CHAPTER V
Moody in Chicago
In 1856 Dwight L. Moody moved from Boston to Chicago. Within twelve years he had become in the words of historian Bernard Weinberger “a one-man civic showpiece.”1 On his own Moody built a thriving Sunday school; he was the drive wheel of the Chicago Y.M.C.A.; and he established his own church.
May 3, 1957, Dwight L. Moody transferred his church membership from the Mount Vernon Church in Boston to the Plymouth Congregational Church in Chicago.2 His poor grammar inhibited him from taking much part in the prayer meetings and social affairs of the congregation, but he was incapable of belonging to an organization without doing something. So he rented four pews and filled them up with commercial travelers. Not finding enough religious activity in the Plymouth Church, Moody (apparently quite unconcerned about denominational tags) then joined the Mission Band of the First Methodist Church and walked the streets visiting hotels and saloons distributing tracts and invitations to church activities. While prowling unfamiliar districts, he found a small, out-of-the-way Sunday school mission on North Wells Street. Upon assuming that his use of English would at least match that of the children of the street, he asked for a class. The superintendent replied that he had enough teachers, but if Moody would recruit a class, he could have the privilege of instructing it. The next Sunday he showed up at the school with eighteen ragged and filthy urchins.3
Unknowingly Moody began his career by choosing to find on what was then the major battlefront of the churches. Workers from the rural areas of America and from across the sea packed into Chicago to become its working force for a new industrial era. In the words of historian James F. Findlay, Jr.: “Chicago was a city of extremes–of wealth and slums, of beautiful homes and muddy unpaved streets. But all this only mirrored the turbulence of dynamic growth. Raw and yet unformed, the city and its inhabitants looked optimistically to the future.4 In such an environment Moody would spend the next several years recruiting children from “the Sands” for his Sunday school. “The Sands,” which was located on the north side of the Chicago River, was sometimes also known as “Little Hell.”5 One observer has described it as a “moral lazaretto.” “Disorder, and even crime, was regarded as a matter of course on ‘The Sands,’ which would have been checked and punished in any other part of the city. To this abandoned region flocked the bad women and worse men, who had fallen too low to feel at home anywhere else; and it was proverbially dangerous for any decent person to walk those streets after nightfall.”6 Among its shanties, bordellos, and saloons young Moody moved tirelessly as a Sunday-school recruiter and organizer.
The Sunday School
In the fall of 1858 Moody started his own Sunday school.7 He conceived of it as an undenominational mission Sunday school. Near the North Side Market he found and rented a deserted saloon for his school on Sunday. He found a helper in J. B. Stillson, a visitor from Rochester, whom Moody met one morning when they were both tramping the lakeside piers giving out tracts and Testaments to sailors. It was not long before the two of them had gathered too many children for the new quarters.8
The Growth of the School
Biographer Richard K. Curtis wrote about the next step of growth: “Friends interceded with Mayor John C. Haines, and Moody located in a large saloon-dance hall above the North Market. Sunday morning he was out early, cleaning up after Saturday night’s party, sweeping out the sawdust, washing out the tobacco and beer, ventilating, arranging benches.”9 The North Market Mission quickly became popular. In the words of the Reverend William H. Daniels: “Before this time no mission school in the city had numbered more than one hundred and fifty; but the school of Moody . . . increased by such rapid strides, that in three months it was two hundred strong; in six months, three hundred and fifty; and within a year the average attendance was about six hundred and fifty; with an occasional crowd of nearly a thousand. It is estimated that about two thousand children annually passed through the school; many, of course, staying but a few weeks.”10 It became one of the largest Sunday schools in the United States.11
The school grew to such proportions that in 1863 a $20,000 structure was built on Illinois Street to house Moody’s North Market mission, not very far from the old North Market Hall.12 As Moody’s school grew it gained in reputation. By 1860 it was a recognized Chicago institution. President Abraham Lincoln visited it on his last trip to the city, shortly after his election to the Presidency.13
