Beginning in November 1885, twenty-five women living on the East Side of Manhattan joined a new employment society that promised to help them subsidize their households’ incomes.Footnote 1 Members received an hourly wage to produce garments that organizers then sold, and they also received occasional invitations to clean the homes of the society’s wealthy patrons. Developed in the midst of an economic depression that had led many factories in New York City to halt production and lay off workers, the initiative focused especially on women “in families where the bread winners, from no fault of their own, are out of employment.”Footnote 2 The institution behind this program was St. George’s Episcopal Church, one of New York’s most prominent Protestant churches and a pioneer of the ecclesiastical form known as the “institutional church.”Footnote 3
So called because of the collection of institutions they created to supplement their religious services and related activities, institutional churches became known by contemporaries and historians alike as quintessential expressions of the reform movement often termed the “Social Gospel” or “Social Christianity.” The historian Charles H. Hopkins described institutional churches as “the most concrete organized product of the movement.”Footnote 4 These churches served large, urban congregations—which typically included sizable populations of poor and immigrant parishioners—by offering education, charity, and recreation through outlets such as social clubs, hospitals, mentorship programs, libraries, schools for children, athletic teams, gymnasia, work placement opportunities, and vocational schools. In contrast, conventional Protestant churches tended to engage growing urban populations primarily by offering religious services and outreach, sometimes based out of “mission chapels” established in nearby neighborhoods.
Located on the western edge of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square since 1848, St. George’s transformed into an institutional church during the 1880s and became what one historian described as the “prototype” for other institutional churches.Footnote 5 Defining its prototypical form was its array of subsidiary institutions as well as its apparent spirit of social benevolence. Praising St. George’s in 1906 for being “acutely sensitive to the needs of others no less than to the way in which these needs could be effectively met,” President Theodore Roosevelt referred to it as “the most notable institution of its kind in the world.” The genre of churches that Roosevelt had in mind were those that devoted themselves to “social and civic righteousness” in an era of acute and intensifying urban poverty.Footnote 6
But at St. George’s and many other religious institutions ostensibly manifesting a spirit of benevolence during the second half of the nineteenth century, practices of charity often took shape around the commonplace conservative concept of the “pauper.” The era’s social reformers—including religious officials, philanthropists, policymakers, and volunteer charity workers—invoked the concept in two ways. Technically, the term referred to people who received and depended on economic assistance from the state or other institutions. More colloquially, reformers identified “paupers” as people who possessed the pathological condition of “pauperism.” Defining pauperism as a sort of disease that justified social and cultural hierarchies, they often attributed an individual’s persistent poverty above all to their inherent character, morality, and ability. Many reformers assumed that some racial and ethnic groups were inherently more susceptible to pauperism and less redeemable than others. White Protestant reformers in New York, for example, tended to view German immigrants as more capable of achieving self-sufficiency than Irish immigrants, while white reformers in the South and North often presumed that poor Black and formerly enslaved people would remain perpetually dependent on others and lacked the motivation to help themselves.Footnote 7 Although many social reformers claimed that poor people became paupers by succumbing to their inherited or acquired predispositions, those same reformers also believed that they could either “pauperize” the poor or save them from pauperism by manipulating its causes. Functioning as nothing less than a unified theory of social change, pauperization was used not just to account for economic disparities in the present but also to classify people and policies in ways that would generate what opponents of pauperization—whom I describe as anti-pauperizers—imagined as a future of harmony between the wealthy and working classes.
Designed to function as engines of class harmony, institutional churches took anti-pauperization as their operating principle. As the prototype for other institutional churches in the United States, St. George’s exemplified and cultivated that principle. Its primary leaders and funders—such as the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, who served for decades as the head of the church’s governing vestry and oversaw virtually all of its financial and administrative decisions—viewed wealth inequality not as a symptom of insufficient benevolence but rather as the result of misguided and misapplied charity.Footnote 8 The church’s leaders often claimed that anyone who distributed poor relief “indiscriminately”—without conditions such as work requirements—would pauperize the poor. “We believe that genuine work, justly compensated, elevates,” the St. George’s Employment Society’s first annual report explained in 1886. Carefully qualifying that platitude, the report insisted that the society’s employees should not be provided with too much work or paid too generously for their labor. “Work given out of so-called charity, and paid for unduly, though better than almsgiving, is pauperizing in effect.” The report also boasted about paying a “fixed price according to the value of the work done.”Footnote 9 In light of the way that classical theorists of capitalism such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx all associated the value of commodities with the quantity of labor required to produce them, this boast illustrates how advocates of anti-pauperization sought to proclaim the virtue of capitalism in an era of rising demand for more radical responses to economic inequality, such as socialism.
Treating St. George’s as an archetype of the institutional church movement and its anti-pauperization, this article not only highlights an influential response to inequity at the turn of the twentieth century but also helps revise long-standing narratives about the tenor of Social Christianity. For a century, historians have tended to describe Social Christianity as a movement that inaugurated the socially progressive orientation of contemporary liberal Protestantism. Other historians have complicated that teleological narrative by pointing out some of Social Christianity’s conservative overtones. One historian notes, for example, that institutional churches’ campaigns of social outreach served “conservative ends” insofar as they continued long-standing campaigns “to evangelize the city.”Footnote 10
Yet even as these depictions of Social Christianity and institutional churches have complicated the progressive narrative of Social Gospel historiography, historians typically have understated how innovations such as the institutional church elaborated upon a conservative, class-based vision of hierarchical social control. Highlighting that elaboration, the historian Janine Giordano Drake describes the Social Gospel as “a conservative response to radical Christian ideas about economic justice” and points out that institutional churches sought to “replace the moral authority of the labor movement with that of the Protestant church.” Drake argues that a desire to protect the power of the Church led many social Christians in the early twentieth century to treat avowed socialists and labor leaders as threats to the future they sought to transform.Footnote 11
Built and sustained largely with funding from many of the same wealthy donors often identified as the Gilded Age’s “robber barons,” institutional churches manifested confidence in the power of private philanthropy and Social Christianity to remediate poverty while simultaneously maintaining industrial capitalism and its fundamental social order.Footnote 12 Wealthy and middle-class white Protestant leaders, philanthropists, and laypeople insisted that churches could and should lead the way in pointing American society toward a future without pauperism, and they built institutional churches in order to secure the ascendance of anti-pauperizing principles. Those principles included individual responsibility, male breadwinner ideology, and the moral virtue of capitalism.Footnote 13 In our contemporary era of wealth inequality and plutocratic power, these principles remain familiar.Footnote 14 Tying the principles together—in the past and present—is the claim that individuals and their families fundamentally could and should help themselves.
Good Samaritans
“What can we do for the poor?” This is a question that William S. Rainsford asked readers of his congregation’s newspaper in 1891, about eight years after he became the rector of St. George’s. For an answer to the question, he turned to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), in which Jesus tells a story about a man from Samaria who compassionately cared for a Jewish man whom robbers had stripped and beaten.Footnote 15 “We cannot … leave him wounded and bleeding by the wayside,” Rainsford exhorted. Yet he also clarified that empathetic exhortation, noting that people in need were often culpable for their own suffering. The Samaritan’s act of kindness served as a model for listeners because he had offered aid to a person who had likely “fallen among the thieves largely by his own fault.” Presenting pauperization as a process that the poor chose for themselves, this sort of hermeneutic allowed social Christians to see paupers less as victims of unjust social conditions than as people who could and should learn to navigate society’s metaphorical roads with greater knowledge and responsibility.
