Civilizing the World: The Social Activism of Practical Christians from Chicago to the Middle East

By Sarah Miglio

Civilizing the World explores the vibrancy and impact of forgotten social reformers who defied categorization within the Social Gospel or secular progressive movements. These social reformers, or "Practical Christians," functioned as a network of activists whose dedication to spiritual conversions and cultural transformation arose from a shared commitment to nonsectarian Christian cooperation and practicing Christian citizenship. Bringing together a diverse coalition of liberal Protestants, revivalists, evangelicals, and "secular" reformers, Practical Christians rejected theological divisions in favor of broad alliances committed to improving society at home and abroad. A complete understanding of the intimate relationship between local and global activism provides new insight into Practical Christians' social networks, political goals, religious identities, and international outlook. This broad reform alliance considered their domestic and global reforms as seamless tasks in modernizing the world. Just as Chicago Practical Christians labored to "civilize" their immigrant neighbors and encourage their adoption of their own Christian and American habits, like-minded Americans worked to "Christianize" and "modernize" Armenians and the Middle East. The Practical Christian coalition faltered post-World War I as evangelicals and revivalists continued to prioritize spiritual conversions while liberal Protestant and secularizing activists placed more emphasis on the process of Americanizing immigrants and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666796407

Sarah Miglio

Sarah Miglio is assistant provost at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.

Book preview

Civilizing the World

The Social Activism of Practical Christians from Chicago to the Middle East

Sarah Miglio

Civilizing the World

The Social Activism of Practical Christians from Chicago to the Middle East

Copyright © 2023 Sarah Miglio. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-3719-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-9639-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-9640-7

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Miglio, Sarah, author.

Title: Civilizing the world : the social activism of practical Christians from Chicago to the Middle East / by Sarah Miglio.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-3719-6 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-6667-9639-1 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-6667-9640-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Evangelicalism—History—20th century. | Liberalism (Religion)—Protestant churches—History—20th century. | Progressivism (United States politics). | Humanitarian assistance, American—History—20th century.

Classification: br525 m50 2023 (print) | br525 (ebook)

08/14/23

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Darkest Chicago and the Need for Action

Part One: Civilizing Missions

Chapter 1: Revivalist and Evangelical Activism

Chapter 2: Christian Citizenship

Part Two: Reforming Chicago’s Citizens

Chapter 3: Non-Partisan Christians, New Abolitionists, and the Power of Unexpected Alliances

Chapter 4: Civic Evangelism

Part Three: Bearing the Global Burden

Chapter 5: Unity in Mission

Chapter 6: Missionary Activists and the Problem of Primitive Armenian Christians

Chapter 7: From Christianizing to Americanizing

Epilogue: The Dissolution of the Practical Christian Reform Coalition

Appendix A: Midnight Mission Board Members, 1909 Letterhead

Appendix B: Illinois Vigilance Association, 1908 Letterhead

Appendix C: Illinois Vigilance Association, 1919 Letterhead

Appendix D: Chicagoans and Humanitarian Work on Behalf of Armenians

Bibliography

—For Adam, Everett, and Graham

Acknowledgments

One of the most meaningful experiences while working on my dissertation has been the gifts of kindness and generosity from my academic mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. Research and writing can be a solitary task, but my research and writing proved delightful due to the companionship and contributions of many along the way. My dissertation committee provided wise counsel and collegial support. It has been a privilege to work with Gail Bederman, George Marsden, John McGreevy, and Mark Noll. Gail Bederman proved to be an invaluable mentor as she taught me about teaching, writing, and the art of historical argument. The time Gail took to brainstorm with me made the difficult process of revising a much more straightforward and rewarding task. It has been an honor to work with my advisor, George Marsden. He taught me the wisdom of charity in interactions with other scholars and ideas. His own scholarship prompted me to interpret historical figures on their own terms and with an eye to their self-understanding. George gave many, many hours to training me as a historian. I am thankful for his willingness to work alongside me and for his investment in my own work. His careful readings and thoughtful criticisms have contributed to my personal and professional growth. John McGreevy’s passion for incorporating the global into the writing of American history unlocked new vistas in my own research and writing. His enthusiasm and support for my work bolstered my courage to press forward. Mark Noll was a source of encouragement and sound advice before I entered the PhD program at the University of Notre Dame. His continued guidance and encouraging words have shaped my historical vision in significant ways.