Moody used rather unorthodox methods in attracting children to his mission school, maple sugar and prizes for Sunday school attendance.14 Sometimes he would chase children into alleys and cellars, up and down ladders, and over piles of lumber for the purpose of making their acquaintance. He also searched for them in their homes and made the acquaintance of their parents.15
It was not always easy to get consent of the children’s parents. In the words of Weinberger, “Many of the fathers were burly loafers with a wholesome distrust of slumming Christians bringing gifts and respectability.”16 A good many, too, were Irish Catholics, who were all too eager to strike a blow for the faith by beating up on a Protestant heretic looking for converts among them. More than once upon meeting an enraged father with a club in hand and rushing at him with curses, Moody sprinted through back streets, dodging barrels, carts, and boxes with a bellowing Irishman in pursuit. Upon such occasions Moody used to say, his legs were his best friends.17
Parents who threatened Moody away, however, learned that he was hard to keep away. He simply would not give up. He would come back–again and again, and again often answering a curse with a prayer and never relaxing his hold. Finally, astounded that any man could be so passionately concerned about their children, parents would give in and permit the enrollment of their sons and daughters. What could a mother do with a man who chased her daughter half a mile over wooden sidewalks and through saloons and under her bed merely for the purpose of getting her into school on Sunday?18 What could a father do when he came home to find Moody had poured a jug of his best whiskey down the sink? He could roll up his sleeves for battle when Moody returned the next day to enroll the children in his school. But what if Moody dropped on his knees and began to pray for him–not in the conventional cant phrases, but with an unmistakable and plainspoken earnestness? What was there to do then except shake hands sheepishly and wish the missionary good luck with his children?19 Moody’s love and sincerity was so transparent that these citizens of “the Sands” were helpless before it.
Moody also met opposition from Catholic boys who disturbed his meetings and broke the windows of the meeting hall. When Moody lost his patience, he decided to visit with Chicago’s Bishop James Duggan to see if he could use his influence to restrain them. As a result of the conversation, the Bishop stopped his wild young parishioners from breaking the windows. Until the day of Bishop Duggan’s death, he and Moody were good friends.20
Once Moody got the children in his school, the next task was taming them. Such “toughs” as Madden the Butcher, Smikes, and Butcher kilroy were drawn into Moody’s mission. Moody’s assistants were “worked to their fullest capacity, in quieting several simultaneous scuffles and fights in different corners of the room, rescuing little boys from the clutches of the big ones, and keeping down the noise among this mob of children, who, between the prayers and hymns, would pull each other’s hair, and black each other’s eyes, in a manner which left no doubt to the strictly missionary character of the school.”21 Moody would try any honest method for winning the children’s support. Pony rides, prizes, and picnics were used. When rocketing attendance forced a division into seventy to eighty classes, he let the youngsters pick their own teachers. The principle established that the school was for the pupils and not the pupils for the school. In the words of William H. Daniels: “This unusual freedom of choice, though often abused, at length developed a spirit of pride, which helped to keep the classes in order. The school was their school, the teacher was their teacher, the superintendent was their superintendent; and above all, Moody was their Moody.”22 When all else failed, Moody could take direct action. When one lad had tried his patience beyond its capacity, Moody seized the adolescent and led him into the anteroom. Meanwhile, his assistant distracted the others children by leading them in a hymn, fortissimo. The music muffled the sounds of combat. Shortly, master and disciple emerged, red-faced and sweating. The boy, thenceforth, was a model of discipline.23 Candy, prizes, spankings, and romps were all used to tame these wild kids of the “the Sands.”
