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Reform Movements

From "Encyclopedia of American Studies"


2010 Johns Hopkins University

Reform in the United States constitutes a central vindication of democracy itself. What is a man born for, asked Ralph Waldo Emerson in Man the Reformer (1841), but to be a reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good. Universal concerns such as the right to vote, the ending of slavery, the pursuit of economic justice, and equal civil rights for all citizens are among the many causes advocated by American reform movements. Yet reformers have been physically attacked, parodied, and ostracized. The reformer, observed Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., in The American as Reformer (1960), is apt to be self-righteous, untidy in dress, truculent, humorless, with a single-track mind and an almost ostentatious liking for the hair shirt and martyrdom: he makes virtue repulsive. At the heart of the American experience of reform is a troubling ambivalence: while glorying in the achievements of reform, Americans have generally resisted, to the point of violence, the very measures that in time have won broad acceptance. The opponents of reform have often had the support of the best-educated, wealthiest, and most influential leaders of public opinion. The U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court historically have been bulwarks against reform legislation in areas such as child labor and the minimum wage. The tenacity of those opposed to reform has seldom stirred American hearts or provided exemplary lessons for the young. But when confronting cigarette or gun manufacturers, reformers have literally found themselves outgunned, outspent, and, until later, outlawyered. A Tocquevillean approach to reform movements suggests that the resources of civil society itself have been the greatest of all the resources for reformers. Before surveying some of the most significant reform movements, then, the typology of American reform and the social conditions within which reform has functioned merit consideration. Even when confronted by the most entrenched abuses, Americans have believed, at heart, that beneficial reform could and would triumph. But there is no doubt that reform is, in the end, political; the nature of American reform displays itself in the conflict of interests in the law court and ballot box. British common law and parliamentary traditions have exerted a profound influence on American attitudes toward reform and give the transition from a special-interest campaign to peaceful political process a unique authority. Americans regarded the British example of reform as being directly relevant to their aspirations. There was a regular flow of ideas, and sometimes funds, from Britain, which heartened American reformers. (In the late twentieth century the flow of ideas was more likely to be in the other direction.) Not only was abolition influenced and encouraged by the successes of William Wilberforce and the British antislavery cause, but even campaigns for sanitary reform in antebellum America drew investigative techniques, rhetoric, and campaigning strategies from British exemplars. Edwin Chadwick's 1842 report on the sanitary condition of the laboring population of Great Britain shaped Dr. John H. Griscom's pioneering Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (1845); he was in correspondence throughout with Chadwick. Stanton Coit, Jane Addams, and other leaders of the settlement-house movement drew direct inspiration from Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. The British connection proved to be a mixed blessing to the abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison solicited the signature of Wilberforce on an antislavery petition; but when he invited Thomas Clarkson, chief organizer of the British antislavery society, to America in 1834, it unwittingly strengthened the claims by slaveholders and their friends in the North that foreign agents such as Clarkson were preaching sedition and plotting to destroy the American way of life. The strong national vein of Anglophobia made American reformers wary of

