Steel City Gospel: Protestant Laity and Reform in Progressive-Era Pittsburgh (Religion in History, Society and Culture)

RELIGION IN HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Edited by Frank Reynolds & Winnifred Fallers Sullivan University of Chicago A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

RELIGION IN HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE FRANK REYNOLDS & WINNIFRED FALLERS SULLIVAN, General Editors LAS ABEJAS Pacifist Resistance and Syncretic Identities in a Globalizing Chiapas Marco Tavanti THE SPIRIT OF DEVELOPMENT Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe Erica Bornstein EXPLAINING MANTRAS Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a Natural Language in Hindu Tantra Robert A.Yelle LEST WE BE DAMNED Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 Lisa McClain THE FOX’S CRAFT IN JAPANESE RELIGION AND FOLKLORE Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities Michael Bathgate LITURGY WARS Ritual Theory and Protestant Reform in Nineteenth-Century Zurich Theodore M.Vial THEORIES OF THE GIFT IN SOUTH ASIA Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Reflections on Dāna Maria Heim HEAVENLY JOURNEYS, EARTHLY CONCERNS The Legacy of the Mi‘raj in the Formation of Islam Brooke Olson Vuckovic STEEL CITY GOSPEL Protestant Laity and Reform in Progressive-Era Pittsburgh Keith A.Zahniser

STEEL CITY GOSPEL Protestant Laity and Reform in Progressive-Era Pittsburgh Keith A.Zahniser

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN http://www.routledge.co.uk/ Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-203-49683-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58046-X (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN: 0-415-97031-8 (hardback: alk. paper)

To the memory of Professor Robert L.Kelley

Contents Series Editors’ Foreword

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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ChapterOne Pittsburgh Protestant Churches and Early Progressive Reform in the Steel City Chapter Two Pittsburgh’s Activist Laity: Agents of the Moral Reform Discourse ChapterThree Pittsburgh Reformers and the Search for Moral Government

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Chapter Four Graft, Vice, and the Reform of Pittsburgh’s Government

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Chapter Five Back to the Churches: the Christian Social Service Union and the 118 Reclamation of the Moral Reform Discourse Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Series Editors’ Foreword Religion in History, Society and Culture brings to a wider audience work by outstanding young scholars who are forging new agendas for the study of religion in the twenty-first century. As editors, we have two specific goals in mind. First, volumes in this series illumine theoretical understandings of religion as a dimension of human culture and society. Understanding religion has never been a more pressing need. Longstanding academic habits of either compartmentalizing or ignoring religion are breaking down. With the entry of religion into the academy, however, must come a fully realized conversation about what religion is and how it interacts with history, society, and culture. Each book in this series employs and refines categories and methods of analysis that are intrinsic to the study of religion, while simultaneously advancing our knowledge of the character and impact of particular religious beliefs and practices in a specific historical, social, or cultural context. Second, this series is interdisciplinary The academic study of religion is conducted by historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others. Books in the series bring before the reader an array of disciplinary lenses through which religion can be creatively and critically viewed. Based on the conviction that the instability of the category itself generates important insights, “religion” in these works encompasses and/or informs a wide range of religious phenomena, including myths, rituals, ways of thought, institutions, communities, legal traditions, texts, political movements, artistic production, gender roles, and identity formation. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The University of Chicago, Divinity School Frank Reynolds, The University of Chicago, Divinity School

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the many people and institutions that have helped make this book possible. I am thankful first for the help and guidance of the professors who served on my dissertation committee: Robert L.Kelley, whose broad spirit and great learning shaped the early conceptual stages, and to whose memory this book is dedicated; Otis L. Graham, Jr., who gallantly took on the project as major advisor; and Mary O. Furner and Catherine L.Albanese, both of whom gave careful readings to the manuscript and invaluable suggestions for its improvement. Numerous people in Pittsburgh assisted me in the research phase of this project. The Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh was very supportive during my time in Pittsburgh. I would like to thank the staffs of the University of Pittsburgh’s Archives Service Center in Hillman Library, and especially Frank A.Zabrosky and John D.Thompson of the Archives of Industrial Society. John J.Fry and others at the Clifford E.Barbour Library of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary were very patient in collecting and locating documents for me, as was Corey Seeman and colleagues at the Library and Archives Division of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Division also deserves mention. Finally, I wish to thank the following churches and especially their patient staffs, for helping me to locate and research their archives: the Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in Trinity Episcopal Church, where Lynn Wohleber has done an amazing job of organizing; Mrs. Susie Wolfe at Calvary Episcopal Church; Barbara Irwin at the Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania; and the staffs of First Unitarian Church; First United Methodist Church; Allegheny United Methodist Church, NS; the Western Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church; First Presbyterian Church; Point Breeze Presbyterian Church; Shadyside Presbyterian Church; the Presbytery of Pittsburgh; First Baptist Church; and the Smithfield Church. The following assisted this project by providing funding: at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Department of History, the Graduate Division, the General Affiliates, the History Associates, the Robert L.Kelley Scholarship, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center all provided valuable support. The Pew Foundation provided a year of aid during the writing of the dissertation. Colleagues D.Scott Cormode, Mark Healey, Joe LaSala, Mike Sider, and Diane Winston offered helpful suggestions at various stages. Most especially, I wish to thank my writing group—Erin Bonin, Amy DeRogatis, Hilary Wyss, and Dave WeaverZercher—all of whom read the entire work several times, and helped me to better my prose and sharpen my thinking. I am also grateful to Joel Carpenter, Timothy Gilfoyle, Joseph Rishel, and Gary Scott Smith for suggestive comments on conference papers drawn from this work, and to Edward K.Muller, who read the manuscript in its entirety.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents Marvin R. and Adrienne A. Zahniser, and other family members for all they have done to help me finish this project successfully. Above all, I wish to thank my wife, Adriana M. Brodsky, for all her help and support as both colleague and partner, and to David and Leah, my children, for forgiving me all the time spent in front of the computer.

Introduction On the night of April 1, 1910, A.Leo Weil, Pittsburgh attorney and president of the Voters’ League, stood before a “tumultuous” gathering of over 3,000 Pittsburgh citizens in Exposition Hall in downtown Pittsburgh. Behind him on the platform sat an impressive collection of the city’s notable men, including prominent manufacturers, businessmen, attorneys, political figures, and clergy, along with the Republican mayor William Magee. The agitated crowd before Weil represented a broad cross-section of Pittsburghers, drawn to the meeting by notices of a “mass indignation meeting” to protest the ways in which the current city administration promoted graft and vice in Pittsburgh. The previous month had been an exciting one for scandal in the Steel City. Investigations spurred by the Voters’ League, a local civic reform organization, had uncovered a grafting scheme in the city council in which the vast majority of council members had accepted bribes to vote for certain legislation. Also in recent months, the director of a local settlement house had conducted a survey of the largely immigrant and African American Hill District, and discovered that prostitution had skyrocketed since the end of the previous mayor’s tenure. Reformers connected graft to vice and saw both flowing from misrule by the city’s machine government. Weil, spurred on by the wildly cheering crowd, accused the city administration of undermining the civil service laws, of “handing over the city to vice; of being in sympathy with graft and corruption; of waste of public funds and of building up a political system at the cost of the honor of men and the virtue of women.”1 The Rev. James McIlvaine, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, voiced the moral condemnation of these sordid facts on the part of the church. “The legalization of vice is bad enough,” he thundered, “but its systemization by which the State profits is the most awful thing under heaven.”2 When Mayor Magee attempted to defend his administration against all charges, the angry crowd booed and hissed him off the stage, and he left the meeting in disgust. Pittsburgh’s reformers were just getting started. Out of this meeting came the formation of a committee with representatives of the seventeen civic groups present, determined to devise a new and “honest” form of municipal government. The result was the “Pittsburgh Plan,” enacted a year later in 1911, which changed city council from a ward-elected body of over a hundred and fifty members to a city-wide elected body of only nine members.3 Reformers demanded as well an end to the vice trade, and created a “Morals Efficiency Commission” in 1912, securing for it investigative and police powers that allowed it to shut down, by its own estimate, 70 percent of Pittsburgh’s disorderly houses in its first year of operation.4 One of the key reformers behind the mass indignation meeting was prominent Episcopalian businessman H.D.W.English, a member of the Voters’ League and chairman of the Municipal Affairs committee of the Chamber of Commerce. English had long worked with a variety of groups to bring about the type of reforms initiated that April evening.5 In April of 1912, two years after the mass indignation meeting, English delivered a speech at the yearly Episcopal Diocesan convention in Pittsburgh which

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suggested that the city’s Protestant laity had played a crucial role in the reform process. Ostensibly, English was to give an appreciation speech that night honoring thirty years of service by Pittsburgh’s Episcopal Bishop, Cortlandt Whitehead. English chose to praise Whitehead by noting the successes of prominent laity within the diocese under the bishop’s tenure. He told a story of how a core group of Episcopalian laity, especially from Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh’s elite East End, inspired by the ideas of social Christianity, had entered into struggles for political and social reform beginning in the 1890s and won many significant victories. Significantly, English stressed that it was the laity which had done these things; the role of the church hierarchy had been more ambiguous. While the bishop was responsible for “seeing visions,” and making “large plans,” English noted, it was the job of the laity both to counsel him in the formation of these plans and to act as the “agents” that actually carried them out. The great successes of the laity “reflected credit” onto the diocese, English observed. But the credit was only “reflected” off the shining triumphs of the laity. English ended by suggesting both a vision for the future stance of the church, and perhaps a criticism of its past neglect, when he expressed the hope that the church would “stand for social service in its relation to the well-being and upbuilding of men.” This must occur, English warned, “if the Church is to be the force in the twentieth century the Laity hope it will be.”6 These two “moments” in Pittsburgh’s reform story encapsulate well many of the era’s thematic conflicts and represent the issues that are most fascinating about Progressive Era reform in this city. In the first vignette we see the not unfamiliar staging of an effort by the city’s elites to discredit Pittsburgh’s machine government—an effort rhetorically “framed” in moral terms, and linked to a long-time goal of ridding the city of the nefarious political and moral influence of the saloon and the brothel. It is not clear, either from the speeches given that night or the subsequent actions taken, which type of corruption reformers found more repugnant—cheating and inefficient city governments, or officially tolerated prostitution. It is quite obvious, however, that they believed that corruption, broadly defined, was beating like a steady, scum-surfaced tide at the foundations of the city, and that Pittsburgh’s evil influences were all somehow allied and mutually supportive. In the second episode, we see one of the elites most involved in the city’s reform efforts give primary credit for reform successes to the activity of inspired Protestant laity. Taken together, these vignettes suggest a rich interweaving of political, social, and industrial reform with religious language, ideas, and institutions. Although the trend in Progressive Era studies has most recently been toward establishing the transatlantic or even global contexts of Progressive reform, I have chosen to focus on a single city, Pittsburgh, because such a focus allows a deeper penetration into the complexities of one region’s reform efforts.7 When the Russell Sage Foundation unveiled the results of the Pittsburgh Survey in 1908, Paul U.Kellogg, the Survey’s director, indicated that Pittsburgh had not been chosen as “a scapegoat city,” or as a notorious example of the worst effects of rampant American industrialism. Rather, the Sage Foundation saw Pittsburgh’s problems as quite typical (typical, at least, of large, northeastern industrial cities).8 We must question efforts to make a singular city or region and its particular reform history stand somehow for the reform histories of other cities.9 One of the arguments of this study will in fact be that local character, chronology, and concerns gave a very individual shape to Pittsburgh reformers’ efforts. Nevertheless,

Introduction

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Pittsburgh shared social, political, and economic structures and problems with other industrial cities and its reformers clearly learned from the reform struggles acted out in other cities. As well, these reformers were both consciously and unconsciously linked in powerful ways to long historical traditions of morally motivated political reform. If approached with some caution, a study of the reform history of Pittsburgh can offer new insights about how religious institutions, language, and concerns could shape and be shaped by broader reform agendas. To understand the reform history of Pittsburgh in the Progressive Era, I will argue, we must analyze the networks that connected reformers to churches, settlement houses, and civic reform organizations and see how this network fostered the creation of a moral discourse—a discourse that fed a general sense of moral outrage over political and cultural corruption. This discourse represented a serious expression of reformers’ concerns, but far from becoming hegemonic or announcing the uniformity of reformers’ agendas, became rather a linguistic crucible for the mediation of state and individual, politics and religion, and the church and laity in the Steel City. Crucial to the evolution and functioning of the moral reform discourse was the central role played by Pittsburgh’s “activist laity” as conduits between “religious” and “secular” organizations as well as earlier and later reform movements. Paying attention to these reformers as laity (and not as stand-ins for the church as an institution, or as ciphers for the class interests of the elite) will contribute to a clearer sense of how religious ideas and language came to permeate the political, social, and industrial reform efforts of this era, and will highlight how this moral discourse took on the contours and emphases that it did. Paying closer attention to activist laity will also help make a case for the conclusion that the social gospel was in reality many “social gospels.” Not described accurately as a doctrine passed down from national denominational commissions and the great social gospel theorists such as Walter Rauschenbusch or Washington Gladden, Pittsburgh’s social gospel was constructed jointly by clergy and laity. It was contingent upon local contexts, on the whims of personality and chronology, and above all on the way that laity heard and acted upon social gospel ideas. Finally, while laity remain the central actors, I argue that we must keep church and laity together in order to understand the struggles that emerged between the institutional church and the laity over questions of who should have the power to arbitrate and define society’s moral questions. Laity became so central to the reform story in Pittsburgh because even socially conscious church leaders were hesitant at first to enter directly into certain kinds of reform. Instead, they encouraged their laity to do so. After two decades the tables had turned, and it was Pittsburgh’s activist laity who, like English above, were insisting on greater church involvement in reform efforts. As the church responded to this call, however, it led to conflict within the reform coalition and an ultimate weakening of reform momentum.

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THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH AND LAITY IN PROGRESSIVE ERA REFORM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF PITTSBURGH’S SOCIAL GOSPEL H.D.W.English’s speech at the beginning of this chapter evokes questions about the role that Pittsburgh’s laity played in the reform process, and the relationship of laity to the church as an institution with its own approach to reform. The beliefs and practices of laity have by now been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry. Scholars in a variety of fields interested in “popular religion” have turned their attention to the ways in which lay people resisted, challenged, and modified “religion as prescribed” or “official religion.”10 Focusing heavily on the non-mainstream and generally non-institutional aspects of lay belief, almost by definition, this literature has framed its special contribution precisely in downplaying, if not ignoring, the goings-on of “institutional” or “official” religion and its spokespeople in the guise of clergy, theologians, the religious press, denominational bodies, and churches as institutions. Such studies have conducted an ever-widening reading of religious traces in far-flung realms of culture, looking to an increasing array of extra-institutional sources for signs and portents of religious life such as material and popular culture, parades, monuments, holidays, family relationships, gift giving, and movies, to name but a few.11 Much of the scholarly energy in American religious history, specifically, now privileges non-traditional settings in an effort, according to Thomas A.Tweed, to “tell more inclusive stories of America’s complex religious past.”12 For Tweed and others, there is an obvious need to tell the marginalized stories of women, the working class, minorities and minority belief, the religious lives of laity, and religious practices in understudied geographical regions. Certain scholars have even wanted to go one step further, interpreting the church itself as just one more site, not more important than any other, where religion is practiced. Leonard N.Primiano has argued that divisions between “official” and “popular” religion are often problematic and misleading. He has suggested that no such thing as “official” religion actually exists—all religion is “vernacular religion,” or “religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it.”13 While he perhaps too easily does away with the significant ways in which religious institutions, forms, and doctrines shape (and are changed by) individual religious practice, Primiano makes the valuable point that in all contexts lived religion is an interpretive appropriation of belief, and thus it is quite difficult to separate the “official” from the “popular” in religious practice. Over the course of a generation there has occurred a striking shift in how scholars read and interpret “popular religion.” Peter Brown, in his 1981 work on the cult of the saints, found it necessary to argue against a “two-tiered” model of such studies, which seemed to hold the religious beliefs and practices of the few, the cultured, and the educated as the standard against which the belief and practice of the “vulgar” many were unfavorably compared as “modes of thinking and worshiping that are best intelligible in terms of a failure to be something else.”14 There still seems to be a “two-tiered model” working within studies of American “popular religion,” but the tables have turned. Histories of actors long at the center of stories told by religious historians—the white, the male, the

Introduction

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mainline Protestant—are considered fairly much exhausted. To the extent that belief distances itself from the traditional, the orthodox, the liturgy, the sanctuary, the minister, and denominational hierarchies, the more interesting, vital, and seductive. Studies of the “many” are as hot as a spicy Italian sausage; the Protestant, the white, and the male as stimulating as cold gruel. Does one dare to embark on a subject as well documented as the intersection of religion and political reform in Progressive Era America in the face of this historiographical direction? So much scholarly attention has been paid to this particular topic that the “reform society” joins Tweed’s list of “public spaces and elite sites” that have been overemphasized as a “background” for religious actors in American religious historiography.15 I believe, however, that to turn away from such sites at this moment would be to shut off the possibility of exciting new insights—precisely the insights developed by scholars of popular religion, but applied now to the study of Protestant laity. Even Tweed acknowledges that there is still possibly something to be gained from traditional stories “that highlight the beliefs and behaviors of elite Protestant males and narrate their successful struggles for political, economic, and cultural control” as long as these stories are not told “as if [they] were the only one[s] worth telling.”16 It turns out that many of the themes standard to traditional accounts of popular religion were acted out by Pittsburgh’s reforming laity. These elite men and women also criticized the church, challenged its power, and forwarded their own readings of theology as they sought to give concrete expression to their ministers’ teachings. Granted, these reformers were wealthy and powerful, often taking theology in a more conservative direction. But this does not make their appropriation any less “popular.” Charles Long has provided seven different definitions of what constitutes “popular religion,” at least three of which make room for the religious beliefs of society’s elite as legitimately falling under the popular religion rubric.17 While part of what I wish to do is thus to stretch the definition of popular religion by applying the insights that have arisen from its study to the mundane world of mainline Protestantism, I also believe there is a need to go beyond popular religion’s assumptions and methodologies. Specifically, we must modify the stricture that “popular religion” need necessarily be kept separate from “official religion,” and instead “bring the church back in,” even to studies that focus on Protestant laity. Those interested in the religious belief and actions of laity in fact are beginning to acknowledge the complexity of relationship between layperson and clergy, lived religion and Sunday ritual, formal theology and the appropriations of daily personal faith. Robert Orsi has cautioned that “theologies are not made in a single venue only—in the streets or in the churches, at shrines or in people’s living rooms,” and warned against the tendency in studies of popular religion which maintain the “familiar dualities” but simply replace “religious practices in the streets and workplaces for what goes on in churches.”18 In his introduction to a recent collection on the subject, David Hall has noted that the approach of what he and his collaborators term “lived religion,” while valuing the project of popular religion historians, does not “displace the institutional or normative perspectives or practice, as historians of popular religion so commonly do.”19 Leigh Schmidt reiterates this point, noting that “practices should not be separated from the ideas that inform them, nor should intellectuals, clergy, and theologians be treated as somehow outside the pale of lived religion.” “Lived religion” as a concept, he concludes, is intended exactly to

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“break down further the already crumbling oppositions between popular and elite, high and low, official and vernacular, the social and the religious….”20 This is a healthy recognition that the split between laity and clergy is not often accurate or essential for the understanding of people’s religious lives and that even the most distanced and diluted traces of religious practices can and do have links to religious institutions. The call of those advocating the study of “lived religion” is to study religion, logically, as it is lived—whether in church or out of church. This study will therefore also highlight how Pittsburgh’s churches reacted to the need for reform in this era—another understudied aspect of the city’s reform history. Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches throughout the period from 1890 to 1920 had a complex and shifting relationship with the city’s reform organizations and its broader reform efforts, one shaped by chronology, denomination, theology, lay support or resistance, and a host of other factors. At no point did all churches unite for support of particular measures; at no point, even, did entire congregations come unanimously together to support a unified vision. At every point, rather, the relationship of church to reform was “contested terrain,” and struggle occurred on multiple levels.21 Despite hesitations about becoming overtly involved in political reform efforts, however, Pittsburgh’s churches launched a series of important reforms in the second decade of the century through an interdenominational church organization known as the Christian Social Service Union (CSSU). These reforms included an attack on the city’s police court system, a renewed effort to stamp out the vice trade, the prosecution of various city officials, and the establishment of a specialized “Morals Court” within the city’s judicial system. Denominational social service commissions and interdenominational organizations assumed leadership of causes that had been the sole purview of secular civic reform organizations a decade earlier. Not only is this evidence of the centrality of a moral framing of reform issues in Pittsburgh, I will argue, but the church role sheds new light on the bi-directional flow of reform ideas, agendas, and strategies between secular and religious organizations in this era. While acknowledging the power of moral ideas and rhetoric in motivating Progressive reformers, Paul Boyer and other scholars have seen the churches themselves as peripheral players. Boyer concluded that by the late 1800s, while Protestantism “would remain a potent force in the urban moralcontrol movement,” as both a “seedbed of values” and a “generator of reform zeal,” nevertheless “as a formal institutional factor, its day had passed.”22 Likewise, Robert Crunden has noted that “Protestantism provided the chief thrust and defined the perimeters of discourse, but the civil religion of American mission soon transcended its origins,” and, one might add, its institutional base, “and became a complex of secular democratic values.”23 Eldon Eisenach, in tracing the intellectual, moral, and religious roots of Progressive thought asked whether, in the years following the Civil War, “evangelical churches and churchmen” were not the natural intellectual leaders needed to fashion a new America along the lines of what would come to be known as Progressive thinking. But “theologians of the social gospel in alliance with Progressive social scientists” said no, as “churches had separate institutional and denominational interests that compromised their larger social and political roles; most churchmen were wedded to particularistic theological and doctrinal systems that constricted the depth and reach of religion in the daily life of the larger society; many denominational colleges were parochial, defensive, hopelessly unprofessional, and anti-

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intellectual”; and thus leading creators of Progressive thought found that “churches and clergymen themselves needed to be ‘Christianized’ (or democratized or socialized) on new terms.”24 In this strand of the literature, then, the role of the church in reform fades to the background, both institutionally and intellectually. On the surface, Pittsburgh’s churches seemed to confirm this conclusion. They were hesitant to enter in overt ways into explicitly political reform efforts, believing that the church had to stake out a higher ground above the worldly fray of political conflict. But far from the day of their involvement having “passed,” Pittsburgh’s churches, clergy, and activist laity discovered creative and complex ways to be at the forefront of such efforts while simultaneously assuring more conservative members of their communities that the church was keeping its traditional place. In fact, throughout this period Pittsburgh church members and their denominational and interdenominational institutions both shaped and were shaped by other reform efforts in clear and explicit ways. Denominational and interdenominational ministerial associations, and later such interdenominational social reform organizations as the CSSU and the Pittsburgh Council of Churches often made their voices heard on issues of societal concern. More than this, it was often church organizations which led the charge against increasing prostitution, corrupt city officials, the control of the machine government, and other moral/political ills of the city. It is possible to underplay the prominence of the church in even overtly political reform movements, however, because throughout this entire period, individual clergy and churches and even the CSSU claimed to be “staying out of politics” and industrial disputes. Socially involved churches constantly attempted to steer a tricky path between the equally unacceptable extremes of a lethargic church and one that engaged in direct political action. Those churches wishing to influence the social and political life of the city therefore developed a range of strategies to allow their involvement, without giving the image of “taking sides.” Foremost among these was to make what I call “activist laity” the “agents” of Christian influence in the world. If we shift our focus of attention from the church as an institution to the ways that churches maintained an active presence in reform efforts through their laity, we see that this presence was more consistent and more influential in the reform process than the pure institution-oriented focus of Boyer or Eisenach allows. English’s opening speech suggests an unappreciated role for these “activist laity.” Much of what he suggests was true: Pittsburgh laity were given extraordinary power as the “agents” of various theologies and came to play a central role in giving malleable concepts such as the “social gospel” concrete definition in the specific chronological and geographical context of Progressive Era Pittsburgh. They did this early on through their participation in civic reform organizations, settlement houses, Chambers of Commerce, women’s church groups, and lay missionary movements, and later through denominational social service commissions and groups such as the CSSU. These latter groups in fact came to rely heavily on the previous reform experience of the laity and utilized many of the same strategies as the earlier secular groups. It was thus Pittsburgh’s activist laity, as much as any single church hierarchy or distant social gospel theorist, who played the most significant part in the construction of Pittsburgh’s social gospel. Activist laity, further, made the reform role of the church a contested field in which they struggled with conservative clergy, passive laity, abstract theories of the social gospel, and each other in forging reform solutions to the city’s various ills.

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Connections between laity and more “secular” reform organizations appeared on a variety of levels. English himself, for example, was not only the local president of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew (an Episcopalian laymen’s organization), a vestryman, and a longtime Sunday School teacher, but was, as one scholar has noted, “the single most important influence for reform on the Pittsburgh scene,”25 having served as President of Pittsburgh’s Civic Commission and the Chamber of Commerce, as a member of the Voters’ League and a trustee of one of Pittsburgh’s settlement houses, and as a “sponsor” of the Pittsburgh Survey in 1907–08. His church, Calvary Episcopal, had been active in a variety of social and political reform efforts and counted among its congregation Pittsburgh’s “reform mayor” George W.Guthrie and other politically involved reformers. Other individuals and congregations threw themselves into social reform initiatives. Further, churches often used “shadow groups” of laity to act for them in the political realm as a way to stay importantly connected to reform, but technically apart from its specifics. More important than these structural links were the linguistic ones, for the moral discourse was an important part of religious practice for these reformers and was the ground on which activist laity connected creed and belief with everyday experience and reform action. Robert Wuthnow has noted how “every community is awash in words,” and that “religious communities are no exception.”26 That the words of sermon, creed, theology, and church tradition found their way into the public discourse of Progressive reformers was a natural continuation of a long tradition of Protestant moralism generally wherein behavior—public as well as private—was an essential purview of Protestant belief.27 This impulse to moralism certainly found expression in the reform discourse of the Progressive Era. Whether pitched in the evangelical cadences of perfectionism or a Calvinistic insistence on a society “unified under God’s moral government,” or whether articulated in the social justice concerns of the liberal social gospel, reform language in this era was a natural extension of the long-standing American Protestant concern with morality.28 As noted above, it was a language sufficiently identified with a range of Protestant traditions that reformers from a variety of denominational backgrounds could find it persuasive and motivating. And because it was a language that had long been heard in the arena of American politics, the moral discourse not only constituted an avenue of religious action but also served as a natural zone of contact between the worlds of church and state. Pittsburgh’s “activist laity” thus became the key links between “secular” and “religious” organizations in their struggle for reform and were given primary responsibility for concretizing social gospel teachings. Questioning how Pittsburgh’s laity heard and acted upon the social gospel serves to critique a social gospel historiography which is heavily weighted toward analyses of national commissions and leading social gospel thinkers, but has not typically given sufficient attention to the ways in which social gospel ideas could take on highly individualized and localized forms.29 The diverse nature of these forms becomes especially clear if we focus on how laity heard and acted on these ideas. In this period the meaning of “social Christianity” had not yet congealed—the social gospel was still an “open story.” Donald Gorrell concluded that “Protestants did not always agree” on what exactly was meant by the social gospel, and that the term, as well as its predecessor, “social Christianity,” could have multiple meanings. I will dwell more emphatically on this range of possible meanings, and on

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what such a range implied. Because of the centrality of lay participation in giving shape to social gospel ideas, we need to be open to the possibility that many “social gospels” existed. Pittsburgh’s laity were central participants in shaping the concrete application of social Christianity, an application that often looked quite different from the “Social Creed of the Churches” or the writings of a Rauschenbusch. In fact, it was Rauschenbusch himself who proposed that “the social gospel approximates lay religion.” In the same way that laity tended to “tote a large load of theology and live on a small part of it”—the pragmatic part—so the social gospel appealed to the practical aspects of religious belief. Rauschenbusch argued that the social gospel coalesced around just such a core of pragmatic concerns, with its “theology” com-ing later. He thus implied that practice preceded formal articulation of belief in the development of the social gospel.30 The importance that Rauschenbusch placed on the pragmatic actions of laity is echoed in the theoretical concepts of Wolfgang Iser. I have found intriguing the similarities between the process undergone by a congregation hearing and acting on the teachings of a minister and the process involved in Iser’s notion of “reader-response.” Iser writes: “meanings in literary texts are generated in the act of reading; they are the product of a complex interaction between text and reader, and not qualities that are hidden in the text.” The same seems true for those hearing the social gospel. The “meaning” of the social gospel was not inherent in the ideas or words of the ministers, but had to be created by the laity acting on these words. The meaning of the social gospel was in this way “textguided though reader-produced.”31 Pittsburgh’s lay reformers tended to be much more concerned with eradicating the machine government and with issues of public morality than they were with labor reform, and sought to end the capitalization of corruption rather than challenge the tenets of capitalism itself. That Christians involved in social gospel activities might not reflect national emphases in their work was not unique to Pittsburgh. Jonathan A.Dorn, in a study of four institutional churches in Boston from 1880 to 1920, found that many church members devoting much of their time and energy to institutional church work showed no apparent concern for issues of labor relations.32 My suspicion is that no city’s efforts fit an abstract “model” of social gospel reform, but in each case developed its own reform personality. Pittsburgh’s reformers’ efforts, in any case, are no less a legitimate expression of social Christianity; the social gospel was something produced jointly by clergy and laity in Pittsburgh, not something passed down complete and polished from a national commission or adopted wholesale from the writings of leading social gospel thinkers. Pittsburgh’s activist laity worked together with its social gospel-oriented clergy to forge a reform agenda that was strong on civic righteousness, but less effective in addressing the industrial ills of the Steel City. The use of moral language to describe Pittsburgh’s problems, the priorities of social justice, and the project of reform were often shared by Catholic and Jewish reformers, both lay and clergy. However, although non-Protestant reformers will make an occasional appearance in this study, I do not offer a systematic treatment of Catholic or Jewish reform efforts. This may seem a startling omission in a treatment of a city whose character was dominated numerically by Catholics (the largest single “denomination” in Pittsburgh during the Progressive Era) and geographically by its rich immigrant communities, including German Jews, Russian Jews, Poles, Italians, and many others. I decided deliberately, however, not to include an analysis of non-Protestant reform efforts.

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To do so, and to do the topic justice, would require another book-length treatment. An important reason why this is so is that the nature of the relationship between Jews and the synagogue or rabbi and that between Catholic layperson and the Roman Catholic hierarchy are both quite different than the relationship of Protestant laity to the Protestant church as an institution. As the above should indicate, much of this study is focused exactly on this relationship, and a comparative treatment would necessitate setting up the same context for these other religious traditions—a fascinating exercise, but impossible in the space available, and one that will need to await further study.

THE POLITICS AND LANGUAGE OF REFORM IN PITTSBURGH AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE MORAL REFORM DISCOURSE The major interpretations of Progressive or turn-of-the-century reform in Pittsburgh and elsewhere have missed the driving power that moral ideas often had for reformers—a power reflected in the ways that reformers’ ideas, language, and agenda all swirled around moral concerns.33 The vision of the city and its problems heard in the opening account of the 1910 “mass indignation meeting” in Exposition Hall did not appear on its own, we shall see, but had streamed from a variety of reform sources in the preceding two decades, culminating in what became a surge of reform in the period from 1906 to 1920. Even ostensibly “secular” Progressive reforms came to be framed in moral terms because they occurred in the context of a long history of independent moral reform efforts which preceded, paralleled, and post-dated the period of intensive Progressive reform. Organizations such as the Anti-Saloon League and various Law and Order Leagues provided powerful models for reform strategy and worked to define in the public mind the nature of Pittsburgh’s problems. More importantly, both those who sought purely “moral” reforms such as temperance or an end to the vice trade and those who were more interested in “Progressive” political reforms (such as changing the structure of city council) often moved within the same “public reform sphere” of churches, civil reform organizations, political watchdog groups, men’s and women’s clubs, business associations, and Progressive reform circles. This term, “public reform sphere,” is meant to evoke the Habermasian notion of a “public sphere.” For Habermas, this was the sphere of society which developed in the eighteenth century where private individuals debated the policies of the state. Located in the press, salons, coffee houses, lodges, and other sites, the public sphere served as a mediating force between the state and the individual, and was a forum for the generation and expression of public opinion. The late nineteenth century was the era when Habermas saw the public sphere as declining, and be specifically excluded religious discourse from inclusion in the “rational-critical” speech which supposedly characterized the public sphere. However, other scholars have fruitfully and convincingly extended the concept of the public sphere to analyze societal debate in the years from 1890 to 1920.34 Philip J.Ethington, for example, has argued that “given the profusion of public debate in America between 1890 and 1920, in pamphlets, periodicals, books, meetings, clubs, settlement houses, speeches, and new voluntary organizations, the public sphere described by Habermas had yet to collapse before the end of the First World War.”35 If

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we accept Geoff Eley’s gloss on Habermas, and see the public sphere as “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place, rather than as the spontaneous and class-specific achievement of the bourgeoisie in some sufficient sense,” then it is possible to view the network of reform organizations, churches, settlement houses, philanthropic organizations, and Chambers of Commerce that served as the sites of generation for reform ideas, language, and agendas as a type of public sphere.36 Pittsburgh reformers were if anything opposing the power of a local version of “the state” in the machine government, for the dominance of the machine in Pittsburgh had closed off party politics as an effective avenue for debate about society. As Roy Lubove has noted, “social welfare and philanthropy” in Pittsburgh in this era became “a substitute for party politics” and “a basis for definition of the self and the social order.”37 Over time this network served as a forum where reformers interested in “moral” and “Progressive” measures met and patched together Progressive political ideas, social gospel ideology, good government ideals, and very localized concerns, and worked them into a coherent structure of thought, a process D.Scott Cormode has labeled “institutional isomorphism.”38 The reform network adopted a common discourse which stressed the need for a “moral government” and a “moral city”; it focused its attacks above all on the city’s machine government, thus effectively “moralizing” the reform discourse in Pittsburgh. What does it mean that a moral reform discourse suffused reform efforts in Pittsburgh? Discourse in this instance included not only the speech and written texts of reformers, but the welter of ideas, ideologies, and beliefs that stood in back of these. Eldon Eisenach has noted that “(t)he Progressive intellectuals who created ideas, institutions, audiences, networks, publicity techniques, and opinion-shaping organs were less a ‘meritocracy’ than a new and politically emergent ‘clerisy’, national public moralists in thought, purpose, and deed.”39 The use of morally charged language and terminology was a large part of this—a language that evoked the stern Protestantism in which many reformers had been raised40 and which echoed down through Protestant public discourse from the Puritans, through the Federalists and Whigs, and into the rhetoric of the Republicans.41 It was a language often peppered with references to the Bible or to religious concepts, and which used words such as “evil,” “sin,” “shame,” “righteousness,” and “corruption” to describe everyday institutions or political situations. The word “morality” itself also often cropped up as a standard by which policies and public figures should be judged. The concept of “morality” was broad rather than specific. Paul Boyer, for example, has shown us that concern over “urban morality” led reformers in both “coercive” and “environmentalist” directions—the former focusing on anti-prostitution, prohibition, and the shutting down of gambling dens, the latter on cleaning up the filthy physical city and providing the correct moral “atmosphere.”42 Concepts such as the need for “moral government” resonated on multiple levels, being flexible enough that different groups could read their own meanings into them. Thus more conservative churches could support such reforms, seeing a “moral government” as one which would strive for temperance laws, attack the city’s vice trade, and maintain a quiet Sabbath. For those outside of churches, or those in the process of leaving them, “moral” behavior still remained a potent call, be-cause, as James Turner has shown, ideas of progress inevitably incorporated ideas of moral progress.43

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While the use of moral discourse has been associated almost exclusively with the middle class, the same language could be heard across class boundaries, although perhaps not with the same resonance. Ghettoizing the moralized discourse of reformers as exclusively middle class is highly problematic, for the same moral terminology, standards, and references were available to the working classes. As Herbert Gutman and others have demonstrated, religion was “contested terrain,” and working class leaders used religious and moral language to further the causes of labor. Indeed, the work of Kenneth Fones-Wolf on the Labor Forward movement notes: Christianity was not merely the possession of one social group, but rather was a dynamic social force capable of complementing a wide spectrum of political and class positions. Far from imposing a single way of understanding the moral rules of the new system of capitalist wage labor, Christianity itself underwent transformations in the fifty years following the Civil War. The autonomous power Philadelphians invested in religion meant that neither labor nor capital could expect the churches to consistently support their objectives. Instead, each side made claims upon Christianity for justification and legitimacy. By representing a set of ideal aspirations commonly accepted by most Philadelphians, religion both mediated social tensions and served as an arena for class conflict throughout the period. But if Christianity was not merely the domain of capital, it did impose limits within which conflict could legitimately occur.44 Also, as will become apparent below, elites in Pittsburgh used such language easily and often. To define moral language as fundamentally or exclusively “middle class” is therefore misleading. Nevertheless, from these sources and others, it is clear that Pittsburgh’s laborers and working class had their own version of a moral discourse, one shaped by their life’ experiences and their own take on what constituted a moral economy, politics, or lifestyle. The question of how and when the moral discourse of the working class competed or converged with that of Pittsburgh’s reforming elite, along with the extent and impact of labor involvement in Progressive reform, are huge and fascinating, but ones unfortunately beyond the scope of this work and the sources on which it is based. Thus the moralized discourse, although evocative most specifically of Protestant values, thinking, and language, was capacious and flexible. The implications of this flexibility will be discussed below. In arguing that the reform discourse was “moralized,” I am claiming at least two things. First, that moral language was chosen deliberately by reformers and in the face of many available languages or discourses which could have been used to inspire or set the agenda for reform. Reformers had available to them rich discourses on the social scientific need for “experts,” the advisability of using “business methods,” the curative powers of “efficiency,” class language about the need for leadership by the “right people,” and others. The moral discourse did not replace these other discourses, or entirely shut them out, but it tended often to subsume them. Second, I am also claiming that the choice of a moralized discourse, for whatever reason, had consequences for the shape, direction, and character of reform in Pittsburgh.

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That reformers spoke in the passionate cadences of moral language is undeniable—their speeches, letters, broadsides, pamphlets, and sermons are saturated with it. There are, however, many possible ways to interpret the use of moral language in reform efforts. It is tempting, conditioned as we are by some of the more manipulative uses of this language in our own political time, to dismiss such usage as cynical. Knowing that a clearly moral cause would “play” in Pittsburgh, this view would hold, its reformers laced their speeches and objectives with moral sound bites. Reformers talked morality, but were most interested in elite control of local politics, putting government on a business basis, or restraint of working class recreational habits. A less jaundiced interpretation, but one also ultimately dismissive of the significance of such language, might suggest that morally weighted terms, speeches laced with Biblical reference, and an ongoing verbalized interest in the “moral city,” were a standard and expected mode of speaking. Such usages ultimately constituted heedless utterances of common speech, and it is not possible to ascribe particular affective significance to words or concepts carrying moral implications. I hope to show, however, that reformers chose the words they used and the projects they took on deliberately and carefully. They articulated their visions of the problems of Pittsburgh and their solutions in moral terms because that is how they viewed them. And the fact that they saw the situation through moral lenses meant that reform was going to take one form and not another. The moralizing of the reform discourse necessarily (although not overtly) sent reform down particular paths, and guided it away from others. It also meant that Pittsburgh’s churches and clergy, long the arbiters of Pittsburgh’s public morality, would be companions to the reform process, although the explicit forms this collaboration took would change over time. Having made these claims, let me also make some disclaimers. Although moral language effectively dominated certain strands of reform efforts in Pittsburgh, it was never hegemonic, nor totalitarian. That is, a variety of reform languages and approaches were always present in the city, and all reformers did not march to the tune of moral reform. This was, after all, the Progressive Era, a time ripe with reforms of all kinds— each with an organization and spokesmen to push its cause. The reform languages of business efficiency, expertise (scientific or otherwise), pragmatism, socialism, and a host of others were consistently employed in and about the various causes reformers addressed. I do not intend to say that the moral discourse overshadowed all of these in importance, although Pittsburgh reformers often gave alternative languages (such as that of business efficiency) a moral spin. Rather, I wish to highlight the importance that the moral discourse did have, and thereby complicate discussions of Pittsburgh reform that focus too narrowly on singular motivations such as class or profession. Further, while arguing that moral language mattered in the reform story of Pittsburgh, the sources (with certain exceptions) do not allow me to comment on the inner motivations of individual reformers. Rarely do reformers stand up within the sources and declare that their reform stances are determined by this or that theological perspective (although some certainly do). Nevertheless, if a reformer consistently employs moral language and ideas in the service of not-explicitly religious reform efforts, and it turns out that he or she attends a church with a social gospel minister who encourages the faithful to be active as Christians in political reform, and sits on the church’s commission for social justice, etc., then it is not unreasonable to suggest that that reformer’s use of moral language is reflective of that experience. Finally, establishing that moral language and a moral

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conceptualization of the problems of Pittsburgh played a central role in the city’s reform story constitutes only a first step of sorts. How such language worked is the next question, and as argued above, the “moralized” reform discourse still made room for a variety of approaches, agendas, interests, and needs. Scholars of Pittsburgh reform have concentrated almost entirely on the class and professional identities of the reformers as the key to understanding their reform agendas. Samuel Hays set the boundaries of interest for nearly three decades in a 1964 article which was meant to challenge Richard Hofstadter’s status anxiety thesis as well as the continued acceptance of the Progressives’ descriptions of their own agendas.45 Progressive reformers did not hail from the disappointed middle class (as Hofstadter had concluded), but from an “industrial elite” that was in fact rising in wealth and power, according to Hays. Nor did they champion the democratic rights of “the people” in the face of large-scale business “interests.” Arguing largely from his research on municipal government reform in Pittsburgh, Hays concluded that “the movement for reform in municipal government…constituted an attempt by upper-class, advanced professional, and large business groups to take formal political power from the previously dominant lower- and middle-class elements so that they might advance their own conceptions of desirable public policy.”46 Hays detailed the upper-class composition of reform groups such as the Voters’ League and Civic Club that spearheaded efforts to change the structure of the city government in 1911, and demonstrated the ways in which these groups benefited politically from the era’s reforms, to the detriment of working class representation in local government. Hays’ basic argument about reform in Pittsburgh has continued to hold sway among historians who study Pittsburgh. Roy Lubove demonstrated that “bureaucratic rationalization” rather than the diffusion of political power was the fundamental motivation for reform. He concluded that “in such disparate areas as politics, welfare, and environmental melioration,” and as exemplified in the Pittsburgh Survey, Progressive reform in Pittsburgh “had little to do with revitalizing democracy. It was an elite rather than a mass movement and was designed to centralize rather than diffuse power.”47 Paul Kleppner provided a more in-depth look at the political processes involved in reform efforts, and determined that because Republican machine politics in Pittsburgh had “virtually eliminated” main party competition at the polls, and because the major concerns of the era “lacked any geographic base of organization,” a political space was created for the influence of elite interest groups such as the Civic Club and Voters’ League.48 It was these elite groups, with their agendas, that dominated Pittsburgh’s reform. Francis Couvares detailed the ways in which an upper-class culture developed in Pittsburgh after the introduction of strategic cable-car lines made it possible for the city’s wealthy to move out of the downtown wards and into the verdant suburbs of the East End. Accompanying this physical shift from downtown to suburb was a shift among elites from a dour Presbyterian culture which prized only hard work, thrift, and modesty, to a looser, more cosmopolitan and generally upper-class culture, which enjoyed going to see an orchestra, spending money on art, lavishly entertaining one’s rich friends, and attending the Episcopalian church on Sundays. “Turning from the workplace they had mastered,” Couvares resolved, “Pittsburgh capitalists contributed in a similarly conservative way to efforts aimed at reforming the working-class city.”49 These efforts included the introduction of libraries, playgrounds, art museums, classical music

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concerts, and other strategies designed to wean working-class Pittsburghers off their typical centers of entertainment such as the saloon. John Ingham has offered one of the most recent interpretations of reformers in Pittsburgh. He disagreed with Hays’ characterization of the reformers as a “new industrial elite,” finding that over 60 percent of the membership in the clubs which Hays analyzed were from “older rather than newer families” and that “most of these men and women were from families who were part of the city’s pre-Civil War upper class.”50 This “old upper class,” Ingham concluded, retained control throughout the Progressive Era by blaming the city’s problems on absentee capitalism. Huge, uncaring U.S. Steel and other such companies, with their directors in New York, were the culprits for overlong hours, bad wages, inadequate housing, and inefficient government. Adroitly using the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–08 to their advantage, this old upper class called for reform, and portrayed themselves as the best possible leaders of such a movement for change because they were removed from the steel trust, the political machine, and the “crass commercialism” of the age (although many of them had connections to all three). Enough Pittsburghers were convinced by this argument that the old upper class was able to use reform as a way of maintaining a “complex hegemony” over the city. The steel mills and political machine were blamed for problems that very easily could have been laid at the feet of these old-money elites, as they sat smugly in their “opulent clubs,” remaining “lords of all they surveyed.”51 While challenging Hays on the exact identity of the reformers, therefore, Ingham’s analysis preserves the spirit and thrust of Hays’ conclusions: it was elite-driven, and designed to preserve a long-held position of power. These historians of Pittsburgh reform, although revising or moving beyond Hays in certain ways, have agreed that the city’s Progressive reformers were by and large elites who shared a developing set of neighborhood, social, cultural and professional networks and values. These elites sought to bend the political, economic, and social realities of the urban cityscape to their own vision, one in which people very much like themselves maintained control over an efficient, centralized, and nonpartisan government and where the moral values of middle and upper class folk held hegemonic sway over the city’s culture, leisure, work schedules, businesses, and government. This historiography has either ignored the moral concerns of reformers, or has portrayed such concerns as one more strategy to achieve domination.52 Hays again set the tone. He argued, for example, that even Pittsburgh’s ministers involved in reform did not fight against the machine government because their beliefs spurred them to oppose public immorality. Instead, it was clear to Hays, because such ministers came “peculiarly from upper-class churches” that “their role in reform arose from the class character of their religious organizations rather than from the mere fact of their occupation as ministers.”53 Hays was clearly arguing against Hofstadter’s claim that ministers were especially prone to involvement in reform efforts because of the declining status of their profession in American society. Nevertheless, Hays’ firm belief that reform ministers were most fundamentally motivated by class location prevents him from considering the importance of religious ideas or moral beliefs in spurring reform. More broadly, Hays judged that the reformers’ stated concern with such issues as “corruption” in local government, although prominent in their rhetoric, was a smokescreen to conceal deeper desires for political power. Earlier historians such as Hofstadter had in fact erred in taking reform rhetoric at face value. Reformers “did not oppose corruption per se—although there was plenty of

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that. They objected to the structure of government which enabled local and particularistic interests to dominate.”54 Those following Hays have for the most part ignored reformers’ obsession with corruption, or the connection of ministers or churches to Pittsburgh’s reform movement. A recent exception was Ingham, who discovered the early importance of certain churches and clergy to the reform process, calling Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh’s East End “the earliest linchpin of progressive reform in Pittsburgh.” Rather than tracing the continued importance of religious institutions, ideas, and language to the efforts of reformers, however, Ingham also falls back on the Haysian picture of hegemonic elites bending the city to their own vision.55 Reform leaders in Pittsburgh in these works closely resemble the middle-class men and women who populate Paul Boyer’s rich 1978 study Urban Masses and Moral Order in America. Boyer was much more attuned to the moral interests laced into reform efforts than the Pittsburgh historians. He noted how, in the 1890s, a moral uplift movement that had conscientiously avoided specific political reforms in its attempt to fashion the country’s burgeoning urban centers into morally recognizable landscapes, crossed over into specific advocacy of alterations in municipal government and other such distinctly political efforts. “For municipal political reformers of the late nineteenth century,” Boyer concluded, “the worst thing about a corrupt and thieving municipal government, or one linked to vice interests, was that it poisoned the moral atmosphere of the entire city.”56 Boyer, in contrast to Hays, recognized the power that moral concerns could have in spurring reform efforts. In many ways, however, Boyer ends up sounding very much like Hays and the others, for the application of moral standards to political reform that characterized the 1890s, Boyer argued, also made quite explicit the class basis of the moral reform of America’s cities. Although denied by reform leadership, which stressed cross-class participation and the universality of their goals, “this stirring of reform in urban America in the 1890s,” Boyer concluded, “was in fact a process by which elements of the middle and upper classes were organizing for yet another determined moral-control effort directed at the urban masses.”57 This broad movement at moral control tended to follow two distinct strategies; one “coercive,” which emphasized the stringent efforts to root out vice and political corruption, the other “environmental,” which focused on fostering a physical environment conducive to moral living. Both tendencies, however, had as their ultimate goal the moral bringing-to-heel of a seemingly out-of-control working and immigrant class which so obviously violated the model of moral order that reformers had firmly in mind—that of the rural, evangelical environment in which many reformers had been raised.58 Does this collective interpretation, however closely it hews to the social reality of elite reform movements, tell a complete and accurate story? I will argue that it does not. Even if one believes that the overwhelming use of moral language was a cynical attempt to legitimate upper class political and business goals, the way in which political movements or political issues get defined in the public mind crucially affects their outcome. Rhys H.Williams and N.J. Demareth III contend that in the arena of political language “distinctions between…‘moral’ or ‘economic’ issues are not a priori” “A particular problem can be framed as one or the other,” by using rhetoric to marshal cultural resources to effect political change, “and the framing that succeeds in publicly defining the issue carries great weight.”59 Gareth Stedman-Jones, further, has warned of the perils

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of ignoring language in favor of social position in understanding the motivations of political reformers. In his study of the English Chartist movement, he concluded that “we cannot…decode political language to reach a primal and material expression of interest since it is the discursive structure of political language which conceives and defines interest in the first place.”60 Whether we go as far as Stedman-Jones in seeing all political interest as “defined” by, or “produced” in political language, we can nevertheless recognize the possibility that the words chosen by Pittsburgh reformers and the concepts they forwarded to describe their own agendas mattered. Moral language in public settings fulfills a number of important functions. For example, moral language might very well have closely reflected the motives of reformers, and as noted above, was central to the course reform took whether or not this discourse was persuasive to the majority of Pittsburghers. Moral language could also serve to usher in the transition from one era to another. Hayden White argues, for example, that “narrativizing discourse serves the purpose of moralizing judgments” and that “narrative closure” marks “the passage from one moral order to another.”61 The moral discourse of Pittsburgh reformers worked, in this sense, as a way to give “closure” to the reign of the machine government, and to usher in new forms of governing. Ignoring or underplaying the importance of moral language prevents investigation into the ways that definition of what was “moral” drove many public debates, and framed the results of reform in the public mind. Further, merely identifying the class status of reformers is only a first step, and to assume that doing so fully explains their motivations and goals and the results of their efforts is to fall prey to reductionism. Historians of the 1960s and 1970s were understandably focused on revising an earlier picture of Progressive reformers which gave an inaccurate assessment of their identity and was uncritical in its acceptance of their ideological motivations. The response of these historians, however, swung too far the other way in trying to correct these earlier errors. We must therefore be wary of explanations for reform that assume, because the moral concerns articulated were those of elites, that they were perforce insincere. Or if they were sincere, then they were naively held, masking the “true interests” of upper classes everywhere: the maintenance and extension of their own power. Richard L.McCormick has argued against the picture painted by Hays and others that portrayed the economic and business elites of the America’s cities coolly building their own power bases through the instrument of Progressive reform. In contrast, McCormick reemphasized the shock and outrage felt by reformers and other citizens of cities upon discovering that business could corrupt politics. Hays and other supporters of the “organizational thesis” (those studies of Progressive reform which “located the progressive impulse in the drive of newly formed business and professional groups to achieve their goals through organization and expertise”) cannot account for the heat of reformers’ rhetoric, McCormick concluded, for the true sense of moral danger they felt government corruption engendered, or for the reformers’ own sense of what they were trying to accomplish.62 McCormick’s specific argument may be read against the background of a developing literature which is taking a new and less-jaundiced look at elite and middle-class reform movements. What this literature has discovered is that the problems which obsessed these reformers were serious and real. Their efforts at reform, although hedged in by class assumptions and biases of all sorts, nevertheless reflected deep concern with real societal difficulties.63

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This was no less true in Pittsburgh, where the moral concerns of the reformers had an arguable basis in reality. Reformers focused many of their attacks, for example, on the city’s machine government. Urban machine governments have generated intense historical interest, both academic and popular, for nearly a century. Formal studies of the machine have been dominated by the “boss-reformer synthesis”—descriptions of the struggle between reformers and urban bosses, the “clash between upper middle class reformers seeking centralized, efficient, moral rule and the political machines dedicated to rewarding party loyalists and securing the mass of immigrant votes through favors and service.”64 Within this overarching paradigm, the fortunes of the leading actors have shifted. Earlier accounts followed the characterizations of the reformers themselves, portraying them as selfless caretakers of society out to stymie nepotistic, greedy, inefficient machine governments. Readings of historians in the 1960s and 1970s shifted course, charting the ways in which machine governments provided valuable services and needed power to society’s outgroups, and showing up the reformers as elites primarily bent on social control of the working class. This generation of interpretation was persuasive, and thus for some time it has been unfashionable to suggest that the machine governments of this era were anything but ingenious structures designed to protect the working and immigrant classes from the more powerful, and to provide them with political clout. Fred Matthews has described this tendency as a “Hobbesian Populism” wherein the “powerful or would-be powerful” are drawn “in terms of naked drives for immediate self-interest, for maximization of power, status, or wealth,” while the “downtrodden” always “appear as varieties of virtuous, if often passive, victims, innocent of the lust for wealth or domination, active only insofar as they mobilize for selfprotection.” “Virtue” in this paradigm, Matthews concluded, “resides in small cultural units, ‘communities,’ inert, introverted and independent, whereas vice is inherent in the unifiers or ‘modernizers.’” He described Samuel Hays’ portrayal of urban machine governments as one of the primary proponents of this paradigm—a paradigm shaped as much by political conditions surrounding the writing of history in the 1960s as by the actual conditions during the Progressive Era.65 In the early 1980s, historian Jon Teaford called for an end to the “boss-reformer” paradigm altogether as the central story in urban history, pointing to the ways in which this focus diverted attention from more important subjects like the inner workings of urban politics.66 In spite of Teaford’s plea, studies of bosses and reformers and the struggle between them continued to proliferate, and new insights continued to appear even on this much-studied subject. Because historians have felt the need to challenge the interpretations of the 1960s and 1970s, studies have now appeared demonstrating that reformers were acting on serious, damaging, and costly social problems, and that the reforms they enacted in many ways effectively addressed these problems. The view that an attack on the machine government equaled an attack on the needs of the working and immigrant classes is one now seriously challenged in urban studies literature. Terrence McDonald has described this view as “functionalism twice removed.” It is functionalist to claim, McDonald argued, that because immigrants and the working class voted for machine governments, that these governments truly represented their best interests. It is thus “functionalism twice removed” to then say that because reformers attacked the machine government, they were attacking the interests of the lower classes.67 This literature supports the notion that those very things which so outraged reformers—

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politically protected vice, the extent of corruption within machine governments, the problems with graft in city councils—were in fact occurring and were costly. Machine governments, far from being the benevolent representatives of a politically voiceless poor, in reality undermined the interests of the poor and the immigrants in favor of local businesses.68 Recent studies of particular machine governments reveal as well that the machine often more closely resembled the descriptions of the Progressive reformers than those of later historians. Urban bosses, rather than being “urban liberals” who used government to help the plight of the poor and the immigrant, were rather “power brokers who were primarily interested in maintaining control over their affairs,” and were “concerned with their own self-interest and the life of the party machine,”69 often to the detriment of their constituents in the poorer neighborhoods of America’s cities. This recent picture of the machine, if nothing else, brings back into high relief the charges and concerns of Progressive Era reformers. There was substance to reformers’ charges against the machine; their outraged rhetoric was a response to the very real concerns of a corrupt system and the mismanaged and debilitated cities this system engendered. Reformers in Pittsburgh, as reformers throughout the United States in this period, became increasingly sensitized to the sins of the machine government, and their outrage intensified with every investigation or scandal revealing some new avenue of corruption. McCormick described the “moral intensity” of Progressive reformers who discovered the systematic and dangerous ways in which “privileged businesses corrupted politics”— “incendiary knowledge” that set off “explosions” of political reform.70 Beyond the churning, raw emotions of fear and disgust generated by the prospect of a government corrupted at its core by the very modus operandi of the machine, the growing strength of the reform movement also relied on the expanding ability of reformers to theorize their findings, and to place them in a national-local context. This contextualization crystallized as reformers discovered they were not alone. Through the muckraking exposures of local and state government scandals, legislative and judicial investigations, the probings and evidence-gathering of national commissions, and the meetings and publications of national reform organizations such as the National Municipal League, the extent and nature of corruption nationwide was made thoroughly known to Pittsburgh’s and other cities’ citizens.71 The expanding knowledge of other cities’ scandals worked in two directions for Pittsburgh reformers. It helped them know what specifically to investigate and look out for; and, having revealed corruption in their local government, it helped them understand its causes and its methods by comparison. Pittsburghers and other Americans, participating in national municipal reform organizations, reading articles by muckrakers and listening to social gospel sermons, became increasingly aware of the corruption of the machine government. As they did so, they simultaneously came to understand with ever-greater sophistication how the machine worked, and developed both the conceptual and linguistic framework to describe the problem and strategies to end it. Elite moral rhetoric in condemnation of machine practices, therefore, although at times exaggerated, cannot be equated simply with an attack on the interests of the lower classes or with the support of big business. Further, in Pittsburgh at least, the main object of attack by reformers was those who profited from the exploitation of workers and immigrants and not those classes per se. Reformers sought ultimately to undermine the capitalization of political and social corruption, and although their language could reflect

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elite disdain for the lower classes, they saved their most severe condemnations for organized interests behind the political machine, the brewery, and the spread of vice. It is also inaccurate to assume that all elites also shared political, economic, and reform agendas. Studies of elites in the United States, and more specifically in Pittsburgh, have tended to stress those factors that united and formed them, such as education, residential neighborhood, clubs, churches, ethnicity, family history, endogamy rates, and occupation. The impact of such studies, especially in their reliance on methodologies of statistical profiles and collective biographies, is to portray elites as types, and thus as essentially similar.72 Such an assumption does not take into account the ways in which their ranks split and cracked, forming divisions and camps often quite antagonistic to one another. In Pittsburgh, wealthy reformers often found themselves ranged against powerful business and manufacturing interests, Presbyterian culture struggled for dominance over an Episcopalian one, and opposing groups among Pittsburgh’s upper strata sprung up to embody differing philosophies of philanthropy.73 In addition, the upper class split along race and gender lines, as upper-middle class African American leaders condemned the racism inherent in certain reform strategies, or as female-led civic organizations and church groups carved out agendas separate from their male-only counterparts. Thus we need to move beyond a “monolithic” view of elites and their reform organizations. The “public reform sphere” in which Pittsburgh’s activated citizens forged the moral reform discourse was a site of debate as well as agreement, of contestation as well as consensus. Paul Kleppner has argued that, in Pittsburgh, a primary reason for the importance of elite reform groups was the fact that Republican machine politics in the city had “virtually eliminated” main party competition at the polls and thus voided party politics as a forum for discussion of local concerns and broader societal issues.74 This is why Roy Lubove concluded, as noted above, that debates about social welfare and philanthropy became in Pittsburgh a “basis for definition of the self and the social order.”75 Civic reform, social welfare, and philanthropic groups, along with involved churches, clubs, business organizations and other extra-political associations became the forum for expressing concerns that could not be articulated effectively in the traditional place for such discourse. The fact that these were made up largely of elites did not automatically void the passionate divisions traditionally voiced in political and religious settings. Indeed, elites continued to wrestle with one another over the most basic issues of how to shape their community. Having said all this, it is not my intention to replace one or another of these totalizing explanations with my own. Elite Pittsburgh reformers were culturally situated, and spoke their moral concerns from an inescapable web of interests grounded in their economic and social position. The rhetoric of “moral government” was plastic enough to be susceptible to broad interpretation. In the spaces left by such a loosely constructed concept, it is perhaps only natural that reformers would see their own backgrounds, neighborhoods, and careers as worthy models for a government run according to “moral principles,” and reveal elite biases toward the other classes. But to dismiss reformers’ moral concerns because they were articulated by wealthy professionals is to assume that wealthy professionals could not draw upon their religious beliefs in responding to urban reality Any belief uttered by any person is always inextricably bound up with the context of that person’s personal history and cultural location, and this was no less true for Pittsburgh’s reformers. To posit a situation where “social work or social welfare [and we

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could add political reform] should function, in contrast to any other sphere of life, as the realm of pure altruism and self-sacrifice,” Lubove has noted, is “absurd.”76 To recognize, however, that nobody acts out of pure altruism, does not mean that altruism does not exist. It is equally absurd to discount the possibility of altruism in reformers because they did not practice an impossible, de-contextualized form of it. Instead of offering a counter metanarrative of explanation which centers on the moral and religious aspects of the reform story, therefore, I hope to evoke the worlds in which reformers moved, showing how one crossed easily and often into the next. Without placing moral concern within a specific hierarchy of importance for Pittsburgh reformers, I hope to demonstrate how such concern was a constant and vital presence in this period, and one which must be understood to see clearly how and why reform happened the way that it did.

Chapter One Pittsburgh Protestant Churches and Early Progressive Reform in the Steel City Before all else, Pittsburgh assaulted one’s senses. Turn-of-the-century travelers arriving by train reported seeing the pall of smoke from its iron and steel mills hanging in a dense cloud over the city, and smelling the sharp bite of sulfur long before reaching the downtown station. The smoke was oppressive and omnipresent, giving Pittsburgh a dark and brooding character. It fouled the air, soiled buildings and clothing, choked out the sun, and slowly poisoned the city’s inhabitants, who had to take two shirts to work because one would inevitably get blackened on the trip. Streetlights burned at noon on especially bad days, just so citizens could see their way down the street, and as late as the 1940s women could be seen shopping with masks protecting them from the smog. The factory fumes mixed, in certain neighborhoods, with the stench of shut-in, light-starved tenements. Adding to the stink was the garbage piled up out front and open privy vaults emptying into dry stream beds in the back, or running into open sewers. Rain was a mixed blessing in these wards: it would temporarily wash away the reek of the privy vaults, but would also turn the unpaved streets into rivers of mud and muck. Such neighborhoods existed not five minutes from the narrow, noisy streets of Pittsburgh’s Central Business District, tucked away in the quiet, desperate valleys formed by the region’s “corrugated floor.” The downtown was an aural contrast, home to a cacophony of sounds (except on the Sabbath): the screech of brakes as trains, railcars, streetcars, automobiles, and horse-drawn carts competed for space; the distant hum or oppressive clatter of always-running steel, glass, and iron factories. These factories lined the shores of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, which drew to a point and flowed off west together as the great Ohio River. Pittsburghers were familiar with the sight of these rivers, crossing and re-crossing them on the city’s twenty-some bridges. They also knew the taste of these rivers, the source of Pittsburgh’s drinking water. Pittsburgh’s citizens had become accustomed to the flavor of impure water, piped from rivers that served as the dumping ground for a dozen upriver cities’ sewage and industrial waste. This water flowed untreated into the homes and courtyard pumps of the city, giving Pittsburgh the highest death rate due to typhoid in the United States. Pittsburghers came to know the taste of typhoid. The end of the nineteenth century saw the stirring of resentment against these conditions, and the application of mind and soul to their betterment. Theories abounded as to the causes of the social, environmental, and political pathologies that plagued America’s growing cities. The squalid condition of Pittsburgh was attributed to unchecked industrialization, overwhelming immigration, too-rapid urbanization, individual sin, corruption, the saloon, lack of planning, the need for experts, monopoly capitalism, machine governments (both state and local), inefficiency, massive

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accumulation of wealth by the privileged few, absentee capitalism, labor violence, bad habits, ignorance, race, or blood. Proposed solutions for Pittsburgh’s ills were similarly diverse: centralization, efficiency, corporate capitalism, socialism, Christianity, anarchism, immigration restriction, Americanization, fresh air, the social gospel, prohibition, labor republicanism, pure and simple unionism, trade unionism, expertise, democratic and responsive ward-centered local governments, honesty, or some combination of these factors, would right what was wrong. Crowding in upon the American urban landscape, these theories vied for explanatory power. Those that ultimately seemed most persuasive to Pittsburgh reformers were the ones which corresponded to particular and tangible local conditions. Reformers in this city worried about a toxic environment; worried about the poor and how best to meet their needs; worried about the Sabbath, the selling of liquor, and prostitution; and worried about how their city was governed. Because they experienced Pittsburgh through their minds and souls as well as through their senses, these reformers came to oppose the inefficiency and corruption that characterized Pittsburgh’s machine government, and to view this corruption as intimately connected to, and even ultimately responsible for, Pittsburgh’s other ills. Fear of corrupt government had a long and honorable history—most notably in the republican ideology of America’s Revolutionary era—and echoes of this fear lasted into the Progressive Era. Paul Krause has made a convincing case for the centrality of the values and themes of “labor republicanism” among steelworkers in the Homestead Steel strike of 1892.1 Progressive reformers arguably shared the desire to apply republican principles to the problems facing turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. They were convinced of the importance of a virtuous citizenry (those “willing to sacrifice many of their private, selfish interests for the res publica, the good of the whole community”); believed in “the moral character of the independent citizen as the prerequisite to good politics”; valued equality when this meant that distinction was based on merit as opposed to family; and feared the corruption inherent in unchallenged power, all of which characterized Revolutionary republican thinking.2 Certain scholars have disagreed, arguing that corruption in this era came to be seen as a specific and individual violation of the rules rather than generalized and collective loss of virtue, and that by the Progressive Era the values and perceptions of classical republicanism no longer held sway in American politics.3 James Kloppenberg has suggested in a study of early American political discourse that “because of the ambiguities of the traditions from which they drew, and because of the unsteadiness and the inconsistencies of the arguments they advanced, [American colonists] were able to join together behind a banner of ideas stitched together from three different sources: religious, republican, liberal.”4 In a similar fashion, Progressive reformers were able to employ a rhetoric which championed selflessness and condemned corruption that drew simultaneously on Christian morality, republican notions, and a modern liberalism. Turnof-the-century Pittsburgh reformers did not fear monarchy, standing armies, or an established church (except in the abstract), but cried out against the abuses of the city’s health and environment, and denounced one-party machine government domination that allegedly stood on the twin pillars of graft and vice. As Pittsburgh’s reformers joined a nationwide awakening to the importance of municipal government, they came to articulate these fears in a language of moral concern. Bit by bit they would fashion a moral discourse in which a corrupt local government was as “malodorous” in their noses

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as the worst of the city’s smells, and as cancerous in its effects as the most polluted of rivers.

