Chapter V -- Moody in Chicago

CHAPTER V

Moody in Chicago

   In the previous chapters Moody’s career, his times, the workingman, and the evangelist’s social views have been discussed.  In this context the stage is set for an examination of Moody’s impact upon the working class.  One of Moody’s primary objectives throughout his life was to bring the gospel to the unchurched masses, particularly to the urban workers.  If Moody considered work among the working class so important, an assessment of the results of his career should properly include consideration of the effect of his endeavors upon this group of people.  In what ways did Moody relate his social views to the workingman of his day?  Possessed by a driving desire to evangelize the urban workers, Moody constantly searched for new means to achieve this end.  The story begins and ends 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.

CHAPTER  III

THE WORKINGMAN OF THE ERA

   Much could be written about the workingman of the period of 1860 to 1900.  This chapter, however, will be restricted to a brief discussion of labor’s relationship with the captains of industry and labor’s attitude toward religion.

   Following the Civil War entrepreneurs came to view labor as a commodity.  Capital’s impersonal viewpoint toward labor put workers at odds with their employers.  As a result, labor revolted.
   The gulf that separated the workingman and the employer, either individual or corporate was caused by vast economic changes.  Before the Civil War industry was smaller in scope, less of it was corporately organized.  The independent artisan was still an important industrial factor, and escape from the ranks of labor was less difficult.  The relationship of employer and employee of that previous period had almost disappeared by the eighties.  A brass-worker, discussing this change before a Senate Committee in 1883, remarked:
“Well, I remember that fourteen years ago the workman and foremen and the boss were all as one happy family; it was just as easy and as free to speak to the boss as anyone else, but now the boss is superior, and the men all go to the foremen; but we would not think of looking the foreman in the face now any more than we would the boss. . . .  The Average hand growing up in the shop now would not think of speaking to the boss, would not presume to recognize him, nor the boss would not recognize him either.”1  Employers “adopt a superior standpoint,” complained another testifying employee.  “The employer has much the same feeling towards the men that he had toward his machinery.  He wants to get as much as he can out of his men at the cheapest rate. . . .  That is all he cares for the man generally.”2  One industrialist bluntly stated, according to Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, “I regard my employees as I do a machine, to be used to my advantage, and when they are old and of no further use I cast them in the street.”3

The Relationship of the Captains of Industry and Labor

   The indifference to human worth here demonstrated was neither an invention of Gompers nor wholly exceptional.  A wool-manufacturer in New England complacently observed that when workers “get starved down to it, then they will go to work at just what you can afford to pay.”4   Such views accompanied the conviction that it is, as Jay Gould put it, an “axiom . . . that labor is a commodity that will in the long run be governed absolutely by the law of supply and demand.”5   This argument justified adequately the manner in which workers were commonly treated.  Labor was a commodity, and there was no reason why it should be dealt with differently from other commodities.

The Change in Labor Relations

   As it became increasingly conscious of its condition, labor boldly voiced its complaints and demands and resorted more widely to industrial action to gain its objectives.  In twenty-five years, 1881-1905, there occurred in the United States 38,303 strikes and lockouts which involved 7,444,270 workers in 199,954 plants.6 Four of these strikes were particularly explosive and rocked the social structure of the nation to its foundations. 

The Revolt of Labor

   The first were the railroad strikes in 1877 that spread out over the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore, and Ohio, and the New York Central railroads.  Historian Henry F. May called them “the most destructive labor battle in American history,” since these strikes involved workers, police, militia, and federal troops fighting pitched battles in many cities.7 Property damage was immense, and sober men envisioned mobocracy and revolution.  The year 1877 became a symbol of shock, of the possible crumbling of society.8  
  The second was the disastrous Haymarket affair in Chicago.  In a clash between pickets and police at the McCormick Harvester Plant on May 3, 1886, six of the picketers were killed and several wounded.  At a protest meeting held the next day in Haymarket Square a bomb was thrown which killed eight policemen and injured twenty-seven persons.  The trial, which resulted in seven “anarchists” being sentenced to death (four were hanged, one committed suicide, and two were given life-imprisonment), revealed a widespread mood of hysteria.9  
   The third was the great strike of the Carnegie Steel Plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892.  On July 5 two boatloads of armed Pinkerton detectives, sent by General Manager Henry Clay Frick to guard the mills after he had shut them down, were driven off in a pitched battle with strikers and twenty invaders were wounded.  Eventually eight thousand state militia reasserted control for the company, and the mill was reopened with nonunion labor.10
   The fourth was the great strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894, when President Grover Cleveland–over the protests of Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois–sent two thousand federal troops to Chicago to “guard the mails.”  The injunction was effectively used against the unions.  The propriety and necessity of dispatching federal troops to the area have been keenly debated ever since.11

The Relationship of the Church to Labor

   Because of the church’s lack of sympathy for the workingman’s plight and revolt, labor developed a hostile stance toward institutional Protestantism.  The Catholics were able to remain in positive relationship with labor because many immigrant workers were Roman Catholics.  Although they rejected “churchianity,” which they held to be another word for pious fraud and pretense, most workers professed belief in Christianity.12

