Hallelujah Lads and Lasses: Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880-1930
264
Hallelujah Lads and Lasses: Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880-1930
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Overview
When the Salvation Army crossed the Atlantic from Britain in 1879, it immediately began to adapt its religious culture to its new American setting. The group found its constituency among young, working-class men and women who were attracted to its intensely experiential religious culture, which combined a frontier-camp-meeting style with working-class forms of popular culture modeled on the saloon and theater. In the hands of these new recruits, the Salvation Army developed a remarkably democratic internal culture. By the turn of the century, though, as the Army increasingly attempted to attract souls by addressing the physical needs of the masses, the group began to turn away from boisterous religious expression toward a more "refined" religious culture and a more centrally controlled bureaucratic structure.
Placing her focus on the membership of the Salvation Army and its transformation as an organization within the broader context of literature on class, labor, and women's history, Taiz sheds new light on the character of American working-class culture and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807875667 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 11/25/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Lexile: | 1690L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hallelujah Lads and Lasses
Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880-1930By Lillian Taiz
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2001 University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4935-4
Introduction
The washerwoman is a member of the Salvation Army. And over the tub of suds rubbing underwear clean She sings that Jesus will wash her sins away, And the red wrongs she has done God and man Shall be white as driven snow. Rubbing underwear she sings of the Last Great Washday. -Carl Sandberg, CornhuskersAs it has for most Americans, the Salvation Army skirted along the periphery of my consciousness all of my life. In the early 1950s I lived in a section of Philadelphia that today is dominated by oceans of row homes. In those days, however, there was just a handful of houses around the corner from Five Points Cafe, a local bar. For the few children in the area, the duckpond and hillside sledding at Children's Heart Hospital, the Fairmont Riding Academy, Woodside Amusement Park, and the Salvation Army's orphanage distinguished the neighborhood. I lived down the street in one of two huge, nearly identical three-story brick mansions each of which that had, by this time, been broken up into apartments. Although the neighborhood children played a made-up game called "orphanage," none of us ever visited or played with the kids at the Salvation Army home. Perhaps the large, gray stone building seemed too forbidding or the idea of meeting real orphans too disquieting for the many of us who lived in single-parent households.
Over the decade during which I lived in that neighborhood, it changed radically; the other brick apartment building was torn down along with Woodside Park and the Riding Academy. The area quickly overflowed with block after block of new row homes. Even the Salvation Army tore down its building in 1962 and replaced it with a series of individual "bungalows" reflecting the latest ideas about caring for children in smaller familial-style groupings by the 1960s.
Except for their ubiquitous Thrift Stores and Christmas-time bell ringers, I never gave the Salvation Army another thought until 1971 when my obstetrician moved his practice to Booth Memorial Hospital on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia. First opened in 1896 as a "rescue home" for "fallen women," by the 1920s the hospital had evolved into a "Home and Hospital for Unmarried Mothers." By the 1970s, in a world in which young single women increasingly chose to keep their children, the home once again transformed itself into a "birthing center" where married and single women could have their children in a less hospital-like setting.
In the 1980s I was searching for a dissertation topic that would somehow resonate with my own lengthy experience living on the economic margins as a single mother of two. In the course of that hunt I attended a meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Reno, Nevada. During his commentary at a session on the settlement house movement, Clark Chambers elder statesman of social welfare history, reiterated some of the points that he raised in his 1986 article, "Toward a Redefinition of Welfare History." Most welfare history, he suggested, has focused on middle-class social workers and philanthropists. But "[w]hat of the networks, informal and formal, of reciprocal assistance ... [that] defined the lives of those millions who were not middle class either in objective condition or in subjective self-perception." Furthermore, other aspects of voluntary associationalism in American life also need study. "Mainline, respectable Protestant charities have received dutiful attention," he wrote, "but the welfare programs of evangelistic crusades-the Salvation Army, Volunteers of America, Goodwill Industries of America-have yet to be taken seriously."