There are a number of other faculty members at the University of Notre Dame that shaped my research and thinking. Many thanks to Paul Cobb and Asher Kaufman for training me in the fascinating world of modern Middle Eastern history. Jim Turner proved an invaluable mentor in the scholarly practices of sharpening prose and argumentation.

Myrtle Doaks provided well-needed advice and excellent support as I navigated graduate school. Kathryn Long’s friendship and shared interest in the history of missions enlivened my own work and encouraged me along the way. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner’s encouragement to pursue history helped me embark on a new discipline and a new career. Provost Stan Jones and Provost Margaret Diddams provided support and encouragement to see this project to completion as I transitioned to teaching and administration. Former student Joel Erickson proved to be an invaluable research assistant and careful reader of my work.

I am thankful for the generous funding of the history department of the University of Notre Dame. The ongoing support of Council for Christian Colleges and Universities through their Initiative Grant to Network Christian Scholars enabled me to participate from 2006–2009 in a collaborative project with Stephen Alter (Gordon College), Thomas Kidd (Baylor University), and Timothy Larsen (Wheaton College). Each gave perceptive feedback in my early stages of research and writing. The CCCU funds also provided for consultation sessions with David Bebbington (University of Stirling and Baylor University), Paul Boyer (University of Wisconsin), and Bruce Kuklick (University of Pennsylvania), and each provided instructive counsel in the early stages of this project. Additionally, the travel and research grant from the Rockefeller Archive Center allowed me to consult the Near East Relief archives, and it was a delight to work the archival staff at RAC. My stay at RAC was enriched by the time spent in conversation with fellow researcher Frances Gouda (University of Amsterdam), and her advice and input on missions and imperialism proved helpful years later. The archival staff at the Billy Graham Center Archives, the University of Chicago Special Collections, the Chicago Public Library, the Newberry Library, and the Chicago Historical Society also provided key assistance.

My family’s support of my graduate work has been an ongoing source of renewal and encouragement for me. My parents, John and Linda, never wavered in their interest and support of my studies. The friendship and kindness of my sisters—Hannah, Lydia, and Rebecca—continue to be a precious gift. I am also very grateful for the encouragement and love from my father and mother-in-law, Edward and Jo. I began this research while in graduate school, and this project is as old as my first son, Everett. He and his younger brother Graham continue to be an endless source of joy to me. Finally, there is Adam. He has been my constant companion, a welcome distraction from work, and a steady source of encouragement and good advice. He read every word (many times over!) and listened to my discoveries about Practical Christians. His own insights into the world of religious social reform in America and the Middle East sharpened my thinking, and his unswerving confidence in the merits of this project made my burden light and my days joyful. That is more than one could ever ask or hope for in a companion.

introduction

Darkest Chicago and the Need for Action

On January 8 , 1893 , Dr. Carlos Martyn proposed a way out of Darkest Chicago. Martyn deliberately alluded to William Booth’s book, In Darkest England and the Way Out, published only three years before. Like Booth, Martyn surveyed his modern city and saw a barbarism rather than progress. ¹ He described a squalor and meanness that defied the illusions of Chicago’s imminent World Fair and the White City’s temporary facade. Martyn portrayed his despair over Chicago’s darkness with disturbing words: Squalor, ignorance, and vice characterized these thugs of civilization. Chicago’s red-light district threatened the city, where Moral pestilence and physical disease prowl under the gaslight in the persons of painted shapes of shame out of whom the womanhood has faded, leaving only the animal in sight. Equally alarming to Martyn were the overcrowded tenement houses that beget disease and crime. He concluded, There are 500,000 heathens in this town. ² Martyn’s heated rhetoric revealed sharp contrasts for Chicagoans in 1893. Its inhabitants and tourists encountered discordant images, whether it was the glowing utopia depicted in the White City or rhetoric that emphasized the un-Christian and corrupt nature of Chicago.

The city’s jarring realities begged Martyn’s question, What is our way out of darkest Chicago? The city’s commercialized prostitution, overcrowded housing, corrupt government, and simmering labor disputes led many of Chicago’s churchgoers, Martyn included, to take action. He explained, "Our first duty is to admit responsibility. The church is particeps criminis. How? By its indifference and inaction. Our main effort has been to protect ourselves. This indifference was about to change as many of Chicago’s churchgoing middle class moved to action. Martyn proposed a crusade with Chicago’s churches. He divided the city into districts with churches assuming responsibility for a district’s reform: Let each of our churches . . . riddle it with light, strike it through with educational and reformatory appliances, and shake the devil out of it. Martyn asked why the church should not rescue from poverty, from ignorance, from coarseness, as preparatory to and significant of spiritual salvation?"³ He was adamant that the city and its tenements’ best hope sat in the pews of Chicago’s churches.