Labor’s Relationship to Protestantism

   Until there is further research into the religious habits of nineteenth-century workers to prove otherwise, present historical research demonstrates widespread defection of workingmen from the ranks of Protestantism.  In the desperate struggle which was taking place over the distribution of this world’s goods, workingmen beheld the clergy as accepting the economic principles of their wealthy parishioners.  Workers were not church-goers because clergymen did not understand the life of a worker and too often apologized for the wrongful actions of employers, according to Samuel Rompers.13 “There was a time,” he wrote in 1919, “when the ministry belonged to the host that prayer for us one minute on Sunday and preyed on all the rest of the week.”14  Workers found themselves, moreover strangers to the elegant trappings provided in houses of worship by the wealthy.  High pew rents isolated them from those who could afford desirable locations.  “Have the working classes fallen away from the churches or have the churches fallen away from the working class?” inquired the Reverend Charles F. Goss of the Chicago Avenue Church (later named the Moody Memorial Church), as he thought about the workers’ indifference and hostility toward religious institutions.  He said, “There is no place in the average Chicago church for the poor man . . . surrounded by individuals who not only regard poverty as a disgrace, but by their vulgar display endeavor to perpetually remind the poor man of his poverty.”15  

   Hostility toward Institutional Protestantism

   Whenever workers engaged in a strike to gain what they believed theirs, they heard the clergy voice from the pulpit opinions similar to those held by their employers.  As strikes spawned violence and workingmen united, the clergy attacked them in general as socialists and communists who should be hunted down like “mad dogs.”  In order to quell radicalism ministers approved of a strong militia, prompt suppression of independent drill clubs, absolute prohibition of free assembly where inflammatory speeches might be made, a rigid censorship of the press and of all printed material, and the denial of the vote to communists.  On the Sunday following the Haymarket affair, pulpits rang with denunciations of workers.  Little, if any, distinction was drawn between those workers who participated in violence and those who had not.16
   Because of the church’s posture of active or passive alliance with labor’s oppressors, workers lost confidence in institutional Protestantism.  Washington Gladden cited the instance of a “tired-looking shop girl” in Boston who, in response to a query by a reporter as to the reason for her failing to attend church services, replied, “My employer goes.  He is one of the pillars of the Church.  That’s reason enough why I shouldn’t go.  I know how he treats his help.”17 During the eighties several ministers investigated the religious habits of the various occupational groups, invariably discovering the wage-earners attended Protestant services in much smaller proportions than other classes.18
      Even Protestant churches that had adopted a progressive social stance failed to reach and to attract the support of labor.  Henry F. May suggests three main reasons for this failure.  First, there had developed an emotional wall of hostility between churchmen and labor.  The wall was old and strong.  Labor leaders did not recognize nor could they believe that they had new friends among the ministers of the progressive social movement.
   Second, the ministers who did attempt to tear down the wall of hostility and profess friendship for organized labor often displayed an extreme lack of understanding of labor’s problems.  Many of the aims which the American labor movement stressed grew from the aims which the American labor movement stressed grew from immediate and often desperate needs.  The clerical progressives often misunderstood the immediacy of the situation.  They urged labor to be patient in their demands.  As a result, labor leaders had little confidence in the hope of religious progressives that industrial conflicts could be solved by appealing to the better natures of capital rather than through strikes.
   The third reason for failure was the unfortunate manner in which the progressive clerics approached union men urging them to abandon their vices.  Condescendingly these clergymen attempted to explain to the workingmen problems with which the latter had lived far too long.19 Because of a tradition of clerical hostility, a misunderstanding of labor’s problems, and the manner of its approach, even progressively social Protestantism was unable to attract the workingman to any great degree.

   Labor’s Relationship to Roman Catholicism

   Within the fold of Roman Catholicism, workers often of foreign birth or of alien parentage, felt the warmth of understanding and tolerance.  In Catholic parishes the workingmen predominated in the number of communicants, and there they met fellow worshipers on a plane of equality.  With the priest looking upon his parish as primarily service among the poor, and with the Church’s leadership recognizing that the increasingly powerful business corporations were not controlled by Catholics, workers by and large found a religious haven in the Catholic faith.  Even the Church’s hostility toward the secrecy of the Knights of Labor diminished under the influence of Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, and his insistence upon a sympathetic approach to the problems of labor preserved for the Church the loyalty of this part of the American population.  In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued his important social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which placed the Church in the vanguard of humanitarians.20
   Although workers had rejected institutional Protestantism, many of them had not rejected the Christian faith.  To the charge that workingmen were atheists, John Willett, a Michigan trade-unionist, quickly retorted, “We believe much in Jesus and his teachings, but not much in the teachings of his pretended followers.”21 Though highly critical of the churches, the workers’ desired aim was not to destroy but to socialize Protestant Christianity.

   Labor's Use of Protestant Faith  

   The workers took Protestant traditions and used them to justify labor organization and agitation, to encourage workers to challenge industrial power, and to compel criticism of “natural” economic laws, the crude optimism of social Darwinism, and even the conformist Christianity of most respectable clergymen.  The workers drew from premillennial and postmillennial understandings of the Protestant faith.  The premillennial theme was subordinate to the postmillennial.  However, this pessimistic, apocalyptic tradition appealed to those who experienced psychological strain because of the social and economic changes wrought by the industrializing process.22 To these workers change itself meant decay and destruction.  Thus prophesies of doom and imminent catastrophe before “redemption” were meaningful.23  
   The Christian perfectionism and postmillenialism, identified with Charles G. Finney and other pre-Civil War and pre-industrial evangelical revivalists, were predominant in the thinking of labor leaders in the Gilded Age.24 Prominent Gilded Age trade-unionists, labor reformers, and even radicals–with the notable exception of Samuel Gompers and Daniel De Leon–shared a common faith in a just God, effused perfectionist doctrine and warned of divine retribution against continuing injustice.  This form of Protestantism offered labor leaders and their followers a transhistoric framework to challenge the new industrialism and a common set of moral imperatives to measure their rage against and to order their dissatisfaction.25
   The social Christianity espoused by workingmen was different from the more widely known and well-studied social gospel put forth by middle- and upper-class religious critics of industrial society.  As Herbert G. Gutman has pointed out, “Both groups reacted against the early disintegrating consequences of rapid industrialization and drew from the same broad religion tradition.”26 However, available evidence demonstrates few formal connections between the two movements.27

CHAPTER IV -- THE SOCIAL VIEWS OF DWIGHT L. MOODY

CHAPTER IV

Dwight L. Moody’s View of the Workingman and Big Business

   This chapter explores Dwight L. Moody’s views toward labor and big business.

