvard Divinity School, in dealing with the Gospel of Jesus, was compelled to engage with the increasingly-popular Marxist literature of his day. Peabody re-contextualized the apocalyptic prophecies relating to the Kingdom of God and the End Times as a material, not spiritual, reality, thereby salvaging the consistency of the Christian Biblical narrative. The “Christology” (nature of Jesus’s divinity) was further explored in 1900, when Peabody published Jesus Christ and the Social Question, one of the founding documents of the Social Gospel corpus. In it, Peabody states:
It is not enough to say that the socialist program is indifferent to religion. It undertakes to provide a substitute for religion. It is a religion, so far as religion is represented by a philosophy of life, to which men give themselves with passionate attachment. It sets itself against Christianity […] It offers itself as an alternative to the Christian religion. [It is] not merely a new economic and social program. but proposes to compete with Christianity in offering a comprehensive creed […] May it not come to pass that the solution of social question shall be found in the principles of the Christian religion? And is it not, on the other hand, evident that the only test of the religion which the modern world will regard as adequate, is its applicability to the solution of the social question? Must we not […] either socialize Christianity or Christianize socialism?[62]
Peabody’s scholarship would have other consequences. His popular course, Philosophy 5, (known colloquially as “Peabo’s drainage, drunkenness, and divorce,”) explored a constellation of issues surrounding labor, prison reform, temperance, charity, and the institution of marriage.[63] This gave rise to the field of Social Work as a profession. Relief work belonged, traditionally, to the purview of the churches, with groups like the Charity Organization Society aiding those in need. With the decline of church attendance, however, such organizations could not survive, and so the domain of morality was outsourced to the state. In 1904 Harvard collaborated with nearby Simmons College to create the Harvard-Simmons Institute, “A School for Social Workers,” as The Boston Evening Transcript stated in May 1905, was a “fitting culmination to Professor Peabody’s twenty years of teaching in Social Ethics.”[64] In 1905, Harvard received a gift of $100,000 from an anonymous benefactor for the endowment of the Department of the Ethics of Social Questions and was to be known as the “Francis Greenwood Peabody Endowment Fund.”[65]
One person who would take advantage of financially gifting to churches and universities was John D. Rockefeller. He shrewdly provided large endowments to the University of Chicago, Brown University, and other schools and organizations, thereby successfully “silencing to a very extent the voice of a church which next to Methodist was long the most fearless and in combatting corrupt and evil conditions from time to time sought to fasten on the social and political organisms.”[66] The “gold so judiciously spent” on missionary societies, churches, and colleges, by Rockefeller and “other modern master spirits of the commercial feudalism,” had effectively “anesthetized the religious conscience of America.”[67] The purchase of academics and church leaders would have another effect.[68] It left the door open for intruders. That people needed religion of some kind was evident to most theorists of the day, many ascribing the rise of suicide in Europe and America to the absence of faith. The “tired broken souls” who craved meaning and who had “a great want of true religion and Christianity.”[69] Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party of America acknowledged as much, stating:
While Socialism is a political movement with an industrial purpose, and because it pays chief attention to the bread-and-butter problem, has been called materialistic, it is really the most idealistic movement of the centuries. So idealistic is it in its aims that, while having no specific religious tendency or purpose, it partakes somewhat of the nature of a religious movement and awakens something of a religious enthusiasm among its adherents.[70]
Like other religions, Socialism had converts. The most high-profile was, perhaps, Jack London. “I was now a Socialist without knowing it, withal, an unscientific one,” London stated. “I had been reborn, but not renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was.”[71]