EARLY OUTRAGE OVER MACHINE CORRUPTION Two powerful figures dominated Pittsburgh’s machine government in the late 1800s. Chris Magee, son of a Pittsburgh hatter and descendent of long-time Pittsburgh residents, started out as an office boy in an iron manufacturer’s office. In 1864, however, he was given a job in the city controller’s office, a position won as a result of the influence of his maternal uncle, Squire Thomas Steele. Steele was deeply involved in the local political scene, having served as alderman, president of the city council, and director of the office of the city controller. At age 23 Magee was elected as city treasurer on the Republican ticket and served in that capacity for two terms. After this, according to historian Harold Zink, Magee “determined to accept no more full-time public offices” so that he could “devote his entire time to bringing the city under control.”5 Apart from being twice elected to the Pennsylvania Senate in 1896 and 1900, he stuck to his plan, although he continued to serve in advisory roles on a number of politically-oriented commissions. The key to his political success was the partnership formed in 1879 with William Flinn. Flinn was born in England in 1851, but moved to Pittsburgh before he was a year old. He left school at age nine to sell papers, to black boots, and later to work in a brickyard. In 1877 Flinn formed a contracting and construction business with James L.Booth. The same year that Booth & Flinn, Ltd. got off the ground, Flinn used his experience as a ward boss to secure the position of Commissioner on Pittsburgh’s fire board. From there he went on to become the chairman of Pittsburgh’s Republican committee, a position he held for nearly twenty years, and served two terms as a state representative and three terms as a state senator. In 1879 Flinn and Magee became political allies, subsequently dominating city and county politics for over two decades. Magee, known for his diplomacy and “personal charm,” played the role of the benevolent boss, while Flinn, not a mincer of words, was the “strong organizer who would awe men into obedience.”6 The Magee-Flinn machine achieved notoriety fairly quickly. Magee allegedly traveled to New York City to study the strengths and weaknesses of the Tammany Hall machine and learn from its successes and failures.7 One of the earliest studies of the Magee-Flinn machine, that of journalist/muckraker Lincoln Steffens in Shame of the Cities, held that “Boss Magee’s idea was not to corrupt the city government, but to be it; not to hire votes in councils, but to own councilmen; and so, having seized control of his organization, he nominated cheap or dependent men for the select and common councils.” These “cheap and dependent men,” according to Steffens, included Magee’s relatives, “bartenders, saloon-keepers, liquor dealers, and others allied to the vices, who were subject to police regulation and dependent in a business way upon the maladministration of law.”8 Later studies have demonstrated that Magee’s power relied as well on his ties to certain businesses. The Magee-Flinn machine used its dominance over legislation passing through city council to provide city franchises and contracts to building companies (many of which went to the construction company of Booth & Flinn, Ltd.), secure crossing and trackage rights to the railways and streetcar companies, arrange street vacations for expanding manufacturers, deposit city money in favored banks, and cut deals with the

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city’s utility companies. For such favors companies were expected to pay commissions, which would then be used by Magee and Flinn to secure political support and enrich machine loyalists. Urban historians have questioned the extent to which bosses actually ruled and were able to control legislation. They caution that the picture of the all-powerful boss is more a creation of reform rhetoric extremism than it was reality. Timothy Gilfoyle, in a review of the recent literature on municipal governments, declared that the “machine model of urban politics” has been so undermined that it can now only be viewed as “myth.” “The squandering boss is simply a caricature,” he concluded, “the political machine a social construct.”9 Other recent studies of urban bosses, however, have shown that they very often did have the power that anti-machine rhetoric suggested. Studies of Pennsylvanias state boss Matthew S.Quay and of Philadelphia’s “Organization,” for example, stress that these bosses had even more power than the manufacturers and other businessmen that dealt with them because of their control over the legislative process.10 While no comparable in-depth study of the Magee-Flinn machine exists, characterizations of these two as powerful bosses were not merely fictions created by reformers. Magee and Flinn directed and controlled the awarding of city contracts, set the pace and location of infrastructural improvements, consistently manipulated the institutions in which city money was deposited, and determined which city streets were given over to railways and other companies.11 Together the two also worked to dominate the Republican Party organization in both the city and the county, seeking control over the selection of ward and city administration candidates. Paul Krause tells the story of how Magee brokered a deal that allowed his friend Andrew Carnegie to purchase land sold by the city adjacent to Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Works at a cut-rate price representing less than half the land’s assessed value. The deal worked, Krause concluded, only because of illegal collusion in the bidding process between Carnegie and Magee, and because the representatives of these parties perjured themselves in court when the deal was legally challenged. Magee’s machine effectively met the needs of Pittsburgh’s powerful business elite through machine control of city council.12 The power of the Magee-Flinn machine, although certainly not undisputed or unchallenged, was an effectively wielded reality until the death of Magee in 1901. While the work of Jon Teaford and others provides a necessary caution in taking at face value reform rhetoric concerning the dominance of machine power, it is misleading to classify this power as “mythical.” Class position or professional status did not determine how one would stand vis-à-vis the machine. Magee and Flinn, perhaps more than any other urban bosses, were tied into the community’s business interests. Magee was owner of the Pittsburgh Times and president of the Consolidated Traction Company; he owned several downtown buildings and other prime real estate, served as a director on the boards of fifteen companies including banks, insurance companies, and traction interests, and held stock in over fifty other local, regional, and national companies.13 At his death his estate and real estate holdings were valued at over four million dollars. Flinn was if anything even more connected. By 1917 he was owner of the Pittsburgh Leader, president and director of five companies, chairman of the board of managers in one, and director of nine others, specializing in mining, lumber, and fuel interests.14 By his death he was worth eleven and a half million dollars. How much of this wealth was the result of business acumen and

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how much the result of crooked political influence we may perhaps never know, although Magee clearly benefited financially from his close relationship with traction and railway interests and Flinn from receiving city construction contracts. What is interesting is that this sort of wealth made both Magee and Flinn socially indistinguishable from Pittsburgh’s other elites. Very much like the elites that became reformers, for example, these men were philanthropists, involved especially in the building and direction of two of the city’s hospitals.15 Magee, born into an old ScotchIrish Pittsburgh family, was a life trustee of the Carnegie Fine Arts and Museum Fund, a guarantor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, president of the Pittsburgh Press Club, a Mason, a member of the prestigious Duquesne Club, a member of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, and was consistently listed in the elite Social Register. Flinn also was socially connected, and was listed in the Social Register for nearly twenty years. He resided on a 127-acre farm in Allegheny County named “Beechwood” and bred cattle in his spare time. Nor were Magee and Flinn the only elites involved in the machine government. The Magee-Flinn machine, although consistently popular with saloon-keepers, small businessmen, African American voters, and certain sections of working-class Pittsburgh, nevertheless ran “wealthy and socially prominent individuals as candidates for city-wide offices.”16 Joel Tarr concluded that “few blue-collar workers or immigrants were involved” with the machine, its main support coming from “saloonkeepers, contractors, building supply proprietors, and real estate and insurance agents, many of whom could benefit directly from city contracts.”17 Voting for the machine, Peter McCaffery has concluded, did not necessarily give the city’s poor significant advantages, and therefore opposition to machine power did not equal opposition to immigrant and working-class interests in any simple and easy way. “Even though the Organization managed to secure the support of the overwhelming majority of Philadelphia’s new immigrant, poor, and black population in return for the ‘personal service’ it rendered,” McCaffery wrote of Philadelphia’s machine, “it exploited these social groups as much as it helped them.” In its concern primarily for selfpreservation, the machine “effectively prevented political parties and government from responding to the real needs of the city’s poor inhabitants.”18 S.J.Kleinberg has documented the reality that Pittsburgh’s city services—piped-in water, garbage collection, the paving of roads—tended to go to those neighborhoods that could afford them. The result, of course, was that poorer sections of the city suffered the consequences of exposed raw sewage, heaps of uncollected garbage, and streets which turned to rivers of mud when it rained. City Council approved all of this, operating on the principle that “those who benefited from services should pay for them,” along with the corollary that if a neighborhood could not pay, it would not receive needed improvements. But there were several prominent instances when “the City Council relieved the well-to-do of their obligations to pay for urban improvements while rigorously enforcing the rules for the poor.” When roads in the wealthy East End section of the city were paved, for example, the city assumed the entire cost in the exact period that they refused to do so for the poor living on Pittsburgh’s Point.19 Joel Tarr found that although the City of Pittsburgh constructed over 400 miles of sewers in Pittsburgh’s centralized sewer system in the years from 1889 to 1912, “many working class areas were without sewers” because of “the requirement that abutting residents pay for services.”20 Such actions, John Ingham concluded, “began to erode working-class faith in the system of machine politics in

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Pittsburgh,” and were roundly condemned in such working class journals as the National Labor Tribune.21 Perhaps the lack of worker support was linked to the adversarial role that Magee had played in the Homestead strike of 1892, “orchestrating” the intervention of the state militia to aid his friend and business partner, Henry Clay Frick.22 In any case, anti-machine reformers could and did line up with labor interests to oppose Magee and Flinn, and elite reformers found themselves struggling against other elites who wished to maintain the status quo. One fact is clear: the whole system ran on corruption and the evading of laws to favor certain companies and individuals. Contemporary journalists, Progressive reformers, and every subsequent wave of scholars who have analyzed the machine government acknowledge the presence of this corruption, but have all forwarded different interpretations of it. For Pittsburgh’s elite reformers or muckrakers like Steffens, such corruption was the debilitating, evil heart of what was wrong with American local government, with inevitable damaging consequences that rippled out, degrading all aspects of city and national life. Scholars in the 1960s and 1970s like Samuel Hays have taken a more distanced view, seeing Pittsburgh’s “corruption” more abstractly as “a device to exercise control and influence outside the legal channels of decision-making when those channels [were] not readily responsive,” and indicative of “the lack of acceptable means for those who exercise power in the private community to wield the same influence in governmental affairs.”23 That is, “corruption” was only the necessary corrective that gave manufacturers and other elites a comparative measure of influence in enacting legislation through a political system controlled by men representing different interests. Machine corruption has been portrayed as well as the necessary side effect of the machine’s latent function of providing needed services to the city’s out-groups in a society that did not care about, or provide for, such needs.24 Others have argued that corruption enabled the infrastructure of the city to be built more quickly and more efficiently than would have been otherwise possible. The Magee-Flinn machine, for example, effectively centralized decision-making, focused the dispersed power of unwieldy city councils, and passed needed funding, construction, and other business decisions speedily through the local bureaucratic process. In light of the most recent studies of the machine, however, it is now difficult to view the corruption inherent in machine politics as pragmatic, unavoidable, or in service to a higher goal. Machines existed primarily for their own self-perpetuation, and corruption was what allowed them to stay in power. Machine governance clearly came with several burdensome costs. Because the machine was essentially fueled by corruption, staggering amounts of time, energy, and resources went into the greasing of the political wheels and the maintenance of the system. Thus, as Joel Tarr has argued, although the machine’s modus operandi might be considered efficient compared to the one that preceded it—being “organized rather than disorganized corrup-tion”—it was not efficient per se. Nor was it fair. As we have seen, the physical development of Pittsburgh favored those who could pay the machine to get done what they wanted. Infrastructural improvements therefore benefited large businesses and manufacturers over smaller ones, and favored wealthy neighborhoods over poorer ones. Reformer condemnation of the machine thus coalesced around citizen anger over the very real problems of corruption, inefficiency, and the anti-democratic nature of machine

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rule. That there was a substantial, concrete basis for such reform condemnation does not exclude the fact that reformers also formulated and forwarded “imaginative dimensions” of machine rule in the Steel City.25 “Machine rule” would thus take on added layers of meaning as reformers sought to find the words and images to express the dangers they perceived to their city and its common life. In doing so, reformers inevitably drew on a variety of available discourses to give discursive shape to their vision of Pittsburgh’s problems and what to do about them. And it was in certain Pittsburgh churches that this vision, and the language and images that would shape reform discourse, was earliest and most clearly articulated.

GEORGE HODGES, CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF PROGRESSIVE REFORM IN PITTSBURGH Calvary Episcopal Church, established in 1855, had by the 1890s become a center of reform interest, leading efforts to establish Pittsburgh’s first settlement house and to organize more efficiently Pittsburgh’s charity organizations. This social interest took root during the rectorship of George Hodges in the years from 1889 to 1894. Hodges, a strong social gospel advocate, spurred the entrance of many Calvary laypeople into reform activities. It was “under Dr. Hodges,” Calvary parishioner and businessman H.D.W.English wrote in a 1919 letter, that “Calvary men and women…began to take an interest in the city and affairs” and “entered into political life, becoming candidates as well as acting on commissions.”26 According to another prominent parishioner, Hodges “surround[ed] himself with a body of laymen whom he constantly encouraged and urged to take interest in the city’s life, its politics, its social conditions, etc., training in this way a large number, and filling them with his own enthusiasm…none of whom, except for Dr. Hodges’ influence, would probably have ever taken any active part in the city life.”27 These key Calvary reformers included George Guthrie, who was elected mayor in 1906 running on a non-partisan reform platform; George R.Wallace, a prominent attorney who served on the Executive Committee of the Voters’ League; James W.Brown, elected on a Citizen’s Ticket to Congress; Joseph Buffington, orphan court judge and one of the sponsors of the Pittsburgh Survey; and above all English himself, who served as president of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Chairman of the Pittsburgh Civic Commission, and as vice-president of the Voters’ League. So many from this congregation began working for reform, in fact, that they became known to local machine politicians as “that damned Calvary Crowd.”28 John Ingham, noting that Calvary’s efforts to systematize Pittsburgh’s charities “provided the impetus for broader reform movements in the early twentieth century,” argued that Calvary should be considered the “earliest linchpin of progressive reform in Pittsburgh.”29 That one church in a suburb of Pittsburgh would contain such a collection of notables was the result of two demographic shifts that took place at the end of the nineteenth century—the movement of elites from the downtown area to Pittsburgh’s East End, and the increasing allegiance of the upper crust to the Episcopalian church. Leading Pittsburgh families, as might be expected, were constituted to an impressive degree by native-born, Protestant, and well-off men—the descendants of long-time manufacturing,

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merchant and professional families who had ruled Pittsburgh for over half a century.30 A collective portrait of the “founding families” of Pittsburgh traced by Joseph Rishel from 1760 up to 1910 shows that the same families who dominated mercantile interests in the early nineteenth century continued their influence into the early twentieth. The Dennys, Dilworths, Guthries, Herrons, Negleys, Nevilles, and others whose forebears took advantage of Pittsburgh’s location at the head of the Ohio River to make the city a major shipping link to western frontier markets would later use their position to link mercantile interests with industrial ones and gain control of the banks and financial support networks.31 In the period from 1880 to 1920 Pittsburgh’s elite families moved in large numbers from what had become the city’s Central Business District to less crowded and less polluted suburban settings. The expansive houses set along Penn Avenue, or clustered in the downtown zone bounded by Fifth, Water, Smithfield, and Market Streets (neighborhoods which, although in no true sense “upper class,” had seen higher concentrations of elites living in them) were no longer popular. Instead, by 1900 clearly elite neighborhoods had been established along Ridge Avenue in Allegheny City (across the Allegheny river from Pittsburgh) but more importantly in the East End districts of East Liberty and Shadyside, establishing the East End as the “founding families’ center of gravity.”32 As the name “Shadyside” implies, the suburb was a verdant section far from the city’s industrial center which had recently been farmland, but which was rapidly becoming settled by those wishing to escape from the downtown. A major impetus to this movement was the creation of streetcar and rail lines which connected these districts to the down-town, making it possible and convenient to commute.33 Developing hand in hand with this move into distinctly upper class neighborhoods was a clearer sense among elites of their own identity. Francis Couvares has argued that the move to the suburbs by Pittsburgh’s elite facilitated a more cosmopolitan culture and that the “suburban life style…bred a suburban point of view.”34 The new suburbs also served as “a melting pot of older and newer money,” where members of the founding families mixed with the rising “industrial elite” of Pittsburgh.35 While the East End’s residents differed in the source of their wealth and their professions, the mixing of older and newer money and the creation of an upper-class consciousness was smoothed by the fact that the social and ethnic make-up of the new industrial elite was essentially similar to that of the older Pittsburgh families. They were native-born, of largely English and Scotch-Irish descent, and almost exclusively Protestant.36 Several scholars have also noted and heralded as significant an apparent shift from Presbyterianism to Episcopalianism among Pittsburgh’s elites over the course of the nineteenth century. Among Rishel’s “founding families,” those claiming Episcopalianism as their faith rose from thirteen percent in 1820 to almost twenty-seven percent in 1900. That this increase occurred in territory long dominated by Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism was evidence, Rishel concluded, that Pittsburgh’s elite were beginning to mimic national upper-class propensities, including adherence to the Episcopal faith.37 Francis Couvares, although he does not specifically chart a shift to Episcopalianism, does account for the new strength of elite class consciousness as resulting in part from the release of the elite “from the confines of their own narrow virtue.”38 Ingham reads Couvares in light of Rishel’s statistics, and concludes that the development of an elite “life-style” in Pittsburgh’s East End coincided with the shift to Episcopalianism. “The Pittsburgh iron

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and steel elite,” he noted, “had been traditionally Presbyterian. But as they developed a suburban elite culture in the East End, conversion to Episcopalianism, which became virtually a generic upper-class religion in America in the twentieth century, gained increasing popularity.”39 Although Episcopalians in the years from 1890 to 1916 accounted for a little over one percent of Pittsburgh’s population and only two and a half percent of the religiously-affiliated, the fact that elites were significantly overrepresented in this denomination made it a powerful and wealthy one.40 Calvary Episcopal Church, located in Shadyside, found itself in the 1890s an increasingly popular church among elites in an increasingly popular elite Pittsburgh neighborhood, and thus ministering to a powerful and wealthy congregation, one intimately linked to the city’s iron and steel industry. George Hodges would be the minister who spurred select members of this wealthy congregation to reform. He was not a big man, and throughout his life had a youngishlooking face, made younger in appearance because he kept it clean-shaven. His hair was always fairly short and parted in the middle, and his smallish oval Ben Franklin glasses provided a rounded counter-point to his rather squarish chin, and the expansive plain of his clean-shaven upper lip. When he first came to Calvary as assistant rector in 1881, Hodges had not yet developed the social thrust of his belief. He was excited, as a young man might be, about his new job, which paid $1,000 a year. As he wrote to a friend in July of 1881: “I have one of the best sort of men to work with, the richest and most aristocratic of Pittsburgh society to associate with…I came here expecting to rush at once into the desolate wilderness of some grimy boarding house, and here I am at Mr. Vincent’s in a delightful house on Fifth Avenue, with none of the bothers of the city, and all its advantages, with none of the smoke of Pittsburgh, and all its pleasantness, with delightful friends, made entirely at home, with a good library to bone at.”41 Calvary Church, likewise, had yet to cultivate a systematic, collective social approach to reform. Until Hodges’ tenure, Calvary offered only a typical range of opportunities for church social involvement, such as ladies’ sewing circles for local hospitals and work in the mission churches sponsored by the parish in the poorer sections of Pittsburgh. During the years in which Hodges became assistant minister (1886) and then rector of Calvary (1889), however, he also came under the intellectual influence of the works of English reformers Charles Kingsley and Frederick Dennison Maurice, early founders of the Christian Socialist movement in England. Kingsley, in his early writings for the journals The Christian Socialist and Politics for the People, in tracts such as “Cheap Clothes and Nasty” and “Who Causes Pestilence?”, and in his novels such as Alton Locke, had demonstrated his sympathy for the Chartists, had detailed the plight of urban workers, and had highlighted the necessity of the church involving itself in politics and reform. Hodges’ sermons, along with the weekly article he wrote for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, reflected the influence of Kingsley’s thinking (as did the naming of Pittsburgh’s first settlement house “Kingsley House”), and Hodges increasingly emphasized the duty of Christians to involve themselves in the life of the city. Hodges in fact stressed a number of themes (such as the need for the church to develop a social rather than individual focus) which would later come to characterize the social gospel, and built a strong argument for the necessity of the church to turn its attention to Pittsburgh’s social ills, and for the laity to be the major agents of this process.

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One message Hodges repeatedly sounded was the need to break down barriers among Christian denominations. Historic theological divisions which had divided Christianity for centuries no longer had contemporary relevance, in Hodges’ view.42 The fact that the focus of religion had shifted from abstract, dusty theological discussions to its practical application was reinforced in Hodges’ thinking by the turn of liberal Christianity in this era from right belief and Biblical literalism to right action.43 Insistence on a literal reading of the Bible, Hodges believed, led to “endless absurdities and fanaticisms.” The “genuineness” of one’s Christianity was not evidenced by adherence to an approved doctrine, but rather by his or her “sympathy for all good causes,” or faithfulness in “deeds” rather than “creeds.”44 Hodges thus tried to get his congregation at Calvary thinking about “everything which is meant to make earth more like heaven,” and to see that “the purpose of the church is understood in its social applications” and “the betterment of the daily life of men.”45 In fact, he expounded, “the purpose of the Christian religion is to uplift all life”; to make “good citizens,” “unselfish politicians,” “prudent housekeepers,” “industrious mechanics,” and “public-spirited capitalists.” Christianity is interested in…the progress of education…the improvement of machinery…in political reform and social betterment; in the houses that men and women live in; and the clothes they wear and the dinners they eat and the wages they get, and the amount of pleasure and of opportunity that enters into their lives.46 Sounding what would become a common social gospel theme, Hodges also encouraged his parishioners to reflect on why labor meetings would applaud the name of Jesus, but hiss the name of the church. The church must become more a friend of the worker and a supporter of his needs, Hodges felt, including advocating for just wages, decent housing, and the assurance of one day off in seven.47 Hodges even flirted with the idea of redistribution of wealth. “The art of gathering a great fortune has been discovered,” he noted. “Now we need to know the art of perfectly just and Christian distribution.”48

PROTESTANT WOMEN’S CHURCH ORGANIZATIONS: BUILDING SOCIAL CONSCIENCE AND FEMALE NETWORKS A social gospel approach to the city’s problems was not created out of whole cloth. Indeed, the claims of H.D.W.English aside, certain Calvary laity had long been involved in ascertaining the needs of Pittsburgh’s poor and taking steps to address them— Calvary’s women’s organizations. As early as the mid-1880s a Ladies’ Benevolent Society, a series of “Mother’s Meetings,” a kitchen and a sewing school, and a “Calvary Sisterhood” were active at Calvary, all with an interest in providing for the poor.49 Calvary also had a chapter of the diocesan “Women’s Auxiliary,” which had formed in January of 1881. A historian of this organization, writing of the period from 1885 to 1890, noted that “there were very few public social agencies so the parishes did much of the then-called ‘charity work’ for the poor of their parish and community; food,

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medicine, clothes, shoes, coals and rent were furnished to the needy,” and money was raised for city charitable societies.50 Calvary’s women were not alone. In fact, such organizations were virtually omnipresent in the Protestant churches. Identified as “Women’s Auxiliaries,” “Ladies Home Mission Societies,” or “Women’s Clubs,” these groups of women performed a wide range of charitable activities focused on providing basic necessities for Pittsburgh’s poor. The First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh, for example, bad a “Ladies Sewing Society,” organized in 1888 in order to “sew for the destitute, both those in the city and elsewhere, to help prepare missionary boxes, and to aid the deacons, when necessary, in their work among the poor of the church.” First Presbyterian also had a “Women’s Work Society,” and held “Mother’s Meetings” beginning in 1901 for the neighborhood working class and immigrant mothers in order to “help them by giving them good ideas of improving the wretched conditions of their homes and also by showing them higher Christian ideals.”51 The Women’s Home Missionary Society and Women’s Industrial Exchange of Christ Methodist Episcopal Church, in Pittsburgh’s East End, along with the church’s “Society for Aid to the Poor,” battled Sunday liquor sales, sewed clothing for local hospitals, charitable homes, the SoHo baths, and the YMCA, and raised money for local philanthropic causes.52 They also gathered to hear talks on a variety of subjects, including child labor, immigration, works such as Josiah Strong’s “The Challenge of the City,” the work of women in factories, and African American history.53 The “Ladies Aid Society” of the First Baptist Church “carried on several ministries” including visiting the “sick and afflicted,” to whom they would take flowers and food; and a “Sewing Committee,” which engaged in “collecting and distributing clothing, bedding, food to the needy,” and “all-day sewing for the hospitals and Colored Orphans’ Home.”54 The purpose of the society was not only to help the needy, but “the banding together of the women of the church in spiritual, charitable and missionary work, and for the intellectual and social development of every woman of the church.”55 As the latter might indicate, such societies developed functions beyond charitable work, increasingly serving as networks which connected women to similar groups in other congregations and other denominations, and slowly making a large number of women (and through them, their larger congregations) intimately aware of the growing problem of poverty and poor living conditions in the city. Indeed, Mary S.Donovan, in her study of women’s organizations in the Episcopal Church in this period, concluded that the activities of the women [in the Episcopal church] in the period between 1850 and 1920 literally transformed the church by providing the labor force and the moral initiative to establish social service ministries…by structuring the support system necessary to enable missionary expansion and by developing a communications network that fostered a diocesan rather than a parochial identity for individual church members.56 These activities “shaped a climate of opinion” which made Episcopalians (and other denominations as well) receptive to social gospel ideas, whether male reformers or clergy recognized the fact or not.57 They also provided a basis for the same interdenominational

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cooperation that Hodges would later espouse. Anne Firor Scott noted in her study of church women’s home and foreign missionary societies, the WCTU, and the YWCA that “all three drew members from the same pool of church women,” and were sometimes “so interrelated that an outsider might have had trouble keeping them separate.” This network, conducted within the context of religious work, “allowed women…to grapple with social and political issues that could have seemed alarmingly radical in a secular political setting,” and enabled them to develop “a grass-roots version of what would come to be called the social gospel.”58 Women’s church organizations could therefore be considered the backbone of the Protestant church’s social presence in the community in this early reform period.

HODGES AND PITTSBURGH’S SOCIAL GOSPEL Hodges believed that the church, as it always had, should help to meet the needs of Pittsburgh’s impoverished. He began to believe, however, that the underlying causes of such needs did not reside with the poor themselves, but were the result of broader social, political, and economic realities. He became very explicit about what reforms were needed, as well as about who was to blame for many of the problems of Pittsburgh. Hodges’ teaching and thinking provided a crucial step in the reform history of Pittsburgh for several reasons. He was able to establish a religious motivation for joining in a particular type of independent political reform by yoking liberal Christian and social gospel ideology to an anti-machine, anti-party reformist stance that seemingly impelled an impressive number of his elite congregants into independent reform activities. He also sounded a theme that would become central to the moral discourse of reform: that the machine government of Pittsburgh should be the prime target of reformers, both because of its selfish mismanagement of the city, and because of its links to the capitalists of corruption who profited from the city’s saloons and brothels. Hodges’ vision is thus interesting in that he mixed liberal or progressive theologies and political notions with what has been categorized as conservative ones. Already present in the teaching of George Hodges, therefore, is the distinctive stamp that Pittsburgh reformers would put on Progressive reform: a middle way that was neither clearly liberal nor clearly conservative, but one which mixed and matched ideas, theories, and strategies without strict regard for ideological or theological categories. He repeatedly exhorted his listeners to join in the battle against the city’s machine government. The “chief hindrance” toward solving the problems of the city lay in the fact that the municipal offices were occupied by inefficient men. “Rings and corporations” ran local governments for their own interest, and sacrificed the common citizen’s needs in the process. They were allowed to do so, Hodges reasoned, because citizens continued to vote along national party lines in local elections. The first thing that had to be done to get the city back on the right track, according to Hodges, was “to get rid of this delusion of party.” Good government clubs should put their own candidates in the field, and good citizens should vote for them, regardless of party. In this way voting would no longer be an “idle farce,” but have “purpose and meaning.” Hodges also suggested that the problem of inefficient and corrupt local governments could be solved by a ward system of government in which the people were elected on a city-wide basis, according to their

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talents rather than to their ties to a political party or their work for the machine. “The purpose is to get the best men who can be had without regard to artificial boundaries,” he concluded.59 To accomplish this aim, Hodges encouraged a politically nonpartisan stance that paralleled his call to denominational nonpartisanship. His rhetoric even explicitly connected the two: There is an idea, derived from much experience, that religion and politics do not go well together. But that depends on what is meant by politics and by religion. If by politics is meant the party and by religion is meant the sect, then is the combination evil indeed. For partisanship represents all that is bad in politics and sectarianism represents all that is bad in religion. Each is a form of selfishness, the spirit of service is in neither of them, and they are joined in marriage by the devil. But if politics is defined to be the care of the interests of the people and if religion is defined as the application of the principles of Jesus Christ to the alternatives of daily life, public as well as private, then the two belong together. Politics properly understood is a part of religion. The primary and the polls are as close to the path of duty as the prayer-meeting.60 Thus the Christian citizen,” he concluded, “will consider himself called as a Christian to take an active interest in politics.”61 Hodges here did not merely make an argument for why the Christian legitimately should carry his or her faith into the political realm. By linking political and denominational partisanship as the twin evils preventing the salvation of the city, he yoked the development of liberal Christianity to a certain type of reformist, Mugwump politics. The good Christian not only got involved in politics, but voted the independent ticket. As Hodges concluded, the reason that the Christian citizen/layperson should forsake sect and party and band together for the good of the city was that only an organized and united Christianity could effectively combat the “admirably disciplined army of the devil—the allied forces of intemperance, of impurity, of corrupt politics, of fraud and falsehood, of theft and murder” that opposed them.62 The “army of the devil” on the one hand included the machine government, organized and powerful and controlling a bloc of votes that allowed it to stay in power. In this early period, the greatest crime that the machine government committed was that of inefficiency and selfishness: in striving above all to remain in power, the machine government neglected the needs of the city. But these forces were “allied” on the other hand with a more nefarious group—those who controlled the city’s saloons, brothels, and criminal rings. Striking a theme that would become a central concept in the moral discourse of reform in Pittsburgh, Hodges castigated the “capitalism of corruption.” “Saloons are built and stocked and managed and multiplied not to minister to the normal thirst of the community,” Hodges argued, “but to increase it for the purpose of making money. The saloons are largely in the hands of great corporations, makers of the fiery stuff which they retail, and are established for the purpose of creating a better market.” Arguments about the “poor man’s beer” were hypocritical: all these corporations cared for were “the poor man’s dime.” Temperance reform must be as much or more concerned with addressing

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the “greed of the dealer” as with the “appetite of the drunkard.” “The legislation which will do the most good will be that which removes the element of gain to the remotest distance from this business.”63 The same was true for prostitution. “The disorderly house means money; that is the strength of it… So long as it is a fruitful source of revenue it will be maintained.” The best way to attack it, therefore, was to threaten its profits— which would occur if the laws against the disorderly house were properly enforced.64 In these and other evils, it was the studied creation of needs for capitalist gain that most appalled Hodges. “Appetites are deliberately cultivated; people are intentionally degraded, sin is diligently multiplied, temptation is attractively advertised, custom is sought by agents who go out to create the demand, and it is in the way of business that men and women are ruined, body and soul, because there is money in it.”65 Reformers, above all, needed to find a way to strike down the growing profitability of the saloon, the brothel, and corrupt politics because this alliance was ruining lives and undermining the possibility of making Pittsburgh more like the Kingdom of God. In his stress on the capitalism of corruption, machine politics, and the brothel and saloon as the culprits of Pittsburgh’s social ills, Hodges was attuned to a trend of reform that reached across the country to many of America’s cities. As this trend peaked in the years after 1910, twenty-seven cities and three states formed commissions to investigate the problem of prostitution, the Anti-Saloon League lobbied city and state governments building the groundwork for a national prohibition that would come in 1919, and scores of cities turned their attention to the corrupt workings of their local governments. Linked to broader Progressive efforts by a shared “infinite capacity for moral indignation,” the struggles against the saloon, the brothel, and corrupt government were buttressed by a common view that “the social disruptions of urbanization were the work of alien and sinister men who collectively formed, in George Kneeland’s words, a ‘whole network of relations…elaborated below the surface of society.’”66 Paul Boyer has concluded, however, that although these were central projects of Progressive reform, the main participants in the “great coercive crusades” tended to be the “socially marginal people…being drawn into the fundamentalist churches,” and that “at the more rarefied social and economic levels, the attitude toward these reforms ranged from tepid support to outright opposition.”67 He also argued that the anti-saloon and anti-prostitution movements were fundamentally secularized, and their efforts “divorced from the Protestant establishment.”68 The fact that it was a social gospel minister at one of Pittsburgh’s elite, liberal, Episcopalian churches that struck these same themes earliest and most forcefully in this city not only contradicts Boyer’s distinctions, but points up the fact that the boundaries between liberal and conservative theology, and the ideological thrusts behind reform movements, could be quite jumbled, especially in the early years of such movements.

PITTSBURGH UNITARIANS AND CLEAN WATER In these same years, Pittsburgh’s First Unitarian Church took up the cause of better water filtration for the city. The Rev. C.E. St. John, pastor of First Unitarian, had warmed to the need for better city government through his friendship with George Hodges, who had asked him to be part of the leadership of the Kingsley Settlement House. St. John

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oversaw the formation of a “Men’s Patriotic Guild” in 1893, which had as its objects the encouragement of “the application of ethical principles to political practice in all branches of our government,” and cooperation with the Unitarian church “in carrying out all its social and charitable activities.” More than half of the members of this organization taught night classes at Kingsley House, and the close connection between these two groups was further demonstrated by the fact that the same man, James O.Handy, represented both organizations at the first annual meeting of the National Municipal League in Cleveland in May of that year. Handy must have made some good contacts at that particular conference, because the next year the Men’s Patriotic Guild hosted Clinton Rogers Woodruff, president of the National Municipal League, who talked to the men in November about the evils of machine government.69 In 1895 the Guild changed its name to the “Citizens League,” and took up the cause of water filtration for the city. Their concern was apparently spurred by the declaration of “Sanitary Sunday” by the Women’s Health Protective Association in June of 1895, when preachers throughout Pittsburgh were to preach on the issue of “clean water.” The Unitarian Church heard a sermon by Handy, who worked for the Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, on the need for better filtration.70 The Citizen’s League responded by financing the construction of a model sand-filtration system on the lawn of the Unitarian Church, whose “efficiency gave a strong and convincing demonstration that the city’s dirty infected water could be made cleaner and purer.” People in the neighborhood of the church actually began coming to the church filter for their water. The League thus “not only established and conducted this demonstration but gave it the wide publicity which, we believe, played no small part in educating the people of Pittsburgh and bringing about the proper filtration of the water which ended the terrible scourge of typhoid fever from which the city had suffered for years.”71 Reformers saw the problem of clean water as closely connected to the machine. Machine dithering over who should get to build the city’s water plant delayed for nearly nine years the solution to Pittsburgh’s deadly typhoid problem.72 Investigations as early as the mid-1890s had revealed Pittsburgh’s typhoid rate to be greater than that of any other large city in the United States, caused by the city drawing its water from the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, both contaminated by untreated sewage from cities upstream. The Pittsburgh Filtration Commission, created by a city ordinance in 1896, recommended in 1899 that a sand-filtration plant would drastically reduce the rates of typhoid, and a city bond measure to finance such a plant passed in the same year. Because of factional machine struggles over who should build the plant and where, however, construction was delayed until the end of 1907– a delay that reformers estimated was directly responsible for nearly 500 senseless deaths due to typhoid.73 As might be expected, a disproportionate number of these deaths occurred in working-class wards, where the residents were more likely to be immigrants who did not know (or believe) that the water was contaminated, or who, for reasons of time and money, “found it more difficult to take private measures to protect themselves from the risk of typhoid.” Typhoid was in fact the number-one killer of recent male working-class immigrants.74 The Rev. St. John preached sermons against the machine government throughout the early 1890s, reiterating many of the same charges often articulated by George Hodges one mile away at Calvary Episcopal. In December, for example, St. John charged from the pulpit that contracts for public works were fraudulently let, that the Department of

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Public Safety refused to enforce prostitution laws, that the police forced disorderly houses to pay them to stay open, and that street car companies received their franchises illegally. “I believe that the foundation and support of all these evils,” he concluded, “lies in this ring.”75 This conviction, buttressed by his work with Kingsley House, led St. John to support a new civic reform organization that was just then forming, known as the Civic Club of Allegheny County. The Civic Club grew out of the Women’s Health Protective Association at the instigation of several prominent members of an elite women’s organization known as the Twentieth Century Club. It seems that the issue of clean water was one of the major spurs to the formation of this new municipal reform organization— James Handy, the Rev. St. John, and Kate Everest of Kingsley House gave the major speeches describing the need for such an organization at the founding meeting, held in the rooms of the Twentieth Century Club.76 Although old Presbyterian suspicions about Unitarians had not dissipated entirely (the Clubwomen had opposed St. John speaking at the meeting because of his affiliation), it appears that service to the city provided a neutral meeting ground for those of different faiths, and speeded the already-occurring diminution of boundaries between denominations.77 The movement of First Unitarian’s reformers from church into the world of secular reform organizations—a movement paralleling that of the “Calvary Crowd”—was also indicative of the burgeoning sense that morality had a municipal dimension, and that, like wise, municipal reform had a moral one.

PITTSBURGH PRESBYTERIANS, THE MACHINE, AND THE REFORM DISCOURSE A reform discourse articulated in moral terms and centered in attacking the influence of the machine government was not limited to theological liberals like Hodges and St. John. It is useful to see that similar reform visions, goals and strategies were being formulated in very different theological quarters during this early period of Pittsburgh reform: among the city’s staunch Scotch-Irish Presbyterian community. Pittsburgh’s Presbyterians were the traditional guardians of the city’s public morals. Settled by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Pittsburgh and its elite were dominantly of this faith. The Scotch-Irish had arrived in large numbers in the eighteenth century, heading to Pennsylvania because of its lack of legal restrictions on religious belief. Nearly twentyfive percent of Pennsylvania’s inhabitants were Scotch-Irish in the years before the American Revolution.78 Of Rishel’s “founding families,” fifty-two percent were Presbyterian in 1900, and from fifty-seven to sixty percent of those listed in the elite social registers were of this denomination. Presbyterians were the most populous Protestant denomination, representing six and a half percent of the population in 1906 and almost thirteen percent of the religiously affiliated. John Ingham, likewise, found that fifty-six percent of Pittsburgh’s “iron barons” claimed Presbyterianism as their belief.79 In spite of the fact that not even seven percent of the city’s population at the turn of the century were Presbyterian (in contrast, say, to the almost thirty percent who belonged to the Catholic Church), contemporaries continued to associate Pittsburgh with a deeply Presbyterian identity. This was easy to do, for the city’s elite remained disproportionately of that faith, and conservative Presbyterians of Pittsburgh had put a firm cultural stamp

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on the life of the city. Willa Cather wrote in 1897 that all of Pittsburgh was divided into two parts, “Presbyteria” and “Bohemia,” and “the former [was] much the larger and more influential kingdom of the two.”80 An investigator for the Pittsburgh Survey noted that “the observance of outward decency has always been favored in Pittsburgh and has been brought about in a measure through the influence of the strong church element in this Scotch-Irish community…as perhaps in no other American city, Sunday observance laws have long been enforced on saloons and hotels.”81 Its Presbyterian leaders wished for the climate of Pittsburgh to parallel that of one of its Old Side conservative church services: stern, demanding, moral, discreet, and unemotional.82 These leaders valued hard work. The smoke from Pittsburgh factories was tolerated because it meant that work was being done and money being made. As Lincoln Steffens recounted when he visited the city in 1903: Six days and six nights these people labor, molding iron and forging steel, and they are not tired; on the seventh day they rest, because that is the Sabbath. They are Scotch Presbyterians and Protestant Irish. This stock had an actual majority not many years ago, and now, though the population has grown…the Scotch and Scotch-Irish still predominated, and their clean, strong faces characterize the crowds in the streets. Canny, busy, and brave, they built up their city almost in secret, making millions and hardly mentioning it.83 As we shall see, the concerns of Pittsburgh’s reformers were significantly influenced by the Presbyterian character of the city. Reform movements in many important ways sprang from efforts to battle the saloon or keep the Sabbath holy. Reformers could be driven by a prickly Presbyterian individualism. Such was the case with merchant Oliver McClintock. McClintock was a prominent and well-connected businessman, owner of the city’s oldest merchandising interest. Over the course of his life, McClintock participated in almost every important reform or reform organization in Pittsburgh. He was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and of the Municipal Affairs committee of that body. He was an early member, and later president, of the Civic Club. He served on the executive committee of the National Municipal League, was active in the Civil Service Reform Association (both state and national), and gave his time and money to a number of educational and philanthropic organizations. In the 1880s McClintock temporarily aroused the public conscience against the Magee-Flinn organization, gathering evidence that a suspiciously high number of city construction contracts had been awarded to the construction firm of Booth and Flinn, Ltd. Not only were these city contracts let to Flinn’s business at higher bids, McClintock tried to show, but the company did shoddy work. To procure evidence of this charge, McClintock took photographs of streets built by the company, full of potholes and fabricated with inferior materials. McClintock ultimately had to present his case in a court presided over by a machine judge, however, and to no one’s surprise, the judge dismissed the case. This “single citizens long, brave fight”84 was unsuccessful in generating significant anti-machine sentiment in the 1880s, much less in dislodging its power. He would soon find other ways to battle the machine. In 1895, for example, he was among the founders of the Citizen’s League, an anti-machine reform organization which ran George Guthrie

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(a member of Calvary Episcopal) as a candidate for mayor. When this was not successful, he put his energies into a series of other reform groups, and was active in civic reform until his death in 1922. His seemingly indefatigable battle against the machine had its roots in his Scotch-Irish ancestry, and in his Presbyterianism. When he died at the age of 82, McClintock wrote in his will that “I have endeavored during my life to comply with the obligations of stewardship toward God, my bountiful Benefactor, by supporting to the best of my ability religious, educational, civic and charitable causes.” He then encouraged his wife and children to continue on “the great work of world reconstruction whose burden now rests upon all Christians.”85 When asked during his life why he spent so much time battling the machine, he also evoked his ethnic roots, with all their ancestral passions and hatreds: Whatever of zeal I may have had in promoting religion and higher education, and in contending for the rights of the people and the welfare of Pittsburgh, my native city, I believe that the main spring of my inspiration lies in my native American ancestry…and still farther back, in my Scotch-Irish ancestry. I have only yielded to the irresistible impulses of my hereditary hatred of both ecclesiastical and political domination… I became a political reformer and a fighter against the boss and political machine, because…it was in my blood; I couldn’t help being a reformer and setting my face against autocracy in church, or state.86 McClintock’s Presbyterian sense of reform was thus not impelled most importantly by a social gospel message, a liberal theological belief, or the sense that salvation was “social.” McClintock serves as an example that reformers could get their reform zeal from church in a number of different ways. McClintock was hardly the only Presbyterian with an interest in preserving a moral Pittsburgh. In 1892, the same year that Hodges was building support for the Kingsley House social settlement, and that Henry Clay Frick was crushing the Homestead Strike, the United Presbyterian Ministerial Association took up the cause of anti-prostitution in Pittsburgh. In the summer of 1892, one of the Pittsburgh dailies, the Commercial Gazette, launched an editorial campaign against the city’s vice trade. It was a popular time for such acts: Charles Parkhurst had begun an investigation into politically protected vice in New York City in May of that year, vowing with the help of his City Vigilance League to ensure the “purity and honesty” of city government.87 In Pittsburgh, the campaign was spurred by the complaints of Father Morgan M.Sheedy, priest of St. Mary of Mercy Catholic Church in the city’s downtown first ward. Sheedy protested to the mayor that the first ward was being virtually taken over by houses of prostitution, that good families were being driven out, and that those who remained were harassed by the nefarious business. Those worshipping at St. Mary’s could often hear the “sounds of drunken revelry and ribald songs” issuing from such houses, and “night after night the door bells of respectable people were constantly being rung by drunken debauchees in search of abodes of vice.”88 After Sheedy called attention to the problem, the Commercial Gazette took up the struggle and issued a series of editorials calling on the city administration to

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enforce the laws against disorderly houses. When the mayor promised to stop the selling of illegal liquor in such houses, the uproar died down. Several months later, however, the Ministerial Association of the United Presbyterian Church revived the cause, and upped the political ante. The association not only complained about the continued existence of prostitution in the city, but charged that the city itself protected the trade. At the November 14 meeting of the Association, the Rev. J.D.Sands, pastor of the Seventh United Presbyterian Church, read a paper on “The Social Evil and Its Protection by Municipal Authority.” Sands, citing the fourth annual report of the Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Safety (which oversaw the police department), charged that the city administration, but especially the police, had deliberately undermined the law in allowing houses of prostitution to stay open. The report of the Department of Public Safety stated that “it is well known…that there are many public houses of prostitution in the city of Pittsburgh, and the numbers of and the streets on which said houses are located are also well known. If we thought it advisable to do so or to the advantage of the community to suppress such places we could and would close all of them within twenty-four hours.” That the Department of Public Safety and the city’s police had taken it upon themselves to choose which laws should be enforced and which should not outraged the ministers. Not enforcing this particular law placed “the house of ill-fame on a level with the purest home in affording it the same protection.” The ministers, upon hearing Sands’ paper, drafted a letter to Pittsburgh mayor H.I.Gourley insisting that vice dens be closed. Gourley, although claiming to be sympathetic to the position of the ministers and likewise believing that prostitution was “one of the greatest evils,” nevertheless responded that no big city had ever successfully eliminated prostitution, and that if the 3,000 prostitutes that plied their trade in Pittsburgh were summarily turned out into the street, they would have no place to go. He ended by challenging the ministers and the “Christian men and women” of the city to show him that they would take care of the women who would be kicked out of their houses.89 The U.P. Ministerial Association, backed by the Commercial Gazette, replied that the decision on whether a law should be enforced or not should not be dependent on what the consequences would be for the criminal. Furthermore, they argued, the city made itself complicit in the vice trade by allowing it to continue. The conservative United Presbyterians, whose denomination was centered in Pittsburgh, even in these early years articulated many of the same themes and fears that liberal Episcopalians had concerning the city, its corruption, and the duty of Christians to change things. A case of embezzlement by a public official in Allegheny, Pittsburgh’s sister city, early in 1892, led the editors of the United Presbyterian to urge the practice of an independent politics based on moral righteousness, proclaiming that “when citizens will rebel against party dictation, a better day will dawn in municipal affairs.”90 Unable to believe that “there is not moral power in every community to deliver itself and manage its own affairs with wisdom and purity,” the United Presbyterian advocated for removing “politics” from municipal government, thereby resisting the “tyranny of the ‘rings’ and combinations which are bleeding the life out of our cities.” Municipal politics constituted “one of the most important fields of Christian activity,” for “it is possible to redeem our cities and to enthrone virtue in them,” if only Christian citizens would “make their moral power felt in the support of every official who is faithfully doing his duty, and in the enforcement of wholesome law.”91 The danger inherent in government corruption,

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according to the United Presbyterians, started with individual corruption and worked outward. “The most potent factor in politics,” these editors concluded, “is righteousness”: The world will never get beyond the law of right, or from under the will of God… Whatever importance may be attached to the ordinary political issues…they are not to be compared with the questions relating to character and right-doing in the sight of God. With wicked men in power, with corrupt practices in the administration, and prevailing ungodliness, the nation will be involved in calamity and disaster, whatever the ordinary political policy. God is supreme, and he regards righteousness.92 Both the minister and his church should be involved in righting such wrongs, and UP ministers were encouraged to use the pulpit to denounce political corruption, the evils of the rum traffic, Mormonism, Romanism, and the assault on Sabbath laws, as well as to advocate the mutual obligations of employer and employee.93 Echoing the concerns of George Hodges, the Ministerial Association wondered if the city administration was going to accept prostitution as a legitimate capitalistic enterprise. The ministers asked, in a lengthy letter to the mayor: Are the decent press, the manufacturing and commercial establishments, the institutions of learning and the religious organizations of Pittsburgh to regard the houses of prostitution as one of Pittsburgh’s industries, receiving equally with themselves the protection and care of our municipal authorities? Must journalist and lawyer, and teacher and preacher and physician recognize pimp and pander as fellow professionals, enjoying equally with themselves the recognition and protection of the municipal government? Shall our virtuous men and women, wage-earners in the honorable and useful employments, receive just the same municipal recognition as those who receive the wages of prostitution?94 The rhetorical structuring of this series of questions was meant to emphasize both the consequences of protected prostitution and the absurdity of such a situation. Nevertheless, it also indicated a real fear and a clear-eyed grasp of the situation. As Timothy Gilfoyle’s work on the development of prostitution in New York has shown, prostitution in this era was increasingly integrated into “an expanding urban network of commercial enterprise and entertainment.” It was “organized into institutions…that guaranteed commercial efficiency” and was “structured by the market” such that “sex became a profit-making venture…subject to the conditions of commerce.”95 That prostitution should become as legitimate a capitalistic enterprise as the manufacturing of steel was preposterous, in these ministers’ view, and so they and other “right-thinking citizens” cried out for its suppression. These reformers were not anti-capitalist, but they reserved the right to apply moral judgments to any and all aspects of the capitalist system that they found morally wanting. For those not adhering to early social gospel theologies (which provided a more explicit set of theoretical justifications for such criticisms), the abusive profiteering of turn-of-

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the-century capitalist practice could be articulated through the moral denunciation of the profit-making brothel and saloon-owners. In this way “manufacturing and commercial establishments” were set off from “houses of prostitution,” “professionals” from “pimp and pander,” and a clear line drawn demarcating legitimate and illegitimate capitalist enterprises. While this seemingly only served to buttress mainstream capitalist practice, groundwork was being laid (as with George Hodges’ observations about the dangers of competition in business) for later and more direct criticism of the effects of monopoly capitalism. In any case, capitalism was not what these reformers saw as the main threat to the city. Clearly they wished to preserve, to “redeem,” the righteousness of the city, and were focused on those elements perpetuating the cancerous sins of alcohol consumption and prostitution. In acting publicly against the prostitution trade, United Presbyterian ministers were shocked to uncover the extent to which brothels were tolerated and even protected by local municipal government figures. As the Rev. J.T.McCrory, the president of the Ministerial Association, recounted: It was discovered that the houses of prostitution were the center and conservator of a great part of the crime, vice, and drunkenness that cursed the community. One who has not had special advantages for studying the matter can have no idea as to how mightily this vice works for the corruption of politics, and the complete subversion of social and civil order in the community. 96 Thus, much as Hodges had, the United Presbyterians began to see the machine government responsible for this protection as a primary target for reform measures. Until those who developed the illicit industry of prostitution were removed, the underground capitalism of corruption would continue. Eventually, the political pressure and bad publicity generated by the whole episode led Mayor Gourley to act. He directed the Superintendent of Police to close all houses of prostitution in Pittsburgh within two days. The result, of course, was just what Gourley wanted: floods of prostitutes kicked out of their apartments swarmed into the city streets and began an immediate protest against the action. A coalition of the better known madams of the city called on the mayor. The Commercial Gazette described the visit as “the most disgraceful, nauseating and unheard-of farce in the history of any municipal government in the United States”: An army of diamond-bedecked and costly-arrayed women, comprised mainly of the keepers of the lately police-protected disorderly houses of this city, with an assurance born of long-time intimacy with the officeholding powers, invaded the office of Mayor Gourley to raise a mighty wail of distress.97 Other displaced prostitutes appeared at the home of the Rev. J.T.McCrory in the middle of the night, demanding a place to sleep. These visitations were kept up for a full twentyfour hours and by the end some seventy-five women had entered his house or stood around outside of it, complaining loudly about their situation. Far from preventing this

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spectacle, Pittsburgh’s police had in fact sent the women to McCrory’s house, even giving them his address written neatly on pieces of paper. One day later, the Director of Public Safety, J.O.Brown, without consulting the mayor, reversed the order to close down the disorderly houses and allowed them all to reopen. Quoting the mayor to the effect that the speediness with which the order had been carried out had been “cruel” to those involved, Brown instructed the Superintendent of Police Roger O’Mara to wait to enforce the order until the mayor decided how much time was needed. In the end, unsurprisingly, the houses were allowed to remain open indefinitely, setting the stage for future battles against the disorderly house. Several scholars have read anti-prostitution efforts as largely motivated by a fear of women outside the constraints of the Victorian home. Mark Connelly, for example, concluded that anti-prostitution campaigns in this era “expressed a profound anxiety and pessimism about the new position of women in the industrial world,” and further, that such anxiety seemed “as strongly provoked by the fact that women were working in industrial jobs at all”—not just that they were receiving low wages which were pushing them into prostitution. The ways in which reformers highlighted the connections between low wages and the life of prostitution therefore reflected a concern that industrial society was “subversive of traditional female morality…and traditional female roles.”98 While gender anxieties undoubtedly played a part in the all-male Ministerial Association’s campaign to rein in the women who had moved from the domestic sphere into “disorderly houses,” the prostitutes themselves did not seem to be the focus of the Association’s outrage. Their rhetoric concentrated instead on those who controlled and profited from prostitution—both men and women—and on the ways in which a “social evil” like prostitution infected the entire civil society. If anything, the association called for the equal treatment of women as undifferentiated “criminals” before the law, not subject to any special treatment or concern based on their sex, and as non-gendered sinners before an angry God. The need to portray anti-prostitution sentiment as symbolic of more than moral denunciation (and thus, as fundamentally a struggle between male reformers and independent females) appears only if one does not consider moral outrage to be a sufficiently motivating force to have impelled reformers to act. Thus while there were certainly gender dimensions to this anti-prostitution surge, it is perhaps more accurate to see them as thoroughly integrated in the moral vision of the United Presbyterian reformers.

IMPLICATIONS The beginnings of Progressive reform efforts in Pittsburgh, therefore, lay most importantly in the work of certain Pittsburgh churches. Together clergy and laity in these institutions began to outline the boundaries of a moral reform discourse for the city. In the early 1890s, the outlines of themes which would dominate Pittsburgh reform rhetoric for the next thirty years were already appearing in liberal and conservative churches alike. The teachings of George Hodges, Charles St. John, and others provided the thinking, language, and agenda that would come to characterize the reform efforts of elite Pittsburghers, even after such efforts moved out of churches into broader civic reform organizations. These themes did not necessarily originate with figures such as Hodges, or

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with churches such as First Unitarian, but churches were the most focused and energetic site for the call to municipal reform in these years before the formation of secular civic reform organizations. That reform rhetoric had its clearest origin in the religious life of Pittsburgh was significantly to shape the boundaries and direction of reform efforts in the Steel City. One of the themes articulated by reformers or reform ministers was that the preservation of the moral city (with all its diverse meanings) remained a vital goal. That this language was inevitably integrated with the languages of business, class, gender, and other divisions does not detract from its centrality. Scholars have been tempted to dismiss such language, or to read it as symbolic of deeper concerns. Moral concern is interpreted as anxiety about the disruptions of industrial society (Boyer), or roles for women (Connelly), or as masking attempts to control a powerful working class (Hays), but not as a sufficient concern unto itself.99 Pittsburgh’s early Progressive reformers, often anchored in the life of the city’s churches and its institutions, were shaped in their reform efforts by their moral vision and anger. As a result, reformers often expressed this vision in the cadences of moral concern, and the moral discourse marked the boundaries of a rhetorical space in which reformers considered the major social, economic, and political questions of the city. This discourse increasingly came to see Pittsburgh’s machine government as the source of many of the city’s problems, a view that would be validated as the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth. Machine government was characterized for these reformers by selfishness and inefficiency, and these qualities were read in a moral light. “Selfishness” meant that the machine existed primarily to perpetuate its own power and domination, and thus the machine operated in opposition to the common good. Its inefficiency meant time and money wasted, and implied a nepotistic “who you know” system rather than one run on a meritocratic basis. Although reformers objected to this form of organization in principle, their moral critique of the machine focused more on the results of the system than on the system itself. A system that not only tolerated but allegedly throve upon the evils of graft, vice, and the power of the saloon, and presided over environmental travesties such as the scourge of typhoid, was clearly an evil that needed to be replaced. This budding moral discourse functioned in several interesting ways, demonstrating that, if anything, it was sufficiently copious and ambiguous to encompass a variety of reform strategies and ideologies. Although Boyer is certainly correct in seeing both “coercive” and “environmentalist” tendencies within the moral concern over America’s cities, for example, the reform discourse in Pittsburgh was marked above all by how such tendencies were consistently mixed by reformers. Hodges, the liberal, social gospel Episcopalian, and J.T.McCrory, the conservative United Presbyterian, used similar language and arrived at similar conclusions about what plagued the city. Laity, both male and female, moved into the reform arena for a number of different reasons, and found that it was not restricted to people of one theological or political stripe. That the moral discourse sacralized the language of political reform and read such efforts as an essential Christian duty meant that the border between church and civic reform was porous, especially for laity. A layperson was able to enter the reform community as a Christian, stripped of denominational and political trappings. The stress of Hodges and others on the dual need for subverting political partisanship and the breakdown of denominational

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rivalry only furthered this tendency. Thus it is not surprising to see networks developing that joined clergy and laity across denominational and political boundaries, in the service of a broader moral agenda, or to see similar reform language cropping up in religious and secular reform circles. A lay member of First Unitarian could attend a National Municipal League conference as the representative of both the church and a settlement house, and would find the same language and agenda of reform in all three locations. Reformers’ focus on the machine government as the main source of Pittsburgh’s problems and their anger directed at the “capitalists of corruption” did not match up exactly with what would become the classic priorities of the social gospel. The moral discourse was not, even in these early stages, something that was crafted and detailed in elite and closed-door sessions of national denominational commissions, and released fully formed into the churches. That early Pittsburgh reform efforts took this direction was determined partially, as we will see, by an ambiguity and fluidity in early social Christianity, and partially by an emphasis which made laity largely responsible for the concretization of social Christian teachings. The activist laity that honored their churches’ social priorities and involved themselves in bettering life in Pittsburgh were never passive receptacles for the teachings of their ministers. They were to put a distinctive stamp on Pittsburgh’s reform language and reform agenda. Reform in Pittsburgh, above all, was to be an affair of the laity.

Chapter Two Pittsburgh’s Activist Laity: Agents of the Moral Reform Discourse In the early 1890s, the “social gospel” was still two decades away from any kind of formal codification, or the summarized written articulation of a Walter Rauschenbusch.1 Early advocates of the principles and emphases of social Christianity were, according to Rauschenbusch, like lone prophets: “we were few, and we shouted in the wilderness.”2 While it may be tempting to read later, more formalized versions of social gospel thinking back into this early period, it is more fruitful to see this as an especially open epoch when it was not clear which direction the social gospel would take. Ministers could weave together a social emphasis with older messages of individualism, and could advocate for the needs of laboring people without automatically dismissing those of the wealthy. There was in fact an inherent ambiguity in much of social Christianity over such issues as the role of the church as an institution in reform efforts, the object and strategies of reform, and who should be the primary agents of reform. This ambiguity in the early message of social Christianity made possible a number of reform alternatives— alternatives which ranged along an ideological and theological spectrum. More importantly, the roles given to activist laity in shaping the concrete application of this social Christian message meant that this message could take on very localized expressions, often quite different from the priorities suggested by leading social gospel thinkers. While even social gospel leaders like Hodges were unclear about the role the church should play in reform efforts, there was an explicit call for the laity to move out and involve themselves in bettering the city. Activist laity responding to this call came to play crucial roles in reform efforts. Ministers knew that reform institutions such as the settlement house could not survive without the financial and administrative support or the day-to-day staffing and supply needs that were provided by interested laity. Even in minister-led reform movements, such as the Allegheny Federation of Churches’ antiprostitution campaign in 1905, laity financed the operations and formed buffer organizations that could act freely in the political realm in a way that churches could not. The reliance that was placed on laity as “agents” of the social gospel shaped reform in several significant ways. First, reform projects such as the Kingsley Settlement House came inevitably to reflect the class and gender conflicts and predispositions of their lay leadership. Second, activist laity provided crucial linkages between churches and the secular world. They not only carried religious language and concepts with them into more secular settings, but they carried reform ideas and strategies from more secular settings back into the church. Such movement of ideas, language, and people served to spread the moral reform discourse, helped to connect the network of organizations and reformers

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which would articulate it, and assured that the churches in some way would remain an important part of this network. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the center of reform energy would move with activist laity out of the churches and into civic reform organizations in the years from 1895 to 1912. For now, however, reformers involved themselves with institutions that were of the churches, but not completely in them. And while activist laity would be given an increasingly vital place in connecting churches to the world of reform, Pittsburgh’s churches and clergy were not ready to cede their traditional social and cultural influence entirely to the actions of their laity. In this period of transition, therefore, Pittsburgh saw a combination of institutional and extra-institutional efforts on the part of its churches, some initiated or led by clergy, others where laity took the lead. Both clergy and laity were feeling their way, within the ever-shifting confines of differing theologies and denominational stances, toward acceptable actions for each. As churches took the lead in certain reform efforts they discovered the limits (whether internally, socially, or theologically imposed) to what they were willing or able to do in reforming the Steel City. Activist laity, in picking up reform where the church left off, began to explore the possibilities of their own reform roles—ones they would expand and develop in the years to come.

ACTIVIST LAITY: LINKING REFORMING CHURCHES TO BROADER REFORM EFFORTS Early reform efforts in Pittsburgh, as we saw in the previous chapter, were clearly bound up with the life and language of the city’s churches, clergy, and laity. Nevertheless, churches as institutions were hesitant to enter openly into reform movements, especially if this meant involving themselves in political contests. Such a stance was typical. Martin Marty has noted that “ministerial and lay leadership are normally concerned lest their congregations become full of political dissensions, subject to schism, or distracted from other ministries precisely because they are miniature publics, and thus they evidence internal pluralism.” For this reason, in spite of the homogenization that can occur through racial, theological, class, or residential segregation, ministers are careful “to protect and enhance the congregation as a meeting place or as an event for expression of elements representing both public and private spheres, not as a political battlefield.” Even though most congregations wish their churches to be involved in a broad way in the life of city and community, therefore, they are normally quite hesitant for a minister, or the church as a whole, to support specific legislation, political parties, or candidates for political office.3 George Hodges, for example, seemed to give a mixed message concerning the role of the church in social and labor reform. Although Calvary parishioners heard from their clerical leadership that they should be active in local reform issues, they also heard that the church would not be, at least not directly. The church as an institution restricted itself from becoming involved in the particulars of reform efforts. Hodges realized that the minister, besides usually being trained in arcane theological issues and not those of “modern society,” was limited in his knowledge of the specific facts in political or labor disputes and would be wisest not to advocate for one side or the other.4 The danger in

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preaching specific solutions to political problems, Hodges concluded, was that “the details are so many, the need of technical information is so great, the actual conditions and the real rights and wrongs are so hard to get at, that the preacher sitting in his study, looking at the world out of a dusty window, is in great danger of a mistake.”5 Similarly, the wise parson should avoid speaking to the labor question “in a detailed way” Rather, “the part of the religious leader is to lift up the whole debate into clearer air.” The fact that the churches were often made up of members from both sides of a dispute led to the same conclusion.6 Hodges dreamt of the day when all churches would act with one voice. Then the entire city would be divided up with each church responsible for its own section. The church would take on the functions of all manner of groups “on the side of righteousness,” from good government clubs and temperance societies to boy’s clubs and law and order leagues, would decide the needs of the neighborhood both spiritual and physical, and would deploy resources to meet those needs. Until that time, however, it was best that ministers, with the church behind them, concentrate on elaborating “eternal principles, guidance of motives, [and] the strengthening of the right spirit.”7 The church’s ambiguous role in social reform was heightened as well by mixed messages coming from the Episcopalian Bishop of the Pittsburgh Diocese, Cortlandt Whitehead, who allowed himself to be named vice-president of a local civic reform organization, but showed no signs of support for an active reform role for the church; in fact, he made it clear that he found the existing social thrust to be of dubious value. Whitehead expressed such views both overtly and in more subtle ways. The official organ of the Diocese, the Church News, virtually ignored social reform issues until the second decade of the twentieth century, and one searches in vain through Whitehead’s sermons for typical social gospel themes. Whitehead could also be more explicit. In speaking of the extensive institutional work of Episcopalian churches in Pittsburgh, he questioned whether the Church is fulfilling her mission when she caters to human nature, and mixes up her high commission to convey the Good Tidings and teach men to observe whatever Christ has commanded, with a feverish endeavor to allure the multitude by sensational and pleasurable and more or less worldly methods to an unwilling and presumably transitory allegiance. Ought there not to be, and must there not be presently, an inevitable swinging back of the pendulum to a renewed recognition of the Church’s one great task [of proclaiming the Gospel]?8 Other churches evidenced a like ambiguity. The United Presbyterian, organ of the United Presbyterian church and printed in Pittsburgh, regularly commented on issues of political, economic, and social contention. As with Hodges, United Presbyterians were convinced that it was the duty of the Christian to involve him- or herself in fixing the problems of the city. In an 1893 editorial on “Municipal Reform,” for example, the United Presbyterian called for opposition to machine governments and for non-partisan municipal elections, noting that this was “one of the most important fields for Christian activity.” “It is possible to redeem our cities,” the UP concluded, “and the responsibility for this lies with those who hold the ballot.”9 But what was to be the role of the minister, or of the church as an institution? Here there was dispute. In 1897, for example, the Rev.

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D.W.Carson of South Burgettstown contributed an article on the subject of “The Church and Political Reforms” which concluded that the church and the state had their own proper spheres, and the mixing of politics and religion was ill-advised. “The spectacle of a Church of Jesus Christ,” he opined, “constituted as a political party to fight political parties with their own weapons, would not… be a pleasing or inspiring sight.” To become adept at fighting political battles, the church would need to “descend to the level of Romish Jesuitism.”10 Two months later the Rev. W.B.Smiley responded with a critique of Carson’s article, questioning whether it was possible for “a party to become so corrupt that a man cannot help to further its interests without being guilty of sin.” “If so,” Smiley concluded, “then it is certainly the duty of the Church to teach him that he must come out from this wicked association.”11 The latter position was supported a few months later by a “Pastoral Letter on Reforms” issued by a committee of ministers and elders appointed at the previous UP General Assembly. This document exhorted United Presbyterians that “if practices exist in society that are displeasing to God, each child of God is under obligation to do what he can to stop those practices.” These included temperance reform, Sabbath reform, and opposition to divorce and secret societies. As to whether such opposition brought politics into the church, the committee members responded that “God, by casting our lot in America, has put us in politics” by putting “a ballot in our hand.” “To select men to make and execute good laws,” the letter concluded, “we must associate with men of like mind. We must seek the power that large numbers give. We must become, in a good sense, politicians.”12 But United Presbyterians saw different spheres for the church and the laity. A later editorial in the United Presbyterian on the subject of “Morals and Politics” nicely summarizes this view. “The Church and the State are closely related,” the editorial began, and their concerns “necessarily overlap,” as when “moral questions enter into legislation and political movements.” But church and state had distinct roles to play when such overlap occurred: The Church has its own sphere and as such must keep in view the extent of its right and duty. It is coordinate with the State, but rises to a higher plane. The individual Christian citizen has a larger sphere, for he is a citizen of the State and as such must take an active part in all that relates to civic affairs and administration. It belongs to the Church to teach the principles that should govern in secular affairs; it is the duty of the citizen to apply these principles to his own deportment. The pulpit is the platform for the teacher sent from God. It may be used only for such purposes as belong to the Kingdom of God… The sphere of politics as such lies beyond the domain of the Church and the pulpit.13 Ministers were enjoined to use the pulpit to elaborate the ways that morality spoke to all spheres of life. But, as this editorial indicates, it was up to the laity to use work in the “larger sphere” and “apply these principles” to the political and social realities they found around them. In addition to delivering a mixed message over the exact role that the church as an institution should play in reform efforts, ministers could also evidence a certain amount of ideological ambiguity. While George Hodges criticized the excesses of capitalism, for

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example, and brought to task those wealthy Pittsburghers who exploited workers and the poor for selfish gain, he did not believe that wealth itself was sinful. The wealthy were “for the most part well-intentioned and good-hearted people, who think a great deal more about the poor than the poor imagine, and who do a great deal more for the poor than anybody ever finds out.”14 Further, one could not easily apply an economic determinism to moral matters. “Most parsons are acquainted with a great many people of all conditions, rich and poor, employers and employed,” Hodges noted, “and they know perfectly well that the figures of a man’s income do not at all show where he stands upon the scale of sanctity. You cannot persuade them by any socialistic arguments that the poor are all saints, and that the rich are all sinners. They know better. They know that the bad and the good are closely intertangled in this queer world.”15 For Hodges the problem was not capitalism, and not wealth, but a lack of application of Christian principles by rich and poor alike “between Sundays.” His sermons and writings mixed individualist and collectivist solutions to the social problems he identified. While the church should certainly turn its attention to the needs of workers, Hodges instructed, the answer to the “problem of labor” was “more religion” for both labor and capital. “Regeneration of society” could only begin with a “regeneration of the individual.”16 The problems of rundown tenements and labor disputes were not to be solved by sermons on sanitation or “the better regulation of industry,” but by emphasizing that “no man can possibly be a Christian without behaving like a Christian.”17 Hodges exemplified the way in which the early 1890s was a time of transition for liberal Christian teachings concerning the ills of industrial society. A new agenda of social concern was still very much wrapped up with the laissez-faire attitudes of the Gilded Age. In many ways, such ambiguity reinforced what some historians have viewed as the inherently conservative nature of the social gospel. Robert Craig, for example, concluded that “those who preached the social gospel sought to prick the conscience of a complacent public by speaking on behalf of those who bore the burden of unrestrained capitalism,” but because its proponents and adherents were almost exclusively members of the middle class, “their viewpoint reflected their identification with that class,” and “they remained wedded to basic elements of industrial capitalism.”18 While it is certainly true that middle class and elite reformers reflected their social position in their reform goals and strategies and did not seek to dismantle the capitalist economy, it is also true that these early efforts can be viewed as nascent criticisms of capitalism’s negative effects. Hodges’ denunciations of the overworking of employees, low wages, and bad housing were laid on the shoulders of industrialists, employers, and wealthy property owners—the very people sitting in his pews. Further, even his strident outrage over the “vice capitalists” could be seen as the beginnings of a critique of a capitalist mindset. It is not a large step from Hodges’ basic criticism of prostitution and saloon networks, that it was their “business” that ruined men and women “because there is money in it,” to a broader criticism of businesses that ruined men and women in other ways, also for profit. Hodges even conducted a survey of Pittsburgh businessmen in the early 1890s, asking whether business practice “forced businessmen to sin,” and concluded that “business is a race. And in this race it is every man for himself—and poverty (if not the devil) take the hindmost. Probably there is more temptation today to set sin between buying and selling than ever before, on account of this fierce, unceasing, and unsparing competition.”19 Elites were too invested in the system to criticize capitalism wholesale, but it is

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significant that they did find ways to contest its more selfish motivations and onerous consequences. However, the more radical implications of such a message could be blunted in any number of ways due to the lack of clarity of the social gospel itself. The fact that the laity were given a crucial role putting into practice the teachings of the church also contributed to the mixed ideological nature of the reform approach taken by activist laity. For while the church as an institution and the minister as the representative of the church had to maintain a certain circumspection in matters of political or labor reform, the laity were under no such constraints. In fact, quite the opposite was true. “The Christian layman will help to the best of his strength in every endeavor in the church and out of it which looks to the betterment of men,” Hodges stated, and the “genuineness” of one’s Christianity was evidenced by the extent to which one became involved in politics, “the promotion of good government, in the right ruling of the city, in sanitation, in the reform of tenements, in the abolition of drunkenness, in the problem of poverty.”20 Non-partisan activism thus replaced sectarian belief at the core of Hodges’ message, and it was above all the laity who would be the “agents” and “counselors” of the church vision. 21 Hodges’ emphasis on the lay role echoed a wider Episcopalian priority. The late 1800s in Pittsburgh saw a variety of lay Episcopal organizations spring up as integral parts of the Episcopal structure. The Layman’s Missionary League formed in 1889 to help clergy in conducting services, staff mission churches throughout the city, and encourage visits by laity to “Civic Institutions…Hospitals, Asylums, Reformatories, Alms Houses, Prisons, and Homes.”22 Sisterhoods and Brotherhoods from the various parishes in the Diocese linked up with one another, and local chapters of national lay organizations such as the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and the Women’s Auxiliary formed. Episcopalian laymen in the late 1890s also created a Church Club, open to any layman in the diocese. The participatory outlets that such groups provided, along with the incorporation of laity in the ruling structures of church, gave laity a sense of their central importance. As a member of the Layman’s Missionary League noted: In our General Convention, as in most Diocesan Councils, the Laity have an equal share in initiative, discussion, and voting. The effect of this system has been to abridge, to a degree, clerical dominance, and to give somewhat extensive powers to the Laymen of the Church. A consequence of this method has been, undoubtedly, the enlisting most deeply, the sympathies, the intellectual forces, and the material talents of the Laity.23 In the wider spiritual ministries of the church, as well as in more specifically social service-oriented work, the Episcopalian laity were to have an important part. Placing such responsibility in the hands of the laity in no way assured an activist and liberal participation or direction for the church’s reform efforts. Not all Episcopalian laity, for example, desired an activist role. Many responded with apathy to the call to become involved in reform efforts. The Diocesan Social Service Commission, after its formation in 1912, made yearly pleas for a more extensive turn to a social reform stance. “The problem which confronts our Commission and this diocese,” they wrote in 1915, “is to devise some method to convince our people that…social service is indeed of paramount importance.”24 Individual churches had the same problem. Calvary church

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held a special dinner in 1910 to assess why, with an impressive physical plant outfitted for all manner of institutional ministries, the church suffered for lack of lay participation, especially male participation. One speaker estimated that out of 1,600 communicants, 900 of whom were men, only 25 men were “giving actual service” to the church and its ministries.25 Others responded with hostility. Trinity Episcopal, as the main down-town church of the diocese, faced the same problem of many city churches in this era in deciding what to do as its wealthy parishioners moved out into the suburbs and were replaced by workingclass members from the neighborhood. The rector of Trinity in this period, Alfred Arundel, a self-identified Christian Socialist, sought to structure Trinity’s ministry around the changing composition of its congregation. Beyond appealing to the workers that were filling the pews with ringing sermons against “the undue enrichment of the few and the undeserved poverty of the many,” Arundel poured the church’s resources into its institutional outreach. Trinity’s vestry, however, remained in the control of wealthy members of the congregation, many of whom, Arundel understatedly noted, showed a “lack of sympathy with my aims.” When he ignored their admonition to “stick to the gospel and leave other things alone,” the vestry in 1912 engineered a situation which ended in Arundel’s resignation. The Bishop was inclined to support the vestry, and in a letter to another bishop noted that in recent Trinity parish history “there has been in spiritual matters retrogression, and a growing dissatisfaction which Dr. Arundel tried to meet by adopting what he called Christian Socialism, which won popularity in certain directions, but was not attractive to the people who really composed the parish.”26 While it may be true, therefore, that Episcopalians as a denomination were among the first to advocate social gospel principles in national institutional bodies, and certain churches like Calvary could evidence a strong activist bent, Episcopalians at the congregational level did not necessarily or even normally reflect the same priorities. However, lay organizations could support, and sometimes even strongly urge, the social mission of the church. The Episcopalian Church Club regularly heard topics on the themes of social Christianity, and attempted at moments to encourage the bishop and clergy to give the church a larger role in social service. In January of 1902, for example, after a discussion on the “spiritual needs of the poorer classes,” the club passed a resolution stating that “Institutional and Social Settlement Work should be largely increased and more extended, and carried on in the more congested parts of this great city, and…this Club would press the matter earnestly on the attention of the Bishop and Clergy of the city.”27 Members of the Pittsburgh Diocesan Branch of the Woman’s Auxiliary, established in 1880, conducted a wide sweep of social service activities. The first discussion of the Laymens Missionary League even batted around the ideas of Christian Socialism, and also demonstrated an interest in the extension of the church’s “Institutional Work.” What “Christian Socialism” meant to these laymen is not clear. The author of this document noted only that “Christian Socialism, as distinguished from the more secular cult of that ilk, was beginning strongly to attract, and to influence, both the Clergymen and Laymen of this Church in Pittsburgh.” Jacob H.Dorn has noted the term “socialism,” when used by those attracted to the social gospel, was “susceptible of more than one meaning.” Meanings could range from merely signifying “unselfishness, or social cooperation,” to referencing the “‘scientific socialism’ of Karl Marx or its summation in the platforms of socialist parties.”28

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Even within one denomination, then, the question of what role Christians and the church should play in reform efforts was contested along multiple axes. There was no single stance taken by laity, by clergy, or by the church hierarchy. Such diversity is of course hidden if one only looks at religious affiliation as an indicator of class, or if one sees the position of the clergy as always in opposition to that of the laity. Instead, the example of Pittsburgh demonstrates that there were no fixed and absolute categories that served to explain how reform forces lined up. Wealthy Episcopalians could be staunchly conservative, studiously passive, or actively progressive toward the issue of social reform, and could form coalitions or organizations with each other and with clergy to battle with or support such reform. Anything seemed possible. And the picture became even more complicated as activist laity ranged out into the city, attempting to concretize the teachings that they heard in church in extra-ecclesial institutions. One of the first such efforts was the establishment of Pittsburgh’s first settlement house in 1894.