Moody’s Views toward Labor

   Dwight L. Moody was aware of the grave domestic problems of his day, particularly the plight of the lower classes in Great Britain and America.  Early in his evangelistic work Moody had become acquainted with the failure of the church to reach the “bleeding” masses.1  Biographer Richard K. Curtis has written of Moody’s insights into the masses: “If he knew little of the study of alcoholism, he knew plenty about drunkenness.  If he knew little of labor relations, he knew the poverty, disease, and the filth of jobless families.  If he knew little of sermon construction and rhetoric, he could talk religion in the idiom of the street.  If he knew little of liturgy and ecclesiastics, he knew coldness when he saw it, and formalism, and stiff-necked professionalism.  And, after all, the masses also knew little of alcoholism, of labor relations, of homiletics and ecclesiastics, and further, they were little interested.  But what they were interested in were plain words, simple assurance, and bite-size certainties.  If these could be served up with the spice of catch music and garnished with homey, humorous anecdote, they were found to become well nigh irresistible.”2  
   Moody’s evangelistic target became the urban metropolis of the 1870's where lived the seething masses.  As a result, he adapted revivalism to modern conditions with great ability and foresight with the intention of reaching the great population centers.  “Water runs down hill,” Moody declared at the outset of his evangelistic career, “and the highest hills are the great cities.  If we can stir them, we shall stir the whole nation.”3

   Laborers as Individuals

   Although Moody’s target was the masses, he sought to rescue them as individuals from the desperation of poverty with the cure of the gospel.  Moody also sought to make the masses into good Americans.
   Moody viewed men of labor as individuals rather than as members of a class.  This attitude was consistent with his basic religious philosophy.  Although Moody sensed the fundamental domestic issues of the day as they related to the working classes, he believed that society could only be changed by the moral and spiritual regeneration of individuals and that all political, social, and economic reform must be an appendage of revivals.  Moody once said to Henry Ward Beecher, “There is no use attempting to make a deep and lasting effect on masses of people, but every effort should be put forth on the individual.”4  Thus Moody approached the workingman as a person in need of salvation.
   Because of Moody’s individualism he tended to view labor relations in face-to-face terms.  Thus, he advised the workingman:  “Work faithfully for three dollars a week, it won’t be long before you have six dollars and then you will get ten dollars, and then twelve dollars a week.  You want to get these employers always under and obligation to you.  You must be such true men and be so helpful to your employers that they cannot get along without you and then you will work up and your employer will increase your wages.  If a man works in the interest of his employer, he will be sure to keep him and treat him well  . . .” 5
   Moody had no use for labor unions and their strikes.6 He had little to offer the working class in the way of concrete and realistic proposals.  As the gulf between big business and labor grew in the industrial society of Moody’s later years, his words of advice to labor became increasingly unrealistic.  His thoughts seemed particularly irrelevant during periods of depression.  In the difficult years of the mid-nineties the evangelists had nothing more to offer the depressed laborers that advice to take advantage of vaguely conceived acts of good will on the part of employers.7  In this spirit he requested his middle-class audience to “go and act the Good Samaritan. . . .  Send your carriages out and give poor people a drive in the park once in awhile and they’ll call you an angel, I’ll warrant.”8
   In his later sermons Moody enjoined employers to be faithful to their employees.  “We treat our servants just about as we treat our sewing machines.” He said in 1894.  “If they do their work well, all right, but if they don’t, we kick them out.”  He called A. T. Stewart, the owner of a New York department store, “supremely selfish” because “one of his clerks got sick and couldn’t come to the store for two or three or ten weeks; his wages cut right off” because Steward felt “he wasn’t responsible for aiding the clerk.”9
   Moody saw labor relations in terms of individuals relating to individuals rather than management relating with labor.  Although Moody in his later years saw the responsibility of individual businessmen toward labor, he blamed labor for most of its problems with poverty.