Martyn’s depictions of Chicago and her thugs of civilization were sensational, echoing his sermons that regularly considered the seedier side of Chicago’s political landscape and the need for Christians to engage their city and municipal politics. Martyn held the pastorate at Sixth Presbyterian Church. He earned the reputation as Chicago’s Parkhurst, with a nod to his unrelenting interest in social reform like New York’s Charles Parkhurst.⁴ Martyn’s worries about the city’s well-being resonated among Chicago’s middling sort that was both religious and civic-minded. Their home seemed like a foreign mission field amidst the sudden late-nineteenth-century explosion of Chicago’s population.

In 1894, social reformer Graham Taylor saw a city in need of re-evangelization and restoration. Taylor gained a national reputation for his social work in Chicago, and his sermons and essays on Social Christianity and the Social Gospel earned him a faculty position at Chicago Theological Seminary. He later founded a school for social workers that became the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. Taylor, with his wife and four daughters, moved into a working-class neighborhood, where he founded the settlement Chicago Commons so he could live and work with the Seventeenth Ward’s immigrant population on the city’s west side. Taylor considered his efforts with immigrants a form of missionary work and a tangible expression of the Social Gospel he advocated. He envisioned converting these families to the habits of Christian civilization as a means to transforming the city of Chicago. His new neighborhood faced the problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, uneducated children, and underpaid laborers.

According to Alexander Johnson, a fellow social reformer, Taylor’s Seventeenth Ward had more in common with foreign, heathen lands than with America. Johnson depicted Taylor’s move to the neighborhood in stark terms—missionaries in the heart of Africa could hardly present a greater contrast with their surroundings than did these cultured refined people in such a neighborhood.⁵ Johnson’s assessment that noted with racial overtones that Taylor’s family stood out in comparison with the surrounding immigrant working-class families testified to how foreign and threatening American cities had become to the middle classes. Taylor and his family went to great lengths to model daily the benefits of American housekeeping and sanitation.⁶ Taylor was not alone in his assumptions that American middle-class cultural traits and habits surpassed the lifestyles of those living among the tenements, shabby little stores and saloons . . . a mere slum on Chicago’s West Side.⁷ Like Martyn, Taylor found military imagery apropos as he declared Chicago Commons the last stand to maintain Christianity on the frontier in the rear.⁸

Taylor’s embattled and nativist imagery arose from the dramatic changes Chicago had undergone in the last decade. Chicago was a young city, but its rapid growth was not without problems. The city’s municipal infrastructure struggled to keep pace with its burgeoning population. Dirty streets, noxious odors from the meatpacking and factory districts, and dangerous housing conditions were just a few of Chicago’s most obvious needs. Furthermore, the very demography of the city had been transformed by the arrival of new immigrants from overseas. In 1890 the United States Census revealed a staggering 1,099,850 residents in the nation’s new Second City. Even more astounding was the contrast to the census findings just ten years prior, when Chicago housed 503,185 people. The doubling of the city’s population and the arrival of many new residents, including immigrants, prompted many Chicagoans such as Taylor to wonder how the city would help so many immigrants assimilate as Americans.⁹ Equally troubling was the uneasy stalemate between radical labor groups and Chicago’s business community. The polarizing violence of the Haymarket affair just seven years prior did little to ease the worries of nativist Chicagoans. In 1893, Chicago’s conditions appeared bleak. Labor tensions, a failing economy, corrupt elections, unsanitary streets and housing, and an underdeveloped public school system seemed to peg Chicago as a city in dire need of help.

Graham Taylor and a network of activist Chicagoans used various reform tactics to transform their working-class and immigrant neighbors into respectable citizens. But as Chicagoans worked to re-evangelize darkest Chicago, they also pursued a much larger reform project of civilizing the world. From the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, a diverse coalition of religious activists sought domestic and international social reform through civilizing missions. I call these activists Practical Christians in order to highlight their shared traits of Christian religious belief (typically Protestant but not always) and their deep commitment to transform their city and the world through acts of Christian citizenship, or public acts of piety for the sake of the collective good and nation.