KINGSLEY HOUSE AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF ELITE REFORM One of the first and easiest steps for Pittsburgh’s activist, reform-oriented laity to take in engaging the problems of the city was really only a half-step from the world of the church—participation in the creation and running of a settlement house. Settlement houses had just begun to appear in other cities (Hull House in 1889, Boston’s South End House in 1891), but it quickly became clear that the settlement would serve as an ambiguous space between the church and reform efforts, between religion and social science, between an older, individualist view of the poor and a newer, environmentalist one. Lay reformers in Pittsburgh participated in the creation, financing, and running of the settlement houses. George Hodges was familiar with the settlement house movement that had just begun to spring up in Chicago, New York, and Boston, and with the work of the English settlement house movement. He had become aware of the latter through his reading in the work of Charles Kingsley, and especially through his friendship with Robert A.Woods (a former Pittsburgher), who had written English Social Movements and was the head of Andover House in Boston (later South Side House). Warming to the vision of a settlement house in Pittsburgh, Hodges “spoke with some enthusiasm of the matter” to the congregation at Calvary one Sunday evening late in 1892, immediately after which a member of the congregation gave him a check for one thousand dollars to make his vision a reality. Shortly after this Hodges invited Woods to come to Pittsburgh to talk to the “Junta Club” of Pittsburgh’s East End—“an association of thirty gentlemen, men of eminent position here in law and commercial life”—on the subject of Social Settlements.29 As Hodges later recounted, “[Woods] had the advantage, for our purposes, of knowing not only the work of the settlement but the conditions of our city, being himself a Pittsburgh boy. There was a little dinner at the Kenmawr, and a long talk following, and the project began to get underway.”30 In establishing Kingsley House, Hodges tried to make the effort a distinctly nondenominational one, one in which laity of all stripes were active. He solicited the help of Father Morgan M.Sheedy, pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic in Pittsburgh’s First Ward;

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Rev. E.R.Donehoo, a Presbyterian minister; and the Rev. Mr. St. John, minister of Pittsburgh’s First Unitarian Church. As the first head worker they chose Kate Everest, a Methodist and former economics student of Richard T.Ely. Hodges also worked to garner the support of a number of Pittsburgh’s wealthy philanthropists and businessmen. H.D.W.English of his own congregation was enthusiastic in the endeavor, and helped Hodges to win support and to find a suitable house and location for the settlement. In pursuing both an interdenominational and lay-involved project, Hodges was acting on two of his most-emphasized beliefs: that the time had arrived to weaken the denominational boundaries separating Christian churches, and that Christians, by definition, should be engaged in preserving the moral life of the city. Because churches as institutions were necessarily heavily involved in their denominational identities, ministers and laity had to melt denominational boundaries first in organizations outside of the churches themselves. The settlement house could be such an organization, one which also allowed Christians an active role in meeting the needs of the poor and disadvantaged. Such efforts mirrored national trends. Robert Wuthnow has noted that “during the latter half of the nineteenth century urban elites…increasingly found their common identity not in the churches that divided them but on the museum planning committees and arts councils that united them.” Such an arrangement allowed common identityformation among participants without hurting churches, he concluded, because “attending church reinforced a set of ‘deep’ values, that is, ones deeply interwoven with what it meant to be a person, a neighbor, and a citizen.” Values learned at church and those learned in extra-ecclesial organizations were not at odds, for “the bridges needed to make these values part of one’s public responsibilities were already in place.” Paul Boyer has also noted how in the Gilded Age moral reform efforts such as the charity organization movement “not only arose outside the church but took pains to remove itself from the church’s shadow.” In spite of the “ambivalence” that moral reformers in the 1880s and 1890s (and beyond) showed toward the church as a reform leader, however, reformers saw great untapped potential for the church; not least in the fact that “urban congregations could provide recruits whose energies, even if expressed through other institutional channels, would be crucial” to the success of moral reform efforts.31 Hodges described the two main purposes of Kingsley House in an article that appeared in 1893, before the opening of the settlement in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. The Strip was a physically descriptive name referring to the strip of flat floodplain squeezed between the sharply rising hills abutting Penn Avenue to the south and the Allegheny River to the north that was home to a smoky, noisy welter of industries; squat, soot-blackened warehouses; churches; shops; and working-class housing. Interestingly, the first purpose Hodges listed for Kingsley House amidst this environment was that of investigation or “study.” The residents of the house would move in and make friends with those living in the neighborhood, and in the course of doing so find out such things as “how many houses there are in a block, how many families there are in a house, the condition of the streets and houses from the sanitary point of view, the names and responsibilities of the owners of the property, the occupation of the residents, with their hours of work, their wages and the relation between their pay and their needs, their abundance or lack of employment, their good points and their faults.” The ultimate goal was to mark on a giant chart the character of every house, all the churches, saloons, and mills, and thereby create a “moral map of the Twelfth Ward.”32

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The second purpose was that more commonly associated with settlement houses—to be a meeting place for the neighborhood that provided such services as classes and clubs for boys and girls, cooking and mothers’ classes, a library, a playground, free movies, lectures, and slide shows. Further, the residents would “identify themselves with the interests of the district. They will be immensely interested in all phases of politics which affect the welfare of the ward. They will be a means of mutual understanding in case of industrial discussion. They will do something towards the breaking down of the barriers that divide classes.”33 Kingsley House would try to do what a divided church was not able to do: create a unified community in an urban neighborhood that would serve to lift the life of all of its residents. The staff of Kingsley House tended to be more effective in pursuing its investigative purpose than in establishing a cross-class community. As with many of the reform efforts of this period, progress toward uniting the classes fell far short of the hopes that Hodges expressed. Although the Kingsley Association—the collection of ministers and largely elite laypeople assembled both to fund and to run Kingsley House—continued to chart the increasing numbers of “neighbors” that came to use the services of the house, participate in its clubs, and attend its events, those who used the house did so as much as possible on their own terms.34 S.J.Kleinberg has documented the attitude that Pittsburgh’s poor came to have toward Kingsley House and other philanthropic efforts of the city’s elites: they resented the ways in which such organizations attempted to modify and reform their behavior while seemingly ignoring the deeper economic causes of their situations. They ironically observed that “the same people who underpaid their workers subsidized good works among their families.”35 Those poor who attended the classes and used the services offered at Kingsley House, and those who did not, saw that these opportunities were a way to ease the consciences of the wealthy as much as a way to help the poor, and that they came with unwanted strings attached, offered often impractical and even offensive advice, and ultimately were conducted not “at the clients’ behest,” but in the interest of “social control.”36 There is much in Kingsley House’s history that confirms these impressions. Its resident workers avoided any systematic critique of the economic system which victimized Pittsburgh’s working poor, and studiously avoided taking sides in labor disputes, even to the point of not allowing unions to hold meetings in the Kingsley House building. That Henry Clay Frick—also a congregant at Calvary Episcopal—purchased the land and building for the second Kingsley House in Pittsburgh’s Hill District and financed the modifications that put in a pool and a gymnasium demonstrates that the activities and messages of Kingsley House were anything but threatening to the city’s industrialists. In fact, Pittsburgh’s industrialists enthusiastically supported the work of Kingsley House. “Lifetime Members” of the Kingsley Association included Andrew Carnegie, E.P. and R.B.Mellon (financiers and founders of Mellon Bank), Joseph Horne (founder of Horne’s Department Store), Schoenberger, Speer & Co. Iron Works, James Lockhart (son of oil baron Charles Lockhart, and vice-president of Lockhart Iron and Steel Co.), Rueben Miller (vice president of Crucible Steel), Mrs. B.F.Jones (wife of the owner of Jones and Laughlin Steel Co.), and a host of others who made the membership of Kingsley Association read like a who’s who of Pittsburgh industry, banking, and business interests.

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The Kingsley Association described its goal as the establishment of institutions such as the settlement house that would “make for the civic, social, economic, physical, mental or moral betterment” of Pittsburgh’s inhabitants, a goal that could easily slide into paternalism articulated in a language of class superiority.37 And as Pittsburgh’s poor suspected, the Kingsley Association did see that Kingsley House could serve the needs of the wealthy, not just as a means of communicating the values of thrift, cleanliness, sobriety, and hard work to the poorer classes, but as an outlet for elite philanthropic generosity. Kingsley Association Board President H.D.W.English in 1896 felt that the Head Resident, Kate Everest, was not spending enough time raising money for the support of the services of the House. “We must help the privileged as well as the unprivileged,” he noted, and urged that “Miss Everest go out more among the rich and well-to-do,” so as to give the rich a chance to do good works.38 Kingsley House and its residents were more successful at Hodges’ first stated goal— that of investigation—and while this too was conceivably conducted with the object of subjecting the poor to the controlling gaze of the upper classes, it nevertheless was more likely to end in improved conditions for them. Head residents at Kingsley House all engaged in such investigation, starting from the time in which Kate Everest deplored the “degraded” conditions of run-down housing, poor sanitation, child labor and illiteracy in the Strip District.39 Such investigation became more systematic when William H. Matthews assumed the Head Resident position in 1902, and began what one scholar called the “activist environmentalist” phase of Kingsley House in this era.40 Matthews in the early 1900s conducted a campaign to get the city to clean up the filthy alleyways and run-down tenements located in Kingsley House’s neighborhood, and used the organ of Kingsley House, the Kingsley Record, to publish photographs of the offending locations when the city government ignored his efforts. The height of the investigative role of Kingsley House residents came in 1907–1908, when the House served as the command center for the researchers of the Pittsburgh Survey, and residents aided in collecting information for that six-volume work. The next Head Resident, Charles C.Cooper, carried on the tradition and his investigations into the growth of vice in the Hill District helped to spur the creation of the Morals Efficiency Commission in 1913. While it is difficult to tie an exact effect or result to such investigations, they made arguable contributions to the stemming of child labor, the improvement of housing for the poor, the effort to provide cleaner water and cleaner streets to Pittsburgh’s citizens, and the recognition of the ways in which Pittsburgh’s industries and Pittsburgh’s wealthy were often the culprits behind such evils. Thus while its approach could be paternalistic, it was nevertheless a “constructive paternalism” that in important ways came to be identified with “the correction of environmental pathologies, social legislation, and the expansion of government welfare and service functions.”41 The early years of Kingsley House also saw a struggle over the gendered identity of the settlement. The need to masculinize the church and its ministries was often a subtle subtext of differing styles of reform chosen by male and female reformers. In this way specifically church-centered reform efforts reflected a trend apparent in broader Progressive reforms.42 Occasionally this need surfaced in an explicit manner. The Board of Directors of Kingsley House in 1896 listed among their complaints about the tenure of the first Head Resident, Kate Everest, that the programs of the House had not attracted enough men, and that the boys who came could not be controlled. And after five more

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years under the next Head Resident, Mary Lippincott, Kingsley Association Board President H.D.W.English declared that “work among men” had been “grievously small,” and that the Board desired a man in charge of Kingsley House who could start men’s clubs to encourage the “uplifting and improvement of unprivileged workingmen.”43 Lippincott, refusing to resign as asked by the Board, was summarily replaced by William H.Matthews. This trend continued. In contrast to settlements such as Jane Addams’s Hull House, Kingsley House came to be increasingly dominated in its administrative positions by men. Only men were chosen after 1902 for the position of Head Resident, and whereas 41 percent of the officers of Kingsley were women in 1897, this dropped to less than 4 percent by 1926. As Maurine Greenwald concluded from such statistics, “Kingsley House [unlike Hull House] did not groom women for leadership positions in social reform.”44 It would be a mistake, however, to see the experiences of women as entirely subverted by the efforts of male reformers. Even though Kingsley House did not equal Chicago’s Hull House as a training ground for female leadership, there were ways in which its women residents were able to use their experiences there to gain a wider familiarity with the city and its political processes. Settlement houses served as sites where women could interact with other talented, educated women, develop their own strategies to meet the needs of the poor, provide links to other women’s and men’s reform organizations, and furnish a forum wherein women could gain public experience that helped to launch them into more directly political activities.45 The fact that in its first thirty years there were eight to ten permanent residents, and close to one hundred and ten short-term residents, 75 percent of whom “were women coming from fashionable colleges such as Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and the Pennsylvania College for Women” who used Kingsley House “as a stepping stone for their own professional growth” suggests that women were able to use their Kingsley House experiences in beneficial ways.46 Also, Peggy Pascoe has recently shown that the Western rescue homes, founded by female Protestant missionaries, could serve as a haven for women from male violence, and were predicated on the goal of establishing “the moral authority of women vis-à-vis men” that allowed for significant bonds to develop between rescue home matrons and their residents that set them against the mores of a male-dominated society.47 That male reformers such as English felt threatened because the work of Kingsley House was too female-oriented is perhaps evidence that the same sort of safe space where women of different classes could bond and set themselves against the male-dominated society were in fact forming. Reformers’ experience with Kingsley House demonstrates several important realities about Pittsburgh reform as it moved from churches into extra-ecclesial institutions. Gender issues joined with class, theological, denominational, lay/clergy, and other divisions in providing a context for the choices made by reformers in this era. Activist laity, hearing that their very Christianity depended on involving themselves in fixing the problems of the city, heard that the church itself would be less involved. Social gospel advocates such as George Hodges could be very explicit about who was at fault for the city’s problems, and what should be done to fix them, but was equally explicit that it was the laity who would be the agents giving form to these ideas. Ambiguous in their ideological and theological positioning even when spoken from the pulpit, such ideas became even more fluid and subject to even more contextualizing factors when they moved out of the church and into the hands of organizations such as the Kingsley

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Association. This organization, and its approach to reform, came naturally to reflect the ambiguities that enveloped its lay leadership. The language emanating from these efforts could at once be conservative or progressive, class biased or sincerely interested in the needs of the poor, male-dominant or female empowering. The moral reform discourse, in other words, did not necessarily gain in clarity of purpose or ideology in moving from church sanctuaries into more neutral reform sites such as the settlement house. But one could argue that it did increase in power and influence. For settlement houses served as a place where the rough, ill-fitting edges of denomination-specific reform theologies could be sanded down and glued together into a broader, more encompassing structure of discourse. Those reformers who gathered to staff the settlement and run its programs, along with those who met in boardrooms to finance it and determine its personnel and agenda, had to find a common purpose and a like way of speaking about what they were doing. In working to meld social gospel thinking, “secular” social science methods, a “constructive paternalism,” and a desire for environmental amelioration, those reformers associated with the Kingsley House effort fashioned a hybrid language which included parts of all of these approaches. In doing so, they facilitated the increasing networks of social reformers in urban settings like Pittsburgh. For this broader moral reform discourse should not be conceived of as a new and exclusive synthesis which shut out what had gone before, but rather as a linguistic roof under which ever more groups could meet and mingle. This included Pittsburgh’s churches, which always maintained an interest (how ever removed) in reforming the city.

THE CHANGING FACE OF CHURCH INVOLVEMENT: THE ALLEGHENY FEDERATION OF CHURCHES AND THE 1905 ANTI-PROSTITUTION CAMPAIGN Although often unclear about their exact role in reform efforts, Pittsburgh’s churches were not ready to cede all moral reform action to laity. Throughout this early reform period there would be events which the churches perceived as being of significant moral import, and around which they would coalesce, organize, and project their views into the public sphere. One such event took place in 1905, when the Allegheny Federation of Churches organized to combat the vice trade. Although the issue was one that had long provoked Pittsburgh churches to action, church strategy in this case evolved in ways which outlined an important new role for activist laity. The resulting strategies pursued by the Federation provided a model for churches on how to spearhead a reform movement and yet claim a certain distance from the movement’s actions by having affiliated lay organizations finance the operation and serve as its political arm. This antiprostitution movement, conducted in the year before mayoral elections for the cities of Allegheny and Pittsburgh, also served to buttress and advance a major theme in the moral reform discourse, and to draw attention to the significance of that discourse for the upcoming elections. Not only did Allegheny officials allow prostitution to flourish, the Federation charged, but city officials directly profited from the trade. Graft and vice were thus linked ever more firmly to the machine government. Concern over temperance issues led a coalition of Allegheny ministers into a foray against the political machine in Pittsburgh’s sister city in 1905 and 1906. The Anti-

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Saloon League of Allegheny County had been conducting investigations into Allegheny saloons, resorts, and disorderly houses, gathering evidence to use in the upcoming License Court cases. This was habitual practice for the ASL. Laws on the books stated that it was illegal to sell liquor to speakeasies or bawdy houses, and thus the ASL could get many licenses refused by the court to retailers who did business in these places. Likewise, the ASL would ask the court to refuse petitions for licenses which had aldermen, police magistrates, attorneys, or public officials as sureties, for such was “not only unseemly and improper on the part of a public official,” but was “bound to weaken and handicap the administration of the liquor laws.” The ASL had several petitions during every License Court denied on these grounds.48 In the course of gathering evidence for the 1905 License Court battles, the ASL uncovered disturbing evidence that Allegheny’s disorderly houses, beyond serving alcohol illegally, were being politically protected by Allegheny’s machine government. In going after one particular wholesale liquor dealer, investigators discovered that the dealer was widely known as the “official bottler” for Allegheny disorderly houses, because he was the only person allowed by the machine to distribute alcohol there. “It was evident that he paid city officials for the right to sell to these people…[and] for the money paid to these officials he was protected against all competition,” investigators concluded.49 A coalition of businessmen known as the “Vigilance Committee” formed— “partly for political reasons”—and seizing on this evidence financed more intensive investigations. The coalition was led by Dr. S.S.Woodburn, who had been defeated in the last election for mayor of Allegheny by the machine candidate, James G.Wyman. Investigation was followed quickly by successive prosecutions of Allegheny city officials for their role in protecting or profiting from the city’s vice trade. Superintendent of the Allegheny Police Bureau Melvin Campbell was found guilty of extortion, having received a diamond and money from a well-known Allegheny madam.50 Street Commissioner Charles Striepeke was found guilty of “acting as the agent between the disorderly houses and the head of the Department of Public Safety,”51 and an alderman was convicted of receiving money for dismissing cases against protected houses.52 Apparently spurred into action by these convictions and by widespread accusations of graft centered in his department, the Director of the Department of Public Safety, Thomas Scandrett, initiated a sweeping anti-vice directive for Allegheny, ordering “all keepers of disorderly houses, gambling rooms and places where liquor [was] sold illegally that they must cease business, close up and remain closed.”53 He also resolved to uncover and expose the real estate owners who handled the properties given over to such use. Unfortunately for Director Scandrett, however, the hardship imposed by his directive provoked several members of Allegheny’s shadowy underworld to come forward with allegations against Scandrett himself, and within a month he and six more members of the Allegheny Police Bureau were brought before the court. Meanwhile, the Scandrett directive began to unravel, and establishments in the Allegheny tenderloin slowly started to defy the ban. Sue Williams, who ran a house in W.Robinson Street, opened it again stating that “I paid $100 for the privilege of conducting this place, and until that money is returned I will consider that my privilege still stands.”54 The extent of corruption in the Allegheny city administration—along with the fact that the graft was coming directly from the vice trade—outraged a much wider group of citizens than just the businessman’s coalition initiating the prosecutions. That coalition,

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in fact, dissolved rather quickly for reasons that remain unclear. But almost immediately an organization formed to take over leadership of the anti-graft and anti-vice movement. On March 21, 1905, 50 ministers and laymen from a wide range of denominations convened in the chapel of the Allegheny Theological Seminary and established the Federation of Allegheny Churches. Declaring Allegheny to be a “veritable Sodom for the vile,” the Federation stated that its object would be “to promote the moral, social and political progress of the city.”55 More specifically, they intended to shut down “dens of vice” and “prosecute cases of graft.”56 As an early Federation publication noted: It is a sad commentary on our civic spirit that Allegheny, the city of churches, with its thousands of Christian voters, should have more than 200 disorderly houses and numerous speakeasies and gambling houses, all under police protection. These dens of vice and crime are allowed to flourish because they yield a large revenue to some of the city officials. The extent to which this graft has been carried on is astonishing.57 At the first scheduled meeting of the Federation, members heard speeches detailing the extent of known information about graft in Allegheny. Although one layman, attorney Harvey Henderson, criticized the churches for their past negligence of the social evil, calling them “passive,” and finding their lack of effort “unaccountable,” the churches quickly sought to make up for their inaction. They planned for the formation of auxiliaries to the Federation in each of Alleghenys churches, worked with the “Vigilance Committee” to plan a mass protest meeting for the following month, and stirred up public sentiment by distributing circulars and drafting announcements to be read from Northside pulpits. That a coalition of churches historically hesitant to enter into the nitty-gritty of political reform would come so prominently into the leadership of such a reform movement was surprising. But the actions of the Federation pushed the political involvement of the churches in the struggle against the machine even further. The Executive Committee of the Federation realized from the start that some level of political involvement would be necessary, for until “good men” were elected to office the clean-up of Allegheny’s vice could never be permanent. As noted in a circular read from all Northside pulpits in May, the Federation believed that “the final responsibility” for having grafting politicians running the city “is upon the voters who put men in office.” One of their immediate goals thus became to form a “compact body of several thousand voters” committed to voting only for those candidates who supported Federation policies, and who would eschew party identification at the local level in order to create a “balance of power” in favor of good candidates in either party. This they sought to accomplish by expanding membership in the Executive Committee to include a representative from each Northside church, and through the formation of auxiliary committees in each congregation. They printed and distributed to Allegheny churches a booklet with the constitution of the Federation on the front page, which contained lines for signatures, addresses, and wards of those who would agree to “rise above party lines in municipal affairs…and vote according to their moral convictions.” Auxiliaries were formed in about thirty congregations, the largest being the Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation.58 The Federation also sought to stir up public sentiment against the machine government

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by holding a mass protest meeting at the end of May, 1905, which some 2,500 people attended. The coalition of churches realized that they would need help from the laity. Thus the Federation appointed a committee of twenty-five citizens (later growing to 250), which helped them both to raise the money needed to finance their projects, and to serve as a negotiating buffer with the political world. This citizen’s committee “became a great factor in meeting political conditions,” as when representatives of the Federation met with machine political leadership in order to agree upon a candidate for mayor that the Federation could endorse. Not able to agree upon a “man whom the moral people could follow,” the Federation took another surprising step: they formed their own political party. Actually, they encouraged the citizen’s coalition to do so, since as a church organization they felt it inappropriate for the churches represented to be the acting agent in such a venture. Nevertheless, the party, named the “Good Government” party, was inaugurated in the chapel of the United Presbyterian Seminary on January 5, 1906, and maintained close ties to the leadership of the Federation. George B.Logan, head of Pittsburgh’s oldest hardware company and elder in the Presbyterian Church, was selected as the party’s candidate for mayor. The Federation instructed voters in Allegheny that the mayoral campaign was “a fight of the churches and the better, law-abiding classes against protected vice and civic corruption.”59 Churchwomen got involved in the campaign. Modeling an organization based on their church and benevolent work, women working for the election of Logan took as their motto “For Home and Purity,” and canvassed the city ward by ward, stumping for votes. “The whole force of good womanhood” was “given to the movement.”60 Logan was ultimately defeated, but the work of the Allegheny Federation was just the opening volley in what would soon become a major battle with the forces of the machine government. The history of the Allegheny Federation is thus significant for several reasons. First, it provided an early model both of guiding themes and of strategies of reform that were to become an almost standard course of procedure for Pittsburgh reformers, especially for later church organizations interested in reform. The discovery that “vice corrupts politics,” to paraphrase Richard McCormick, drove the Allegheny Federation (although its lay associates might have had more purely political motives), and the AFC moved to eliminate vice by eliminating graft. It built on and extended a strategy developed by the Anti-Saloon League, which also hired private detectives to procure evidence against individuals and organizations. But the AFC innovated with the publication of issues through mass meetings, the use of the media, and announcements read from church pulpits; high-profile prosecution of involved public officials; and the formation of “shadow groups” of laity (often prominent businessmen in the church) which would serve as the financial and political arm of the group. We thus see the beginnings of a strategy used by churches which wanted to influence moral issues in the city while being able to claim non-involvement in the trenches of day-to-day political conflict. In the case of the Allegheny Federation, they allied themselves with a committee of laity who helped them to negotiate their demands with the city government, who provided financial backing for the ongoing investigations, and who eventually helped them front a reform candidate for mayor. The Federation went farther than religious organizations in the recent past by actually participating in the formation of a political party and the backing of a specific

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candidate. They thus provided both the exposure and the intellectual and moral framing of an issue that was to have explosive consequences in Pittsburgh a few years later. Second, the involvement of the Federation demonstrates the extent to which churches in the Pittsburgh area were linked into and contributed to the discourse of the reform network. No one thought it strange that a group of ministers would form such an organization, would demand a hearing from secular political forces, and would effect change. Churches and clergymen, clearly, were used to, and even expected to, comment on issues of public morality such as prostitution. Such issues were within the purview of the churches. What is interesting is that a traditional issue of public morality— prostitution—was rhetorically linked by the church forces to the operations of the machine government. Even churches not explicitly advocating a social gospel stance were coming to view the institution of the machine government, and not individual moral failing, as the root of Pittsburgh’s social evil.

CONCLUSIONS It is clear that laity would play a vital role in Pittsburgh’s reform efforts. They became “agents” of the social teachings of the church, both because they believed it was their Christian duty to do so, and because churches as institutions were restrained from a level of involvement that was necessary for the reform agenda to succeed. As agents, activist laity were more than mere carriers of the words of ministers into the reform world outside of the church, although many of these words did travel with them. Already attuned to judge the workings of the machine government in moral terms, lay reformers strengthened and deepened the moral denunciation of the machine, and carried the views and priorities of the moral discourse into extra-ecclesial institutions. As activist laity found reform roles in purity campaigns, in settlement houses, or in other civic reform organizations, they also found one another, and began to build the foundations of what would become an extensive network of reform groups in Pittsburgh. It was also becoming clear that in their role as agents of the church’s social teachings, activist laity would have an enormous influence on the shape and character of reform efforts. They would finance and provide membership for reform organizations, would administer and direct them, and would be the explicit actors in the political and economic realm. In doing so, they would bring their own predilections and biases, their class, gender and professional identities, to bear on their tasks. Such abstractions as the “social gospel” thus became concrete only by going through several stages of interpretation, and only after being filtered through the worldviews of both ministers and activist laity. Robert Wuthnow has written of the ways that private belief of congregants interacts with “public faith” as articulated in ministers’ sermons. The simple model wherein the pastor preaches on a topic and his words convince his congregants, who then support the church with their offerings, describes a “cozy relationship” that “seldom exists so neatly in practice.” “Most congregations,” he concludes, “hide an enormous range of private religious views.”61 The ideas of social Christianity undoubtedly worked in a similar way. Individual laity may or may not have become involved with reform efforts because of the teachings of social Christianity, but it was these laity who nevertheless were in the position, for various reasons, of being the

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ones who gave solid form to such teachings. Not surprisingly, the results were always local, reflective of the clergy and laity who, through their actions, interpreted them.

Chapter Three Pittsburgh Reformers and the Search for Moral Government George Guthrie, elected mayor of Pittsburgh in 1906 on a reform, anti-machine platform, spent his adult life battling the machine government. Guthrie came from an elite Pittsburgh family with a political tradition—both his father and his maternal grandfather had been mayors of Pittsburgh.1 Guthrie graduated from Western University of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh) and went on to a successful career as an attorney in the firm of Kerr & Guthrie. But his heart and soul were in reform politics. In 1896, a mass meeting held to protest the power of the Magee-Flinn machine led to the formation of the Citizens’ Municipal League, which chose Oliver McClintock as its president and Guthrie as its candidate for mayor in that year’s election. The Citizens’ Municipal League opposed the system in which “a few appointed leaders…have assumed as overseers the control of both city and state legislation, the election and appointment of all officials and employees, the grants of franchise and awards of public contracts, and have turned the current of pecuniary and political…to their own interest.” The Citizens’ Municipal League was one of many municipal reform organizations arising in American cities in the 1890s, and became quickly linked to the National Municipal League (NML), which had formed at the end of 1894 and had its first annual meeting in May of 1895. George Guthrie would serve as the Citizens’ Municipal League delegate to the following year’s national meeting of the NML, and two years later both Guthrie and McClintock were serving on the NML’s executive committee.2 Although he lost in a close race that he claims was tainted by voter fraud, Guthrie’s zeal continued for the passage of civil service laws and the ascendancy of non-partisan, honest, and independent local government. He was an early and active member of the Voters’ League in Pittsburgh, was an executive council member of the National Municipal League and a frequent speaker at their conferences, belonged to the Civil Service Reform Association, and was prominent in Democratic Party politics.3 Guthrie was also a vestryman and loyal member of Calvary Episcopal Church, had been an active parishioner during George Hodges’ tenure, and was a preeminent example of the “Calvary Crowd” who moved out from the church into the city, battling for political influence and municipal reform. Guthrie in this sense represents well the trend of reform in Pittsburgh in these years: out of the church and into the world. Although not all reform impulses had been located exclusively within the church world in 1890s Pittsburgh, much of the reform energy certainly had. In the years from 1895 to 1912, however, reform in Pittsburgh would be dominated by civic reform organizations and non-partisan political organizations,4 and it was these organizations which would collectively become the primary site of societal debate. In the 1890s Calvary Episcopal Church could legitimately be called the “linchpin” of Progressive reform in Pittsburgh;5

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in the first decade of the twentieth century the Voters’ League, the Civic Club, and the reform administration of George Guthrie assumed this mantle. Because the dominance of the local political machine had “virtually eliminated” party politics, debate which had historically occurred between the parties over societal needs and priorities necessarily had to move elsewhere.6 Forming outside the boundaries of political parties meant that these organizations were usually non-partisan and were not geographically restricted in their interests and plans to a particular ward or neighborhood. In Pittsburgh, it was in this network of reform organizations and their literature; in their agendas, meetings, and speeches, that one finds the “Social Question” and the “Labor Question” being addressed, effectively making this loose network a “public reform sphere.”7 What purpose was politics to serve? Was local government meeting the needs of the people? What relation should the local government have to the maintenance of a moral city? What were the effects, good and bad, of rapid industrialization on society? What could be done to help Pittsburgh’s poor? How should the conflict between industry and labor be mediated? The fact that reform energy and initiative shifted into secular reform organizations in this period in no way implied that the churches and ministers of the city had lost all say in the shaping of Pittsburgh reform or that reform itself took on a purely secular cast. Churches maintained a strong and vital link to the reform network through their laity, who not only supplied some of the most active leadership in secular organizations, but who also came to fashion the dominant theme and tone of the reform discourse. Although interested in different facets of the social and labor questions, groups such as the Voters’ League, the Civic Club, the Pittsburgh Civic Commission, and others articulated a common discourse about the problems of Pittsburgh and their solutions. In seeking to find a trope adequate to describe their hopes for society, government, and the physical environment of the city, reformers often expressed themselves in the themes of the moral discourse which had germinated in Pittsburgh’s churches in the 1890s. As activist laity ranged out from Pittsburgh churches and synagogues and into civic reform organizations, they provided the reform movement with a rich and resonant vocabulary of moral vision. Hearkening back to ideas long heard in socially concerned Episcopalian, Unitarian, and Presbyterian churches, activist reformers rhetorically portrayed the problems of Pittsburgh as founded in the corruption of the machine government. Such speech could refer to the corruption inherent in running the machine, or to its links with other morally debilitating institutions of society—saloons, gambling dens, and disorderly houses. In this way, secular-led reform shared more with earlier church-centered efforts than a common object of reform furor and a way of speaking about Pittsburgh’s problems. They also combined “coercive,” “environmentalist,” and other approaches, pursuing reforms that ranged along a spectrum from anti-prostitution and undermining governmental corruption to building playgrounds and cleaning up the city.8 That secular-led and church-led reform were closely linked—rhetorically by shared vocabulary and personally by activist laity—had crucial consequences, not only for the direction that political and social reform would take in Pittsburgh, but also for how the city’s churches would envision their role in the process. George Guthrie, in his capacity as mayor, frequently employed the cadences of this discourse, no more so than when he spoke to the gathered members of the National Municipal League, who met in Pittsburgh at the end of 1908. He asked this group of

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reformers (which included the directors of the Pittsburgh Survey) what city government meant to them, and stressed the ways in which a city government affected “the moral life and the physical life” of the people. City government needed to be characterized by intelligence, honesty, and a “strong moral purpose,” Guthrie noted. Without the latter, government would debase and ruin its people, threatening city and nation alike; with it, “the people will rise to meet their responsibilities.” So that his audience would not miss his point, Guthrie used the word “moral” seventeen times. Guthrie concluded by tallying what a moral government would accomplish if the people would “meet their responsibilities”: “our cities will be safe from preventable diseases, will be safe from violence and disorder, will be safe from all those pernicious influences that tend to debase the moral standard or the physical growth of the people, and we shall have a people able to rule this nation….”9 Through Guthrie, and through his counterparts active in the Civic Club, the Voters’ League, Pittsburgh’s Civic Commission, the Chamber of Commerce, and other organizations, Pittsburgh’s activist laity in this era brought the moral discourse to prominent fruition.

A CITY ASHAMED: LINCOLN STEFFENS RAKES PITTSBURGH’S MUCK In 1903 Pittsburgh made muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffens’ top-seven list, joining the infamous likes of New York, Chicago, and St. Louis as “a city ashamed.” The fact that Pittsburghers felt shame over their city is what made it distinct: according to Steffens, the city knew of its corruption and had tried to eliminate it, but had failed.10 Steffens leveled damaging charges against the city and its government: that Pittsburgh was rife with “both police and financial corruption”; that boss Chris Magee’s idea was to “own” city council; and that Pittsburgh’s businesses, corporations, railroads, and banks were implicated in machine rule.11 Graft flowed to the machine through the granting of franchises and public contracts, through the deposit of public monies, and through the vice trade. The latter, Steffens asserted, was not “blackmail,” as it was in other cities, but a “legitimate business, conducted, not by the police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates” which netted the machine a reputed quarter million dollars a year.12 Organized on a ward basis, this syndicate designated “official” real estate agents, beer distributors, clothiers, and furniture dealers to supply the disorderly houses at “monopoly prices,” the profits enriching machine loyalists and filling its war chest.13 These charges, as we have seen, were not entirely new. George Hodges, as well as the United Presbyterian ministers in their 1892 anti-vice campaign, had asserted that prostitution was protected by the city because it was profitable. But there were “good men” in Pittsburgh, Steffens noted, who were incensed at conditions in their city, and had effectively challenged machine rule. One such focusing point of outrage over machine practices came in 1901 with the so-called “Ripper Bill” controversy. William Flinn in that year instructed machine followers in City Council to dismiss Edward M. Bigelow, the Director of Public Works, because Bigelow had sought to make bidding competitive on the public contract for the building of Pittsburgh’s water filtration. This meant that Flinn’s contracting business, long the automatic choice by the Magee-Flinn machine for the city’s construction needs, would now be competing with a

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host of other companies. Bigelow did not take his dismissal lying down, however. His millionaire brother, attorney Thomas W.Bigelow, sought the counsel of Matthew Quay, the undisputed head of the state Republican machine. Quay had been watchful of the politically ambitious Chris Magee of Pittsburgh for some time, and the two had sparred politically over earlier state Republican controversies. Quay used this opportune moment to try to leverage some political discipline in Allegheny County, and to cut the power of the Magee-Flinn reign. As Scranton was just then joining Pittsburgh and Allegheny as “cities of the second class,” it meant that the state legislature was considering necessary changes in these cities’ charters. Quay pushed legislation which altered their charters in March of 1901 such that the mayoral system was abolished in all three cities, and the Governor of Pennsylvania, William Stone, was to appoint “recorders” to serve in their stead. The bill also gave the governor, a Quay supporter, the power to remove (or to “rip out,” hence the name of the controversy) any of these recorders at his pleasure for a period of two years, until elections for the position took place. This Governor Stone promptly did, ripping out Pittsburgh’s mayor, William Diehl (a Magee man) and replacing him with Recorder A.M.Brown. Brown removed many of the Magee-Flinn loyalists in the city administration, although less as a partisan move in support of Quay then as an attempt to fill these positions according to merit and skill. The Magee-Flinn forces doubled their efforts to influence Governor Stone. Apparently they succeeded, for Stone removed Brown after less than a year in office, and replaced him with the former Director of Public Safety and leader in the Magee city administration, J.O.Brown. Stone sought to convince the skeptical otherwise, writing at the bottom of his order to install Brown: “P.S.: I was not bribed.”14 It is less important to understand the ins and outs of this political wrangling than the galvanizing effect it had on Pittsburgh’s reformers and citizens. As George Guthrie reported to the annual meeting of the National Municipal League at the Boston Conference for Good City Government in 1902, “it is impossible to give adequate expression to the disappointment and indignation of the people of Pittsburgh.”15 This indignation was founded in disgust at the power of the machine to remove a good man from office, the apparent collusion that the Allegheny County machine of Magee and Flinn had reached with the state machine of Matthew Quay, and the fact that the power of self-government had been taken away from the city of Pittsburgh for nearly two years.16 In December of 1901, Thomas Bigelow, with the support of reformers and the city’s Democrats, formed a breakaway “Citizens’ Party” in order to challenge Magee-Flinn rule. Reformers, allying themselves with the Citizens’ Party, set out in the 1902 elections to cut into the strength of the machine. The city’s voters responded, and the Citizens’ Party elected their candidate for City Controller, secured a large majority in the Common council, and won fourteen out of nineteen contests for the Select Council, with 90 percent of eligible voters casting their ballots.17 Guthrie, McClintock, and other representatives from the city to the National Municipal League hailed this election as “The Pittsburg Victory.”18 The sweetness of this “victory” was undercut, however, by the fact that Thomas Bigelow began to act very much like a political boss himself, pushing aside the concerns of the reformers who had helped to get Citizens’ Party candidates elected. As Steffens concluded, Pittsburgh reformers had “risen against their ring and beaten it, only to look about and find another ring around them.”19

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It is difficult to assess Steffens’ impact. As he stated at the beginning of his Pittsburgh article, his purpose was not the “exposure of corruption,” but rather the “exposition of what the people know and stand.”20 He gathered his information by talking to Pittsburghers and thus his article must be considered a summation of what reformers in Pittsburgh already knew. There is, of course, something provocative about having your municipal dirty laundry aired in the national backyard, and the consciences of this Scotch-Irish Presbyterian city were finely attuned to respond to the languages of shame and redemption. Steffens’s article, however, left a lasting impression only in that it reinforced the notions that Pittsburgh reformers had come to on their own: that the machine government was the fat spider in the center of a web of graft that reached out through city council, local businesses, banks, and the vice trade to entrap the city and suck its vital moral juices. While Steffens’ article might not have provided new knowledge, however, his picture of the machine and the language he used to describe it would appear again and again in reform rhetoric. Ironically, 1903–the year the Pittsburgh article was published—marked a time when the Magee-Flinn machine had declined in power, due to the disorientation caused by Magee’s death in 1901, and the subsequent local electoral victories of the Citizens’ Party. What bad ended in 1901, however, was only the complete dominance of a singular, powerful machine, an ending that nevertheless simultaneously ushered in an era of competition to gain control of the remaining factions. The machine was not so much dead as in the process of reorganization. Although Steffens gave Pittsburgh’s machine government a thorough scourging, he was ultimately hopeful that the city could take care of its problems. “Craven as it was for years, corrupted high and low,” he wrote, reformers arose, shook off the “superstition of partisanship in municipal politics” and attempted to “save the city.” This attempt, “pitiful as it [was],” nevertheless served as “a spectacle good for American self-respect.” And Steffens pointed to the groups that would lead the way to future reform: the “old fighters” like Guthrie and McClintock of the Citizens’ Municipal League and Citizens’ Party, who would gather under another flag to challenge the machine; and the “younger men” who had formed the Voters’ Civic League, “which proposes to swing from one party to another that minority of disinterested citizens which is always willing to be led, and thus raise the standard of candidates and improve the character of regular party government.”21 Steffens was correct: these newly-formed civic reform organizations in Pittsburgh had become the vital center of reform energy.

BUILDING THE REFORM NETWORK, SPREADING THE MORAL DISCOURSE: REFORM ORGANIZATIONS AS THE SITES OF SOCIETAL DEBATE Traditional sites of debate in the public sphere in this era included political parties, the press, and unions. But in the two decades surrounding the turn of the century a range of other institutions became vital to the public discourse as well: benevolent associations, civic reform organizations, political watch-dog groups, alternative political parties, church reform commissions, settlement houses, women’s societies, and others. These voluntary associations—through pamphlets, lectures, broadsides in the press, mass

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meetings, speeches, organization periodicals, and sermons—shaped in important ways the public perception of Pittsburgh’s problems and what to do about them. Societies such as the Civic Club of Allegheny County (CCAC) and the Voters’ League, two of the most influential of such reform organizations, were dominated by Pittsburgh’s elite, but neither these reformers nor their organizations were ever in a position simply to impose their will on the city. Like any other interest group, they had to enter into the public sphere and convince Pittsburgh’s citizens that their view had substance.22 Civic reform organizations became particularly important in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh for several reasons. The extremity of need in an era when there was little governmental protection against poverty meant that charitable institutions provided an essential societal function.23 The local government did have a Department of Public Charities, which was given control over the “care, management, administration and supervision” of all public charities. This department performed such functions as distributing food, clothing, and coal to the city’s poor, administering city hospitals and homes for the indigent, providing free medical treatment, and burial of indigents. However, the fact that reformers worked from the 1890s until 1907 to create an umbrella organization to coordinate the activities of the city’s charitable societies seems to indicate that this Department was perceived as ineffective or corrupt. A wide range of private organization thus arose to fill the gap.24 In a 1913 directory of the “philanthropic, charitable, and civic agencies” in Pittsburgh, Kingsley House listed 41 “hospitals, dispensaries, and sanatoriums,” 27 “general relief societies,” 16 “general relief homes,” 73 homes for men, women and children, 8 “summer fresh air homes,” 7 settlement houses, and a number of day nurseries, district nurses, public baths, civic agencies, libraries, and associations of one kind or another—almost all privately financed and run. However ad hoc and unsystematic, these organizations provided whatever safety net existed for the city’s poor and sick. As such, they developed their own perspective on the city’s ills, one which they articulated in a variety of public settings. Another reason for the proliferation of such reform organizations, as discussed in the introduction, was that the traditional ideological battle-ground of partisan politics as a viable site for societal discussion had been shut down by the dominance of the Republican machine. Citizens of Pittsburgh—elite and working class alike—felt that political discussion either centered on national party issues which were irrelevant to the city itself, or was circumvented (or meaningless) because there was no point in running candidates against the machine. Thus there was a turning away, elites to their reform organizations and labor reformers back to union work. This is not to say that these reform organizations ceded political rhetoric, political offices, and political structures to the machine. Rather, debate over societal issues occurred more importantly and vibrantly in reform organizations because of the absence of debates between the two main political parties. Reformers often did enter political contests, but more as reformers (members of “Citizens’” parties, or as non-partisan reform candidates running on main-party tickets) than as party representatives. Labor leaders in Pittsburgh and elsewhere saw an inherent danger in working too closely with the machine. Machines provided “potential access to power,” but thereby “undercut some of the reasons for alternative forms of working-class political mobilization at the same time that they dramatically raised the costs of effective alternative mobilization.”25 Pittsburgh labor leaders likewise feared that the Magee ring

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would “displace the labor movement as the principal organizer and educator of the working class,” but nevertheless found themselves becoming successful professional politicians firmly within Magee’s orbit. This transition, and the success with which labor reformers were able to integrate themselves in the “junior management” of Magee’s organization, ironically led to “bitter choices” for labor leaders wishing to foster the interests of labor. Because the Magee ring was concerned primarily with its own “machinery of power,” and because there were insurmountable constraints in translating class sentiment into long-term political power via third-party challenges, labor leaders ended by choosing between support of the “grandest of anti-monopoly coalitions” advocated by the Knights of Labor, and the “limited interest-group tactics” of trade unionism. In the face of a hostile national judiciary and the oppressive tactics of powerful industrialists, neither of the latter two options worked for Pittsburgh workers; thus their leadership found themselves increasingly absorbed into the self-justifying web of machine politics.26 As noted in the discussion of Paul Krause’s work on Homestead in the Introduction, the Pittsburgh machine exhibited limited responses to the interests of labor that ranged from benignly negligent to overtly hostile. Elite reformers, for their part, turned to philanthropy and civic reform as the most public forum for discussion of the city’s needs. The chance that labor and elite reformers might work together in battling the machine disintegrated as leading labor reformers became increasingly integrated into Magee’s organization and as elite reformers focused their early efforts in a culturally divisive Law and Order League agenda. The first league appeared in the eleventh ward of the city in 1885 when a church group hired a lawyer to prosecute the operator of a roller coaster that dared to operate on Sunday. When this tactic was successful, leagues formed in other wards to ensure that Sabbath laws and saloon regulations were enforced. Established as a city-wide organization in 1887, the League managed, through investigation of violations of liquor and Sabbath laws and the presentation of this evidence before the License Court, to reduce the number of licensed saloons in Allegheny County from 3,500 to 389. Its zeal, however, began to overpower its sense of discretion, and it became infamous for attacks especially on Catholic, working-class, non-native institutions. The League’s president, William A.Heron, resigned in protest to this agenda, and the organization’s effectiveness had dwindled by the early 1890s.27 But even without a prosecutorial zeal evidenced by the Law and Order League, chances for a cross-class reform coalition faded quickly as newly forming elite reform organizations quickly came to view the machine as the wellspring of Pittsburgh’s physical and social inadequacies. Reform organizations of a different tenor appeared in the 1890s. The Civic Club of Allegheny County grew out of the Women’s Health Protective Association in 1895, organized in part by the Twentieth Century Club, an elite women’s society group. The WHPA had existed since 1890 (claiming to be the first civic association in Pennsylvania), and had addressed a number of issues, advocating for a garbage ordinance, working for clean streets and street cars and the “abatement of the smoke nuisance,” among others. William M.Kennedy, mayor of Allegheny, noted the effectiveness of the WHPA at the National Municipal Leagues first conference in 1893. He praised the organization for the “most valuable results in the betterment of public health and comfort,” due to their “indefatigable efforts,” and hoped that men would likewise “bestir themselves” to participate in civic reform.28 The Civic Club thus became broadly concerned with issues

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of Pittsburgh’s environment. The Club’s purpose, its Constitution declared, was “to promote by education and organized non-partisan effort a higher public spirit and better social order.”29 They felt that “the ultimate solution of all public questions should depend upon ascertaining and publicizing what is the greatest good to the greatest number, which consideration, alone, is truly ‘in the public interest.’”30 Civic Club members involved themselves in efforts to bring pure water to the city, established parks and playgrounds, formed a Legal Aid Society, created a Juvenile Court, worked for anti-tuberculosis measures, provided public baths in working class districts, and were instrumental in securing legislation to ameliorate housing conditions and eliminate child labor.31 The institutional origins of the Voters’ League are recounted in an early pamphlet which records that the organization was proposed at the end of 1901 “by some people acquainted with the work of the Cleveland Municipal Association,” and after “familiarizing themselves with the methods” of this association, called a meeting on April 18,1902. The meeting was attended by “about fifty of the representative business and professional men of Allegheny and Pittsburg [sic],” who organized the Voters’ League under the original title of the Voters’ Civic League.32 Although they would later use some of the same tactics, the VL was not a revival of the Law and Order League. It is more likely that the Voters’ League was conceived of as an extension of the old Citizens’ Municipal League, which had been affiliated with the National Municipal League and had run George Guthrie as an opposition candidate for mayor in 1896. The Voters’ League was also affiliated with the National Municipal League, had George Guthrie and Oliver McClintock as members, and was perhaps formed in response to the outrage over the “ripper bill” controversy of 1901–02. In any case, the purposes of the League revolved around the promotion of “the business-like, honest and efficient conduct of the public offices within the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County,” ensuring the “choice of competent officials,” and encouraging “the faithful performance of public duties.”33 To this end they involved themselves with researching and publishing the records and stances of candidates for political office, published opinions concerning public issues such as the structure of the municipal government or the school board system, and saw themselves as a political watchdog group with the job of investigation and prosecution of wrongdoing and waste in the local government. The CCAC and the Voters’ League provided the lion’s share of reform initiative, energy, and successes in the early part of twentieth-century Pittsburgh. Both organizations were composed primarily of Pittsburgh’s elites. Samuel Hays found that of the membership of the Civic Club and the Voters’ League, sixty-five percent were listed in upper-class directories which were restricted to the upper two percent of the city’s population, and many others not listed lived in upper-class areas. John Ingham’s study of the Civic Club confirmed Hays’ findings. Some forty “iron and steel” families held memberships in the Civic Club, with sixty percent of these being pre-Civil War elite families. Membership in the Civic Club had significant numbers, therefore, of old upperclass Pittsburgh families attached to it. Although Ingham takes issue with Hays’ characterization of the membership of these clubs as a “new industrial elite” because of the connections to old upper-class Pittsburgh families, he does not dispute that it was predominantly elites of one sort or another who joined these organizations.34 In addition to being elite in terms of social standing, the Civic Club and Voters’ League membership was also professional: forty-eight percent of these organizations’ members were doctors,

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lawyers, ministers, and teachers, while the other fifty-two percent were corporate executives, bankers, or their wives. Hays argued that this class and professional identification explained, far better than the reformers’ own rhetoric, why these organizations pursued the reforms they did. They were not fundamentally concerned about the “corruption” which their rhetoric stressed, but about the governmental system which allowed “local and particularistic interests to dominate.” Both the Civic Club and the Voters’ League also lined up against the machine government. In doing so, Hays concluded, reformers were really attacking “the entire ward form of political organization and the political power of lower- and middle-income groups which lay behind it.”35 In the thirty-plus years since Hays wrote his article, a number of scholars have pointed to the weaknesses of these arguments and the assumptions which lay behind them.36 Missing from this collective scholarly rebuttal has been a specific reading of the CCAC and the Voters’ League in gendered terms. Analyzing the history of these organizations with an eye to gender demonstrates that the CCAC and the Voters’ League, as femaleand male-identified organizations, could pursue very different agendas for reform. The actions of the CCAC, for example, must be understood within the gendered context provided by the broader development of women’s reform organizations at the turn of the twentieth century. Unlike its all-male counterpart, the Civic Club in many ways fits the profile of women’s organizations that increasingly and importantly populated urban landscapes in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. A large literature has described how such organizations often constructed their reform activities in the city along the lines of “municipal housekeeping,” relying either on the historical conception of women as inherently more moral or on their socially valued experience as mothers to legitimate their notably different reform perspective and agenda. Women, according to this sanctioning perspective, had a benevolent—and crucial—role to play in a range of reform activities which included organizing and distributing charity, providing the city with bath houses and playgrounds, and advocating for the rights of women and children in the world of labor. Theirs was an “alternative version” of Progressive reform, “rooted in a distinctive women’s consciousness.”37 Paula Baker has argued that the tasks of women’s voluntary societies seeking “to bring the benefits of motherhood to the public sphere” by advocating for and securing pure food, clean streets, adequate sewage, and pleasant parks, had its roots in the nineteenthcentury development of a separate sphere for women, in which women became the guardians of society’s morals in an increasingly individualistic and competitive male capitalist world. Women were given responsibility over the “home,” but the definition of home expanded to mean “anywhere that women and children were,” and thus women reformers (with male support) took on tasks that had “domestic” applications. In the Progressive Era, women realized that the network of female voluntary societies was not adequate to such an enormous task, and “passed on to the state the work of social policy that they found increasingly unmanageable.” This process led to a “domestication of politics,” as state governments came to pass child labor legislation, and municipal governments took over responsibility for clean streets and places for children to play. William H. Chafe, drawing heavily on Baker’s article, has argued for seeing differing gender styles of reform as a way to partition Progressive reform efforts into “capital P” and “small p” Progressivism, the former predominately male and concerned with regulation of trusts, railroad laws, and “the effort to rationalize industry,” and the latter

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(in contrast) with “everything we find admirable about the Progressive Era” such as factory safety, child labor, regulation of tenements, and the building of playgrounds. Maureen Flanagan, in her study of differences between male and female middle-class reformers in Chicago, rejects the idea that these differences could be accounted for by an assumption of the moral superiority of the women. Rather, while male reformers drew their notions of a model city government from business, “women applied their experience of how the home worked to what a city government should try to achieve.”38 John Bauman and Margaret Spratt have noted that, although men were involved in the formation and membership of the Civic Club, it was the female leadership who “dominated its management and set its reform agenda” and “spearheaded urban reforms.” Further, the “wives, daughters, and widows of Pittsburgh’s business and professional elite performed most of the CCAC’s daily reform work, advancing moral issues about the environment, as well as other reforms.”39 Female CCAC club members, true to form, worked within the metaphor of “municipal housekeeping.” In the 1903 annual meeting, for example, it was decided that women alone would conduct the upcoming year’s work of the Civic Club. A local paper reporting on this meeting under the headline “Civic Club will Actively Labor for Cleaner City—Municipal Mothers to Wield the Broom and Help Make Things Shine” noted that the “city fathers of the municipal household now had better look forward to the reign of the broom wielded by the municipal mothers of this much-neglected city…the time for municipal housecleaning is at hand.”40 There is evidence that women leaders in the Civic Club were perhaps wary of their activities being constrained by the “municipal housekeeping” metaphor. Their wariness was hinted at by the characterization of Civic Club president Kate Cassat McNight, who “presided at the meeting, and with delicious humor and delicate sarcasm referred to woman’s work and the conception often put upon it by men.” She and others clearly recognized the limitations of this metaphor and its underlying assumption that women could only contribute on topics having a direct domestic implication. Two different histories of the Women’s Club of Pittsburgh reflect this tension. One author, writing in the 1950s, stressed that the Club women at the outset felt “that a strong, intelligent woman’s work should begin at home but like charity should not stay there. Women…could best safeguard and educate their children if they had a knowledge of the world.” Mrs. Harry Eakins, the Club historian in the early 1920s, took a slightly different tone: the early Women’s Club “made it their object to bring together women interested in Art, Literature and Science, for the purpose of mental culture and mutual help, and whatever tends to the advancement of women.” They encountered opposition from high society, clergy, and “goody-goodies” because “it scared them to think what would become of women who would study and talk about the history of countries, and discuss such books as ‘The Intellectual Development of Europe’…rather than make flannel petticoats for the heathen, while they talked over the doings and misdoings of their neighbors.”41 Linguistic constraints to some extent reflected even more powerful forces restraining female influence. As Maureen Flanagan concludes in her more recent book-length treatment of Chicago reform, despite the ability of female-led civic reform organizations to craft an alternative and more liberal vision of reform for the city, male-dominated political institutions were often able successfully to undercut this female vision, even after women were granted the vote.42 As we have already seen with struggles over the

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leadership of Kingsley House, female power within reform organizations was often perceived as threatening by males, who then worked to subvert true female power. However, it is also perhaps overly tempting in charting the differences between male and female visions of reform to obscure the broad goals often held in common by male and female reformers. As I have argued, the moral reform discourse was ascribed a variety of meanings, and its flexibility allowed the bringing-together of diverse strands of reform. This flexibility to some extent tempered the overt differences in male and female reform visions and allowed Pittsburgh’s men and women to work efficiently together. Whether conceiving their efforts as flowing directly from a natural interest in things of the home and family, or from an interest in the “advancement of women,” it seems that Civic Club leaders agreed that their efforts should be conducted along lines sketched out by the notion of “moral environmentalism.”43 Bauman argues that Civic Club members “believed that an efficiently managed, clean, attractive, urban environment exerted a morally uplifting influence on a city’s population.” This was in fact a perspective shared by many middle-class urban reform movements in the Progressive Era. Echoing the teachings of George Hodges and Charles St. John, Civic Club members sought to create a moral city by creating a clean and healthy city, and one with uplifting outlets for its citizens’ leisure time.44 That meetings were regularly held at the Twentieth Century Club—a leading Pittsburgh women’s club—indicates the ways in which the Civic Club was firmly linked into the network of all-women clubs, associations, societies, and church groups that had developed in the city. And through this network, women reformers often developed contacts in state and national reform organizations.45 Lucy Dorsey Iams, for example, the Civic Club’s first vice-president, came to head the Club’s Legislative Committee, and through this responsibility participated in the legislative committees of a number of state and national reform organizations, such as the Consumers’ League of Western Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Child Labor Association, the Associated Charities, and the National Housing Association. As Roy Lubove points out, her work with the issue of housing as part of the Civic Club’s Tenement House Committee led to a crucial role in the drafting of a state tenement law in 1903. Lubove concludes that Iams “became virtually the unofficial coordinator of reform legislation for Western Pennsylvania,” and rightly suggests that it was activist reform individuals like her who provided a vital “linkage between the public and private welfare sectors,” and thereby “expanded the responsibilities” of the former.46 In the same way, organizations like the Civic Club became sites for the mixture and melding of national, state, and local reform discourses. The Civic Club operated in an urban environment in which women’s clubs were increasingly turning their attention to municipal betterment. The Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh was one of the city’s oldest, established in 1875 by women involved in one way or another with the newspaper business. Their original purpose, as seen above, was broad discussion. Although there was “an unwritten law that religion and politics should be barred as subjects of debate” in order to steer clear of “the rocks upon which numberless societies and churches split and founder,” by the early 1900s the club had taken a “new departure,” and was “largely engaged in works of philanthropy and reform.”47 The club formed a “Municipal Improvement Committee” and club members came to advocate for pure milk laws, worked for child labor legislation, and heard lectures on settlement house work and tenement life.48

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The Twentieth Century Club was another women’s organization, founded in 1894. It was active in a range of civic functions similar to the Woman’s Club and the Civic Club. Its committee on children’s playgrounds coordinated the similar activities of other women’s clubs, it was responsible for the formation of the local Consumers’ League. Club members advocated for child labor legislation, educated Pittsburghers about the need for pure food and milk, sponsored public bath houses, and established libraries.49 These organizations thus became linked, not only through shared agendas and joint action, but through shared membership and similar outlook. Kate Cassat McKnight, for example, was one of the founding members of the Twentieth Century Club, and was vicepresident and then president of the Civic Club. Elizabeth Thaw also held a membership in the Civic Club (having founded the Women’s Health Protective Association with which it merged), and served as a president of the Twentieth Century Club. The Twentieth Century Club house served as the meeting place for both the Civic Club and for the Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh for some time. Although these women’s organizations would at times inevitably speak in the cultured tones of the privileged, a blanket attribution of their actions to class constitutes a problematic reduction. Anne Firor Scott, for example, has argued that particularly in women’s organizations, there is no clear evidence that these organizations were doing what they were doing in order to “assert control over the behavior of the ‘lower classes.’” Although these women certainly had a conception of class difference, their language and agenda was not predicated on this difference. As Scott concluded: Their world might be divided into the saved and the lost, the abstemious and the intemperate, the chaste and the licentious, native born and immigrants, workers and loafers, those who cared about children and those who exploited them, the worthy and the unworthy—and they did not assume that these categories were necessarily connected to class.50 To assert that the activities of these women’s organizations were most importantly driven by a social control agenda also implies that the desire for clean water, for well-paved streets free of garbage, for healthy and affordable housing, and for sanitary sewage facilities was limited to the middle classes (which it was not), and that there are no good reasons the middle class could want such things apart from a desire to control workers and immigrants. It might also be added—to return to an earlier point—that these categories were not necessarily overtly connected to gender. The Voters’ League would come into the reform spotlight in the years from 1908 to 1912, during which time they would conduct an investigation into political graft in the Pittsburgh city councils and coordinate the subsequent prosecutions of guilty councilmen, lead a campaign to change the structure of the councils, investigate and publish the connections between the machine and the vice trade in Pittsburgh, and publicly denounce those individuals and organizations fostering corruption and inefficiency in local government. Their rhetoric and agenda seemed a combination of the priorities of the National Municipal League and the Chamber of Commerce, and indeed, the VL had significant connections to both. Among those listed in the earliest record of Voters’ League members were virtually all Pittsburgh representatives who regularly attended, and took leadership roles in, the National Municipal League.51

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This agenda could have a stark, male edge to it, and much of their rhetorical appeal was to men in the community as heads of households. Antiprostitution efforts, for example, would be one of the Voters’ League’s main concerns in the coming years. A.Leo Weil was to go before the city council in 1912 to demand an answer for why houses of prostitution, identified the previous year in a Voters’ League investigation, had not been closed down. “Every man of you sitting here,” he challenged them, “would have done it if it had been your private business enterprise, if it had been your own private business, if he had any regard for the moral condition of his family estate, if it was his family estate.”52 Weil also told the Council that “civil society springs from the family, and the family rests upon the chastity of women. It is a true saying that the ethical man is formed at the knees of his mother.” He continued: The moral tone of a country is decided by its women, and their goodness, or badness, as our very language witnesses, depends chiefly upon their purity. All feminine virtues are rooted in this one virtue of chastity… The virility of a nation depends upon the modesty of its women. We have, therefore, before us a consideration than which no greater can be found.53 Weil was presenting a simple moral syllogism: the morality of a community depends upon the virtue of its women, and the virtue of its women “depends chiefly upon their purity”; therefore to have the moral community, the purity of its women must be safeguarded. Clearly, Weil saw the purity of Pittsburgh’s females as a passive thing: it could be taken from them by the “cabal” involved in running the disorderly houses, or preserved by the efforts of the all-male Voters’ League. Using the words “virility” and “morality” synonymously, and relying on the male perception of “separate spheres,” Weil implied that moral righteousness was very much tied up in manliness. While thus spurring reformers to preserve both their moral integrity and their manhood by eliminating prostitution in Pittsburgh, Weil nevertheless made the community and the nation dangerously dependent on preserving a prostitution-free city. If prostitution existed, then the community was not moral. Weil was not the only VL member to appeal to the patriarchal duties of male listeners in lining up supporters behind their anti-prostitution agenda. H.D.W.English, in a letter sent to every Pittsburgh pastor, defended the actions of the Voters’ League as an attempt “to protect the morality and integrity of our people and to get efficient government.” Its role as protector of the city’s threatened morality would be shared, apparently, with the churches, but only if the churches bestirred themselves to participate in the Voters’ League’s anti-vice campaign. “Is it not time,” English thundered, “that the religious conscience of Pittsburgh be aroused, and that all decent, moral men join hands in this effort to cleanse and reclaim our city once and for all time?”54 English here used a more traditionally male notion of “cleansing” than the domestic spin women’s reformers often used. It evoked instead a righteous prophet or angry God calling down a cleansing fire to rid a city of sin. In spite of their similarities in terms of class, therefore, the CCAC and the VL often took on widely divergent (although complementary) reform strategies, and described their actions in very different, engendered language. In spite of their different gender styles of reform, however, the Civic Club and the Voters’ League could pursue the same objectives, and often did so under the umbrella of

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the moral reform discourse. In a speech in support of a small city council, for example, VL president A.Leo Weil would note in 1911 that In an atmosphere of corruption—in an atmosphere of vice, where those occupying the place said to be honored, as the representatives of the people, are associated with and are in partnership with and share in the profits of, the vice of the community, it is impossible that the moral tone of that community should not be so lowered as to affect every phase of the city’s life—political, business, and social.55 Seeing the corruption of the machine ruining the business prospects of the city, making its politics inefficient, and lowering the moral tone so that all of Pittsburgh’s citizens were hurt was an argument residing in the shared rhetorical space of the National Municipal League, the Chamber of Commerce, and the activist lay reformers in the Voters’ League. It also fit within the rhetorical framework of the “moral environmentalism” ascribed to the women-dominated Civic Club. That the Voters’ League came to advocate similar reforms in similar language as the Civic Club is a result of the close connections between the two organizations, and of the flexibility of the moral discourse. Close connections resulted from shared functions and from shared membership. One of the VL’s primary functions, for example, was the publication of positions by candidates for public office, a task originally taken on by the Civic Club. More importantly, the two had a significant shared membership. Fully one-third of those listed as members in the Voters’ League in 1902 (the year it formed) were either members of the Civic Club, or were connected through the membership of their wives. Overlapping membership helped to shape the Civic Club reform agenda. The Municipal Affairs Committee of the Civic Club, for example, was long chaired by Oliver McClintock, who infused the Committee (and through the Committee the Civic Club itself) with an outlook common to the mostly-male National Municipal League. One of the main tenets of the committee was the need to eliminate the structures that supported the machine government, and thus the Civic Club lined up behind the Chamber of Commerce and the all-male Voters’ League in its anti-machine programs.56 One significant reform jointly pursued was the alteration of the ward-based school board system in 1911. In that year the Federation of Women’s Clubs, with the Civic Club playing a crucial role, led a campaign for better schools, moving to abolish the city’s sixty-one ward-based school districts, replacing them with a single city district “organized on modern business and educational lines.”57 The Voters’ League, in their own style, helped to promote the elimination of ward-based school districts, publishing a pamphlet accusing this system of fostering “graft, extravagance, and waste,” and making the claim, based on their own investigations, that “much of the school funds [were] lost and stolen.”58 Another jointly pursued reform was the formation of an Associated Charities in 1908. Beginning with the vision of George Hodges, reformers had long worked to establish an organization which would organize and coordinate the evergrowing number of private and public charities, hospitals, and benevolent societies, and thereby regularize philanthropic giving. This reform had then been continued by a committee of the Civic Club, headed by Oliver McClintock.59 Despite periodic attempts

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to create such an institution, however, it was only in 1908, spurred on by the leaders who had come the year before to survey social conditions in Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Survey, and under the leadership of the Civic Club, that the Associated Charities got off the ground. It served as a clearinghouse for the city’s philanthropic and charitable institutions, coordinating their activities and giving. It would investigate applications for relief and refer applicants to the most appropriate charity, help to find work for those who were able to work, repressed public begging, and helped “to promote the general welfare of the city by social and sanitary reforms.”60 In both the school board reform and the drive for organized philanthropy, the Civic Club and Voters’ League pursued reforms coded “female” (schools/children and charitable giving) for “male” reasons (efficiency, systemization, centralization of power)—all within the flexible discourse of “moral environmentalism.” In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars have identified the shared Voters’ League and Civic Club agenda of environmental amelioration as a function of its elite make-up, and as a tool for moral control. John Bauman, for example, argued that the CCAC “reflected the municipal and environmental reform proclivities of its upper-class constituency.” But their view of what reforms were needed in Pittsburgh, as we have seen, went beyond cleaning up the environment. Like the Voters’ League, they too became involved in efforts to curb prostitution, and to curb the power of the machine government. All the more then, these same scholars might argue, were these elite reform organizations using moral arguments to achieve control over the work, leisure, and home life of the city’s workers. Considering the source of reform rhetoric, emanating at it did from organizations dominated by Pittsburgh’s elite, one might dismiss the moral themes struck time and again as so much window dressing designed to freshen up the old structure of elite dominance. Beyond the prevalence of such rhetoric in both male and female reform organizations, however, there are other reasons for taking elite articulations of the moral reform discourse seriously. Many (if not most) of the reform leaders in these organizations in fact belonged to churches or synagogues with an active interest in applying faith to social service. While a committed presence in a socially active church certainly did not determine reform involvement, it makes these reformers’ use of moral language in describing reform objectives more understandable and more plausible. Calvary Episcopal Church was first among these reform-oriented churches. George Hodges established a tradition of social involvement, one followed by Rector James H.McIlvaine, who served as a member of the Civic Club, a trustee of the Associated Charities, and a committee member of the soon-to-be-formed Pittsburgh Civic Commission. From Calvary Church came an impressive array of reformers: George Guthrie, H.D.W.English, attorney Edwin Z.Smith, manufacturer Reuben Miller, and many more. Among laity at Calvary there were ten members of the Voters’ League (nearly 20% of the original membership) and nine in the Civic Club.61 These men were not only leaders in the VL and CCAC (English was a vice-president in the Voters’ League and president of the Chamber of Commerce; Smith served as a president of the Civic Club and treasurer of the Voters’ League), but were active church members as well. English was a senior warden, President of the national Brotherhood of St. Andrew, and led a Sunday school class; Guthrie, Smith, and Miller served as vestrymen; and all four were members of the Church Club of the Pittsburgh Diocese. This level of service indicates that these men were not just pew

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holders and occasional congregants at Calvary, but actively participated in the church’s life. Although no other church approaches Calvary for the level of involvement by its clergy and laity, several other congregations did contain concentrations of reform leaders. One of these was First Unitarian. The Rev. Charles St. John, minister from 1891–1900, was active in the formation of the Civic Club, and First Unitarian had six laity also involved in the Civic Club.62 First Baptist Church had a series of social-gospel ministers, beginning with Rev. Lemuel C. Barnes, a member of the Voters’ League, and including the Reverends Warren G.Partridge and Frederick T.Galpin. Activist laity at First Baptist included five Civic Club members, one who served as president of the CCAC from 1897 to 1899, another as chair of the Educational Department from 1896 to 1901, and a third as the chair of the Department of Government. All three were active members in the church.63 Shadyside Presbyterian had at least three Voters’ League members, and two with connections to the Civic Club. Christ Methodist Episcopal had members in Voters’ League, Civic Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and other reform organizations. Rodef Shalom Temple was home to reform Rabbi J.Leonard Levy and Voters’ League president A.Leo Weil. And there were many other churches whose laity came to participate in important ways in the city’s secular reform organizations. This list is not intended to suggest a necessary causative link between membership in a church where there was a social gospel minister or other congregants involved in civic reform, and participation in a civic reform organization. There were examples within these churches both of laity who heard pastoral calls to social involvement and did not act on them and laity who heard only traditional Christian messages but became involved anyway. Nevertheless, we must give credence to the possibility that the use of moral language to describe the city’s problems was not a smoke screen and a smooth-sounding legitimation of policies pursued for other, less lofty goals, but could very likely and logically have come out of such socially involved churches. Not all Pittsburghers, and not all reformers, used a moral discourse to describe the city’s problems, which indicates that the use of such language was chosen and deliberate. Activist laity who gave credit for their social involvement to their churches or their religious belief were numerous enough that we should consider the moral discourse that they used to be descriptive of how they really viewed things, or at least an important part of their perspective. Further, that a significant contingent of the reform leadership may be traced back to churches in which they were active members provides further explanation as to how the moral discourse was spread and deepened. Hearing presentations on “good government” in their Sunday school classes only reinforced existing public discourse on the need for moral government. Beyond the arguments presented by the moral discourse for a desired form of government or the need for a sanitary environment, then, the very linguistic overlapping of proposed reforms in both church and civic reform organization only cemented the hegemony of this discourse.