   Reasons for Poverty

   In New York City in1876 where 50,000 men were out of work because of the depression.  Moody commented:  “I know there is great misery and suffering in this great city; but what is the cause of most of it?  Why, the sufferers have become lost from the Shepherd’s care.  When they are close to Him, under his protection, they are always provided for.”10  According to Moody, a man who lost his job should consider it as a judgment of God for his sins.  “If you had a son who wouldn’t obey you you would not expect him to prosper, and wouldn’t be anxious that he should, because prosperity in wickedness would be an injury to him.”11  Moody was convinced that for the most part poverty was the result of personal sin.  “I believe today one reason why so many men’s ways are hedged up and they do not prosper is because they have dishonored their parents” or disobeyed some other commandment.12  Sometimes, Moody believed, poverty was simply the result of not being a converted Christian.  He believed this truth about himself.  He often commented:  “The whole of my early life was one long struggle with poverty; but I have not doubt it was God’s way of bringing me to himself.  And since I began to seek first the kingdom of God, I have never wanted for anything.13  
   Moody saw the prevailing sins of the poor workers to be the immorality of laziness, a lack of thrift, and the consumption of liquor and tobacco.  As far as he was concerned, these sins inevitably led to poverty.  Moody understood laziness and idleness to be heinous sins.  At a meeting in Boston in 1877 Moody told a group of converted drunkards who were out of work:  “Get something to do.  If it is for fifteen hours a day, all the better, for while you are at work Satan does not have so much chance to tempt you.  If you cannot earn more than a dollar a week, earn that.  That is better than nothing and you can pray to God for more.”14  Of course, these ancient verities of Puritanism were not much comfort to men out of jobs, but industrialists who had to cut wages during this period of great economic difficulty welcomed Moody’s comments as a powerful support for their actions, whether he consciously intended to support them or not.
   While Moody was in Boston, 48,000 persons were applying for poor relief.  Rather than remain idle and fall into sin, he suggested that if they could not get work in the city, they should go out into the country.  “It is not degrading to go out and hoe and shovel in the field,” he told those who were jobless.  “It is noble, I think.”15  However, Moody failed to explain how the farmers of New England were to absorb that vast army of unemployed.
   Moody also believed that poverty was caused by a lack of thrift.  He felt that the poor were poor because of spending their money in foolish ways.  He saw no point in giving the money to the poor unless they were willing to be responsible with it.  He once warned an audience that one must be careful in giving money to aid the poverty stricken, for too often “the money would go into their pockets to get whiskey with.”16
   The wickedness of the jobless and the poverty stricken was demonstrated by the continued sales of liquor and tobacco even during times of depression.  In one of his sermons Moody said: “I do not believe we would have these hard times if it had not been for sin and iniquity.  Look at the money that is drank up!  The money that is spent for tobacco!  That is ruining men–ruining their constitutions.  We live in a land flowing with milk and honey.  God has blessed this nation; yet men complain of hard times.”17  Moody believed that the rags of poverty were the emblems of the drunkard’s child.  He reasoned that since converted men never drank, ragged children were ipso facto being raised by sinners.18
   Moody could not see any reason for poverty in America that eagerness to work could not overcome.  He had seen what his own mother had done with nine children and no visible support.  Furthermore his own boundless energy made indolence all the more unsupportable.
   Moody contended that economic hardship could be a fine discipline.  He commented in a series of meetings in New York City, “It is a good thing that people should suffer.”19  This step in his reasoning appeared to be brutal.  However, in his day-by-day actions Moody never went to such extremes as the preceding statement might suggest.  His deep concern for individuals which grew out of his Christian faith prevented such extremities from happening.  Nevertheless, his beliefs did possess a callousness if pressed to their logical conclusions.  It is most likely that Moody had never thought through all the implications of his point of view.  If he had, probably he would not have made such harsh statements as quoted above, or perhaps he would have changed his deeds to align more closely with these conclusions.  Even in the nineties, when his opinions seemed particularly naive, if his words are read in context they still reveal a continuing concern for the laboring man (although only as an individual) and a desire to help him in his difficulties.20
   During the nineties Moody attacked the rich for their callousness toward the poor.  Unlike his attitude in the eighties he began to place some of the blame for the discontent and poverty of the workingman on the shoulders of the financiers and the great captains of industry.  In a meeting in New York City he declared,  “We have altogether too much wealth.  We have too much poverty, too.  Why don’t some of the people who have made their fortunes stop, and go out into the highways and byways and help the poor fellows who are famishing there?  That’s my idea of socialism, and it’s founded on the teachings of Christ Himself.”21

   The Cure for Laborer's Problems

   In the main, however, Moody contended that poverty was caused by personal sin.  Therefore, a laborer’s only rescue from deprivation was Christian conversion.  He often said: “A heart that is made right with God and man seldom constitutes a social problem and by seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, nine-tenths of social betterment is effected by the convert himself and the one-tenth to Christian sympathy.”22
   For Moody salvation could work wonders.  In his 1876 New York City campaign he stated, “I seldom meet a drunkard who does not long to get rid of his vice, his appetite for strong drink.  And I always rejoice, for I know they can be saved if they will.  Their appetite is the work of the devil, who makes them believe that there is no hope for them.  But oh, my friends, God has got power to destroy the work of the devil, and kill this appetite for strong drink.  He has got the power to snap the fetters of every vice that degenerates our nature.  All we have to do is to trust in Him, pray for strength, and rely upon His saving power.23
   It was Moody’s belief that Christian conversion would make lazy, poor men into energetic and hard-working persons who become prosperous.  At his revival meetings Moody would look about at the wealthy men who sat on the platform with him, the William E. Dodges, Cyrus McCormick, and John Wanamakers, and note that they were all devout church members, all “born again” Christians.  He would point out that few if any of the poor in the slums of Chicago, London, or New York attended church services.  Many of his wealthy supporters had once been poor boys, but few of the nonchurchgoing slum dwellers demonstrated any signs of getting rich.  Therefore, the conclusion seemed self-evident.24 “It is a wonderful fact that men and women saved by the blood of Jesus rarely remained subjects of charity, but rise at once to comfort and respectability.”25 Moody radiated optimism when he thought about the effect of true conversion upon a poor man, “I don’t see how a man can follow Christ and not be successful,”26 and “I never saw the man who put Christ first in his life that wasn’t successful.”27
   If someone should point to a rich man who was not converted, Moody would say that man was first of all a fool, second he was probably suffering or would shortly suffer from some secret sorrow or misfortune, and third, he was damned, like Dives, to spend eternity in hell.28  He was hard put to explain the unsaved man’s wealth with his simplistic Puritan ethic.
   If a man claimed to be a Christian convert but still had not risen to comfort and prosperity, Moody would say that he probably had not been truly converted.  “There are a great many professing Christians who never get on intimate terms with God, and so they never amount to much.”29
   If someone would show Moody a man who had undoubtedly been converted and was intimate with God but was nonetheless still poor, Moody would quote the biblical text, “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”30 Moody sensed no inconsistency in telling those who were truly converted but bound to live in hardship and poverty that “God gives us a little adversity here, a little prosperity there and works all for our good” although “we are not able to read the problem now or to see just why we are afflicted.”31
   Since he believed poverty could in most cases be cured by conversion, Moody declared that it was the highest duty of a Christian to “visit the homes of the poor and the wicked and tell them how the Son of God came into the world to seek the fallen and those who were lost.”32  Whenever he was asked what type of work young converts should do for the church, he suggested that they “visit the sick or go around and distribute tracts and invite people to come to church.”33  He encouraged young ladies of leisure to visit the homes of the masses and preach the gospel and sing hymns for them.34