The Results of the School
Moody’s primary purpose in establishing his school was the salvation of souls. He saw literary and social advantages as less important. However, he contended that if he could make Christians of these wild boys and girls, they would make ladies and gentlemen of themselves. From among the pupils of his school and their parents Moody had made three hundred of them converts to his faith in five-and-a-half years. Many of the children in Moody’s school became “highly respectable and useful” people, becoming active in churches and in the business community.24
Moody’s Sunday school had some other social effects. His charity relieved the discomfort of many in need. The school helped some fathers to sober up. Moody placed the daughters of prostitutes and the keepers of brothels in Christian families so that their lives could be saved from certain ruin.25 The North Market Mission mitigated the baneful effects of illiteracy, which frequently were widespread in the slum areas. The instruction in English helped to break down the social and cultural exclusiveness which often characterized the immigrant groups. Findlay wrote in regard to this point: “Native Americans reduced the possibility of social friction by imposing on new arrivals what they conceived to be desirable norms of social conduct. The program of ‘Americanization’ tended to reduce the suspicion and distrust that some citizens possessed the ‘strange’ ways and aloofness of the newcomers. Thus did Moody promote the maintenance of social harmony and the status quo.”26
The Y.M.C.A.
As the United States was undergoing the changes of industrialization and urbanization. It was noticed by contemporary observers that many young men were leaving the rural areas to find a job in the modern city. As they left home, they tended to relax the ties of habit, social pressure, and emotional association which had bound the new arrivals to the church back home. The Y.M.C.A. was a British import designed to protect teenage boys from the vices of alcoholism, delinquency, and crime in growing urban areas. The Boston Y.M.C.A. was organized on the British model in 1851. It was the first American association. The first association in North America was established in Montreal one week before the Boston association.27 The Y.M.C.A. was orginally established as a way of keeping in the church young strangers coming to urban areas. However, the eager members of the Y.M.C.A. soon transformed the organization into a mission to the whole community. These young men collected funds to aid the poor and cared for the sick in hotels and lodging houses, but their chief activity was evangelistic–working in rescue missions, organizing groups for Bible study, distributing tracts, and going out to preach on street corners. Moody was to be influenced by the Y.M.C.A. and, in turn, was to make an impact upon that organization.28
In 1854 Moody became a member of the Boston Y.M.C.A. In a letter home he wrote: “I am going to join the Christian Association tomorrow night. Then I shall have a place to go to when I want to go anywhere. And I can have all the books I want to read free from expense. Only have to pay one dollar a year. They have a large room and the smart men of Boston lecture to them for nothing and they get up and ask questions.”29 The interest recounted in this letter was to continue throughout his life. Moody liked the nondenominational character of the organization with its orthodox, evangelical temper, and its membership of white-collar workers helped to draw Moody to the Y.M.C.A.30
The Chicago Years
Upon moving from Boston to Chicago Moody associated himself with the Chicago Y.M.C.A. In the words of S. A. Kean, treasurer of the organization, ”Moody found a congenial field of labor in the Association. When [he] joined, it had but few members; . . . it was composed and managed almost entirely by middle-aged or elderly men. . . . Its methods and policy were quiet and conservative. Moody’s advent among them was like a stiff northwest breeze. His zeal and devotion were the life and hope of the Association; but he shocked the nice sense of propriety of some of these gentlemen by carrying its work among a class of people who had hitherto been neglected, under the impression that its proper line of effort was among the higher classes of young men.
Under Moody’s leadership the Young Men’s Christian Association became, like the North Market Mission, a free and popular institution,–extending its influence to all classes of society and bringing the cultured and wealthy to the assistance of the ignorant and the poor.”31
Once the Chicago Y.M.C.A. had recognized Moody’s ability, the organization appointed him to be Chairman of the Visiting Committee to the sick and to strangers. According to Daniels, “The report of the first year’s work of the Committee of Visitation . . . gives the number of families visited 554, and the amount of money bestowed in charity $2350.”32
From its beginning the Chicago association had projected the establishment of an employment agency. The projected service was started informally in 1863 by J. M. Chapman and J. M. Cutler, two members of the association, who spent fifteen minutes daily taking names of those desiring help. During the first year approximately five hundred persons found positions through the agency.33 After the Civil War returning soldiers were faced with few jobs and many seekers. Before the close of 1865 the association’s employment agency had placed 1,435 men, 124 boys, and 718 girls.34 This success brought about an agency which found jobs for 3,411 in 1867-1868, for 5,081 in 1869-1870, and for 3,490 in 1870-1871.35 In all this work Moody played an important role.