GEORGE GUTHRIE AND THE DRIVE FOR MORAL GOVERNMENT

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George Guthrie wished to make Pittsburgh’s government a moral government. A prominent member of Calvary Episcopal Church, parishioner and vestryman during the rectorship of George Hodges, and long influential in the social service efforts of Calvary such as the Kingsley Settlement House, Guthrie echoed Hodges’ teaching that it was the duty of Christians to become involved in the affairs of the city. “As the Christian owes his duty to God,” Guthrie said in a speech before laymen at Calvary, “no less does he owe his duty to the government and the community in which he lives. He cannot be false to one without being false to the other.”64 This duty lay in the moral centrality that Guthrie gave to the city and its government. “Our government, made up of moral communities, is a moral government,” Guthrie concluded. As he told the assembled members of the National Municipal League, which held its annual conference in Pittsburgh in 1908, “We are moral agents. Our city, which is but the aggregate of a number of moral units, is also a moral agent, and upon us rests the moral responsibility for what we do with it.”65 For Guthrie, the importance of the city government as moral exemplar and arbiter of public morality rivaled even that of the church. Guthrie seized the chance to act on these sentiments by running in Pittsburgh’s 1906 mayoral election. By this time the Magee-Flinn machine was in disarray, broken up by the impact of Magee’s death in 1901, as well as by a successful reform campaign of 1901–02 in which reformers had managed to elect their candidate for City Controller and a majority of the Common Council members.66 Factions of the machine still vied for power, however, and the Flinn-Leslie ring struggled with the Hays-Bigelow machine to be heir to the dominant control exercised by the old organization. When Guthrie announced his intention to run for mayor as the representative of the Democratic Party and of non-partisan interests, these factions joined forces to defeat him. The Pittsburgh Post reported in December of 1905 that H.C. Frick and the Pennsylvania Railroad, along with “several other giant corporations and half a dozen Pittsburg [sic] millionaires” had “forced an agreement between the Hays-Bigelow or administration Republicans and the Flinn-Leslie ring by which they are to unite” and support A.M.Jenkinson as the mayoral candidate. Jenkinson was a millionaire local businessman, but a man of little political experience, who apparently entered the race at the suggestion of banking magnate R.B.Mellon. Not only did this powerful coalition of economic and political VIP’s announce who the mayoral candidate would be, they tried to bribe Republican candidate William A.Magee (a nephew of Chris Magee) to refrain from participating in the primaries.67 Guthrie wholeheartedly adopted the local Democratic platform of moral virtue and civic responsibility as his own. It was explicitly anti-machine, holding that the city government should be non-partisan or the whole city would become “the booty of the ‘grafter’ and the ‘boss,’ a citadel of public wrong and private injustice.” It held as well that “civic virtue is as necessary for the welfare and progress of a city as moral principles are for the permanent progress of its citizens.” The Democrats called for economic accountability, the end to useless public offices, investigation of city employee salaries, competitive bidding both for the deposit of city funds and for the granting of city construction contracts, the extension of water service and filtration of water, assurance that public utility companies served the interests of the city, and the granting of franchises for a limited period.68 All these were the opposite of what Democrats and reformers felt the machine actually provided. Pledging that he would serve Pittsburgh as

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a “non-partisan officer,” Guthrie quickly garnered the support of a prestigious group of local Republicans, who wrote a public letter to him claiming that the time had come “when all good citizens without regard to party affiliation should unite in an effort to lift our municipal government above the selfish deals and control of politicians and promoters.” Of the over one hundred signatories, sixteen were members of the Civic Club (and six more had wives who were members), and at least five members of the Voters’ League.69 Guthrie also won the support of the Citizens’ Party, whose members fled the camp of Thomas Bigelow to vote for nonpartisan government. Despite the collective efforts of local machine factions, the support of powerful financial and manufacturing interests, and the desire of the state machine, Guthrie was victorious. In an election noted for its large turnout, Guthrie won twenty-two of forty wards among a broad-based constituency.70 Guthrie was prepared to use the government to bend the city to his moral vision. The government should represent the “moral and social standard” of the community, Guthrie held, and should safeguard the moral and physical well-being of its citizens. The function of government, according to “reason, history, and the teachings of Christ” was “to make in the community an environment in which every person living…shall have an opportunity freely to reach that development, that stature to which God in His Loving kindness intended they should reach.”71 He worked quickly upon election to enact his anti-machine vision of moral government, passing a civil-service law which placed hiring, firing, and promotion decisions on a merit basis, and which studiously ignored political party allegiance. He then moved against the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, forcing them to pay money owed to the city of Pittsburgh for cleaning between the company’s tracks, and compelling them to remove their tracks from Liberty Avenue.72 He pushed for legislation which could have been drafted in a committee of the Civic Club: laws to provide clean streets and side-walks, to outlaw open cesspools, and to regulate pollution in order to reduce Pittsburgh’s trademark smoky skies. He also made clean water one of his administrations goals, demanding an end to the decade of machine dawdling over the project, and successfully presiding over the opening of Pittsburgh’s sand-filtration plant in 1907. Acting on the concerns raised in the 1905–06 anti-vice campaign, Guthrie also worked to restrict commercialized vice in the city. He ordered the enforcement of laws prohibiting the sale of liquor in disorderly houses, shut down brothels on streets where trolleys ran, and curtailed the graft flowing to the police from the trade.73 But Guthrie progressed beyond the notion of using the government to enforce both corporate and individual morality to viewing government as the very model of public morality. He believed that the city itself was not a “mere social organization,” nor was its “chief purpose” the “exercise of what is technically known as the police power.” Rather, the city was “an organism” in which “the people who live in it are the cells, that together make the body,” and this collective body was responsible for shaping the character of its inhabitants.74 As the aggregate of moral forces, the city, when controlled by corrupt influences, had an untold destructive effect on the lives of its people—especially its young people. If local government was corrupt, this immorality would radiate downward through bad example to the city’s youth, and upward through debilitated and compromised party structures to the state and national levels, eventually choking the social and political life of the community and the country. As Guthrie concluded, “If low

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moral standards prevail in the government of our city—there is no human influence at work which will have as potent an influence on the moral standards of the young who are growing up under its influences.”75 But, if men elected to local offices represented “the aggregate life of your community, its composite moral sentiment,” and displayed “a high ideal of life and decency and honor and honesty,” then this would show the city’s youth the benefit of uprightness.76 If good men and honest, efficient local government did not prevail, the “debasing…corrupting influence” of “the evil of bad city government” would spread to the states and to the nation, and lead to national “disaster.”77 It is striking that, for Guthrie, the city government had joined the church as a moral representative and instructor of the community. Indeed, Guthrie’s view of the proper role for the church in the public sphere was circumscribed. Guthrie noted that it was not for the church “to usurp the powers of civil government.” Rather, the duty of the church was “to teach its members proper conceptions of the State, and the relation of the citizens to the State.”78 A “proper relation” to the state in no way included the views of radical Christian social teachings such as Christian Socialism, of which Guthrie was skeptical.79 Although he never explicitly articulated his reasons for these views (so far as we know), Guthrie likely believed that the city government as moral model had these advantages over a church: it was potentially representative of a broader cross-section of citizens; it had a wider-ranging influence; and it was not tied to or hobbled by doctrinal divisions and enmities, nor restricted by a primarily spiritual mission. That Guthrie would declare no “human influence”—including the church—had as great an influence on the moral life of the community as the local government, was a measure of the moral seriousness with which reformers judged the effects of machine government rule, and a further indication of the extent to which reform energy had moved out of the churches and into the secular organizations and structures. In Guthrie’s thinking, then, the church as an institution was passing away as the main arbiter of public morality, especially if that meant the church “usurping” the police powers properly relegated to the state, or taking on the semblance of a political party. This was quite a different view of the role of the church than that of his own rector at Calvary Episcopal Church, the Rev. James McIlvaine. McIlvaine claimed in a 1905 sermon that “it is the Church that very largely creates the moral atmosphere and gives moral tone to society. The moral atmosphere of a town or city is in great measure the impression produced on the community by the Church” (emphasis added). Further, the church was the “natural representative of moral authority” on social disputes such as those between capital and labor.80 This tension is significant, because it shows how necessary it is to resist lumping together reformers who, although advocating similar goals and using similar language, might have strikingly different views. In this case, the tension was between the ways in which laity and clergy—both concerned with public morality—envisioned the extent of leadership or involvement of Pittsburgh’s “church forces” in reforming the machine-run city. For the time being, the breadth of the concept of “moral government” acted like a glue which held reformers with disparate goals together. Guthrie exemplifies the complex negotiations among Pittsburgh’s activist laity and its churches, clergy, and social gospel ideas. On the one hand, he reflected with his life and goals the teachings of Episcopalian clergy like George Hodges that the Christian must participate in reforming the urban ills of the turn of the century, that “vice capitalists” and

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the machine government should be the true target of reform, and that non-partisanship should characterize both religion and local politics. He used what power and influence he had in the world to help fashion a moral city. On the other hand, membership at Calvary Episcopal was not a sufficient guarantee of such interests. Henry Clay Frick, the notorious author of the Homestead lockout, and eminence grise behind the 1906 machine support of A.H.Jenkinson, was also a member of Calvary Episcopal Church. Not just a pew-sitter (or renter), Frick had even shown an interest in the social policies of the church, donating the property that became the first Kingsley Settlement House. The social Christian sermons of George Hodges, like the sermons of any pastor on any Sunday in any church, were thus clearly taken in different ways by Calvary’s parishioners, and were adopted, adapted, or resisted by people who were already shaped by their own life experiences, ideologies, class position, gender, and personal histories. It is ultimately impossible, of course, to separate out from the fabric of a man or woman’s life the intellectual, emotional, or religious origins of this or that particular act or gesture. But Guthrie as a Democrat in a Republican machine-controlled city likely developed an anti-machine stance and a sense of the importance of non-partisanship in local politics long before he ever heard it from George Hodges. As Hodges made clear, activist laity were the “counselors” of clergy and the “agents” of the church’s social teaching. In this capacity, it was the laity who quite often worked out the specifics of reform, and the detailed sorts of policies advocated from the pulpit by George Hodges might very well have come from the concrete experiences of laity like George Guthrie. But Guthrie’s experience at Calvary Episcopal undoubtedly influenced him in important ways. His actions fit into what was an exciting atmosphere of reform in that congregation. But his beliefs and actions cannot be lined up one by one with those of Calvarys ministers. Guthrie, like any other of Pittsburgh’s activist laity, mediated in a complex and virtually indescribable way what the church taught him. Guthrie’s views on the necessity of “moral government” were therefore shaped most importantly by his own moral vision—one crafted through a life spent battling the machine government, spent in the trenches of the Democratic Party, and spent in church. George Guthrie and other reformers had a chance to give a very public and ritualized form to their message when Pittsburgh celebrated the Sesquicentennial of its founding in September and October of 1908. Guthrie headed a committee to plan the celebration that included the active input of groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Daughters of the American Revolution. In a week of public events that included a massive parade, a flotilla of boats on the Allegheny, artillery salutes, speeches, diplomatic receptions, and ceremonies on the site of Fort Pitt, the city celebrated the “industrial, commercial, artistic, educational, musical and literary growth and progress of the city.” The events were constructed to include all the citizens of Pittsburgh and send the message that in the glorious history of Pittsburgh’s development could be found, at least for a week, a healing of the class and other divisions that often cleaved the city. The parade held to celebrate “Greater Pittsburgh Day,” for example, contained eight divisions, with floats and marchers from a wide array of groups including members of the city government, police and fire departments, schools and universities, fraternal societies, city and county labor organizations, and manufacturing and commercial interests. Greater Pittsburgh Day was capped by a carnival held in lower Fifth Avenue and Liberty Street which lasted “far into the night.” In all, the week’s activities provided, in the words of one recorder of the

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events, “the greatest and most impressive exhibit of municipal resources ever given in street pageants in the history of the world. It was literally a ‘World’s Fair’ on wheels.” 81 Guthrie also declared that, “as the first important act of General [John] Forbes and his army, after taking possession of and naming the site of Pittsburgh, was to hold a thanksgiving service,” the week would begin with a unified religious service, and with “suitable religious services in all the churches.” The union service was held downtown in the Nixon Theater. University of Pittsburgh Chancellor S.B.McCormick presided over the service, and representative Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious leaders all gave addresses. Rabbi J.Leonard Levy echoed the sentiment of unity, praising the city in which it was possible for “Protestant, Catholic and Jew [to] participate in the same religious service, offering thanks and praise to the same God,” a city representative of the New World, “where men are judged by their qualities as citizens, where men are brethren in the same universal Father, where patriotism binds men into a great family reunion.”82 The Protestant ministers, while articulating the same message of unity, were a bit less celebratory, and turned the audience’s attention to what still needed work in Pittsburgh. The Reverend Daniel Dorchester of Christ Methodist Church instructed the audience that “we are all members of one another,” and thus encouraged the “so-called upper classes” to provide for the “badly employed, the unemployed, and the unemployable” an “equality of opportunity” so that all of Pittsburgh’s citizens could live “self-respecting lives.”83 The Reverend Dr. John Gassler Prugh, of Grace Reformed Church, turned the attention of the audience toward the need for good city government. “There must be the ideal of efficient government,” he noted. “A city efficiently, rightly, governed represents the very highest kind of organization.” However, he cautioned, “to have an efficient government we must have an honest government. No corrupt government was ever efficient.”84 The Unity Service thus echoed the moral discourse of George Guthrie: the city was an organism, one at risk when corrupted by the greed of the rich or the inefficiency and dishonesty of its government.

CONCLUSION In the decade from 1895 to 1905, the Civic Club, the Voters’ League, and the reform administration of George Guthrie became the primary stage from which Pittsburgh’s elite reformers projected their voices into the public sphere. Although Samuel Hays and other scholars have long interpreted the actions of these organizations as primarily motivated by their elite composition, I believe that the reforms they pursued are not best understood as a function of their social or class status, at least not exclusively. There were layers of complexity to the actions and rhetoric of these organizations which, although not erasing the effects of their elite social location, make it necessary to look beyond class identification for a full explanation of their reform agenda. One of these factors was gender. The Civic Club, as a female-dominated group, often had a differently skewed sense of what was needed in Pittsburgh than the all-male Voters’ League, but just as often worked with male reformers toward shared goals. Women’s clubs and male reform organizations could in fact pursue similar goals with similar strategies, work toward the same goal in separate spheres of city life, or advocate substantially different visions as to what was needed—with all these possibilities encoded

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in gendered language. An example of the first would be the reform of Pittsburgh’s school system in 1911, where the Civic Club and the Voters’ League both decried the old system in language condemning inefficiency and corruption. It is possible that female reformers saw themselves bringing the school—an extension of the domestic sphere—into line with visions of the model Victorian home while male reformers were more concerned with the ways in which the ward organization of schools fostered political corruption and supported the machine government, but both groups shared the same goal (the abolition of the ward organization of the school system) and a unified strategy. An example of the second possibility is seen in the broader orientations of the Civic Club and the Voters’ League to reforming the city. Both worked on “moral environmentalist” assumptions and models, but the Civic Club was more invested in discrete, local changes to the city’s environment (the addition of parks and playgrounds, the establishment of bath houses) while the Voters’ League pursued what it viewed as systemic solutions through its attack on the machine government, whether by changing the structure of city council, or attacking machine politicians in its role as political watchdog. The third possibility, that female and male reform groups could have different goals and different strategies is well documented by Maureen Flanagan who, as noted above, argued that male and female reform groups in Chicago arrived at different solutions to the same problems because they were working from different models of what constituted an ideal city government. Marlene Stein Wortman made the same point, arguing that “domestic reformers wanted to make the city a home and a social community, and they directed the bulk of their energies into projects that would strengthen the physical, social, and moral order of the neighborhood,” while “corporate and professional progressives conceived of the city as primarily a business and cultural center.”85 Despite the fact that male and female reformers could differ on approach and objectives and base their reform visions on divergent models, however, reformers in Pittsburgh more often than not came together in the end to present a united front. Wortman, for example, found that in spite of the gender-divided visions for reform, male and female reformers nevertheless often found common ground: “progressives agreed on the need for uniform standards” and “the faith in efficiency was as deeply a part of the cult of domesticity as it was of the professional and corporate order.”86 Alan Dawley has effectively articulated why such broad agreement was possible despite gender differences: “Women reformers,” he has written, “pinned themselves on the horns of a dilemma” because while they transgressed perceptions of “true womanhood” in their aggressive public reform presence, they nevertheless “accepted much of the prevailing family ideology, glorified motherhood, and argued that women’s virtue would purify male corruption.” “The division was not between men and women,” he concluded, “since most reformers of both sexes accepted the same assumptions about gender,” but was rather between ideas of gender equality and the ideology of “woman’s special nature.”87 These years were therefore characterized by a submerged tension over gender, but one which was not yet sufficiently taut to snap relations between male and female reformers who still had so much else in common. Like a purely class-oriented analysis, therefore, a gendered reading of these reformers’ actions is important to recognize but is not sufficient in and of itself to explain why they pursued the reforms they did. What we need instead, I believe, is a re-appreciation (without the interpretive baggage that has weighed heavily on long-accepted historiographical positions) of how these

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organizations articulated and garnered support for their agenda in the public sphere. Philip Ethington, in his work The Public City, provides a more useful and nuanced paradigm for the understanding of reform in this era, one that takes into account both class and gender, but one which sees these factors at work with other identities (such as ethnicity), all played out in the political and linguistic context of the urban public sphere. Ethington refuses to concede that society in this period was fundamentally organized by social groups, or at least that this identification drove all societal action, politics included. Instead, Ethington believes that it was politics, and especially political language as it was employed in the public sphere, which shaped the direction of social policy, the structures of government, and the relation of government to the people. For Ethington, social groups as interest blocs in society came to clear formation in the post-Civil War years, especially over labor-capital struggles. Before this time, the language of the public sphere was dominated by the concepts of republicanism. When interest groups became clearly formed in the late 1800s, liberal republicanism (Ethington’s term) took its place. For Ethington, then, the Progressive Era “emphatically did not constitute the triumph of a social group,” but instead “represented the practical triumph of the social-group conception of political contestation.” Reforms pursued in this era, rather than being the imposition of social-control measures by the ruling class, had to be fought for and won in the public sphere. In writing of charter reform in San Francisco in 1898, he noted that the reform’s elite authors were able to marshal the support of a range of social and political groups, and concluded that the success of the charter reform movement “shows the pivotal role of the public sphere as the site of contestation and persuasion, in which the capitalist class could rule only by convincing other classes and groups to go along with it.” This was one episode Ethington employed in his work on nineteenth-century San Francisco to demonstrate that “the story of political change is not reducible to the story of social change; that the institutions of the state and of the public sphere were relatively autonomous from the ‘social base’; and that the public sphere is every bit as important to reconstruct historically as the private.”88 In the case of Pittsburgh’s reform organizations, reform rhetoric was quite often pitched in the dominant key of Pittsburgh’s moral reform discourse. This discourse, it turned out, was copious and generous enough to admit of different gender styles; as such it became a language that could be easily shared by organizations pursuing various reforms along gender lines. The distinct agendas of male and female organizations thus came to be blurred as organizations took on similar languages for describing the problems of Pittsburgh. Granted, the ability of these organizations to overcome gender differences lay in part in the fact that these were men and women from the same social strata, the same neighborhoods, the same churches, and often from the same family. In this sense, the Civic Club and Voters’ League were two prongs in the common attack on an identifiable “other.” However, this “other” was not the working classes per se, or organized labor, or a dirty and shiftless immigrant population that needed to be taught proper (bourgeois) American standards of cleanliness and work discipline. The object of attack was the machine government. Unless one assumes that an attack on the machine government equaled an attack on the working classes, therefore, the reform language and reform agenda of these organizations cannot be seen most fundamentally as an attempt to subdue and control labor or immigrants.

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That these reform organizations took on the rhythms and meters of the moral discourse is not surprising when we see that significant leadership in these organizations (as well as membership) came from activist laity, who acted as conduits for the moral discourse to move out of the churches and church-related groups we have seen in the last two chapters, and into secular reform organizations like the VL and CCAC. This shift was not without consequence for the moral discourse. Because the concretization of the sentiments of the moral discourse was put in the hands of elite, activist laity, this discourse was warped to a greater extent toward the class and gender perspectives of these activist reformers—the moral discourses primary representatives in the public sphere. Another important consequence of this shift was that the responsibility for a moral society was increasingly seen by reformers to be centered in reform organizations and in local government, not in the churches. Eldon Eisenach has argued that the same trend occurred on the national level as well. Although Progressive thinkers were thoroughly grounded in a Protestant moral discourse, he noted, they wished to widen this discourse to one of a “common religion” in service to nationality, a task they deemed too large for theologically and denominationally divided churches.89 One result of this was that political enemies became moral enemies, and vice versa. Although the seeds of these ideas had been planted in Episcopal rector George Hodges’ day, this view blossomed in the rhetoric and actions of the Civic Club and the Voters’ League, and in the speeches of reformers like George Guthrie. Challenging machine rule thus became a secular duty pursued with religious conviction by reform organizations nominally secular, but with important links, personally and rhetorically, to the city’s reform-oriented churches. One might argue that at the turn of the century the use of moral reference was, and had long been, the common coin of public speech. As appropriate for a church-going and Bible-reading America, this argument would go, the public speech of reformers, politicians and others more regularly and broadly resounded with moral themes, Biblical metaphors, and the like than in our own time. One could thus conclude that the moral concern in reformers’ speech was driven more by habit and ritual than by any true sense that moral themes had application in the rough and tumble world of urban, industrial America. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Kenneth Cmiel has argued that “by the early twentieth century, the Bible was no longer read by enough people with enough regularity to be considered a text that shaped the language.”90 And with 45 percent of Pittsburgh’s population in 1906 having no religious affiliation (and nearly 30 percent Roman Catholic working class), reformers would not have been able to be certain that Pittsburghers would warm to political reforms put forward in the name of fashioning a moral city. In fact, reformers had available to them and used a number of different discourses—those of social science, medicine, business efficiency, and Progressive politics, among others. That they warmed to the rhetoric of Lincoln Steffens and made moral conceptions of Pittsburgh’s present and future a dominant note in this symphony of potential discourse demonstrates that reformers chose and deliberately deployed this language. And if it is true, as Ernest Gellner has maintained, that “when serious issues are at stake, when the fate of individuals and communities is at risk, men…think in the terms which they cognitively respect,” then the moral vision of Pittsburgh’s reformers must be taken seriously as one of the guiding forces in shaping that city’s reform efforts.91

Chapter Four Graft, Vice, and the Reform of Pittsburgh’s Government In the years from 1908 to 1912, Pittsburgh reformers continued to worry about morals and about efficiency. 1908 marked the last, most active year in Guthrie’s tenure as mayor, and reformers carried on a welter of reform activity. In 1907 the investigators of the Pittsburgh Survey descended on the city to explore and document its social, environmental, and living conditions. According to Roy Lubove it was the “discrepancy between the level of centralization, coordination, and planning in the economic sector” and “the failure to apply similar techniques to environmental and social change” which became the “main theme” of the Survey.1 One year later the Voters’ League began investigations into the workings of the machine government, and in 1910 uncovered and publicized an extensive graft scandal in the City Council. Outrage over this scandal fueled the passage of the “Pittsburgh Plan,” which altered the structure of Pittsburgh’s city council from an “unwieldy” bi-cameral body elected on a ward basis, to a ninemember body elected city-wide. The Voters’ League also battled growing rates of prostitution, and their efforts led in 1913 to the formation of a “Morals Efficiency Commission” with the power to investigate and take steps to eliminate Pittsburgh’s social evil. Through all of this, the notion of “efficiency” came to be saturated with moral meaning, as reformers sought to paint Pittsburgh’s inefficient city government as inherently corrupt, and to portray corruption uncovered in local government as always bound up with its inefficient structure. This conjunction of efficiency and morals was just as prevalent in thinking about prostitution, and thus the “Morals Efficiency Commission” was to lead the way to a cleaner, healthier, and more moral future for Pittsburgh. None of Pittsburgh reformers’ strategies were new: the idea of abolishing the ward system of government had been aired for some time, graft scandals in local government had long been a common phenomenon, and commercialized vice had worried Pittsburghers for decades.2 Why was it, then, that in the years from 1910 to 1912 all these elements came together to fuel an explosive series of reforms? Pittsburgh’s reformers owed their success in these years to groundwork laid in earlier efforts. Much of this was linguistic groundwork—the shaping of the reform discourse into a recognized collection of concepts, keywords, and rhetorical associations that enabled the Voters’ League and others to trace effectively the opportune scandals of the city council corruption and the spread of vice to the machine government. Carl Smith has written that late nineteenth-century Chicagoans attempted to come to terms with “urban disorder” by finding the “best language available” to give city dwellers an imaginative control over the chaos of urban existence. “The passion that characterized the discussion of the meaning of urban life in this period,” he concluded, “reveals how important the establishing of imaginative control over the city was thought to be.”3 For certain Pittsburghers, it was the narratives associated with the moral discourse that would come

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to be most compelling as visions of what was wrong with the city and how problems could be fixed. The rhetorical conditioning of the city to accept a moral reading of politics and prostitution, and their possible connection, began as early as the sermons of George Hodges in the 1890s. With the increasing strength and interrelatedness of reform organizations in the city which habitually employed the same moral discourse, and the pursuit of moral government by the Guthrie administration, there was by 1908 a significant public ready to see the machine government as the source of a debilitating evil. This discourse withstood even the prestige of national reform opinion. In 1907 the investigators of the massive Pittsburgh Survey would descend on the city and once again make Pittsburgh the subject of national reform attention, publishing the results of their year-long study first in the magazine Charities and the Commons (later Survey magazine), and then in six volumes published by the Russell Sage Foundation. The conclusions at which these investigators arrived did not match up with the moral discourse in important ways. Pittsburgh reformers were nevertheless able to harness this negative national attention for their own agenda, downplaying the results of the Survey that went in a different direction than that established by the confines of the moral reform discourse. All of this created an explosive context in which the graft scandals of 1910 and the simultaneous rise in commercialized vice led to actual political change.

THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY: REFORM MODEL? In 1907, Guthrie worked with other reformers to capitalize on the reform spirit that had energized his administration by sponsoring the research and presentation of the Pittsburgh Survey. The idea for the survey originated with a Pittsburgher named Alice B.Montgomery. The Charity Organization Society of New York had, in 1905, conducted an investigation of Washington D.C. and decried its abuses of child labor, its lack of educational opportunity for the city’s children, and its substandard housing conditions “under the eaves of the Capitol.” It published these findings in its organ Charities and the Commons, and also distributed copies to the members of Congress, to newspapers and magazines, as well as to “one thousand child labor committees, civic leagues, tuberculosis associations, women’s clubs, charity organization societies, and so forth, throughout the Union.”4 Montgomery, chief probation officer of the Allegheny Juvenile Court, read this report and then wrote to the Charities Publication Committee asking it to conduct a similar investigation of Pittsburgh. The Committee agreed, and enlisted the support of William H.Matthews, the headworker of the Kingsley House settlement in Pittsburgh. Edward T.Devine, general secretary of the Charity Organization Society of New York and editor of Charities and the Commons, used his contact with Matthews to “put the plans before a group of forward-looking Pittsburghers who gave it their encouragement and cooperation.”5 These “forward-looking Pittsburghers” included primarily Matthews’ Episcopalian-reformer connections, and in this way George Guthrie, H.D.W.English and Judge Joseph Buffington became the Survey’s sponsors. In fact, the Survey seemed to have a surfeit of Episcopalian connections. Robert Woods, head of South End Settlement House in Boston and in the “advisory group” for the Survey along with Florence Kelley and John R. Commons, also knew these men from

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the “Calvary crowd” because George Hodges had brought him to discuss the possibility of starting a settlement house in Pittsburgh with them in the early 1890s, as noted in the first chapter. Woods and Hodges had also subsequently been colleagues at the Episcopal Theological School, where Woods lectured on “practical philanthropy,” and Hodges had been the dean since 1896. H.D.W.English, in his role as national president of the Episcopalian lay men’s organization—the Brotherhood of St. Andrew—was also wellconnected to the national Episcopalian social reform network. In fact, English, along with Hodges and Woods, would eventually serve on the Episcopal Church’s Joint Commission on Social Service when it was formed in 1910. With only eleven lay members, the Commission put English and Woods in heady company: other lay members included the likes of Gifford Pinchot, Jacob Riis, and Clinton R. Woodruff, the long-time president of the National Municipal League. While in no way dictated or even dominated by specifically Episcopalian social understandings, the Survey nevertheless tapped into a network in which Episcopalians played prominent, if not dominant, roles. In any case, financial support was secured from a variety of individuals such as food manufacturer H.J.Heinz and from organizations like the Civic Club, but the bulk of the Survey’s cost was financed by three grants from the newly-formed Russell Sage Foundation, totaling $26,500. The period of investigation stretched over the course of a year, from September 1907 to September 1908. During that time, nearly fifty different researchers came to Pittsburgh and began to probe into the effects on day-to-day life of its dominant industrial identity. Experts on housing, social work, and charities; professors and graduate students; specialists in various health fields; artists and photographers all came for two months to a year to document Pittsburgh’s condition. A number of locals also participated. Some ten Pittsburghers (including attorneys, engineers, charity organization leaders, and society ladies) contributed articles to the final volume, and numerous others—especially those associated with the Kingsley House, Woods Run, and Columbian settlements—assisted in fact-gathering, statistic checking, and providing local details. The final research also included six sustained, individual projects (four of which came to constitute entire volumes of the Survey) on the subjects of the steel workers, work accidents, family life in Homestead, the city’s typhoid problem, and child-helping institutions in Pittsburgh. The Survey was thus a hodgepodge of methodological approaches, relying on the perspectives of a wide range of investigators.6 The Survey needed the support of local reformers as much as local reformers hoped the results of the Survey would impel their own reform agendas, for, as Steven Turner has noted, “local notables were one of the target audiences for the surveys results.”7 Although John McClymer’s early article on the Survey tended to treat the investigators and the local reformers who supported the work of the Survey as having identical agendas, subsequent scholarship has shown the diverse opinions held by each group. John Ingham found that local reformers were largely tied into the community of independent manufacturers and steel mill owners. Although the Survey’s findings certainly damned the steel industry, Ingham concluded, Pittsburgh’s reformers were able to buttress their own position in the community by highlighting the Survey’s focused criticism of absentee capitalism as the cause of industrial misery. Largely constituted by the city’s “old upper class,” Pittsburgh’s reformers thus continued a “tradition of muted paternalism” by portraying themselves as “the guardians of public weal in the city” and

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the leaders who could guide Pittsburgh out of its industrially-blighted state.8 John Bauman found that Pittsburgh reformers largely ignored the social justice and pro-labor aspects of the Survey’s conclusions, but lifted out the parts that supported their own proplanning agenda and desire for political centralization in the local government. “As fervently as Pittsburgh’s reformmined elite hailed the vision, contained in the Survey, of a safe, sanitary, and efficient city,” Bauman concluded, “they just as vehemently spurned its disturbing findings about social injustice.”9 In spite of such differences, Pittsburgh reformers found much in the Survey’s results to bolster the main themes of the moral discourse. Survey investigators, for example, criticized the city for being dominated by a rigid and individualistic moralism. Allen Burns noted that the individualism of the community’s Scotch-Irish leaders (who were infamous for going their own way), had kept philanthropic efforts from uniting, and had prevented “church federation for social service.”10 Robert Woods pointed to the strict Sabbath and liquor laws that gripped Pittsburgh—stricter than in almost any other big city in America—as evidence of misplaced moral priorities. Although morally positive on a superficial level, this near obsession with liquor and the Sabbath was problematic in the long term because “the passage and enforcement of certain types of legislation having an immediate and obvious ethical bearing, satisfies this restricted ethical demand, and sidetracks tendencies which might check the indirect causes of great underlying demoralization.” Pittsburghers’ moral focus was too narrowly defined, and thus they could not see the moral implications of broader societal issues. As Woods continued: If the churches which with so few exceptions seemed to regard as a secular intrusion the introduction of broad civic interests into their counsels, and thereby often appeared shamefully indifferent in matters of public morality, could be led to take part in a campaign for a better home and neighborhood life, they would soon learn practically the close bearing of all human facts upon character and spirit. Those ministers who presided over the costly and surprisingly numerous stone edifices throughout the East End [$17,000,000 invested in church buildings] would thus be able to meet their most serious problem, that of bringing up young people with some practical sense of their responsibilities to the less favored.11 The result of this misplaced moral focus, as John Fitch wrote in The Steel Workers (one of the Survey’s monographic volumes) was that “ministers sometimes deliver their heaviest blows against secondary evils while the prime wrongs, the ones that dry up the roots of the community life, may escape their wrath.”12 These “prime wrongs,” Woods argued, included most importantly the crushing number of hours of hard labor demanded of workers which resulted in the “gradual destruction of the religion sense.” Woods concluded that Pittsburgh was passing through a “moral adolescence.” Its religion “cultivates definite restraints and reassurances, rather than aspiration and moral enterprise,” Woods felt, the result when “a community’s moral powers are absorbed in the subduing of nature and the achieving of a great material destiny.”13 These criticisms constituted the same social gospel critique that had long been heard at Calvary Episcopal, Christ Methodist Episcopal, First Unitarian, and other Pittsburgh churches. Encouraging the reform forces of Pittsburgh to see the moral weight of broader

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social issues—the hours steelworkers were made to labor, the corruption inherent in city and state governments, the environmental conditions suffered by the city’s poor stuffed into dangerous tenements, exposed to open privy vaults, and with no access to clean water—the Survey’s authors sounded a prophetic call worthy of a Washington Gladden or a Walter Rauschenbusch. These conditions cried out for the moral attention and moral outrage heretofore saved for those printing Sunday newspapers or running a saloon too close to a schoolhouse. McClymer noted that the investigators of the Survey evidenced many “borrowings from the language of the Social Gospel” and while stressing their ultimately differing goals, nevertheless concluded that the “social engineering” serving as the investigators’ main agenda “could be seen as a practical extension of the Social Gospel.”14 Thus, whether motivated specifically by social gospel allegiances, or by its secularized Progressive version, the Survey’s investigators and their Pittsburgh supporters wished to promote the idea that the city needed to broaden its definition of morality, and that the poisoned environment resulting from prioritizing industry (and giving it a moral sanction) itself had serious and damaging moral consequences for Pittsburgh’s citizens. Pittsburgh reformers also found support for their condemnation of the machine government in the Survey. Although the Survey focused on the injustices surrounding the life of the working class in Pittsburgh, there was sufficient anti-machine sentiment within its six volumes for reformers to seize upon in support of their own conclusions. Allen Burns contributed a detailed narrative listing the triumphs Pittsburgh reformers had achieved over the city’s “ring.” Pittsburghers H.V.Blaxter and Allen H.Kerr wrote a scathing critique of the city’s aldermanic court system. Not the least of the court’s problems was that it had a “judiciary so steeped in politics that the squire’s office as a campaign center rivals the saloon.” Such politicization—along with the lack of training in law and jurisprudence on the part of the aldermen—led, these authors concluded, to an inevitable level of inefficiency and corruption.15 James Forbes, the secretary of the National Association for the Prevention of Mendicancy and Charitable Imposture, contributed an article on Pittsburgh’s criminal element. He reiterated the now-common view that the machine profited from the vice trade, both financially (by designating “official” suppliers to brothels of alcohol, furniture, clothing, etc.) and politically, because the vice trade created a large number of people dependent on the machine for protection from harassment by the police.16 The police, in seeing the criminal element being protected by those “higher up,” had its own morale “destroyed” and the way was opened to police corruption. Forbes made the interesting point that the linguistic connection between the police and the underworld needed to be cut, since many officers were recruited out of the underworld “element.” The police should be encouraged not to use the street slang of the underworld, because “by the restriction of this jargon to the thief world, one common bond of comradeship between the police officer and the thief world would be destroyed. Too long has the policeman gone to school with the thief in order to learn his code. In doing so he has not only adopted the thief’s vocabulary, but often his moral standards as well.”17 The investigators of the Survey, without emphasizing it, thus treated the machine government as something which should and would pass away. There was a split, however, between local reformers and those associated with the Survey, with very different ideas about what was ultimately wrong with Pittsburgh. The

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Survey’s investigators clearly focused on the ravages of Pittsburgh’s abusive industrialism, charting and documenting the ways in which it sapped the life from Pittsburgh’s workers, disrupted their family life, took their limbs and their lives, and forced them to live in unsanitary and sub-standard housing. Pittsburgh’s industries were also implicated in the systematic destruction of the natural environment, most obviously from the incessant smoke which choked the city day and night. But like Ingham’s independent mill owners who successfully resisted being painted with the brush of guilt by highlighting the faults of national firms like U.S.Steel, Pittsburgh reformers were able to resist successfully a national, “outsider” reform community in determining the necessary course of action Pittsburgh’s citizens needed to take. They were able, as both Ingham and Bauman have noted, to appropriate the findings of the Survey and use them to shore up their own agenda. In part, Bauman and Ingham are certainly correct: reformers ran in the same crowd with many who owned, managed, kept the accounts, or provided legal counsel for the city’s iron and steel industries, and so were disinclined to embrace the Survey’s conclusions. However, they were not by and large part of the crowd that rejected the findings of the Survey entirely. Pittsburgh businessman Robert W.Jones, for example, wrote a series of articles for the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times (Pittsburgh’s Republican business-oriented paper) following the release of the findings of the Survey. The articles, entitled “Pittsburgh, A City to Be Proud Of,” disputed the truthfulness of many of the Survey’s observations.18 Those in the reform network held a different viewpoint. They saw the revelations of the Survey as largely true, and indicative that reform was needed. Their view was best expressed by C.E.E. Childers, the Britannic Majesty’s Consul in Pittsburgh, and President of the Episcopalian Church Club, who noted in a speech given in January of 1910: The Survey was drastic, it took courage to make it, and to give publicity to it, but it was recognized that the only way to lay the foundation of civic righteousness anywhere is by a process of introspection. First see how bad we are, and then we can see clearly how to become better.19 Pittsburgh’s reformers did not deny the bad shape that Pittsburgh was in. And although it was embarrassing to have their problems published nationally and in detail, reformers quickly went to work to harness the Survey’s findings for the cause of “civic righteousness.” In the process, they did not relinquish their imaginative hold on the city’s problems—one outlined in the themes of the moral reform discourse—but followed their own local conclusions about “how to become better.”

CAPTURING THE REFORM MOMENTUM: THE NATIONAL MUNICIPAL LEAGUE CONFERENCE, THE PITTSBURGH CIVIC COMMISSION, AND THE SOLIDIFICATION OF REFORM GAINS In line with the Survey investigators’ belief in the necessity of “bringing the facts home to the community,” a civic exhibition displaying the Survey’s results was held in

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conjunction with the National Municipal League meeting in Pittsburgh in November and December of 1908.20 The exhibit was held in the Carnegie Institute Galleries, with exhibits on display by the Pittsburgh Survey, the Bureau of Municipal Research in NY, the Associated Charities, Kingsley House, the Civic Club, the Tuberculosis League, the Pittsburgh Playground Association, and several other organizations. The “Citizens’ Reception and Entertainment Committee” of the local branch of the Municipal League was responsible for this show, and was ably chaired by George Guthrie, with Oliver McClintock and A.Leo Weil serving as first and second vice presidents. The exhibit was dedicated to “the increasing group of citizens in every American city who recognize that government is the most important factor in securing good living conditions and preserving the life, health, and well-being of all citizens, and who desire their city’s best development.”21 Displays included charts, maps, diagrams, drawings, and photographs from the Pittsburgh Survey which detailed the problems with Pittsburgh’s dirty water, showed the pathetic housing workers were forced to live in, and documented industrial accidents.22 The various organizations participating in the exhibit hoped that Pittsburgh citizens who came to view it would learn that “the Government is the most important factor in securing good living conditions,” that the taxpayer “has to pay the bill” for the evils of overpopulation, and that “efficient administration is necessary to make ‘Good Government.’” The organizers also promoted the idea that Pittsburgh needed a “town plan” in order to provide healthy conditions.23 What is striking is that although the conference followed hard on the heels of the Pittsburgh Survey, and Edward Devine, Robert Woods, and Paul Kellogg all delivered addresses, Pittsburghs at the conference were already forgetting the main point of the Survey. The repeated stress in the Survey on the need for justice for Pittsburgher’s workers and their families, and the extent to which Pittsburgh industry was responsible for the city’s problems, received very little airing at the Pittsburgh Conference on Good City Government. In part this was because the topic of the conference was government, and not industry, but the National Municipal League dealt broadly with civic questions, and the results of the Pittsburgh Survey were there to see. George Guthrie gave a speech in which he outlined his views about city government being a “moral government,” making those involved with politics “moral agents.” He called for honesty, intelligence, efficiency, and a “strong moral purpose” in making local government what it should be. His language dripped with explicit moral reference, and although an exact meaning for “moral government” did not emerge from his speech, its outlines and qualities could certainly be discerned. A moral government was by precondition non-partisan, because the political debates of the national parties had nothing to do with the effective running of a city, and tended only to foster party discipline for the sake of political rewards and nepotism. If non-partisan, local politics should be decided locally, and Pittsburghers should “demand of the legislature that they give back to us that which belongs to us by virtue of our manhood, a free ballot that no one can control and in which no one has a greater right in than we have.” A moral government would be efficient and would have at its head good and honest men. The latter likely meant Pittsburgh’s business men and “old upper class,” and not the career politicians of the machine government on the one hand, or the absentee capitalists and the large manufacturing conglomerates that had their headquarters outside of Pittsburgh on the other. A moral government would be concerned about the physical well-being of all

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its citizens, regardless of wealth, and provide them with clean water and healthy living conditions. It would also have the power to make decisions regarding its own future, and not be tied, as Pittsburgh was, to a classification system which forced Pittsburgh to act together with Scranton as “cities of the second class” whenever one or the other wished to change its city charter. Both cities should “be given power to frame a government of their cities in such form as they think wise.” Finally, the moral government would exclude those modern-day Benedict Arnolds who either “[prostitute] public office for personal gain or for the profit of his friends or for the advancement of his political organization,” or those who “[tempt] a public officer to thus betray his trust.”24 Other speakers sang the choruses familiar to the National Municipal League for over a decade: the need to eliminate ward representation; the need for a professional police force; support for the Progressive reforms of the initiative, referendum, and recall.25 Many of these ideas, as we have seen, had become part and parcel of Pittsburgh’s moral reform discourse. In this sense, the conference was symbolic of the ways in which the “reform network” in Pittsburgh had truly melded. Local activists from the Civic Club and Voters’ League came together with civic reformers from other cities and the national municipal reform discourses mixed and mingled with locally-grown varieties. H.D.W.English spoke to the gathering, giving a sense of how these disparate groups now worked virtually as one: In Greater Pittsburgh we have fourteen commercial and civic bodies organized for the purpose of fostering trade and for civic betterment, composed of 3500 leading business men and women, all citizens. The great civic questions are taken up by some one of these organizations and by them discussed and the consensus of opinion arrived at and passed on to the others and by them in turn discussed and opinion arrived at. The final judgment should be of inestimable value to any legislative body, and is a real contribution to the subject in hand and should have its weight in the final determination of any question by a municipal legislature seeking the highest good.26 Not only did the “commercial and civic bodies” take up the same questions and try to arrive at a consensus, but English made it clear that these groups expected their advice to be followed, at least if a municipal legislature was “seeking the highest good.” A.Leo Weil, a member of the executive committee of the Voters’ League, added that “the great work of both the Municipal League and the Civic Association has been not only the coordination of all societies and associations working for municipal betterment, but the coordination of individuals as well, and the creation and stimulation in all such of high municipal ideals.” He was so optimistic of the extent to which such civic societies had done their work, in fact, that he believed that there existed a “universal public sentiment, demanding men of ability and integrity in municipal office administering the city’s affairs for the city’s good.”27 Guthrie and other reformers also worked to institutionalize the momentum created by the Pittsburgh Survey through the creation of a central city planning body. Although not contradicting the thrust of the recommendations by the Survey, the attention given to planning was certainly the more comfortable alternative to confronting U.S.Steel.

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Bauman and Spratt argue that “while Pittsburgh reformers balked at the Survey’s indictment of low wages and poor work conditions…they ecstatically embraced its environmental reform message because it suited their own reform agenda.”28 Inspired by the conclusion of Charles Mulford Robinson, founder of the American Civic Association, that “if ever a city needed the definite plan that an outside commission could make for it, it is Pittsburgh,” Guthrie created the Pittsburgh Civic Commission. The Commission, to which Guthrie appointed H.D.W.English as president, structured the participation of over a hundred reformers into categories which “seemed lifted directly from the Pittsburgh Survey,” including Industrial Accidents, City and District Housing, Education, Legislation, City Planning, Charitable Institutions, Lower Courts of Justice, Public Hygiene and Sanitation, Municipal Research and Efficiency, and several others.29 Its object was “to plan and promote improvements in civic and industrial conditions which affect the health, convenience, education and general welfare of the Pittsburgh industrial district,” to generate public opinion in favor of these improvements, and “thus to establish such living and working conditions as may set a standard for other American industrial centers.”30 Some of its more notable successes were to invite Frederick Law Olmstead to come to Pittsburgh to draw up a comprehensive plan for the city, and to address the problems of smoke abatement and flood control. The creation of the Civic Commission marked a significant shift in city planning thinking. No longer was the goal to be the “City Beautiful,” which had sought since the 1890s to clean the cities, and to carve out parks and other natural, aesthetic spaces for its citizens. Now the goal would be the “City Efficient,” with “efficient thoroughfares, accessible playgrounds, rational landuse planning, and other practical matters.”31

PUBLIC MORALS AND PITTSBURGH’S NEW CITY CHARTER: THE GRAFT SCANDAL OF 1910, THE PITTSBURGH PLAN, AND THE CHANGE IN CITY COUNCIL Whether roused by the Pittsburgh Survey’s results, or incensed by implications uncovered during the Survey’s year of fact-finding, the Voters’ League began an investigation of its own in 1908 to determine the extent of the alleged corruption of Pittsburgh’s city council and to bring to light any specific instances of grafting. As a result of their probing, a number of city councilmen, a banker, and several businessmen were found guilty in a bribery scheme. In the midst of the Voters’ League investigation, the reform candidate for mayor in the 1909 election, William H.Stevenson, was defeated by William A.Magee, the nephew of former Pittsburgh boss Christopher L. Magee. Reformers worried that this would usher in a revitalized era of machine control, and redoubled their efforts to demonstrate the ways in which the machine government was inadequate to rule. Suspecting that councilmanic graft ran deeper than they had just demonstrated, the League procured and financed the services of Robert Wilson, a private detective from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who came to town with some associates and began to collect information. Wilson slowly unraveled the threads of corruption, and turned his findings over to District Attorney W.A.Blakeley. By March of 1910 it became clear that the bank graft scandal had involved many more council members than those who had been convicted.

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In late March, Blakeley’s case received its final needed impetus. When it became clear that the Superior Court of Allegheny County was going to uphold the convictions of those men initially charged, one of them, former councilman John F.Klein, decided to bargain for a more lenient sentence by revealing what he knew about the whole affair. Six banks had paid bribes to council members to ensure that they would be voted as city depositories. Becoming a city depository meant that a bank would serve as the repository of local government funds, and, because they would pay a lower rate of interest to the city than customary for this money, it was profitable for a bank to have access to these funds. Klein, it turns out, was the main liaison between the banks and the council, and had kept detailed information about which banks had paid what amount of money, and how it was distributed to various council members to vote the correct way on the bank deposit legislation. He had even sent out bribe money to council members by registered mail, whose signed receipts Klein carefully stored away. The revelations that followed amazed and disgusted Pittsburghers. The extent of corruption was shocking. Over 60 percent of the 1908 Common Council—98 out of 155 members—were indicted for receiving bribes (some as low as eighty dollars)—to vote for the chosen banks as city depositories. The extent of the corruption in city council, as well as the pettiness of it, outraged reformers, and made Pittsburgh the object of nationwide derision. Further, investigators revealed, councilmen had been implicated in receiving kickbacks on liquor sold in disorderly houses and money paid to procure gambling privileges. Vice in the city had “opened up” to a shocking degree. Detective Wilson made explicit in a newspaper interview what all the other commentators implied: that there was a clear connection between graft and vice. “Grafting is the fruit of a system,” he declared. “The tree upon which official corruption grows has a name that should be odious to every man and woman in this country. This name is ‘systematized prostitution.’”32 Reformers worked quickly to harness the outrage over these revelations. The Pittsburgh Civic Commission, headed by H.D.W.English, called a lunchtime meeting of representatives from the city’s civic reform and business organizations. Clergymen, reformers, and other city leaders made speeches calling for an end to vice and graft, and it was decided that a mass meeting should be held to express outrage at the recent events. A committee was appointed to work with the Municipal Affairs committee of the Chamber of Commerce to devise a more efficient and honest form of city government, and plans were laid for the mass indignation meeting, to be held April 1 st in Exposition Music Hall. The group turned to the city’s churches to spread the word of the meeting, sending a letter to all ministers in the city asking them to urge their congregations to attend the meeting “for the purpose of expressing public indignation at the vice and graft disclosed in our city and ratification of the present prosecution.”33 On the night of April 1, 1910, over 3,000 Pittsburgh citizens packed into Exposition Hall to protest corruption and vice in Pittsburgh. On the platform sat representatives of various civic, religious, and business groups in Pittsburgh, as well as such political notables as former mayor George Guthrie and the current mayor William Magee. A.Leo Weil, president of the Voters’ League, gave a scathing speech in which he accused Magee’s administration not only of allowing the spread of prostitution and of fostering the councilmanic graft, but of itself being rife with corruption. Magee attempted to answer these charges, but the boisterous crowd would not allow him to speak and he stormed out of the Hall.34 The Rev. James L.McIlvaine and other religious leaders also

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had a chance to speak, and accused the local government of profiting from the widening trade in prostitution.35 The linked outrages of governmental corruption and spreading vice remained the theme of the rest of the speeches. What is significant about this meeting was that reformers clearly and publicly connected vice and political corruption, and from this point forward in the minds of Pittsburghers, the two would be seen as evil fruit growing from the same rotten tree of machine government. Having had their city’s problems paraded before a national audience not two years before in the investigations of the Pittsburgh Survey, Pittsburgh’s citizens were sensitive to their image. Now it had been soiled again, and Pittsburghers worried that they would be a laughingstock. This generalized worry about the image of Pittsburgh mixed and mingled with more explicitly religious notions of “shame.” Ever since Lincoln Steffens had passed through Pittsburgh in 1904, entitling his chapter on Pittsburgh “A City Ashamed,” various reform figures had picked up on the image.36 As a city long dominated by a conservative Presbyterianism, the concept of shame was not new. In the same way that muckrakers like Steffens often used moralistic language to condemn the excesses of America’s go-go industrial era, Pittsburghers had often heard public crises described in moral terms. This time was no different: The Presbyterian Banner noted that with these events “Pittsburgh continued to drink the bitter cup of its municipal shame,” and that the extent of the corruption would “publish the humiliation of the city abroad over the whole world.”37 Such characterizations were not restricted to Presbyterians. In fact, there was a generalized outcry against the evidence of corruption uncovered by the Voters’ League. The day after the “mass indignation meeting” ministers in a range of Protestant and Catholic churches preached scorching sermons against the “vice and graft” that had been made public. Episcopalian Bishop of Pittsburgh Cortlandt Whitehead called for all Episcopalian ministers in the city to preach on this theme, and authorized a prayer for the city, to be prayed on April 13th. Directed to the “Great and Dreadful God,” the prayer begged forgiveness for “our own sins and shortcomings and those of this people among whom we dwell.” It asked God to “direct and guide all who fill the municipal offices,” and to “save this whole community from political corruption, greed, intemperance, lawlessness, the desecration of the Lord’s Day, the violation of the sanctity of marriage, and every false way.” Hinting that God would not be counted on for everything, the prayer concluded by asking that “all our people learn to fulfill more and more truly and intelligently their duty of citizenship.”38 The Rev. James McIlvaine, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, delivered a rousing sermon entitled “The Shame of the City,” putting a religious spin on Steffens’ 1904 work, and evoking the ways in which religious institutions, muckrakers, and other civic reformers were now banded together against a common foe: the machine government. McIlvaine’s sermon began with an excoriating of government corruption, but laid ultimate blame at the feet of Pittsburgh’s neglectful citizens: The disgrace, the shame, the humiliation that has come upon our city, in which we all share today is the result, the inevitable result, of the neglect on the part of its more intelligent citizens to do their duty as citizens. They have left politics to politicians, the government of the city to be exploited by partisans, whose object is not service but plunder; and the result is that

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we stand before the country and the world humiliated by such an exposure of wholesale dishonesty, corruption, and rascality, as is almost unexampled in the history of the country.39 McIlvaine then turned his invective on the vice trade, condemning the way in which Pittsburgh’s vice had been able to push itself “into all parts of the city, influencing and dominating the municipal government, laying the whole country under tribute.” And, like the leaders in the mass meeting, McIlvaine connected the two: “I claim that this infamous business is carried on in violation of the law, in defiance of the law, with the knowledge, if not the protection of those whose business it is to execute the law.”40 McIlvaine’s charges and condemnations were echoed in churches throughout Pittsburgh. Dr. Warren G.Partridge of the First Baptist Church preached that same Sunday on “Civic and Individual Righteousness,” while the Shadyside United Presbyterian Church held an indignation meeting in place of their usual Sunday evening service. The congregation at Sixth Presbyterian Church heard that District Attorney W.A.Blakeley was a “guardian angel” for the city, and Dr. Daniel Dorchester of Christ Methodist Episcopal challenged his flock to deal with the twin evils of government corruption and the spread of vice as an aroused community, “organized against vice of every kind, and making this issue paramount over all party or other considerations.”41 Various civic and business groups joined Pittsburgh’s churches in their condemnation of the local government. The Pittsburgh, Uptown, and South Hills Boards of Trade all held meetings that same Sunday to discuss the problems of vice and graft, and the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Municipal Affairs committee at their next meeting called for concrete ways to change the system. The Committee presented resolutions calling for a change in the form of the city council, and members heard a proposal drafted by attorney George R.Wallace (also an executive for the Voters’ League, and an active parishioner at Calvary Episcopal) which called for amendments to Pittsburgh’s charter act that would eliminate Pittsburgh’s bicameral city council, and replace it with a unicameral body of only eight members, elected city-wide. Unlike the Des Moines commission plan that had been adopted by other cities and discussed as well that night, Pittsburgh would keep the position and function of the mayor intact, and the city council would not assume other executive duties such as the appointment of city officers. This proposal represents the germination of what would become the “Pittsburgh Plan” of city government. The Chamber also saw fit to discuss Pittsburgh’s prostitution problem. Another resolution presented at the meeting by Samuel W.Black called upon those who owned property in the city’s red light districts to oust those engaged in prostitution. Although those present agreed with the thrust of the resolution, they felt it unfairly singled out those who owned property in one particular district, and so the resolution did not pass.42 What is clear is that the two burning issues of graft and vice had been yoked together, and that discussions of a new government for Pittsburgh would proceed in tandem with concerns about the moral health of the city. The Voters’ League exemplified this organic view of city life when it stated in a bulletin dated April 23, 1910: Misgovernment cannot be looked at in the abstract as only money wasted, contracts fraudulently let, officials bribed and the city’s interest neglected.