being thought to be in the pay of their wealthy and aristocratic British allies. Sanitary Reform Abolition and sanitary reform suggest the Janus face of reform in antebellum America. The sanitary reformers were led by a dedicated elite of enlightened physicians including Griscom who, as city inspector, was responsible for compiling records of the health and mortality of the citizens of New York. Griscom was among the first to argue that high levels of mortality and the deteriorating health of the poor were related to housing conditions in the slums. Such elite men were able to rely on the support of leading newspapers and a minority of enlightened, wealthy merchants and industrialists. At their side was an influential group of ministers, concerned about the conditions in the slums, as well as charity workers, journalists, and urban missionaries. Arrayed against the reformers were powerful enemies within Tammany Hall, the political club that dominated the Democratic Party in New York City, who were hostile to any form of governmental intervention. By the 1860s, with William M. Tweed and his Tammany allies in full control of city government, clean streets and decent housing conditions were a distant memory of the time when city government was the province of gentlemen, not the toy of corrupt machine politicians. The owners of tenements opposed any attempt to interfere with the rights of private property. The poor and the immigrants feared that sanitary regulation would make housing more expensive. What swung the battle was the success of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, in which sanitary reformers played a prominent role, and the glaring need for practical sanitary reform in the tenements, alleys, and factories in the face of the impending arrival of ships from Europe that were known to be carrying cholera. Sanitary reform, at first conducted as a political struggle between Whigs and Tammanyites, and then between upstate Republicans and Tweed's Tammany Ring, had about it a modern feel, with experts struggling to impose reforms on a largely unwilling populace. The techniques used in their campaign, from moralistic appeals to heart-wrenching sermons, were shared by other antebellum reform movements. Where sanitary reformers innovated was in commissioning a large-scale sanitary survey in 1864 of New York City's 15,511 tenements. The idea that reforms should be underpinned by facts, hundreds of pages of unanswerable tables and coolly recorded accounts of conditions in the slums, made The Report of the Council of Hygiene of the Citizens' Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition of the City (1865) a prophetic document, looking forward to the large role of science and sociology in the reform projects of the future. With sanitary reform came a recognition that appeals to conscience were unlikely to succeed on their own. It was an important recognition. Abolition Support for the abolition of chattel slavery entered the consciousness of most Americans in the 1830s. Abolition was a deeply unpopular cause, supported before the Civil War by no more than a small minority of Northern whites. Denounced by respectable opinion until the 1850s, abolition had the support of few political leaders of national standing. The abolitionists felt theirs was a sacred cause, and the more extreme abolitionists welcomed martyrdom (the abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy, murdered in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, and John Brown, hung in 1859, were the best known). The abolitionists developed secret forms of organization (the Underground Railroad conveying escaped slaves to Canada and the committee of Massachusetts abolitionists who secretly funded John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry). But in the eyes of most Americans, it seemed a movement with astonishing resources (two million pieces of propaganda were issued by the American Antislavery Society in the early 1840s), powerful international allies, and leading figures moved by the reckless fervor of a noble cause. The sources of abolition lay in conscience and faith. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, in Pennsylvania had spoken early against slavery and slaveholders. The Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery was founded in 1774. Individual states, beginning with Vermont in 1777, abolished slavery within their jurisdictions. The issue of slavery lurked in the wings of the Federal Constitution of 1787, though the terms slave and slavery were omitted out of respect for the scruples of the delegates from Northern states. The Constitution reflected a range of compromises between Northern and Southern interests. It was agreed no steps would be taken to abolish the slave trade for twenty years (Article I, Section 9). The presence of slaves in the Southern states posed a problem when devising the basis for representation in Congress. The