   Evangelization as Necessary to Americanization

   Reaching the masses was important to both Moody and his supporters.  Moody feared labor activity and saw conversion as a way of making good Americans out of the foreign-born element of the masses.  Moody and his supporters wished to help the working man rise to respectability and prosperity, but both were insistent that the worker do so by way of the Protestant ethic.  If the poor workingman followed the advice of Moody’s sermons and became pious, industrious, thrifty, sober, and honest, he would automatically better his condition.  But if he chose to use the weapons of strikes, boycotts and union activities to take by compulsion what he could not gain by merit, he was a criminal.  In the wake of the Paris Commune, the Haymarket Riot, the increasing number and violence of strikes, the rise of the Knights of Labor and the Communist International, Moody wrote to some of the leading businessmen of Chicago, “there can be no better investment for the capitalists of Chicago than to put the saving salt of the Gospel into these dark homes and desperate centers from which come forth the criminals” and those who increasingly support “the desecration of the Sabbath.”35 Since a high percentage of the unskilled workingmen were foreign-born with alien ideas and were either Roman Catholics, Jews, or nonchurch-goers, it seemed logical for Moody and his businessmen supporters to conclude that Americanization and evangelization were synonymous.36

Moody’s Views of Big Business

   In general Moody’s views in regard to big business were favorable.  However, in his later years he grew critical of some of the practices of big business.  There are many reasons for Moody’s inability to criticize in an ultimate sense the values of the ruthlessly acquisitive society that characterized America in his adult years.

   Moody's Favorable Attitude toward Big Business

   Like many of his contemporary clergyman, Moody supported the values of the business community.  He was largely responsible for the union between the evangelical mind and the business mind which was to characterize subsequent popular revivalists.37 Moody’s religious individualism blended perfectly with the rugged individualism of the businessmen of the era.  Although Moody preached his gospel of salvation to both men of labor and men of business, he shared the social and economic views of the success mythology of big business leaders.  His revivals and fund-raising efforts received the active support of business leaders.  The major post-Civil War titans belonged to churches that articulated an orthodox view of Christianity.  Two close observers of the New York City business community testified that the most prominent merchants and financiers could usually be found on Sunday mornings in the churches interpreting the Scriptures.  Making money was important but saving souls seemed to go along with it hand in hand.38  Moody and big business leaders shared a common Christian faith and common social and economic views.
   It is not surprising that Moody’s political views invariably resembled those of the Republican businessmen who supported him.  Although Moody publicly professed a lack of concern for politics, in private he was a staunch Republican.  When William Jennings Bryan, the silver movement, and the Populists offered a serious threat to the status quo in 1896, Moody actively worked for William McKinley’s election.  At least once during that campaign Moody broke his silence on political issues to say to an audience in New York City that he didn’t believe a thing he [Bryan] said,”39  
   In his private correspondence Moody was even less guarded in his comments.  Three weeks before the election Moody had become so fearful of the outcome that he told a friend that he had counseled the leader of a group from England visiting him that “if the country goes for silver he had better take his Boys Home.”40
   During most of Moody’s career he looked with favor upon the wealthy businessmen of America.  He saw them as men of great character who had overcome poverty.  However, in Moody’s latter years one significant shift in his views did seem to occur.  Whereas in the eighties he had shown great concern over the radicalism of the workingman and attributed much of this agitation to the influx of immigrants from Europe who carried to the United States the red flag and the revolutionary zeal of the Paris Commune, in the nineties he added a new note to his fear of labor unrest.  This fear was in a growing dislike of the extremely wealthy men who controlled the giant corporations.  Moody’s feelings were partly the result of his disgust at the mere size of the capital accumulations of these captains of industry.  D. L. Moody had never opposed a man who had become reasonably well-to-do.  But these tycoons of the nineties, the progenitors of finance capitalism, he judged to be insatiable in their desire for money.  Once during his later years the evangelist recalled that in the earlier days “when a man got his million he had enough.  But now, two, three, or five hundred millions don’t satisfy.”41 
   Moody also feared the owners of the “trusts” because they threatened his position (or the position of men like him) in society.  Shortly before his death the revivalist expressed such fears openly to a reporter in Kansas City.  No longer, it appeared, did “a young man have the chances he used to have.”  The “trusts” had changed a man’s ability to rise from rags to riches.  “They take away his chances of getting along.  What can a poor young man do nowadays, unless he goes to work for someone else who is wealthy? . . .  Trusts, corporations, . . . are bad for the young man.”42  Loss of independence, the end of rugged individualism and the unfettered struggle for success, all this meant a negation of the success mythology in which Moody had long believed.  His way of life was threatened, and the directors of the giant corporations seemed to be one of the major sources of those unsettling conditions.”43
   If historian Richard Hofstadter is correct, Moody’s feelings were parallel to many middle-class Americans at the turn of the century.  Beset by fear of discontent among the lower classes, they also had to worry about the development of a powerful plutocracy at the other end of the social  scale.  The traditional status of Moody and many of his fellow countrymen as leaders and bearers of the central values of society appeared to be undermined.  Their response was to protest vigorously and turn to political agitation and reform in an attempt to change these conditions.44  Whether the evangelist would have become a progressive if he had lived is not subject to debate here; however, he did develop attitudes in the late nineties that were similar to those of later adherents of the progressive movement.