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On these a corrupt city machine subsists. They mean also the tenement, lax sanitation, the gambling hell and dive, the protected criminal, the debauched honor of the official, all of which and more unspeakable thrive in the corrupted, polluted atmosphere of machine politics. A city governed by a corrupt machine has upon its hands more blood than has a victorious army, blood shed in sin and shame by those sworn to protect and save.43 Representatives from business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, along with others from civic reform organizations, clubs, and religious institutions formed a “charter committee” charged with developing a new plan for Pittsburgh’s city government. The Committee, chaired by Colonel Thomas J. Keenan, former owner of the Pittsburgh Press, quickly decided on the details of Pittsburgh’s new charter. The city council was to be reduced to nine members, elected at large and serving for four years, and they were to be paid a yearly salary of $6,500. The new charter also called for the institution of the initiative, the recall, and the referendum, and provided for a non-partisan city ballot.44 Each one of these features was intended to undercut the power of the machine government. City-wide elections would override the powerful ward organizations of the machine, and the reduced number of council members would ensure that close watch could be kept on all. The establishment of a salary was intended to combat the notion that one was paid for such public service by helping oneself to the profitable spoils of political influence, and the popular Progressive aspects of the initiative, the recall, and the referendum were intended to give the voting citizens of Pittsburgh some measure of control over the city’s legislation and the conduct of its officials. The Charter Committee worked to drum up support for the Pittsburgh Plan over the next year, issuing a number of bulletins that pointed up the shortcomings of the old system, which they saw as shot through with “shame, scandal, rottenness [and] rank corruption,” and asking the citizens of Pittsburgh to give the city “a chance to redeem herself.” The bulletins reiterated the ineffectiveness of a large council and underscored the power that the machine government had over the passage of legislation, quoting as evidence the confessions of former members of the city council who had been convicted of accepting bribes. The Committee also secured the endorsement of “every important civic, business and professional organization of the city,” and held some two hundred public meetings in clubs, unions, mills, and churches.45 The zenith of support for the Plan came in early April, when ten thousand people attended a rally in Exposition Hall to launch the Plan in the new state legislative session. A huge banner hung above the speakers’ table, reading “Pittsburgh Demands the Pittsburgh Plan—A Small Council, the Initiative, the Referendum, the Recall, the Non-Partisan Ballot—No Compromise.” Once again, speakers at the rally gave the theme of the moral city central importance. Reform Rabbi J.Leonard Levy told the crowd that “if Pittsburgh more nearly approached a morally ideal state a change in the city charter would be unnecessary.” But because many believed that the situation could not be much worse, “we appeal to the duly constituted authorities for a change which we believe may tend to righteous civic government.” The Rev. J.H.McIlvaine called the present form of Pittsburgh’s city government “antiquated,” and noted that although the inefficiency of the current structure ensured that city government would always be a costly affair, the greatest cost to Pittsburgh was “in the

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corruption of character, the degradation of the people, the destruction of health, happiness, life.”46 Support for the Pittsburgh Plan, although strongest among elite Pittsburghers and their representative reform organizations, developed among a variety of constituencies. Pittsburgh’s black citizens, and especially their middle-class, educated leadership were aware of the ways in which the machine government could work both for and against them, and clearly felt free to choose to support reform measures which would help to curb the corrupt excesses of local machine power. The city’s African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, while protective of Mayor Magee, supported the provisions of the new charter, and hoped that “with the new order of things… the people will be considered first, and the ‘interests’ last, if at all. At any rate, everybody now has a chance to run for the office, no matter in what part of the city he lives, yea even a Negro may run.”47 There were certainly good rea-sons for Pittsburgh’s African American community to be wary of the reformers backing the Plan: reformers had not shied away from using race-baiting as a method of generating support for their measures.48 But racism was not restricted to the reformers, and the city’s machine politicians, saloonkeepers, and police officers could also notoriously discriminate against the city’s black population. The Pittsburgh Courier editorialized in April of 1912, for example, that African Americans in Pittsburgh’s First Legislative District should not vote for the “saloonkeeper Boss of Center Avenue” Elmore because he had bragged that he could secure the vote of every “nigger” in the district, and because two years earlier Elmore had put a large number of blacks on the machine payroll, only to summarily remove them immediately after the election. The district’s black voters, the Courier concluded, should “positively refuse to be led to slaughter any more.”49 Representatives of the working class, as we have seen, had the same ambiguous relationship to the machine. They apparently understood that even though the machine was their best bet for access to local political power, that the machine was most responsive to those who had something to contribute. That working class wards suffered from lack of paved roads, adequate sewage facilities, and other infrastructure demonstrates that the contribution of their votes was not always enough to ensure machine action on their behalf. The Tribune also came out against the machine government in other contexts. Although not commenting specifically on the Pittsburgh Plan, the Tribune’s position concerning the Magee-Oliver machine was made clear in the summer of 1910 when Joseph H.Vitchestain, president of the Tribune, ran for the state legislature in the sixth district. He told the Tribune: the corporations and the bosses combine to keep honest and able men out of the legislative office for fear there may be occasionally legislation against “the interests.”…Bossism should be discouraged and the machine politicians should be repudiated now…I have fought Mule-driver Flinn for the last fifteen years…as enthusiastically as I have fought Laborcrusher Oliver… One of these overrich ringsters, fattening on the toil of honest labor, has about as much use for the workingman as the other.50 Members of the working class in Pittsburgh, like the African American community, realized that both good and bad could come from the machine government, and in no way

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demonstrated a universal support of the machine or its functionaries. Thus while there were good reasons for both the African American and the working-class communities of Pittsburgh to be wary of the reformers and their agenda, the Pittsburgh Plan nonetheless garnered wide support on the basis of a shared enmity with the corrupt aspects of the machine government. Thus after nearly a year of support-building by the Charter Committee, the proposed charter made it onto the docket of the state legislature at Harrisburg in March of 1911. The day before the scheduled reading of the bill, a “charter army” gathered in Pittsburgh and traveled in eight special train cars to Harrisburg to speak in support of the Plan. The army consisted of representatives of over twenty organizations concerned with “civic uplift,” some two hundred fifty men in all. The Pittsburgh Post commented that probably “no single railroad train which ever crossed the State contained so great a number of men who are earnestly and enthusiastically bent upon the improvement of municipal conditions….”51 The Chamber of Commerce, various Boards of Trade throughout the city, Pittsburgh’s Civic Commission, the Voters’ League and Civic Club, the Civil Service Reform Association, the Allegheny County Bar Association, and representatives of the city’s churches appearing as “at-large” delegates all joined together to convince the State Legislature about the need for change in Pittsburgh’s city government. The Pittsburgh Post published a front-page cartoon drawing captioned “On to Harrisburg,” with William Pitt striding purposefully down a set of railroad tracks, a copy of the Pittsburgh Plan rolled up under his arm, saying “No sir! There’ll be no compromise!” He was accompanied by a rooster that proclaimed “Initiative, Referendum and Recall or Bust.”52 Former reform mayor George W.Guthrie, Voters’ League president A. Leo Weil, and Chamber of Commerce representative George Wallace were chosen to make speeches before the Legislature on behalf of the supporters of the Plan. Guthrie gave a characteristically deliberate and reasoned speech, reiterating what Pittsburghers were asking for and why they should get it. His language had strong religious overtones: the Plan was a “prayer” to the legislature for the “redemption” of Pittsburgh, for which they had a “moral responsibility…to answer before the Judge who never forgets.”53 Weil was not as circumspect. He delivered a powerful, cutting and detailed speech which outlined the facts of the grafting scandal, charged the current city administration itself with corruption, and showed how the machine government was tied in multiple ways to the city’s vice, gambling, and liquor interests. He began by enumerating the results of the graft investigation: ninety-eight city council men indicted, forty-eight convicted or pleading guilty, and the rest awaiting trial. After the scandal broke, Pittsburgh and Allegheny had been reapportioned, reducing the number of council members from 155 to 67 (40 on the common council, and 27 on the select council, representing 27 wards). Of the current city council of sixty-seven, eight members had been among those who were convicted and resigned from the old council, and sixteen others were still under indictment, so that nearly a third of the current city council was made up of those who had a year earlier been implicated in the bribery investigation. Nor were these members tangential to the workings of the council, Weil reported; they held chairs of important council committees and served on these committees in impressive numbers. Beyond those actually convicted, Weil complained, “the majority of the present councils are wholly unfit for office,” counting among their number “gamblers, ward-heelers,

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bartenders and the like….” In addition to the continued dominance of city council by corrupt representatives, Weil noted that the city administration itself was corrupt. The chiefs of the departments of public works and of health and charities were both under indictment. Weil even accused the mayor of illegally borrowing from city funds for his personal use, denounced his decision to place city money in the very banks that had been found guilty of bribery in the graft scandal, charged that the mayor undermined the civil service laws, and censured him for allowing a vast increase in the city’s vice trade. As had been true since the mass indignation meeting of 1910, Weil and the other speakers justified the Pittsburgh Plan with a mixed rationale which included business and property interests, a general Progressive value on efficiency, and strong moral sentiment. Weil’s conclusions contained all these elements. “Not only do our men of business and affairs see the value of their property threatened, their business injured and the city’s progress stopped, but as husbands and fathers they are looking to the future of their families.” Striking a theme that had been articulated often by George Guthrie during his administration, Weil noted that the health of the entire city was threatened by corruption anywhere: In an atmosphere of corruption—in an atmosphere of vice, where those occupying the place said to be honored, as the representatives of the people, are associated with and are in partnership with and share in the profits of, the vice of the community, it is impossible that the moral tone of that community should not be so lowered as to affect every phase of the city’s life—political, business, and social.54 Pittsburgh’s reformers had clearly moved from seeing the machine government as the unconcerned, non-law-enforcing entity of George Hodges’ criticisms in the 1890s, to seeing it as the center of all corruption in Pittsburgh. This conclusion had not appeared suddenly with the graft exposures. The Pittsburgh Ministerial Association of the United Presbyterian church claimed in a resolution passed in March of 1910 that for years this Association has been crying out against these protected vices and demanding their suppression on the very ground that they belonged to a system of corrupt municipal misrule that must inevitably result in just such a condition of grafting and lawlessness as it is discovered has overtaken our beloved city.55 But Weil made the accusations specific. He added to his list of charges the allegation that city councilmen were allotted a certain number of disorderly houses as perquisites upon election, reiterated the theory that each ward contained “official” liquor distributors, clothiers, caterers, furniture dealers and even doctors for its brothels (financial plums handed out by the machine to ensure party discipline), and cited the opinion of a detective that tribute levied upon the prostitution trade raised over a million dollars a year for the machine’s war chest. Through their rhetoric Weil, Guthrie, and the rest of the “charter army,” as one newspaper noted, thus made “public morals one of the chief demands for the new charter.”56

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Mayor William Magee of Pittsburgh, in a newspaper interview, denied all of these charges in substance, calling Weil the “owner of a depraved imagination,” a “slanderer,” and “wild exaggerator,” and hypothesizing that Weil was a person whose pride lay in taking on the duties of elected and appointed officials, and playing policeman. He answered Weil’s charges about the corruption of his own administration point by point, providing rationales for the actions criticized by Weil. Coming to the operation of prostitution in Pittsburgh during his administration, he questioned who it was that levied and received tribute on this trade, and demanded concrete evidence of Weil’s charges. His defense of his administration’s policies vis-à-vis prostitution were somewhat confused, however. He cited a visiting Presbyterian minister and the head of Pittsburgh’s Volunteers of America to the effect that Pittsburgh was one of the cleanest towns, morally, in the country, and that the prostitution problem was negligible compared to cities like San Francisco and Chicago. But he then launched a defense of his administration’s somewhat laissez-faire prostitution policies by comparing the results of his approach to that of the Guthrie administration. He noted that “the regulation of the socalled social evil is a question that no public administrator can ever claim to have solved satisfactorily to everyone,” but that under his administration “conscientious efforts have been made to keep it within bounds and that it is now under better control than ever before in this city.”57 Despite the efforts of the “charter army,” and the overwhelming sentiment in favor of it, the Pittsburgh Plan was gutted by the state legislature. Word got out that Boise Penrose, leader of the state Republican machine, opposed the initiative, referendum, recall, and non-partisan ballot portions of the proposed changes, and these provisions were removed from the bill. When the bill finally passed on May 25, 1911, only the provisions for the reduction of the size of city council and the establishment of salaries remained, and in this truncated form the governor signed the bill into law. Reformers were crushed. The illustration on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post this day was of William Pitt sitting with his head in his hands, shackled to a large iron weight reading “boss rule,” with the Pittsburgh Plan in shreds on the floor. As passed, the bill provided for Governor Tener to appoint a city council of nine members for Pittsburgh, to hold office until January 1, 1912, with a general election for those positions to be held in November of 1911. Reformers worried that Tener, a reputed tool of the machine, would appoint machine candidates, and that, after all the effort to secure a new council, the city would be even more firmly in machine control. Tener did not do so, however; he appointed a council dominated by businessmen and professionals, with one clear representative of labor interests.58

A PARALLEL AGENDA: THE MORALS EFFICIENCY COMMISSION, THE MORALS BUREAU, AND THE CONTINUING BATTLE AGAINST PROSTITUTION Although they had succeeded in securing a small city council, elected city-wide, the Voters’ League was not finished with its work. Based on information procured in their ongoing investigations, the Voters’ League charged the Director of the Department of Public Safety J.M.Morin with “malfeasance of office and mismanagement of official

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duties” for presiding over the department responsible for control of the vice trade during a period when houses of prostitution had “been allowed to increase to an enormous extent and to spread all over the city.” According to the League, new houses had been allowed to open, established houses allowed to continue (even ones near schools, settlements and “places where young girls and young men and boys congregate”), and the illegal sale of liquor in these houses tolerated. What is more, the League charged, “certain classes of houses of prostitution in which perversion and bestiality are practiced before audiences” had been known to the police and were permitted. Finally, the League concluded, Morin had fostered the ties between the citys prostitution trade and the machine government: “official” suppliers of houses of prostitution still existed as financial plums to loyal machine operatives, money was paid to open and operate such houses, and violators of the law who were caught were often protected by friends with “political influence.”59 In bringing these charges before the City Council, Voters’ League president A.Leo Weil struck the same theme as he had two years earlier in the attempt to pass the Pittsburgh Plan: that the maintenance of a healthy “moral environment” in Pittsburgh was of the utmost importance. In the pamphlet published by the Voters’ League which outlined the Leagues accusations against Morin, Weil noted that although Pittsburghers used to view the city merely as a place to conduct business, they now realized that: It is a city in which to live; it is a city in which to play, as well as to work; it is a city in which we have our homes, in which we rear our families, In which we bring up our children, and in which it is our duty to give them a moral environment, and to insure those conditions which at least would give them an even chance to grow up to manhood and womanhood, decent, respectable, moral men and moral women. He stressed that the children of the “poor and unprotected” deserved this moral environment as much as the children of the “richest man who has his palace upon Fifth Avenue.” Creating such a moral city was far more important than “the business consideration”; in fact, if a city was created that was prosperous, but not moral, “you would have accomplished nothing for the permanent welfare of your community.”60 That the Voters’ League saw the importance of preserving a moral city is perhaps reflected in the fact that they secured as vice-presidents Pittsburgh’s Episcopal Bishop Cortlandt Whitehead, the head of Pittsburgh’s largest Reform synagogue, Rabbi J. Leonard Levy, and the Rev. Regis Canevin, a Catholic priest.61 Not only did the Voters’ League encourage the view of Pittsburgh as a moral city, but it saw fit to set itself up as the moral voice of the community. To do so, it needed the support of Pittsburgh’s churches, and so H.D.W. English, in the name of the Voters’ League, wrote an open letter which was sent to over 300 Pittsburgh clergymen. The Voters’ League, English noted, was conducting its anti-prostitution campaign in order “to protect the morality and integrity of our people and to get efficient government,” a goal for which the League had “the right to expect the support and co-operation of every righteous citizen—clergyman or layman.” English requested of the ministers that they preach sermons on the subject of the righteous city, that their ministerial associations would “take such action as will direct public opinion,” and that they would gather the men of the church and urge them to support “by their voice and influence” the work of

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the League, and thereby “stand for a cleaner city.” English was not begging for support; he was demanding it. Striking a theme heard in many a social gospel sermon, but most recently in the pages of the Pittsburgh Survey, English wrote: It is the duty of the Church to take part in saving the spiritual life of men, but to accomplish this it must do its part in transforming social and political conditions which destroy men’s lives physically as well as spiritually. If the Church is to keep its rightful place in the life of Pittsburgh, it must look at every part of the government of this city to detect causes of wrong, selfishness, and incompetency, which ultimately encourage conditions inimical to a decent, moral life, and thus produce sin and sinners which the Church is seeking to prevent and rescue… Every clergyman in this city should be stirred to action in behalf of this work to which the League has set its hand…. The letter was “a call to the Churches to come out and stand and be counted on the side of civic and social righteousness.” English clearly envisioned the Voters’ League as the voice for this side, and the church as a reluctant power that needed to be shown the light, and then brought along in support of the League’s social and political agenda. Community forces were divided, English concluded, “right on the one side and evil on the other.”62 Which side would the churches choose? Many, apparently, found the League’s stance persuasive, for the following Sunday the League’s charges against Morin were “read and discussed from more than two hundred pulpits.”63 It should not be surprising that the Voters’ League would turn to anti-prostitution as one of its main concerns. As we have seen, concern about the moral environment of Pittsburgh had long been evident in Voters’ League rhetoric. Extension of Voters’ League concern into anti-prostitution efforts also made strategic sense: if they were truly convinced on the basis of their investigations that the machine was directly linked to, and profiting from, the city’s saloons and brothels, then an attack on these institutions was the next battle in the war for good and moral government. The Voters’ League thus went before the newly appointed “City Council of Nine” and asked them to conduct an investigation into charges that officials in the Magee administration had been deliberately lax in the enforcement of Pittsburgh’s anti-prosti-tution laws. It quickly became clear that the new City Council was not going to be the immediate savior of moral Pittsburgh. The Voters’ League complained in a public, published letter dated May 7, 1912, that the Council seemed not to be taking up the mantle of reform rapidly enough. Although the League had presented evidence before Council in early April of the “mal-administration” of the Departments of Public Safety, Public Health, and Public Works, the Council had not initiated any independent investigations, and so it fell to the Voters’ League both to procure evidence and to press charges. In their letter the Voters’ League stated that they had hoped to avoid airing such charges publicly, so that Pittsburgh would be saved from facing “further shame,” but were willing to do so, “however distasteful and unpleasant the duty,” “in order that we may have a clean, honest, moral, businesslike, and efficient municipal administration.” The League reiterated their sense of disappointment with the new Council in October, when Morin was actually tried, noting that it had been over a year since the prostitution charges had been raised in the debates over the new charter,

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and still the Council had not taken the lead in investigating or prosecuting the charges. Such dissatisfaction is evidence that the coming in of the “Council of Nine” was not the panacea to Pittsburgh’s troubles that reformers had hoped it would be. It also suggests that, contrary to Samuel Hays’ portrayal, the new council’s agenda can not be seen as identical to that of the reformers.64 The Voters’ League was not above race-baiting in their attempt to remove Morin from office, charging that “assignation houses are permitted to exist, to which, day and night, colored men can be seen taking young white girls and white women.” This charge exemplifies the way that both reformers and their opponents used racial fears to build support. The editors of Pittsburgh’s black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, were outraged at the League’s obvious racial play. They demanded to know why the League had not commented on the much more frequent practice of “colored girls and women led to the houses of shame every day by white men,” or of the black women “maintained by the patronage of white men, and them only” The Courier concluded that “any such work as the league professes to do must be directed to conditions among all of the people or it is a sham and a failure.”65 Although generally supportive of the Magee administration, Pittsburgh’s African American community did not find any more racially enlightened thinking coming from the camp of the machine government. When A.Leo Weil made his accusations against the Magee administration in Harrisburg about the increase in prostitution, Magee had responded that under the stricter anti-prostitution policies of the earlier Guthrie administration the number of sexual assaults in Pittsburgh had increased, and that women had been afraid to walk in the largely African American Hill District for fear that black males, without the outlet of the brothel, would attack random white women on the street. As Magee recalled: Can anyone forget the epidemics of attacks on women during that dispensation [the Guthrie administration]? Do the people of Pittsburgh forget a period of three months when no woman in the “hill district” dared leave her doorstep except with the thought of the ravisher in her mind? Did not the newspapers have as their principal feature of sensational news each morning the recital of an assault or an attempted assault? Were there not daily accounts of the hysterical outcries and fears of nervous, overwrought women in the leading public highways excited by the assumed intentions and the supposed suspicious conduct of nearly every Negro that was met not only after dark, but in many cases in broad daylight?66 This same slur surfaced again during Morin’s trial, this time in the mouth of an Inspector Bartley, as the police justification for leaving brothels up and running. As the Courier responded, this race-baiting “pictures the Negro of Pittsburgh as a brute and a thug whose criminal appetites can be appeased only by toleration of disorderly houses operated for their special benefit.” Understatedly polite, the Courier opined: “We deny that such is the case.” The Courier also made the same recommendation to the Inspector that they had to the Voters’ League: tell the whole truth about prostitution, and illuminate the dominant role of whites, rather than focusing on that of blacks, in the whole process.67

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A slim majority of the Council, whether influenced by the widespread support for the action, or themselves finding the Voters’ League’s combination of arguments persuasive, voted 5–4 to remove John Morin from office for mismanagement. Reformers were thus successful in launching the second part of their agenda—anti-prostitution—which had been linked with anti-machine rhetoric and the graft scandals since 1910. But the Morin trial was just the beginning. Acting on the same concerns articulated in the charges of the Voters’ League, the City Council in this period also voted for the organization of a “Morals Efficiency Commission” (MEC), a twelve-member body which was to “have power to suggest and recommend to the Departments of Police and Health, the Council and Mayor, such measures and activities, based upon private investigation and study of problems and conditions, as shall tend to improve the public morals of the city.” In order to do so, they were given the authority “to invite communications and conduct inquiries for the purpose of securing information,” encouraged to “co-operate with other civic, religious, philanthropic and educational bodies,” and were granted a budget of $500 to carry out their mandate.68 The name itself wonderfully encapsulates the thinking and vision of Pittsburgh’s reformers. In good Progressive fashion, they felt that a government commission was perhaps the most effective path to ensuring a moral city. One reason for this was that reformers very much believed that morals had a public side, or at least a public effect— hence all the talk of “public morals.” Morality had moved out of the closed-in Victorian sitting rooms and from the exclusive purview of parish clergy, and into the streets of the ⇔ city itself. Influenced by twenty years of social gospel rhetoric which stressed the “social” side of traditional moral concepts such as sin and salvation, reformers had come to believe that the city itself possessed a morality, one that needed guarding and crafting by its leaders. The concept of “efficiency” had also long been saturated with moral meaning, a signification given recent reinforcement by the graft scandals, where the “inefficiency’ of the large city council was often rhetorically characterized by reformers as a synonym for the immorality of their dealings. In an entrenched Presbyterian community such as Pittsburgh, inefficiency, waste, and sloth were all tantamount to immorality, and inefficiency had become a code word symbolizing the graft, bribes, and unearned gain of political spoils which were the fuel of machine government dealings. That this commission would deal with Pittsburgh’s public morality “efficiently” also evoked the pseudo-scientific methods of the day used to legitimate the actions and conclusions of untold commissions and governmental bodies. One could predict that the report of this commission would be rife with statistics, surveys, and scientific advice of one sort or another. Mayor Magee appointed the Commission at the end of April 1912, and chose as its members two physicians, three lawyers, a professor, a minister, a rabbi, a social worker, two women’s club members, and one businessman.69 The members met and quickly organized into Executive, Police, Legislative, Health, and Educational Committees. They outlined the scope of their own activities, which would include “enumeration of all houses of prostitution and their inmates,” the suppression of the sale of liquor, music, and shows in these houses, and the attempt to remove existing houses in residential districts. Where they could they would do so with the help of Pittsburgh’s police, but based on past experience, the Commission planned for “private supervision of police activities.” They also wished to consolidate all laws pertaining to prostitution on the books, and planned to

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sponsor new legislation, such as requiring medical examination for all marriage licenses. The Commission felt that beyond the general moral malaise fostered by protected prostitution, the trade also posed a specific danger in the form of venereal disease. They therefore planned to set up structures that would allow the widespread testing of prostitutes for these diseases (and perhaps even the construction of a “venereal hospital”), and envisioned a “system of moral education and sex hygiene in schools and colleges.” Beyond this, the commission would act in the role of a general censor for the city, devising methods for the “reclamation of fallen women,” and initiating efforts to abolish “indecent, suggestive and disgusting reports, illustrations and advertisements in newspapers.” In envisioning all these tasks, the Commission looked to the examples of other cities’ anti-prostitution efforts, and sought the advice of reformers in both the U.S. and in Europe.70 And, perhaps because the Mayor had not appointed any African Americans to the membership of the Commission, it was unable to avoid the tint of racism, vowing that “all houses of prostitution with colored inmates receiving white visitors [would] be eliminated.”71 The Commission rapidly established contacts with other reform groups in the city, and “nearly all religious and civic bodies gave the Commission loyal support whenever it was asked or needed.” They thereby continued the linked tradition of the “reform sphere,” and assured themselves of a broader foundation from which to act. The Ministerial Union of Allegheny County appointed the Revs. H.C.Gleiss (Baptist), W.I.Wishart (United Presbyterian) and C.R.Zahniser (Presbyterian) as a linked committee, and the Commission commanded the support of many of the city’s churches. Rabbi Rudolf Coffee, a member of the Commission, concluded that “the value of the churches’ cooperation in this movement can not be overestimated. In fact, it would have failed utterly without such support.”72 The Federation of Women’s Clubs also established a linking committee to the Commission, selecting Mrs. Enoch Rauh, Mrs. Franklin P.Iams, and Mrs. Robert D.Coard to serve. Other auxiliary committees were formed by the Commission, nearly one-third of their membership comprised of ministers from prominent local churches.73 The Commission worked in an undefined zone which mixed legitimate and assumed power. Being created by an official act of the mayor and approved by the city council, the Commission was different from the purely private “preventative societies” that Timothy Gilfoyle has described in New York, such as those led by Presbyterian reformer Charles Parkhurst.74 The Commission in fact publicized its methods as unlike the “Parkhurst Raid policy,” holding as its slogan “Ultimate Elimination by Gradual Restriction.”75 Unlike Gilfoyle’s reformers, who “undermined the authority of municipal government [and] privatized “moral” law enforcement in regulating sexual and leisure activity in the city,” Pittsburgh’s MEC sought to undermine police cooperation with the “vice interests,” and make the city’s morals a matter of government concern. The government commission, being constituted by leading doctors, clergy, clubwomen, lawyers, and businessmen, effectively symbolized a Foucauldian combination of medical, clerical, legal, political, economic, social and scientific power, a power which would be wielded above all on the basis of the “knowledge” generated by the Commission on Pittsburgh’s prostitutes. Michel Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison that “power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful)…power and knowledge directly imply one

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another…there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” As Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s Panopticism in this work was interpreted by one scholar, “the disciplinary system that replaces sovereign monarchs cannot exercise power without the new forms of information and knowledge that the new experts collect through their labors of observation. This complex link between disciplinary power and information makes the new social system highly attractive to intellectual experts, and it makes the experts indispensable for the social system.”76 That is, by the nineteenth century power was distributed through the various “disciplines,” and exercised through the prerogative of observation and the development of knowledge. Pittsburgh’s Morals Efficiency Commission sought to regulate “public morality” through just such a combination of observation and knowledge-formation, orchestrated by “experts” culled from the leading professions. Most of the Commission’s power lay in their mandate to investigate and make recommendations—actions it undertook with zeal. Although they did not officially have the power to close even a single brothel, they turned the results of their findings over to the police, and exploited the publicity given their findings to ensure that the police would act. After organizing themselves, the Commission first attempted to get a sense of what they were up against. This meant conducting a survey of police, ministers, neighborhood residents, and others who could help them assess the scope of prostitution in Pittsburgh. They found that even though “Pittsburgh was not nearly as bad as most other large cities,” that Pittsburgh and Allegheny contained nearly 250 known houses of prostitution, and over a thousand prostitutes. These they rapidly attempted to suppress using a variety of techniques, taking their cues in several significant ways from the policies of the Guthrie administration. The Commission called for the prohibition of brothels on the street car lines, for example, and for the elimination of brothels in residential areas (while remaining firmly opposed to the notion of creating a segregated district for prostitution), as well as for the prohibition of music, dancing and shows, and the sale of liquor and even soft drinks in the disorderly houses—all tactics pursued by Guthrie when he was in office. These methods seemed to work: the Commission claimed after one year of work to have reduced the number of brothels and prostitutes in Pittsburgh and Allegheny nearly 75 percent.77 Their strategy, culled from the long experience of Pittsburgh’s anti-prostitution efforts, was to undercut the capitalization of prostitution in the city. The above policies were designed to stamp out the “commercialization of vice,” and proceeded on the assumption that if they could severely undercut the profitability of prostitution, and sever its financial ties to the ever-enlarging circles of those related in one way or another to the trade, they could make prostitution a risky financial venture and ensure its decline. Indeed, the motto of the Commission was “ultimate elimination by gradual restriction,” and they concentrated their early efforts on the restriction of the trade’s profitability. The first annual report of the MEC noted that such policies made them many enemies because “its practical work was attacking the profits of many persons in various lines of business.” These included not only the prostitutes, madams, pimps, and procurers, but also property owners who received inflated rents for brothels, bankers with mortgages on the properties, liquor dealers, physicians, druggists, attorneys, peddlers, taxi drivers—all of whom served the needs of the prostitutes in one way or another—and even the policeman

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“who missed his cold bottle and Christmas present” when disorderly houses were shut down.78 In attacking such a range of interests, the Commission felt, they brought about a determined but covert opposition. The Commission became the object of damage suits and was subject to the “specious misrepresentation” that it was illegal, was useless, and was exceeding the bounds of its legal authority—claims dismissed by the Commission as the opposition of those who could not defend outright their ill-gotten profits, but had to do so surreptitiously. Such attacks “were too transparent to deceive sensible and decent men,” and the reputation of the Commission “emerged unscathed from all detraction and attacks.”79 As the Commission’s report concluded: “Prostitution as a business must be wiped out, or it will wipe out the civilization that tolerates it.”80 The Commission published a report after a year of activity, detailing its findings and conclusions, and making some twenty-eight recommendations to the governing powers of Pittsburgh concerning prostitution. The report was a mixed bag of stereotypes, traditional thinking, and surprising statistics, but evidenced some progressive conclusions as well. The capitalization of prostitution and the relationship of the trade to a capitalist economy provides a good example of this mixture. As noted, the Commission saw the ways in which prostitution had firmly embedded itself into the local economy and how its profitability elicited opposition to the Commission even from “respectable” sources. On the question of how the economics of the wage system related to the decisions of women to become prostitutes, however, they were less willing to see the impact of economic forces. The most common reason women became prostitutes, the Commission concluded, was “parental neglect.” A closely watched and guarded daughter would never have the chance to stray into such a profession. Low wages as a factor driving women into prostitution, the Commission felt, were overrated. “The truth is that far more are lured by the love of luxury and idleness than are driven by the pangs of penury,” and “too great emphasis…is usually laid upon the influence of women’s low wages in promoting the tendency to vice.”81 But the report quickly contradicted itself. It faithfully reported the answers of prostitutes interviewed about why they had first gotten involved in the trade. Nearly eighty percent gave explicitly economic reasons for doing so, including “to support self,” “to support baby,” “discouraged and no work,” “deserted by husband,” and “ill health” (which presumably unfit them for other employment). Over sixty percent of those interviewed came from poor homes, and thirty-seven percent from homes of “moderate circumstances,” with less than three percent coming from wealthy or well-to-do homes.82 The Commission even conducted their own investigation into women’s wages in Pittsburgh, and discovered that while prostitutes made anywhere from $5 to $100 a week, the jobs prostitutes had left earned at the most $15 a week, with the average more around $5 a week. The Commission sent a female investigator out into the streets of Pittsburgh in the months of November and December to try to secure employment, and she was hired at various jobs paying from $4.50 to $7.50 a week, but after the holiday season was not able to find a job at all. The report concluded from this investigation that “a woman entirely dependent upon her own efforts cannot make a living under these conditions.” One of the first recommendations the Commission made in its report, therefore, was to encourage the passage of legislation which would provide a minimum wage for women and minors.83 The Commission apparently had difficulty in facing what their investigations clearly told them: that an oppressive wage system for workers combined

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with gender inequality in wages drove the vast majority of Pittsburgh’s prostitutes into the profession. As good pseudo-social scientists they reported all their findings, but in the end made conclusions which seemingly contradicted what their own study had revealed. Such ambiguity was present in other facets of the report. Among the recommendations issued by the Commission were such draconian and policestate notions as having the police keep close watch on who moved where at all times; suggesting that “confirmed criminals and degenerates should be sterilized”; and asking that the Department of Health be given the right to test any prostitute at any time for venereal disease. But the report also arrived at more progressive suggestions as well. Their statistics helped smash the myth that prostitution was an immigrant problem: 82 percent of prostitutes were natives, with only 18 percent coming from abroad. In a similar vein, in a city where Catholicism was the dominant religion of the working class, over half of the prostitutes claiming a religious affiliation named themselves as Protestants, with 35 percent claiming to be Catholic.84 The most typical prostitute in Pittsburgh was thus white, native, and Protestant. The Commission also recommended that children born out of wedlock should have the same rights as legitimate children—an attempt to make men responsible for fathering children. Men were also called to task in that the Commission hoped to promote “a single standard of morals” where “the man of immoral life” is “ostracized as relentlessly as the woman.” They encouraged women’s clubs to “compile a blacklist of immoral men, especially of employers who make improper advances to women in their employ”—demonstrating an early sensitivity to sexual harassment. The abuse of prostitutes by male police officers spurred the Commission to advocate the development of a separate night court for female offenders, and the hiring of female police officers to process them.85 How do we read such ambiguity? The Commission appeared to combine a scientific, methodological concern to gather all relevant information with a willful misreading of that information. Clearly the Commission, along with the reform forces that they represented and were linked to in the city of Pittsburgh, found prostitution to be a serious problem. But were a thousand prostitutes in a city of over half a million inhabitants worthy of such concern? Scholars who have looked at anti-prostitution efforts in this era conclude that the prostitution problem was never as extensive as the overblown rhetoric of anti-prostitution forces made out. Both Mark Connelly and Paul Boyer, for example, argued that such efforts were therefore merely “symbolic” of deeper and more abstract worries about the changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization, the role of women in industrial society, or women’s public sexuality.86 Perhaps such anxieties did get expressed in condemnations of prostitution. Rather than seeing such efforts as primarily or fundamentally “symbolic,” however, it is more accurate to view the problems of prostitution as very real to reformers from a moral, financial, and health standpoint, and to see their solutions as the necessarily mixed bag of traditional and more forward-looking thinking inevitable in such early efforts. There were in fact very real ills associated with prostitution. Venereal disease in the days before penicillin claimed the lives of many men and women every year, and the Commission estimated that the city of Pittsburgh spent $20,000,000 a year on the costs associated with the disease (although this was just an estimate, representing Pittsburgh’s proportion of the nationally estimated cost of venereal diseases).87 Based on this figure, the Commission concluded, every man, woman, and child in Pittsburgh paid $50 a year “unwittingly” to support prostitution. The

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Commission also felt a moral duty to the city, and to its future generations, to stop prostitution: It is our duty toward the innocent who are menaced, and toward unborn generations who will suffer under the curse of parental sin, to enact measures that will check diseases now spreading practically unhindered. It is our duty by education to shield the young, and to warn all that wild oats raise a crop of disease, despair and death. It is our duty to promote such wise laws as will insure better housing conditions, and other social preventive measures. It is our duty to discountenance the frivolity and materialism of the age, and to encourage the saner pleasures, the sounder ethics, and the deeper spirituality that alone will conserve the future welfare of mankind.88 The moral ills arising from unchecked prostitution were as significant to the Commission and to other reformers as the physical spread of venereal disease. The toleration of such “public immorality” would have serious and destructive consequences for the public life of Pittsburgh and the nation. As they concluded, since commercialized vice was forbidden by law, its toleration constituted “a dangerous source of graft and corruption.”89 Thus it is not possible to separate their moral worries from the worries about the city’s health and about the financial cost of prostitution to Pittsburgh’s citizens, for the latter, along with “graft and corruption,” were simply the wages of tolerated prostitution. Because of this sentiment, and because of their apparent success, the Commission felt that its work in guarding the public morals of the city should be made a permanent function of the local government, and they therefore endorsed the creation of a Bureau of Public Morals which would become a permanent facet of the Department of Public Safety. Such a Bureau was established by law in June of 1913. Its broad mandate was to investigate and act “upon all questions and conditions arising from sex relationship which affect public morals.” It was to be governed by a board of seven directors (three of whom could be women), appointed by the mayor, confirmed by the city council, and led by a superintendent who would be paid $3,000 a year. In the Bureau, the powers of the Morals Efficiency Commission were given the force of law, and were even extended. As the act creating the Bureau held: [The Bureau] shall have power to investigate all conditions growing out of sex relationship affecting public morals; and they shall have full power to enforce all laws, and prosecute all violations of law, in matters of sex relationship; and for that purpose they shall exercise such police power as may be necessary. In addition, the Bureau had at its disposal (subject to approval by the director of the Department of Safety) the services of Pittsburgh’s police and detective forces as needed to enact their mandate. Legislated into existence on June 27, 1913, the Bureau had but a short life. The following year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional (finding that the Bureau was financed through an illegal tax scheme),

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and reformers had to begin to look for ways to transfer its functions to a new organization.90

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Reform groups sought to use the results of the Pittsburgh Survey presented at the 1908 Civic Conference and meeting of the National Municipal League to emphasize the problems that Pittsburgh faced, and to build enthusiasm for needed political, social, and environmental reforms. While doing so, Pittsburgh locals were able to resist the main message of the Survey itself regarding the city’s problems, turning their attention not to absentee capitalism and the overweening steel industry, but to local government corruption and to prostitution as the main source of the city’s problems. The years after the Pittsburgh Survey thus represent a split and a road not taken. This is not to say that the problems that Pittsburghers did choose to concentrate on were not real and important, however, for these issues touched on deeply felt concerns over tangible urban pathologies; reformers in the years from 1908 to 1912 won several crucial victories that they thought would end these problems. They succeeded to the extent that they did because their message resonated with significant numbers of Pittsburghers—a function of the familiarity of the message, the prestige of the reformers, and the shared sense of outrage over the excesses of the machine government. The ways in which Pittsburgh reformers exposed councilmanic graft, sought and secured a change in the structure of local city government, and used local governmental power to sustain an anti-prostitution movement, necessitate a new look at how we understand the Progressive reform agenda in Pittsburgh in the years from 1908 to 1912. Samuel Hays, in describing events in Pittsburgh in these years, has focused on the class and professional identities of the reformers as offering the key to the reformers’ motivations and goals. Driven by this view, Hays necessarily concluded that reformers “did not oppose corruption per se,” but rather used accusations of corruption to achieve their real objective: undermining the power of local and particularistic interests, especially as these represented the working and immigrant classes.91 Reformers in Pittsburgh did oppose corruption. Not only did the Voters’ League portray its actions and articulate its agenda in moral terms, but throughout this period the League, along with other organizations, pursued a two-pronged strategy designed to wipe governmental and sexual immorality from the face of the city. Reformers firmly linked together governmental graft and commercialized vice following the League’s investigations and the mass indignation meeting of 1910 (if not earlier); undermining corruption in Pittsburgh therefore meant attacking both. Pittsburgh’s moral health thus became a central theme both in the efforts to pass the Pittsburgh Plan and those to institute and empower the Morals Efficiency Commission. To deny that reformers were in fact very much concerned with “corruption per se” is not only to dismiss reformers’ self-articulated goals and morally-charged language but would necessitate ignoring the whole parallel agenda of anti-prostitution enacted by reform groups such as the Voters’ League. Instead, it is reasonable to see that reform ran easily in tracks grooved by decades of the moral reform discourse.

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Further, reformers would not have been able to create a moral crisis out of whole cloth. Their characterization of the graft scandals and the rise in prostitution as moral crises needed to resonate with notions already firmly embedded in the common Pittsburgher’s conception of what had moral application and what did not. As Quentin Skinner has pointed out, the dominant moral concepts of a society circumscribe the range of possible political action in that society.92 One implication of this reality is that it is not accurate to separate out the moral rhetoric used by reformers as cynical post facto legitimation of an already-decided-upon political agenda. Such an interpretation is wrong not only because moral concern proceeded hand in hand with reform efforts (and in fact often inspired and drove such efforts), but also because moral notions helped to determine what actions reformers could take in the first place. Skinner, as an example to demonstrate the way in which “social vocabulary” restrains and bounds possible social action, posited an eighteenth-century merchant wishing to “legitimate his actions with moral or religious language.” Skinner concluded that “if we wish to explain why our merchant chose to concentrate on certain courses of action while avoiding others, we are bound to make some reference to the prevailing moral language of the society in which he was acting. For this, it now appears, must have figured not as an epiphenomenon of his projects, but as one of the determinants of his actions.” Like Skinner’s eighteenthcentury merchant who wished to portray his self-serving actions as “religious,” but was therefore restricted by what society at large considered “religious,” Pittsburgh’s reformers could not fashion a moral crisis of their own devising and expect to persuade anyone to follow them.93 As did any actor in Pittsburgh’s public sphere, reformers had to provide compelling reasons why their view was the right view and their way was the right way. That churches, clergy, and activist laity took up the cause of changing local governmental structures and participated in anti-prostitution measures shows the extent to which the reformers’ rhetoric rested comfortably within the bounds of Pittsburghers’ thinking on what constituted moral reform. Hays portrayed the change in city council as a victory for Pittsburgh elites, one which turned control of the city over from democratic and representative ward-centered (and therefore often working-class) council members to nine men representing only elite interests. In fact, reformers felt as though they had gotten only “half a loaf,” and that the democratic and Progressive elements they had fought for (the initiative, referendum, and recall) were struck from the plan by the state machine. Later scholars have confirmed the reformers’ sense. Alan Digaetano studied the reform movements in thirty-nine U.S. cities to determine what effect such reform had on urban machine governments. Although Pittsburgh was “moderately reformed” because of successes in changing the structure of city council and the school boards, Digaetano nevertheless classified it as an “unsuccessfully reformed city,” because the machine did not disappear until 1970.94 Clearly the story did not end in 1911 with the passing of the Pittsburgh Plan. Reformers who had celebrated the advent of the “Council of Nine” quickly showed their disappointment when the council was unable to act as swiftly or as unilaterally as reformers had hoped they would. The reform discourse took on notes of discouragement: the panacea of the change in city council, although a great victory, was not going to be an end to the problems of government corruption, the power of the saloon, or the increase in vice. Reformers realized that the power of the machine government could not be stymied even by such a momentous political victory. The Pittsburgh Christian Outlook noted in

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the year that the Council of Nine came up for reelection that the machine was putting forward a slate of nine candidates of their own, and that it would be difficult for the forces of righteousness to defeat them unless they could get Christian voters to do their duty and elect them. Twenty years after the change in the structure of city council, one could hear in Pittsburgh reform rhetoric themes that could just as easily been articulated in 1911.95 Rather than dwelling on their disappointments, however, reformers braced themselves to battle the machine in the administrative wing of local government.

Chapter Five Back to the Churches: the Christian Social Service Union and the Reclamation of the Moral Reform Discourse In the period after the passage of the Pittsburgh Plan, reform energy began to shift back under the leadership of Pittsburgh’s “church forces.” The most important institutional form that this energy first took came in 1912, with the formation of an interdenominational group representing Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches known as the Christian Social Service Union (CSSU). As one of its first public acts, the CSSU pressed the Department of Public Safety, the new nine-member City Council, and Mayor Joseph G.Armstrong for assurances that the city’s nickelodeons and pool halls would be more closely regulated. Concerned that the power of suggestion in the extremely popular weekly movies needed to be carefully guarded, and that pool halls were becoming fronts for gambling and other illicit activities, the Union wanted to ensure that both of these would be “real places of pure pleasure and recreative amusement”.1 Many citizens grumbled about the CSSU’s efforts. Robert Garland, one of the members of the new ninemember council (and parishioner at Calvary Episcopal Church), implied that the involvement of the CSSU in local government business bordered on interference, and that its actions were perhaps motivated by a political opposition to the Armstrong administration. Pressed a few days later to make a statement, Garland noted that while the ministers serving in the CSSU were “highly honorable and actuated by the purest motives,” there were “a few men among the laity, high in the counsels of the union, who…would rather play politics than eat.”2 The Union sought to secure the moral high ground in responding to these charges. Although the executive secretary of the CSSU conceded that “some of the laymen elected to our board are not affiliated with the political group now in power in Pittsburgh,” he denied that anyone involved in the CSSU was grinding a political axe in speaking out about Pittsburgh’s movie and pool hall problem. The CSSU, as an official body connected to Pittsburgh’s Ministerial Union and through it to the over 400 Protestant churches in the city, was not, according to its president, “a self-constituted, irresponsible organization,” and was strictly “non-partisan,” having “nothing whatever to do with party politics.” But the CSSU, as it made clear to both the city administration and the council, would be watching. They did not exist to fight with public officials, CSSU president John Ewers insisted; but “where we find it necessary we will feel perfectly free to criticize or oppose” them.3 The Union, in other words, was taking on for Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches the mantle of a moral and political watchdog, without, at the same time, “playing politics.” The CSSU quickly immersed itself in a broad range of other reforms. It was made up of representatives from all the “evangelical Christian” denominations in Pittsburgh

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(which included the Baptist, Christian, Congregational, Evangelical Association, Lutheran, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Protestant, Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Protestant Episcopal, Reformed, United Brethren, United Evangelical, and United Presbyterian churches), and governed by a Central Board consisting of twelve ministers (elected by Pittsburgh’s Ministerial Union), twelve laymen (elected by representatives from the churches), and the chairs of the CSSU’s departments.4 Its initial goal was to conduct “aggressive programs along several lines, particularly social survey, including the disclosure of unwholesome civic conditions, and agitation against corrupt political conditions such as were protective of the social vices.”5 This agenda was enacted through the councils of the CSSU, which included Surveys, Social Education, Civic Action, Legislation, Commercialized Vice, Industrial Relations, Recreation, Race Relations, and Publicity. Beyond conducting surveys of Pittsburgh’s problem sections, the CSSU quickly became involved in efforts to stem the city’s vice trade, to reform its police court and jury system, to draw attention to the need for industrial reform, to restrict the licensing of saloons and distributors of liquor, and to undermine the power of Pittsburgh’s political machine.6 Such a range of activities is particularly striking considering the ambivalent position Pittsburgh’s churches had taken toward reform efforts in the previous decade and continued to take even into the second decade of the century. More intriguing, however, is that while deliberately and publicly working to reestablish Pittsburgh’s “church forces” as the leaders of moral and political reform efforts in the city, the CSSU nevertheless adopted a consistent rhetorical stance that it was “staying out of politics.” This chapter will explore the contradictory desire on the part of Pittsburgh churches to be in the world of politics but not of it. The CSSU felt compelled to act from a position of consensus within the Protestant community because they believed that united Protestant action was the only effective means of opposing the “intimately inter-operating forces” of the underworld and because they wished to reassert the right of the church to act as the arbiter of public morality. To achieve such a consensus, the CSSU believed, they needed to draw on the traditional legitimacy of the church to speak to social issues, which rested on staying above partisan politics and labor disputes, and to emphasize the traditional Protestant mission of evangelization. That they simultaneously wished to spur Protestant churches to a new collective sense of their social responsibility and encourage a new position of leadership for the church in reform efforts—an agenda resisted by denominationally-centered church hierarchies, conservative clergy and apathetic laity— created an ambiguous situation, one the CSSU negotiated by deploying a rhetoric of noninvolvement while finding ways to be very much involved indeed. In their struggle to find an acceptable middle way between a traditional lethargy and overt political involvement, the CSSU embodied the inherent difficulties for churches interested in concretizing the social gospel. Activist laity proved to be a vital link in the reassertion of control over public morality by the “church forces.” Having served for nearly two decades in the city’s civic reform organizations, participated in the Pittsburgh Survey, altered the structure of the city government, and worked for a range of other reforms, these activist laity served as invaluable links to Pittsburgh’s reform history. The reforms the CSSU pursued were not new but were part of a vast stockpile of strategies and methods accumulated by the city’s interdenominational pressure groups, civic reform organizations, women’s clubs, single-

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issue legislative groups, local, state, and national government commissions, good government institutions, and others. Lay reformers often provided the connection to outside groups, served as the storehouse of strategy suggestions, staffed the necessary shadow groups created to carry out investigations and explicitly political action, and in these years funded the efforts of the CSSU. This reliance on activist laity demonstrated on one level the success social gospel churches had achieved in inspiring some of their members, as Christian citizens, to involve themselves in fixing Pittsburgh’s problems. But it also demonstrated the contingencies always involved when social gospel ideas were concretized in particular geographical and chronological contexts. Whether drawing on sacred or secular sources, the CSSU chose always to push for a consensual rather than a prophetic role. In this way the more radical implications of social gospel theology were domesticated and trimmed to fit into the already-established reform agenda of the Pittsburgh elite. Shaped more by the moral reform discourse about Pittsburgh’s problems than by other sources such as the Pittsburgh Survey or more radical social gospel ideas, the CSSU believed that it was vital for the city’s churches to act as one in battling the machine and its connections to the Saloon and the Brothel. While they were thus able to accomplish their goal of seeking a “middle way” between “lethargy” and “overt political involvement,” one which combined progressive social agendas with a continued interest in the traditional evangelistic mission of the church, becoming truly “representative” meant shedding their more progressive goals.

IN THE INTEREST OF SOCIAL SERVICE: PITTSBURGH CHURCHES GET INVOLVED Long content to leave the leadership of Pittsburgh’s political, industrial and other reforms to organizations such as the Voters’ League, many Pittsburgh churches in the period from 1910 to 1912 began to form social service commissions and focus more explicitly on their social ministries. While zeal for the social mission of the church would only consume a relatively few clergy and laity for a relatively short time, this period was nevertheless an important one in setting the stage for what was to come. For the formation of social service commissions represented the institutionalization of a heightening desire to see Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches become more active in social service to the city—an interest that would later blossom into a desire for full-fledged leadership of the city’s reform efforts. For now, the establishment of commissions and an increase in a social focus within the services and Sunday schools of select Pittsburgh churches provided an overtly religious outlet for reform zeal, energy which had until this point necessarily been spent in the secular reform organizations. As we have seen, participation by Pittsburgh’s activist laity significantly contributed to these organizations’ framing of the reform discourse in decidedly moral terms. Such an overtly moral discourse had this effect: it helped church leaders to think that the city’s “church forces” could play a larger role in leading reform efforts. Thus while the Voters’ League and Civic Club played up the corruption of the city government and bemoaned the increase in prostitution, church organizations formed which began to take up the same causes. Of course churches, clergy, and activist laity had long been involved in the antiprostitution movement, and the citys Protestant ministers had often commented on the

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political and labor situation in Pittsburgh. What had been missing, however, was effectively linked church organizations which would lead such efforts. The churches had been unwilling to take explicit sides in political or industrial conflicts, and unwilling, in many cases, to give the church an overtly social focus. In 1912, many of these church organizations would find such an organizational linkage when the Men and Religion Forward Movement came to Pittsburgh and gave a brief but powerful example of how “church forces” could unite for social change. That such change was centered in a movement that worked from men’s Sunday school classes, various denominational “brotherhoods,” and usually all-male social service commissions, and pointedly excluded African American and female voices, also meant that church-led reform in Pittsburgh was to have a lopsidedly homogenous voice. The formation of committees and commissions in Pittsburgh churches devoted to exploring the social role of the church often followed the lead of the denominations at the national level. The General Convention of the Episcopal church in 1910, for example, resolved to form a Joint Commission on Social Service which was “to study and report upon social and industrial conditions” and “co-ordinate the activities of the various organizations existing in the Church in the interest in social service.” The Commission had several Pittsburgh connections. George Hodges served on its board, as did H.D.W.English. It is therefore not surprising that when the Pittsburgh Diocese created its own Social Service Commission in May of 1913, English was a prominent member and was later selected as its chair. The Commission met four times a year in English’s downtown business office. As it wrote in its first message to the diocese, the Commission felt that: We are so busy these days about non-essentials that we are missing the great opportunity which Almighty God has set before us, to launch out into the deep of the world’s unrest, misery and social dissatisfaction, and strive by the study of actual conditions to help humanity by deed as well as word, and draw men into the Church because of our interest in their temporal, as well as spiritual side… Your Commission feels strongly that the Church in this Diocese should show such an interest that a stop would be put to the constant expression in our community on the part of those antagonistic to the Church that social injustice makes no appeal to the Church in this Diocese. We know this to be false, but until we demonstrate its falsity by our social interest we cannot change the opinion of many who are constantly discussing these matters.7 In spite of a longtime commitment to social service in Episcopal churches such as Calvary, the Social Service Commission felt it necessary to prod Episcopalians into greater social service efforts. Striking a theme that would become a common refrain by the “church forces,” the primary appeal by the Commission was to consider the image of the church in the community. If the church was perceived (accurately or inaccurately) as unconcerned about social injustice, it would lose its ability to control public opinion of such matters. The situation in which the Episcopalian Social Service Commission found itself, with a core group of activist and interested laity trying to rally the rest of the denomination’s

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clergy and laity into social service, held true for other Pittsburgh Protestants in this era as well. Pittsburgh’s Methodists, although not forming a social service commission until 1921, were nevertheless aware of the turn of the national denomination to social gospel thinking (as in the “Social Creed of Methodism”), and began to reflect its teachings. They retooled existing organizations in this era to give them a more explicit social service cast. The Methodist Episcopal Church Union (MECU), for example, was formed in 1880 primarily as a source of emergency funding for financially troubled churches in the Pittsburgh area. Over time the Union also assumed responsibility of the church’s home mission efforts, and coordinated the activities of the various Methodist Episcopal missions sprinkled throughout the city. In 1912 the Union began to publish the Pittsburgh Methodist, which informed the city’s Methodists about the state of the various missions and served as a forum for the exhortations by Union leadership toward greater social effort. Its work was broken down into several committees, which oversaw the operation of the District’s Fresh Air Home, its Day Nursery, its institutional church work on Pittsburgh’s North Side, the operations of Trinity Temple (a settlement house in the Strip District), evangelistic work, “relief and correction,” and “constructive social measures.” The latter was charged to investigate “causes of inefficiency in the individual and society; mal-adjustments in the home and economic life, and the reason for the failure of social policies designed to promote the best interests of society.”8 This committee also had the responsibility for conducting “systematic campaigns of social education” among the Methodist churches to teach ways of effective involvement in social problems. And, breaking out from behind denominational boundaries, this committee was to devise “ways and means of practical co-operation with all social, economic, political, and religious agencies” in improving society. It was a duty they took seriously. Two of its lay members, attorney W.H.Pratt and funeral director Harry G.Samson, would both assume leadership positions in the Christian Social Service Union. The MECU in this period also pushed the formation of “Social Study Groups” among Methodists, and offered a list of suggested topics that focused on the study of “local community needs,” including educational and recreational opportunities, living conditions, the methods of poverty relief, crime statistics and the causes of delinquency, “what municipal ordinances and state laws are not being enforced and why,” working conditions of laborers, and whether “any section of the population (colored or immigrant)” was “not sharing fully in the life of the community.”9 They organized as well a “Social Service Forum” in the spring of 1912, which would meet every Wednesday to discuss different subjects. Such forums, becoming common in Pittsburgh’s social-oriented churches, provided a distinctly religious site for “secular” reform conversation, and served as well as a point of confluence for religious language and notexplicitly-religious reforms. Methodists in this forum, for example, heard talks on “education for social efficiency,” heard Allen T. Burns, president of Pittsburgh’s Civic Commission, talk on “taxation in Pittsburgh,” and listened to the national president of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers John Williams speak on the “eight hour day” and “one day’s rest in seven.” Mr. J.T.Taylor, a man “closely connected with the meat industry” told the Methodists that “as far as the meat problem goes…you must work out your own salvation.10 Such topics were now not only legitimately discussed within church space, but, even if jokingly, discussed in religious terms.

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In a similar vein, the First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh had formed, in 1912, the “Yokefellows” class for men (established as a chapter of the national Baptist Brotherhood), and a “Women’s Class for the Study of Christian Social Service.” The former heard talks such as “The Factory Girls of Pittsburgh and the Social Problem”; “Woman’s Suffrage”; “Pending Child Labor Legislation”; and “The Social Evil, Its Cause and Its Cure.” Speakers included J.Byron Deacon, Rabbi Rudolf Coffee, and Allen T.Burns, who seemed to be making the rounds to socially-concerned churches. First Baptist members Beulah Kennard, founder of “Playgrounds in Pittsburgh,” and E.L.Mattern, member of the Morals Efficiency Commission of Pittsburgh, also lectured the Yokefellows.11 The Women’s Class, founded with the object of applying “Bible teachings to the solution of everyday social and personal problems,” conducted a multiweek study of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis and heard talks on many of the same subjects as the men.12 Such classes could lead to action. The men’s class, for example, took up the cause of voter registration in 1915, getting 75 percent of the church’s members to pledge to register and vote in the primary and regular elections. In the same year, Dr. Charles R.Zahniser, executive secretary of the CSSU, attended a supper at the church “held to discuss the merits of the various election candidates,” and the class heard as well from the Secretary of the Voters’ League and from City Council member Dillinger.13 The United Presbyterians had demonstrated, at least at the denominational level, a long and intense interest in civic righteousness and justice. The denominations organ, the United Presbyterian, was consistently sprinkled with articles on a range of topics concerning social justice, including child labor, Pittsburgh’s housing conditions, the right to work, immigration, the “offensive luxury of men suddenly rich,” the “responsibility of employers” to provide decent wages and healthy living conditions, as well as more expected topics such as prostitution, Sabbath labor, and temperance.14 The UP Ministerial Association would regularly host speakers on topics of civic concern, as when they invited Civic Club president Julian Kennedy to address them on “civic righteousness.”15 The United Presbyterian also kept up a constant drumbeat of opinion that Christian voters should use their ballots for the good of the city: “he who shuns personal sin should, by his vote, shun the promotion of public vice…[and] he who will not carry his religion into his politics has none that is worth carrying anywhere.”16 1910 was the first year that the UP General Assembly heard from the Commission on the Church and Industrial Labor, which generated a certain amount of opposition and fear that “there was a danger of the Church straying out of its proper sphere.” By the time the assembly met in 1913, however, and enthusiastically heard a report on the reform work in the church which “placed the Church on record as standing firmly for equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life,” things had changed. The 1913 report, which was likely modeled on similar Federal Council of Churches pronouncements, called for “proper housing,” the “abolition of child labor,” regulation of female labor, “suitable provision for the old age of workers and for those incapacitated by injury,” for one day’s rest in seven, and for “the most equitable division of the product of industry that can ultimately be devised.”17 The United Presbyterian noted that the report was “passed without a dissenting vote,” and claimed that this was evidence of a “profound change that was taking place within the Church,” and “an increasing apprehension of the fact that the

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principles taught by the Christ and lived by the Christ must be applied to every condition and circumstance of human life.”18 That the social message was getting through to United Presbyterian laymen is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that Pittsburgh’s only social gospel novel was authored by the son of a United Presbyterian minister in 1910. The Man Higher Up was written by Henry Russell Miller, a Pittsburgher who successfully practiced general civil law in Pittsburgh for a decade, writing novels on the side. He later went into the publishing business.19 The Man Higher Up is the story of Bob McAdoo, a man born in immigrant poverty in Pittsburgh who works his way up from being a bootblack to become a powerful ward boss. Events take place in a context loosely structured around Pittsburgh machine history. The story opens shortly after Steele (based on Christopher Magee) dies, and “the machine was allowed to fall into excesses that Steele never would have permitted.” A character named Harmon, “to satisfy a long cherished dislike,” dismissed another (named MacPherson) as Director of Public Works, a clear reflection of the dismissal of E.M.Bigelow by William Flinn.20 Within this setting, Bob McAdoo rises to success as a ward boss by being a ruthless and physically intimidating man—one who cares about “his people,” but who is intoxicated by his own rise in power and ability to make the political system work for him. Inspired by the example of a reforming senator, John Dunmeade, McAdoo eventually converts from a selfish ward boss to mayor of Pittsburgh. John Ferre has written that in the genre of the social gospel novel, a “social gospel for millions,” evil resided in “the selfishness of individuals,” a selfishness amplified and highlighted by evil or uncaring institutions, such as an apathetic church or the saloon. The hero was the individual “who leads people to repent of their unbridled selfishness,” with the result being “social harmony.” The concern with institutions, Ferre argues, was rooted in the environmental thinking of the turn-of-the-century middle class wherein “an unwholesome environment could corrupt all but the strongest of persons.”21 McAdoo’s conversion comes after a conversation with John Dunmeade’s wife and another character, a Mr. Murchell, who explain the motivating power behind John Dunmeade’s success: “the Force.” The “Force” was the “great social Force” that “makes the man, the social unit, find his happiness, his welfare, in the happiness and welfare of his brethren, or society.” McAdoo then has this exchange with Murchell and Mrs. Dunmeade: “Bob’s mouth twisted into his sardonic grin. “It’s a hopeless theory, Mr. Murchell. You make us all blind automatons. You take away from me—the crassest egoist you have ever known—my individuality, my reason for existence, my Self. And you give me in exchange—a species of sublimated socialism.” “Yes,” Murchell said quietly, “the socialism of Christ when He commanded “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Your Force is as inexorable as God!” “The Force is God,” Murchell answered quietly. “Yes, Mrs. Dunmeade said gently, “For God is love.” “Bob turned to her and the sneer faded from his mouth. “What does the Force give us in exchange for our selfishness? What have I, reduced to an atomaton [sic], to make life and action worth while?” “The happiness of seeing your fellows happier,” she replied. “And Love.”22

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McAdoo believes, and thereafter successfully administers the city of Pittsburgh for the good of all, in spite of temptations on the part of representatives of the steel trust to return to his old ways. Resisting the outlines of the moral reform discourse, the book in the end is less critical of the machine government than it is of the rich and powerful steel manufacturers. The former is painted in familiar, stereotypical hues, but is seen as existing because the people allow it to exist. The real evil, Miller indicated, resided in the “money kings,” the “small group of modern financiers” who had amassed unbelievable sums of money and then used that money to “fire the engines that run the nation’s political machinery.” On his deathbed McAdoo wonders about the fate of the common people of the country, “whose lives are being worn out in the effort to produce far more than they consume,” and asks why they can never get ahead. “He knew the answer:” It gloomed solemnly down at him from million-dollar palaces, honked hoarsely through the streets from costly imported automobiles, flashed brilliantly from the bejeweled fingers of wife and courtesan, kept gleaming necks and shoulders warm in the face of shivering poverty, gurgled in goblets of precious vintages, raced panting under the wire. Above all, he read the answer in the terrific power of the modern feudal system—concentrated wealth—whose machinery was slowly crunching, crunching, crunching his people into helpless subjection. From a race of men who were producers had sprung a generation of men whom the world called “financiers”—who gave no equivalent to humanity for what they wrung out of humanity. They reared magnificent memorial churches…endowed universities, erected libraries…they gave to charity as did the Pharisee, conspicuously… But the surplus which they distributed was wealth that others had created and which the possessors had not earned.23 Miller thus ends the story with his ward-boss-turned-reformer espousing a producer’s ideology and siding clearly with the “common people.” This, too, constituted a lay appropriation of United Presbyterian social teachings. Presbyterians in the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) were more hesitant, collectively, to trumpet the cause of social service, for Pittsburgh had long been a bastion of conservative Presbyterianism (discussed below). Nevertheless, even these Presbyterians manifested a certain amount of social sentiment. In 1915, three new committees appeared at the Presbytery level of the PCUSA: a Committee on “Sabbath, Temperance, and Public Morals,” one on “Work for Men,” and one on the “Church and Social Problems.” The duty of the latter was to “gather facts and information on important social and economic problems in our community, and to report the same to Presbytery from time to time,” collaborate with the denominational Bureau of Social Service and Committee on Temperance, and cooperate with “similar committees or commissions of other churches of our community in making a concurrent study or investigation of pressing social questions upon which the voice of the church should be heard in an effective and united way.”24

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THE GENDERED DIMENSIONS OF CHURCH-LED REFORM In Pittsburgh, as in many cities, the growth of interest in the social service agenda of the churches was linked to attempts by Protestant churches to get more men to become active in church work. Such attempts began with the recognition that the Protestant church in the Victorian period was predominantly female, and that it was necessary to find ways to involve and interest men in the church. One important early site of interdenominational attention to this issue were the “men’s Sunday School” groups that met in different parts of the city. These began without an explicit link to social service agendas. A good example is the “Neighborhood Men’s Bible Study” that began in 1906 in the Eighth United Presbyterian Church in Allegheny. Prof. John McNaughter, president of Allegheny Theological Seminary and professor of New Testament and Greek, led the class, which attracted “many men not identified with the church.”25 McNaughter conducted a very traditional class, focusing on such subjects as “the Ten Commandments.” Such men’s groups, serving as informal sites of conversation and education and as a meeting ground for activist male laity from a variety of denominations, provided the groundwork for the development of denominational brotherhoods. Nearly every mainline denomination, in the early years of the twentieth century, determined to form denominational brotherhoods in order to draw more men into the work of the church. The United Presbyterians, for example, in the Semi-Centennial Missionary Convention in December of 1904, recommended that every congregation form a “Men’s Missionary League” in order to involve men in the work of missions. More explicit was the “Business Men’s Conference” of the UP church which met in Pittsburgh in February of 1906, called “in the hope and belief that if the men of the Church could be brought together to consider prayerfully the whole question of men’s work in and for the Church, they would arrive at some practical plans for doing this work better.”26 The “Men’s League” of Monongahela Presbytery arose out of this conference and held its first meeting in January of 1907. Although the social service aspects of the United Presbyterian mission did not receive center stage, the beginnings of such work could be seen in the “Neighborhood Work,” “Helping Sick and Poor,” and “Promoting Reform” round-table discussions held at the conference. The rally also passed resolutions that urged an investigation of atrocities in the Congo, deplored the “desecration of the Sabbath,” and “heartily” commended the administration of Mayor George Guthrie, “in the firm stand he has taken in upholding the laws pertaining to the Sabbath and the general uplift along moral lines.”27 Pittsburgh’s Episcopalian men had been tuned into the anxieties of a “feminized church” for even longer. Reformers such as H.D.W.English, as we saw in a previous chapter, had worried over the effect of largely female leadership at the Kingsley House settlement. He joined others in concern that church work in general, and social reform work in particular, was too dominated by women. George Hodges, for example, although he encouraged women to Christian service (especially because, he noted, they “had the most time,”)28 did so specifically along the metaphorical lines of “municipal housekeeping.” “The housekeeper knows very well that there cannot be clean houses unless there are clean streets,” he noted. “The needs of the city are such as appeal directly to the intelligence of women. The condition of the schools, the housing of the people, the

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question of the public health, the regulation of the traffic in drink, the management of the city charities, the adornment of the town—all these matters are of immediate and natural concern to women, and without their counsel and assistance will be done with clumsy fingers.”29 Male moral reformers realized the extent to which women already participated in myriad ways in sustaining the social work of the church. Some years later English would note that, while only 25 men out of the 900 or so on Calvary’s church rolls were “giving actual service” to the church and its ministries, Calvary’s women were “saving us from humiliation,” subscribing money to the church at twice the rate of its male congregants.30 As it became clearer to clerical advocates of social Christianity like Hodges that the social mission of the church needed to go beyond its traditional bounds and involve itself in all aspects of the life of the city, it became apparent as well that male laity needed to be convinced that such work could not be left up to the women. Thus the male leadership of the Kingsley Association signaled, in their rhetoric and their actions, that reform work was manly work. Hodges called for “a resolute, undaunted army of manly men” to involve themselves in attacking the city’s problems.31 It is not insignificant that the 1890s saw the formation of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, the allmale Church Club, and multiple efforts to establish and sustain Men’s Bible classes. The Church Club heard such talks as that given in 1899 by E.H.Ward, rector of Pittsburgh’s St. Peter’s Church, on “The Claims of the Church Upon Men To-day.”32 Calvary’s newsletter, the Parish Advocate, proclaimed after the national convention of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew met in Pittsburgh in October 1896 that “no layman in Pittsburgh should think that the religious work of the Church is an exclusive affair of the Clergy and the devout women; he should rather wonder why laymen have been so long finding their place and function in definite Church work.”33 Long-simmering desires to involve men more significantly in the life of the Episcopal church blossomed in the second decade of the twentieth century. Calvary Episcopal Church, for example, hosted in 1910 a long evening program entitled “Addresses on Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men.” Pierce C.Williams, explaining why young men were not attracted to the church, worried that in the church “the atmosphere is feminine, psychologically, and the women have more to do than the men. The emphasis is placed upon feeling rather than upon action, and the natural bent of the young man is toward action in which he can infuse a religious spirit and energy.” George Hodges, brought back as a guest speaker, declared that he wished he could see the 400 men attending the dinner that night in church the next Sunday. He would then be able to say that Calvary was a “man’s church,” a fact which would help to make the church more attractive to visiting men. “When a man looks in a church filled up with women,” Hodges concluded, “he does not go in.” The path to making Calvary a “man’s church,” according to H.D.W.English, was a problem that was “big enough to engage big men who are engaged in big material enterprises.” Anticipating the themes of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, activist laity and clergy at Calvary portrayed participation in the reform activities of social Christianity as a manly crusade against both the corrupting foes of the city and the “feminine atmosphere” of the church.34 Denominational brotherhoods began to notice their common interests, and plans to hold a common meeting became reality in 1908. Pittsburgh was host to the second InterBrotherhood conference in February of 1909, when the executive officers of national

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denominational brotherhoods gathered downtown at the Fort Pitt hotel.35 “Its dominant note,” one journal reported, “was one of spiritual unity, brotherly fellowship and cooperation in promoting the Master’s kingdom throughout the world by the organized manhood of the Christian Church.” This unified gathering turned a bit more explicitly toward the need for churches to become socially involved. Dr. Josiah Strong, the representative for the American Institute of Social Service, “told of the series of lesson studies” on “Christian Sociology” which was being prepared by the Institute “for use in Brotherhoods and other organizations of men.36 The culmination of the fear of a feminized religion, and the clear portrayal of social service as manly work, would come with the Men and Religion Forward movement (MRFM) of 1911–1912. The MRFM was a national movement conceived in 1910 by representatives of the YMCA, the national denominational Brotherhoods, and the International Sunday School Association, with the broad object of increasing the “active membership of men and boys in the Christian churches” in America.37 Stressing the five themes of evangelism, boys’ work, missions, Bible study, and social service, the organizers of the MRFM planned for and executed week-long meetings in seventy-six of the largest U.S. cities and more than a thousand smaller towns from September, 1911 to April, 1912, eventually reaching over a million people. The overriding message in all of these meetings was that the numerical and atmospheric dominance of America’s Protestant churches by women needed to end—to be replaced with a virile, muscular Christianity which offered tasks to America’s Protestant men “worthy of the best time and mightiest effort of the manliest man.”38 In seeking to provide “More Men for Religion, More Religion for Men,” Gail Bederman has argued, the MRFM emerged as a response to shifts in the perceived value of a “feminized religion.” “As entrepreneurial capitalism gave way to an increasingly corporate order,” she concluded, “the voice of feminine restraint embodied in Victorian Protestantism began to seem sissified and effeminate…[and] the value of a feminized Protestantism came to appear increasingly dubious.”39 The response on the part of the organizers of the Men and Religion Forward Movement and those who came to support it was to stress the ways in which church work was especially masculine. Movement organizers, although initially lukewarm toward social gospel ideas, soon discovered that the activities proposed by social Christianity were especially effective in attracting male allegiance, and thus came to promote social service as a primary vehicle for the masculinization of Protestant Christianity. Pittsburgh, beyond being one of the cities hosting a MRFM campaign meeting, boasted several members on the movement’s national executive “Committee of NinetySeven.”40 Rev. W.I.Wishart, pastor of the Homewood United Presbyterian Church and a Pittsburgh member of this Committee, attended one of the first organizational meetings of the MRFM, held in New York City in June of 1911. He noted that the committee was largely made up of laymen—laymen “accustomed to do things…men of achievement,” who were “putting into the Men and Religion Forward Movement the energy, the mastery of detail, the foresight and the persistence which have made them so successful in the business world.”41 As one of the speakers at an earlier meeting of the MRFM leadership had noted, men were absent from the church because the church was not performing services they were interested in. “What are they interested in?” this speaker queried. “Just now they are interested in honest administration of the public service, in clean municipal politics, in

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the suppression of vice, in the regulation or suppression of the liquor traffic, in adequate provision for the sick and unfortunate, and in many other such concerns.” By getting the church more involved in these sorts of activities, “the man and the church may be brought together along the line of common service and common interest.”42 According to Pittsburgh’s United Presbyterian, the MRFM was correct in asserting that the church needed to be involved in, and lead, social reform. “Without the Church of Jesus to furnish the workers, to offer a motive, and to back up these movements,” the editors concluded, “there would be no social service in our country worth talking about.”43 The MRFM thus sought to place the manly task of civic, political, and environmental reform under the leadership of the church, so that the church could recruit the men interested in realizing these reforms. As Bederman concluded, the movement was able to bring together traditional, evangelistic-oriented and more liberal social-gospel minded Protestant men because “the Social Gospelers appropriated” the movement “to spread their theological message,” while “the advocates of masculinization appropriated the Social Gospel to the services of defeminizing the church.”44 Like other cities in which the eight-day meetings were to be held, Pittsburgh was encouraged to form a “Committee of One Hundred” “made up of men whose Christianity is pronounced and virile;” these were instructed to prepare the ground for the campaign by conducting surveys of local conditions and organizing the various men’s groups in the city into committees along the lines of the five thematic emphases.45 The national movement provided lectures, strategies for organizing, and reams of literature advertising the ideas of the movement, but local committees were given ultimate responsibility for arranging each city’s convention.46 The organizing committee divided Allegheny County into seventeen divisions, and sponsored events and meetings intended to unite the efforts of some 2,500 workers “with all the care to detail of a great political campaign.”47 The committee also attempted to secure the allegiance of local churches, getting nearly 400 churches to make addresses on the theme of social service one Sunday in December. On January 28, 1912, the eight-day Pittsburgh campaign commenced with a meeting of five thousand men in Exposition Hall. As in other campaign cities, a team of four “experts” had been dispatched to Pittsburgh to present the five themes of the movement to the city’s men, and to teach them to spread the word when the campaign was finished. Raymond Robins, a former miner who had become a minister in a university social settlement in Chicago, addressed attendees on the social gospel. In one of his first talks he was challenged by a minister who was a self-identified Christian Socialist, but responded that his “hope of social improvement [did] not rest upon the working of…economic determinism…but upon…the transforming power of the strong Son of God as he touches the lives of men and the laws of society.”48 The rest of the week’s activities included sessions with each “expert,” denominational luncheons, shop meetings in local industries, and other large gatherings. The campaign ended with many Pittsburgh men committed to solidifying the advances made and concretizing its organizational results. Apparently, the movement was not interested in soliciting the membership of African American churches. The national MRFM, Bederman found, “ignored black Protestant organizations altogether.”49 Pittsburgh’s campaign was more proactive, deliberately excluding African Americans who wished to participate. Two black delegates from Steubenville, Ohio, and from Franklin, Pennsylvania, showed up for the conference and

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dinner at the Hotel Pitt. As the Pittsburgh Courier, Pittsburgh’s black newspaper, recounted: The introduction of the Socialist question into the discussion proved an insignificant feature as compared with the presence of the two Negro delegates. The “men” ran to cover, the “religion” went up in smoke, and the “forward movement” was ordered to mark time until a Wylie Avenue restaurant [the main street through one of Pittsburgh’s African-American neighborhoods] could be found for the accommodation of the colored brethren, so run reports. This incident proves an ample test of the Christianity behind the Movement. All the devil had to do was play his deuce of Negro Delegates, and the whole game was captured. Just what report the Negro Delegates will take back with them, has not been ascertained; but certainly they will have little to say about the menus served to the workers.50 Although the “Negro problem” was one item of discussion for the participants in the movement, this discussion would take place without the actual presence of anyone who lived in a black community. This would change, and white Protestant organizations would come to see the need in including black ministers and lay leaders in reform efforts. For now, only white men were wanted for white churches. While the MRFM fell short of its intended goals to save 25,000 souls in Pittsburgh and raise a million dollars for missions, it did have several significant consequences for the direction of Pittsburgh reform. It provided a strong spur toward the involvement of churches in social reform, helped to form a more strictly church-oriented network of reformers, and provided strategies and literature for these organizations. The sweep of the movement through the city left in its wake a variety of denominational and transdenominational social service commissions and church organizations. The Men and Religion Forward Movement had combined the awakening social sense of select Protestants with the outrage over civic affairs, and its “social service” branch provided both motivation and an organizational structure for a group of male reformers, lay and clergy, who had long been interested in the problems of urban Pittsburgh. One of the most important outcomes of the MRFM was that these men decided to make the “social service” aspect of the movement permanent by creating the Christian Social Service Union.51