Although the population living in cities like New York had become increasingly diverse over the course of the nineteenth century—as immigrants arrived from Ireland, Germany, Poland, southern and eastern Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and elsewhere—the most influential ideas in Rainsford’s day about whether and how to help the poor continued to come primarily from England. Among those ideas, the most crucial was a distinction between those “deserving” and “undeserving” of assistance. “Deserving” paupers consisted primarily of elderly people and those unable to work due to injury or other physical “infirmities,” while the undeserving included anyone physically able to work and earn wages.Footnote 16 Invariably, critics condemned poor relief policies for being too generous and ironically pauperizing the undeserving poor by promoting “idleness” and encouraging them to produce more children.
Social theorists such as Thomas Malthus had elaborated on this general distinction. Claiming that generous poor relief policies encouraged the poor to have more children despite a limited food supply, Malthus and his supporters called for policies that severely restricted access to indiscriminate giving or “outdoor relief”—the term for charitable assistance that provided money, food, or other necessary items to the poor without requiring them to receive it “indoor” as residents of workhouses, poorhouses, or other institutions created for paupers. These restrictions supposedly would reduce pauperism by encouraging the poor to cultivate sexual restraint and complementary practices of moral self-control.Footnote 17 Rather than viewing poverty as a result of the meager wages that workers earned for agricultural and industrial labor, anti-pauperizers interpreted behavior rooted in poverty and economic desperation as examples of poor people’s supposedly deficient character, which justified further reform of charity.
England also pioneered institutions that complemented these ideas and policies about poverty. Traditionally, the established Anglican Church had received money from the state to carry out poor relief through its geographic and administrative units known as parishes. But in 1834, the “New Poor Law” created new regional administrative unions that took primary responsibility for poor relief away from Anglican churches and their officers. While some Anglican and Nonconforming churches subsequently remained committed to addressing the needs of the urban poor, they did so without significant state funding.Footnote 18 Private philanthropists accordingly began to fund urban charity, under the watch of organizations such as the Charity Organization Society (COS). Founded in London in 1868 and imported to New York in 1882, the COS scrupulously investigated individuals and families who requested charity, in order to identify truly “deserving” requests. They used the supposedly objective data they collected to develop what supporters saw as “scientific charity.”Footnote 19
In the United States, where the economic crises and changing urban demographics of the 1870s and 1880s inspired many bourgeois Americans to seek new methods of securing social stability, scientific charity and private philanthropy became appealing solutions. Economic suffering had become particularly severe in New York after 1873, when an economic panic led to a prolonged economic contraction that left hundreds of thousands of workers open to eviction and starvation. Approximately 30 percent of workers were soon unemployed, and 40 percent lived below the unofficial poverty line.Footnote 20 More than 5,000 strikes involved almost a million of the city’s workers between 1881 and 1900. This inaugurated an era of worker unions and organizing that saw groups such as the labor federation Knights of Labor (KOL) insist that poor people became paupers neither due to idleness nor due to an excess of charity but because of wealth inequality itself. The KOL’s constitution warned that unchecked wealth inequality “will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses.”Footnote 21 Yet with as many as a third of New Yorkers in 1880 born in Ireland or Germany, and 80 percent claiming at least one foreign-born parent, the city’s political leaders and wealthy citizens increasingly treated the labor problem as an immigration problem. They reacted to the rise of organized labor with two strategies: violence and what the historian Sven Beckert describes as “retrenchment.” Another historian calls this posture a “laissez-faire doctrine” of “minimal state intervention.”Footnote 22 Scientific charity gave the strategy of minimal intervention an ideological rationale, allowing retrenchment to function as a proactive method of combating pauperism rather than a passive mode of withdrawal.
But why did churches seem like ideal instruments of anti-pauperization? One reason is that their buildings were located in neighborhoods populated by the immigrant families whom leaders hoped to save from pauperism. Reflecting on the “genius” of institutional churches, the prominent minister and author Josiah Strong explained that such churches thrived primarily in urban “slums.” According to Strong, the main problem facing immigrant populations in those slums was their lack of a “healthy home life.” Strong classified home and church as the two “great saving institutions of society,” explaining that institutional churches were not needed in places such as city suburbs, which “are made up almost wholly of beautiful homes.” A champion of the notion that poor Catholic immigrants were a significant threat to the stability of the United States’ “Anglo-Saxon civilization,” Strong predicted that the growth of cities would generate “increasing need of institutional churches,” since “the home practically does not exist” among the cities’ poor, immigrant “tenement-house populations.”Footnote 23 This emphasis on the reform of the home also served as a rationale for settlement houses, which developed in England and the US through a movement focused on having middle-class students and other reformers “settle” or live alongside the urban poor in renovated tenement buildings.
A second reason why churches seemed suited to fighting pauperism involved their flexible administrative oversight. Champions of institutional churches argued that they could accomplish much more than settlement houses or other reformist institutions inherited from England, such as the YMCA. “The church contains within itself,” the minister Edward Judson explained, “the potency for the cure of every social ill. All that good people seek to accomplish through University Settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations, Rescue Missions, and other redemptive agencies, can better be done through churches, embedded in society, each forming a center of light, which irradiates the circumjacent gloom.”Footnote 24 In the US, Protestant church initiatives were broad and varied because they took shape largely in response to the whims of the lay leaders who composed the governing boards of their congregations and funded them. Even seemingly hierarchical denominations such as the Episcopal Church allowed congregations to effect what amounted to a form of representative congregational governance over their own affairs. Other denominations gave an even freer hand to the leaders of institutional churches, in part because they typically set out to revive failing or failed congregations, which had shrunk dramatically as wealthy and middle-class Anglo-American parishioners moved away due to the influx of immigrant populations.