My original intent had not been to study Chicago’s Practical Christians. However, as I read letters, memorandums, and pamphlets in social reformers’ archives, I discovered a labyrinth of interconnected social ties between unexpected parties. I did not intend to research or tell the story of revivalists and evangelicals, but I soon learned their story was intertwined with the experiences of the liberal Protestants I was researching. Why was Social Gospel spokesman and liberal Protestant Graham Taylor exchanging letters with Ernest Bell, a conservative evangelical on the margins of Chicago society? How did Taylor’s frequent praise of evangelicals and evangelism coexist alongside his explicit desire for social salvation and labor reform? How did Ernest Bell manage to fill the board of his anti-prostitution mission with such disparate Chicagoans such as revivalist (and early fundamentalist) Rev. A. C. Dixon of Moody Church and liberal Herbert W. Gates of Chicago Theological Seminary? Who was this A. B. Farwell who helped introduce legal reform to Hyde Park and greater Chicago while seeking to save lost souls, all the while earning the support of noted modernist theologian Shailer Mathews? The wonderful fin de siècle practice of letterhead providing details of reform organizations’ leadership and constituency unlocked a world of social activism populated by liberals, conservatives, orthodox, heterodox, pious, and skeptic collaborators. Further investigation revealed that despite the remarkable differences, a reform alliance was possible due to a shared language of practical and active faith that engaged civic concerns. This Christian alliance of social reformers largely broke into three wings—revivalist, evangelical, and liberal. I call this network of religious activists invested in spiritual and Progressive reform Practical Christians.¹⁰

To fully appreciate the unlikely nature of the Practical Christian coalition and rhetoric, it is essential to understand the different religious groups that fed into this movement. Many Practical Christians were broadly Protestant and theologically liberal. Theological liberals adopted what Gary Dorrien describes as a liberal third way between authoritarian orthodoxy and secular disbelief.¹¹ Theological liberals self-consciously emerged in the early nineteenth century, and they were open to new readings of the Bible due to critical theory and their understanding of God’s immanence in his creation and humans. God’s immanence in his creation led liberals to see his kingdom progressively evident in human society, made possible by the increased application of science and morality to civilization.¹² This confidence in ushering in God’s kingdom fueled the Social Gospel wing of liberalism, which sought cultural reform through the application of Christian ideals and morals to society. Protestant liberals resisted radical economics and secular ideologies and were not necessarily modernists. Modernists took theological liberalism further and believed religious belief should adapt and adjust to mirror culture and cultural advances in science and other forms of knowledge. Modernists’ theological adaptations led to more radical or new doctrines or the willingness to disavow traditional teachings such as the virgin birth, the historical resurrection of Jesus, and so on.¹³

In addition to liberal Protestants and Social Gospel types, the Practical Christian coalition also included the more theologically conservative evangelicals and revivalists. American evangelicals emphasized the authority of the Bible and the centrality of the gospel, or the need for individual salvation from sin via the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross, which then prompted saved believers to pursue acts of piety and the salvation of others. Evangelicals emerged out of the American revivalist traditions from the first and second Great Awakenings, while drawing from global pietist and revivalist streams in Great Britain and the continent. Evangelicals emphasized a vibrant, personal relationship with God that included regular prayer, Bible reading, the pursuit of personal holiness, and sharing the news of Jesus’ saving death and resurrection through evangelism and missions.

Revivalists were evangelicals who placed a high priority on seeking spiritual renewal and new conversions. Revival meetings sought increased spiritual zeal and religious commitment through conversions of new believers and the recommitment or consecration of existing believers. Revivalists were often itinerant preachers and evangelists who held large, public meetings for non-Christians and Christians alike to attend for services focused on sharing the gospel and strengthening spiritual commitments. Revivalists tended to embrace innovative tactics and methods for their evangelistic campaigns, and the tone and tenor of their sermons and revival meetings often held a populist appeal with dramatic and straightforward messages intended for immigrants, the working class, and those without formal education. Many revivalists of the Progressive Era went on to embrace fundamentalism, or a militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism that militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed.¹⁴ Unlike revivalists, evangelicals did not necessarily affiliate with fundamentalism or take a militant stance toward theological and cultural modernism.