KEEPING CAREFULLY OUT OF POLITICS? THE CSSU AND THE RHETORIC OF POLITICAL NEUTRALITY The CSSU thus formed at the crest of a reform wave that enveloped the churches as well as the civic reform organizations of the city. It was certainly not the first example of interdenominational cooperation for social reform in the city. In fact, the executive secretary of the CSSU, Presbyterian minister Charles Reed Zahniser, noted several organizations active in Pennsylvania that served as “precursors” to this group: the Allegheny County Sabbath School Association (est. 1889), the Woman’s Christian

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Temperance Union, and the Anti-Saloon League—all of which represented interdenominational groups making efforts to address the social ills of the era.52 And although it had tended to shy away from declarations concerning social or political reform, the Pittsburgh Ministerial Union (established in 1902) had for a decade brought the city’s Protestant ministers together for Monday meetings and quarterly conferences. Following the lead of the Federal Council of Churches, Pittsburgh’s churches had even tried to federate in 1910, but “its time was not yet ripe.”53 Lacking the organizational structure that a local council of churches would have provided, those interested in uniting the churches for social service turned to other channels of organization in 1912. Initially an all-male entity, the CSSU relied on the network of Men’s Bible Classes that had sprung up in a number of denominations, a network that was deepened, extended, and more explicitly structured through the Men and Religion Forward Movement. An announcement in the Pittsburgh Methodist about the work of the CSSU claimed that it would not be the policy of the Union “to form new local organizations in the churches, but to utilize the existing organizations, particularly the brotherhoods and men’s Bible classes, from which sources strong support is already assured.”54 The clergy and laity central to the formation of the CSSU had waged a long campaign to convince Pittsburgh’s churches of the necessity of church involvement in fixing the problems of the city. As we have seen, Pittsburgh’s churches had often been unwilling to take explicit roles in the political reform movements, even while teaching that such involvement was central to being a good Christian. Interestingly, some of the more vocal criticism of a withdrawn church came from lay or secular sources, which openly criticized the withdrawn stance most churches had taken. As recounted earlier, Robert Woods, a leader in the settlement house movement in Boston who was named director of field research for the Pittsburgh Survey, concluded in the much-publicized Survey that Pittsburgh churches were “shamefully indifferent in matters of public morality,” and while “the following of the churches is large, devout, loyal…the church in Pittsburgh has been a hospitable garrison to defend the faith, not a conquering army of righteousness.”55 A meeting of representatives from various secular Pittsburgh reform groups in 1910 echoed this criticism, identifying Pittsburgh ministers as “moral cowards unconcerned about public evils.”56 When Pittsburgh churches called for a “day of prayer” in response to the news of the graft scandals that same year, it brought an angry and astonished response from a Braddock United Presbyterian layman who had been elected to the Pennsylvania legislature. The Hon.M.Clyde Kelley denounced the “day of prayer” as “one of the most pathetic things ever witnessed in Pennsylvania” because “a great city was placed in the attitude of a helpless victim of looters and plunderers.” “It would have been far better,” Kelley concluded, “if there had been a few more pre-election prayers in the sense of recognizing the sanctity of the ballot and the duty of casting it in the right way.”57 An article appearing in the October 1910 issue of The American Magazine even tried to use anti-Semitism to shame Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches. Referring to the fact that the Voters’ League investigations were led by A.Leo Weil, a member of Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom synagogue, the author Albert Jay Nock questioned whether “the iron-clad militant Protestantism [was] worth having if the city has to feel its way toward elementary social Christianity under the leadership of a Jew.”58 H.D.W.English, a central figure in the formation of the CSSU, expressed the role these reformers sought for the church when, as described in an earlier chapter, he sent a letter

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to over three hundred Pittsburgh ministers in 1912 in his capacity as vice-president of the Voters’ League. English lectured the ministers on the “duty” of the church and warned that the church could lose its “rightful place in the life of Pittsburgh” if it did not widen its social program.59 Where the early 1890s had seen socially conscious ministers spurring their congregations to involvement in reform efforts, the tables had now been turned, and activist laity scolded inward-looking churches for their lack of social concern. Laity such as English, who had not only drunk deep droughts of social gospel teaching at Calvary Episcopal but had been a major mover and shaker in Pittsburgh’s Progressive reform efforts, thus set out an ambitious new role for the church. In declaring that it was the “duty” of the church to “look at every part of the government of the city to detect causes of wrong,” English was calling for the expansion of church activities to encompass the role of political watchdog. In doing so English encouraged the church to take on a task that was the central function of the Voters’ League itself. The reform discourse, having long been infused with moral conceptions, led reformers to the natural conclusion that the churches should support the reform efforts of groups such as the Voters’ League. Certain ministers in the CSSU wished to promote the same view of the church’s role. Echoing English’s message, they believed that the future legitimacy of the churches to speak with authority in society depended on whether they embraced the principles of “social Christianity.” Social gospel clergy had long denounced the “spurious pietism” of their more conservative brethren, which gave priority to an otherworldly morality over bringing the Kingdom of God here and now, and the CSSU’s ministers struck this same theme. As CSSU Executive Secretary Zahniser wrote, for example: The demands of our day are distinctively social and these demands the evangel of our fathers is failing to satisfy. Yet they must be met by the church or she will lose her leadership. There is rising and will continue to rise a vox populi that is a vox dei demanding a gospel for social needs… If the church is to retain her grip on the confidence of the masses, she must heed this call and respond with a larger evangelism.60 This dual concern with both “a gospel for social needs” and the “leadership” of the church was reflected in the stated object of the CSSU, which claimed that the Union had been organized “to unite the religious forces of the city and county for social service and to serve the community by turning the dynamic of religion into definite channels of effort for social betterment.” This should happen “so that religious forces shall be working for social improvement under religious direction.”61 CSSU organizers understood how the two were tied together. It was no longer enough for socially conscious churches to encourage the involvement of their laity in secular civic reform organizations. For the church truly to stand for a social gospel, one that would unite the “religious forces” for social betterment, it was necessary for the church itself to take on a leadership role in reform efforts. Long a force in shaping the discourse of Pittsburgh reform in moral terms, church-affiliated reformers now wished to bring this reform under the ostensible control of the church. These reformers felt that the social gospel demanded a more active role that, if not pursued, would strip the church of all claims to leadership in moral matters,

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and powerful “religious” forces would be dissipated in the service of secular organizations’ agendas. The CSSU thus worked on several fronts to integrate itself formally into Pittsburgh’s reform network. It gathered into its organization an impressive collection of the city’s laity and clergy who had been involved in Pittsburgh’s reform organizations, creating, for this purpose, an “Advisory Board” staffed by leaders in social service work in the city. The board’s members included the presidents and heads of Pittsburgh’s settlement houses as well as its temperance, charity, and civic reform organizations.62 Leaders in the CSSU also worked to staff the Union’s Central Board with laity active in the Pittsburgh reform scene. Members included H.D.W.English, who was one of the city’s most prominent reformers. Other lay members of this Board included the President of the Pittsburgh YMCA and the Treasurer of the Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League, and fully half of its members or their wives belonged to the Civic Club, the Voters’ League, or both.63 These efforts not only integrated the CSSU into the extensive network of reform forces in Pittsburgh, but provided as well a significant bank of reform strategies and experience for it to draw upon. Despite deliberately connecting itself to the major social reform agencies of the city, the CSSU, here and in later reform efforts, employed a rhetoric of political neutrality to assuage its critics. There would be limits, it noted, in the role that the CSSU would play. In all its activities, the CSSU claimed it would be “staying out of politics.” The Union downplayed its actual involvement in reform efforts, and portrayed itself as primarily a fact-finding agency. As Executive Secretary Zahniser noted, the organization intended to “put the facts before the people, until the people change the facts.” The CSSU, along with the Pittsburgh Council of Churches (the organization that subsumed it in 1917), claimed repeatedly in its organ The Pittsburgh Christian Outlook that “the churches have no intention of going into politics,” and that the Council had “carefully kept itself out of politics.” An effort was made in this early period never to endorse a particular political party, or to support a specific candidate for office; the Civic Action Committee of the PCC claimed that “as long as we hold to that principle we are not in politics.”64 Using language which evoked the position of the churches in the previous decade, the Union’s leaders wished to preserve for it a prophetic role: they would declare the shortcomings of Pittsburgh, and others would be expected to act to change them. Thus, having set out to make the “church forces” of Pittsburgh a potent political force, the CSSU felt it necessary to maintain a rhetorical stance claiming a careful distance from the particulars of reform efforts. This contradiction between the agenda and the rhetoric of the CSSU had several sources. One reason was that the CSSU occupied an ambiguous organizational space. Although claiming to represent more than 400 congregations, and granting membership to the minister and one layman from every Protestant church in Allegheny County, the CSSU was not a purely representative body. Membership until 1917 was limited to men, and afterwards the leadership of the organization remained all male. Those serving on the various boards of the organization were not selected by the denominations at large, but by their social service departments, and the work of the CSSU as a whole was not supported financially by the city’s Protestant denominations (Zahniser noted that the CSSU “was being financed by popular contributions but under-written for the initial years by certain reliable individuals”). This meant that the CSSU was not perceived as ultimately

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answerable to or strictly representative of Pittsburgh’s Protestant denominational bodies.65 In reality, the CSSU served as an interdenominational clearinghouse for those in Protestant denominations who were interested in getting the church to engage more actively in social service, and in this sense represented the interests of only a percentage of Protestant churchgoers. It was thus in the position, according to its executive secretary, of being able to “speak to the churches,” but not having the authority to “speak for the churches.”66 This did not seem to stop the CSSU from doing so, however, and thus “many of our church leaders felt that [the CSSU] had no right to speak in the name of the churches or presume to represent the churches until they themselves became subject to control by the churches through their regularly constituted denominational bodies.”67 When tackling divisive issues, the CSSU therefore found it a good strategy to emphasize its fact-finding and moral exhorting roles over its more politically active ones. Further, the Union was caught in the ambiguity of its own message. Pittsburgh’s churches in the first decade of the century—even its social gospel-oriented churches— were hesitant to engage in explicitly political reform efforts, believing that their moral authority derived from maintaining a position somehow “above” the specifics of either the “social question” or the “labor problem.” The CSSU was very interested in reestablishing the legitimacy of the church to lead society in moral questions. Thus it wished to draw upon this traditional moral legitimacy while simultaneously shifting its basis, arguing that the church to be heeded must be involved in making the city better. The Union realized, on the one hand, that mere rhetorical support for secular reform groups on the part of the church was no longer sufficient. But, the leaders of the CSSU felt, the church also needed to avoid the mistake that Christian Socialists had made— using the church to build a new political or social order, a task clearly “outside the function of the church.” As Zahniser argued: The accomplishment of the church’s social function will make possible the erection of the ideal political and economic order…but the church is not to be the builder of these and emphasis on these things only calls away from the real work the church has to do for social improvement… There is a political activity of the church that is as pernicious as the lethargy complained of. Scylla is as bad as Charybdis.68 In attempting to steer between the Scylla of lethargy and the Charybdis of overt political involvement, the CSSU found it necessary to draw very fine distinctions between what constituted political involvement, and what did not, and therefore waged a semantic campaign which encouraged political influence while preserving an image of neutrality. Knowing what not to do, however, did not always yield a clear plan of action, and the CSSU was not entirely sure itself what exact role the church should take in reform efforts. The executive secretary of the CSSU realized that “the church must have a program if her social message is to be made effective, but in trying to determine what it shall be she finds herself in territory in which she has had little experience.”69 It is thus not surprising that the CSSU turned both to the city’s “secular” civic reform organizations and interdenominational (but not strictly church-led) efforts such as the Anti-Saloon League as models for this experience. These groups’ overtly “moral” analysis of Pittsburgh’s social ills, and the wide participation by activist Protestant laity

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in them, made it natural for the CSSU to become quite reliant on their per sonnel, and to adopt large portions of their reform vision and strategies.

GATHERING KNOWLEDGE AND SHAPING OPINION: THE CSSU AS SOCIAL INVESTIGATOR AND EDUCATOR The CSSU pursued two early strategies which allowed it a prominence in reform efforts without clearly involving it in partisan politics. The first was the use of surveys and investigations to uncover problems and to gather evidence against what it believed to be the forces of evil. The CSSU stressed the importance of surveys and gave much of its energy to them. Richard Hofstadter has identified this aspect of the “Progressive mind” as a quest for “social realism,” an attempt to define a reality that was now “rough and sordid…hidden, neglected, and off-stage.” This was the first step in a process. “First reality must in its fullness be exposed, and then it must be made the subject of moral exhortation; and then, when individual citizens in sufficient numbers had stiffened in their determination to effect reform, something could be done.” His description matches the self-described goal of the CSSU, which was to bring to light “vice, political corruption, intemperance, industrial oppression, social injustice of all kinds.” Then, the CSSU firmly believed, “the proper correction will be made by the people through proper channels.”70 In the decade from 1915 to 1925, the CSSU and the Pittsburgh Council of Churches would conduct three area-specific studies (of the Strip District, the Uptown and the Rankin areas), a survey of African American Pittsburgh, and a large-scale project known as “The Challenge of Pittsburgh” which compiled statistics on the number, nationality, and occupation of the city’s population, with quantitative and impressionistic descriptions of Pittsburgh’s “social” and “anti-social” institutions. In striving to “put the facts before the people until the people change the facts,” the CSSU participated in a broader belief common to social gospelers and Progressives that the mass of humanity was basically good, and would take righteous action once informed of the actual conditions of the city. The CSSU could emphasize that there was no need for it to become too explicitly involved in political or legal enforcement matters because the people, once informed, would demand the necessary changes. Surveys would not only show the churches and Pittsburgh at large what the problems were, but would also help to avoid overlapping efforts to fix them. The CSSU had numerous models to guide its work, reaching back through the most recent and extensive example of the Pittsburgh Survey to the early investigative missions of Pittsburgh’s settlement houses. In the CSSU’s first survey, an inquiry into the living conditions in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, it conducted the type of fact-finding that George Hodges had recommended long ago for the residents of Kingsley House.71 The final report (called “The Strip: A Socio-Religious Survey of a Typical Problem Section of Pittsburgh”) even opened with the type of “moral map” of the Strip District Hodges recommended, showing the locations of “anti-social agencies” such as saloons, chartered drinking clubs, pool rooms, and breweries, and where they sat in relation to the “social” agencies of the Protestant and Catholic churches, the public and parochial schools, and the public bath houses. A second map showed the extent of industrial development in this area of the city, which covered nearly 80 percent of the area. Investigators performed a

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door-to-door canvass of the entire district, marking down the use of each building, nationalities of families, number of people living in each home, the sanitary conditions of the homes, and a host of other facts. Undoubtedly the surveyors had benefited from observing the tactics and the identification of problems that needed to be addressed from the Pittsburgh Survey. “The Strip” detailed the ethnic make-up of the district, birth and death rates, rates of poverty and their causes, an investigation of criminality and the police courts, housing conditions, and industrial conditions (including safety, hours of work, and wages)—all factors isolated and quantified in the Survey.72 “The Strip” differed from the Survey, however, in that its goal was explicitly religious and it was an interdenominational church effort. The final document is a fascinating mixture of conservative and liberal Protestant religious worldviews and the latest secularProgressive answers to the “Social Question” and the “Labor Question.” On the conservative side, much was made, for example, of the fact that although there were only some 8,000 people living in the three-fifth’s square mile area comprising the district, the Strip was home to some ninety-six saloons, chartered drinking clubs and “fly by night” speakeasies, and that “here economic dependence is so frequently accompanied by the addiction to drink and other vice.”73 The report also displayed a bald anti-Catholicism. In the final essay of the survey, “Evangelical Christianity and the Strip,” the Rev. Daniel Marsh referred to the 70 percent of the residents of the Strip who were Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox as “nominally Christian,” and encouraged mission efforts to be launched to provide an evangelical Protestant alternative to the “many Catholics in whom all interest in religion has been killed by the revolt against Roman and Greek superstition, formalism, greed and immorality.”74 On the other hand, “The Strip” also evidenced progressive conclusions. It condemned the conditions of tenements, the lack of municipal services which meant unsanitary living and a dearth of clean water, and the fact that there was not a single playground for the children of the Strip. It also undermined the notion of “the lawlessness of the foreigner” by demonstrating with a statistical analysis of police records that in an area that was 83 percent foreign born, 56 percent of the crimes were perpetrated by native Americans. Further, the report on “Poverty and Dependency” identified the number one cause of poverty among Strip families as the long periods of unemployment suffered by workers because of the boom and bust nature of the industries for which they worked. This conclusion was buttressed by a study of wages which demonstrated that even though iron and steel workers in one block made a livable average of $10.50 per week, the actual average wages of these same workers were a dismal $4.66 per week when periods of unemployment due to down time were taken into account. The committee responsible for the survey thus not only recommended “more adequate wages” and shorter hours; it also encouraged “careful attention on the part of employers to the regulation of industry so as to reduce the deplorable social and economic waste hitherto caused by frequently recurring unemployment.”75 As to what the churches could do, the report urged interdenominational financial support of Trinity Temple, a Methodist Episcopal mission established in November of 1910 that served as an institutional church for the district. By funneling all money to one institution, the CSSU hoped to break away from the tradition of denominationalism, which had often led to overlapping efforts to meet the spiritual and physical needs of particular areas.

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Thus to its new role as political watchdog the Union was adding that of social investigator. The CSSU, in conducting its moral surveys, certainly took a methodological page out of the Pittsburgh Survey, and was clearly influenced by that works focus of attention and assessment of Pittsburgh’s woes. However, in insisting that social investigation was now a legitimate and necessary activity of the church, the CSSU was attempting to bring under church control a power formerly reserved for muckrakers or social science experts. The church mimicked these experts, drawing upon social science’s increasing societal prestige to buttress its own legitimacy and refashioning the social science tool of the survey to establish itself as a moral expert qualified to comment on the morally defined ills of Pittsburgh. Industrial policies, workers’ wages, and the nationalities of residents needed to be considered in conjunction with the anti-social forces of saloons, pool halls, brothels, and other organizations within the larger context of their moral or immoral import. Only by considering social factors and forces in terms of their impact on the moral needs of the city could a true understanding of the city’s problems be reached. In this the CSSU continued a long tradition of “moralizing” the reform discourse in Pittsburgh. Mary Furner has elaborated the ways in which social science expert(”)s came to shape political discourse on the “labor question” and the “social question” nationally by “bringing policy makers to inhabit, in some sense, the same mental world… to adopt the languages of explanation and modes of analysis that experts have constructed, and thus to define problems and envisage policy alternatives similarly.” In much the same way these intellectuals attempted to “economize” the discourse over state intervention in the Progressive Era, the CSSU tried to “moralize” Pittsburgh reform.76 That is, it tried to demonstrate the moral nature of societal problems at the same time that it sought to appropriate secular reform methods and ideologies. In addition to surveys, the CSSU endeavored early on to spread its vision to Pittsburgh’s churches, and to the city at large. A 1914 CSSU pamphlet describes as one of its goals the use of “social education for the making of correct public opinion on religio-social questions.”78 Beyond sending out pamphlets which described the work of the Union, the CSSU also made available a three-month course in “Bible Studies in Social Christianity.” This course came complete with lesson plans which followed Zahniser’s 1911 social gospel work Social Christianity and included special classes every week at the University of Pittsburgh for the Sunday School teachers who would teach the material. In addition, the CSSU put together a lecture course “offered to a limited number of groups of churches,” which featured speakers from a range of Pittsburgh’s social agencies and churches—largely the same ones listed on the CSSU’s “Advisory Board.” These speakers were spread over a seven-week course of lectures which included such topics as “How the Other Half Lives, or The Problem of the Poor”; “The Promotion of Purity or, Eugenics and the Commerce in Vice”; “The Saloon and Social Stagnation or, Social Aspects of the Liquor Question”; “The Christianizing of Industry or, The Church and the Problems of Labor”; and “The Hidden Government or, Preying Privilege in Politics.” Zahniser also made himself available to speak on these same topics to churches on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, and to address “Men’s Meetings, Rallies, etc.” He was backed by a Speakers Bureau staffed by members who would address midweek meetings at the city’s churches. The December 1916 issue of the Pennsylvania Outlook reported that Zahniser had by then spoken on 513 occasions to a total of some 70,000 people, and that other speakers had reached another 15,000. In addition, the Social

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Education Committee had distributed, in the form of bulletins, leaflets, letters, and the Outlook, some 250,000 pieces of literature promoting the mission of the CSSU.78 Through all of these efforts the CSSU was attempting to answer for the city’s churches the question of “just what is “the Social Question” and what has religion to do with it?”79 All of this activity to shape public opinion belied the CSSU’s faith that if they “put the facts before the people, the people [would] change the facts.” The “facts” had long been before the people, displayed prominently in the published findings of reformers such as George Hodges, Oliver McClintock, Lincoln Steffens, the Pittsburgh Survey, the Voters’ League and Civic Club, and untold others. That the CSSU found it a vital and necessary part of its work to provide the context in which such facts should be considered indicated a situation among Pittsburgh’s churches incongruent with CSSU rhetoric. Clearly the CSSU felt that it was necessary to train Pittsburgh’s Protestants—lay and clergy alike— in the correct role for the church in reform efforts. CSSU speakers served in this capacity as missionaries of the social gospel message. Such an emphasis on “social education” might be read in several ways. One might conclude that Pittsburgh’s Protestant faithful had little knowledge of the problems of the city. Comfortably ensconced in Pittsburgh’s plush suburbs, they needed first to be convinced that citizens of Pittsburgh were even suffering. More likely, however, the CSSU realized that merely revealing the city’s problems did not guarantee a specific or approved of response. Pittsburgh’s churches needed to be convinced that these problems were moral in nature, that they were severe enough to demand the immediate and unified response of all Christian citizens in ways heretofore specifically avoided by the institutional church, and that the CSSU should lead the way.

CONTINUING THE BATTLE AGAINST THE “BEAST”: THE CSSU FIGHTS THE SALOON, THE BROTHEL, AND CORRUPT GOVERNMENT The Union, whether doing so consciously or not, smoothed the path to Protestant acceptance of its agenda by reiterating rhetorically what was by now a familiar view of the root cause of Pittsburgh’ defects. Having secured some of the leading personnel of Pittsburgh’s civic reform organizations, the CSSU largely adopted their outlook as well. Specifically, in its rhetoric and reforms it demonstrated a belief that the machine government was one of the central problems Pittsburghers faced. A 1915 article in the Pennsylvania Outlook likened the work of the machine government to a predatory monster. The body of the monster was “that politico-business group which affords the centre of the co-operating powers that prey on human welfare”; its arms were made up of the brothel and the gambling house; its tail represented the liquor traffic. The “beast” also had tentacles which reached out “through payrolls, through banking privileges, through business opportunities, through juries, through appropriations,” to “grasp and hold captive multitudes of people.” Clearly, the CSSU felt, the “foes of social welfare” were organized: they constituted “a veritable social organism of intimately inter-operating forces.”80 For the church to have an active role in creating a moral Pittsburgh, and for the “powers that pray” to triumph over the “powers that prey,” it would have to attack this entire conjunction of interests as a united force.

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It was quite a task that the CSSU was setting for the churches. It would mean fighting the saloon, the brothel, and corrupt government at all levels, monitoring economic institutions, riding herd on greedy capitalists, examining the make-up of juries, and determining the fitness of public figures such as city councilmen and local judges. How would the CSSU convince Protestants to unite behind this ambitious new vision of the church’s role and at the same time assure critics that the CSSU was holding to its promise to “stay out of politics”? Beyond appropriating the tool of the survey, with its accompanying cachets of neutrality and objectivity, the CSSU chose carefully the institutions it would oppose most openly. The saloon provided a clear target, so the CSSU found a way effectively to link the traditional and theologically safe attack on the saloon with the need for new actions and new views. Anti-saloon activities in this way provided a good point of entry for the CSSU—they were fighting something they knew was evil, and church involvement in the operation against the saloon had a long history, so their undertakings here were practically taken for granted, not viewed as suspiciously “political.” The Pittsburgh Christian Outlook had originally been a temperance paper entitled “The White Ribbon Outlook,” edited by Mrs. Stella Masters, a prominent member of the East Liberty WCTU. The CSSU took over publication of the paper in 1915, (when it was called the Pennsylvania Outlook) noting that it would display a greater concern with “social service” because “with the passing of times…the liquor question is being seen more and more to be tangled up with other social problems; and it is being made evident that they must be worked out together.”81 In this way the CSSU was able to use an issue in which the church had held legitimate leadership as a springboard to wider reform efforts. As the Outlook continued, “we are simply trying to reach out in the struggles against vice, for sanitation, for better housing, for industrial justice and for other similar reforms with the same sane scientific methods that have come to be followed in temperance work.”82 These various reforms were not linked just by a similar methodology or by a backhanded attempt to use an anti-saloon front on which to fight other non-related issues. Adopting the reform rhetoric which linked the saloon to the brothel and to corrupt politics, the CSSU believed that to battle the saloon was to battle all these other social ills as well. The Outlook warned in August of 1915 of a collaborative effort on the part of “the liquor interests and the vice element, along with those politicians who live off public service and by what they can extort from the big corporations” to raise a war chest that would allow them to fight the reform efforts of temperance and anti-vice workers, and fill the City Government “with ward-heelers who will obediently serve the hidden government.”83 The CSSU painted the upcoming political elections in November as a struggle for the city’s soul, urging Christians to register and vote. “Booze, vice and graft have combined in this county this Fall in an effort to crush the political power of the church element… The gauntlet has been thrown down to the people who believe in law and order, justice and welfare.”84 In their goals and strategies on the “liquor question,” the CSSU not only cooperated with the Anti-Saloon League, but seemed to adopt quite similar attitudes, organization, and agendas. The Anti-Saloon League, like the CSSU later, promoted the idea that the saloon served as a major source of funding for the political machine’s war chest. The ASL also provided a model for the CSSU in organizing churches into a interdenominational and nonpartisan force that would be politically powerful without

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taking on the role of a political party itself. They were, in effect, one of the earliest political pressure groups, trying particularly to agitate on the saloon question without becoming too involved in other reform efforts, although they also realized the ways in which the saloon was tied into prostitution, governmental corruption, and other ills. In addition to supporting local option legislation, and later national prohibition, the ASL worked on the local level, sending questionnaires to candidates for political office to determine their stance on temperance issues, and then publishing and widely distributing the results. Although “no attempt was made to dictate how a person should vote…the record of the candidate left little room for doubt as to how a true Christian should cast his ballot.”85 In their efforts to fight the saloon at the local, state, and national levels, the ASL developed an organization that the CSSU would later dream of. In 1908, Superintendent of the ASL in Pennsylvania S.E.Nicholson boasted that he had gathered, through “the cooperation of some 4500 churches,” the names, addresses, phone numbers, and party affiliations of nearly 75,000 men, and with a few letters sent to strategic lieutenants, could set in motion a voting machine to support chosen political candidates or bury opposing ones. The ASL, interestingly, was accused by contemporaries of functioning very much like a political machine itself, a comparison extended by more recent scholars of the ASL who described the local minister sympathetic to the ASL cause as a “veritable local boss.” The ASL responded that “the church is a machine and the League is a machine within a machine.” But whereas “the ordinary political machine is built and maintained for the personal advantage of the biggest cogs in the machine,” the ASL was constructed so that “all personal advantage is submerged to the one task of establishing sobriety in the nation.”86 The Allegheny County ASL, established in December of 1902 with the sole object of “the suppression of the saloon,” vowed “to avoid affiliation with any political party, as such, and to maintain an attitude of neutrality upon all questions of public policy not directly and immediately connected with the traffic in alcoholic liquors.”87 It formed committees on Education, Organization, Law Enforcement, Legislation, and Finance. The Education Committee was charged with spreading the word of the ASL among the churches in Pittsburgh and Allegheny, and formed a speakers’ bureau to this end. The Organization Department sought representatives from each church and temperance organization in the county for its Board of Directors, who would constitute “such a cordon of strength that large influence can be brought to bear on all political parties” in order that only pro-temperance candidates would be chosen and elected. Using similar language to that echoed in later CSSU publications, the Law Enforcement Department would work to ensure that all temperance laws were enforced. They would operate “in conjunction with the civil officers of the County when there is a disposition on their part to be faithful in the performance of duty, and urging them to greater activity when necessary.” To this end, they hired an attorney to conduct the needed legal and prosecutorial business of the League, and secured the services of detectives to gather information and evidence.88 The work of the ASL in procuring evidence for battles in the 1903 license court turned up some disturbing news. First, it discovered that “on the saloonkeepers’ bonds and petitions are to be found the names of the very officers of the law whose sworn duty it is to enforce the liquor laws.” Moreover, many of the saloonkeepers turned out to be school directors, on boards of education, and “in some districts the name of almost every

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election officer can be found on the petitions,” along with those of legislators, select and common councilmen, a justice of the peace, aldermen, the police magistrate and his constables, the chief of police and the chief of the fire department. It was clear to the ASL that politics and the saloon were inseparable and that the liquor traffic was firmly “identified and entrenched behind the politics of the county.”89 Second, investigators discovered, in defiance of a law explicitly forbidding it, that many saloonkeepers or liquor retailers held stock or bonds in brewing companies and distilleries. One saloonkeeper in Allegheny was found to own almost $50,000 worth of stock in the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. The League cried out against the obvious capitalization of the saloon, and evoked images of a sordid “Beer Trust.”90 These images were not imagined: in 1914 an ASL investigation of Pennsylvania brewers resulted in over one hundred breweries being indicted “for violation of the conspiracy section of the Federal criminal code.”91 Thus in the decade before the creation of the CSSU, the ASL had already marked the path of reform thought, showing the saloon to be illegitimately allied with local politics, and a primary agent of the capitalization of corruption. The CSSU benefited from the ideas and strategies of the Antl-Saloon League. Executive Secretary Zahniser of the CSSU named the Anti-Saloon League as one of the “precursors” of the CSSU, modeling interdenominational efforts toward social reform. And the CSSU cemented links with this organization by having the ASL president, Harry H.Willock, serve on its Advisory Board, and its treasurer, Harry G.Samson, on its Central Board. Although the strategies used by the ASL were in some sense generally available through the example of other reform organizations, the CSSU enacted a remarkable number of similar tactics. The investigation of socially damaging conditions and publication of their findings in order to spur public outrage and action, the prosecution of offending parties, a reliance on and encouraging of Christian citizens to vote the right people into office, the pressuring of officials to enforce the law, and the view that the breweries and distilleries, saloons, brothels, and local governments were all woven into the same web of corruption—all these the ASL and the CSSU had in common. In this sense the CSSU was borrowing yet another “secular” model in its construction of what the new social role of the church should be. Moreover, in consecrating the reform vision of the ASL, the CSSU strengthened the foundations of the long-established direction of reform in Pittsburgh, which focused its attention on the evils of the machine government (as opposed, for example, to the direction for reform indicated by the persuasive conclusions of the Pittsburgh Survey). In this way the significant historical presence of Pittsburgh’s churches and activist laity, both institutionally and ideologically, significantly shaped reform priorities in the Steel City. The CSSU also encouraged the Protestant community to vote for temperance candidates, and in doing so came perilously close to overt involvement in partisan political struggles. Much like the Anti-Saloon League, the Union also pursued measures to ensure that the church would become an active political force. One of the Union’s initial goals was “to make Christian sentiment such an appreciable integrated force in the community that the political leaders would cater to it.”92 Clergy and reformers leading the CSSU did more than advocate a generalized participation in the politics of the city—they practically demanded it. The Union set up voter registration drives, and branded the Christian “stay-at-home-voter” as “the greatest political evil we have,” and one of the primary reasons for the continuation of political corruption in Pittsburgh. “The first

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reform needed,” the CSSU concluded, “is not a political one at all but the religious one of getting every Christian man to do his duty by voting.”93 Daniel Marsh, minister of the downtown Smithfield Methodist Episcopal Church, member of the CSSU’s Central Board, and Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church Union, even suggested keeping prominent charts of church members in church lobbies and checking off those who had voted, thereby highlighting those who had not.94 The Union also publicized the positions of candidates for local government offices on temperance and various moral reform issues, and while not explicitly advocating one or another candidate, made it perfectly clear whom “good” citizens should vote for. By 1925, the “church forces” had given up even this pretense. A report written for that year’s mayoral campaign by a committee which included Daniel Marsh and Charles R.Zahniser, and which was unanimously adopted by the Ministerial Union, identified candidate Charles H.Klein as a “servile tool of the gang” in control of county politics, one which had been implicated in graft scandals and in politically protecting the vice trade. Candidate William L.Smith, on the other hand, was one that “church people can support without apology… He is a Christian gentleman, a member of North Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church.” The report encouraged work for the Smith campaign.95 Beyond encouraging Christian voters to elect temperance candidates, the CSSU also used their investigations to battle the saloon in License Court. Places that sold liquor had to have their licenses renewed on a yearly basis, and a local county court determined whether or not this would happen. Licenses could be revoked or refused if the saloon in question had violated the city’s liquor laws, had sold alcohol on a Sunday, had operated near a school or a church, or if it was proven that prostitutes operated within the premises. In May of 1916, the Outlook triumphed that “the decisions in License court last month mark the greatest victory for temperance and decency in the history of license courts in Allegheny County.” Evidence secured by the CSSU, in conjunction with the Anti-Saloon League and the Temperance Committee of Pittsburgh’s Ministerial Union, had shown many of Pittsburgh’s saloons to be harboring “commercialized vice.” Seventy-six applications were refused by the court, “including all of the vile joints in the city against which weighty evidence was produced, many of them being places that had been licensed for more than a generation.”96 Not surprisingly, the investigation into the city’s saloons renewed the interest of activist clergy and laity in the suppression of the citys vice trade. The Morals Bureau, in its incarnation as the institutional continuation of the Morals Efficiency Commission of 1912, had been declared unconstitutional by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1914 after one year of action, and dissolved.97 With the Morals Bureau “overthrown by the courts,” and the police apparently going back on promises to continue to enforce the Bureau’s policies, the CSSU claimed that “we felt it our duty to see that some steps were taken to show that vicious resorts [were] in operation with the connivance of the police.”98 They chose a sample case to test the waters. The CSSU appointed a “special investigative team” headed by city councilman Dr. D.A.Dillinger, and which included Charles R.Zahniser. The team gathered information on a “resort” called the Seminole, and presented a case before a city alderman claiming that virtually all the roomers there were prostitutes, that liquor was being sold illegally, and that the house was operating with the consent of at least two policemen. Zahniser himself acted as prosecutor in the case. The Union was temporarily successful, able to have the Seminole shut down and its

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occupants evicted. When the defendants were brought to trial in November of 1915, however, final success eluded the CSSU. According to the Union, there was evidence of witness-tampering, political intimidation, jury-fixing, and a smear campaign launched against Zahniser himself. Whatever the cause, the trial resulted in a hung jury, and all defendants were acquitted.99 The CSSU, in reporting these efforts, continued to strike the theme of noninvolvement. It noted that although it “supported” the investigation, it had not “sponsored” it. Spokesmen made it clear that “not one dollar of the funds of the Union has been spent in this case,” financing having been provided “by special contributions made for this purpose.”100 And although Zahniser himself prosecuted the initial case in the courts, he did so not as a representative of the CSSU, but as a member of the nonaffiliated “team” headed by city councilman Dillinger.101 The Union knew that it was sailing in dangerous rhetorical waters. “Politics” had come to signify, in the linguistic lexicon of the reform network, that system which maintained its power through corruption, nepotism, vote-buying, and intimidation, and which was financed by the saloon, the brothel, and other institutions of immorality. This word could also be used to denote “immigrant” or “working class,” although such usages among Pittsburgh reformers were rarer. The reform of the city council in 1911 was thus a triumph, according to the CSSU, because the “malodorous” old bicameral council had been “removed from politics,” and altered into a “business council.” Similarly, when school board members were convicted of graft, and the city’s school boards were taken out of ward control, centralized, reduced in size and professionalized, it was clear that the school boards had been removed from the influence of “politics.” Echoing the usage of civil service reformers, political watchdog groups such as the Voters’ League, and other elite reform organizations, the CSSU also came to equate “politics” with the practices of the machine government. As well, “politics” evoked, for churches, the dirty, daily, partisan grappling from which the church, with its eternal message, had long tried to disassociate itself. Yet despite its continued use of the reform notion that the local government, city administration, and school boards needed to be removed from politics (that is, be conducted on a nonpartisan basis by righteous officeholders), the CSSU found itself trying to convince the city’s Christians that as Christians they and their churches should be politically involved. Attempting to draw on the accumulated capital of negative references to “politics” in battling the machine government while simultaneously creating a rhetorical space in which church involvement in politics was nevertheless legitimate and important, it is not surprising that the CSSU articulated positions that seemed contradictory. Such tactics—securing external sources of funding, and establishing a separate organization that retained intimate connections to the CSSU without being officially representative—allowed the Union both to lead reform efforts, and to continue to claim non-involvement in politics. Ironically, the CSSU was continuing a strategy long practiced by Pittsburgh churches interested in reform efforts, and one which the Union was trying on other levels to combat. Not able or willing to involve explicitly the church as an institution, churches had tried to wield influence through the participation of clergy and laity in “secular” civic reform and business groups. The CSSU mimicked this approach, having its members sit on the “Commission of Eleven Against Vice,” the “Citizens’ Political Union,” and the like, preserving simultaneously both the appearance

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of neutrality and an access to reforming power.102 Thus Paul Boyer’s conclusion that moral reform efforts in the Progressive Era had moved decidedly outside the churches is true on one level. But the example of Pittsburgh demonstrates that this did not in any way mean that the churches were content to sit on the sidelines, or satisfy themselves with a purely motivational role. Select Pittsburgh churches and their activist clergy and laity found ways for the CSSU to be importantly and explicitly involved. In order to head off possible objections, however, the CSSU in this era cloaked its leadership in such efforts by the use of closely allied, but nominally independent, civic reform organizations. The CSSU pursued a wide range of reform activities using such tactics. In 1916 and 1917 the Union combined its attack on vice with one on the city’s police courts. An investigation in the summer of 1916 by the Union revealed an increase in the vice trade on the North Side, so the mayor ordered a “sweep” which netted over a hundred prostitutes and owners of disorderly houses. Although the Union, through city councilman Dillinger, presented a “mountain of evidence” against this group, every person was dismissed without charges by the police magistrate John Sweeny. The Union then followed the course that had been successfully employed by the Voters’ League six years earlier: it called a mass meeting to give the issue publicity, and appointed a “Citizens’ Anti-Vice Committee of Eleven,” chaired by Daniel Marsh, which they used to institute a prosecution against Sweeny for malfeasance of office.103 That the CSSU adopted Voters’ League strategies is not surprising, considering that the police court investigation and agitation was suggested by George R.Wallace, who had been a member of the Voters’ League’s executive committee since its formation in 1902. Wallace, a member of Calvary Episcopal Church, served on the Advisory Board, the Central Board, and the Civic Action committee of the CSSU. In this case, however, the tactics failed: there was no mass public outrage, and Magistrate Sweeny was eventually exonerated. These developments spurred a CSSU effort to reform the city’s police and aldermanic courts. These latter had been roundly condemned in the Pittsburgh Survey, which had found that aldermen tended to have very little knowledge of judicial procedure or precedent, that the alderman’s office was “so steeped in politics” that “as a campaign center it rivaled the saloon,” and that the aldermanic court was “always extravagant,” “generally inefficient,” and “often corrupt.”104 The Union, after a thorough investigation of Pittsburgh’s police courts and their magistrates in 1915, echoed the same criticisms. The police courts were the “poor man’s court” and the “immigrant’s court”—often the first exposure of the immigrant to American justice. But the Union held that the courts were used “to protect corrupt sources of political funds,” and were presided over by “eight men not one of whom was fitted by training for the work, and most of whom were utterly unfit in personal character.” One was “an illiterate foreign-born Jew,” alleged to be a thieves’ “fence”; another was claimed to have been the “official bottler” for the redlight district several years back; a third was a bartender.105 On the strength of its investigation, the Union proposed legislation in the state legislature at Harrisburg that would have drastically altered the structure of the city’s police courts, but this legislation was defeated. This was a setback to the Union, but also a spur to action. Acting under the benediction of the Pittsburgh Council of Churches, formed in 1917, the CSSU lobbied for, and then successfully passed legislation which created a “Morals Court” in the city of Pittsburgh. The Morals Court became an official court of the city, and was given a jurisdiction over all cases “involving women and minors, all sex offenses, domestic

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relations, gambling and a number of other specified offenses.”106 Pittsburgh’s church forces were in this way instrumental in a striking change in the structure of Pittsburgh’s court system. These reformers continued the use of these strategies even after the CSSU was subsumed into the Pittsburgh Council of Churches in 1917. A clear example was the formation of the “Citizens’ Political Union” in 1917. Intended as a political watchdog organization which would research and recommend candidates for political office that “constructive, forward-looking citizens” could vote for, the CPU had close ties to the PCC. The President of the CPU, James H.Gray, was on the Board of Directors of the PCC; the secretary, P.R.Williams, had been an officer of the CSSU. Among the executive committee of the Political Union, fully one-third of the members had ties to the PCC.107 This close connection allowed the PCC to work through the CPU without itself advocating specific candidates. “While the Council of Churches has no official connection with the organization,” the Pittsburgh Christian Outlook commented, “its membership is largely composed of church people connected with our work and Mr. Gray of this Council is its president.” “Such an organization,” the journal concluded, “is unquestionably needed to do a directly political work that the churches as such through the Council should not and cannot do.”108 This work included mostly the recommendation of specific candidates for political office. Feeling that “no one need hope to be selected to an important office here without getting on somebody’s ‘slate,’” it was the intent of the CPU to create a slate of candidates “in the interest of decency and welfare and all that is human.”109 They would thus issue bulletins at election time recommending one candidate for every office. Taking the position that “the greatest political evil in Pittsburgh is the Penrose machine,” the CPU mostly recommended independents of one stripe or another. The recommendations, or condemnations, were made very clear. On the candidacy of E.V.Babcock for mayor in 1917, for example, a CPU pamphlet noted that the candidate “stands openly for all that the Penrose machine represents…all the immorality of the worst type of political organization is rightly charged against him.” “He represents autocracy in government,” the bulletin continued, and stood for “government by the great financial powers, by the public service corporations, by the liquor party, by a debasing political machine, all in their own interests, everything that is opposed to democracy.”110 Ever-faithful to the anti-machine strains of the moral discourse, the “church forces” had found a way to create and boost slates of political candidates, all the while avoiding (they claimed) inappropriate church involvement in political contests.

THE CSSU AND REFORM OF PITTSBURGH’S INDUSTRY The CSSU also evidenced a classic social gospel concern with the need for industrial reform but was in this area much less effective in generating reform action. It is instructive to question why this was the case. The CSSU’s leaders promoted the ideas of the “Social Creed of the Churches” and editorialized in favor of shorter work weeks, safer working conditions, an end to child labor, a living wage, greater safety in the workplace, better housing for workers, and the right to collective bargaining.111 It advocated a “producer’s ideology,” arguing that “industry must be organized around the

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opportunity of the worker to produce, not that of the adventurer to speculate,” and called for industry to provide full employment.112 The urgency of the “labor problem” had convinced the CSSU that “the Christianizing of industrial relations…[was] among the most fundamental tasks of the church.”113 The CSSU took the same rhetorical stance toward industrial conflicts as it did toward political ones: the church needed to remain above the day-to-day struggles between capital and labor, but encourage each group to climb to higher moral ground. The CSSU, and later the Pittsburgh Council of Churches, “steadfastly refrained from becoming the advocate of one side or the other in an industrial dispute or from becoming an arbitrator in such disputes,” and “held steadfastly to its function of being primarily a religious agency and as such concerned with promoting adherence to the ideals and conforming to the spirit of Jesus on the part of those undertaking adjustment of industrial situations.”114 In an extensive report on industrial unrest in 1916, the Committee on Industrial Relations of the CSSU noted that “it has not been our purpose to place responsibility or to suggest what courses should be pursued, but only to gather data which will be of help to all interested in forming their own conclusions.” Seemingly undercutting the persuasiveness of the investigation’s suggestions, the report concluded: “The committee does not assume to fix responsibility or blame or to dogmatize regarding social theories or suggest what should be done.”115 The CSSU worked as well to address the problems associated with Pittsburgh’s industry. In their survey of Pittsburgh’s Strip District, the CSSU criticized various industries in the Strip (without naming them) for harboring unsafe machinery, permitting unhealthy work environments, and lacking worker welfare programs. Also, as noted above, the study reported the average wages of various categories of workers, questioning their adequacy in an economic environment characterized by many weeks of industrial downtime and unemployment. In 1916, the CSSU conducted a more extensive survey on “Pittsburgh Industrial Unrest.” The report provided a summary of strikes that had occurred in various Pittsburgh industries in that year, including a molders’ strike, one at the Westinghouse plant, one by the Pullman taxicab drivers, and several others. In their analysis of the causes of the strikes, they pointed to the fact that wage increases were not keeping up with the rise in the cost of living, and supported workers’ demands for an eight-hour day. The report also gave a favorable impression of the American Federation of Labor, and implied that collective bargaining provided an element of stability to industry.116 The church forces, the CSSU concluded, were on the side of labor: Most of these churches have adopted the “Social Creed of the Churches,” which speaks out plainly for collective bargaining, for the short-hour day, for most of the platform of organized labor. Scores of our ministers have taken an active part in supporting political candidates committed to forward-looking social and labor legislation.117 In contrast to its political reform efforts, however, the CSSU saw few victories in this line of reform. The CSSU admitted in 1916 that its committees on industrial relations and race relations “have done less than any other committees [sic].” The reason given for this is telling. It was not for lack of effort or interest on the part of the CSSU that little had been accomplished, but because the industrial committee “found fewer concrete things to

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be done for which the church is yet ready.” “There is still so much uncertainty as to just what part the church should take,” it concluded, “that there must be more crystallizing of sentiment before we can start on a definite program of action.”118 The CSSU, advocating rhetorically a position on industrial reform that many Protestant Pittsburghers found difficult to support, in these years foundered in its efforts to give significant form to its social gospel ideas concerning such reform. The industrial reform agenda of the CSSU was in this sense stymied by its reliance on the moral reform discourse. A discourse serves to set the boundaries of what may and may not be discussed and can limit what may even be perceived as problems or solutions. Because the CSSU had available to it the supplementary discourse of the social gospel—in which the needs and rights of workers are a central and abiding theme—it was not unaware of competing explanations for the root cause of Pittsburgh’s problems. But once again its compelling need to speak in the name of a united Protestantism, its focus on the machine government and not labor conditions as the true culprit in the suffering of Pittsburgh’s workers, and its own proclivity to pursue reforms with clear “moral” significance, undercut CSSU efforts to encourage reform in this area.

PROTESTANT RESPONSE TO THE CSSU AGENDA Beyond having focused its attention on attacking the “capitalization of corruption,” the CSSU’s conclusions regarding the need for more “crystallizing of sentiment” points to further explanations for the CSSU’s ineffectiveness in this line of reform. That is, the CSSU had to deal with the response of both churches and laity in Pittsburgh to its goals and agenda. As the CSSU’s initial foray into city politics over the movie houses and pool halls demonstrated, some felt that the CSSU was acting illegitimately in the name of Pittsburgh’s churches. There were continuing complaints from within the churches that the CSSU was not a truly representative body and should not presume to act in the name of all Pittsburgh’s Protestants.119 In fact, the CSSU encountered a range of both active and passive resistance to its reform efforts from within the churches. Resistance could be grounded in theological opposition. Perhaps foremost among those theologically concerned were the conservative Presbyterians who had long dominated Pittsburgh. As with other theological conservatives, Pittsburgh’s conservative Presbyterians worried that the social gospel downplayed the need for individual conversion and called for an unscriptural role for the church in reforming society.120 They were part of a national attempt on the part of conservatives within the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) to give a greater scriptural basis to social reform efforts than was reflected in the Federal Council of Churches’ “Social Creed.” Among the ideas that this group of conservatives promoted was that the church as an institution should not be directly involved in reform efforts but should work primarily for the transformation of individuals and when necessary support the work of reform organizations.121 The Presbytery of Pittsburgh seemed to have adopted this position. It was careful to portray any social service work—such as the establishment of institutional church programs—as primarily a means to the end of spiritual conversion. The Rev. George Montgomery, Superintendent of the Presbytery of Pittsburgh, wrote in a 1917 summary of Presbyterian work in the city, for example, that “the Presbytery of Pittsburgh has

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always looked upon the social and educational side of the work as elemental and not fundamental, as means to an end and not an end in itself, while many who talk much of social service to-day treat it as if it were the end to be sought. The Sunday-school has been emphasized more than the sewing school, the teaching of the Bible as more important than the teaching of the Declaration of Independence.”122 And when the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh began institutional church programs in 1905, its minister, Dr. Maitland Alexander, made it crystal clear that “the institutional work is, in no sense, a sociological experiment or a merely humanitarian enterprise that stresses the social and physical need, or a faddist scheme to find outlet for pious sentimental energy that finds personal evangelistic effort disagreeable…[but is] as actually evangelistic as any other phase of the church’s life and work.”123 Although supportive of the city’s civic reform organizations’ attempts to quell vice and political corruption, Pittsburgh’s Presbytery did not advocate more than a fact-finding role for its own social service committee. When a committee on the “Church and Social Problems” was formed by the Presbytery in 1915, its duties were to “gather facts and information on social and economic problems in our community,” and also to work with other church social service committees and interdenominational groups in “making a concurrent study or investigation of pressing social questions upon which the voice of the church should be heard in an effective and united way.”124 Such sentiments were often buttressed by the beliefs of staid Presbyterian congregations—even ones ministered by clergy closely associated with the work of the CSSU. The Homewood Presbyterian Church, for example, pastored in these years by the Rev. P.W.Snyder, a member of the Central Board of the CSSU, displayed in its session minutes no great enthusiasm for social service. No mention was made of the CSSU or its work in 1914 or 1915, and the minutes focused (as many church minute books do) on the day-to-day running of the church—acceptance and dismissal of members, who was allowed to use the church for what purposes, who should be paid from the church treasury. No indication was given that the church in any way participated in either the actions or the sentiment of the Union. The end of the year report submitted by the session in 1914 noted, “we are just closing one of the best years in the history of our Church.” Attendance at all services had been good, the Sunday School had grown, Christian Endeavor societies had all increased, “we believe that there has also been a development of interest in the missionary agencies of the Church,” “our gifts to benevolence have been steadily increasing each year,” and church membership had gone up. No mention was made, however, of any social outreach. 125 One must of course be careful in reading such silences as evidence of hostility or apathy toward a social agenda or theology. We may safely conclude, however, that such an agenda had clearly not gripped and dominated this church, and that any such inclinations would be worked out on a more individual basis. Conservative Presbyterians in Pittsburgh were especially obstinate in opposing church efforts at industrial reform. It was a “small coterie of Conservatives” from the Pittsburgh area, according to Charles Stelzle, that led the conservative backlash against the Presbyterian Bureau of Social Service and Stelzle’s Labor Temple at the 1913 Presbyterian General Assembly, resulting in, among other things, Stelzle’s own resignation as secretary of the Bureau of Social Service.126 One scholar of the history of Presbyterians in the Pittsburgh area speculated as to why the conservatives in this denomination were especially touchy about industrial reform efforts: it was estimated that

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nearly 75 percent of Pittsburgh industry was controlled by Presbyterian money in this period. Representatives of these business interests served on central policymaking Presbytery committees and had a history of anti-labor stances.127 The CSSU knew that it had to be able to speak for the churches if it was going to be able to accomplish its agenda, and so it worked to structure its activities in a way that would not alienate this conservative and powerful denomination. The reform agenda of the CSSU was undercut less by overt hostility, however, then by tepid responses from Pittsburgh’s Protestants that ranged from mild sympathy to outright apathy. There were large numbers of laity who were convinced of the importance of social applications for Christianity, but whose efforts were restricted to the variety of outlets provided by individual churches. For some, this meant the continuation of social service long a part of church efforts. The various women’s auxiliaries within area churches, for example, that sewed garments for the city’s poor and area hospitals, created gifts for poor children at Christmas, raised money for medicine, clothing and food for the needy, practiced these forms of social service before, during, and after the appearance of social gospel ideas.128 Often, in spite of the CSSU’s efforts at social education, wellmeaning church organizations with a desire for social effectiveness did not know what to do. A Methodist minister describing that denomination’s social service efforts noted that “our program is far in advance of our practice,” and reported, in a conversation with a man “who has a wide experience in dealing with men’s organizations,” that there was in “94 per cent of these organizations a ‘holy ambiguity’ as to what was expected of them.”129 It seems clear as well that churches felt free to adopt or not adopt portions of the CSSU’s agenda. Resistance could be subtle. The First Baptist Church, for example, although agreeing to participate in a campaign to register the church’s voters, nevertheless refused to follow the suggestion that a list of the church’s members should be posted in a prominent place, and the names of those who voted checked off.130 More than this, there appeared to be a large number of laity who were just plain apathetic to the agenda of the socially concerned clergy and laity. Social service commissions in a range of Protestant denominations complained about the lack of response to their calls for the church to become involved. Daniel Marsh, Superintendent of the Methodist Church Union, for example, wrote in 1920 that “the most difficult proposition” that he had faced in his six years on the job was the “tendency on the part of some of the churches in our great connectionalism to give free reign to parochial selfishness; to feel that they have fulfilled their whole duty if they have succeeded in getting people into the membership of their own Churches and Sunday Schools.” The Episcopalian Diocesan Social Service Commission, also, after its formation in 1912, made yearly pleas for a more extensive turn to a social reform stance. “The problem which confronts our Commission and this diocese,” they wrote in 1915, “is to devise some method to convince our people that…social service is indeed of paramount importance.”131 The CSSU, as noted above, was consistently disappointed that the mass of Christian voters did not rise up as one and make their political strength felt.132 There were even suggestions that there were church members who were actually benefiting from the liquor and vice trade. The Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League complained in 1904 that not only had a vast number of congregations neglected to elect representatives to the ASL, and many more had refused to allow ASL speakers to give talks and raise money for their work, but that many “prominent” church members were

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discovered to be the owners of properties which housed saloons.133 The Ministerial Association of the United Presbyterian church indicated the same problem in December of 1913, when they found it necessary to pass a resolution which stated that: this association…urges upon the churches to express their great disapproval of any member of the United Presbyterian Church who owns, rents or places a mortgage on houses used for immoral purposes; or any lawyer who defends the propretors [sic] or inmates of such houses in order to justify their business or continue the same; and any merchant who gives a commission to agents to obtain business from persons connected with such houses.134 The inconsistent and selective nature of support given the CSSU by the city’s Protestants had the effect of limiting the CSSU’s effectiveness to those areas which required the dedicated service of a few individuals—investigation and survey, prosecution of city officials, exposure of corruption, and lobbying the city government. Other more controversial issues, however, such as labor reform, proved to be much more difficult to change.

IMPLICATIONS The CSSU’s attempt to provide Pittsburgh with an “organized social gospel” was one beset with ironies. In trying to bring the collective power of the “church forces” to bear on Pittsburgh’s political and social structures, the Union highlighted the many ways in which those forces were still fractured and separate, doing so under the banner of an ostensible neutrality and political noninvolvement. In trying to Christianize the city and to bring civic reform back under the umbrella of church leadership, they took on the agenda and methodologies of secular reform groups, relying heavily on the services, knowledge, and experience of the laity. Claims as late as 1918 that Pittsburgh was “enjoying probably the best situation as to public morals in its history,” and was possibly “just now the cleanest big city in this regard in the country,” must be read against the reality that, long after the CSSU had faded from the scene, vice was ever-present, workers only gained a measure of control over their destinies with the coming of a Depression and a World War, and the machine government maintained a firm grip on the city into the 1970s.135 But the activities and interests of the CSSU change in important ways our picture of church involvement in this era. Historians of moral reform such as Paul Boyer have characterized the Progressive Era as the exact moment when churches as institutions were fading from the reform spotlight. For Pittsburgh, in contrast, it was this very period in which the churches, through interdenominational efforts such as the CSSU, sought to regain an active, leading role in reform. Rather than conceding social investigation to government and academic commissions, the role of political watchdog to civic reform organizations, voter registration to existing political parties, and the suppression of saloons and brothels to the city’s police, the CSSU sought to bring all of these activities back under the umbrella leadership of the “church forces.” In a period that prized and

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eagerly sought the opinions of “experts” to decide social questions, the members of the CSSU set themselves up as “moral experts” qualified to comment and act on all issues pertaining to the morality of the city and nation. They were able to do so for several reasons. Because the range of social and political questions addressed by the CSSU had, in Pittsburgh, long been coded “moral” issues, they could legitimately assert the authority of church forces to speak to these issues. Thus the moral rhetoric in which Pittsburgh’s elite reformers had articulated the city’s problems served to smooth the way to the CSSU’s attempt to reassert the leadership of churches in reform. Further, without the long history of involvement of Pittsburgh’s churches, socially conscious clergy and activist laity in the reform organizations of the city, and their consistent application of moral notions and language to describe both its problems and solutions, it would have been much more difficult for the CSSU to justify its leadership. Finally, because the range of reform pursued by Pittsburgh’s elite reformers had virtually excluded the more divisive issue of the “labor question” and focused instead on the machine government and its ties to corruption and vice, the moral leadership of groups such as the CSSU was perhaps not as widely contested. But as the CSSU discovered, the “church forces” were nowhere as united as the Union’s rhetoric made them out to be. Ministers opposed to the work of the CSSU undermined the image of the Union as representative, and Protestant laity demonstrated that they might or might not follow the CSSU’s agenda. The laity especially had available to them a huge number of options regarding the social reform agenda presented by the CSSU. They could oppose it, ignore it, work within congregational bounds, pick and choose among the issues raised by the CSSU, and present their own definitions of what it meant for a church to be engaged in “social service.” Despite the massive educational effort on the part of the CSSU, it is not clear that Pittsburgh’s Protestants lined up in any large-scale way behind the Union. Time and again the CSSU’s efforts seemed to fail whenever they needed large public support for success, as in electing particular political candidates. The mission of the CSSU to reinstate (in its view) the churches as the rightful arbiters of public morality was thus to be accomplished within the context of a continued contestation by the city’s Protestant laity.

Conclusion The representation eagerly sought by the CSSU came in 1916, but with a cost. The Christian Social Service Union was subsumed that year under a newer and larger interdenominational association—the Pittsburgh Council of Churches (PCC)—and the attempt of Pittsburgh’s “church forces” to lead social and political reform efforts in the name of Pittsburgh’s Protestants was put on more solid ground. The PCC, modeled on the Federal Council of Churches and other city church councils, served as an umbrella Protestant organization that coordinated the social service, evangelistic, and mission work of member churches. The PCC claimed the membership of twelve denominations in its first year of operation, increasing to fifteen by the end of 1917.1 In 1917, the PCC represented the Baptist, Brethren (Dunker), Christian, Congregational, Evangelical, Lutheran, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Protestant, Presbyterian, Reformed (German), Reformed Presbyterian, and United Presbyterian denominations, accounting for approximately 83% of Protestants in Allegheny County.2 Member churches selected the PCC’s officers and committees and financed its work, with representation and dues based on the number of members. This was done so that the PCC could truly speak in the name of Pittsburgh’s churches—something which the CSSU had done without such structures, and which had caused dissension. Executive Secretary of the PCC Charles R.Zahniser noted that the CSSU had trouble because it was financed by individuals interested in the work, and because its policies were not subject to denominational approval. Thus “many of our church leaders felt that these agencies had no right to speak in the name of the churches or presume to represent the churches until they themselves became subject to control by the churches through their regularly constituted denominational bodies.” These same leaders believed that “only when the financial support of an agency comes from the churches themselves do the churches actually control it.”3 The purpose of the PCC, according to its first executive secretary, was “to promote the spiritual and moral interests of the community through cooperation on the part of the churches as dynamic sources of spiritual power.”4 What this meant in concrete terms was that the resources and personnel of Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches would be coordinated to determine the city’s needs, to fight its foes, and to attempt joint, non-overlapping solutions. The Social Service Commission of the PCC (the institutional continuation of the CSSU), in its reform strategies and rhetoric, represented the culmination of thirty years of Pittsburgh reform conducted within the rhetorical styling of the moral discourse. The leaders who sought to speak for Protestant churches, however, influenced by a moderate-to-conservative version of the social gospel, yoked the social service agenda to that of evangelism and the coordination of city missions efforts. A typical expression of this sentiment may be found in Zahniser’s statement that “personal evangelism and social service are mutually dependent on each other,” and that “no social service is enduringly vigorous which does not root in evangelism, and that no evangelism fully arrives which does not fruit in social service.”5 This limited what was considered appropriate and

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acceptable reform—and consensus now had to be reached over an even broader range of Protestant theology. The continuation of the church forces’ social and political reform agenda may be seen, briefly, in three representative moments of PCC reform. One of the PCC’s first efforts was the “Challenge of Pittsburgh” project, which included a survey of the entire city of Pittsburgh, followed by a campaign to disseminate the findings of the survey. The resulting book, entitled The Challenge of Pittsburgh, constituted a kind of moral Pittsburgh Survey. It included a brief history of Pittsburgh and a description of the numbers and characteristics of the various immigrant nationalities in the city, reported on living and working conditions, discussed health and environment, inveighed against the evils of the saloon, the vice trade, and the machine government, gave a description of social agencies and reform efforts, and recounted the social service and evangelistic efforts of each PCC denomination. The editor, Rev. Daniel Marsh, the Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church Union, pastor of Smithfleld Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Pittsburgh, and a member of the PCC Executive Committee, culled facts and figures from a variety of sources such as the U.S. Census and previous surveys conducted by the CSSU, and patched together reports from the various denominational missions in the city. The Challenge of Pittsburgh, was, like the Pittsburgh Survey itself, a hodgepodge of statistics, vignettes, sermonizing, stories, and pictures, but with the purpose of presenting a moral snapshot of the city’s conditions. The problems and solutions elaborated in the Challenge of Pittsburgh encapsulate the PCC vision of reform. Like reforms conducted under the rubric of the moral discourse for twenty years, the approach of the PCC was neither purely “environmentalist” nor “coercive,” neither classic social gospel nor traditional evangelicalism, but represented a middle way and a mixture of tendencies.6 The PCC effort to establish a “Morals Court” for Pittsburgh signals another structural and ideological culmination of reform rhetoric. Growing out of CSSU and PCC agitation against the police court system, the Morals Court was established as an official city court in July of 1918. Reflecting the centralizing desires of Progressive reformers, the court was not ward-centered (as were the other aldermanic courts), but heard all cases in the city that concerned minors, sex offense (and thus prostitution), offenses by or against women, domestic relations, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, gambling, and the illegal sale of liquor. Seen in the minds of PCC reformers as the heir to the defunct Morals Bureau’s agenda, the Morals Court represented a double victory. Not only would the power of the machine be undercut (by reducing its ability to protect from the law its loyal followers and those who had paid their protection money), but the church forces had gained a powerful legal instrument for unifying the moral goals of church and state, successfully defining a set of judicial actions in moral terms. Each defendant was assigned a caseworker who “would undertake to assist in the restoration of offenders both by their own skillful services and establishing contacts with the church of each offender’s natural affiliations for follow-up assistance.” This was much better than having city workers adopt this role, because they would not be “subject to possible political influences.”7 Instead, they would be subject to religious influences. The Pittsburgh Christian Outlook noted that “the frank recognition of religion and even emphasis upon it, has been distinctive of the Pittsburgh Morals Court through its whole history…. Our court has gone on the assumption that a spiritual element is essential to moral reformation

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and character building, that nowhere else is the help of Almighty God more manifestly needed than among those whose wrong doing has brought them here.”8 The religious dimensions of the Morals Court were not limited to Protestants: there were representatives of Catholic and Jewish organizations that served as liaisons to the Court as well. Having long fought for such influence in the governing of the city, reformers could proudly point to the creation of the Morals Court as a long-awaited comingtogether of the functions of city government and the churches to forge a moral city. Finally, the PCC record reflected years of concerned, but ultimately ineffective efforts on the part of the church forces to influence labor relations in Pittsburgh. We have seen how the PCC’s Committee on Industrial Relations, while wishing to ameliorate conditions for labor in Pittsburgh, felt stymied by the lack of support within Pittsburgh’s churches for any real change. The Challenge of Pittsburgh also wished to weigh in on the side of better working and living conditions for Pittsburgh’s working class. Believing that the church “must have a message for an industrial age, or cease to be moral leaders,” Daniel Marsh asserted that “the church had spoken” in the form of the Social Creed of the Churches, and that it was the duty of churches to fight for the right to work, the enforcement of child labor laws, the right of labor to organize and associate, the need for collective bargaining, “the most equitable division of the product of industry that can ultimately be devised,” and one day’s rest in seven. The Creed also supported the establishment of workman’s compensation and old-age pensions, the reduction in hours of labor, and the passage of female labor laws. Marsh reprinted the Social Creed in the Challenge study, and spent half a chapter discussing (and supporting) these positions.9 The Challenge study contained a chapter entitled “The People at Work” which condemned the “brutalizing poverty” that many Pittsburgh citizens had to suffer, and all that it meant in terms of substandard, dangerous, and unhealthy living conditions. Citing the CSSU survey on industrial unrest conducted in 1916, it reiterated the finding that workers’ wages had not kept pace with the cost of living, and that workers had been excluded from their fair share of the enormous profits accumulated by industry. It further denounced the reality that the poor, who represented sixty-five per cent of the population, owned only five per cent of the wealth. “Against such inequalities,” the study concluded, “the Scriptures cry out aloud: ‘Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by injustice; that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not his hire.’”10 A decade prior, these church reformers had to cajole their membership to support the formation of social service commissions; the collective voice of the Pittsburgh’s Protestants now spoke out boldly in support of policies admittedly progressive for the Steel City. Publishing the Social Creed was one thing; getting the churches to support workers during a strike was entirely another. This was especially true during the great steel strike of 1919. Shortly after the strike broke out in September of that year, the PCC appointed a special committee to study the strike and to make reports and recommendations. The committee remained silent, however, and when it became known in late November that a Commission of the Interchurch World Movement was also investigating the strike. The PCC committee ended their investigation and handed over their findings to the Interchurch Commission. The Interchurch Commission, in its report on the strike, had both praise and criticism for Pittsburgh’s pastors. It noted the difficulty which confronted the PCC in making its

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investigation, concluding that the PCC was hobbled by the more conservative churches in the council (which viewed federated churches as too progressive), by lack of financial resources to investigate a problem that was national in scope, and by the fact that “investigations of industrial situations by local societies are not likely to be satisfactory” because “local sentiment plays too large a part on one side or the other.” These factors, combined with an intense pressure created by local newspapers which uniformly condemned the strikers, created “an atmosphere around the public mind which only the strongest individuals can withstand.”11 Under these conditions it was courageous for the PCC, the commission felt, to have issued a bulletin entitled “An Appeal to Americans” in late November asking Pittsburgh’s native citizens to respect the rights of immigrants, to understand that only a small minority of immigrant workers could be considered radicals or revolutionaries, and to take responsibility for the conditions which led to the strike.12 Nevertheless, the PCC allowed itself to be effectively prevented by these forces from broadcasting its pro-labor sentiments. The Interchurch Commission heard “considerable criticism” of the PCC, both from the commission’s investigators and from members of the council itself, over the PCC’s failure to continue its investigation or speak out about the strike. Pittsburgh’s churches were “weak in social service,” critics concluded, and “the responsibility for this rests largely with the council.”13 PCC Executive Secretary Charles R.Zahniser made an “informal request” to member churches asking pastors “not to comment on the strike,”14 and the Pittsburgh Christian Outlook defended PCC neutrality by noting that “in an issue that involves so much of the community and on which prejudice is running high, it is task enough to try to help our people to hold their heads and not rush off rashly in immature judgments and wild assertions in support of one side or the other in the controversy.”15 Thus, in spite of the PCC’s apparent support for justice for workers, there were severe limits on the extent to which these social gospel pronouncements could be realized in the Steel City.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION AND POLITICS Essayist Annie Dillard, in her description of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, describes a Sunday morning communion service in the tony Shadyside Presbyterian Church. Dillard, not wanting to be there in the first place, and in the throes of adolescent rebellion, had dark thoughts about “the putative hypocrisy of the expensive men and women” at the church, men who worked in the steel industry or for Mellon Bank and their well-off wives and children. “I knew why these people were in church: to display to each other their clothes… In church they made business connections; they saw and were seen.” She was confident that she knew these people around her. She knew what they loved: “their families, their houses, their country clubs, hard work, the people they knew best, and summer parties with old friends full of laughter,” and what they hated: “labor unions, laziness, spending, wildness, loudness.” But as the communion service culminated, the congregation began to pray in preparation for the distribution of the elements. Dillard hesitated in her denunciations. “I was alert enough now to feel, despite myself, some faint, thin stream of spirit braiding forward from the pews… There was no

