Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 [Paperback]

Paul Boyer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674931106 | ISBN-13: 978-0674931107 | Publication Date: March 1, 1992

For over a century, dark visions of moral collapse and social disintegration in American cities spurred an anxious middle class to search for ways to restore order. In this important book, Paul Boyer explores the links between the urban reforms of the Progressive era and the long efforts of prior generations to tame the cities. He integrates the ideologies of urban crusades with an examination of the careers and the mentalities of a group of vigorous activists, including Lyman Beecher; the pioneers of the tract societies and Sunday schools; Charles Loring Brace of the Children's Aid Society; Josephine Shaw Lowell of the Charity Organization movement; the father of American playgrounds, Joseph Lee; and the eloquent city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham.

Boyer describes the early attempts of Jacksonian evangelicals to recreate in the city the social equivalent of the morally homogeneous village; he also discusses later strategies that tried to exert a moral influence on urban immigrant families by voluntarist effort, including, for instance, the Charity Organizations' "friendly visitors." By the 1890s there had developed two sharply divergent trends in thinking about urban planning and social control: the bleak assessment that led to coercive strategies and the hopeful evaluation that emphasized the importance of environmental betterment as a means of urban moral control.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674931106
• ISBN-13: 978-0674931107
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #301,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Invasion of the "Friendly Visitor", June 24, 2002

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Paperback)

Boyer's URBAN MASSES AND MORAL ORDER was a book just ahead of its time. In the Foucauldian spirtit of the historical genealogy which has become the standard form of books about social power, Boyer periodizes the many manifestations of social control that rose in American cities from 1820 to 1920.

The first social control programs were the Tract Societies who distributed tracts showing new urban populations how to live morally, according to a kind of outdated bucolic Christian ideal. When tracts didn't work (none of the methods worked at all well according to Boyer), a number of other missionary societies stepped in with new ideas: the Children's Aid Society, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the Settlement Movement, and finally, the City Beautiful Movement. Many of these societies went after children as the best hope for saving innocent urban unfortunates from the ills of the city, their ethnic parents, and the filthy Catholic and Jewish denizens of the tenements. The only exception was the Children's Aid Society whose founder saw urban urchins as extremely savvy, smart and supremely adaptive. Nonetheless, the Children's Aid Society shipped young people out to rural America in the belief that they could better prosper elsewhere than in the city. Most of the time this was done with parental consent, but sometimes kids claimed to be orphans so they could have an adventure with their friends.

Boyer's largest theme is the tracing of slow retreast of the strategy of personal contacts with the urban poor rendered by the "friendly visitor" of these many organizations as the means for moral uplift and social control, and its eventual replacement by the notion that a new achitecture, a new environment of playgrounds, swimming pools, outdoor concerts would have a mass civilizing effect. The prosletyzing was done in the form of buildings and patrolled urban spaces. Sans the religion, but still full of the moralizing and improving rhetoric, the progressive age government was enlisted in these new strategies of social control. And, of course, eventually, the "friendly vistior" became the social worker. But the same goal was pursued -- turning scary immigrants into solid middle-class citizens. Positive resentimentalizaion through civil space, through education, through public art in public museums, etc., is still a major strategy in large cities. Art and high culture as a moral instrument.

Boyer's other large theme is that all of these movements were essentially the same -- the tactics barely changed from generation to generation, with the exception of the spatial solution which had a different means but the same hoped for end. As one exhausted organization after another gave up, new organizations sprung to take their place, most of them presided over by men from rural communities who had moved to the city and were disturbed by the lack of social cohesion and surveillance they had experience growing up, and so sought to impose their rural or town Christian values and moral controls upon the city dwellers. The Puritans practiced this form of coercion in their small settlements, until the flock dispersed to such an extent that social control through surveillance could not work. By the end of the 19th century, city dwellers surpassed country dwellers, and much of the impetus of these early movements faded.

There is, of course, a parallel now with the Southern fundamentalists trying to impose their beliefs on the "godless" cities of the Northeast. In fact, in reading URBAN MASSES AND MORAL ORDER with an eye toward the rise of the South in the 70s and 80s, the same kinds prosletytizing are apparent. Although the intent of this particular social control movement was at odds with the free market ideologists on the other side of the conversative movement, the moral conservatives of the South and West (which had always been backward until vast flows of Federal money were diverted there by Southern senators after WWII), needed an ideology to go along with their grab for power. So, once again, we in the wicked urban North once more got to hear about our moral corruption -- as if nearly two hundred years of it weren't enough already.

A great read, a great synthesis, a real classic.