The national platform of the Socialist Party began making a push to enter the churches, labor unions, and universities.[72] London, together with Upton Sinclair, were instrumental in inaugurating the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. (I.S.S.) in 1905.[73] As a template on how to proceed with planting the seeds of the I.S.S. in the universities, London and his cohorts referred to the tactics of the Italian Socialist, Enrico Ferri who boasted that he could make two-thirds of his students “conscious Socialists,” without even pronouncing even uttering the word Socialism. “We should introduce Socialism into the students’ minds as a part of science, as the logical and necessary culmination of the biological and sociological sciences,” said Ferri. “No need of making a direct propaganda which would frighten many of the listeners.”[74]
At the same time George Davis Herron and Carrie Rand would use the inherited Rand fortune to open a Socialist school in Manhattan called The Rand School.[75] Herron would also write the platform for the Socialist Party of America which stated that “there can be no possible basis for social peace, for individual freedom, for mental and moral harmony, except in the conscious and complete triumph of the working class as the only class that has the right or power to be.”[76] As for the Church itself, it was the aim of the Socialist Party to “turn church people into voting socialists.” To that end they established the Christian Socialist Fellowship. The Christian Socialist Fellowship declared that it had two ends in view:
First: To go after the church people and make voting Socialists of them. Second: To prevent the church people being side-tracked by some near-Socialistic and near-Christian movement, which shall lead them away from real Socialism and real Christianity. The men and women at the head of this political movement are active church-workers and also active and genuine Socialists. [77]
THE “GREAT AWOKENING”
The Christology of the “Great Awokening” is all but Christ-less, but its schema is no different than its predecessors. It is a denomination. It is a Christless Christianity, an intolerant theology of moral absolutism. Why talk of the separation of Church and State when “progressive” policies have been integrating them for years? The state is the church. It has taken on the institutional roles that were previously the domain of various churches. As those who advocate for such policies admit, society achieves progress through “the direct use of the central government’s planning, regulatory, and directive powers.”[78] Those who do not believe in the eschaton, are left with the ateleíoton, the “endless.” Endless progress without reason.
SOURCES:
[1] Rochefort, David A. “Progressive And Social Control Perspectives On Social Welfare.” Social Service Review. Vol. LV, No. 4 (December 1981): 568-592.
[2] Wagar, W. Warren. “Modern Views of the Origins of the Idea of Progress.” Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. XXVIII, No. 1. (January-March 1967): 55-70.
[3] Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York, New York. (1930): 1-11 [Foreword by R.H. Tawney.]
[4] Rossel, Robert D. “The Great Awakening: An Historical Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. LXXV, No. 6 (May 1970): 907- 925.
[5] Greg, Percy. History Of The United States From The Foundation Of Virginia To The Reconstruction Of The Union: Volume I. W.H. Allen & Company. London, England. (1887): 22-23, 36, 44-46, 55, 77-80, 83, 131-132.
[6] Fitzhugh, George. “The Message, The Constitution, and the Times.” De Bow’s Review. Vol. V, No. 2. (February 1861): 156-167; Fitzhugh, George. “The Puritan and the Cavalier.” De Bow’s Review. Vol. VI, No. 3. (September 1861): 209-252.
[7] Rossel, Robert D. “The Great Awakening: An Historical Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. LXXV, No. 6 (May 1970): 907- 925.
[8] Rossel, Robert D. “The Great Awakening: An Historical Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology. Vol. LXXV, No. 6 (May 1970): 907- 925.
[9] Bienfait, H.F; van Beek, W.E.A. “Right and Left as Political Categories. An Exercise in ‘Not-so-Primitive’ Classification.” Anthropos. Bd. 96, H. 1. (2001): 169-178.
[10] Mathews, Donald G. “The Second Great Awakening As An Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis.” American Quarterly. Vol. XXI, No. 1 (Spring 1969): 23-43; Conforti, Joseph. “The Invention Of The Great Awakening, 1795-1842.” Early American Literature. Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (1991): 99-118.
[11] Basch, Norma. “Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828.” The Journal of American History. Vol. LXXX, No. 3 (1993): 890–918.
[12] Watson, Elmo Scott. “A Campaign Is Coming And It Will Bring Songs, Slogans, Symbols, And Slanders.” The Weekly Call. (Birmingham, Alabama) February 29, 1936.