In retrospect, it seems somehow appropriate that I would write about this organization with which I'd had periodic contact but about which I knew absolutely nothing. I must confess that (perhaps because I am not a Christian) never once in my contact with the orphanage, thrift stores, bell-ringers, and hospital did it occur to me that the Salvation Army was a Christian religious organization. Indeed, I am now embarrassed to say that I imagined the "salvation" in Salvation Army referred to the salvaged goods they sold in their second hand stores! Why, I wondered as I began my research, had I never realized that this was an evangelical Christian group?
I discovered, to my surprise, that in 1978 the Salvation Army organized and funded a sophisticated Archive and Research Center initially located in New York City but now housed in their National Headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. The archive has a number of strengths, not the least of which is its team of professionally trained archivists who, with resources provided by the organization, have ensured the preservation of historical materials. The number of documents is staggering and includes thousands of photographs, hundreds of films, audio recordings, reports, correspondence, personal papers, memoirs, personnel or career files, birth records from the maternity hospitals, and much more. The staff has carefully cataloged the materials to which they constantly add new documents. I found the resources rich and largely untapped by outside researchers. Typically the archive serves Salvation Army members who are writing histories of the organization and individuals who, armed with court orders, are seeking information about their birth parents.
While the archival resources are quite rich, they also have serious limitations. When I began the project I expected to focus more on the Salvation Army's rank-and-file members (also known as soldiers). Unfortunately, data for soldiers is very difficult to find. Not only did corps (mission stations or churches) move frequently, but Salvationists often lacked the educational skills needed to maintain accurate written records. Of the few Soldiers' Roll Books that survive, most date from the early twentieth century and provide very little information beyond a name and address. Geographical mobility made tracking these men and women through the census virtually impossible; the books regularly show four or five addresses for a single soldier and do not indicate when he or she lived at any one particular location. There may be other materials out there, but they are probably in the attics and basements of Salvationist families.
In addition to the dearth of materials on the rank and file, the Salvation Army exercises considerable control over their holdings. For example, the organization restricts access to the founding family's papers including those of Evangeline Booth, commander of the Salvation Army forces in the United States from 1904 until 1934. While they did provide access to previously restricted officer career files, the archivists established strict written guidelines that allowed me to "record only non-identifying information for the sole purpose of compiling aggregate statistics," which I then used to draw a portrait of male and female officers. Moreover, although the group kept their own aggregate statistics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries explaining why officers left the organization, they still do not permit these data to be published.
Even without the limitations imposed by the archive, it would be difficult for me to provide information about the number of participants, their movements in and out of the organization, where they came from, and where they went. The very nature of Salvation Army religious activities makes even defining who qualifies as a "participant" difficult. Although thousands of Americans attended Salvation Army events, much smaller numbers actually became soldiers. Who, then, should be considered a "participant"? I decided to limit my focus to the men and women who committed themselves to the rigors of officer or soldiership (those for whom data is available).
Salvation Army: Working-Class Religion
In 1865 William and Catherine Booth organized what would eventually become the Salvation Army in Britain. During the 1870s the group evolved from a loosely organized nondenominational urban home mission to a more structured revivalist movement. In 1878, the organization adopted military symbolism and discipline and renamed itself the Salvation Army. This book investigates the Salvation Army in the United States from its earliest days as an evangelical Christian holiness mission advertising salvation with its peculiarly working-class form of experiential religion. It also examines the group's developing style of evangelical-social Christianity and the concomitant "refinement" of its religious culture beginning at the turn of the century. These discussions reveal ongoing tensions between autonomy and hierarchy, independence and subordination, local innovation and centralization that characterized the group's evolution.
The Salvation Army is a colorful but understudied religious movement. Historians of American religion, urban poverty, and reform movements regarded the Salvation Army in the United States as part of the Protestant response to urban life. As a consequence, their discussion of the organization focused exclusively on its welfare work in city slums and its influence on the emerging social gospel movement. I would argue, however, that representing the Army solely as a "Gospel Welfare" movement obscures its role as a working-class religious institution. Studying the Salvation Army as an evangelical Christian organization, on the other hand, provides a unique opportunity to examine the character of working-class religiosity in the late nineteenth century.