Amidst the theological diversity of revivalists, evangelicals, and liberals, the Practical Christian network allowed for cooperation and co-belligerency across denominational lines. Practical Christians’ discourse and activism helped fuel American imperialism abroad in the early twentieth century while prompting many citizens to political action at home. In Chicago, Practical Christians’ network(s) pursued reform to fight the threat of the Chicago Democrat machine, radical labor, saloons, and brothels—all entities that relied on immigrant support. Bringing together a coalition of liberal Protestants, evangelicals, and secular reformers, this subculture of Chicago Progressives organized domestic missions to civilize the masses. To do so, they downplayed theological divisions in favor of broad alliances committed to improving society at home and abroad. This broad Protestant reform coalition considered their domestic and global reforms as one seamless task in modernizing the world. Following the pathways of Practical Christian reform from Chicago to Turkey demonstrates the global vision of these urban reformers. Chicagoans supported global missions, and Turkey serves as a case study of the foreign social work that Chicago’s Practical Christians supported. Many of the same domestic networks of Practical Christians provided American missionaries and globally oriented philanthropists. They mobilized disaster relief for Armenians as they suffered considerable violence from the 1890s to the 1920s. Just as Chicago’s Practical Christian activists labored to civilize their immigrant neighbors and encourage their adoption of Christian and American habits, Americans overseas worked to Christianize and modernize Armenians and the Middle East.

I argue that Practical Christians constructed a social vision for reform with intimate connections between local and global civilizing missions.¹⁵ For these activists, the causes of domestic reform, city and home missions, and foreign missions were inextricably intertwined. Their common discourse about civilization and their role in forming a unified entity of domestic and international social work reflected their religious beliefs and inspired their actions. Like other Americans of the urban middle class, Chicago’s Practical Christians wanted to transform the world.¹⁶ When we consider Martyn, Taylor, and other reform-minded Chicagoans’ worries about Darkest Chicago, then we can place Progressive Era domestic reform in its global context and understand the cultural dynamics of religious belief and practice, race, class, and gender at play in the Practical Christian’s civilizing mission.

A careful analysis of fin de siècle civilizing rhetoric reveals that the Practical Christian reform vision transcended American borders. As it unfolded, this global agenda fostered a paternalism that drew upon prior assumptions about foreign cultures and actual exchanges with foreigners at home and abroad.¹⁷ Civilization discourse was a powerful tool for both domestic and foreign social reforms as the tactics of Chicago’s reformers traveled to foreign locales through an extensive network of foreign missionaries, international humanitarians/social workers, and political figures. Domestically, the civilizational ideal facilitated harsh critiques of behavior that resided in the upper and lower classes. Excessive greed, class exclusivity, and selfishness of the elites were condemned alongside the boisterous drinking, improper housekeeping, and poor money management of the poor. Foreign missionaries lodged the same criticism as their domestic counterparts, only they spoke not of a recalcitrant working and immigrant class but of the foreign heathen.

The exchange also worked in the other direction, from overseas back to home. Domestic reformers also gleaned insight from foreign missionaries and diplomats about the shortcomings of foreign culture that they employed to assess the character and needs of America’s burgeoning immigrant population.¹⁸ As Americans developed an appetite for international interventions, they also rallied to transform the foreign immigrants in their midst. America’s cultural elites and middle classes were worried about the lack of assimilation by the working and immigrant class into American culture.¹⁹ Like the domestic activism of Practical Christianity, often carried out under the banner of home missions, American foreign missionaries also sought spiritual and cultural conversions. This dual conversion included a spiritual transformation accompanied by external changes in housekeeping, personal hygiene, worship practices, and gender roles within families. American diplomats, military leaders, and financiers worked to promote Christian and American habits among the new colonial outposts of the US military.

The idealism of Progressive Era reformers knew no geographical bounds between the domestic and international. As a prime example, foreign missionaries during the Great War became first responders to international war crimes and refugee crises, while churches raised money for European and Middle Eastern victims of the ongoing violence. Progressives also tied the success of their local projects to the expansion of American ideals and democracy in other nations. Military operations deployed humanitarian language while relief work evolved into nation-building. The willingness of activists and American citizens to use unconventional tactics to achieve dramatic change helped foster a unity of domestic and international reform that was exemplified in the missionary spirit of Progressivism and executed through the activism of Practical Christians.²⁰

A closer look at Practical Christians brings into focus how Progressive Era reform functioned as a holistic expression of religious, political, economic, and social concerns. When moral reform is considered alongside political reform, the broad contours of pre-war Progressivism emerge.²¹ Progressives, individuals committed to reform that took shape in politics, economics, education, and broader social matters, contributed to American and European reform movements that ushered in more centralized government interventions in social life and fostered the rise of a new class of credentialed experts. Contrary to later stereotypes of chiefly other-worldly and spiritual preoccupations, theological conservatives such as revivalists and evangelicals were closely involved in Progressive Era reform as they worked alongside their secular and liberal counterparts. This collaboration was possible because liberals and conservatives used a common moral and religious language to diagnose social ills and prescribe solutions.