notorious three-fifths clause (Article I, Section 2) accepted that a slave should be counted as three-fifths of a person (a white citizen) for both political representation and taxation. There was also a provision for the return of fugitive slaves (Article IV, Section 2). Drawing on humanitarian and Christian values, the opponents of slavery denounced the Constitution, in William Lloyd Garrison's lurid phrase, as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. The abolition of the slave trade by Britain in 1807 and by the United States in the following year left untouched the domestic reality that slavery was entrenched in the Southern and border states, and territorial expansion raised the prospect that new slave-territories might be admitted to the union. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 admitted that territory into the union as a slave state but excluded slavery from new territories north of 36 30" north latitude, the line that Mason and Dixon had surveyed in the 1760s to establish the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. As cotton became a staple crop in the South, proslavery sentiment strengthened. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, advanced the project of returning freed blacks to Africa. Colonization commanded the support of a broad swathe of American political leaders but proved expensive and ineffective. It was in the grassroots of evangelical Christianity in the North where the first calls were heard for the immediate abolition of slavery. Garrison (1805-1879), a printer from Newburyport, Massachusetts, became the most influential advocate of the immediate ending of slavery. A man of rigid temperament, Garrison grew up in poverty and deep Baptist piety. A Quaker abolitionist drew Garrison into an attempt to rouse antislavery opinion in Massachusetts and made him coeditor of a small paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, in 1829. Garrison's attacks on slaveholders and his denunciations of the colonizers alarmed the subscribers and scared away respectable opinion. When Garrison launched the Liberator in 1831, the core of his support came from the Northern free blacks, delighted with his implacable voice: I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am in earnestI will not equivocateI will not excuseI will not retreat a single inch AND I WILL BE HEARD. He demanded that the nation look slavery directly in the eye and recognize the abomination that it was. Immediatism challenged everything: private property, the Constitution, and the history of legislative compromise, which held the union together. Garrison did not hesitate to call for disunion, demanding that free states break away from a union dominated by the slaveholders. Garrison was a nonresistant abolitionist, wholly opposed to political reform or other means of direct action. But he was an unflagging proselytizer, and sought out supporters far and near. He recognized the value of a network of local antislavery societies, who would form a natural pool of readers for the Liberator and a source of willing hands and funds for the cause. He helped found the New England Antislavery Society in 1832. Abolitionists in New York, led by the wealthy silk merchant Arthur Tappan, funded missionaries to be sent across the nation preaching the cause. Changes in the technology of printing made it possible for leaflets, books, and other forms of printed propaganda to be produced in unprecedented quantities, which flooded the nation. Theirs was the first modern, nationwide single-issue propaganda campaign. In the wake of organized (male) antislavery, there was pressure from women to form female auxiliaries. The doctrine of the women's sphere allowed male abolitionists (and most women) to assume that women would play only a subsidiary role, devoting themselves to organizing events, raising funds, and making tea. Dissatisfaction with that role led to the formation of bodies such as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and the Ladies' New York City Anti-Slavery Society in 1835. Such bodies were rooted in the ethos and values of evangelical Protestantism (the movement in Philadelphia was dominated by Quakers). The leaders were usually the wives of evangelical clergymen and merchants. There were abundant civic associations, which helped bring forward female abolitionists. In a culture with startlingly high levels of personal mobility, the Maternal Associations, closely tied to Congregational churches, gave its members an invaluable sense of community and experience of participation in concerns beyond the home. The tradition of benevolent concern, which preceded the organized abolition movement, gave the members of such societies organizational skills and a rich resource of social capital that made them effective as advocates and vigorous on behalf of righteousness. But, as women, they faced harsh criticism for seeking to involve themselves in public issues. Abolition was not a respectable cause, however righteous in its supporters' eyes. In defiance of public opinion, female