   Moody's Criticism of Big Business

   The foregoing material does not imply that Moody became a great advocate of reform measures in his final years.  He attacked only the most wealthy and ruthless businessmen.  However, he still viewed the majority of businessmen with approval and affection.  Earlier in his career Moody had often attacked business leaders for unscrupulous practices and for the frequent evidence of their all-consuming pursuit of the great god Mammon.  Yet most of his criticisms were basically superficial.  Moody’s condemnation was reserved only for businessmen who lost sight of the true end in life, the salvation of one’s soul, in their pursuit of wealth.”45
   Therefore, Dwight L. Moody consistently judged the actions of businessmen individually and was ready to criticize if individuals in the business community did not measure up to his standards of right and wrong.  With the exception of the vague stirring of concern that animated him in the nineties,  Moody never questioned in an ultimate sense the values of the ruthlessly acquisitive society that characterized the United States in his adult years.  In this regard Moody was no different from the great majority of his fellow citizens during the so-called Gilded Age who had placed their faith in the gospel of morality and prosperity.46

   Reasons for Moody's Inability to Criticize

   Moody found it difficult to criticize the values of business leaders because both the individualistic outlook of pietistic revivalism and the “gospel of wealth” were rooted in traditional orthodoxy.  The success mythology of the post-Appomattox years was grounded in the old Puritan code of worldly asceticism.  Revivalism also had its roots in America’s Puritan past.  Both were based upon a philosophy of individualism.  Ralph Henry Gabriel has noted that “the persistent American philosophy of individualism never had greater intellectual support than in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.”47  In the evangelist Dwight L. Moody there is an amalgamation of the individualism of pietistic revivalism and the social outlook of industrial capitalism.  As a result of this union, Moody was not in a very good position to be critical of business values.
   Another reason for Moody’s inability to make any effective criticism of the business community was his fund-raising activities.  Moody was capable of reaping sizeable monetary gifts from the captains of industry.  Even if he had wanted to do so, Moody would have thought twice before making a sustained attack upon those who made possible his work as an evangelist and a fund raiser for worthwhile causes.  One of his most perceptive followers saw clearly the threat that close association with the wealthy posed to his work.  This friend wrote:  “If I were asked as to the direction in which his [Moody’s] greatest danger lay, I should say that it would come from his ambition to lead and influence Rich Men and that this might have a tendency to lead him to compromise his convictions–unless much of the grace of God is given him. . . . How much he needs our prayers that he may be kept firm and in the John the Baptist spirit!!”48
   Dwight L. Moody’s success in his own endeavors also blurred his critical faculties.  As is sometimes true of those who have achieved position in their profession, Moody regarded with veiled admiration almost any man who had reached the top.  Moody’s youngest son, Paul, has written about the time when his father, as a lobbyist of sorts advocating the closing of theaters on Sunday, once spoke to Richard Croker, the notorious leader of Tammany Hall.  His son reflected, “I have often wondered since whether it was really Father’s interest in the defeat of this bill . . . as much as it was to find a pretext for meeting the great Tammany chieftain which prompted him [in his action].”49  On such occasions Moody largely ignored the ethical conduct of the individual.  Rather he judged a man more on his possession of mere technical competence and on the fact that out of the struggle of life that person had come out on top.  Most likely this same attitude crept into his relationships with the many successful businessmen who became his friends and supporters.50
   The peculiar nature of the evangelist’s theological concerns also hindered him in critically analyzing the economic and social conditions of his time.  His task as a revivalist inevitably forced him to simplify his thoughts so that even the least educated members of his audience could understand and respond.  What was true of theological formulations also applied to other issues.  Moody tended to oversimplify and to personalize social and economic issues that were in reality exceedingly complex.
   For example Moody’s preoccupation with salvation caused him to fall into such errors.  For him unbelief was a primary cause of economic difficulties and social dislocation.  Men were in need, according to Moody, because they were living in rebellion to God.  He contended that there would not be a drunkard or a prostitute walking the streets, if it were not for unbelief.51
   Moody’s perfectionism also played an important role.  If one were truly “saved,” he experienced immediate release from daily troubles.  Thus Moody made the answer to the problems of industrialization extremely simple–believe in God and these problems will soon disappear.52
   As a corollary to his perfectionism, the evangelist insisted that Christians should “be separate from the world.”  “Separation” was a way that the believer might deal with current issues.  It might mean, as it had to restrict followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin, that by using biblical norms which seemed to transcend or stand above any particular historical era, Christians could develop criteria by which they could effectively examine and criticize their culture.  However, Moody defined “separation” in a narrow, legalistic sense by attacking drinking, dancing, card-playing, and theater going–activities long opposed by evangelical Protestant groups.  This limited concept of “otherworldliness” was not capable of coming to grips with the major problems of late nineteenth-century America.53
   The evangelist also advocated another form of withdrawal which removed Christians from any effective criticism of the far reaching implications of industrialization.  For Moody the Christian preacher’s only obligation was to preach the gospel and save souls.  For Moody, only experts should manage politics or operate the economic system.  Whenever Moody did mention publicly the crucial issues facing society, they were used as an additional emphasis in driving home some basic point in his sermon.  In the seventies, then, he could easily dismiss politics by saying, “Now, my friends, we will not bring up this question of parties.  I have nothing to do with that, I only use it as an illustration.”54 In 1897 when Moody gave counsel to ministers, he was even more explicit.  In regard to domestic and foreign affairs the evangelist said, “Don’t have anything to say about capital and labor.  You don’t know anything about it. . . .  What right have you to criticize President Cleveland [about Cuba].  You had better preach the gospel and let him deal with questions of state about which you know nothing.”55
   Since Moody lacked the ability to examine and discuss critically in public the major historical developments of his time, he generally adopted the attitudes of the middle-class groups that flocked to his revival meetings and willingly donated to his philanthropies.  Moody embodied much of what his middle-class audiences were or aspired to be.  A reporter for The Nation noted during Moody’s 1876 campaign in New York City that thousands listened to the revivalist because he was one whom they “instinctively feel is only different from themselves by the religion which he has ‘got.’”56  Even that quality Moody insisted was theirs for the asking.
   Dwight L. Moody had definite opinions about reform, charity, and the social gospel.  Moody’s premillennial views in regard to the Second Coming of Christ greatly colored his views concerning social change. 