Scholars do not agree on the nature and meaning of religious experience among the working class in the United States. The few labor historians who have addressed the issue argue that Christianity provided organized labor with a language to critique capitalism and justify trade unionism. Religion, they suggest, was an area of contested terrain where labor and capital "each ... [made] claims upon Christianity for justification and legitimacy." Others have stressed the role of religion in dividing the working class. "The most visible sign of the importance of religion in working-class communities," wrote one historian, "was its divisiveness." These cleavages have at various times pitted revivalists against traditionalists, Protestants against Catholics, Christians against Jews, and the religious against the irreligious. Finally, immigration historians have studied working-class religion by examining the ways in which immigrant churches sometimes helped their communities hold onto traditions and sustain "mutual assistance" but at other times divided them. This rich body of research sought to explain the inability of the American working class to gain meaningful political power in the United States. As a result, religion appears primarily as an obstacle to working-class solidarity. None of this work provides insight into the nature of working-class religion and how working men and women experienced, performed, and represented their spirituality.
Between 1879 and 1896, American Salvationists created a working class-dominated cross-class organization. Hallelujah Lads and Lasses (as young Salvationists were often known) addresses Salvation Army members, their relationship to the organization, and the American religious marketplace. When the group entered the United States in 1879, it immediately located its "market niche" among young, single, working-class men and women. The Army and its constituency constructed a religious culture that attracted attention, or, as one leader described it, "advertised salvation," by combining individual holiness as the true sign of faith with an intensely experiential, autonomous working-class religious culture. In its crowded daily schedule of services, the Army institutionalized frontier camp-meeting religious enthusiasm by encouraging members to follow up the initial euphoria of conversion with a continuous "revival of feeling."
At these sanctioned, intense, emotional religious performances, audiences prayed, testified, and exhorted not only with their voices but also with their bodies, hands, and feet. The evidence also describes religious services that absorbed and reinvented patterns of working-class popular culture modeled on the saloon and theater. Salvationist spiritual expression in the late nineteenth century resembled an urban version of the old-time frontier camp meeting combined with working-class forms of popular culture. This approach to working-class religion provides insight into evangelical Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. As historian Richard Wightman Fox has pointed out, we need "to know much more than we do about the development of evangelical Christianity since 1875, especially its paradoxical mixture of modern and antimodern commitments...." Moreover, the Salvation Army offers a unique opportunity to consider how new ideas about the sources of poverty affected an historic shift within a revivalist organization in the late nineteenth century from a highly experiential Christian evangelicalism to an evangelical-social Christian hybrid religion.
Hallelujah Lads and Lasses demonstrates that, in addition to an autonomous experiential religion, the Salvation Army provided its pioneering generation of young, working-class male and female Salvationists with a variety of rewards for their commitment to the movement. Youthful officers found remarkable levels of independence and adventure as they set off to share the keys to the Kingdom with others like themselves. In return for their efforts, the Army provided an organizational hierarchy that offered them new opportunities for religious and administrative leadership, moral authority (regardless of gender), and membership in a sacred community.
Although the Salvation Army drew most of its membership from the working class, the group also attracted much smaller numbers of middle-class men and women with college education and business and/or civil service experience. While their numbers were small, their training facilitated the implementation of the group's social service program for the poor at the turn of the century. Like the many working-class members, the intensity of religious feeling, the communal solidarity, and opportunities for usefulness and leadership drew them to the organization. Unlike their working-class comrades, however, many middle-class Salvationists shared the concern of "respectable" Americans that the democracy of the group's experiential religious practice revealed spiritual shallowness in rank-and-file members. As a result, for some of them, a desire to teach holiness to rank-and-file Salvationists took priority even over the conversion of sinners. Furthermore, in contrast to working-class members, these middle-class men and women apparently regarded their mission as service to others quite unlike themselves. Their reservations about experiential religion as well as their understanding of religious service facilitated the development of a Salvationism in which they preached to the already converted (Salvationists) and performed Christian service through social work to the "heathen masses."