abolitionists in New York invited Angelina and Sarah Grimk to deliver female-only parlor lectures on abolition. In Boston, the Grimks outraged opinion by addressing promiscuous assemblies of males and females. Female abolitionists were engaged in a struggle within their own movementnot only between gradualists and immediatists and between the abolitionists who accepted black members and those who did not, but also in their own ranks there was a sharp divide between those who deplored women taking an enhanced public role and those determined to make gains for women no less than for slaves a central motive of the movement. Garrison's intemperate language and the trail of disorder and riot that followed his public lectures made it clear that he was no consensus-builder or compromiser. Rather, he was a fundamentalist fanatic, declaring no compromise with sin. Nonetheless, the immediatists forced abolition on to the agenda of American life. But the Garrisonians played a reduced role after the passing of the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, when the more sophisticated leadership of Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner found in the newly formed Republican Party a vehicle for the political aspirations of the abolitionist movement. And when slavery was abolished during the Civil War the movement, at its moment of greatest triumph, went into terminal decline. The politics of Reconstruction after the war left the old abolitionist leaders ever more divided, and their movement faded into obscurity. Women Antebellum assumptions about the physiological and intellectual nature of women served to restrict their lives to the woman's sphere of the home, family, and a few forms of respectable employment. Social pressures on young women to find their life's meaning in marriage and family were unrelenting. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the classic feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and the groundbreaking study Women and Economics (1898), argued that women faced a struggle between the competing claims of the socially sanctioned norms of marriage and motherhood on the one hand, and an insurgent, powerful yearning for self-fulfillment on the other. Nineteenth-century theories of the inferiority of women possessed a scientific authority and enjoyed widespread acceptance. The movement, which sought to overturn that near-universal belief, had many namesthe women's movement, feminism, women's rights, women's emancipationand embodied different goals at different times. The decision to exclude women from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 provoked a protest that eventually led to the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. From the Declaration of Sentiments, with its advocacy of equal rights, came the formation of local associations, public lectures, equal suffrage clubs, and petitions aimed at the government. The National Woman's Suffrage Association was founded in New York in 1869, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as the first president. While never approaching the size of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, which had local affiliates in ten thousand towns and rural communities and a formidable symbolic badge of knotted white ribbon, the suffrage campaign achieved its first successes with the winning of limited franchise for women in municipal elections. The local, state, and territorial campaigns were designed to create momentum for a national strategy calling for an amendment to the Constitution that would give women the vote. The unification in 1889 of Stanton's society with the American Woman Suffrage Association, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), gave the movement a unified leadership, with active associations in forty-one states. Under the imaginative leadership of Alice Paul, the congressional committee of NAWSA was turned into a freewheeling single-issue pressure group in 1913, badgering President Woodrow Wilson and Democrats across the nation for their failure to support female suffrage. Paul formed an independent congressional union and then the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916. NWP activists picketed the White House and as a matter of principle went to jail rather than pay fines after they were arrested. They staged hunger strikes and made good street theater. Paul harnessed Greenwich Village socialists, radical feminists such as Crystal Eastman, and wealthy Fifth Avenue hostesses including Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, president of the Political Equality Association. Paul's determined leadership (her admirers compared her to Lenin) made the NWP a powerful campaigning body, but the alliance of radicals with society ladies was inherently unstable. An independent and imperious figure