In England, by comparison, Anglican congregations in the middle of the nineteenth century were attempting to separate themselves institutionally and financially from the state, and the scope of their affairs generally became smaller rather than larger. Anglican churches stopped receiving local tax revenue in 1868, and High Church or “Tractarian” Anglicans meanwhile argued that churches should focus their limited resources on spiritual matters, serving as “a resort for the devout rather than a resource for the community.” The churches most often cited as English analogs to American institutional churches were Nonconforming Protestant churches, yet their comparably smaller and more middle-class populations included far fewer wealthy congregants to fund ambitious initiatives.Footnote 25
Located in bastions of pauperization, equipped with buildings and infrastructure, and well financed by wealthy members, institutional churches appeared in the US as ideal instruments of what supporters saw as efficient and effective giving. Reflecting in 1899 on the phenomenon of institutional churches, Edward Judson—whose institutional church was built with the financial support of John D. Rockefeller—remarked that the New Testament’s Good Samaritan would have supported efforts to reform charity. After all, Judson explained, the Good Samaritan did not respond to the wounded man with “a gush of compassion” and “overdo the matter, emptying his purse and leaving nothing for other needy cases.” Instead, he argued, the Good Samaritan was “thrifty and business-like in his beneficence,” providing only enough money to “meet the requirements of the case.” He presented that approach to charity as a defining trait of the benevolence that institutional churches should exemplify.Footnote 26
Good Churches
Today, when the term “institutional” modifies “religion” or “church,” the conjunctive phrase often functions as an implicit criticism of religious activity attached to institutions and their hierarchies, traditions, and dogmas—in contradistinction with a more authentic “spirituality” supposedly detached from institutional settings.Footnote 27 Yet for advocates of the institutional church movement, the crises plaguing late nineteenth-century cities involved daunting and entangled problems, such as pauperism and unchecked immigration, all of which demanded a response from institutions with sufficient organizational scale, social stature, and financial resources to meet those crises. And according to ministers no less than wealthy donors, not just any institutions could mount an adequate response. “It would almost seem as though the Church were the only society,” Edward Judson explained, “in which human units can cohere on a common plane … [and] share in the same aspirations, struggles, and hopes.”Footnote 28 Comparing churches to other institutional vessels of influence, one handbook for creating institutional churches paraphrased William Rainsford in explaining that “the best thing which can be done for the reformation of a bad neighborhood is to plant in the midst of it not a model tenement, not a school, but a church. With a good church, all other good things would logically follow.”Footnote 29
Whatever denomination they were affiliated with, institutional churches were deemed “good churches” because they fought back against pauperization and allied problems—including immigration and Catholicism. Speaking in 1894 at the founding conference of the Open or Institutional Church League (OICL)—which served as a space to advocate for and share resources about the ideas and principles that institutional churches typified—a minister from Boston’s Park Street Church not only condemned what he saw as the “low class of foreigners” who allowed Boston to be “run by rum and Romanism” but also praised New York’s institutional churches for “setting the example for the continent” in the fight against those supposed dangers.Footnote 30 Protestant charity reformers often justified their special disdain for Catholics—and Irish Catholics in particular—by citing a long Catholic tradition of extending relief to the poor without assessing whether they were “deserving” or not. The poverty experienced by so many Irish immigrants to New York served as evidence of their susceptibility to pauperism and of Catholicism’s pauperizing power.Footnote 31 Only an institutional church, another speaker at the OICL’s founding conference explained, could counteract these forces of pauperization and “permeate the entire community” by reaching the poor on “many sides—head, heart, pocket.”Footnote 32
Before the era of the institutional church, white Protestant social reformers typically had not treated churches as primary vehicles for addressing social problems such as poverty and pauperism. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, American Protestants had pursued those objectives mainly through an array of benevolent societies. With funding from sophisticated schemes of “systematic benevolence,” benevolent societies set out to become what one historian describes as “the functional equivalent of an established church.”Footnote 33 Far less well funded than benevolent societies, Protestant churches had generally responded more modestly to urban social problems.Footnote 34 The most popular method of church-centered reform was the city mission, which churches frequently established in immigrant communities located away from their primary locations. Engaging immigrant communities at a proverbial arm’s length, churches created temporary or permanent chapels as sites where “home missionaries” could speak to people whom they hoped to influence.Footnote 35 But the scale of immigration and poverty from the 1870s onward made such efforts seem insufficient. “The small mission church,” St. George’s rector later pronounced, “is a waste of energy.”Footnote 36 The geographic expansion of immigrant communities also erased the distance between churches and the places that their leaders imagined as ripe mission territories.
Treating missions as inadequate and even misguided responses to pauperism, institutional churches adopted a different theory of social change. Rather than emphasizing conversion, they welcomed people without regard to denominational or religious affiliation. The OICL explained that institutional churches aimed “to save all men and all of the man by all means, abolishing so far as possible the distinction between the religious and the secular.”Footnote 37 Theological support for this approach came from figures such as the English minister Frederick W. Robertson, whom William Rainsford claimed as a primary influence. Robertson argued that Christians cannot simply expect poor people to resist “outward temptation” but must also recognize that outward conditions influence behavior. “It is true that vice leads to poverty: all the moralizers tell us that,” Robertson argued, “but it is also true that poverty leads to vice.” Free from poverty and pauperism, humans could live the life of “infinite expansion” that Jesus had modeled.Footnote 38
Many charity reformers claimed that conventional churches tended to waste resources due to their misunderstanding of pauperism and its causes. Complaining in 1886 that 490 “religious bodies for worship” had distributed alms during the prior year, the New York COS’s annual report condemned churches for their “unwise and inexperienced distribution of alms.”Footnote 39 Another critic of church-based charity lamented that “social parasites” always preyed on and crowded around institutions that distributed alms, such as monasteries and parish churches.Footnote 40 With these criticisms in mind, advocates of the institutional church argued that they could remediate pauperism efficiently and effectively because they could practice careful oversight of charity recipients and ensure that assistance was necessary and deserved. Institutional churches pursued that goal through systems of “district visiting” or “friendly visiting,” which the COS and other charity reformers recommended as methods of teaching Christian virtues as well as assessing whether households that requested charitable aid should receive any.Footnote 41
The practice of friendly visiting built on a much longer history of viewing the home and family as the place where the pathology of pauperism incubated.Footnote 42 As the historian Christine Stansell explains, this emphasis initially developed within the gender system that prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century, when bourgeois women designated themselves as “moral guardians of their husbands and children.” Claiming charitable work as an appropriate extension of women’s domestic responsibilities and “redemptive powers,” bourgeois charity initiatives focused on teaching poor women how to create ideal homes.Footnote 43 But as poverty grew during the second half of the nineteenth century, male charity reformers often claimed that women too often allowed their sentimentality and emotions to inspire excessively generous charitable relief, which supposedly undermined paupers’ individual discipline.Footnote 44 Aware of that criticism, some women responded by advocating especially stark scientific charity policies. The charity reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell insisted in 1888, for example, that “pauperism—hereditary pauperism—is the result of relief receiving, and … relief giving is an evil.” Citing Malthus, Lowell added that “the causes of extreme poverty and degradation are moral.”Footnote 45
Rather than offering poor relief in the form of alms, friendly visitors encouraged families to become involved with the church’s varied education and self-improvement programs. Rainsford explained in 1886 that “knowledge of the individual characters of the men, women, and children in the five hundred (500) poor families on our lists” made the church’s work “effective” and ensured that “charity has not been given indiscriminately.” Acknowledging the emotional difficulty of withholding relief from people in need, district visitors were urged not to pauperize the families they visited by give them money, food, or clothes.Footnote 46 As late as 1902, when more progressive reformers such as Jane Addams remarked that the poor often had good reason to view friendly visitors as “cold and calculating,” Rainsford still described “good visiting” as “the secret of the Church’s success in New York City.”Footnote 47
Although St. George’s occasionally issued pleas for men to volunteer to visit sick or absent members of the Men’s Club and Men’s Bible Classes, most friendly visitors and church volunteers were women.Footnote 48 Women were also the primary volunteers and employees of charitable organizations such as the COS, the Children’s Aid Society (founded in 1853), and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1873).Footnote 49 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, lay members of St. George’s and its administrative alumni regularly joined the staff of the New York COS. St. George’s also established a cohort of deaconesses in 1886 and tasked them with primary responsibility for attending to the poor and overseeing the church’s charitable programs.Footnote 50