In working with the Chicago Y.M.C.A. Moody was responsible also for much city-wide relief work. From 1865 to 1868 the association doled out more than $25,000 annually.36 However, people received goods only after careful screening.37 Moody’s use of the relief work as a missionary institution met opposition by Unitarian members of the Y.M.C.A. According to Daniels, “It was alleged by the opposition, and confessed by Mr. Moody, that he never gave away a pair of trousers, or a load of wood, or a pound of tea, without an accompanying exhortation or prayer; and on all possible occasions the recipients were urged to give their hearts to Christ, devote themselves to a life of piety, and attend the prayer-meetings in Farwell Hall.”38
When he became president of the Chicago association, Moody built in 1867 the first building in the world to be used solely for Y.M.C.A. purposes. When Farwell Hall burned to the ground in 1868, he built another. And when the second burned to the ground in the ashes of the Chicago Fire, he helped build yet a third.39
The Later Years
For the rest of his life Moody was a friend of the Y.M.C.A. It is not difficult to see why the organization had Moody’s unqualified endorsement and lifelong sympathy. For, indeed, Moody had been introduced to organized evangelistic work and induced to forsake his commercial pursuits in order to devote himself wholly to the business of conducting revivals because of the Chicago association’s influence on his life. By the turn of the century Scotland, Ireland, England, and the United States were dotted with Y.M.C.A. buildings which owed their existence to his direct influence.40 Moody became the organization’s first and foremost money raiser; “he unquestionably,” according to Charles H. Hopkins, “raised more money than anyone else in the nineteenth century to reinforce or build Y.M.C.A.’s”41 In 1875 when the International Committee was having critical financial difficulties, he aided the organization with $1,500 from his hymnbook royalties and continued to do so each year thereafter; later it was raised to $2,500.42 The Y.M.C.A., grateful for his many contributions, elected him international president in 1879.43
Like D. L. Moody, the Y.M.C.A. sought to reach the working class, but its main appeal was to the elite white-collar worker. Hopkins has pointed out, “Begun among white-collar workers for themselves, the city Y.M.C.A.’s remained with few exceptions the creatures of that economic class.”44 The Y.M.C.A. of the United States always had a bad conscience about the industrial workers. The organization served only clerical and skilled workers and in effect excluded the great mass of unskilled workingmen. The one brilliant exception to this fact was the highly successful development of railroad Y.M.C.A.’s. However, it must be admitted that the railroad workers were the aristocracy rather than the rank file of labor.45
Despite attempts to make the Y.M.C.A. available to labor, there seem to be two basic reasons for the failure to reach that class. One problem was that of the Association, like Moody, exercised a spirit of paternalism. It completely identified itself with the employing class in a paternalistic service to workers. Hardly any Y.M.C.A. men allied themselves or their organization with the cause of the poorly paid and overworked employees who fought, for the most part, losing battles with giant corporations in the strike-ridden years of 1877, 1886, and 1894. International Association secretaries called upon and promoted their work with hundreds of railway officials but never once met with organized labor. Although Y.M.C.A. workers were constantly exhorting one another to bring in more members from the laboring class, the invitation extended only as far as associate membership. Throughout the nineteenth century the representation of labor on boards of directors or policy-forming committees was rare as to be almost non-existent.46
A second reason for failing to reach labor was the Y.M.C.A.’s attempt to keep hands off controversial political or social questions. This attempt was largely motivated by the desire to consolidate favorable public sentiment.47 This stance was much like its arch supporter, D. L. Moody. According to Hopkins, “For the most part Y.M.C.A. leaders kept their facilities neutral during strikes. . . . On the whole the policy evolved was that of a course ‘straight down the middle of the road.’”48 As a result of this policy, labor did not see the Association as a labor organization.
The Birth of the Illinois Street Church
As the Civil War drew to a close, Moody’s North Market Mission was plucking brands from the burning at a lively annual rate. It became necessary to organize it into a church.