A vibrant network of volunteer and professional activists formed in Chicago that used key phrases such as Practical Christianity and Christian civilization as shorthand for their reform visions. They shared a growing sense that modern American cities had lost their way, falling woefully short of their ideals for modern civilization. Chicago’s Practical Christians sought a more refined, humane city that bore the marks of a civilized nation. This shared goal of improving American cities’ moral and civic conditions brought together unlikely allies. The story of reform in Progressive Era Chicago is important because it reveals efforts that transcended the divisions imported anachronistically from later eras, such as religious vs. secular, domestic vs. international, and moral vs. political. As I will demonstrate, the day-to-day reality for Practical Christians defied these binaries.

I do not claim all reformers or Progressives were religious or motivated by religion. There were those who toyed with orthodoxy until it gave way, along with revivalists, evangelicals, and liberals who did not agree on the finer points of theology. But they did reach a consensus on the need for dramatic, lasting transformation of America. The project of civilizing America’s heathen by promoting Christianity and accompanying modern habits appealed even to those who were no longer orthodox. In an age with a dizzying number of social problems, activists used talk about civilization as a way to map out the troubles plaguing individuals and social structures. Reformers employed civilization discourse to identify social diseases along with their cure. It could signify a lost past, an illusive future with utopian achievements, or a current state of being for those who exhibited respectable ethics and habits. The ideal of civilization took many forms in Progressive and reform discourse, and it was by no means a fixed, monolithic entity.²² But the ideal evoked abundant meaning and served as shorthand for activists. Moreover, it functioned as a unifying theme for a large and diverse group of people. By teasing out the various meanings of Christian Civilization that gave way eventually to American Civilization or American Democracy, we find that Progressive Era Americans wrestled daily with the public and political implications of private morality and personal choices in the midst of dramatic social changes.²³ Civilization was both a destination and an abstract ideal, something that had been embodied with varying levels of success in the past but never quite achieved to full satisfaction. Ultimately, the allure of civilizing the people and environments that failed to live up to modern expectations served as a powerful group identifier and source of motivation for Chicago’s Practical Christian activists.

Rather than frame this reform narrative around the efforts of the well-publicized and often well-placed outliers of Progressivism, we will follow the current of reform that permeated churches, neighborhoods, and popular media of the day. This is not a history of the more radical or well-known representatives of Progressivism such as Margaret Sanger, Florence Kelley, or Eugene Debs, but a narrative about the surprisingly active and civic-minded religious middle class.²⁴ When the Practical Christian activists are restored to the historical narrative, the active social vision of conservative evangelicals comes into focus. Revivalists and evangelicals were on the front lines of reform and political activism, where they found common ground with Social Gospelers and secular reformers who shared their vision to civilize the home and foreign heathen.²⁵ This conflation of religious and political language appealed to Practical Christians, from revivalist proto-fundamentalists to the broadly evangelical to those who harbored a personal faith that was far from orthodox. This broad reform coalition emphasized the need to prepare the working and immigrant classes for full (Christian) citizenship, but the specifics of what it meant to be civilized took different forms depending upon the reformer. Yet, as we will see, this unity was short lived, and for a brief and intense period Chicago’s Protestant activists joined together to seek innovative solutions for their city’s problems.

Chicago’s Practical Christians’ pursuit of both domestic and international civilizing missions exerted a special force on local politics. A proper understanding of this close tie between local and global activism provides new insight into Progressives’ social networks, political goals, religious identities, and international outlook. My first section, Civilizing Missions: Practical Christians in Pursuit of Spiritual and Cultural Redemption, explores the social concerns of Practical Christians and how personal piety led many of Chicago’s revivalists and evangelicals into reform work. Chapter 1, Revivalist and Evangelical Activism: Salvation Preparing the Way for Social Transformation, examines religious reformers in Chicago and their embrace of nonsectarian alliances. A key tenet of Practical Christianity was the conviction that sectarianism served as an obstacle to social progress. While Chicago’s Social Gospel tradition and reform efforts have been recognized, there were many more religious reformers outside Social Gospel circles who were prompted to take civic action because of their personal faith. For Chicago’s revivalists and evangelicals, there was a close connection between personal faith, social change, and the assimilation of the immigrant and working classes into respectable Christianity. Chapter 2, Christian Citizenship: The Missionary Impulse Behind Social Activism, considers the social work of city missionaries and the duties of Christian citizens to engage in local politics fighting corruption, economic injustices, and urban moral dangers.