[13] Pritchard, Linda K. “The Burned-over District Reconsidered: A Portent Of Evolving Religious Pluralism In The United States.” Social Science History. Vol. VIII, No. 3 (Summer 1984): 243-265.
[14] Rochefort, David A. “Progressive And Social Control Perspectives On Social Welfare.” Social Service Review. Vol. LV, No. 4 (December 1981): 568-592.
[15] The New Volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (Tenth Edition.) Vol. XXV. London, England. (1902): 470-482.
[16] “The Tide Of Immigration.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (Brooklyn, New York) March 17, 1882.
[17] Munch, Janet Butler. “At Home in the Bronx: Children of the New York Catholic Protectory 1865-1938,” The Bronx Country Historical Society Journal. Vol. LII, No. 1-2 (Spring 2015): 30-48.
[18] Greg, Percy. History Of The United States From The Foundation Of Virginia To The Reconstruction Of The Union: Volume II. West, Johnston & Company. Richmond, Virginia. (1892): 134.
[19] “The Tide Of Immigration.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (Brooklyn, New York) March 17, 1882.
[20] Watson, Elmo Scott. “A Campaign Is Coming And It Will Bring Songs, Slogans, Symbols, And Slanders.” The Weekly Call. (Birmingham, Alabama) February 29, 1936.
[21] Fetter, Frank A. “The Subsidizing Of Private Charities.” American Journal Of Sociology. Vol. VII, No. 3 (November 1901): 359- 385.
[22] Irvine, Alexander. From the Bottom Up: The Life Story of Alexander Irvine. Gosset & Dunlop. New York, New York (1910): 274; Irvine, Alexander. A Fighting Parson: The Autobiography of Alexander Irvine. Little, Brown, and Company. Boston, Massachusetts. (1930): 79-80.
[23] Bremmer, Robert H. “The Big Flat: History of a New York Tenement House.” The American Historical Review. Vol. LXIV, No. 1 (October 1958): 54–62.
[24] “The Tide Of Immigration.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (Brooklyn, New York) March 17, 1882.
[25] In 1879 a famine occurred in the west of Ireland, which resulted in the Land War of 1879-82. It was the largest mass migration in modern Irish history. As a response, a man named Michael Davitt formed the Land League with the Irish-Nationalist M.P., Charles Parnell, as the group’s titular head. This organization agitated the Irish countryside by reinforcing the politicization of rural Catholic nationalists and placing it in opposition to Englishness (and implicitly Protestantism,) urbanization, and landlordism. What followed was a sustained challenge to Britain’s control of the Irish countryside by the rural Irish poor. Their system of elaborate warfare was moral and economic, and included boycotting those who were perceived to be oppressing the poor, embargos on evicted farms, and holding mass demonstrations where tenants were evicted. [Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland: 1600-1972. Penguin Books. New York, New York. (1989): 415.; McNamara, Conor. “Illuminated Address to Charles Stewart Parnell from the Tenant Farmers of Ireland, 1880.” History Ireland. Vol. XIX, No. 1 (January-February 2011): 32–33.]
[26] The global economic troubles of 1873 caused lack of employment, scarcity of income, and high taxes (imperial and local.) Riots, and political uncertainties were commonplace. The agricultural troubles occurred because of the monetary standard of England. While England used the gold standard, India used the silver standard, and since the value of gold had fallen, exports were stimulated by silver using countries. The agricultural sector of England was hit hard. The Indian ryot (farmer) realized he could get the same number of rupees for his wheat when sold at 24s. per quarter as he did when it was sold at 36s. per quarter. The consequence was that wheat was exported from India (and other silver using countries, e.g. Russia and many South American countries) than from Britain. This was perceived as a blow against the British farmer. [W.S. “London Letter.” The Gravesend Reporter, North Kent and South Essex Advertiser. (Kent, England) February 20, 1886; “Bi-Metallism And The Depression.” The Oxfordshire Weekly News. (Oxford, England) June 5, 1889; “The Woes Of The Spinster are Deepening.” The St. James’s Gazette. (London, England) July 13, 1889; United States Congress Special Committee on the Investigation of Silver. Silver: Hearings Before a Special Committee on the Investigation of Silver. U.S. Government Printing Office. Washington, D.C. (1939): 262-263.]