Moody’s Views of Social Reform

   Although the evangelist was aware of the grave domestic problems of the day, especially the conditions of the lower classes, Moody chose “the indirect way” to alleviate conditions.  Moody believed that society could only be reformed by the moral and spiritual regeneration of individuals and that all political, social, and economic reforms must be an appendage of revivals.  Moody’s oldest son, William R. Moody, has said in regard to his father, “He insisted that the most efficacious means of reformation was through the individual.”57 Shortly before leaving for one of his revival campaigns of the seventies, Moody stated to an audience in Northfield, Massachusetts, “We hear every few years the cry of ‘Reform !’ ‘Reform!’ but man, away from God, is not to be trusted, and there is no reform until God has been found.”58 Moody believed that until Christ affected the hearts of men there was no hope for reform.   In 1887 he said, “The nation is now crying ‘reform.’  I don’t know how long they are going to continue that cry; they have kept it up ever since I remember; but there will be no true reform until Christ gets into our politics.  Men are all naturally bad, and cannot reform until the Reformer gets into their hearts.”59
   Moody’s solution to the domestic problems was an individualistic gospel.  He spent his career developing methodological and operational bases for reaching individuals in a mass society.  He had an old-fashioned solution for new problems.  His contribution to religion was as an innovator in finding ways to reach the masses.  Thus, he helped the revivalistic solution to men’s problems to survive in an urban, mass society.

   Moody’s Views on Charity

   Throughout his lifetime Moody raised thousands of dollars for charitable causes.  In his work with the poor in Chicago he often gave coal, food, and clothing to the needy.  He rescued erring sons of his church members from the hands of the law and found jobs for deserving young men.  He founded the Northfield Schools for poor, deserving children.  He raised great sums for such worthy causes as the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Young Women’s Christian Association, temperance, the orphans of England, city missions, and the inmates of prisons.
   Although Moody believed in charitable work, his charity was always secondary to his soul winning.  Historian Bernard A. Weinberger has written in regard to Moody’s attitude, “Charitable work was not an end in itself, but one more means of reaching men to prepare them, one at a time, for the final judgment.”60 During the Civil War Moody worked as a first aid delegate for the United States Christian Commission.  His justification for the care of the wounded was evangelistic rather than humanitarian.  Once on board a steamer from Cairo, Illinois, a discussion arose as to the most efficient way of handling the wounded.  “Mr. Moody, full of the idea of saving souls, urged that the very first business in every case was to find out whether the sick or dying man were a child of God, if so, then it was not necessary to spend much time on him–he being safe enough already.  If not, he was to be pointed at once to the Savior.”61  
   The essence of Moody’s attitude toward charity in relation to evangelism is contained in the following comments from one of his sermon delivered in 1876.  “When I was at work in the City Relief Society, before the [Chicago] fire, I used to go to a poor sinner with the Bible in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other.  Dr. Chalmers used to forbid his missionaries giving away money or supplies.  He said those things ought to come by other hands, and I thought he was all wrong.  My idea was that I could open a poor man’s heart by giving him a load of wood or a ton of coal when the winter was coming on, but I soon found that he wasn’t any more interested in the Gospel on that account.  Instead of thinking how he could come to Christ, he was thinking how long it would be before he got another load of wood.  If I had the Bible in one hand and a loaf in the other, the people always looked first at the loaf, and that was just contrary to the order laid down in the Gospel.”62
   In many respects Moody’s philosophy of charity was like Andrew Carnegie’s gospel of wealth.63  Moody came to believe that charity by itself was debilitating to character and that those who received it without being willing give something in return were people who usually turned to bad ends.  Unless the poverty stricken were willing to help themselves, the Christian had no obligation to contribute to their support.  To Moody poverty was a badge of failure for those who did not rise above it.  He viewed poverty in terms of the individual rather than the masses.  For the individual it was a transient state; poverty could be overcome by initiative, industry, and ability.  Therefore, for those who remained in poverty, their condition loudly proclaimed that these individuals were defective in capacity or morals or both.  No amount of charity could change that.  “There is a good deal that we think is charity,” Moody said, “that is really doing a great deal of mischief” because it encouraged people to expect doles instead of working for a living.64

   How Moody Viewed the Social Gospel

   Moody’s approach to social reform was through changing the hearts of men.  During his lifetime some of his most respected friends such as Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott became convinced that man motivated by religion could alter his environment.  Such men were founders of the “social gospel” movement.
   Moody failed to change with Gladden and Abbott.  He did not see how one could sanctify the social order apart from individual conversions.  He often declared that the heart of the individual had to be changed before a change in his environment could take place.65  One of Moody’s favorite aphorisms was, “Whitewashing the pump won’t make the water pure.”66
   The social gospel also differed with Moody’s theology.  The doctrine of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was certainly contrary to Moody’s theology.  “I want to say very emphatically that I have no sympathy with the doctrine of universal brotherhood and universal fatherhood. . . . Show me a man that will lie and steal and get drunk and ruin a woman–do you tell me that he is my brother?  Not a bit of it.  He must be born again into the household of faith before he becomes my brother in Christ.”67