Section 2, Reforming Chicago’s Citizens: Practical Christians and Chicago Politics, investigates the social reform of Chicago’s Practical Christians and the central role of civilizing missions in improving the city. Chapter 3, ‘Non-Partisan Christians,’ New ‘Abolitionists,’ and the Power of Unexpected Alliances, examines the alliance of Chicago’s revivalists, evangelicals, liberals, and civic reformers that united to abolish prostitution. Following the anti-vice crusade, Chicago’s reformers pressed on in their fight against brothels, saloons, and civic corruption. Chapter 4, ‘Civic Evangelism’: Good Morals, Good Government, and Social Godliness, follows the Practical Christian agenda of spreading democracy and the new Americanization program for Chicago’s immigrant population.

The international scope of the Progressive civilizing mission and global vision of Practical Christians is explored in Section 4, Bearing the Global Burden: Practical Christians’ Missions and International Social Work. Chapter 5, Unity in Mission: Home Missions and American Christians’ World Responsibility, examines how Practical Christian reformers treated home missions and foreign missions as analogous tasks. Social reformers’ exposure to the domestic civilizing projects aimed at immigrants often led to work overseas in foreign missions. Conversely, foreign missionaries’ techniques were studied and adopted by domestic reformers. Home missionaries shared the same goals, tactics, training, and pool of workers as foreign missionaries, while foreign missionaries labored to export modern education in order to regenerate foreign societies.

Chapter 6, Missionary Activists and the Problem of ‘Primitive’ Armenian Christians, follows the Practical Christian civilizing mission to the Middle East, where American missionaries sought a cultural and spiritual redemption for the heathen. Yet these missionaries also struggled with the dilemma of seemingly primitive Armenian Christians who exhibited genuine faith without an accompanying cultural transformation. The crucible of the Armenian massacres produced the unexpected transformation of American missionaries into co-religionists with the primitive Armenians.

Chapter 7, From Christianizing to Americanizing: American Missionaries in Turkey and the Rise of Modern Humanitarianism, examines the Progressive relief campaigns led by missionaries and Chicago notables. Chicago elites such as Harry Pratt Judson, president of the University of Chicago, and Rev. Frank Gunsaulus, minister of Central Church and president of Armour Institute, devoted considerable time and money to the Armenian cause. Meanwhile, the missionaries soon redirected their efforts from proselytizing to modernizing primitive Armenians. Their main vehicle was the newly formed Near East Relief (NER), which served as a catalyst for global reform and diplomacy. The NER’s intention of Christianizing, and in the process Americanizing, the world led NER and American Progressives away from missions. The deliberate shift to a humanitarian model came as the goal to Christianize the Armenians diminished, and the focus shifted to Americanizing the Middle East. Following Progressive reform and Practical Christianity from Chicago to the Middle East provides an intimate portrait of the relationship between Progressives’ local and global activism and the crucial role that religion played in those endeavors. This international case study broadens the interpretive boundaries for Progressive reform by demonstrating the global reaches of their reform efforts.

As we will see, Practical Christians practiced nonsectarianism Monday through Saturday so they could unite in bringing about spiritual and cultural conversions for the sake of the public good. They held a personally vibrant faith and prized the spread of applied Christianity to the world around them, even as they downplayed theological differences and emphasized the shared commitments to a Christian civilizing mission that prioritized spiritual and cultural conversions. They gave a bleak reading of their current context, but they held high hopes that the home and foreign heathen were capable of dramatic transformation into full participants of Christian civilization. Given these cooperative realities, why did the sharp binaries between evangelical and liberal Protestants overtake subsequent historical narratives of the era? It appears that the hardening of positions in the subsequent culture wars led to underreading the commitments of liberal Protestants to spiritual conversions and religious vitality while simultaneously underreading the conservative Protestant actions to work for social change and cultural transformation. Far too many surveys or introductions to the era and different religious parties anachronistically retroject divisions in the Progressive Era before they took shape on the ground, among ordinary people going about their family, church, and social lives. The early echoes of theological debates and differences between clergy and theologians did not immediately or significantly shape the lived realities of Progressive Era Protestants—liberal and conservative—who mobilized to the cause of civilizing their neighbor, their city, and their world.