[27] Prior to 1880, the policy regarding outward transatlantic migration from Germany was fairly liberal. In some sense emigration was regarded as a way to export their “social problems.” In 1879 Friedrich Fabri, a leading German expansion publicist, published a propaganda pamphlet titled “Does Germany Need Colonies?” The work focused on questions regarding population and emigration, and the concerns of the renewed vigor of transatlantic emigration. The work stimulated public debate while other authors contributed their own works regarding nationalistic visions, ethnocultural ideas. During the disruptive transition from an agrarian to industrial society, emigration was regarded as a “socio-political necessity” to reduce potential social revolution. There was also the simultaneous desire to emphasize the “Germanness” of the immigrants and to avoid hemorrhaging human capital to the global market, especially to the competing economic power of the United States. There was fear that German emigrants would be quickly absorbed into the North American civilizations due to the superiority and allure of the New World’s economy. Emigration, therefore, was directed from North to South America which was regarded as a culturally and economically inferior to Germany. This, it was hoped, would help preserve their “Germanness.” It was also believed that by establishing “German” colonies in South America, the host country would organically develop a positive relationship with Germany. This was unsuccessful. In Brazil, for example, the informal German state within a state was viewed with suspicion. During the late 1870s and the early 1880s new outward migration legislation was passed, which saw taxation and other penalties (especially for those who tried to avoid forced military conscription.) [Bade, Klaus J. “From Emigration to Immigration: The German Experience in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Central European History Vol. XXVIII, No. 4 (1995): 507–535.]
[28] Of all the immigrant populations to arrive in the 1880s, none, perhaps, caused ore anxiety than the Chinese. The controversial “Morey Letter” was often discussed in the papers, even in 1882 (two years after it was published.) A columnist for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle writes: “We regard the object of this bill as entirely proper for several reasons, any one of them good enough to warrant its becoming law. The question of difference in race is one of these. Nature, as far as history goes back, has set its canon against the intermingling of races […] The Chinaman is a distinct personality we cannot fuse him in with us. The attempt is against natural laws.” [“Exit John Chinaman.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (Brooklyn, New York) March 24, 1882.] The issue carried such weight, that in late-January 1882, a bill was introduced in Washington, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which proposed “wholly suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers [to America] during a period of 25 years.” [“News From Washington.” The New York Times. (New York, New York) January 26, 1882.] (The bill would pass in March 1882 with “significant majority, in spite of the ‘corporate industries’ and the manufacturing ‘companies’ whose interests in the matter of labor are to be ‘conserved’ at the expense of all other considerations.”)
[29] On March 1, 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by the terrorist group, Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Will.”) One of the ten members of Narodnaya Volya, Hesya Helfman, was a Jewish woman.[29] Two weeks later pogroms (“violent destruction, wreak havoc”) against the Jews began in Ukraine. Coinciding with Russian Orthodox Holy Week (as retribution for the death of their beloved Tsar,) these pogroms were the first significant acts of violence against Jews in the region since 1648 and marked a major turning point between the Russian Government and her Jewish Subjects. [Aronson, I. Michael. “Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia.” The Russian Review. Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 (January 1980): 18-31; Pritsak, Omeljan. “The Pogroms of 1881.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Vol. XI, No. 1/2 (June 1987): 8-43.] By 1882, a Mansion House Committee was convened in Britain to help raise the necessary capital to assist in the evacuation of endangered Jews from Continental Europe. “England was only a half-way house,” it was said, “the mass of the immigrants passed further.” [“Amongst the Jews at the East-End.” The Pall Mall Gazette. (London, England) August 7, 1885.] The Jewish Board of Guardians helped them re-settle in America. The great tide of immigration was facilitated by the trans-Atlantic steamship companies, whose innovative connective railway system, and reduced prices, catered to economic migrants. [Higgins, Shawn. “From the Seventh Arrondissement to the Seventh Ward: Blavatsky’s Arrival in America 1873.” Theosophical History. Vol. XIX, No. 4 (October 2018): 158-171.]