   Moody's Social Pessimism

   Moody was a social pessimist in that he held to a premillennial view of the Second Coming of Christ.  In this respect Moody parted company with the previous generation of revivalists who turned to the belief that their mission was to prepare the world for Christ’s coming by reducing it to the lordship of his gospel.  Social reforms fit into their evangelistic and millennial schemes.  These evangelists played a key role in the widespread attack upon slavery, poverty, and greed.  According to historian Timothy L. Smith, “They thus helped prepare the way both in theory and in practice for what later became known as the social gospel.”68
   However, as a premillennialist Moody lacked this buoyant hope of a former generation of revivalists that the millennium was just around the corner and that a little more effort on revivalism and moral reform would usher it in.  Moody contended that until Christ returned none of the basic problems of the world could be solved.  In his sermon on the imminent Second Coming, Moody discouraged those efforts toward reform which were the distinguishing mark of the social gospel movement after 1890.  Moody was optimistic about the destiny of all true Christians and even about the destiny of the United States, but he was not at all confident about the future of the world and the human race.  “Talk about men improving so very fast,” he snorted, “I would like to see them.”69 It would seem that the evangelist purposely adopted a pessimistic attitude in order to spite the advocates of theistic evolution and social Darwinism.  “I look on this world as a wrecked vessel,” he said, “God has given me a life-boat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”70     
   Moody not only parted company with the optimism of past revivalists and the social Darwinians with his premillennial views, but he also parted company with many of the ministers who sat on his platform and nodded agreement with his Poor Richard parables and his Horatio Alger anecdotes.  In future days this doctrine of premillennial ism was to become one of the test points between modernists and fundamentals.  According to historian William G. McLaughlin, Jr., premillennialism’s “popularity among post-Civil War evangelists was the result of an increasingly pessimistic view of life on the part of those intellectually unsophisticated and socially insecure individuals who made up the hard core of urban revival audiences.  The growing complexity of modern life and the breakdown of traditional beliefs and values made these people far less certain about the progressive improvement of American society than their parents and grandparents had been.  To these fearful and perplexed folk, the miraculous cataclysm of the Second Coming offered a far more reassuring hope that the impious and confusing doctrines of Herbert Spencer and the theistic evolutionists.”71
   Most likely Moody adopted premillennialism quite uncritically in the 1870's along with many other interpretations of the Bible which he learned from the Plymouth Brethren in England.  Because they were a pietistic sect of the disinherited, the Brethren found social consolation in the doctrine of Christ’s speedy return.  Moody utilized premillennialism as a convenient handle against the theological liberals who challenged either his revivalism or his social views.  When confronted with the postmillennial argument, he would stubbornly ask: “Where do you get it?  I can’t find it.  The word of God nowhere tells me to watch and wait for the coming of the millennium, but for the coming of the Lord.  I don’t find any place where God says the world is to grow better and better, and that Christ is to have a spiritual reign on earth of a thousand years.  I find that the earth is to grow worse and worse and that at length there is going to be a separation [of the saved from the unsaved at Christ’s return].”72 On that day the liberals and the worldly would get their correction and the saved remnant their crowns of glory.
   Moody found “certain wealthy and fashionable churches” where “this doctrine is not preached or believed.”73  Business leaders did not like the idea of losing their stocks and bonds.  Persons whose status in society had risen with their incomes could not perceive the virtue of believing that the world was getting worse and worse.  It did not make much sense to those wealthy British and American businessmen who had steadily worked their way up the ladder of success for Moody to insist that mankind was a failure.  Nor was it very consistent with Moody’s view of America as that “blessed nation” “flowing with milk and honey” in which anyone could rise to the top.  Of course, the evangelist meant “failure” in terms of sin and not in terms of social position, scientific discovery, or material profits.  However, to doubt progress in any form in the nineteenth century was to run counter to the democratic faith of America.  Moody’s prosperous evangelical supporters may have paid lip service to this doctrine, but it was among the unsuccessful that it received its most enthusiastic response.74

The Inflexibility of Moody's Views

   Moody’s answer to economic and social difficulties remained largely unchanged throughout his life.  His solution continued to be the conversion of the individual coupled with Christian charity.  Moody in his early career could not grasp the roots of poverty as could few at that time.  His views reflected his rural background and the dominating economic outlook of his age–rugged individualism.  Although he spent the greater portion of his adult years in the cities of Europe and the United States, at heart the great urban evangelist remained a simple farm boy.  Throughout his life Moody viewed the social and economic scene from the uncomplicated and already rather primitive vantage point of a pre-Civil War native of the Connecticut River Valley.75 Moody believed that there was no reason for poverty that eagerness to work could not overcome, for he had seen what his own mother with her habits of thrift and economy had done with nine children and no visible support.  As a result, Moody had great admiration for the captains of industry.  When Moody’s liberal friends saw that conversion and charity were not adequate to change society, they suggested public reform and economic reorganization.76  However, Moody had a streak of anti-intellectualism that blinded him to the issues confronting the church and society in the industrial age.  Thus he stuck to the views that he had learned early in life.  Eight months before he died Moody stated his lifelong position: “For forty years I have heard in every city, along toward election time, the cry, ‘Reform!  Reform!’  But things go on in about the same old way.  You can’t reform government without men who have been themselves reformed, and that reformation must be a regeneration through the power of the Holy Ghost. . . .  Human nature has not changed in the last 1900 years.  Preach a different gospel from that which was successful in the apostolic days?  Oh, bosh!”77 This statement indicates the essence of Moody’s attitude toward social and economic issues throughout his life.