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speech nor language. The people had been praying, praying to God, just as they seemed to be praying. That was the fact. I didn’t know what to make of it.”16 Historians who confront religious language in Progressive reform movements also seem not to know what to make of it. These scholars, along with those concerned with popular religion, gender issues in reform, or moral reform movements have tended in their studies towards a binary analysis. That is, the appearance of religious language in these various contexts is explained fundamentally in terms of oppositions between rich and poor, the clergy and the laity, liberal theology and conservative, male styles of reform and female, secular institutions and churches and church organizations. Historians of Pittsburgh’s elite, for example, have viewed membership in Episcopalian or Presbyterian churches in this era as just one more cipher indicating upperclass status, and their concern about moral government as rhetoric shielding more fundamental class or professional interests, or a desire to control the city’s working class. Those who have studied moral reform movements likewise divide moral reform work in this era, separating “positive environmentalists” who tried to address the evils of the city by changing the physical environment from “coercive” reformers who sought primarily to pass laws outlawing prostitution and the saloon. Historians of popular religion often treat the phenomenon of popular religion as something completely removed from the world of the official church with its clergy, hierarchies, and institutions, so that popular religion has almost come to mean that which has nothing whatever to do with “official” or institutional religion.17 In a similar fashion, a literature on gender and reform which explains reform movements as driven by gender difference above all else, has seen contrasting male and female styles of reform as most crucial for understanding why reformers pursued certain strategies.18 To some extent this is the job of scholars—to bring analytic order to the swarming confusion of lived human life. A historian who merely represents that life, no matter how accurately and completely, runs the risk of becoming like Juan Luis Borges’ mapmaker who set out to construct a map of an empire that was so detailed that it ended up being as large as the territory itself. Nevertheless, the story of reform in Pittsburgh calls into question the useful-ness of analytically constructed oppositional antagonisms when they assault the complexity of the real chronological time in which they took place. Although class, gender, race, position within church life, and placement on the theological spectrum bent reformers’ beliefs and actions, these variables, when considered in isolation, too often neaten up what was a welter of competing interests and approaches that could act on any one reformer at any particular time. More helpful is to uncover the ways that religious language and moral reform efforts often cut across class, racial, gender, denominational, theological, and lay/clergy lines. To recognize that moral reform language could at times transcend such categories does not mean returning to a naive acceptance of “consensus” in which reform rhetoric unites previously embattled actors and ideologies. Rather, it is a call for reconsidering this rhetoric as the result of multiple impulses and contextualizations. Elite reformers were addressing serious societal problems in their reform impulses (often with important successes that bettered life in the city), but they nevertheless enacted their reforms as elites, as laity or clergy, as men or women, as Episcopalians or Presbyterians, which inevitably conditioned how they would see the world. Their beliefs and passions, therefore, had to be worked out in service to

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multiple, sometimes oppositional allegiances, and within the constraints that these and other forces placed on the possibility of reform. The moral discourse of reform which developed in Pittsburgh—germinated in churches such as Calvary Episcopal, moving with the activist laity and clergy into secular reform organizations such as the Voters’ League and the Civic Club, and then reappropriated by the institutional church in the form of the CSSU and the PCC— provided a linguistic and ideological flag under which disparate bands of reformers were able to unite. In “moralizing” the reform discourse in Pittsburgh, reformers acted on deep and lasting concerns about the city, about politics, and about society. We are helped in conceiving how this occurred by the explanatory power of recent historical works by scholars such as Philip Ethington on San Francisco or Carl Smith on Chicago, who effectively combine the insights of the “linguistic turn” with a hard-headed assessment of the ways in which social standing continued to matter in reform movements. The “linguistic turn,” as summarized by John Toews, is characterized by the combination of intellectual historians’ concern for the “history of meaning” with the realization that “the pursuit of this study involves a focused concern on the ways meaning is constituted in and through language.” According to these historians, “language can no longer be construed as simply a medium, relatively or potentially transparent, for the representation or expression of a reality outside of itself.” Nevertheless, “the predominant tendency” (and one in which I believe both Ethington and Smith fit) “is to adapt traditional historical concerns for extralinguistic origins and reference to the semiological challenge”; to pay close attention to language because language matters, but to realize that the worlds of human experience are “ultimately irreducible to the linguistic forms in which they appear.”19 Both Ethington and Smith stress the importance of reform language. For Ethington, language was the medium of exchange in the public sphere; for Smith it was the vehicle for the imaginative construction of the city. For both, the way in which reformers voiced public issues and collective images and articulated the city’s problems was decisive in shaping elections, policy, and the reform agenda. Faced with the blunt physical and political reality of Pittsburgh’s pathologies, its reform movement took on shape and momentum from the ways that reformers imaginatively grasped these ills and envisioned a different and better day. Then, as now, the process of interpreting and explaining society’s dysfunctional elements and hoping and planning for something better was wrapped up in “values”—the broad moral views of the city, citizenship, politics, democracy, and sense of what was right and wrong. There were of course competing moral visions. We have seen, for example, the alternative picture of what ailed Pittsburgh put forward by the researchers and writers of the Pittsburgh Survey. Aligning themselves with national social gospel perspectives and priorities, the Survey’s authors claimed that Pittsburgh’s “moral adolescence” was keeping the city’s reformers focused on individual acts of immorality (such as drinking or Sabbath-breaking) while the corporate immorality present in the exploitation of the city’s workers went unaddressed. Pittsburgh’s workers themselves, as workers in other cities, were in the process of fashioning their own morally articulated sense of what American society needed. Richard Oestricher has pointed to the ways in which a late nineteenthcentury “worker’s moral economy…directly confronted employers’ efforts to maximize output and efficiency and directly contradicted the acquisitive ethic of individual gain.”20

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This reality was fleshed out in Leon Fink’s study on the Knights of Labor. Fink noted that a “moralistic, republican message sealed the unity of the Knights’ heterogeneous constituency,” and that while “‘liberal’ in its continuing respect for private property and fear of concentrated power in public or private hands, popular labor rhetoric appropriated a ‘republican’ emphasis on the public good and individual moral responsibility to promote it.” Certain of these values could be said to be shared by Pittsburgh’s reforming elite, but as Fink concluded, the Knights “harness[ed] popular values regarding education, temperance, and family responsibility to a critique of the wage system”— something Pittsburgh’s elite reformers were never inclined to do.21 Although Pittsburgh’s working class no more embodied a singular moral vision than did Pittsburgh’s elites, the clash of republican moral sensibilities with the “acquisitive ethic” represented by Pittsburgh’s industries could be seen at points of labor struggle which bracketed this era—the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the great steel strike of 1919.22 Women reformers in America’s cities worked within a “separate sphere,” one which gave them a distinct agenda based on their putative superiority in dealing with moral questions, and this had a clear effect on how women in this era saw and described urban problems. The impact of gender on reform could lead male and female reformers to disagree on what these problems were, how to talk about them, and what paths should be taken to fix them. In Pittsburgh, however, this remained more of a potential division than a substantial one. Male and female reformers certainly clashed over the gendered identity of reform, and conflicts arose over such issues as settlement house programs and the attention that should be given to building playgrounds versus rooting out government corruption. But Pittsburgh reformers more often were able to harness their different strategies to further shared, ultimate goals, as when the all-male Voters’ League and the female-dominated Civic Club cooperated to alter the structure of Pittsburgh’s school system. In this sense, Pittsburgh’s female reformers offered less of a competing moral vision than one which, though differently gendered, paralleled the concerns and goals of male reformers. There were also constructions of the city’s problems which did not rely most fundamentally on moral condemnation of the macnine government. African American leadership in Pittsburgh evidenced such an alternative vision of reform. Although supporting many of the same reform measures as Pittsburgh’s white reformers—calling for anti-prostitution measures, supporting increased social services for the poor, advocating for better housing and environmental conditions, and condemning political corruption—black leaders like Robert L.Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier refused to see these problems as originating with the machine government. Shut out from white reform efforts by racist snubs and the refusal to grant blacks leadership roles within reform organizations, Vann and other black leaders were loyal in support for the machine because it proved a consistent source of manual labor jobs for Pittsburgh’s black community.23 For Vann and other African American Pittsburghers, racism and its effects remained the most pressing and consistent social problem—one that isolated the black community geographically, socially, politically, and economically—forcing them to live “lives of their own.”24 The moral discourse that reformers came to employ in Pittsburgh was therefore constructed in competition with other visions (even other moral visions) and other hopes—visions which themselves tended to be fractured along various lines of division,

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whether of class, skilled versus unskilled worker, native versus immigrant, or early resident of Pittsburgh versus recent migrant. To say that these constituted “competing visions” is not to say that the reformers in this study were blind to the plight of labor and the problems of racism, or that these groups worked for entirely different ends. Pittsburgh’s workers and African Americans could share broad portions of the moral reform agenda; consequently, there were many points during these years when groups would link up and fight for a common cause. The National Labor Tribune, for example, in 1906 supported the reform candidacy of George Logan for mayor of Allegheny. Logan was the candidate for the Good Government Party, formed as the political arm of the Allegheny Federation of Churches. The Tribune, sounding very much like a Voters’ League pamphlet, noted that Logan, “one of the most prominent business men in the two cities,” possessed “the sort of executive ability and the high character that always ought to be associated with the chief magistracy of a large city.” If he won, “Allegheny can be assured of an upright and an efficient administration.” Likewise, middle-class African Americans like Vann expressed the same concerns about prostitution, crime, and corruption in the black community that Pittsburgh’s white reformers confronted in theirs. Such shared sentiments were the basis of the few attempts to form integrated reform organizations such as the Pittsburgh Association for the Improvement of Conditions in the Hill District.25 Reformers were even closer in thought and spirit to the social gospel priorities outlined in the Social Creed of the Churches, as reflected in the depiction of problems suggested by the Pittsburgh Survey But these alternative reform visions had set different priorities, ones to which Pittsburgh’s reformers did not, or could not, direct the bulk of their reform energy. Convinced that the machine government was Pittsburgh’s primary problem, and tugged in opposing ideological directions from these alternative visions by their class and racial identities, Pittsburgh’s reformers could not see the wage system or racism as the base of the city’s pathologies. Further, to the extent that Pittsburgh reformers were part of a larger Progressive system of thinking, they battled alternative political visions that had dominated in the Gilded Age. As Eldon Eisenach has demonstrated, the intellectuals most responsible for the formation of Progressive thought attacked “local democracy, local economy, national courts, and coalitional political parties” and in the process “subordinated and devalued the ways of life or ‘practices’ constituted in those older institutions.”26 The prevalence of Progressive ideology by World War I, Eisenach concluded—won by legitimating their positions through public political discourse—constituted a “new regime in thought.”27 When Pittsburgh reformers battled machine power and partisanship in local politics, they fought against an alternative vision of political organization and governmental structure. As with the social gospel, Pittsburgh reformers made Progressive thought their own, giving it a more focused moral spin and dwelling to a greater extent on local issues than Eisenach’s Progressives. Eisenach argued that Progressives, in attempting to provide a new nationalist vision, sought “consciously to define, inculcate, and reward ‘national’ ways of life over ‘local’ ones.”28 Pittsburgh reformers, facing a powerful local Republican machine which consistently and successfully used national political issues to garner support (such as the tariff), responded by encouraging Pittsburgh’s citizens to see local politics as separate from national ones, with each sphere having its own important concerns. But it should be clear that there was a plethora of alternatives to the program

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offered by Pittsburgh’s reformers, and the direction that reform would take was in no way a given. Why, then, did the particular configuration of emphases, arguments, moral priorities, and expressions of these reformers’ moral discourse seem to convince? Perhaps the most important reason was that the moral discourse was a linguistic mansion with many rooms. Moral reform language could appeal to a conservative Presbyterian who wished to see saloons controlled, brothels closed, and Sabbath laws enforced; to a social gospel Episcopalian who believed it was necessary to clean up Pittsburgh’s filthy environment and provide a measure of justice to Pittsburgh’s poor; or to a Progressive politician who was most interested in an efficient and honest local government, with the state increasingly taking on responsibility for societal needs. All were given space under the moral discourses expansive roof. And as we have seen, this entire range of goals—from the battling of saloon and brothel, to the purification of Pittsburgh’s water, to the alteration of the local governmental structure—were all consistently part of reform efforts in Pittsburgh. The linguistic and ideological flexibility of moral reform had much to do with this. The very word “moral” was able to accrue a number of meanings—it came to be associated in varying degrees with honesty, efficiency, selflessness, Christian individualism, social environmentalism, and a host of other qualities—such that reforms couched in moral terms resonated in multiple ways. The same blurring of meanings occurred with these reformers’ characterizations of their prime enemy, the machine government. “Machine government” could signify a structure, corruption, ties to vice and the saloon, inefficiency, an ethnic group, or some combination of these identities. The “machine” opposed could be a specific one, like the Magee-Flinn or the Penrose machine, or it could be a vague, shadowy “other” lurking behind and profiting from the cultivation of illicit activities. Thus by the time of the most dramatic reforms in Pittsburgh, the period from 1905–1915, leading reformers of various stripes saw “moral government” as vital, and “machine government” as everything standing in the way of that which was moral and good. This was accomplished in the face of competing reform discourses and of alternative views of the city and how it should be run. As Stanley Fish has written: “It is here that the real power resides, in whatever vocabulary has so permeated the culture that it seems simply descriptive of independent realities; and it is in the succession of powerful vocabularies that one finds the answer to the question…what is it that produces change?” “Change is produced,” Fish concluded, “when a vocabulary takes hold to the extent that its ways of elaborating the world become normative and are unreflectively asserted in everyday practices.”29 That the machine government was the evil source of many of Pittsburgh’s problems and needed to be fought on every front became “normative” for Pittsburgh reformers. Structural factors certainly facilitated the spread and adoption of this thinking. Political conditions in Pittsburgh, with the dominance of one political party which was rigorously controlled by the machine government, meant that reform energy was concentrated in civic reform organizations. Further, the organizations most powerfully responsible for initiating and enacting reform were very much interconnected. They were linked through shared membership, agendas, and outlooks, and came almost naturally to adopt very similar language for describing Pittsburgh’s problems. Here another structural fact was crucial: many reforms ultimately classified as “Progressive” had their originating impulse in the work of Pittsburgh’s churches, and a significant number of the most active and influential reformers like H.D.W.English and

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George Guthrie came to reform through socially involved churches, basing their reform activities on their moral vision. In carrying this discourse into civic reform organizations, there was therefore already a base for support in many of Pittsburgh’s churches, and reformers’ description of Pittsburgh’s problems resonated because many Pittsburgh citizens had heard it before—from the pulpit. James Lewis, in his study of Protestant churches in another steel town—Gary, Indiana—has correctly warned of the dangers in attributing this or that particular action on the part of any individual to religious belief. He noted that the influence of religious belief on Gary’s leaders was “impossible to document unambiguously, inasmuch as human motivation is such a complex matter.” Nevertheless, he concluded that “the history of Gary is replete with clues that religious faith and church membership were often, not always, extremely significant to many of Gary’s leaders.”30 Reformers in Pittsburgh likewise occasionally attributed their social concern to what they had learned in church, as when the “Calvary Crowd” pointed to the influence of George Hodges’ teachings in motivating them to civic reform. But often the “clues,” as in Gary, were less direct: the use of social gospel language, the attempt by reformers to involve the church in reform, the reference to God or providence in political speeches, and even more diluted traces. There are points, therefore, where we can assert that religious belief influenced reform, but we should always do so with the hesitation suggested by Lewis, and with an eye to the complex process by which such beliefs mixed and bonded with other life experiences. Reformers could also certainly speak the language of class—their rhetoric was more than occasionally sprinkled with paternalism, noblesse oblige, a lack of understanding of the obstacles workers faced—and part of their shared outlook resided in the fact that most reformers were elites. This meant that they lived in the same neighborhoods, sent their children to the same schools, saw each other in church and at club meetings. But shared class and professional status, as we have seen, did not necessarily mean agreement on the need for reform, or on the path that reform should take. Reformers employing a moral discourse had to convince their peers, as well as sufficient numbers of other Pittsburgh citizens, that their vision of the city and its problems was persuasive. Thus it is important to note that the moral discourse resonated because there was substance to its vision. Pittsburgh did suffer from a range of difficult political, social, and economic troubles, many directly traceable to the omissions and commissions of the machine government. Since there is no longer any consensus that elite reform was inevitably bound up in social control, that opposition to the machine government was necessarily an attack on the working class, or that reformers only acted out of class interest, space has been created for asking whether or not the moral reform vision was correct in its focus. Were reformers right about the machine? Did their reforms fix the problems? Like much of Progressive reform throughout the country, the picture was mixed. Reform thinking was in some ways limited, and a number of factors impeded implementation and enforcement of reform measures. The change to the small city council in 1911, for example, did not result in the hoped-for rapid succession of legislation quickly remedying the ills that Pittsburgh suffered. In spite of the flurry of studies and recommendations commissioned by the Guthrie-appointed Pittsburgh Civic Commission, for example, which provided blueprints for the efficient solution to infrastructural problems concerning transportation and roadways, water and sewage, air

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pollution, flood control, and the regulation of housing, Joel Tarr concluded that “no substantial improvements occurred” until many decades later.31 Efforts to provide adequate housing and sanitary sewage for all the city’s residents moved more slowly than hoped. A housing code enacted in 1910 and a building code passed in 1916, for example, together required adequate ventilation, an indoor water supply, standards of cleanliness and upkeep, and a water-closet for every family dwelling unit. A social survey from the 1930s, however, found hundreds of homes still without running water, over five hundred privy vaults on sewered streets (in violation of the law), overcrowding, houses in disrepair, and the worst sections of the city, such as the infamous “Skunk Hollow,” virtually unchanged since the days of the Pittsburgh Survey. By the 1930s the water supply was found to be “safe and adequate,” and “under competent supervision,” yet “a part of Pittsburgh where primitive conditions of sewage” had “continued year in and year out” saw a “concentrated occurrence” of typhoid as late as 1934. These shortcomings were attributed mainly to the “lethargic” attitudes and “sporadic” actions of public administrative bodies. The laws were on the books; they were just not enforced.32 Reformers came to learn that the machine government was more entrenched than they had believed, and that there were other powerful forces resistant to reform. Local machine government loyalists retained positions within the city’s administration in the years following the purge of city council, and reformers found themselves constrained by ongoing political wars played out with the state Republican machine. Certain sectors of the business community offered stiff resistance to reform as well, especially with any leaning toward a pro-labor or pro-union stance in labor relations, but also with regard to environmental and infrastructural improvements. Although the reform forces advocating centralization in government charted notable successes, attempts to implement reforms were stymied by a range of factors identified by Joel Tarr, including the “narrow definition” of problems; “lack of action by the federal government,” the “unwillingness of those who controlled the City Council and the county government to surrender their control of development” to experts and planners; the resistance of “business leaders” who “opposed surrendering authority to the municipality”; and “limitations of power and finances” given public agencies.33 The fact that the machine government remained the target of reformers throughout this period shows the staying power the machine possessed. As late as the 1930s, reformers were making the same complaints about machine power that had been heard in Pittsburgh for over half a century. One such reformer claimed that “Pittsburgh admittedly is one of the most corrupt and mismanaged municipalities in the United States,” and that “no other community so clearly reveals how most American municipal governments have been controlled by a close political hook-up between crooked ward heelers and depraved gangsters on the one hand, and powerful bankers and public utility magnates on the other.” The title of his piece, “Mr. Mellon’s Pittsburgh—Symbol of Corruption,” makes it clear whom he found primarily responsible.34 Whether this reformer was accurately reporting conditions in Pittsburgh, or just drawing on a tried-and-true stable of reform concepts is hard to say. But the concerns of Pittsburgh’s moral reformers clearly had not yet found pervasive or permanent solutions. There were, however, reform successes. The achievements of George Guthrie’s administration were summarized by Robert Woods in the 1914 six-volume published edition of the Pittsburgh Survey. Guthrie had “made thorough application of the

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principles of civil service reform and stood out for business methods in awarding all contracts, including the banking of the city’s funds.” He had attacked the machine’s granting of “perpetual franchises” to the street railways, insisting that the Pennsylvania Railroad “cease moving its trains through the middle of what is potentially the best downtown thoroughfare in Pittsburgh,” “clean and repair the streets within the tracks,” and “pay bridge tolls.” “Loose and costly business methods in the city departments were radically checked, and accounts with long arrearages involving heavy interest losses to the city were brought up to date,” Woods continued, and “accompanying the more economical management of departments went intelligent and effective efforts to improve the water supply, to abate the smoke nuisance, to restrain and punish exploiters of women, and to combat typhoid fever and tuberculosis by wholesale inroads upon almost unbelievable sanitary evils.”35 These “wholesale inroads” against sanitary evils included hastening the construction of the water treatment plant, the result being that Pittsburgh’s morbidity rate due to typhoid dropped (in spite of occasional outbreaks) from the highest in the nation for large cities down to the national average, saving at least seventy estimated lives per year. In the same volume of the Survey, Allen T.Burns noted that the change in the city council structure had ushered in a “new era,” where the questions of city government were no longer “settled on the principle of ‘Scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours,’” but effectively considered measures “from the point of view of the good of the whole city.”36 Charges of corruption among councilmembers disappeared. The reorganization and centralization of Pittsburgh’s school system in 1912 was also heralded a success. A 1938 social survey of Pittsburgh noted this change as one of “two or three most notable advances” since the time of the Pittsburgh Survey. Beyond halting the graft fostered by the old system, this reorganization improved education in the city. More children were staying in school longer (the percentage of students in high school went from 5 percent in 1907 to 18 percent in 1938); the physical plants of schools were vastly improved; new programs “in accordance with the best thought in the country” were launched, and conditions had turned around to such an extent by the late 1920s that a survey of education in that era had to caution against becoming “too well satisfied” and therefore “relinquish the effort necessary for further improvement.”37 Reformers, as we have seen, also had sporadically stunning success at stemming the growth of commercialized vice, and certainly made great strides towards cutting the connections between this “capitalism of corruption” and local government. Finally, Pittsburgh’s churches had been moved from a situation in 1890 when for the vast majority of them the broader city’s physical, social, and environmental conditions were not a priority, and efforts to assist Pittsburgh’s poor and secure justice for its workers were conducted along limited and mostly uncoordinated lines, to one in 1920 in which all Protestant denominations were united in the involvement of the church in “social service,” and their attention more finely attuned to the needs of Pittsburgh’s impoverished. What are the implications of this mixed bag of reform success? That legislated reforms were sometimes sporadically enforced cannot be blamed on reformers, nor can we say that the idea of efficiency and honesty in government, the pursuit of environmental amelioration, and the attempt to ensure adequate housing and sanitary standards were wrongheaded because forces not under the control of reformers opposed and blocked them. Reformers, to be sure, underestimated the resistance to a centrally planned municipal life on the part of businessmen, politicians, and others, and relied overmuch on

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the notion that if they “put the facts before the people, the people would change the facts.” Perhaps reformers could be faulted for exaggerating the extent to which Pittsburgh’s environmental problems, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and lack of law enforcement were purely the fault of the machine, and they learned for themselves the difficulties in getting needed changes studied, legislated, financed, and enacted. That granted, it must be recognized that reformers did what they could. Eliminating government graft and restructuring government along more efficient lines; exploring, investigating, and publicizing infrastructural and environmental problems; and attempting to undercut the power and profits of those who lived off prostitution or corrupt connections to government were important first steps, and foreshadowed the more effective solution to these problems that came with the intervention of the federal government in the 1930s, and with the massive public-private collaboration that characterized Pittsburgh’s “Renaissance” in the post-World War II period. Whether one sees the reform agenda as progressive or oppressive, as largely successful or unsuccessful, as expansive or limited, it now seems clear that reformers were concerned about corruption, about the moral effects of a polluted environment, about tolerated prostitution and the political (and moral) influence of the saloon. The moral state of the city, and a moral government to run it, were of vital importance to these reformers in a way not reducible to class or profession, and the power of the moral discourse to hold sway within the “public reform sphere” and thereby to shape reform must be given a new recognition. These moral priorities directed reform energies in certain directions, focusing reform efforts on the machine government and away, for example, from the “labor question.” The dominance of the moral discourse in the public reform sphere also created a special place for the church in the reform story. Throughout this period, Pittsburgh churches desired moral leadership and saw themselves as the appropriate arbiters of public morality. But the church had to address cultural, political, and economic debates at the point of its reputed authority. This meant, for the most part, stressing its ability to stay above day-to-day conflicts and elaborating eternal principles, although on issues most clearly constructed as moral (like anti-prostitution), church organizations such as the Allegheny Federation of Churches felt comfortable in leading reform efforts. Reformers, both activist laity and socially concerned clergy, began to sense that to retain its moral leadership the church must speak to and involve itself in all manner of reform efforts and thus tried to widen the range of issues to which the church could speak (or the way it could speak to them). It was just at the point when the CSSU and the PCC were beginning to convince Pittsburgh’s Protestants that this was a correct course, however, that secular civic reform forces began to desire separate religious and reform spheres, and to leave aside the moral discourse. This could be seen clearly in the attempt to alter the provision of Pittsburgh’s social services. At the same moment that the PCC trumpeted the religious influence of the Morals Court, and PCC Secretary Zahniser published a volume entitled Casework Evangelism which argued that “church forces need today to give particular attention to the technique of casework in social service,” the professionalizing social work community in Pittsburgh felt that “the time-honored motivations of social work—charitable impulses, pity, religious precepts—seem inadequate for the scope of present-day social work,” and that it was time for the churches to leave social work to the experts.38 In this, social work professionals represented the attitude of the American state

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toward social service which would characterize the trend of social policy from the Progressive Era to the 1980s: social work was a matter for the government to finance and organize. The views of the church—that a community’s institutions should take responsibility for the city’s poor, and social aid should appropriately take place within a discussion of values and responsibility—sounds like more recent positions. In this sense, the moral discourse was losing its normative status by the 1920s and was being challenged by the discourse of the expert—another dominant theme in Progressive Era thinking. Protestant churches, through the CSSU and the PCC, had sought to establish themselves as moral “experts,” and thus natural leaders in reform leading to the moral city. But the necessarily broad nature of the moral discourse which had been so successful in bringing together a wide range of reformers was less so in providing specific prescriptions for Pittsburgh’s societal or environmental dysfunctions. This had the effect of ghettoizing the moral discourse, restricting it to usage by the church forces, while the practical, detailed work of actual reforms became the property of civic reform organizations, government departments, outside commissions, and businesses. This movement from broadly moral to expert-practical could be seen in the development and spread of city planning. Spurred by the moral discourse and a vision to work towards a moral environment in the city of Pittsburgh, for example, George Guthrie had created the Pittsburgh Civic Commission to address environmental amelioration. The Civic Commission, in turn, brought in expert city planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Frederick Bigger to provide Pittsburgh with the blueprints for change. These plans, now institutionally twice removed from Guthrie, offer only a faint echo of his call for a moral environment.39 The organized involvement of Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches in social and political reform, therefore, paralleled a diminished ability of the moral discourse to sustain the reform coalition. The process by which organized Protestantism sought a more active role in reform efforts also had the effect of domesticating the more progressive beliefs and actions of its laity. This could be seen, for example, in the way that the PCC constructed a role for women in the social service aspects of its mission. In contrast to the leadership roles that Pittsburgh’s women had commanded in important civic reform and women’s organizations, the Social Service Commission of the PCC, like the CSSU, was all male. In spite of the fact that women comprised a substantial majority of both church and social reform organization membership, no women had been included in any of the PCC committees. In 1921, the PCC formed a Department of Women’s Work, ostensibly to coordinate the extensive social work being done by Pittsburgh’s Protestant laywomen. The incorporation of women into the work of the PCC was accomplished within the now well-worn rhetorical metaphor of “municipal housekeeping.” As Ida B.Little explained in an article on the “Aims and Ideals of the Department of Women’s Work,” a city needed to be beautiful, not only for the sake of visitors, but for those who lived there. There were parts of the city “that need to be cleansed,” and all women should take part in this task, for “evil sweeps out like all filth and finds its way into clean surroundings.”40 The Civic Action Committee of the Department was even more explicit, sending a “Message to the Women of Pittsburgh” that “the woman’s place is in the home,” but as “home-loving women with Christian ideals” who were “endeavoring to be true daughters of our great State” they wished to convince Pittsburgh’s women of “the close relation of politics to the home.” Encouraging women to vote against the “liquor advocates and other vicious

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interests,” the Committee exhorted women to help make the city and the state “models where good homes, active churches and uplifting schools are encouraged and where graft, red-light districts and boot-legging are prevented from invading our very backyards.” “Let us have a thorough house-cleaning,” they concluded. Beyond reference to the home and to housecleaning, women were also appealed to as mothers.41 In addition to the Civic Action Committee and an Education Committee, the Department’s most important function was to coordinate the activities of Protestant women in relation to the Morals Court. This seems a faint echo to the power that lay women exercised in the Civic Club and other “secular” organizations. The church’s attempt to draw all manner of reform under its own direction meant that Protestant women would play the role, in Virginia Brereton’s words, of “subordinated insiders.” As Brereton notes, this was true of Protestant women generally in this period: As halfway members of the establishment, Protestant women inherited a consciousness of their privileged station and also a concomitant sense of social responsibility; they felt an obligation to exercise whatever influence they could on behalf of the poor and the unchurched. They were often stymied, however, in the full exercise of authority by the strictures that the male establishment imposed, and by their own culturally derived selfdoubts and internal inhibitions. Frequently they were forced to employ methods of indirection and content themselves with the attainment of modest goals.42 Women working through church-dominated reform organizations thus faced a “double subordination”—one imposed on women by male-dominated institutions and ideologies in the broader culture, and a second layer imposed by male church leaders, whether clergy or laity. Similar problems plagued CSSU and PCC attempts to improve race relations in Pittsburgh and provide for the needs of the city’s growing African American population. Although motivated by noble goals and a clear-eyed recognition of the need to deal with racial matters, the efforts of the CSSU fell short for several reasons. In part, they could not overcome the residual racism that kept blacks and whites apart, even in church organizations. Black representatives sent to attend the Men and Religion Forward Movement campaign were shut out, and no African Americans served on the Board of the CSSU, even on its Committee on Race Relationship. Further, the CSSU’s first attempts at generating reform in black sections of Pittsburgh relied on the use of models that had been successful for them, but which for a variety of reasons did not work when exported wholesale into the vastly different cultural context of black Pittsburgh. These difficulties were highlighted in an organization known as the “Association for the Improvement of Social Conditions in the Hill District” (a precursor to Pittsburgh’s Urban League) which was formed in 1914 under the leadership of J.Bryon Deacon, Director of Pittsburgh’s Associated Charities, and apparently modeled on and linked to the CSSU. The Association divided itself into the following committees: Health and Sanitation, Temperance, Vice Suppression, Civic Action, and Race Relations. Its stated object was “the promotion, and execution of measures for the correction of all conditions,

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which endanger the social life of the community…the association shall be immediately concerned with such aspects of the general social condition as ‘The Social Evil’, so called, in whatever form it may present itself; the Saloon question, Housing Conditions, Dance Halls, Censorship of Moving Pictures, Recreational Facilities, Juvenile Delinquency, Gambling Clubs and the securing of justice for Negroes in local police courts.” The Association would “co-operate in every way with the Christian Social Service Union,” and membership was “limited to men of sound moral character who reside in the Hill District.”43 An early history noted that, one year later, the group was “making little progress because of much unrest in the organization.”44 One major aspect of the difficulty in working together toward reform was that fact that middle-class African American leadership, while often stressing the same themes and need for reform articulated by white reformers, was less inclined to see the evil of the city residing most importantly in the workings of the machine government. Peter Gottlieb’s study of African-American Pittsburgh from 1916 to the 1930s demonstrates the way in which the black community was divided along very similar lines as white communities. The older, wealthier, and better-established blacks attempted to educate and socialize the mass of black Southern migrants who came north to work in Pittsburgh’s industries. Although the isolating pressure of racism often forced them to live in the same neighborhoods, these two very different elements of the black community would separate, when they had the chance, going to different churches, attending different cultural events, and belonging to different clubs. While the elites in the black community, through institutions such as the Urban League or the Pittsburgh Courier, evidenced the same paternalistic concern about the social, work, and leisure habits of the Southern migrants, and sounded in their rhetoric identical to any number of white civic reform organizations, this did not necessarily lead to political cooperation across racial barriers towards similar reforms. Pittsburgh’s blacks were wary of the machine, and resented that the machine relied on the “black vote” without bothering to give back anything to the black community on a consistent basis. But when politicians did make an effort to secure jobs for blacks, as William Magee did during major road projects pursued during his administration, black opinion-shapers such as Robert L.Vann of the Courier were unstinting in their support.45 Lacking the common ground of an agreed-upon enemy, it was difficult for black and white reformers to come together on reform priorities or strategies.

NEW DIRECTIONS This study therefore indicates the necessity of taking a new look at the role of churches in reform. A strand of the literature has seen churches as not importantly involved in reform as institutions until denominations formed social service commissions at the national level under the influence of social gospel theology. But churches in Pittsburgh were very much players in the reform drama from the 1890s through 1920. If we look beyond standard church rhetoric about “staying out of politics” we see that Pittsburgh’s churches found complex and creative ways to stay linked to Pittsburgh’s reform process. One way they did so was through the links that their laity provided to apparently secular civic reform organizations. These links made Pittsburgh’s churches part of a network of reform

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organizations. As much as churches contributed to the shaping of the reform agenda— whether through ideas, language, or the actual participation of the church as an institution in reform—they were changed by these links as well. Activist laity, as the ones responsible for surveying and assessing what Pittsburgh needed and providing the financial and political clout to make it happen came back to the church with new ideas on how churches could participate. Thus we see this pattern of development: activist laity moved out from churches that stressed the importance of social involvement, taking with them a language and a reform focus, and borrowing organizational and tactical strategies from church-affiliated groups such as the WCTU or the Anti-Saloon League. Putting all this to work in organizations like the Civic Club and the Voters’ League, these laity then helped to shape the official involvement of Pittsburgh’s Protestant denominations by encouraging their churches to be socially involved, by serving on social service commissions when formed, and by helping to finance and run both the CSSU and the PCC. This pattern, however, is merely schematic: the reality was that the borders between churches and the reform world were often indistinguishable. Social gospel ministers like George Hodges benefited from the reform knowledge of laity attending National Municipal League conferences, for example, while his laity mixed the perspectives and language of the social gospel into the Voters’ League’s calls for reform. Likewise, as reformers called for a moral government, Hodges was making the suggestion that a wellrun city could serve as a model for how a church should function. What secular reform organizations had wrought—a non-partisan, efficiently-run city—was now to serve as the model of organization for the church.46 Further, although Pittsburgh’s Protestant churches were fairly consistent in their position that the church needed to address eternal issues and bring to bear the power of the church only by “lifting” social conflicts into the “higher air” of Christian teachings, there were nevertheless many instances of the church as institution taking action and taking sides in political conflict. Throughout the entire period of this study, in fact, the church was very much involved as an institutional force in Pittsburgh’s politics. These actions could range from the Ministerial Association sending representatives to pressure the mayor to curtail Sunday labor, to a collection of churches banding together to battle prostitution, to a single congregation pushing a needed reform, as when First Unitarian acted to put clean water on the political agenda. Even more striking were the covert strategies churches or church organizations adopted to shape the city’s political realities. Modeled on the semantic distinction and the reform strategies of the Anti-Saloon League—an organization of “church forces,” fighting for a church agenda, but not in itself speaking for, or officially representing any church—shadow organizations such as the Citizen’s Political Union with close connections to the CSSU or the PCC conducted private investigations, prosecuted machine government officials, and campaigned for specific political candidates. Far from trying to keep the links between these shadow groups and church organizations quiet, the churches exulted in their accomplishments, sure that the line between church life and political life had been safety maintained. In this way the moral discourse had worked itself back to the churches. Convinced that the machine government lay at the base of legislative graft, undemocratic power in the hands of the city’s industries and financial centers, and the influence and protection of saloon and brothel, church cooperation in addressing “moral” issues—whether traditionally or socially defined—meant that the church must legitimately be involved in undermining

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the machine. A moral call to Pittsburgh’s Protestant laity to be concerned about the city thus eventually returned to the church in the form of a mandate that it fight this political battle. It was a battle the church took up in a number of ways, in spite of their claims to noninvolvement. The inconsistency between church rhetoric and church action points to another struggle that the reform process in Pittsburgh and the church’s link to it intensified, namely the internal battle fought within Protestant churches over the appropriate church response to political, social, and economic conflicts. This struggle played out along lines that in the 1920s would harden into the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and pitted traditional, evangelical Protestants who believed that the church’s role was above all to save souls against more liberal Protestants who believed that to save souls the church needed to save society and construct a moral environment. Robert Handy was correct, however, in warning us that reading the clearly delineated battle lines of the 1920s back into the Progressive Era will “distort our interpretations” in “picturing an oversimplified dichotomy.” Instead, he concluded, we need to see that there was “a strong sense of unity in the major Protestant churches,” and that these churches “had much in common that held in considerable check the centrifugal forces that had divided them.”47 Although there was certainly conflict, liberals and conservatives within Pittsburgh’s Protestant denominations were able to find expressions of social concern which created room for a range of belief. This tendency was strengthened by the turn to interdenominational efforts for social betterment which saw Unitarians working with Presbyterians for clean water, and Episcopalians supporting Methodist efforts to battle the saloon. The “coercive” reform of anti-Prostitution was advocated by the entire range of Protestant churches, as were “environmental” efforts to ameliorate the conditions in Pittsburgh’s worst neighborhoods. That liberal and conservative denominations found ways to work together and came to share a significantly similar social agenda made it easier for conservatives and liberals within particular denominations to find common reform ground. And as noted at the beginning of this chapter, PCC organizers saw social reform and evangelization as two sides of the common coin of Protestant church duty. There were certainly theological and stylistic squabbles in this period, as when, for example, Pittsburgh’s Episcopal Diocese denounced, boycotted, and passed a resolution against the Billy Sunday evangelistic campaign of 1914 organized by the interdenominational Evangelistic Committee.48 But the dominant theme in the reform narrative was one of cooperation, so much so that the “middle way” crafted by Protestant reformers was resistant even to strong advocacy of more progressive social gospel positions found in the Interchurch Commission’s and the Pittsburgh Survey’s conclusions. Denominational adherence was not, therefore, a clear indicator of how a reformer might think about what the reform priority of the church should be. Nor was the crucial division in terms of who lined up with which reform to be found between laity and clergy. Rather, activist laity joined with socially concerned clergy across denominational boundaries in opposition to hostile church hierarchies, conservative vestries, and a mass of conservative or apathetic laity. While attention to the laity is valuable in the ways described above, it is important to see that the clergy/lay division did not demarcate entirely separate worlds. A parallel conclusion is that it is not most fruitful to analyze lay activity (even when this activity opposed “official” religion) completely apart from the

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structures, teachings, and realities of the institutional church. Pittsburgh’s reformers fostered, in the words of Catherine Albanese, a “religious discourse community” rooted in the moral reform discourse—a community not directly traceable to this or that denomination, creed, ideology, or religious institution.49 For in seeing laity in all their roles—as pewsitters, as links to secular civic reform organizations, as “agents” of church teachings, as counselors to ministers on worldly matters, as men and women with the time and money to give structure to church social programs—we not only realize the extent to which the laity were able to influence the church’s reform actions, but also see that the boundaries between “official” and “popular religion,” laity and clergy, church and secular reform, often become indistinguishable. The way in which laity and clergy interacted in Pittsburgh’s reform story thus indicates a need for reassessing several dominant ideas in the literature of popular religion and of the social gospel. The attention to popular religion, or the religion of the laity, is certainly crucial for understanding why reform happened the way that it did in Pittsburgh. It is not an overstatement to say that laity were the central players in enacting reform. This was simultaneously a very local version of reform trends and one with echoes in cities across the nation. That is, the reforms taken up by Pittsburghers had their parallels throughout the country—reforms which came to define the Progressive Era. And yet each city and each city’s reformers had to choose from available reform ideas the ones most needed or most appropriate to their particular situation, and in the process make them their own. In seeking to apply the ideas of the social gospel, for example, Pittsburgh’s reformers ended up with a version of it that differed in major ways from the outlines of the Social Creed of the Churches. As an industrial center with powerful manufacturers, a broken union, and a history of violent labor conflict, Pittsburgh was not fertile ground for the stress on the rights of labor found in the works of Rauschenbusch or in national social gospel articulations, and this arguably central social gospel emphasis was therefore far more muted in Pittsburgh’s version. Instead, Pittsburgh’s activist laity created a social gospel that blended conservative and liberal theologies and agendas, and focused, as we have seen, on reforming the local government. In addressing a legitimate concern about religion “on the margins,” the literature on popular religion has deliberately moved away from yet more studies of mainline Protestants. This is unfortunate in the sense that the same processes valued by this literature—namely, the way in which people make religion their own—occurred among mainline Protestants as much (if not as obviously) as among more marginalized groups. That Pittsburgh’s Protestant laity enacted a localized version of the social gospel demonstrates the value of seeing even the actions and beliefs of elite Episcopalians as legitimate subjects of popular religion. It is true that the effect of lay appropriations of social gospel theology was often conservative, but this does not mean it was not popular. It demonstrates, rather, what has now become a truism among American Protestants: that the belief of the layperson sitting in the pew is often much more conservative than that of pioneering national denominational commissions. The literature of popular religion has championed the laity who have resisted the church and has valued non-traditional belief. If we widen the definition and focus of popular religion studies to include instances where “popular” might have meant “more conservative,” it will enrich and deepen our notion of how laity adopt religious belief and make it their own.

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This study, most fundamentally, has been written out of a conviction that a reconciliation of previously separate and competing historical perspectives on reform efforts in this era is both necessary and possible. First, a synthesis of the insights of scholarly literature is needed on the all-too-often balkanized intellectual divisions of Progressive reform, social gospel, elite, gender, and popular religion studies. I hope that the benefit of letting the innovations and understandings of each of these fields speak to the others in this case study has been made clear. But it has also been a call for a fuller picture of the lives of reformers and a more complete understanding of the forces that moved them and shaped the world in which they lived. My intent has not been to turn the maligned social-controlling, paternalistic elites that populate the literature from Richard Hofstadter to Samuel Hays and beyond into the selfless and self-sacrificing reform heroes of earlier Progressive histories, but to question each of these representations with an eye to making room for a more nuanced and balanced portrayal of their efforts. It has also been to realize, in the way that Annie Dillard sensed about her fellow elite congregants at Shadyside Presbyterian, that more than just social standing or a managerial position at U.S. Steel defined who these people were and what was important to them. The two reform moments highlighted at the very outset of this study raise neglected aspects of the reform story in Pittsburgh. When reformers held a “mass indignation meeting” to cry out against graft, vice, and the machine government in Pittsburgh, they brought together twenty years of reform rhetoric and effectively voiced the concerns of a generation of Pittsburgh reformers. That meeting exemplified the outrage which drove reformers— outrage at their city held hostage to immoral forces and suffering physically, financially, and spiritually as a result. Their language that warm April night was not a dispassionate call for efficiency in government, nor a haughty aristocratic demand for more power to the powerful, nor a plea to return to the good Protestant values of rural America in which they had all been raised. Like the very similar Protestant leaders studied by James Lewis in Gary, Indiana, these reformers were “at home in the city.” They did not fill Exposition Hall to oppose ward representation in City Council, to attack the democratic basis of Pittsburgh’s local government, or to undermine the meager access to power held by immigrant, African American, and working class communities. They were there— Episcopalian and Presbyterian, laity and clergy, elite and non-elite—because they opposed corruption in government and society and because they had come to believe that one led inevitably to the other. Richard McCormick has demonstrated that urban America had come to a collective national realization in the middle of the twentieth century’s first decade that “business corrupts politics,” and the resulting outrage fueled a surge of reform. In Pittsburgh, it was the realization that “corrupt politics corrupts the life of an entire city” that moved reformers to act. In contrast to what Hays argued, they were undoubtedly “concerned about corruption per se.” It was this public expression of outrage that set the reform agenda for the next ten years, as reformers moved out from Exposition Hall that evening with plans to alter the structure of city council, battle the machine’s control of police courts, attack the vice trade and all those who profited from it, undercut the political power of the saloon, and strive overall for a moral government and a moral city. When H.D.W.English put the Episcopalian hierarchy on notice two years later that the laity had been the active agents of the church’s social concern and expected the church to follow their lead, he indicated the extent to which Pittsburgh’s activist laity were the

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crucial actors in Pittsburgh’s reform story. This story began, most importantly, in church, or in the collection of socially conscious churches that strove to make their congregations aware that among their Christian obligations was a concern for the condition of the city, its government, its environment, and its poor. But the church did not contain this story, or narrate it. It moved with its laity into Pittsburgh’s public sphere where these laity, along with other reformers, fashioned a language with which to articulate their moral imaginative grasp on the city’s problems. Social gospel concepts and priorities may have provided the skeletal structure of this language, but it was given flesh, blood and tissue from the experiences of laity outside of church. These activist laity, like laity anywhere, shaped and modified what they heard in church, and stood it up against knowledge they had of the world from their professions, their participation in civic reform organizations, their roles as wives and husbands, and from what they read, what they heard, and what they thought. In the process they wrote their own version of the social gospel, one hemmed in at times by their elite sensibilities and at other times by the conservative city in which they lived, but one which also challenged the churches they attended to match their efforts and their struggles to make Pittsburgh a better place in which to live. The moral concerns of Pittsburgh’s Progressive Era reformers and the language they used were not unique to that time. Religion has always had to do with politics in the American nation, and when significant political change has happened in this country religious belief and language have never been far away. As Americans today struggle over the political solution to modern urban ills, along with the questions of welfare reform, abortion, a living wage, meaningful work, the need for affordable housing and health care, and the ever-growing gap between rich and poor, the debate is framed in moral terms which seem eerily familiar. Jim Wallis, editor of the left-leaning evangelical journal Sojourners, recently published an editorial in the New York Times encouraging Democrats in the upcoming 2004 presidential election to recognize the power religious ideas, values, and language continue to have in America, and to hold the current Republican administration morally accountable for its policies. “The separation of church and state does not require banishing moral and religious values and vision to shape our politics,” Wallis concluded.50 As we begin a new century, the calls of reformers for a moral and a just government from a century ago echo down to us. They will undoubtedly find new life in contemporary calls for political reform couched in the cadences of a moral discourse.

Notes NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. Pittsburgh Post (April 2, 1910), 4. 2. Pittsburgh Daily Dispatch (April 2, 1910), 2. 3. Mary Young, “The Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and the Allied Boards of Trade in 1910,” Unpublished seminar paper, University of Pittsburgh, 1966; Allen T.Burns, “Coalition of Pittsburgh’s Civic Forces,” The Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of the Pittsburgh Survey), ed. Paul U.Kellogg (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), 56– 57. 4. Report and Recommendations of Morals Efficiency Commission (Pittsburgh: 1913), 8–13; Rudolf I.Coffee, “Morals Efficiency Commission,” Wage Earning Pittsburgh (vol. 6 the Pittsburgh Survey), ed. Paul U.Kellogg (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), 504. 5. The Municipal Affairs committee of the Chamber of Commerce had been working on a plan very similar to the Pittsburgh Plan for nearly two years. 6. Church News (Pittsburgh Diocesan Newsletter), February–March, 1912, 17–19. 7. See, for example, Daniel T.Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); Leila J.Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880– 1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 8. Paul Kellogg, “The Pittsburgh Survey,” Charities and the Commons 21 (January 2, 1909), 525, quoted in Roy Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business, and Economic Change (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969), 9. 9. Samuel P.Hays addresses this issue in “Pittsburgh: How Typical?,” in City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh, ed. Samuel P.Hays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 385–405. 10. For an extended theoretical discussion and questioning of distinctions between popular and official religion, see Leonard N.Primiano, “Intrinsically Catholic: Vernacular Religion and Philadelphia’s ‘Dignity’” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1993), and Primiano, “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” Western Folklore 54:1 (January 1995), 37–56. On popular religion and its definition, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, eds. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A.Oberman, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974), 307–336; Luis Maldonado, “Popular Religion: Its Dimensions, Levels and Types,” Popular Religion, eds. Norbert Greinacher and Norbert Mette, (Edinburgh: T. & T.Clark, 1986), 3–11; Peter W.Williams, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Don Yoder, “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion,” Western Folklore 33:1 (January 1974): 2–15; Charles Long, “Popular Religion,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987), 442–452.

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11. A selection that lists only some of the more well-known studies would include: Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Robert A.Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), and ed., Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and “Toward a History of Popular Religion in Early New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., (1984), 49–55; Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Thomas J.Ferraro, ed., Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Thomas A.Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 12. Thomas A.Tweed, “Introduction,” Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 12–13; 23 (quote). 13. Primiano, “Vernacular Religion,” 44; 46. 14. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 17–22; quote, 19. 15. Tweed, Retelling, 12. 16. Tweed, Retelling, 23. 17. Charles Long, “Popular Religion,” 442–452. The three definitions include popular religion as “the religion of the laity in a religious community in contrast to that of the clergy” (445); as “the pervasive beliefs, rituals, and values of a society…a kind of civil religion or religion of the public” (445); and as “the creation of an ideology of religion by the elite levels of a society” (446). 18. Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D.Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–21. 19. “Introduction,” Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), ix. 20. Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Practices of Exchange: From Market Culture to Gift Economy in the Interpretation of American Religion,” Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D.Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 73. A similar point is made by John T.McGreevy in “Faith and Morals in the United States,” Reviews in American History 26:1 (1998), 243–44. 21. See Herbert G.Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” chapter 2 of Work, Culture & Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 79–117. See also Kenneth Fones-Wolf’s reading of Gutman in Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), xvi; and Fones-Wolf, “Religion and Trade Union Politics in the United States, 1880–1920,” International Labor and Working-Class History 34 (Fall 1988), 39–55. 22. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America; 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 142. 23. Robert Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984 [first published, 1982]), x.

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24. Eldon Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 68–69. 25. John N.Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 173. 26. Robert Wuthnow, Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspectives on Religion in Contemporary Society (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B.Eerdmans, 1992), 59. 27. Catherine L.Albanese has noted that “if any one characteristic gave its overall shape to the Protestant code, that characteristic was moralism.” See Albanese, America: Religions and Religion 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1992), 409–415. 28. For the role played by morality in the social gospel, see Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 130; among the social scientists and other intellectuals who served as the originators of Progressive thought, see Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 45; among conservative evangelicals and dispensationalists, see George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 85–93; 124–138, and Douglas W.Frank, Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1986), passim. 29. Charles H.Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); Donald Gorrell, Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1988); David B.Danbom, “The World of Hope”: Progressives and the Struggle for Ethical Public Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Curtis, A Consuming Faith. While there exists a vast historiography of Progressive reform efforts, works which dwell explicitly on the connections between Protestant lay belief and reform are not as numerous. See, as both classic and more recent examples, Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order; William McGuire King, “The Reform Establishment and the Ambiguities of Influence,” Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R.Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122–140; James W.Lewis, The Protestant Experience in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1975: At Home in the City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); David J.Pivar, “Theocratic Businessmen and Philadelphia Municipal Reform, 1870–1900,” Pennsylvania History 33:3 (July 1966), 289–307; Timothy Heinrichs, “‘Onward Christian Soldiers’: Philadelphia’s Revival of 1905,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 118:3 (July 1994), 249–267; Douglas Firth Anderson, “‘A True Revival of Religion’: Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions, 1906–1909,” Religion and American Culture 4:1 (Winter 1994), 25–49. 30. Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987; (first published New York: Macmillan Co., 1917), 16 (quote); 1. 31. Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction,” and “Interview,” in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989), 5; 65. 32. Jonathan A.Dorn, “Remapping the Social Gospel: The Institutional Church Movement in the South End of Boston, 1880–1920,” paper presented at the Conference on Faith and History, Messiah College, October 7, 1994. 33. See Samuel P.Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (October 1964), 157–169; Paul Kleppner, “Government, Parties, and Voters in Pittsburgh,” City at the Point, ed. Hays, 151–180; Francis G.Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 1–4, chapter 7; Joseph F. Rishel, Founding Families of Pittsburgh: The Evolution of a Regional Elite, 1760–1910 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 166–196; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, chapter 6.

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34. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992; first published in 1962), esp. chapters 5 & 6. 35. Philip J.Ethington, “Hypotheses from Habermas: Notes on Reconstructing American Political and Social History, 1890–1920,” Intellectual History Newsletter 14 (1992), 21–40. 36. Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 306. 37. Roy Lubove, “Pittsburgh and Social Welfare History,” City at the Point, ed. Hays, 305. For a fruitful application of Habermasian concepts of the “public sphere” to the African American church, see Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6–9. 38. D.Scott Cormode, “Does Institutional Isomorphism Imply Secularization? Churches and Secular Voluntary Associations in the Turn-of-the-Gentury City,” in Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, N.J.Demareth III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmitt, and Rhys H. Williams, eds. (Oxford University Press, 1998), 116–131. 39. Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 45. 40. The influence of a conservative Protestant upbringing on Progressive reformers is argued most clearly in Crunden, Ministers of Reform, 42–45. 41. See Robert L.Kelley, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” American Historical Review 82:3 (June 1977), 531–562, esp. note 33. 42. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, chapters 12–16. 43. James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), chapters 7–9. For the ways in which “moralism” dominated turn-of-the-century evangelicals, see Frank, Less Than Conquerors, 97–98. 44. Fones-Wolf, Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865– 1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), xx. 45. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), esp. chapter 4. 46. Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 162. 47. Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, 2. 48. Kleppner, “Government, Parties, and Voters,” 168. 49. Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, 95. 50. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 168–69. 51. Ibid., 157–190; quote, 190. 52. Two studies which address the role of social gospel thinking and the relation of Pittsburgh’s churches to the reform process include Gary Scott Smith, “Pittsburgh and the Social Gospel, 1900–1925,” paper presented at the Duquesne History Forum in October, 1994, and (briefly) Linda Pritchard, “The Soul of the City: A Social History of Religion in Pittsburgh,” City at the Point, ed. Hays, 338–345. Both of these studies remain focused on the religious institutions in Pittsburgh, and do not attempt to analyze the connections to more explicitly secular political, industrial, or labor reform efforts. 53. Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 158. 54. Ibid., 161. 55. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 168–69. 56. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 169. 57. Ibid., 174. 58. Ibid., chapter 12 (“coercive” vs. “environmentalist”), viii, 172 (class-based nature of urban reform). On the class-based nature of moral reform efforts, see also David Pivar, “Theocratic

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Businessmen and Philadelphia Municipal Reform, 1870–1900,” Pennsylvania History 33:3 (July 1966), 290, 306. 59. Rhys H.Williams and N.J.Demareth III, “Cultural Power: Religion and Social Movements in Contemporary Politics,” paper presented at the Religion and Culture Workshop, Center for the Study of American Religion, Princeton University, April 1994, 12. 60. Gareth Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22. 61. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 14–24, quotes 24, 23. 62. Richard L.McCormick, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86:2 (April 1981), 247–250; 274. See also McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 267–271. 63. A literature demonstrating the need to reevaluate caricatured, negative pictures of middle and upper-class reform movements and those groups formerly condemned as hopelessly conservative as often embodying a complicated blend of “conservative” and even “progressive” elements would include Kathleen M.Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80:2 (September 1993), 600, and Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Leonard Moore, “Historical Interpretations of the 1920s Klan: The Traditional View and the Populist Revision,” Journal of Social History 24:2 (Winter 1990), 341–357, and Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). On Chicago’s Hull House, see Rivka S.Lissak, Pluralism & Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1–33, 182–84; on the movement to restrict immigration, see Otis L.Graham, Jr. and Elizabeth Koed, “Americanizing the Immigrant, Past and Future: History and Implications of a Social Movement,” The Public Historian 15:4 (Fall 1993), 24–49; on social concern within early fundamentalism, see Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 80–93. 64. Jon C.Teaford, “Finis for Tweed and Steffens: Rewriting the History of Urban Rule,” Reviews in American History 10:4 (December 1982), 135. 65. Fred Matthews, “‘Hobbesian Populism’: Interpretive Paradigms and Moral Vision in American Historiography,” Journal of American History 72:1 (June, 1985), 98–104; quote, 104. 66. Teaford, “Finis for Tweed and Steffens,” 133–149. 67. Terrence J.McDonald, “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History: Liberal Pluralism and the Rise of Functionalism,” Social History 10:3 (October 1985), 323– 345. 68. Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), passim; Timothy J.Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W.Norton, 1992), 251–257. For the ways in which Pittsburgh’s machine government went against the needs of immigrants and the poor, see S.J.Kleinberg, The Shadow of the Mills: Working-Class Families in Pittsburgh, 1870–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 84–99; and Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 166; McCormick, “Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics,” passim. 69. McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia, 131. 70. McCormick, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics,” 249; 270. 71. See Mary O.Furner, “Social Scientists and the State: Constructing the Knowledge Base for Public Policy, 1880–1920,” Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform,

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eds. Leon Fink, Stephen T.Leonard, and Donald M.Reid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 145–181; and McCormick, ibid. 72. See, as examples, Frederic C.Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Edward J.Davies, II, The Anthracite Aristocracy: Leadership and Social Change in the Hard Coal Regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1800–1930 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985). For elites in Pittsburgh, see John N. Ingham, The Iron Barons: A Social Analysis of an American Urban Elite, 1874–1965 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978) and “Steel City Aristocrats,” 265–294; and Rishel, Founding Families of Pittsburgh. 73. On the differing cultural tendencies of Presbyterians and Episcopalians, see Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, chapter 7. On the ways in which elite reformers ranged themselves against other elites, see Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 158–160, 181–190. Ingham also noted how the struggle over the best method of philanthropy set the Pittsburgh Association for the Improvement of the Poor at odds with the Associated Charities of Pittsburgh, both elite-dominated institutions (Making Iron and Steel, 172). In spite of such discoveries, both of these studies stressed a picture of Pittsburgh’s elites as essentially homogenous. 74. Kleppner, “Government, Parties, and Voters,” 168. 75. Lubove, “Pittsburgh and the Uses of Social Welfare History,” 305. 76. Ibid.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 8–11. 2. Gordon S.Wood, “Republicanism,” The Reader’s Companion to American History, eds. Eric Foner and John A.Garraty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 930–31. 3. J.Peter Euben, “Corruption,” Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L.Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 242); Philip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 404–05; John Patrick Diggins, “Republicanism and Progressivism,” American Quarterly 37.4 (Fall 1985), 572–598. 4. James T.Kloppenberg in “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74.1 (June 1897), 9– 33; quote, 20. 5. Harold Zink, City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (New York: AMS Press, 1968 [reprint of 1930 edition]), 233. 6. Ibid. 7. Bruce Stave, The New Deal and the Last Hurrah: Pittsburgh Machine Politics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 27. 8. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992 ed.; first published 1904 by McClure, Phillips & Co.), 107. 9. Timothy Gilfoyle, “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26:1 (1998), 186. See also Teaford, “Finis for Tweed and Steffens,” 136. 10. James A.Kehl, Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matt Quay of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 63; Peter McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia, 88; McCaffery, “Style, Structure, and Institutionalization of Machine Politics: Philadelphia, 1867–1933” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22:3 (Winter 1992), 449. 11. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 165.

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12. Krause, Battle for Homestead, 273–283. 13. Zink, City Bosses in the United States, 239. Among the companies in which Magee served as director were the Freehold National Bank, the Pittsburgh Trust Company, the Western Insurance Company, the Allegheny Light Company and the Citizens’, Duquesne, Pittsburgh, Central, Allegheny, Fort Pitt, and Monongahela Traction Companies. Magee owned stock in numerous utility companies such as the Consolidated Gas Company, steel mills such as the Sharon Steel Company and the Oliver Iron and Steel Company, and future traction companies. 14. Ibid., 251. These included the Duquesne Lumber Company, Pittsburgh Silver Peak Gold Mining Company, Gulf Oil, Pittsburgh Coal Company, and Sharon Water Works Company. 15. Zink, City Bosses, 239, 250. 16. Tarr, “Infrastructure and City-Building in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” City at the Point, ed. Hays, 233. 17. Ibid. 18. McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia, 190. For a recent study that supports the bossas-benevolent-benefactor thesis, see Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78:2 (September 1991), 553. 19. S.J.Kleinberg, The Shadow of the Mills, 84–87. 20. Tarr, “The Pittsburgh Survey as an Environmental Statement,” Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century, eds. Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 184. 21. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 166. 22. For an account of Magee’s role in these events, see Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), chapters 2 and 22. 23. Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 45. 24. The originator of this “functional analysis” approach was Robert K.Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory and Research (Gencoe, 1949). For an example of the application of this approach to the study of urban political machines, see John M.Allswang, Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters: An American Symbiosis (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), 31–35. An insightful critique of the “functionalist” approach may be found in Terrence J. McDonald, “Putting Politics Back Into the History of the American City (Review Essay),” American Quarterly 34.2 (Summer 1982), 200–209, and McDonald, “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” 323–345. 25. This term, and the necessary sensitivity it implies in interpreting reform discourse (as well as a convincing model of how to do so) may be found in Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1–16. 26. Letter to Hodges’ wife, excerpted in Julia Shelley Hodges, George Hodges: A Biography (New York: The Century Co., 1926), 116. 27. C.E.E. Childers, in a speech before the Church Club of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Childers, Church News (February 1910), 21. 28. Childers, ibid. 29. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 172, 169. 30. Ingham, The Iron Barons, chapter 4. 31. Rishel, Founding Families of Pittsburgh. 32. Ibid., 125. 33. Tarr, “Infrastructure and City Building,” 228–231. 34. Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, 99. 35. Ingham, “Steel City Aristocrats,” 275–77.

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36. Renee Reitman, “The Elite Community in Shadyside, 1880–1920,” unpublished seminar paper, University of Pittsburgh, 1964, Archives of Industrial Society, Hillman library, University of Pittsburgh (hereafter AIS), 8–9. 37. Rishel, Founding Families, 168. 38. Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, 96. 39. Ingham, “Making Iron and Steel,” 171–72. 40 In 1890 there were approximately 4,000 Episcopalians in Pittsburgh and Allegheny, which accounted for only 1.1 percent of the general population, and 2.9 percent of the religiously affiliated. In 1906 there was a total of 6,470 Episcopalians in Pittsburgh and Allegheny (incorporated into Pittsburgh in 1907) in a population of over half a million. This represented a scant 1.2 percent of the population, and only 2.4 percent of the religiously affiliated. Ten years later things had not changed much. Episcopalians in 1916 numbered 7,500, or only 1.3 percent of the population, and had shrunk half a point as a percentage of the religiously affiliated. Source: U.S. Government, Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1890; 1906; 1916; 1926. 41. Hodges, George Hodges: A Biography, 64. 42. Hodges, “The Divided Church,” Faith and Social Service (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1896), 248. 43. William R.Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1–9. 44. Hodges, “To Help the Poor,” and “Eleven Laymen,” in The Heresy of Cain, new revised (1914) ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1894), 31, 167–68; “The Credentials of Christianity,” Christianity Between Sundays (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1892), 9. 45. Hodges, “Moral Reform,” in Faith and Social Service, 183. 46. Hodges, “The New Philanthropy,” in Heresy of Cain, 15–16. 47. Hodges, Heresy of Cain, 15–16; “The Credentials of Christianity” and “The Holiness of Holidays,” Christianity Between Sundays, 14–15, 76–77. 48. Hodges, “Business on Christian Principles,” in Christianity Between Sundays, 34. 49. Centennial History, Calvary Episcopal Church, 1855–1955 (1955), Calvary Episcopal Church Records, 14. 50. “History of the Women’s Auxiliary,” Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh records, Record Group 4; Series 4.2; File 18 (n.a., n.d.), 7. 51. Emma Bailey, “Secretary’s Report: Woman’s Work Society of 1st Presbyterian Church,” First Presbyterian Church records, Congregation Misc. #2 file, n.p., n.d. 52. “Remembering, 1893–1993: Celebrating the Centennial of the First United Methodist Church Building,” eds. Gene and Martha Gruver, printed booklet, 1993, First Methodist Church of Pittsburgh records, 24–26; “Closing Services: First Methodist Protestant Church, Pittsburgh, May 11–15, 1892,” printed pamphlet, First Methodist Church of Pittsburgh records, 53. 53. Women’s Home Mission Society, “Minutes,” 1905–1911, First Methodist Church of Pittsburgh records, various pages. 54. “Report of the Ladies’ Aid Society,” Annual of the Fourth Avenue Church, 1895–96, First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh records, 30. 55 “Calendar of Women’s Work,” printed pamphlet, 1912, First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh records, n.p. 56. Mary S.Donovan, “Women’s Ministries in the Episcopal Church, 1850–1920” (Ph. D. dissertation., Columbia University, 1985), 9. 57. “Leaders like Frances Willard,” Ann Braude has noted, “articulated a ‘social gospel’ to a broader spectrum of Christians than those affected by the later, male liberals more identified with the term. Women’s religious activism advanced the presence of Protestantism in public political discourse and advanced new priorities that would transform the denominations”

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(Ann Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A.Tweed, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 101). 58. Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 85. 59. Hodges, Faith and Social Service, 217–18. 60. Ibid., 241. 61. Hodges, Heresy of Cain, 181. 62. Hodges, “The Church and the Labor Movement,” ibid., 72. 63. Hodges, “The City,” Faith and Social Service, 204–205. 64. Ibid., 207–208. 65. Hodges, “Indifference,” ibid., 70–71. 66. Mark T.Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 15–16; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 196, 209, chapters 13–14. 67. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 213–14. 68. Ibid., 200. 69. First Unitarian Church, “Scrapbook.” Clipping from Pittsburgh Dispatch, Nov. 2,1894. 70. First Unitarian Church, “Scrapbook,” September 22–25, 1893. Clipping from Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 17, 1895. 71. Mrs. L.Walter Mason, “Early Unitarianism in Pittsburgh and the Story of the First Church,” printed pamphlet, First Unitarian Church records, January 1940, 16–17. 72. Frank E.Wing, “Thirty-Five Years of Typhoid,” Pittsburgh District/Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of the Pittsburgh Survey), ed. Paul U.Kellogg (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), 83–84. 73. Joel Tarr, “Infrastructure and City-Building,” 236. 74. Clayton R.Koppes and William P.Norris, “Ethnicity, Class, and Mortality in the Industrial City: A Case Study of Typhoid Fever in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910,” Journal of Urban History 11:3 (May 1985), 259–279 (quote). 75. Rev. Charles E. St. John, quoted in Pittsburgh Dispatch, December 9, 1895, First Unitarian Church records, “Scrapbook.” 76. Letters by Mrs. C.E. St. John to her mother, 19. 77. Ibid. Mrs. St. John peppered her letters with comments such as “we have come to a point where the church is taking part in the good work of the city, and even the Presbyterians must recognize that we are not entirely bad” (15). 78. Robert L.Kelley, Cultural Pattern in American Politics, 71–75; 78–80; 101–4. 79. Ingham, Iron Barons, 36. 80. Willa Cather, from her Journal, January 10, 1897, in The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902, 2 vols., ed. William M.Curtin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 505. 81. James Forbes, “The Reverse Side,” Wage Earning Pittsburgh (vol. 6 of the Pittsburgh Survey), ed. Paul U.Kellogg (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), 310. 82. The minute book of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church for 1899, in summarizing the year’s “spiritual” life of the church, reported: “Ordinary, healthful, unemotional normal spiritual life.” Minute Book of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, “Report to the Presbytery,” March 31, 1899, mss, Shadyside Presbyterian Church archives, Pittsburgh, 115. 83. Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 148. 84. Ibid., 117–119. 85. Pittsburgh Post, October 29, 1922. McClintock demonstrated a lifetime of devotion to the Presbyterian church. He was an elder of Second Presbyterian and rented a pew at Shadyside Presbyterian. He was the President of the Board of the Western Theological Seminary, and a trustee of the Pennsylvania College for Women, a Presbyterian-affiliated school.

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86. “Oliver McClintock,” History of Pittsburgh and Environs, vol. 4, ed. George T. Fleming (New York: American Historical Society, Inc., 1922), 6. Such a sentiment, if not a romanticization, gives credence to the lasting power of republican ideas into the Progressive Era, as suggested in the beginning of this chapter. 87. Ibid., 165. 88. Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette (Dec. 1, 1892), 1. 89. Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette (November 16, 1892), 2ff. 90. United Presbyterian (February 18, 1892), 107. 91. Ibid. (March 2, 1893), 136. 92. Ibid. (June 16, 1892), 408. 93. Ibid. (January 18, 1894), 38. 94. Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette (Nov. 29, 1892), 5. 95. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 20. 96. United Presbyterian (December 22, 1892), 857 (6). 97. Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette (Dec. 2, 1892), 1. 98. Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, 35. 99. See Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, viii; Connelly, Response to Prostitution, 35; and Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 161.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907), is widely regarded as one of the first systematic attempts to articulate social gospel thinking. 2. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan Co., 1912), 9. 3. Martin Marty, “Public and Private: Congregation as Meeting Place,” American Congregations: New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, 2 vols., eds. James P. Wind and James W.Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 158–59. 4. Hodges, “Our Duty to Caesar,” Heresy of Cain (1894), 175–76. 5. Hodges, ibid., 177–78. 6. Hodges, “The Church and the Labor Movement,” ibid., 65; 71; “Our Duty to Caesar,” 175– 76. 7. Hodges, “The Church and the Labor Movement,” 73; “The Divided Church,” Faith and Social Service, 267. 8. Church News (June–July, 1914), 10. 9. “Municipal Reform,” United Presbyterian (March 2, 1893), 136. 10. Rev. D.W.Carson, “The Church and Political Reforms,” United Presbyterian (October 1, 1897), 636. 11. Rev. W.B.Smiley, “The Church and Political Reforms,” United Presbyterian (December 2, 1897), 769. 12. D.S.Littell, M.G.Kyle, and J.A.Duff, “A Pastoral Letter on Reforms,” United Presbyterian (March 3, 1898), 20–21. 13. United Presbyterian (November 17, 1910), 6. 14. Hodges, “To Help the Poor,” Heresy of Cain, 35. 15. Hodges, “The Church and the Labor Movement,” ibid., 60. 16. Hodges, Faith and Social Service, 175; Christianity Between Sundays, 64. 17. Hodges, Heresy of Cain, 68. 18. Robert H.Craig, Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 13. 19. Hodges, “Business on Christian Principles,” Christianity Between Sundays, 35.