[30] Coates, Peter. “Eastenders Go West: English Sparrows, Immigrants, and the Nature of Fear.” Journal of American Studies. Vol. XXXIX, No. 3 (December 2005): 431–462.
[31] Coues, Elliott. “English Sparrows.” The American Naturalist. Vol. VIII, No. 7 (July 1874): 436.
[32] James, William. “Great Men , Great Thoughts , And The Environment.” The Atlantic. Vol. XLVI, No. 276. (October 1880): 441-459.
[33] The letter stated, “individuals and companies have the right to buy labor where they can get it cheapest. We have a treaty with the Chinese government […] I am not prepared to say that it should be abrogated until our great manufacturing and corporate interests are conserved in the matter of labor.” [“Garfield On Chinese Labor.” The Boston Globe. (Boston, Massachusetts) October 20, 1880; “The Work of a Clumsy Villain.” The New York Times. (New York, New York) October 24, 1880.]
[34] James, William. “Great Men , Great Thoughts , And The Environment.” The Atlantic. Vol. XLVI, No. 276. (October 1880): 441-459.
[35] Dorn, Jacob H. “The Social Gospel and Socialism: A Comparison of the Thought of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch.” Church History. Vol. LXII, No. 1 (1993): 82–100.
[36] “Mr. Jeremiah Curtin.” The Buffalo Commercial. (Buffalo, New York) March 17, 1881.
[37] “Letters of W. Q. Judge.” The Theosophist. Vol. LII, No. 8 (May 1931): 191-197.
[38] Langdon, William Chauncy. “The Future of Harvard Divinity School.” The Atlantic. Vol. XLVIII, No. 287 (September 1881): 377-384.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Clifford, Putney. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. (2001): 1.
[41] Grant, Percy Stickney. “Dr. Rainsford.” Charities And The Commons. Vol. XV, No. 22 (March 3, 1906): 750-752; “Religion: Clinical Laboratory.” Time Magazine. (November 7, 1938.)
[42] Bliss, William Dwight Porter Bliss. The Encyclopedia of Social Reform. Funk & Wagnalls Company. New York, New York. (1897): 734-735.
[43] Kellogg, John Harvey. Plain Facts For Old And Young. I.F. Segner. Burlington, Iowa. (1882): 113-114.
[44] Aggleton, Peter. “‘Just a Snip’?: A Social History of Male Circumcision.” Reproductive Health Matters. Vol. XV, No. 29 (May 2007): 15–21.
[45] Cayleff, Susan E. Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, Maryland. (2016): 1-11; Hirsch, Dafna. “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a ‘New Jewish Type.’” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. XV, No. 3 (September 2009): 592-609.
[46] White, Ronald C. The Social Gospel: Religion And Reform In Changing America. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (1976): xv.
[47] “Great Chicago Riot.” The Sun. (New York, New York) May 5, 1886.
[48] “Denounced From Pulpit.” The Chicago Tribune. (Chicago, Illinois) May 10, 1886.
[49] “The Anarchists And Diplomacy.” The Inter-Ocean. (Chicago, Illinois) May 14, 1886.
[50] Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. Ticknor And Company. Boston, Massachusetts. (1888): vi.
[51] Willard, Cyrus Field. “The Nationalist Club Of Boston.” The Nationalist. Vol. I, (1889): 16-20.
[52] Webber, Christopher L. “William Dwight Porter Bliss (1856-1926) Priest and Socialist.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 (March 1959): 9, 11-39.