1

. Just as cultural habits of dress and gender norms change over time, so also do norms of appropriate language. I have preserved and present the original word choices such as barbarism, primitive, thug, and so on made by historical subjects from over one hundred years ago. I do not endorse or affirm their rhetoric but provide it for the reader to develop a full sense of the historical context and ideas these individuals inhabited.

2

. In Darkest Chicago: Dr. Carlos Martyn of the Sixth Presbyterian Church. Chicago Tribune, January

9

,

1893

,

7

.

3

. In Darkest Chicago,

7

.

4

. Dr. Carlos Martyn’s nickname flattered him, but Chicago’s journalists used it in a sardonic fashion. See Dr. Martyn Preaches in New York: He Tells Audience about the Political Demons that Control Municipal Politics in Chicago, Chicago Tribune, July

12

,

1897

,

5

. Martyn’s tenure in Chicago was relatively typical, although his subsequent career as the publishing house Abbey Press president led to criminal charges for financial mismanagement. Minister Under Arrest, Washington Post, January

4

,

1905

,

1

.

5

. Alexander Johnson qtd. in Wade, Graham Taylor,

119

.

6

. Wade, Graham Taylor,

120

–

21

.

7

. Wade, Graham Taylor,

120

–

21

.

8

. Wade, Graham Taylor,

120

–

21

.

9

. As we shall see, Social Gospelers and other social reformers of this era assumed that cultural and religious assimilation was the goal for immigrants.

10

. Other cities hosted a similar phenomenon but with distinctive characteristics due to local variables and needs. For example, Benjamin L. Hartley uncovered a vibrant evangelical reform scene in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Boston. See Hartley, Evangelicals at a Crossroads. Hartley's subjects were, unlike the Chicago parallel, primarily lower class in status. In comparison, Chicago’s network of religious reformers spanned a broader socioeconomic stratum that included lower middle class to elites. Protestant women were highly active in the Practical Christian coalitions and public work since many of these initiatives took place outside the sanctuary, where ministerial credentials and male leaders held the pulpit and set the agenda.

11

. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making,

7

.

12

. For more on nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism, see Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture,

24

–

25

and passim; Hutchinson, Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism.

13

. Hutchinson, Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism,

25,

and Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making,

7

.

14

. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture,

4

.

15

. I use the term middle class to identify the population of people who occupied an economic and cultural status distinct from the working and immigrant classes and the elite, industrialist class in Chicago. There were, of course, immigrants who also occupied this middling status and stood apart from the urban immigrant population that worked as laborers. Shelton Stromquist’s definition is helpful: "The middling classes had formed a self-conscious presence in American society at least since the

1840

s. As proponents of common school education, middle-brow cultural respectability, and an ideology of separate spheres of the sexes, they viewed themselves as apostles of measured economic growth, social stability, and republican national purpose." Stromquist, Re-Inventing The People,

15

. See also Johnston, Radical Middle Class, for a case study of the political activism of Portland’s middle class.

16

. By discourse, I mean the ideas, habits, and practices that formed around the term civilization and the act of spreading civilization through civilizing missions. See Bederman, Manliness & Civilization,

23

–

24

, for more on the usefulness of discourse analysis for history writing, or Peter R. D’Agostino’s succinct definition, discourse—practices and ideas that construct norms and power relations in Orthodoxy or Decorum?

17

. For more on the formation and culture of America’s middle class, see Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class. Blumin’s analysis of the elusive middle class provides an excellent survey of historiography on the American middle class and the formation of habits, relationships, economic experiences, and communities that formed around their shared philosophical, economic, and social conditions. Blumin demonstrates the shared identity and awareness of middling folk that allows for distinct cultural and economic elements to their group identity.

18

. I must acknowledge the seminal role of Susan Thorne’s work, especially Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, for my first realization of the intimate connection between American domestic reform and imagination of urban ills and the experiences of foreign missionaries and colonial figures. More recent studies on this phenomenon include Tyrrell, Reforming the World, and Curtis, Holy Humanitarians.

19

. The new interpretive tools provided by postcolonial studies provide compelling insight into the fervent pursuit of reform at the turn of the century. Since the publication of Edward Said’s postcolonial critique, Orientalism, historians have handled with care Western encounters with the East. Now subsequent generations of American cultural historians recognize the presence of (soft) imperial power structures within the Occident’s domestic politics and culture.

20

. As explained in chapters

6

and

7

, an excellent example of this easy transition from missions and civilizing to nation-building and international social