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20. Hodges, “Eleven Laymen,” Heresy of Cain, 167–68. 21. From a paraphrase of Hodges by H.D.W.English: “The Bishop represents the principle of general leadership; his function is to see visions and make large plans; the Laymen are to be his counselors in forming the plans, and his agents in achieving them” (Church News [February–March, 1912], 17). 22. “The Laymens Missionary League of Pittsburgh, Penna.,” typed mss., Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, December 12, 1911, n.a., 8. 23. “The Laymen’s Missionary League,” 3. 24. Social Service Commission of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, “Report,” 1915, Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives. 25. H.D.W.English, “Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men and Money Translated into Personality,” in Addresses on Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men, Calvary Church, September 23, 1910, 10. 26. Pittsburgh Post (October 6, 1912); North American (November 23, 1911), n.p.; Whitehead to Bishop Geurry, March 9, 1912. All records cited located in Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, R.G. 3, Ser. 1.2, Folders 19–20. 27. Church Club of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Yearbook (Pittsburgh, 1916), 24 (Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, R.G. 4, Ser. 7.1, Folder 1). 28. “The Laymen’s Missionary League,” 10; Jacob H.Dorn, “The Social Gospel and Socialism: A Comparison of the Thought of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch,” Church History 62.1 (March 1993):83. 29. Letter reprinted in Hodges, George Hodges, 109. 30. William H.Matthews, The Meaning of the Settlement Movement (Pittsburgh, 1909), n.p. 31. Robert Wuthnow, Producing the Sacred: An Essay on Public Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 65; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 142, 168. 32. Reprinted in Kingsley House and the Settlement Movement, ed. John C.Weaver, (Pittsburgh: Kingsley Association, 1933), 15–17. 33. Ibid. 34. In this, Kingsley House’s experience was similar to other settlement houses such as Hull House in Chicago, especially in the early years of establishment. See Rivka Lissak, “Myth and Reality: The Pattern of Relationship between the Hull House Circle and the ‘New Immigrants’ on Chicago’s West Side, 1890–1919,” Journal of American Ethnic History 2:2 (Spring 1983), 40–41. 35. S.J.Kleinberg, The Shadow of the Mills, 297. 36. Ibid., 298–300. 37. Kingsley Association, “Constitution and By-Laws,” printed pamphlet, Kingsley Association papers, n.d., 2, AIS. 38. Quoted in Philip Rosen, “Thirty Years at Kingsley House,” Unpublished seminar paper, Carnegie Mellon University, 1969, 3. 39. Ronald J.Butera, “A Settlement House and the Urban Challenge: Kingsley House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1893–1920,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 66.1 (1983), 29. 40. Ibid., 38. 41. Roy Lubove, “Pittsburgh and the Uses of Social Welfare History,” 310–11. 42. See discussion of gendered Progressive reform in the next chapter. 43. Rosen, “Thirty Years at Kingsley House,” 3; 8. 44. Maurine W.Greenwald, “Women and Class in Pittsburgh,” City at the Point, ed. Hays, 57. 45. See, for example, Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10:4 (Summer 1985). 46. Rosen, “Thirty Years at Kingsley House,” 9. 47. Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xiii-xxiii.

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48. Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League, “First Annual Report” (Pittsburgh: 1904), published pamphlet, 4, AIS. 49. D.A.McClenenahan, DD., “Moral and Political Conditions in Allegheny,” United Presbyterian (February 1, 1906), 9. 50. Pittsburgh Dispatch (March 16, 190 5), 2. 51. Ibid. (March 19, 1905), 6. 52. United Presbyterian (February 1, 1906), 9. 53. Pittsburgh Dispatch (March 24, 1905), 3. 54. Ibid. (March 26, 1905), 1–2. 55. Ibid. (March 28, 1905), 8. Representatives were present from the Roman Catholic Church, as well as from Presbyterian, United Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Reformed Presbyterian, Methodist Protestant, and Christian denominations. 56. United Presbyterian (February 1, 1906), 9. 57. Pittsburgh Dispatch (May 8, 1905), 8. 58. United Presbyterian (February 1, 1906), 9. 59. Ibid. (February 13, 1906), 4. 60. Ibid. 61. Robert Wuthnow, Producing the Sacred, 161.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. His father, John B.Guthrie, was mayor in 1851 and 1852; his maternal grandfather, Magnus M.Murray, in 1828, 1829, and 1831. 2. Pittsburgh Post (November 11, 1895), quoted in Mark S.Lauterbach, “George Wilkins Guthrie: Mayor and Reformer in Pittsburgh, 1906–1909,” Senior Thesis, Princeton University, April 1976, 15–16, Library and Archives Division, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA. See Proceedings of the Conference for Good City Government (Philadelphia: National Municipal League), 1895–1898. 3. Pittsburgh Press Club, Prominent Men of Pittsburgh and Vicinity, 26. Guthrie was assistant secretary of The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1886, candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania in 1902, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1904, and eventually served as Ambassador to Japan in 1913. 4. For the ways in which this reflected national trends, see Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 141–42; 167–68. 5. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 169. 6. Paul Kleppner, “Government, Parties, and Voters,” 168; Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, 65. 7. See discussion of this term in the Introduction. 8. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, chapter 12. 9. George Guthrie, “Fundamental Municipal Needs in Pennsylvania,” Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Conference for Good City Government (National Municipal League, 1908), 376– 77. 10. Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 102. 11. Ibid., 101; 107; 108–110. 12. Ibid., 115. 13. Ibid., 155–16. 14. Frank C.Harper, Pittsburgh: Forge of the Universe (New York: Comet Press, 1957), 154. 15. George Guthrie, “The Pittsburg Victory,” Proceedings of the Boston Conference for Good City Government (Boston: 1902), ed. Clinton Rogers Woodruff (Philadelphia: National Municipal League, 1902), 153. Pittsburgh, spelled with an “h” since its founding, had its

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name officially changed to “Pittsburg” by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names in 1891. The original spelling of Pittsburgh was restored by the Board in 1911, but the city was spelled both ways throughout this period as a consequence. 16. Ibid., 153–160. Lincoln Steffens reported on the agreement made between the city and state machines, reproducing their alleged agreement in full in Shame of the Cities, 111–114. 17. Guthrie, “The Pittsburg Victory,” 158–59; Glinton R.Woodruff, “A Year’s Municipal Progress,” Proceedings of the Boston Conference for Good City Government (Boston: 1902), 87. 18. Guthrie, “The Pittsburg Victory.” 19. Steffens, Shame of the Cities, 102. 20. Ibid., 101. 21. Ibid., 132–33. 22. Philip J.Ethington, in The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), makes a strong case for how this was so in San Francisco. See discussion of Ethington’s work at the end of this chapter. 23. Theda Skocpol and Gretchen Ritter, “Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Spring 1991), 85. 24. George Guthrie, “Municipal Condition of Pittsburg,” Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference for Good City Government, May 6–8, 1896 (Philadelphia: National Municipal League, 1896), 150; Pittsburgh Civic Commission, “Report on the Investigation of the Controller’s Dept. Regarding The Department of Charities of the City of Pittsburgh, Pa.,” March, 1911, AIS, 2; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 172; H.Marie Dermitt, Fifty Years of Civic History, 1895–1945, printed pamphlet, AIS, 1945, 13. 25. Richard Oestricher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940,” Journal of American History 74:4 (March 1988), 1272. 26. Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, 62–75. 27. Ibid., 76–79. 28. William M.Kennedy, “Municipal Condition of Pittsburg and Allegheny,” 340. 29. Civic Club of Allegheny Co. records, AIS, 70:2 Additional, Box 1, Folder 1, 2, quoted in file notes; Dermitt, Fifty Years of Civic History, 2. 30. Dermitt, ibid. 31. Civic Club of Allegheny County records, ibid. 32. Voters League, Voters League Miscellaneous Pamphlets and Letters, Carnegie Library, Pennsylvania Division, n.d., n.p. 33. Voters’ League, Bulletin of the Voters League Concerning the Public School System of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: February 15, 1911), printed pamphlet, AIS, frontispiece. 34. Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 158; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 168–69. 35. Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 161. 36. See discussion of Hays in the introduction. 37. For “municipal housekeeping” see Scott, Natural Allies, esp. chapter 6; for “alternative version,” see Philip J.Ethington, “Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era,” Social Science History 16:2 (Summer 1992), 395. 38. Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780– 1920,” American Historical Review 89:3 (June 1984), 620–647; William H. Chafe, “Women’s History and Political History: Some Thoughts on Progressivism and the New Deal,” Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, eds. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 105; Maureen Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” American Historical Review 95:4 (October 1990), 1046.

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39. John F.Bauman and Margaret Spratt, “Civil Leaders and Environmental Reform: The Pittsburgh Survey and Urban Planning,” in Pittsburgh Surveyed, eds. Greenwald and Anderson, 155. 40 Report on Annual Meeting, press clipping, January 29, 1903; Civic Club of Allegheny Co. records, AIS, 70:2, Box 1, f.2. 41. Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh papers, HSWP, Box 6, Folder “misc.”; Eakins, “History of the Woman’s Club of the City of Pittsburgh—Pennsylvania,” Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh papers, HSWP, Box 1, Folder 3, n.p. 42. Maureen Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1877–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 124. 43. In Boyer’s terminology, “positive environmentalism.” See Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 179–81. 44. Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform,” 153. For Pittsburgh reformers’ interest in leisure, see Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, chapter 7. 45. Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” U.S. Women in Struggle: A Feminist Studies Anthology, eds. Claire Goldberg Moses and Heidi Hartmann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 76; Skocpol and Ritter, “Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies,” 85. 46. Roy Lubove, “Pittsburgh and the Uses of Social Welfare History,” 304; “Lucy Dorsey Iams,” typed mss, Civic Club papers, AIS, 70:2 Additional, Box 15, folder 243. 47. Eakins, “History of the Woman’s Club of the City of Pittsburgh—Pennsylvania.” For “new departure,” see Mrs. Charles Wade, “History,” mss, 1903, Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh papers, HSWP, Box 1, Folder 1. n.p. 48. Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh, 1950 retrospective, mss (n.a./n.p.), Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh papers, HSWP, Box 6, Folder “misc.”; Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh Minutebook, 1901, Woman’s Club of Pittsburgh papers, HSWP, Box 2, Folder 2, 65–69, 121. 49. E.E.Stephenson, “The Twentieth Century Club,” Modern Woman (1913), n.p., press clipping, Civic Club of Allegheny County records, AIS, 70:2 Additional, Box 15, Folder 226. 50. Scott, Natural Allies, 4. Nancy Hewitt, however, has cautioned women’s historians from letting a “search for sisterhood” obscure the very real differences in reform agendas between races and classes in “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History 10:3 (October 1985), 304. 51. Proceedings of the Detroit Conference for Good City Government and the Ninth Annual Meeting of the National Municipal League (Philadelphia: National Municipal League, 1903, 79; Chamber of Commerce of Pittsburgh, Annual Report, 1910, Carnegie Library PA Division, 5. 52. Voters’ League, “Argument of A.Leo Weil for the Voters’ League on Charges against John M.Morin,” printed pamphlet, October 4, 1912, Carnegie Library PA Division, 7. 53. Ibid., 8. 54. H.D.W.English, letter to Pittsburgh ministers dated May 22, 1912, Voters’ League Miscellaneous Pamphlets and Letters, Carnegie Library PA Division, n.p. 55. Pittsburgh Post (March 29, 1911), 1ff. 56. The Civic Club fully supported the successful attempt to alter the structure of the city government in 1911, eliminating ward representation in city council, and shrinking the size of the council to nine members. See Dermitt, Fifty Years of Civic History, 15. 57. Allen Burns, “Coalition of Pittsburgh’s Civic Forces,” Pittsburgh District/Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of the Pittsburgh Survey), 55. 58. Voters’ League, “Bulletin of the Voters’ League Concerning the Public School System of Pittsburgh,” published pamphlet, AIS, February 15, 1911, 1 (quote); passim. 59. See Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 172. 60. Associated Charities of Pittsburgh, “Constitution,” printed pamphlet, AIS, n.d., n.p.

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62. Sources: Church Club of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Yearbook 1915–1916, Pittsburgh Episcopal Diocese records, RG4, Ser. 7.1, Folder 1, 38–53; Voters’ League, Bulletin for Election, Tuesday, November 4, 1902, printed pamphlet, Carnegie Library PA Division, frontispiece; Civic Club of Allegheny County, Fifteen Years of Civic History, 114–123. 62. See CCAC, Fifteen Years of Civic History; First Unitarian Church, “Directory, 1923,” “Scrapbook,” HSWP, n.p.; Mrs. L.Walter Mason, “Early Unitarianism in Pittsburgh and the Story of the First Church,” printed pamphlet, First Unitarian Church records, HSWP, 1940, 39–49. 63. The three included manufacturer H.Kirke Porter, Beulah Kennard, and clerk William E.Lincoln. See CCAC, Fifteen Years of Civic History; First Baptist Church, Directory of the First Baptist Church, October 1917, Carnegie Library PA Division, n.p.; Joel Tarr, “The Pittsburgh Survey as an Environmental Statement,” 177–78; First Baptist Church, “Annual of the Fourth Avenue Church, 1903–04”; “Bulletins, 1903–1912”; “Minutes of the Advisory Committee, April 1, 1914”; and Nathan E. Williams, “A History of the First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh,” printed pamphlet, 1985, 4–5. All located in First Baptist Church archives, Pittsburgh. 64. George W.Guthrie, “The Duty of the Church to the American City,” Addresses on Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men, printed pamphlet, Calvary Church archives, Sept. 23, 1910. 65. Guthrie, “Fundamental Municipal Needs in Pennsylvania,” 371. 66. Guthrie, “The Pittsburg Victory,” 158–59. 67. Pittsburgh Post (January 3, 13, 1906). 68. Pittsburgh Post (December 28, 1905). 69. Pittsburgh Post (January 4, 1905), 5. 70. Lauterbach, “George Wilkins Guthrie,” 45, 73–77; Robert A.Woods, “Pittsburgh: An Interpretation of Its Growth,” Pittsburgh District/Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of the Pittsburgh Survey), 34. 71. George W.Guthrie, “The Duty of the Church to the American City,” 26–27. See also Guthrie, “Christianity and Civic Duties,” Sermons and Addresses given in Calvary Church during Lent, 1896, printed pamphlet, Calvary Episcopal Church, 1896, 37. 72. Lauterbach, “George Wilkins Guthrie,” 77. 73. Ibid., 45–78; Woods, “Pittsburgh: An Interpretation of Its Growth,” 20–23; Forbes, “The Reverse Side,” Wage Earning Pittsburgh (vol. 6 of the Pittsburgh Survey), 361; John Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 168–190; John F.Bauman and Edward K. Muller, “The Olmsteds in Pittsburgh: (Part II) Shaping the Progressive City,” Pittsburgh History 76:4 (Winter 1993/1994), 191–195. It is interesting that Guthrie’s anti-vice efforts characterize a position of “restriction,” rather than the “elimination” favored by the most vocal of the vice reformers. In spite of this, reformers described Guthrie’s efforts in heroic terms, and chalked his more restrained goals up to resistance on the part of the machine government. 74. Guthrie, “Duty of the Church to the American City,” 26. 75. Guthrie, “Fundamental Municipal Needs In Pennsylvania,” 368–69. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 369. 78. Guthrie, “Duty of the Church to the American City,” 25. 79. Guthrie, in a letter to the Bishop, called the doctrines of Christian Socialism “false and improper.” Letter from George Guthrie to Bishop Whitehead, September 7, 1912, Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, Record Group 3; Series 1.2; Folder 19). 80. See McIlvaine, “Plain Words about the Church,” Sermon preached at Calvary Episcopal Church, 1905; Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, RG 1, Series 1.5; File 1 (“Pittsburgh Calvary”). 81. All quotes and a description of the various weekly events of the Sequa-centennial celebration may be found in Fleming, History of Pittsburgh and Environs, vol. III, 671–688.

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See also Sidney A.King, The Story of the Sesqui-Centennial Celebration of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: R.W.Johnston Studios, 1910), passim. 82. Rabbi J.Leonard Levy, Sesqui-Centennial Service, September 27, 1908, printed pamphlet, Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, RG 3; Series 5.2; Folder 7, p. 7. 83. Rev. Daniel Dorchester, ibid., 4. 84. Rev. Dr. John Gassler Prugh, ibid., 13. 85. Marlene Stein Wortman, “Domesticating the Nineteenth-Century American City,” Prospectus 3 (1977), 563. 86. Ibid. 87. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 102. 88. Philip J.Ethington, The Public City, 24–25; 406–407; 398. See also the work of Gareth Stedman-Jones cited in the introduction. 89. Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 58; 68. 90. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 223. 91. Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 147.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, 6. 2. See, for example, the early meetings of the National Municipal League. 3. Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and the Moral Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11; 7. 4. Paul U.Kellogg, “Field Work of the Pittsburgh Survey,” Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of the Pittsburgh Survey), Appendix E, 495–96. 5. Ibid., 497. 6. Paul U.Kellogg, “Field “Work of the Pittsburgh Survey”; Martin Bulmer, “The Social Survey Movement and Early Twentieth-Century Sociological Methodology,” in Pittsburgh Surveyed, eds. Greenwald and Anderson, 16–20. 7. Stephen Turner, “The Pittsburgh Survey and the Survey Movement: An Episode in the History of Expertise,” Pittsburgh Surveyed, eds. Greenwald and Anderson, 39. 8. John N.Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 18; John F.McClymer, “The Pittsburgh Survey: Forging an Ideology in the Steel District,” Pennsylvania History 41 (1974), 169–186. 9. Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform,” 159. 10. Allen T.Burns, “Coalition of Pittsburgh’s Civic Forces,” Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of the Pittsburgh Survey), 46. 11. Woods, “Pittsburgh: An Interpretation of Its Growth,” Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage, 39. 12. John Fitch, The Steel Workers (vol. 3 of the Pittsburgh Survey), ed. Paul U.Kellogg (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910), 223. 13. Woods, “Pittsburgh: An Interpretation of Its Growth,” Pittsburgh District/Civic Frontage, 10–12. 14. McClymer, “Pittsburgh Survey,” 181–82. 15. H.V.Baxter, Allen H.Kerr, “The Aldermen and Their Courts,” Pittsburgh District/Civic Frontage, 152–53. John Ingham argues, in contrast, that the aldermanic court system served as a buffer between the elite rulers of Pittsburgh and the largely working class population. See Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 164.

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16. James Forbes, “Reverse Side,” Wage-Earning Pittsburgh (vol. 6 of the Pittsburgh Survey), 358; 370. 17. Ibid., 370; 374–75. 18. Robert W.Jones, “Pittsburgh, A City to be Proud Of,” Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, a four-part series that appeared between December 1909 and January 1910, cited in Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform,” 159. 19. C.E.E.Childers, “Pittsburgh Laymen and Civic Reform,” Church News (February 1910), 21. 20. Quote from Paul Kellogg, “Field Work of the Pittsburgh Survey,” 501. 21. Citizens’ Reception and Entertainment Committee, First Civic Exhibition in connection with National Municipal League and the American Civic Association (Pittsburgh: Murdoch, Kerr, & Co., 1908), 45, HSWP. 22. Kellogg, “Field Work of the Pittsburgh Survey,” 492; Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform,” 162. 23. First Civic Exhibition, ibid. 24. George Guthrie, “Fundamental Municipal Needs in Pennsylvania,” 367–377. 25. Pittsburgh Conference for Good City Government, 70–71; 75–84; 97; 223–246. 26. English, “The Function of Business Bodies in Improving Civic Conditions,” Pittsburgh Conference on Good City Government, 414–15. 27. Weil, Pittsburgh Conference for Good City Government, 449. 28. Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform.” 160. 29. Bauman and Muller, “The Olmsteds in Pittsburgh,” 193; Pittsburgh Civic Commission, Pittsburgh Civic Commission: Plan and Scope (Pittsburgh: 1909), found in Early, “The Pittsburgh Survey,” Appendix B). 30. Pittsburgh Civic Commission, Pittsburgh Civic Commission: Plan and Scope, ibid. 31. Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform,” 159. 32. Pittsburgh Post (March 24, 1910), 4. 33. Pittsburgh Post (March 27, 1910), 2. 34. Ibid. (April 2, 1910), 4. 35. Pittsburgh Daily Dispatch (April 2, 1910), 2. 36. Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 101–133. 37. Presbyterian Banner (March 31, 1910), 7 (1399). 38. Cortlandt Whitehead, reported in Church News (April 1910), 4. 39. “Shame of the City,” imprint of sermon preached April 10, 1910 at Calvary Church, Carnegie Library Pennsylvania Division, 6. 40. Ibid., 12–13. 41. Pittsburgh Sun (April 11, 1910), 9. 42. Pittsburgh Post, “Start Campaign for Change of Government” (April 15, 1910), 2. 43. Quoted in the Pittsburgh Post (April 23, 1910), 2. 44. Will Payne, “How Pittsburgh Got Half a Loaf,” Saturday Evening Post (January 27, 1912), 4. 45. Ibid. 46. Pittsburgh Post (April 8, 1911), 4. 47. Pittsburgh Courier (June 3, 1911), 4. 48. This was less true about efforts to promote the Pittsburgh Plan, but the Voters’ League would use racist stereotypes to boost support for their anti-prostitution campaign, discussed below. 49. Pittsburgh Courier (April 13, 1912), 1. 50. National Labor Tribune (June 2,1910). 51. Pittsburgh Post (March 28, 1911), 1. 52. Ibid. 53. Pittsburgh Post (March 28, 1911), 4. 54. Ibid. (March 29, 1911), 1ff.

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55. United Presbyterian (March 31, 1910), 16. 56. Coffee, “The Pittsburgh Morals Efficiency Commission,” 502. 57. Pittsburgh Post (March 29, 1911), 1ff. 58. The new council consisted of P.J.McArdle (president of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers); E.V.Babcock (lumber company owner); Robert Garland (president of a nut and rivet factory, and active member of Calvary Episcopal Church); John M.Goehring (lawyer and former state senator); W.A. Hoeveler (president of a warehouse company); Dr. J.P.Kerr (physician); Enoch Rauh (manufacturer and wholesaler of men’s furnishings, and prominent member of Rodef Shalom Synagogue); W.G.Wilkins (civil engineer); Dr. S.S.Woodburn (physician). 59. Voters’ League to Pittsburgh City Council, May 7, 1912. Voters’ League file, Carnegie Library Pennsylvania Division, Pittsburgh, 2. 60. Voters’ League, “Argument of A.Leo Weil for the Voters’ League,” 5; 14. 61. Voter’s League, “Bulletin of the Voters’ League Concerning the Public School System of Pittsburgh,” published pamphlet, AIS, February 15, 1911, frontispiece. 62. Letter to ministers, May 22, 1912, signed by H.D.W.English (Voters’ League Misc. Pamphlets and Letters, Carnegie Library PA Division). 63. Coffee, “The Pittsburgh Morals Efficiency Commission,” 502. 64. Voters’ League to Pittsburgh City Council, May 7, 1912. Voters’ League file, Carnegie Library Pennsylvania Division, Pittsburgh, 1; “Argument of A.Leo Weil,” 7; Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 165. 65. Pittsburgh Courier (June 7, 1912), 4. 66. Pittsburgh Post (March 29, 1911), 5. 67. Pittsburgh Courier (August 2, 1912), 4. 68. Morals Efficiency Commission, Report and Recommendations of Morals Efficiency Commission, 8. 69. Members were: Frederick A.Rhodes, MD; Rabbi Rudolph Coffee; Mrs. John H. Armstrong; George Seibel; Charles Poth; Suzanne S.Beatty, assistant city solicitor and leader in the establishment of the Juvenile Court of Allegheny County; Mrs. S.B. McCormick, wife of the president of the University of Pittsburgh; Professor Frederic S.Webster; William Lincoln Stewart; Professor John H.Leete; Lawrence Litchfield, MD, and attorney Edwin L.Mattern. 70. Report and Recommendations of the Morals Efficiency Commission, 9–11. 71. Ibid., 14. 72. Coffee, “The Pittsburgh Morals Efficiency Commission,” 502. Charles Reed Zahniser, a prominent Presbyterian minister and social gospel reformer, the longtime executive secretary of the Pittsburgh Council of Churches of Christ, and a leader who will figure very prominently in the story to follow, was a very distant cousin to the author—we share an ancestor from the early 1800s. 73. Report and Recommendations of the Moral Efficiency Commission, 11–12. 74. “The Moral Origins of Political Surveillance: The Preventative Society in New York City, 1867–1918,” American Quarterly 38:4 (Fall 1986), 637–652. 75. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, addendum; Report and Recommendations of the Morals Efficiency Commission, 2. 76. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage ed., 1979), 27; Lloyd Kramer, “Habermas, Foucault, and the Legacy of Enlightenment Intellectuals,” Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform, eds. Leon Fink, Stephen T.Leonard, and Donald M.Reid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 46. 77. Report and Recommendations of the Morals Efficiency Commission, 18. 78. Ibid., 12–13. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 7. 81. Ibid., 28.

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82. Ibid., 32. 83. Ibid., 28–32; 22. 84. Ibid., 19; 33. 85. Ibid., 22–26. 86. See discussion of these works in Chapter One. 87. Report and Recommendationa of the Morals Efficienty Commission, 21. 88. Ibid., 7. 89. Ibid., 14–15. 90. Ibid., Appendix A, “Act Creating a Bureau of Morals,” 37–38. 91. Hays, “Politics of Reform,” 161. 92. Quentin Skinner, “Language and Political Change,” Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L.Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15; 21–22. 93. Ibid., 22. 94. Alan Digaetano, “Urban Political Reform: Did It Kill the Machine?” Journal of Urban History 18:1 (November 1991), 37–67. 95. Walter Liggett, “Mr. Mellon’s Pittsburgh—Symbol of Corruption,” Common Sense 1:1 (December 5, 1932), 4.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Pittsburgh Post (March 19, 1914), 2. 2 Ibid. (March 27, 1914), 3. 3. CSSU president Rev. John Ewers of the East End Christian Church, Pittsburgh Post (March 24, 1914), 4. 4. See Presbyterian Banner (November 27, 1913), 7; Charles R.Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council of Churches: A Historical Interpretation (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Council of Churches, 1943), “Officers and Board Members of the Christian Social Service Union, 1914,” Appendix. 5. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 7. 6. These activities are reflected in the published “surveys” conducted by the Union and by its later parent organization, the Pittsburgh Council of Churches on problem areas of Pittsburgh, including: The Traffic in Vice, 1915; The Police Courts, 1915; Battling With The Beast, 1916; The Strip, 1916; The Uptown, 1917; Rankin, 1920; The New Negro Population, 1918; Crime and Its Treatment in Allegheny Co., 1924; The Challenge of Pittsburgh, 1917; Causes of Local Industrial Unrest, 1916; Local Problems of Industrial Reconstruction, 1919; Civil Liberties in Pittsburgh, 1920 (Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 15–16). 7. Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives, Record Group 4; Series 2.2; Folder 50. Convention of the Diocese of Pittsburgh: Journal of Proceedings, May 1913, 37. 8. Pittsburgh Methodist 1:1 (January 15, 1912), 21. 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Ibid. 1:2 (April 15, 1912), 4. 11. First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, Bulletin, December 8, 1912. First Baptist Church archives. 12. First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, “Annual of the First Baptist Church,” 1913–1914, 30. First Baptist Church archives. 13. First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, “Year Book of the First Baptist Church,” 1915, 70–71. First Baptist Church archives. As noted in the previous chapter, Charles Reed Zahniser, a prominent Presbyterian minister and social gospel reformer, was a very distant cousin to the author, sharing an ancestor from the early 1800s.

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14. United Presbyterian, child labor (January 16, 1908); Pittsburgh’s housing conditions (April 2, 1908); the right to work (December 28, 1905); immigration (July 5, 1906); the “offensive luxury of men suddenly rich,” (November 15, 1906); the “responsibility of employers” to provide decent wages and healthy living conditions (September 30, 1909); prostitution (May 10, 1906). 15. United Presbyterian (February 4, 1909), 16. 16. Ibid., February 11, 1909, 7. 17. “The Fifty-Fifth General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, May 14, 1913,” ibid., (May 29, 1913), 9. 18. Ibid., (June 19, 1913). 19. Henry Russell Miller, The Man Higher Up: A Story of the Fight, which is Life and the Force, which is Love (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1910); “Henry Russell Miller,” in Harper, Pittsburgh of Today: Its Resources and People, vol. IV, 476–77. 20. Miller, Man Higher Up, 33. 21. John P.Ferre, A Social Gospel for Millions: The Religious Bestsellers of Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, and Harold Bell Wright (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1988), 105–06. 22. Miller, Man Higher Up, 244. 23. Ibid., 340–41. 24. “Manual of the Presbytery of Pittsburgh,” 1915, Pittsburgh Presbytery records, 37. 25. United Presbyterian (November 8, 1906), 16. 26. Quoted in Daniel W.Martin, “The United Presbyterian Church Policy on the Men’s Movement—an Historical Overview,” Journal of Presbyterian History 59.3 (Fall, 1981), 412. See also “The Business Men’s Conference,” United Presbyterian (February 22, 1906), 6ff. 27. Percy F.Smith, “Grand Rally of Men’s League,” United Presbyterian (January 10, 1907). 28. Hodges, Christianity Between Sundays, 204. 29. Hodges, Faith and Social Service, 237–38. 30 “English, “Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men and Money Translated into Personality,” in Addresses on Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men, Calvary Church, September 23, 1910, 10–13. 31. Hodges, Heresy of Cain, 192. 32. Church Club of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Yearbook: 1915–16, 23. 33. Parish Advocate, October 1896, 9. 34. Addresses on Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men, Calvary Church, September 23, 1910, 36; 45; 11. 35. Present were representatives from Brotherhood of St. Andrew (Episcopal), of which H.D.W.English was vice-president; Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip; Baptist Brotherhood; Congregational Brotherhood of America; Methodist Brotherhood; Presbyterian Brotherhood of America; Southern Presbyterian Brotherhood; National League of Universalist Laymen; United Presbyterian Men’s Movement; Brotherhood of the Disciples of Christ; International YMCA; Laymen’s Missionary Movement; Laymen’s Evangelistic Committee; FCC; and the American Institute of Social Service. See “Important Inter-Brotherhood Conference,” United Presbyterian (March 11,1909), 12. 36. Ibid. 37. Hubert Carleton, “Introduction,” Men and Religion (Men and Religion Forward Movement, YMCA Press, NY, 1911). 38. Men and Religion Forward Movement, Messages of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, vol. 3:45–46, quoted in Gail Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41:3 (September 1989), 441.

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39. Bederman, ibid., 436. 40. These included H.D.W.English; W.I.Wishart, pastor of the Homewood United Presbyterian Church; Ralph Harbison, who was vice-president of the national U.P. Brotherhood and president of the Pittsburgh YMCA; and Samuel Young. 41. W.I.Wishart, “The Men and Religion Forward Movement,” United Presbyterian (February 8, 1912), 20. 42. Francis W.Parker, “Men and Religion: The Local Church,” Men and Religion, 74–76. 43. “The Church and Social Service,” United Presbyterian (September 28, 1911), 6. 44. Bederman, ibid., 448. 45. George Wallace, “Men and Religion Forward Movement,” United Presbyterian (March 23, 1911), 2; Bederman, ibid., 449; Gary Scott Smith, “The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–12: New Perspectives on Evangelical Social Concern and the Relationship Between Christianity and Progressivism,” Westminster Theological Journal 49 (Spring 1987), 105. 46. “Men and Religion Movement Campaign,” United Presbyterian (August 31, 1911), 24. 47. “Men and Religion Bulletin No. 2,” United Presbyterian (November 30, 1911), 40; and United Presbyterian (December 21, 1911), 25. 48. W.I.Wishart, “The Men and Religion Forward Movement,” United Presbyterian (February 8, 1912), 20. 49. Bederman, ibid., 439. 50. “Men and Religion Forward Movement,” Pittsburgh Courier (February 3, 1912), 4. 51. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 5; 7–8; 15–22; 30; Pittsburgh Methodist 3:1 (January 1914), 15. 52. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 2. 53. Ibid., 5. 54. Pittsburgh Methodist 3:1 (January 1914), 15. 55. Robert A.Woods, “Pittsburgh: An Interpretation of Its Growth,” 38–41. 56. Charles R.Zahniser, executive secretary of the Pittsburgh Council of Churches, quoted in Harper, Forge of the Universe, 163. 57. Clyde Kelley, Machine Made Legislation (Pittsburgh: Percy F.Smith, 1912), 143. 58. Albert Jay Nock, “What A Few Men Did in Pittsburg: A True Detective Story,” The American Magazine 70:6 (October 1910), 818. 59. English to Pittsburgh ministers, May 22, 1912. Voters’ League Miscellaneous Pamphlets and Letters, Carnegie Library, Pennsylvania Division. 60. Charles R.Zahniser, Social Christianity: The Gospel for An Age of Social Strain (Nashville: Advance Publishing Co., 1911), 77–78; 159. 61. Christian Social Service Union, “Christian Social Service Union: An Agency of the Ministerial Union and Churches of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County,” printed pamphlet, 1914, n.p., Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania records. 62. Members of the Advisory Board included C.C.Cooper, Head Resident of Kingsley House; J.Ralph Park, Secretary of the Pittsburgh Board of Trade and Treasurer of the Presbyterian Board of Temperance; J.Byron Deacon, Superintendent of the Associated Charities of Pittsburgh; J.H.Flaherty of the Pittsburgh Association for the Improvement of the Poor; Allen T.Burns, General Secretary of Pittsburgh’s Civic Commission and executive head of the Federation of Social Agencies; George R. Wallace, on the Executive Committee of the Voters’ League; Harry H.Willock, President of the Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League, and several others long associated with the city’s major social agencies (Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, Appendix, “Officers and Board Members of the Christian Social Service Union, 1914,” n.p.). 63. Ibid.

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64. From a pamphlet distributed by the Civic Action Committee of the Pittsburgh Council of Churches, quoted in the “Minutes of the Advisory Council,” First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, June 26, 1917, 100. 65. Frank A.Sharp, “The Development of Protestant Co-operation in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1948), 167; Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 7. 66. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 8, 6. 67. Ibid., 8. 68. Zahniser, Social Christianity, 153. 69. Ibid., 152. 70. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 202; Pennsylvania Outlook 9:9 (September 1915), 3. 71. Christian Social Service Union, The Strip: A Socio-Religious Survey of a Typical Problem Section of Pittsburgh, published pamphlet, September 1915. 72. The Strip, frontispiece. 73. Ibid., 35; 19. 74. Ibid., 54–55. 75. Ibid., 22–24; 18, 51. 76. Furner, “Social Scientists and the State,” 145. 77. CSSU, “The Christian Social Service Union,” 1914. 78. “Report of the General Secretary, Pittsburgh Christian Social Service Union, December 1916,” The Pennsylvania Outlook, 10:12 (December 1916), 1–2. 79. Christian Social Service Union, “Social Education Program for 1914–1915,” published pamphlet, 1914, n.p., Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania archives. 80. Pennsylvania Outlook 9:12 (December 1915), 1–8. 81. Ibid., 9:8 (August 1915), 1–2. The paper, called The Pennsylvania Outlook in 1915, changed its name to The Pittsburgh Christian Outlook in January of 1916. 82. Ibid., 9:11 (November 1915), 8. 83. Ibid., 9:8 (August 1915), 1. 84. Ibid., 9:9 (September 1915), 1. 85. Peter H.Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 56; 44; 207–08; 93 (quote). 86. Ibid., 94; 16–17. 87. Allegheny County Anti Saloon League, “Constitution” (Pittsburgh, 1902), printed pamphlet, 5. 88. The Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League, ibid., 3–5; Allegheny County Anti Saloon League, “First Annual Report” (Pittsburgh, 1904), published pamphlet, 3. 89. Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League, “First Annual Report” (1904), 5. 90. Ibid., 5. 91. Odegard, Pressure Politics, 256. 92. Pennsylvania Outlook 9:11 (November 1915), 4. 93. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 10:6 (June 1916), 1. 94. Daniel Marsh, The Challenge of Pittsburgh (New York: Missionary Education Movement, 1917), 152; Pittsburgh Methodist 6:3 (July 1917), 2. 95. Pittsburgh Methodist 15:3 (July–September 1925), 1–3. 96. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 10:5 (May 1916), 1 ff. 97. Pennsylvania Outlook 9:11 (November 1915), 8; Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, addendum. 98. Pennsylvania Outlook, ibid. 99. Ibid., December 1915, 4–5. 100. Ibid., 3–4. 101. Ibid., 9:11 (November 1915), 4; Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 18; 16. 102. See discussion of both of these groups below. 103. “History of the Morals Court,” Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 26:11 (November 1928), 2.

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104. Baxter, H.V. and Allen H.Kerr, “The Aldermen and Their Courts,” in Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (vol. 5 of The Pittsburgh Survey, 1914), 152–153. 105. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 29. 106. Ibid., 31–32. 107. Citizen’s Political Union of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, “Bulletin,” printed pamphlet, AIS, October 2, 1917, cover. 108. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 11:9 (September 1917), 3. 109. Ibid., 11:8 (August 1917), 6. 110. Citizen’s Political Union of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, “Bulletin,” 2–3. 111. Pittsburgh Methodist 1:3 (July 15, 1912), 3. 112. Pennsylvania Outlook 9:11 (November 1915), 6. 113. Ibid., 10:5 (May 1916), 5. 114. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 19. 115. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 10:11 (November 1916), 1–5. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., 12:6 (June 1918). 118. Ibid., 10:5 (May 1916), 5. 119. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 8. 120. Gary Scott Smith, “Conservative Presbyterians: The Gospel, Social Reform, and the Church in the Progressive Era,” American Presbyterian 70:2 (Summer 1992), 99. 121. Ibid., 97–99. 122. In Marsh, The Challenge of Pittsburgh, 261. 123. Quoted in J.M.Duff, A Record of Twenty-five Years of the Pastorate of Maitland Alexander, DD., LL.D. in the First Presbyterian Church in the City of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: 1924), 61. 124. Pittsburgh Presbytery records, “Manual of the Presbytery of Pittsburgh,” 1915, 37. 125. Homewood Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, March 25, 1914, 150–51. 126. Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York: George Doren Co., 1926), 168. See also Gorrell’s wider description of conservative opposition to Stelzle in The Age of Social Responsibility, 219–230. 127. William McKinney, The Presbyterian Valley (Pittsburgh: Davis & Wade, 1958), 464; Tom Callister, “The Reaction of the Presbytery of Pittsburgh to the New Immigrants,” Unpublished seminar paper, University of Pittsburgh, AIS, n.d., 21–22. 128. “History of the Women’s Auxiliary” (n.a.; n.d.), typed mss., Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh archives; “Report of the Calvary Sisterhood,” Parish Advocate, June 1911, 8. 129. Pittsburgh Methodist 1:1 (January 15, 1912), 22. 130 First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh, “Minutes of the Advisory Council,” June 26, 1917, 100. 131. Pittsburgh Methodist 9:1 (January 1920), 4; Social Service Commission of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, “Report,” 1915. 132. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 10:6 (June 1916), 1. 133. Allegheny County Anti-Saloon League, “First Annual Report,” 9. 134. United Presbyterian (December 25, 1913), 18. 135. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 12:12 (December 1918), 1.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION 1. Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 4–9. 2. Sharp, “The Development of Protestant Co-operation in Allegheny County,” 167–68. The percentage represented decreased to 70% by 1920, because four denominations had dropped out of the PCC.

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3. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 10:12 (December 1916), 4; Zahniser, Pittsburgh Council, 8. 4. Zahniser, ibid. 5. Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 10:12 (December 1916), 1. 6. Daniel L.Marsh, ed., The Challenge of Pittsburgh (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1917). 7. Zahniser, Pittburgh Council, 31–32. 8 Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 26:11 (November 1928), 6. 9. Ibid., 71–107. 10. Marsh, The Challenge of Pittsburgh, 120–24. 11. Interchurch World Movement, Public Opinion and the Steel Strike: Supplementary Reports of the Investigators to The Commission of Inquiry, The Interchurch World Movement (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), 262–63. 12. Pittsburgh Council of Churches, “An Appeal to Americans,” published pamphlet, Urban League of Pittsburgh papers; Box 5: FF 207; “Office files: Churches”; AIS, November 28, 1919, n.p. 13. Interchurch World Movement, ibid., 262; 268. 14. Ibid., 268. 15. “Committees on the Steel Strike,” Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 13:7–10 (October 1919), 4. 16. Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: HarperPerennial, 1987), 196–99. 17. See, for example, Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, passim. 18. William H.Chafe, as noted in Chapter Three, makes such a division of Progressive reform along gender lines in “Women’s History and Political History: Some Thoughts on Progressivism and the New Deal,” 105. 19. John E.Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92.4 (October 1987): 879–907; quotes from 881–82. 20. Richard Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior,” 1266. 21. Leon Fink, “The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History 75.1 (June 1988), 119; 123. 22. Krause, The Battle for Homestead, especially chapters 1, 12, and 16; Eldon G.Ernst, “The Interchurch World Movement and the Great Steel Strike of 1919–1920,” Church History 39.2 (June 1970), 212–223. 23. See Andrew Buni, Robert L.Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 93–94. 24. See John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P.Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 1–87. See also Laurence Glasco, “Double Burden: The Black Experience in Pittsburgh,” City at the Point, ed. Hays, 69–109. 25. National Labor Tribune, Jan 25, 1906, 1; “Constitution of the Association for the Improvement of Social Conditions in the Hill District of Pittsburgh,” typed mss, Urban League of Pittsburgh papers, AIS 81:11, Box 7: FF 320, n.p.. This organization is discussed in greater detail below. 26. Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 18–19. 27. Ibid., 2. 28. Ibid., 28. 29. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 24. 30. James Lewis, The Protestant Experience in Gary, Indiana, 84. 31. Joel A.Tarr, “Infrastructure and City-Building,” 241–244; quote on 242.

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32. Philip Klein, A Social Study of Pittsburgh: Community Problems and Social Services of Allegheny County (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), chapter 5, “Physical Conditions of Life,” 185–236. Quotes from pages 210–11. 33. Tarr, “Infrastructure and City-Building,” 241–244; 248. 34. Walter M.Liggett, “Mr. Mellon’s Pittsburgh—Symbol of Corruption,” Common Sense 1.1 (December 5, 1932), 4. 35. Robert A.Woods, “Pittsburgh: An Interpretation of Its Growth,” 21–22. 36. Allen T.Burns, “Coalition of Pittsburgh’s Civic Forces,” 55–58. 37. Klein, Social Study of Pittsburgh, 331–36. 38. Charles R.Zahniser, Casework Evangelism: Studies in the Art of Christian Personal Work (New York: Fleming H.Revell Co., 1927), 26; Klein, Social Study of Pittsburgh, 13. 39. For a detailed description of the development of city planning in Pittsburgh see Bauman and Muller, “The Olmsteds in Pittsburgh,” 191–205, and Bauman and Spratt, “Civic Leaders and Environmental Reform,” 153–169. 40. “Aims and Ideals of the Department of Women’s Work,” Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 17:9 (September 1921), 3. 41. “A Message to the Women of Pittsburgh,” Pittsburgh Christian Outlook 18:3 (April 1922), 6; 23.5 (May 1927), 1. 42. Virginia L.Brereton, “United and Slighted: Women as Subordinated Insiders,” Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R.Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 148. 43. “Constitution of the Association for the Improvement of Social Conditions in the Hill District of Pittsburgh,” typed mss, Urban League of Pittsburgh papers, AIS 81:11, Box 7: FF 320, n.p. 44. “History,” typed mss, Urban League of Pittsburgh papers, AIS 81:11, Box 5, FF 237, 1. 45. Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 195–205; Pittsburgh Courier, January 27, 1912, 4; April 13, 1912, 1. 46. George Hodges, “The Call of the Church—The Laymen’s Opportunity,” Addresses on Practical Propositions for Purposeful Men (Calvary Church, printed pamphlet, Sept. 23, 1910), 42–43. 47. Handy, “Protestant Theological Tensions and Political Styles in the Progressive Period,” 282–83. 48. James McIlvaine, “Religious Vulgarity,” quoted in The Churchman (March 21,1914), 374; Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh Archives, R.G. 3; Series 4.2; Folder 22. 49. Albanese, “Religion and American Popular Culture,” 736. 50 Jim Wallis, “Putting God Back in Politics,” New York Times, December 28, 2003, 4:9.

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HSWP—

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Index

A African Americans: Association for the Improvement of Conditions in the Hill District, 209–210 and Christian Social Service Union, 209–211 and machine government, 32, 127–128, 135–136, 199, 200 and Men and Religion Forward Movement in Pittsburgh, 151, 162 and Morals Efficiency Commission, 138 and Pittsburgh Plan, 127–128 resistance to white elite reform, 25, 199, 200 Urban League of Pittsburgh, 210, 211 and Voters’ League anti-prostitution reforms, 135 Albanese, Catherine, 214 Alexander, Dr. Maitland, 185 Allegheny Federation of Churches (AFC), 58, 73–77, 200, 207 Anti-Saloon League of Allegheny County and Allegheny Federation of Churches anti-prostitution campaign of 1905, 73–74, 77 and Christian Social Service Union, 13, 174–177 on connection of saloon to machine politics, 176 origins, goals and strategies of, 175–176 Arundel, Rev. Alfred, 64–65 Associated Charities, 92, 96–97, 118, 210 Association for the Improvement of Conditions in the Hill District, 210 B Baker, Paula, 90 Baptist Church, see First Baptist Church Barnes, Lemuel C., 98 Bauman, John, 90–91, 92, 97, 115, 117, 121 Bederman, Gail, 160–161 Bigelow, Edward W., 82–83, 155 Bigelow, Thomas, 82–84, 100, 101 Blakeley, W.A., 122–123, 125 Blaxter, H.V., 116 Booth & Flinn, Ltd., 30, 48 Boyer, Paul S., 8, 9, 14, 20, 44, 54, 55, 67, 142, 180, 196 Brereton, Virginia, 209 Brown, A.M., 83 Brown, J.O., 53, 83 Brown, James W., 35 Brown, Peter, 5 Buffington, Joseph, 35, 113 Bureau of Public Morals, 143–144, 178, 193;

Index

218

see also Morals Efficiency Commission Burns, Allen, 115–116, 153, 205 C Calvary Episcopal Church, 1, 2 elite status of, 37, 69 men’s participation in, 159 Pittsburgh reformers members of, 48, 80, 116, 125, 147, 164, 180 role in Pittsburgh reform, 10, 20, 35, 97–98, 99, 103–104, 197 women’s organizations in, 39 Carnegie, Andrew, 31, 69 Chafe, William H., 90 “Challenge of Pittsburgh” project, see Pittsburgh Council of Churches of Christ Chamber of Commerce (Pittsburgh) Pittsburgh reformers members of, 2, 10, 48, 98, role in reform, 82, 96, 104, 123, 125, 126, 129 Charities and the Commons, 113 Childers, C.E.E., 118 Christ Methodist Episcopal Church, 40, 98, 116, 125 Christian Social Service Union (CSSU); see also Pittsburgh Council of the Churches of Christ; Zahniser, Rev. Charles R. and African Americans, 209–211 anti-Catholicism of, 170 and Anti-Saloon League, 174–177 apathy among Pittsburgh Protestants toward reform agenda of, 186–188 and Association for the Improvement of Social Conditions in the Hill District, 210–211 consensual strategy of, 149–150, 166 dependence on laity in reform efforts, 149, 168 ecumenism of, 170 evangelization, as priority, 149 goals and structure of, 148, 165, 188 on industrial relations and labor conditions, 182–184 as leader of civic reform, 148–149, 165, 171–173, 188–189 and machine government, 173, 189 and Morals Court, 7, 180–181 non-partisanship of, 148–149 origins, 147, 163 and Pittsburgh Survey, 169 police court and jury reform, 7, 148, 180–181 political non-involvement claimed by, 148–149, 163, 166–167, 173, 177–182, 212–213 and prostitution, 7, 148, 178–181 regulation of nickelodeons and pool halls (1912), 147–148 representativeness of Protestant denominations questioned, 148, 166–167, 184, 189 shared membership and agenda with other reform organizations, 166, 178–180 social education efforts of, 171–172 social surveys of, 148, 168–171 temperance efforts of, 173–178 voter registration efforts of, 177 Churches: relation to laity in civic reform, 4, 7–8, 57–66, 73–78, 202–203, 211–212

Index

219

role in civic reform, 4, 7–9, 14, 57–66, 73–78, 80–81, 102–103, 148–152, 161, 164–165, 168, 173, 177, 181–182, 193, 202–203, 206–208, 212–214; see also specific churches; Christian Social Service Union; Pittsburgh Council of the Churches of Christ social service commissions in, 150 Citizens’ Anti-Vice Committee of Eleven, 180; see also Christian Social Service Union Citizens’ League (Citizens’ Municipal League): 44, 45, 48, 79–80, 85, 88 Citizens’ Party, 83–85, 101 Citizens’ Political Union (CPU), 181–182, 212; see also Pittsburgh Council of Churches Civic Club of Allegheny County (CCAC): elite membership of, 18, 89 gendered dimensions of reform, 89–94, 105–106, 199, 209 and 1906 mayoral election, 101 origins and purpose of, 46, 87–88 and Pittsburgh Survey, 114 school board reform of 1911, 96–97 shared membership and agenda with other reform organizations, 96–97, 108–109, 120–121, 166, 211 Civic reform organizations, as connected network, 13, 14, 96, 108–109, 112, 120–121, 124, 129, 138, 166, 202, 211–212 Connelly, Mark, 53–54, 142 Cooper, Charles C, 70 Cormode, D.Scott, 14 Couvares, Francis, 18, 36, 37 Craig, Robert, 62 Crunden, Robert M., 8 D Dawley, Alan, 106 Deacon, J.Bryon, 153, 210 Demareth, N.J., III, 21 Devine, Edward T., 113, 119 Dillard, Annie, 195–196, 215 Dillinger, Dr. D.A., 153, 178–180 Donehoo, Rev. E.R., 67 Donovan, Mary S., 40 Dorchester, Dr. Daniel, 105, 125 Dorn, Jacob H., 65 Dorn, Jonathan A., 11 E Eakins, Mrs. Harry, 91 East End, 18, 33, 35–37, 40, 115 Eisenach, Eldon J., 8, 9, 14, 108–109, 200–201 Eley, Geoff, 13 English, H.D.W. (Henry David Williams): and Christian Social Service Union, 166 church organizations, member of, 9, 98

Index

220

church role in reform, criticism of, 2, 133–134, 151, 164–165, 216–217 and Episcopalian Joint Commission on Social Service, 151 on Episcopalian laity role in reform, 2, 4, 9, 216–217 on Hodges, Rev. George, as motivator of laity to reform, 35, 203 and Kingsley House, 67, 69 and 1910 City Council bribery and prostitution scandal, 123 and Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 121 and Pittsburgh Diocese Social Service Commission, 151 and Pittsburgh Survey, 113, 114, 120 reform organizations, member of, 2, 10, 98 social gospel influence on, 202 and Voters’ League anti-prostitution reforms, 95 Environmental amelioration, as reform goal, 14 Environmental problems, 27–29, 88, 106, 116; see also Typhoid Episcopal Church; see also Calvary Episcopal Church; Trinity Episcopal Church and Billy Sunday, 213 Brotherhood of St. Andrew, 64, 158–159 Church Club, 65, 118, 158–159 elite membership increasing, in Pittsburgh, 37 Joint Commission on Social Service, 151 lay organizations in, 63 men’s church organizations in, 158–159 and 1910 City Council bribery and prostitution scandal, 124 Pittsburgh Diocese Social Service Commission, 64, 151–152, 187 and Pittsburgh Survey, 113–114 Woman’s Auxiliary, 65 Episcopalians: percentage of, among Pittsburgh population, 37 Ethington, Philip J., 13, 107–108, 197–198 Everest, Kate, 46, 67, 70, 71 F Ferre, John, 155 Fink, Leon, 198 First Baptist Church, 40, 98, 125, 153, 187 First Presbyterian Church, 39–40, 185 First Unitarian Church, 44–46, 56, 98 Fitch, John, 115 Flanagan, Maureen, 90–92, 106 Flinn, William, 30–34, 82–83 Flinn-Leslie machine, 100 Fones-Wolf, Kenneth, 15 Forbes, James, 117 Foucault, Michel, 138–139 Frick, Henry Clay, 33, 69, 100, 103 Fundamentalist-modernist controversy, 213 Furner, Mary, 171 G

Index

221

Galpin, Frederick T., 98 Gambling, efforts to restrict or eliminate as reform goal, 14, 74, 75, 81, 123, 126, 129, 147, 173, 181, 193, 210 Garland, Robert, 147 Gellner, Ernest, 109 Gilfoyle, Timothy, 31, 51 Gorrell, Donald K., 11 Gottlieb, Peter, 210–211 Gourley, H.I., 49–54 Gray, James H., 181 Greenwald, Maurine, 71 Guthrie, George W. church organizations, member of, 10, 35, 80 on church role as arbiter of public moraliity, 102–103 and 1896 mayoral election, 79 on machine government, 100–104 on moral government, 81–82, 99–102, 119–120 and 1906 mayoral election, 100 and 1910 mass indignation meeting, 123 and non-partisanship, 100, 103, 119 and Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 121, 208 and Pittsburgh Plan, 129 and Pittsburgh Survey, 113, 118–120 reform organizations, member of, 79–80, 88 reforms of, as mayor, 101, 205 social gospel influence on, 202 Gutman, Herbert, 15 H Habermas, Jurgen, 13 Hall, David D., 7 Handy, James O., 44–46, Handy, Robert, 213 Hays, Samuel P., 17–23, 33, 54, 89, 105, 135, 144–146, 215–216 Hays-Bigelow machine, 100 Heinz, H.J., 114 Heron, William A., 87 Hill District, 1, 69, 70, 135, 200, 210 Hodges, Rev. George, 35, 37 Christian Socialism influence on, 38 on church role in reform, 59–60, 62 on class relations, 62 ecumenism of, 41, 42, 55, 67 and Episcopalian Joint Commission on Social Service, 151 and Kingsley House, 66–67, 68 motivator of Calvary Episcopal laity to undertake reform efforts, 35, 63, 103–104, 203 on machine government, 41–43, 112 on men’s church organizations, 159 on non-partisanship, 42, 55 and Pittsburgh Survey, 113 on prostitution, 43

Index

222

on the saloon, 43 social gospel teachings of, 35, 38, 39, 41, 54, 55, 63 Hofstadter, Richard, 17, 19, 20, 168, 215 Homestead steel strike (1892): 28, 33, 199 Homewood Presbyterian Church, 185–186 I Iams, Lucy Dorsey, 92, 138 Ingham, John N., 18–20, 33, 35, 37, 89, 114, 117 Institutional religion, see Churches; see also Popular religion; Lived religion Inter-Brotherhood Conference (1909), 159 Interchurch World Movement Commission, 194–195 Iser, Wolfgang, 11 J Jenkinson, A.M., 100, 103 Jewish people, and reform, 12 Jones, Robert W., 118 K Kelley, M.Clyde, 164 Kellogg, Paul U., 3, 119 Kennard, Beulah, 153 Kerr, Allen H., 116 Kingsley Association, see Kingsley Settlement House Kingsley Settlement House gendered dimension of reform, 58, 70–72 origins of, 38, 66 and Pittsburgh Survey, 113–114 purposes of, 68, 69 reforms of, 70 and social control, 69, 70 support of, by Pittsburgh elite, 69 working class view of, 69 Kingsley, Charles, influence of work on George Hodges, 38 Klein, John F., 122 Kleinberg, S.J., 33 Kleppner, Paul, 18, 25 Kloppenberg, James T., 29 Knights of Labor, 87, 198 Krause, Paul, 28, 31 L Labor Forward Movement, 15 Labor and machine government, 22–25, 32, 33, 34, 86–87, 128–129 moral discourse of, 15, 198–199 and Pittsburgh Plan, 128–129

Index

223

Laity (Pittsburgh Protestant): apathy of, toward civic reform, 186–187, 214 churches, relation in civic reform: 7–8, 57–66, 149, 164–165, 214–217 civic reform organizations, relation in civic reform 9, 54–56, 58, 149 and popular religion, 6 reform role of, 2, 4, 9, 10, 57–58, 103–104, 149, 164–165, 168, 177, 211–212–217 social gospel, role in formation, see Social Gospel Language, moral, see Moral reform discourse Law and Order League, 13, 87–88 Levy, Rabbi J.Leonard, 98, 105, 127, 133 Lewis, James, 202–203, 216 Linguistic turn, 197–198 Little, Ida B., 208–209 Lived religion, 5, 7, 214–215; see also Popular religion; Laity; Churches Logan, George B, 76–77, 200 Long, Charles, 6 Lubove, Roy, 14, 18, 25–26, 92, 111 M Machine government and African American interests, 127–128, 135–136 corruption, see Machine government, corruption of interpretations of, 22–25, 31 and labor and immigrant interests, 22–25, 32, 33, 34, 86–87, 128–129 and Pittsburgh Survey, 117 power and longevity of, 13, 23, 24, 30–31, 204–205 and water filtration, 45 Machine government, corruption of connection to business, 31, 122–124 connection to prostitution, 1, 49–54, 74–77, 122–132, 178–181, 193 connection to saloon, 176 costs of, 34, 130 interpretations of, 19–24, 33–34 in moral reform discourse, 14, 54–56, 81–82 as reform target, 3, 11, 14, 19–26, 28, 33, 54–56, 81–82, 122–132, 173, 200–206, 216–217 “Ripper Bill” controversy of 1901, 82–84 social gospel view of, 11 United Presbyterian views of, 50–52 Magee, Christopher, 29–34, 82–84, 86–87, 100, 154, 226, n. 13; see also Magee-Flinn political machine Magee, William, 1, 100, 123, 131 Magee-Flinn political machine, 34, 82–85, 201 Marsh, Rev. Daniel, 170, 177, 180, 187, 192–194 Marty, Martin, 59 Mass indignation meeting (1910), 1, 12, 123–124, 216; see also Pittsburgh City Council and 1910 bribery and prostitution scandal Mattern, E.L, 153 Matthews, Fred, 23 Matthews, William H., 70, 71, 113

Index

224

McCaffery, Peter, 32–33 McClintock, Oliver, 47–49, 79, 84, 85, 88, 96, 97, 118, 172 McClymer, John, 114 McCormick, Richard L., 22, 24, 216 McCrory, Rev. J.T., 52–55 McDonald, Terrence, 23 McIlvaine, Rev. James, 1, 103, 123–125, 127 McNaughter, John, 157 McNight, Kate Cassat, 91, 93 Mellon, R.B., 100 Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM), 151, 159–163 Men’s church organizations, 157, 159, 163 Methodist Episcopal Church Union (MECU), 152–153; see also Marsh, Daniel Methodist Episcopal Church, see Christ Methodist Episcopal Church; Methodist Episcopal Church Union Miller, Henry Russell, The Man Higher Up, 154–156 Ministerial Union of Allegheny County, 138, 148, 163, 177, 178 Montgomery, Alice B., 113 Moral reform discourse and alternative reform discourses, 16, 28, 109, 156, 198–202, 208 church role in forming, 77–78, 80–82, 103, 150–151, 165, 171, 189, 196–198, 207, 214 civic reform direction shaped by, 16, 21, 54–56, 78, 80–82, 99, 107–109, 111, 117, 144–146, 149–150, 156, 184, 197–198–201, 207 and civic reform organization network, 3, 14, 25, 54–56, 72, 78, 80–82, 107–109, 144–146, 207 current uses of, 217 decline of dominance, 207–208 emergence of, 12, 29 interpretations of, 16, 19, 109, 196 and labor, 15, 198–199 laity role in forming, 80–82, 103, 108–109, 165, 196–198, 214–215 limitations placed on reform by, 184, 203–204 and machine government, 14, 22–25, 28, 54–56, 77, 80–82, 173, 181–182, 200–202, 212–213 and mass indignation meeting (1910), 3, 12 mediating function of among reform interests, 3–4, 10, 14, 16, 54–56, 72, 96–99, 103, 108–109, 120–121, 196– 198, 201, 213 between male and female reform agendas, 92, 96–99, 105–108, 196–199 and Pittsburgh Council of Churches Challenge of Pittsburgh project, 192–193 and Pittsburgh Council of Churches Social Service Commission, 192 and Pittsburgh Survey, 112, 115 “politics” in, 179 and Protestant moralism, 10, 11, 14, 25, 54–56 and sesquicentennial thanksgiving service, 104–105 and social class, 15, 25–26, 203 social gospel influence on, 17, 78 Moralism, Protestant, 10, 14, 20, 115; see also Moral reform discourse Morals Court, 7, 181, 193, 207, 209 Morals Efficiency Commission, 2, 70, 111, 136–143, 145, 178; see also Bureau of Public Morals Morin, J.M., 132–136

Index

225

N National Municipal League, 24, 44, 48, 79, 80, 81, 83, 88, 94, 99, 118–121, 144 Nicholson, S.E., 175 O Oestricher, Richard, 198 Official religion, see Churches Olmsted, Frederick Law, 121, 208 Orsi, Robert A., 7 P Partridge, Dr. Warren G., 98, 125 Pascoe, Peggy, 71 Pittsburgh City Council change in structure of, see Pittsburgh Plan and labor and immigrant interests, 33 nine-member council, origins and evaluation of, 2, 111, 125–126, 203, 205 and 1910 bribery and prostitution scandal, 1, 122–126 Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 82, 121, 123, 129, 203, 208 Pittsburgh Conference for Good City Government (National Municipal League conference of 1908), 118–121 Pittsburgh Council of Churches of Christ (PCC), 9 and African Americans, 209–211 and Association for the Improvement of Social Conditions in the Hill District, 210 Challenge of Pittsburgh project, 192–195 and Citizens’ Political Union, 181–182 consensual strategy of, 192 denominations represented by, 191 Department of Women’s Work, 208–209 gendered dimensions of reform, 208–209 goals, 191–192 and industrial relations, 192–195 as leader of civic reform, 207–208 origins of, 181, 191 political non-involvement claimed by, 181–182, 212–213 representativeness of Protestant denominations, 191 Social Service Commission, 192 social surveys by, 192 and social workers, professional, 207 and steel strike of 1919, 194 Pittsburgh Plan, 2, 125–132 Pittsburgh Survey conclusions of, 117, 180 criticism of Pittsburgh churches in, 115 elite agenda of, 18, 19 goals of, 111 Episcopalian influence on, 113–114 interpretations of, 111, 114–115 and machine government, 117 methodology of, 114

Index

226

origins of, 3, 111 Pittsburgh Council of Churches Challenge of Pittsburgh project, model for, 192 post-Survey exhibit, 118, 144 and social gospel, 116 Pittsburgh: environmental problems in, 27–28 Popular religion, 5–6, 214–215; see also Lived religion Pratt,W.H., 152 Presbyterian Church, cultural influence of, in Pittsburgh, 18, 25, 37, 46, 47 Presbyterian Church, elite membership decreasing, in Pittsburgh, 37 Presbyterian Church USA; see also First Presbyterian Church and church role in labor problems, 186 and church role in social problems, 156–157, 184–186 and 1910 City Council bribery and prostitution scandal, 124 and social gospel, 185 Presbyterians: percentage of, among leaders of Pittsburgh industry, 186 Presbyterians: percentage of, among Pittsburgh population, 46–47 Primiano, Leonard N., 5 Prohibition, see Temperance Prostitution; see also Morals Efficiency Commission; Bureau of Public Morals; Morals Court Allegheny Federation of Churches anti-prostitution campaign of 1905, 73–77 Christian Social Service Union anti-prostitution reforms, 178–181 elimination of, as reform goal, 13, 14, 43, 49–54, 73–77, 132–144, 178–181 interpretations of, 53–54, 142 and machine government, see Machine government, corruption and Morals Efficiency Commission, 2, 111, 132–144 and 1910 City Council bribery and prostitution scandal, 126 United Presbyterian anti-prostitution campaign of 1892, 49–54 Public reform sphere, 13, 80, 85–87, 107–108, 138, 145–146 Q Quay, Matthew S., 31, 83 R Rauschenbusch, Walter, 11, 57, 153 Republicanism, 28–29 Rhetoric, moral, see Moral reform discourse Ripper Bill controversy of 1901, 82–84 Rishel, Joseph, 36, 37 Roman Catholic Church, and reform, 12 Russell Sage Foundation, 3, 112, 114; see also Pittsburgh Survey

Index

227

S Samson, Harry G., 152, 176 Sands, Rev. J.D., 49–50 Scandrett, Thomas, 74 Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 7 Scott, Anne Firor, 41, 93–94 Sesquicentennial celebration (1908), 104–105 Settlement house movement, in Pittsburgh, see Kingsley Settlement House Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 98, 195, 215 Shame of the Cities, see Steffens, Lincoln Sheedy, Father Morgan M., 49, 67 Sixth Presbyterian Church, 125 Skinner, Quentin, 145 Smith, Carl, 112, 197–198 Smith, Edwin Z., 98 Snyder, Rev. P.W., 185 Social control, 20, 21, 23, 69, 70, 93–94, 97, 107–108, 203, 215 Social Creed of the Churches (1908), 11, 182–184, 194, 200, 214 Social gospel novel, 154–156 Social gospel church role in forming, 4, 12, 78, 149, 165, 188–189 conservative applications of, 62–63, 195 diverse meanings of, 11, 57, 78 gendered dimensions of, 160–161 interpretations of, 10, 11 laity role in forming, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 57, 78, 149, 165, 214–215 and moral reform discourse, 17, 54–56, 78 and Pittsburgh Survey, 116 women’s church organizations role in forming, 40–41 Spratt, Margaret, 90–91, 121 St. John, Rev. Charles E., 44, 45, 46, 54, 67, 98 Stedman-Jones, Gareth, 21 Steel strike of 1919, 194–195, 199 Steffens, Lincoln, 30, 33, 47, 82–85, 109, 124, 172 Stelzle, Charles, 186 Stone, William, 83 Strip District, 68, 70, 169–170, 183 Sunday, Billy, 213 Sweeny, John, 180 T Tarr, Joel, 32, 33, 34, 203–204 Teaford, Jon, 23, 31 Temperance: as reform goal, see Anti-Saloon League; Christian Social Service Union, temperance reforms of Toews, John, 197 Trinity Episcopal Church, 64–65 Turner, James, 15 Turner, Steven, 114 Tweed, Thomas A., 5–6

Index

228

Twentieth Century Club, 46, 87, 92, 93 Typhoid, in Pittsburgh, 45, 204 U Unitarian Church, see First Unitarian Church United Presbyterian Church, 60–61, 153–154, 157–158 United Presbyterian Ministerial Association, 49–54, 130–131, 154 Urban League of Pittsburgh, 210–211 V Vann, Robert L., 199–200, 211 Voters’ Leagueand church role in reform, 133–134, 150 elite membership of, 18, 89 gendered dimensions of reform, 94–95, 105–106, 199 and mass indignation meeting (1910), 1 on moral city, need for, 133, 144 Morin, J.M., investigation of, 132–136 and National Municipal League, 88, 94 and 1906 mayoral election, 101 and 1910 City Council bribery and prostitution scandal, 1, 111, 122–123, 126 origins and purpose of, 88 and Pittsburgh Plan, 126, 129–132 and prostitution, 94–95, 111, 132–136 and public morality, 133–134 racism of, 135 school board reform of 1911, 96 shared membership and agenda with other reform organizations, 95–97, 108–109, 120–121, 166, 179–180, 211 W Wallace, George R., 35, 125, 129, 180 Weil, A.Leo, 1, 94–95, 98, 118, 120–121, 123, 129–131, 133–136, 164 White, Hayden, 21 Whitehead, Bishop Cortlandt (Episc.), 2, 60, 124, 133 Williams, P.R., 181 Williams, Rhys H., 21 Willock, Harry H., 176 Wilson, Robert, 122–123 Wishart, Rev. W.I., 138, 160 Woman’s Club, 93 Women, participation in church organizations, 39, 40–41, 186, 209 Women’s Health Protective Association, 45, 87–88 Woodburn, Dr. S.S., 74 Woodruff, Clinton Rogers, 44, 114 Woods, Robert A., 66–67, 113–116, 119, 164, 205 Wortman, Marlene Stein, 106 Wuthnow, Robert, 67, 78 Z Zahniser, Rev. Charles R., 138, 153, 163, 165–67, 171–72, 176–179, 191, 195, 207

Index Zink, Harold, 30

229