Many of those programs focused on engaging girls, young women, and mothers. Shaping that focus was the claim that pauperism and the problems correlated with it—such as “drunkenness” and “idleness”— would evanesce if pauper women could “learn to make homes.” Offering advice in the midst of the economic depression that began in 1893, St. George’s parish’s newspaper explained that “the liquor stores would not be half as full as they are if homes were more attractive and the food properly cooked. More than half the time it is women who break the homes.” The paper boasted that women who attended the church’s programs “are taught that the best and sweetest thing in the home is the woman who makes it.”Footnote 51 At St. George’s chapter of the Girls Friendly Society (GFS), middle-class and bourgeois volunteers cultivated “a feeling of unity between employers and employed” by mentoring young “working girls” and attempting to teach them how to live with “greater purity of life, honesty, thrift.”Footnote 52 In a similar spirit, the Helping Hand Association (founded in 1865 in New York City) invited middle-class and bourgeois women to socialize and discuss how they might “improve the condition of the poor women of our City by teaching them to help themselves by honest labor.”Footnote 53 Working-class women met separately to receive instruction in sewing and to produce garments. They received a credit of twelve cents per hour for up to three hours per week, which they could use to buy groceries at prices subsidized by the association’s sale of the garments that they produced.Footnote 54
In addition to presenting programs for women as especially effective methods of anti-pauperization, churches like St. George’s directed their programs toward particular racial and ethnic populations. St. George’s leaders viewed the neighborhood’s native-born white people and poor German immigrants as ideal candidates for the church’s anti-pauperism campaigns. Prioritizing people who seemingly possessed Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, they concluded that other ethnic groups required what Rainsford described as “persistent and aggressive effort.”Footnote 55 His successor, Hugh Birkhead, made the church’s ethnic preference clear in 1912, when he resigned his post after lamenting that “the Germans have left and now it’s Italians, Hungarians, and Hebrews” in the neighborhood.Footnote 56 Before that population shift, the church’s neighborhood was known as Kleindeutschland or “Little Germany,” and St. George’s printed many of its announcements and requests in both English and German.Footnote 57 Farther north at St. Bartholomew’s—an institutional church funded primarily by the Vanderbilt family—the church’s relief efforts focused especially on Anglo-Saxon Swedes and Germans.Footnote 58
Behind virtually all institutional church activities was the claim that they had the unparalleled power to unite seemingly divided economic classes. Writing in the congregation’s newspaper in 1886, Rainsford addressed the topic of “Capital and Labor,” in the middle of what one historian describes as “a watershed year for New York’s labor movement.” After a decade of confrontation and violence between labor activists and civil authorities, the year 1886 found labor activism and unionism more unified and popular than ever. The Central Labor Union (CLU) of New York City, for example, claimed approximately 40,000 members in that year, by drawing together over 120 independent unions as well as local assemblies of the KOL. Especially influential among the CLU’s constituencies were German American socialists and their unions, whose members undoubtedly lived among the German Americans who attended St. George’s.Footnote 59 Against that backdrop, Rainsford disparaged “the evils of unions” and insisted that “their policy is not on the whole any higher or more Christian than the policy of the great money holder against whose monopoly they have organized.” He acknowledged that wealthy industrialists had manipulated industries “in the interests of the few”; but he accused both unions and capitalists of perpetuating inequality, insofar as both groups had divided God’s people.Footnote 60
Rainsford claimed that institutional churches could create harmony not just because they could acquaint rich and poor congregants but also because those relationships would “produce and foster the higher elements in man,” since God created humans as creatures intended to live in harmony.Footnote 61 Ten years later, he continued to insist that the most significant problem facing workers was their spirit of division and distrust. “They must help themselves,” he insisted, while claiming that “they cannot help themselves till they trust each other more and learn to work together better.”Footnote 62 Putting tremendous stock in this harmony-focused theory of anti-pauperization, one church report insisted that “the solution of social problems lies in class becoming acquainted with class, the various strata of society commingling in mutual sympathy and understanding.”Footnote 63 Describing “love” as the essence of class reconciliation, Rainsford also argued that women alone could generate and circulate the love that unity demanded. Leading a service for new members of the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) in March 1894, for instance, he explained that all unions “would be failures so long as they were not based on love.” He proclaimed that women never before “so had the power of moulding the society in which they moved.”Footnote 64
To share as much reconciling love as possible while also avoiding potential practices of pauperization, St. George’s and other institutional churches asked the poor to pay for much of the charity they received. Reporting on prominent institutional churches in 1902, a Congregationalist magazine identified the Episcopal Church’s St. Bartholomew’s along with St. George’s as paragons of the institutional church movement not just because they had expansive physical spaces and countless initiatives but especially because “payment is required for services rendered in many departments.”Footnote 65 The report warned that helping people do “what they can and should do for themselves tends to pauperize them and to undermine their manhood or womanhood.”Footnote 66
The policy of avoiding pauperization by requiring payment applied from the very beginning of St. George’s anti-pauperization work. Right after opening in 1884, the church’s Avenue A Mission began offering weekly evenings of entertainment for people in the neighborhood. Entertainments included “five-cent entertainment” events, where visitors could pay for the pleasure of experiencing songs, music, and stereopticon displays. Although organizers seemingly viewed these entertainments as a meaningful balm to the pain of poverty, they insisted upon charging people a nominal sum to indulge in them. Why? As Bishop Henry Potter explained in 1898, “nothing should be free except the gospel.” He added, “the gratuitous giving away of food and other advantages … often tended to pauperize men.”Footnote 67
St. George’s extensive Relief Department followed the priority of payment as much as possible. In 1895, for example, its Grocery Department reported giving some amount of food at no cost to 155 different families. But Deaconess Clara Simpson assured readers of her annual report that all recipients “were in great need, and well known to us.” Simpson noted proudly that only 14 families asked for free groceries regularly.Footnote 68 Those numbers grew substantially by 1897, with 300 families receiving groceries of some kind, 90 receiving free groceries “because they are out of employment, or are too old or too sick to work,” and 50 families buying groceries at subsidized prices.Footnote 69 Simpson took special pride in the number of grocery buyers because she saw the practice of charging for groceries as a superior form of charity to the practice of donation. By selling groceries, she explained, “we are able to assist a large number of people whom it would hurt to give groceries to, or who have too much respect for themselves to ask for help.”Footnote 70 Between 1885 and 1895, the annual budget devoted to groceries grew only from $279.13 to $314.67; in 1896, expenses fell to $230.65.Footnote 71 Simpson and her fellow deaconesses undoubtedly saw that modest budget as evidence of successful charity rather than a lack of generosity. “It is not wise,” Deaconess Georgia Wilkie remarked in 1907 as president of the Relief Department, “to give aid unless it be earned.”Footnote 72 Affirming the same idea in the Clothing Department, Deaconess Hildegarde von Brockdorff argued in 1895 that selling clothes “keeps up our people’s self-respect … much more than a bundle of clothes given them would.”Footnote 73
Especially after the 1893 economic panic deepened poverty still further, St. George’s and other exemplars of Social Christianity increasingly justified the priority of payment and other anti-pauperization measures by appealing to the notion of “self-respect” and related concepts.Footnote 74 Whereas the term “pauper” had stigmatized indiscriminate relief of any kind, newer terminology seemed to celebrate economic independence while also acknowledging that poor people could receive occasional aid so long as the Church prioritized and pursued anti-pauperizing principles. Yet terms like “self-respect” also served as euphemistic ways of renewing calls for the poor to adapt to capitalist culture and help themselves.Footnote 75 One Protestant charity reformer, for example, cautioned in 1894 against allowing the poor to “lose self-respect and become greedy of unearned gain,” while another claimed that giving money or clothing to the poor would pauperize recipients and destroy “their integrity and their self-respect.”Footnote 76 A prominent institutional church in Boston received praise in the press for refusing “handouts” to the poor, thereby aiding them without “impairing their self-respect” or disrupting their transformation into “self-respecting citizens.”Footnote 77 Affirming the spirit of that praise, Rainsford remarked that “the power of self-help, self-respect, and self-dependence is the work of the Christian Church in all her branches.”Footnote 78
But Rainsford admitted that many working people in the church’s neighborhood were not drawn to St. George’s vision of a “good church.” He noted in April 1886, for instance, that “streets were filled with men” around a nearby Roman Catholic church despite “bitterly cold weather,” and he complained that “we have no such spectacle, so far as I know, in any of our Protestant churches to present.”Footnote 79 Eight years later, at a meeting of the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor, Rainsford accused labor organizers of being “hostile to the church.” According to a report on the meeting, the organizers present responded that “working men were only indifferent, not hostile.”Footnote 80 Yet for social Christians committed to anti-pauperization, that indifference provided even greater reason to invest in innovations that might make more churches into “good churches,” thereby overcoming the indifference of poor people whom other sources of charity might pauperize.
