J. Kelly Robison
Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Between 1820 and 1920, the United States urbanized at an incredible rate. This movement from a rural to an urban American produced fears of social disruption in many sectors of the American populace. The proponents of four periods of reform attempted to come to grips with what they saw as the moral decay inherent in the cities. Despite various interest, foci, and methods, these reformers all sought to institute moral order by bringing to the cities the moral order of the village.
During the 1820's, the urban population grew explosively. Some wondered whether the social order would survive this transformation from a rural to an urban setting. The evangelical churches were the first to attempt to control and influence the moral direction of the new industrial cities and towns. They did so indirectly, through the institutions of the voluntary organizations. The Bible societies, tract societies, and Sunday schools all attempted to impose a moral order on the city dwellers. Although they were not, in the end, entirely successful, the first moral reformers did influence many of their audience, as well as those who helped in the movements themselves. The reform movements of this period also revealed to the organizers the methods and the assumptions that influence later urban moral reformers.
During the middle years of the nineteenth century, urban violence sparked renewed interest in instituting moral order in the cities. The voluntary organizations of the earlier period did not last, but their place was taken by a new type of organization. While the earlier organizations did not focus on one particular group, the new ones did. The Young Men's Christian Organization, Children's Aid Society and others focused on a specific audience. Additionally, these new organizations were becoming professionalized and secularized, in stark contrast to the evangelical and voluntary organizations of the earlier period. However, like their predecessors these new organizations worked with the same assumptions that their predecessors did, that the way to bring moral order to the increasingly disorderly cities was to provide them with and convince them of the worth of the moral order of the rural village.
The Gilded Age produced the greatest growth in the cities. Rural youth migrated to the cities in search of work. Immigrants from across the Atlantic also came to the cities to help fuel the industrial machine. Cities began to sprawl as did their problems. Violence springing from industrialization and the fact that many of the new urban dwellers were not born and raised Americans created alarm in the minds of those coming from the middle and upper classes. The churches again took the lead in the efforts to bring morality to the cities. This came in the form of the charity organization. Organizations such as the Boston Associates Charity sought to convert the new immigrants in likeness of themselves, "models of middle-class respectability."(122) Volunteers worked with the poor, seeking to foster attitudes of "neighborly" friendliness. Again, like the two periods of reform before them, the moral reformers of the Gilded Age sought to convert the cities into larger versions of the rural village, where neighbors knew one another and lent a helping hand.
In 1920, the United States officially became an urban country, with over fifty percent of its population living in urban areas. Many of the people of the cities were immigrants. Cities still contained problems, their growth had only served to intensify them. Into the fray marched a new reformist movement, that of the Progressives. The Progressives, like their earlier counterparts, also sought to impose the moral order of the village on the inhabitants of the cities. Unlike their predecessors, however, they sought to change not the individual, the family, or the group, but the entire city. Through governmental programs, the Progressives sought to do so by changing the environmental structure of the city. The Progressives used two approaches, based on two different views of how to win the moral war in the cities. The negative environmentalists attempted to eradicate the institutions they thought of as epitomizing urban moral decay; the bar and the brothel. The positive environmentalists hoped that through the creation of a physical environment of beauty, the urbanite would become like his village cousins, responsible, cultivated and moral.
Despite the various methods used by those who sought to impose a moral order on the developing city of the nineteenth century. Despite the different organizations through which these reformers worked. All the reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked within the basic assumption that in order to bring moral order to the city, the city dweller would have to adopt the morality of the village dweller. These moral reform movements, whether from the Jacksonian period, the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Gilded Age, or the Progressive era, all viewed the problems of the city as being treatable with the moral order of the rural village.