[53] Jenkin, Thomas P. “The American Fabian Movement.” The Western Political Quarterly. Vol. I, No. 2 (June 1948): 113- 123.
[54] Pease, Edward Reynolds. The History of the Fabian Society. A.C. Fitfield. London, England. (1916): 34, 248-249.
[55] Perdue, Jon B. The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism. Potomac Books. Washington, D.C. (2012): 97.
[56] Webber, Christopher L. “William Dwight Porter Bliss (1856-1926) Priest and Socialist.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 (March 1959): 9, 11-39.
[57] Kirk, Rudolf; Kirk, Clara. “Howells and the Church of the Carpenter.” The New England Quarterly. Vol. XXXII, No. 2 (June 1959): 185-206.
[58] Dole, Nathan Haskell. “Notes From Boston.” Book News. Vol. XIV, No. 161 (January 1896):
[59] Creelman, James. “America’s Trouble-Makers.” Pearson’s Magazine. Vol. XX, No. 1. (July 1908): 3-28.
[60] “City Vigilants Wake Up.” The Sun. (New York, New York) November 10, 1896; “Hot Shot For Tammany.” The New York Times. (New York, New York) November 10, 1896.
[61] Roosevelt, Theodore. “How Not to Better Social Conditions.” The Review of Reviews. Vol. XV, No. 1 (January 1897): 36-39.
[62] Peabody, Francis Greenwood. Jesus Christ and the Social Question. The MacMillan Cew York, New York. (1900): 19-21.
[63] Reynolds, Jr., Levering. “The Later Years (1880-1953.)” The Harvard Divinity School. George Hunston Williams. (ed.) The Beacon Press. Boston, Massachusetts. (1954): 165-229.
[64] “Training Social Workers.” The Boston Evening Transcript. (Boston, Massachusetts) May 5, 1905.
[65] Merriman, R.B. “The Summer Quarter.” The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine. Vol. XIV, No. 53. (September 1905): 43-49.
[66] “The Standard Oil Company And The Conscience Of The Nation.” The Arena. Vol. XL, No. 228 (December 1908): 628-631.
[67] “The Church And Socialism.” The Arena. Vol. XL, No. 225 (August-September 1908): 243-245.
[68] “How Corrupt Wealth Is Destroying The Moral Virility And Mental Integrity Of Church, College And Other Fountain-Heads Of Public Opinion.” The Arena. Vol. XXXVIII, No. 217 (December 1907): 721-722.
[69] “Professor Masaryk On Increase In Suicide And The Decadence Of Vital Religious Ideals In The Old World.” The Arena. Vol. XXXVIII, No. 217 (December 1907): 721.
[70] Debs, Eugene V. “Socialist Ideals.” The Arena. Vol. XL, No. 227 (November 1908): 432-434.
[71] London. Jack. War of the Classes. The Regent Press. New York, New York. (!905): 278.
[72] Creelman, James. “America’s Trouble-Makers.” Pearson’s Magazine. Vol. XX, No. 1. (July 1908): 3-28.
[73] “Mr. Jack London’s Socialistic Observations.” The Sun. (New York, New York) June 3, 1905; “To Study Socialism.” The Sun. (New York, New York) June 4, 1905.
[74] Creelman, James. “America’s Trouble-Makers.” Pearson’s Magazine. Vol. XX, No. 1. (July 1908): 3-28.
[75] “The Rand School.” The Evening Standard. (London, England) January 9, 1907.
[76] Creelman, James. “America’s Trouble-Makers.” Pearson’s Magazine. Vol. XX, No. 1. (July 1908): 3-28.
[77] “Constitution of the Christian Socialist Fellowship.” The Christian Socialist. Vol. V, No. 13 (July 1, 1908): 5.
[78] Rochefort, David A. “Progressive And Social Control Perspectives On Social Welfare.” Social Service Review. Vol. LV, No. 4 (December 1981): 568-592.
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