Good Givers
Almost every institutional church depended on heavy investment and leadership from wealthy members.Footnote 81 Other “well-backed” churches in New York included St. Bartholomew’s (completed in 1876), which Cornelius Vanderbilt bankrolled, and John D. Rockefeller’s Memorial Church (opened in 1893), known today as Judson Memorial Church. In Philadelphia, the merchant John Wanamaker helped found and then fund Bethany Presbyterian Church, which expanded into an institutional church during the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote 82 Through their investments, Wanamaker, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller all secured power within their own ecclesiastical kingdoms. Pierpont Morgan ruled over the kingdom around St. George’s, where he served as one of the two elected leaders of its vestry from 1885 until his death in 1913 (Figure 1). He insisted that the vestry’s additional members always should compose “a body of gentlemen whom I can ask to meet me in my study,” and he excluded potential members who could not help him “carry the heavy financial burden of the church.”Footnote 83 In his home’s personal study, Morgan and his vestry made the decision to hire Rainsford. Morgan also led vestry members in offering the rector a discretionary fund of $30,000 over three years to improve the church in a way that would engage “the large numbers of people living in the near neighborhood of St. George’s church, whom all efforts had failed to attract to the regular church services.”Footnote 84
Figure 1. A depiction of Rainsford and his supportive vestry from 1903. Morgan is the last figure on the left, and his face is most prominent. Note the anonymity of the other vestrymen, the sports equipment to Rainsford’s right, the donation envelopes to his left, and the prominence of the church’s buildings and endowment. From Elizabeth Moulton, St. George’s Church, New York (New York: St. George’s Church, 1964), 84. With permission from the Archives of the Parish of Calvary, Holy Communion and St. George’s, New York, NY.
Like other wealthy Protestant philanthropists, Morgan did not fund his church’s transformation into an institutional church because of a special sympathy for the poor. Above all, his philanthropy reflected his conviction that only members of his social class could diagnose and solve the problems facing the United States.Footnote 85 In business, he revealed this understanding of self and society through his successive efforts to consolidate industries and to create syndicates of private wealth to secure the solvency of the US economy.Footnote 86 Outside business, he decried socialism and sought to justify the transformative power of private wealth and ideal character through investment in institutions that seemed capable of effecting or modeling what he saw as respectable modes of social life.Footnote 87 Although the Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers of the Gilded Age amassed their fortunes through a variety of industrial and financial affairs, they all seemed to agree that privately funded churches could remediate pauperism and incorporate immigrants into the system of American capitalism by helping them to help themselves.Footnote 88 As a pioneering infrastructural manifestation of Morgan’s belief in the power of private wealth, St. George’s was influential but not unique.
What did Morgan’s money buy for his church? Almost as soon as Rainsford arrived in 1885, Morgan donated around $300,000 as a response to Rainsford’s request for more space. That money enabled the construction of a large building known as the “Memorial Parish House” next to the church (Figure 2). It housed an array of meeting rooms, classrooms, housing for clergy, bathrooms, a library, a gymnasium, and separate clubs for boys, girls, women, and men.Footnote 89 Because Morgan and other bourgeois Protestants also actively supported organizations like the YMCA, many institutional church initiatives and activities had parallels in that organization’s branches.Footnote 90 As the leaders of the YMCA similarly envisioned, anti-pauperizing institutions ideally should exert a “daily touch” upon the lives of their neighborhood’s residents. “However zealous the preaching or beautiful the services,” Rainsford explained, “if it but claim men and women’s attention for a brief portion of one day in seven, it must fail … seriously to affect their lives.”Footnote 91 But institutional churches stood out from related institutions and amplified their own influence by making access to its features and resources contingent on attendance at the church’s services and classes. At St. George’s, that requirement helped push membership up from around twenty families in 1883 to more than 7,000 members and an enrollment of 1,720 in Sunday school in 1906, when Rainsford stepped down as rector.Footnote 92
Figure 2. The Memorial House in 1901. 1901 Yearbook, 60.
The Memorial House’s gymnasium (Figure 3) was especially popular among many of the church’s constituents. Foreseeing its popularity, Rainsford had proposed its construction almost as soon as he arrived.Footnote 93 Once the gymnasium was ready for use, overwhelming demand led the church to assign particular weeknights to organizations such as the St. George’s Athletic Society, the Boys’ Club, the militaristic “Battalion Club,” and the GFS. Often contrasting the church and its facilities with the environment in which the poor lived, church officials boasted that the gymnasium offered “healthful recreation.”Footnote 94 Like the YMCA, the gymnasium channeled an emphasis on “muscular Christianity,” whose advocates sought not simply to replace “effeminacy” with “strenuousness” but also to defend a mode of “manly” patriarchy seen as essential to a coherent moral society. The renowned muscular Christian Theodore Roosevelt, who became New York City’s police commissioner in 1894 before later going on to become US president, counted Rainsford as a good friend.Footnote 95
Figure 3. The gymnasium in 1899. 1899 Yearbook, 85.
