Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 / Edition 1

by Paul Boyer

Overview

For over a century, dark visions of moral collapse and social disintegration in American cities spurred an anxious middle class to search for ways to restore order. In this important book, Paul Boyer explores the links between the urban reforms of the Progressive era and the long efforts of prior generations to tame the cities. He integrates the ideologies of urban crusades with an examination of the careers and the mentalities of a group of vigorous activists, including Lyman Beecher; the pioneers of the tract societies and Sunday schools; Charles Loring Brace of the Children's Aid Society; Josephine Shaw Lowell of the Charity Organization movement; the father of American playgrounds, Joseph Lee; and the eloquent city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham.

Boyer describes the early attempts of Jacksonian evangelicals to recreate in the city the social equivalent of the morally homogeneous village; he also discusses later strategies that tried to exert a moral influence on urban immigrant families by voluntarist effort, including, for instance, the Charity Organizations' "friendly visitors." By the 1890s there had developed two sharply divergent trends in thinking about urban planning and social control: the bleak assessment that led to coercive strategies and the hopeful evaluation that emphasized the importance of environmental betterment as a means of urban moral control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674931107
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/01/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

Paul Boyer was Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Table of Contents

Part One. The Jacksonian Era

1. The Urban Threat Emerges: A Strategy Takes Shape

2. The Tract Societies: Transmitting a Traditional Morality by Untraditional Means

3. The Sunday School in the City: Patterned Order in a Disorderly Setting

4. Urban Moral Reform in the Early Republic: Some Concluding Reflections

Part Two. The Mid-Century Decades: Years of Frustration and Innovation

5. Heightened Concern, Varied Responses

6. Narrowing the Problem: Slum Dwellers and Street Urchins

7. Young Men and the City: The Emergence of the YMCA

Part Three. The Gilded Age: Urban Moral Control in a Turbulent Time

8. "The Ragged Edge of Anarchy": The Emotional Context of Urban Social Control in the Gilded Age

9. American Protestantism and the Moral Challenge of the Industrial City

10. Building Character among the Urban Poor: The Charity Organization Movement

11. The Urban Moral Awakening of the 1890s

12. The Two Faces of Urban Moral Reform in the 1890s

Part Four.
The Progressives and the City:
Common Concerns, Divergent Strategies

13. Battling the Saloon and the Brothel: The Great Coercive Crusades

14. One Last, Decisive Struggle: The Symbolic Component of the Great Coercive Crusades

15. Positive Environmentalism: The Ideological Underpinnings

16. Housing, Parks, and Playgrounds: Positive Environmentalism in Action

17. The Civic Ideal and the Urban Moral Order

18. The Civic Ideal Made Real: The Moral Vision of the Progressive City Planners

19. Positive Environmentalism and the Urban Moral-Control Tradition: Contrasts and Continuities

20. Getting Right with Gesellschaft: The Decay of the Urban Moral-Control Impulse in the 1920s and After

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Boyer has given us a logical, unified, and richly textured moral genealogy... The research and the grand comprehensiveness of the book will assure its permanence and authority for many years to come.

Reviews in American History - Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Into his epic tale Boyer introduces a fascinating assortment of movements and people... It is excellent at invoking the excitement surrounding the birth of now commonplace features of the urban landscape... Its true achievement lies in the imaginative weaving together of such a diverse collection of measures and men into a single compelling story, which ultimately is the story of the modernization of America.

Journal of American Studies - M. J. Heale

This unusual work in social history...clarifies the most troubling contradiction in democratic theory and practice: In a society in which each person has identical legal status without hereditary rank, and no social institution—such as a church—enjoys official recognition, no elite should have the right to prescribe a code of behavior binding on the members of the social order. Yet without such a code of traditional conduct, how can a democratic society avoid decay and chaos when it loses the original homogeneity of its population and changes the economic relations among its people?... Whatever the future may hold, the issues raised with such tact by Boyer remain crucial.

New York Times - Roger Starr