As Hallelujah Lads and Lasses explains, the Salvation Army experienced several significant changes between 1879 and 1934. In the early years, tensions between centralized hierarchical authority and local autonomy sparked two near-fatal confrontations between the British and American administrations. Within the United States, at the same time, similar conflict generally resolved itself peacefully in favor of democracy giving local corps and soldiers significant levels of autonomy. The introduction of the Army's social Christian work in the United States, as well as the growing numbers of second-generation and upwardly mobile Salvationists, changed the organization at the turn of the century. Democracy and local autonomy declined as bureaucratic authority shifted upward. Increasingly, instead of "advertising salvation" with highly experiential religious performance, the Army attempted to attract souls by addressing the physical needs of the masses.
Finally, long-time opponents of the Army's expressive religious culture found new allies among the Army's second generation and bureaucrats promoting the social work. Together they successfully tamed the group's once boisterous services. Increasingly the group replaced its adaptations of working-class leisure culture with the new technologies of mass commercial culture. Like the transformed world of the nineteenth-century theater and variety shows, once rowdy and highly participatory religious meetings now featured formalized religious rituals, sedate stereopticon slide shows, and films. Similarly, spontaneous and boisterous street parades representing the religious fervor of the Salvationists became highly structured, occasional grand parades down main city boulevards promoting the redemptive nature of the Army's social work. In the early decades of the twentieth century, older Salvationists and new converts alike had to either adapt to the organization's now more decorous expression of religion or select another path.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hallelujah Lads and Lasses by Lillian Taiz Copyright © 2001 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
This engaging, thoroughly documented volume tells the story of a religious movement that had to deal with a distant but demanding headquarters, contentious local troops and opposition from the public and the press. . . . Taiz's research brings to life conflicts within the group, some of which are echoed today.—Los Angeles Times
[This] book is distinguished from many studies by its attention to the ordinary men and women, the 'hallelujah lads and lasses' of the title, who devoted their lives to the army. . . . Taiz has crafted a compelling story about evangelism and urban relief in America, and she tells it in remarkably crisp prose. Armchair Army-ites and scholars alike will enjoy this book.—Publishers Weekly
This study of the Salvation Army, by an individual with no ties to the movement, helps to expand the fairly limited understanding of the group among contemporary historians.—Choice
An excellent addition to the shelf of new books on neglected nineteenth and early twentieth-century religious movements.—American Historical Review
A clear and comprehensive study of the historical development of the Salvation Army in its formative years in the United States. . . . An excellent portrait of the Salvation Army's relationship to popular culture. . . A well-researched and eminently readable discussion of an important and neglected topic in American religious and social service history.—Journal of American History
A long-overdue and highly readable study of one of the country's most significant, yet often overlooked, religious and cultural phenomena.—Maryland Historical Magazine
Taiz's book on the American Salvation Army expertly places the movement within its cultural and social contexts. . . . An outstanding contribution to American cultural and religious history.—Religious Studies Review
This is an outstanding social history of an important but misunderstood American religion. Taiz introduces us to the real people of the Salvation Army. She perceptively illustrates their struggles to express their faith using working-class styles of entertainment while coping with cultural pressures to become genteel Protestants and social workers. Meticulously researched, Hallelujah Lads and Lasses also sheds light on our shifting understanding of poverty and religion's relationship to social reform. Taiz's history of the Salvation Army should be mandatory reading for all those politicians who call for faith communities to become more involved in charity.—Colleen McDannell, University of Utah
Lillian Taiz's excellent book probes the background and membership of the Salvation Army in America more thoroughly and with more sophistication than any previous study. With clarity, insight, and wonderful research, Taiz adds significantly to the increasingly rich historical literature on America's 'Hallelujah Lads and Lasses.' She explains how and why Americans who joined the Army subtly and directly transformed it. An engrossing book on a fascinating encounter between America's working classes and imported British evangelicalism.—Jon Butler, Yale University