Yet even more than its display of muscular Christianity, the gymnasium distilled the church’s racialized vision of incorporating and purifying the neighborhood’s immigrant poor. In many ways, muscular Christianity itself can be seen as an expression of the eugenicist spirit of scientific charity and anti-pauperization.Footnote 96 As historians of European Orientalism have revealed, the characteristic of femininity often was associated with societies understood as premodern, including the societies of “the Orient.”Footnote 97 Especially in Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia, strong bodies became seen as features of strong and modern nations. The modern Olympics began in 1896 as an occasion to compare those nations, and the British invention of “bodybuilding” in 1881 served that same project. By championing muscular Christianity, physical culture, and bodily purity, British and American Protestants enshrined an idealized racial and civilizational body.Footnote 98 Christians could fight “pauperism at its root,” Rainsford remarked in 1895, by attacking vice and cultivating health.Footnote 99
While St. George’s did sometimes engage ethnic communities beyond its primary white German constituency, those other groups were not generally treated as candidates for the kind of transformation in which the church specialized. During the late 1890s, for example, the church began a Sunday school for “the poor and heathen Chinese” who had moved into the neighborhood. Gathering a group of between twenty and forty students on Sundays, the church confirmed three students in 1896. And yet a report on the experiment ultimately concluded that Chinese people were better suited to teaching Chinese students, since “the Chinaman himself [is] necessarily in touch with conditions of his race.”Footnote 100 Similarly reflecting on the distance between the church’s congregation and the array of immigrants surrounding it, Birkhead’s successor, Karl Reiland, lamented that “practically unrestrained immigration has increased our problems amazingly and has challenged our powers of boasted assimilation.” Pointing out that the church’s neighborhood had “a wide distribution of foreigners,” Reiland admitted in 1914 that “we are just now making a systematic effort to reach them.”Footnote 101
St. George’s never reached out meaningfully to Black New Yorkers, most of whom lived farther uptown. Their social distance from the congregation was apparent in the early 1900s, when minstrel shows at the church drew such large attendance that one attendee remarked in 1908 that it felt “just like the early service Easter morning.”Footnote 102 This posture followed a broader pattern in which Northern white Protestants rarely described free Black Americans as potential victims of pauperization, while fretting constantly about pauperizing European immigrants. Before emancipation, apologists for slavery had argued that enslaved people were predisposed to pauperism and avoided pauperization only with the aid of their “master’s nourishing and sustaining hand.”Footnote 103
When white charity reformers in the South and North later accepted that formerly enslaved people could become victims of pauperization, they did so primarily to accomplish their larger goal of condemning indiscriminate charity. They made their case by analogizing the experiences of enslavement and pauperism. Arguing in 1883, for example, that the poor should not receive and depend on poor relief, the social Darwinist and sociologist William Graham Sumner claimed that emancipation had given formerly enslaved people more than their literal freedom; they also had received liberation from dependency. Sumner ignored the wide array of legal and economic inequities that Black Americans continued to face after emancipation, proclaiming that formerly enslaved people now had the ability to help themselves, since they no longer depended on the “care, medicine, and support” they had received while in bondage.Footnote 104 Protestant charity reformers’ fixation on rescuing white European immigrants from pauperization should be seen alongside contemporaneous efforts to abandon the most egalitarian social and political reforms of the Reconstruction era. Both sets of preoccupations were part of a broader campaign to nurture what one historian describes as an “ethnic nationalism centered on whiteness.”Footnote 105
But institutional churches were not solely the province of white Americans. Beginning around 1900, Black Protestants in major cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta established their own institutional churches. In Chicago in 1900, for example, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister Reverdy C. Ransom set up his Institutional Church and Social Settlement, the most prominent early Black institutional church. Offering resources such as reading rooms, clubs for men and women, a kindergarten, industrial education, a gymnasium, and medical services, Ransom’s church and other Black institutional churches served as resources especially for poor Southern migrants and working people in Northern cities that served as hubs of migration.Footnote 106 While some of Ransom’s fellow AME ministers accused him of mimicking white social gospelers and their institutional churches, Ransom drew his greatest inspiration from social settlements, which focused more on class solidarity and mutual aid than institutional churches that premised their initiatives on supposedly benevolent class stratification. At the time, settlement advocates like Jane Addams condemned institutional churches for requiring the poor to feign “feeling for the church” in exchange for relief. But Ransom and other Black social gospelers viewed churches as essential contexts for generating mutual interest and sharing mutual aid.Footnote 107 Reimagining the infrastructural rationale of the institutional church, Ransom viewed it as a form of church life that provided Black Americans with structural support and resources that racist policies and prejudices denied them.
Although St. George’s offered white women and children numerous sources of guidance on how to live responsible and moral lives at work, school, and especially at home, the church devoted relatively little attention to assisting men in their working lives. For boys aged between twelve and seventeen, the church established a trade school in 1893 that offered classes in skills such as carpentry and mechanical drawing, which sought “to stimulate in the boy a desire for skilled labor.”Footnote 108 Yet especially for men older than seventeen, the church focused on nurturing appreciation for bourgeois culture and cultivating devotion to breadwinner capitalism as an ideal form of family life. The church’s bourgeois volunteers presented themselves as social models that activists should admire and emulate rather than condemn.
Consider the case of saloons. Rainsford became infamous in New York for his refusal to insist that working-class men should avoid alcohol. Although he condemned excessive consumption, he also noted that “the vast body of civilized men” drink alcohol and “have our clubs where we can pass the time.”Footnote 109 With that model in mind, Rainsford suggested offering the poor “saloons where beer and light wines may be had by those who want them, and where the surroundings will be clean, cheerful, and moral.”Footnote 110 Trumpeting the fact that funding came from “the liberality of a well-known capitalist and philanthropist,” St. George’s ultimately opened an “anti-saloon saloon” in a former tenement several blocks south of the church. It included a small store and kitchen that offered prepared foods, tea, and coffee for purchase. It also featured club rooms for men and women who paid a monthly membership fee of five cents. The clubs kept the same hours as licensed liquor stores, sold inexpensive drinks, and offered forms of entertainment common to bourgeois social clubs, such as one established a few years earlier at the Memorial House.Footnote 111
Approvingly described as “one of the most important objects aimed at in our Memorial Building—and in itself one of the most important parts of Parish work,” the Men’s Club (Figure 4) was established in the fall of 1888. For an annual subscription of $3, members received access to daily and weekly newspapers, prominent periodicals, a library, a common room, a billiard table, and the opportunity to buy a locker in the gymnasium for an additional $1.Footnote 112 But those were merely the tangible benefits of membership. Detailing the club’s importance, the church’s 1891 yearbook explained that “club life” is “an essential part of the social life of large cities.” But membership in established clubs had been unavailable to the “ordinary wage earner,” who received an income that could “barely furnish the necessaries of a self-respecting life.”Footnote 113
Figure 4. The Men’s Club in 1901. 1901 Yearbook, 73.
