Evaluating the Social Gospel Movement

Janine Giordano Drake







Both scholars have good reasons for calling their subjects "working classes," for both sets of workers think of themselves as virtuous producers and in contrast to that growing class of the super-rich. Both see the growing number of expensive cathedrals as hypocritical. However, these two populations are really quite different.  Anglo-Protestant artisans get "heard" in Chicago in the Progressive Era in a much louder sense than Catholic workers get "heard" on the city streets of New York in the same decades. You might pinpoint those differences on religion (Anglo-Protestants, after all, see themselves as the world's supreme race in the 1900s, so they identify with one another across the class chasm more quickly). Or you might focus those differences on skill level. (The American Federation of Labor defends the virtues of skilled tradesmen in part by cutting proletarianized workers and the unemployed out of their bargaining units). The difference in city matters, too. To grossly oversimplifly, New York in receives a lot more Italians and Jews, and Chicago receives a lot more Poles, Scandinavians, and German radicals. Despite the differences in the ways the books are framed, both come to convincing conclusions based on their own evidence. Nonetheless, the two books, taken together, illustrate the fact that the Social Gospel movement dovetailed quite well with the goals of some laborers (especially, white, Anglo-Protestant men) while it crushed the goals of others (especially, radical and proletarianized Catholics).

Moreover, the books illustrate the glaring fact that working class Anglo-Protestants had a very different relationship with their local churches than working class Irish Catholics had with theirs. While working class Anglo-Protestants (at least in Chicago), built positive relationships with clerics and reformers, radical working class Catholics were frequently at war with the bishops and archbishosp of their diocese. Radical politics were not just rejected by many Catholic churches, but theologically condemned. Priests who professed solidarity with certain radical ideas were not just rejected but excommunicated. While Catholic and Protestant workers may have shared similar opportunities for social mobility within the space of the union hall in the Central Labor Union, their hope for reform through their respective churches could hardly be farther apart.

When we think about who "made" the Social Gospel movement and whom it benefited, we need to keep in mind the limits to a study on a single community and the fact that "working class" meant both everything and nothing during certain moments of the Gilded Age. That said, I find both of these books tremendously well-written and well-argued. I look forward to assigning both of them and engaging in this very important debate.

*Granted, the Union Labor Party did not have the same exact goals as the broadly-conceived social gospel movement in Chicago. They did have a lot in common.


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