Moody exhorted the converts of the North Market Mission to join the city churches. It was the custom of the mission school, as well as the Y.M.C.A.. to introduce people to attend the church of their own denomination. Many of Moody’s disciples had no religious antecedents whatsoever, their roots were in the life of the Mission.49 Many of these folks found it more than they could tolerate to be shunted off to the “free” section of the churches reserved for the poor who were unable to afford pew rents.50 They felt strange being poorly clothed and ignorant in the more beautiful church buildings.51 They found the sermons, prepared for a critical, fastidious city congregation, to be beyond their understanding.52 also, some of the established churches were critical of Moody’s mission.53
The Reason for the Church
As a result, these young converts pleaded with Moody to start his own church. Moody hesitated at first. He had always conceived of his work as complementing, not competing with the established churches. But where were these people of poverty to go? With the new mission building on Illinois Street (“a two-story, gable-end edifice, main front floor in the middle, spindling corner spires, tiny Colonial tower on the comb, with an American flag”) completed, Moody’s converts insisted that it must be the Illinois Street building.54 Finally, Moody yielded.
In 1864 he called a council of churches unique in the history of Chicago. Present for the meeting were Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians. Moody told them what he wanted to do. Each denomination was eager for a new church of its own denomination. As Moody told of his plan to organize a nonsectarian church, one by one they excused themselves on the basis that they could not serve on a council to form a church at best inferior, at worst heretical. Moody continued without them, and on December 30, 1864,55 the Illinois Street Church was officially organized along the lines Congregational polity.56
The Illinois Street Church was established for the poor people of the North Side of Chicago. Plain gilt signs at the right and left of the entrance to the building indicated what class of people were quite welcome. One read, “Ever welcome to this house of God are strangers and the poor.” The other read, “Seats are free. A meeting will be held every evening during the week.”57 Moody’s church particularly appealed to English and Scotch immigrants, and they made up a very large proportion of the congregation.58 Apparently Moody had less success in converting Irish and German immigrants, who had a Roman Catholic background.
The Activity of the Church
As the people came into the Illinois Street Church, they were immediately put to work so that they would not lose interest. A contemporary observer wrote about the church’s activity: “All the members have something to do. The bell in the tower of the first church edifice . . . was said to ring every night in the year for some kind of religious assembly. There were not only the ordinary services common to all churches, but also men’s meetings, young men’s meeting, boys’ meetings, women’s meetings, mothers’ meetings, girls’ meetings, Bible meetings, strangers’ meetings, Gospel meetings, praise meetings, and testimony meetings–each with some distinct character of its own.”59
In the Chicago Fire the Illinois Street Church went up in smoke. After the fire it became known at the Chicago Avenue Church, and before his death was known simply as Moody Church. In 1930 Moody’s son, William, wrote: “Twenty-five years after Moody had passed from his labors, the church, having grown out of its humble beginning as a mission school, erected ‘the Moody Memorial Church,” an imposing edifice with seating capacity for over four thousand and with splendid Sunday school facilities capable of accommodating twenty-five hundred scholars. . . . After seventy years, the work which was begun in the dingy quarters of the old North Market Hall is still carried on.”60 Today Moody Memorial Church remains one of the strongest bulwarks of independent fundamentalism in the nation. Moody’s church was one of the first in a long line of independent fundamentalist tabernacles and storefront churches which were founded on nondenominational lines as a protest against the increasing formality and sophistication of the established churches.61
Through his church, the Y.M.C.A., and his mission school, D. L. Moody sought to win the workingmen living in the city slums to his Savior. Moody in seeking to win these people offered them charity. He also provided channels for the wealthy to aid the poor. His school and church helped “Americanize” the immigrants, although Moody’s conservative social and economic views did little during these years to challenge the acquisitive values of an industrial society. Soon to leave the market place to become a famous evangelist, his social and economic values remained those of the conservative, bourgeois entrepreneur of his day. But for the sake of the gospel, he was to retain an intense interest in reaching the working classes.
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