For the club’s organizers, features of bourgeois culture such as club membership enhanced the lives of people facing pauperization. Clubs had that effect not just by instilling valuable habits and preferences but also by providing people with “higher, broader views of their own lives, deeper conception of the truth.” Organizers were careful to note that “religion and morality are not forced into the club.”Footnote 114 But they also implied that the club and other bourgeois institutions within the church had what the historian Thomas Rzeznik describes as an “ecclesiological” influence. Clubs became ecclesiologically meaningful at St. George’s and other wealthy churches, Rzeznik suggests, by defining “the proper relationship between faith, practice, and aesthetics.”Footnote 115 Those congregations’ most influential members viewed their own club affiliations as essential factors for personal and professional success, and Pierpont Morgan valued clubs more than most.Footnote 116
Clubs valorized the concept of “character,” which advocates of scientific charity saw as a quality that generated efficient and reliable decisions in both mundane and extraordinary affairs. But people who attributed significance to character rarely defined it. Character depended fundamentally upon a person’s stature within a community of other people with good character. Inherently exclusionary, this preoccupation with character justified elite classism and racism; it also served as a rationale for creating more institutions designed to reproduce good character. Churches and social clubs both served this purpose. New York’s most prominent clubs all admitted members selectively, denying membership to Jews, Black people, and women—until elite women began creating their own clubs.Footnote 117
By sanctifying bourgeois culture and concepts of character, St. George’s inspired many of New York’s wealthy Protestants to affiliate themselves with institutional churches in general and St. George’s in particular. One of the church’s new members in the 1890s was Seth Low, a prosperous tea and silk merchant who had served as mayor of Brooklyn and would become mayor of New York in 1902. Low became a member of St. George’s vestry in 1893 while president of Columbia University. He had not even begun attending the church before joining its vestry—a fact that reveals how that body functioned as a sort of corporate board more than a collection of devoted members.Footnote 118
In addition to providing St. George’s with funding and industrial expertise, wealthy members of the church and the vestry were often active charity reformers. Low, for instance, was recognized as a national expert on scientific charity and presented several papers to meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction.Footnote 119 To help prove that private benevolence could achieve the same effect as state-funded outdoor relief, he donated large sums to the church and volunteered in a variety of roles—including serving as the leader of a special Bible class for members of the Men’s Club beginning in October 1893. An emblem of modern Christian masculinity, Low also served as the host of occasional Friday evening discussion sessions with groups of approximately seventy-five members of the Men’s Club.Footnote 120
By 1891, the Men’s Club had become such a valued site of anti-pauperization that the church considered building a new club for men and boys. The proposed club would have replaced the Avenue A Mission, which had served as the primary venue for the church’s poor relief initiatives before the Memorial House’s completion.Footnote 121 In 1893, the budget for the “Men’s Club and Gymnasium” was $1,200—only $130 less than the entire budget for the Sunday school.Footnote 122 A report in the New-York Tribune described the club as “a special feature of the work at St. George’s,” and noted that its membership had already grown to 600 men—up 150 from the previous year—with a daily attendance of more than 100.Footnote 123
Recognizing club membership as a peculiar yet valuable approach to poor relief, critics began asking whether St. George’s and other institutional churches inadvertently pauperized the poor through their clubs. An anonymous clergyman at a “very wealthy church” with “the largest men’s club in New York attached to any church” responded to this concern in 1903, insisting in an editorial that “you no more pauperize five hundred workingmen by building for them a place of pleasurable resort than you pauperize the same number of college students by building a library.” Paraphrasing the classical economist David Ricardo, the clergyman argued that the only way to make the poor help themselves was to make them “dissatisfied enough they will make sufficient effort to lift themselves out of it.” He claimed that clubs had that effect through their contrast with the “filth and sordidness” that poor men experienced at home.Footnote 124
In addition to pursuing its campaign of anti-pauperization through its gymnasium and clubs, St. George’s designed practices of personal finance intended to teach the poor how to understand and appreciate money in ways that harmonized with capitalist ideology and culture. Those financial practices included forms of saving and giving.Footnote 125 Especially at organizations for women and children—such as the Helping Hand Society, the GFS, and the Sunday school—leaders encouraged attendees to save at least a few cents every week. Overseeing the GFS’s “Penny Provident Fund,” Pierpont Morgan’s daughter Louisa testified to her belief that saving money would teach the GFS’s working-class women to appreciate the private accumulation of capital. “I am encouraged to see,” she remarked in 1901, that “many of them are learning … that if one takes care of the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves.”Footnote 126 Louisa was right: the number of depositors in the GFS’s fund grew from 41 to 125 between 1891 and 1897, with the amount saved increasing from $86.32 to $426.20. But the immense scale of the Morgan family’s wealth almost ensures that Louisa did not worry about saving pennies in her own financial life.Footnote 127
This emphasis on saving underscored a preoccupation with the idea and practice of business as a remedy to pauperism. Along with an appeal to “science,” an appeal to “business” represented a seemingly modern response to apparent social chaos.Footnote 128 Contemporaneous writers who reported on the institutional church movement often identified business principles as key characteristics of the paradigm. Remarking that St. George’s was “run like a great railway,” a report in the popular magazine Harper’s Monthly explained that “the conduct of a modern church in the big city is a business in itself, requiring unusual business aptitude, technical skill, and financial and executive ability.”Footnote 129 The church’s organizations amplified this ethos through classes and discussions. At meetings of the GFS, for instance, regular gatherings featured short lectures and group discussions on topics such as “Are Labor Unions Beneficial to the Wage Earner?” and “Does the Spirit of Competition Help Us in Life?”Footnote 130
Alongside practices of saving, St. George’s cultivated practices of giving among its working-class parishioners. Clearly, the church’s wealthiest members easily could have bankrolled the church’s entire annual budget—which totaled $59,957 in 1893 and $91,503 ten years later. But administrators argued that giving was essential for everyone involved with the church, since giving had a “moral, transforming, regenerating value.”Footnote 131 From that perspective, poor members not only benefited morally from giving but also received an opportunity to claim a more significant stake in the church. In a way, that sounds egalitarian in spirit. Yet it also made individuals’ stature dependent upon their demonstrated willingness to give. It was a sort of plutocratic “taxpayer” approach to power.Footnote 132 To help the community recognize donors’ power, the church regularly published lists of donors in its newspaper and annual yearbooks.
St. George’s compelled giving among the church’s poorest members through two main strategies. First, friendly visitors discussed donations whenever they visited their assigned households. In 1897, for instance, a special committee of visitors spent several weeks visiting 165 “families residing east of First Avenue,” delivering copies of a letter that urged the families to “fall into line” and subscribe. Rainsford later boasted that this practice added $1,000 per year to the church’s revenue. “And what was better,” he recounted in the spirit of scientific charity, the church’s request “helped those people … to feel as they had not done before that they were part and parcel of it.”Footnote 133 A second method of fundraising among the less wealthy involved collecting money at virtually every church-related event. In 1893, Rainsford reported raising $2,604.47 from the Sunday school alone. He relentlessly described “the giving of our poor” as an act that benefited the giver above all. If a child begins giving early, he argued, “he will, as a workingman, continue to give.”Footnote 134
For Morgan and others who managed philanthropic affairs, all of these anti-pauperization schemes demonstrated the virtue of private wealth and proved that private philanthropists should not relinquish control over charity and social reform to the administrative state. He and his allies had long made similar arguments through other institutional investments. In addition to funding organizations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice (1872), Morgan joined a group of other wealthy New Yorkers in founding the “Anti-Income Tax Association of New York” in 1871. This group had denounced the income tax levied during and following the Civil War as unconstitutional and insisted upon the sufficiency and wisdom of private philanthropy.Footnote 135
Protestant ministers and charity reformers often affirmed a preference for private philanthropy over state-run and tax-funded charity. The Boston minister, editor, and charity reformer Edward Everett Hale explained in 1886, for example, that “out-door distribution by public authorities must be reduced steadily to the lowest possible figures,” and he declared that “private charity … may have to spend more money than before.”Footnote 136 Amplifying this view a decade later, Rainsford called for “the centralization of ecclesiastical wealth” in the hands of churches that could and would effect change.Footnote 137 Admitting that “private philanthropy, corporate charity, can never altogether remove evils,” he held up churches as vessels of private philanthropy that could “anticipate legislation, not merely follow in its track.” Only well-backed churches, he insisted, could “awaken and … educate man’s sense of duty to his fellow” and “bridge a fast-widening and fast-deepening gulf that divides the rich from the poor.”Footnote 138
But Rainsford’s defense of private philanthropy rang hollow to many contemporaneous activists who championed more radical strategies of reform. Condemning Rainsford as “the Capitalist Parson,” a front-page article in The People—the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party of America—chastised him for describing the poor as “the lower orders of society.” The author accused Rainsford of refusing to “question the right or wrong of the social inequality,” ridiculed him as the “obedient tool” of the wealthy “people who pay him,” and concluded that “he does not advocate a righting of social wrongs.”Footnote 139 Throughout all of 1897 and 1898, Rainsford remained one of the only ministers whom The People singled out for condemnation.
Churches in general did not escape criticism. The People and its contributors denounced “poor laws, church charities, friendly societies, [and] … Salvation armies” as “reforms and palliatives” that “have failed to bring about any relief.” Those institutions only modified “outward appearances” rather than “the internal character of the economic structure.”Footnote 140 Accusing churches of preaching “the religion of Capital” and following a creed of keeping “the working masses submissive to the privileged class,” the paper’s contributors insisted that churches stood far away from the “class-conscious programme” of true socialists. They condemned “Christian Socialism” as an oxymoron. And on that point, at least, Pierpont Morgan would have agreed. While the paper’s writers insisted that prevailing forms of Christianity were not compatible with socialism’s class consciousness, Morgan and like-minded philanthropists viewed socialism as incompatible with their understanding of Christianity.Footnote 141
Conclusion
For many philanthropists, policymakers, religious leaders, reformers, and other avowed social Christians at the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of pauperization offered a complete method of accounting for present inequities and prescribing future solutions. It accounted for power disparities and provided a rationale for change. Pauperism resulted from something inside paupers themselves, but the practice of “pauperizing” a poor person was also a volitional act, which meant that potential pauperizers had power over and responsibility for paupers. Pauperization accordingly demanded innovative approaches to charity, which ideally would ameliorate poverty by encouraging and instructing the poor to help themselves effectively and efficiently. Institutional churches were one such innovation.
But what happened to institutional churches? Modern-day megachurches are heirs to aspects of the institutional church, insofar as megachurches not only have offered their congregations an array of services and forms of entertainment but also have sustained their large scale through persistent fundraising.Footnote 142 With extensive programming and an emphasis on entertainment, megachurches also embraced the notion that subsidiary institutions could draw people who did not normally attend church. Unlike institutional churches, however, megachurches took root primarily in suburbs and exurbs beginning at the end of the twentieth century. Whereas megachurches focused on attracting “spiritual seekers,” institutional churches concerned themselves with remediating pauperism and inoculating poor workers and immigrants against it, so that they might become ideal members of a society organized by racial capitalism.
The mission of anti-pauperization proved difficult to sustain beyond the early decades of the twentieth century. Assessing the state of the institutional church in 1922, one journalist interviewed an assistant minister at St. George’s, who foretold “the inevitable end of all churches, which depend for the growth upon institutional features.” The journalist had chosen to quote a minister from St. George’s because it was, the article explained, a “pioneer in the field” that had “undertaken and successfully prosecuted as many institutional features as any other church.” Noting that St. George’s and similar churches already had experienced a “gradual decline in power and influence,” the minister attributed his pessimism to the tendency for parishioners to move uptown as they moved into the middling classes.Footnote 143 The most ambitious institutional churches became unsustainable as urban populations continued to turn over, recessions continually depressed church revenue, and wealthy philanthropists such as Pierpont Morgan died. Rather than funding institutional churches as means of flexing their social power, the heirs of Morgan and other wealthy Protestants turned to new nonprofit foundations and corporations.Footnote 144 As the political scientist Rob Reich notes, tax exemption and deduction policies have essentially subsidized the ability of wealthy plutocrats to fund their chosen charitable organizations and initiatives.Footnote 145
Yet even if institutional churches became difficult to sustain financially and logistically, advocates of that ecclesiastical form continued to insist upon the unparalleled power of churches and private philanthropy to reform society. Those convictions helped animate the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), which the leaders of the OICL founded in 1908. The purpose of the OICL had been to share strategies of “applied Christianity,” which prominent institutional churches and their leaders viewed as the best way to achieve “the alleviation of human suffering, the elevation of man and the betterment of the world.”Footnote 146 The OICL’s leaders established the FCC in order to amplify their emphasis on the incomparable social power of churches and their leaders, at a time when the continued relocation of middle-class congregants out of urban centers left city churches with shrinking congregations and revenue streams.Footnote 147
At the FCC and elsewhere, practices of anti-pauperization remained essential to the vision of charity and social reform that social Christians championed. They defined what became known as the Social Gospel. Looking back on the first decades of the twentieth century, the ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr remarked in the 1960s that St. George’s reflected what he saw as “the best insights of the social gospel.”Footnote 148 In both the North and the South, churches in urban as well as rural settings adopted “institutional features” and retained their self-appointed role as key sources of charity and poor relief. As the historian Alison Greene explains, wealthier white churches in the South often limited their relief almost exclusively to white people, and they channeled anti-pauperization principles by describing direct or indiscriminate relief as “a threat to the social order.”Footnote 149 The FCC enshrined the same principles in its “Social Creed of the Churches” (1908), a statement that contemporaries and historians have celebrated as an expression of progressive zeal. Its second principle, for instance, asserted “the right of all men to the opportunity for self-maintenance,” which should be “wisely … safeguarded against encroachments of every kind.”Footnote 150 Calling for the poor to help themselves out of poverty and achieve self-respect through wage labor, this creed can be read as a critique of the union-led strikes and work disruptions that socialists and labor leaders had championed.Footnote 151 For social gospelers of the early twentieth century, the growing popularity of the socialist and labor movements served as an invitation to redeploy fears and solutions that previously swirled around the phenomenon of pauperism. Key to that phenomenon was an emphasis on the obligation and authority of wealthy philanthropists to transform people in need.
Due in part to advocacy by organizations like the FCC—which became part of the National Council of Churches in 1950—churches have remained pathways through which private philanthropists have attempted to address the social problems they care about most. Since 1917, the US federal government has subsidized this plutocratic vision of social change by allowing individual income tax deductions for donations to churches and other private charities.Footnote 152 Federal investment deepened further in 1996, when religious organizations began receiving enhanced funding from federal and state governments to support “faith-based initiatives” devoted to solving social problems such as poverty and homelessness. Just as institutional churches presented their anti-pauperization efforts as forms of private charity that reformed society more effectively than the administrative state, faith-based initiatives have been premised on the notion that church-based charity is comparable and even superior to the work of public agencies. But critics routinely have questioned this confidence in private philanthropy. Studies have suggested that faith-based initiatives tend to validate the moral views of religious charities, their volunteers, and their funders far more than they help resolve complex social problems.Footnote 153
In Rainsford’s era no less than our own, anti-pauperizers have insisted upon the social good that their charitable initiatives have generated, and those claims deserve serious consideration. In 1885, the twenty-five women who came to St. George’s employment society earned money by producing garments and cleaning homes, and that money surely helped the workers and their families. But countless other solutions could have provided those families with economic assistance. At St. George’s, Pierpont Morgan not only could have sustained his entire congregation through that year’s economic depression but also could have championed more systemic solutions to large-scale poverty. Today, numerous billionaires could fully fund solutions to an array of seemingly intractable problems. But the devil’s bargain of private philanthropy—continually incubated within churches—is that wealthy individuals tend to define what constitutes the social good, whom it should benefit, and how to achieve it. This has allowed the call to “help yourself” to remain a sacred obligation.
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