such as Belmont could never be a team player. Increasingly Paul and the NWP depended on Belmont's great wealth. At a deeper level, a quiet revolution was taking place in the position of women in American society. Between 1870 and 1930, the number of women gainfully employed outside the home increased from 1.7 million to 10.5 million. In the long term this change was of greater consequence than the politics of the movement's leadership. The case for a constitutional amendment, passionately argued for a generation, succeeded in June 1919 when both houses of Congress passed what would become the Nineteenth Amendment. After ratification in August 1920, the constitutional strategy and the radical elitism of the NWP seemed vindicated, and the old arguments for the inferiority of women were clearly fading. But the franchise, for so many decades regarded as the panacea for the social ills of women, did not usher in a new age of economic or social equality. In the post-1920 aftermath the movement splintered. NAWSA disbanded after designating the League of Women Voters as its successor. Issues of birth control, world peace, and racial injustice were largely abandoned by the NWP. The leadership of NWP and NAWSA sought to detach organized feminism from other social and political issues that affected women. When the feminist movement was reborn in the 1960s and 1970s, the movement reclaimed the term feminism as a challenge to the old divisions between women and a challenge to the full panoply of sexual hierarchies. Civil Rights Founded in 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pursued a policy of investigating abuses and seeking legal remedies for the discriminations that African Americans experienced across the nation. Working alliances between white liberals and African Americans, impelled by a generous vision of racial equality, made scarcely more than marginal inroads on the formidable edifice of prejudice and the pseudoscience on which segregation and discrimination were based. The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South in the early twentieth century shifted the issue from the impoverished farms of the South to the factories and slums of the urban North. In the jazz clubs and ballrooms of Chicago and New York, African Americans were more likely to be performers and waiters than customers, but the influence of jazz made Americans aware, in a way that the old black-face minstrelsy had never done, that theirs was increasingly a culture of racial crossover and complexity. Although World War II was fought by racially segregated regiments, President Harry Truman signed an executive order in 1948 that desegregated the armed forces. Perhaps more than any other single presidential act, Truman's signature prepared the way for the many challenges mounted against segregation in the following decade. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), in which the Supreme Court unanimously swept away the formal segregation of public education, was built on decades of careful legal work by the NAACP. The strategy of seeking legal redress, and legislative remedy, remained at the heart of the struggle for civil rights. The result of the Brown decision was decades of obstruction and massive resistance by white Southerners. When the struggle to desegregate education moved to the North, the resistance was no less determined. The 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in retrospect has become a national symbol of the marches, pickets, sit-ins, beatings, bombings, and arrests that have marked every stage of the civil rights movement. The debates among participants and historians continue to swirl around the events in Montgomery, which began, peacefully enough, on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a seamstress, a Methodist, and an active member of the NAACP, declined to vacate her seat on a crowded bus to make way for a standing white passenger. The bus driver summoned a policeman, who arrested Parks. African American religious and community leaders in Alabama had been looking for a legal case as a wedge against the whole structure of segregation. Parks agreed to fight the case, and at once a furious networking through the African American community began. A group of African American female teachers at Alabama State University organized a petition calling for a boycott of the local bus service. The decision to oppose the arrest was taken to the leading African American ministers in Montgomery, who concurred with the strategy, rewrote the boycott appeal, and called on their congregations to walk to work. On the day that Parks was convicted and fined fourteen dollars, the buses had no black passengers. The boycott organization elected a twenty-six-year-old Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., as president. Addressing a mass meeting, King, his rhetoric soaring, became a national leader of the struggle for racial equality with his first major speech.

King embraced the Gandhian tactic of nonviolent resistance through civil disobedience. The African American community, divided internally by class, education, and religion, persisted in the boycott despite concerted pressure from the white power structure in Montgomery. With the full force of tradition, the law, and complete control of local government, white Alabamans failed to crush the boycott. In a momentous decision in November 1956, the Supreme Court declared void the legal basis of segregation. The Montgomery boycott in 1955-1956 embodied the classical form of American reform, rooted in the mesh of civil society. Money was always tight and leadership, improvised. But it had a resource that Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), identified as a particular strength, a form of social capital, that Americans might call on: the habits of acting together in the affairs of daily life. Writing of white Americans in the 1830s, Tocqueville's perception of the importance of civic associations applied equally to the African American community in Montgomery in 1955. The boycott was won as much in the black churches, in the Women's Political Council, and in the established leadership in the local and state branches of the NAACP, as in the Supreme Court. Yet when, as so many observers fear, civil society wanes and the social trust and confidence to work together is weakened, reform becomes ever more dependent on the whims and agendas of its wealthy supporters. Conscience, faith, and politics are the American way of reform. Images

Faith, hope, charity. Inebriate's express. c.1870. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Our countrymen in chains! Am I not a man and a brother? 1837. John Greenleaf Whittier, writer. Broadsides, Leaflets, and Pamphlets from America and Europe, Library of Congress.

Suffrage parade. New York, New York. 1913. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach watching agents pour liquor into sewer following a raid during the height of Prohibition. c.1921. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

Dorothea Lynde Dix. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. 1963. Warren K. Leffler, photographer. U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Bliss, William D. P., ed., The Encyclopedia of Social Reform; Including Political Economy, Political Science, Sociology and Statistics (Funk 1897) [despite its age, this massive work (nearly 1,500 pages) remains an invaluable source of information on nineteenth-century reform movements]. . Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (Simon & Schuster 1988) [a detailed and accessible narrative history of King and the early stages of the civil rights movement]. . Claybaugh, Amanda, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Cornell Univ. Press 2006). Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale Univ. Press 1987). Duberman, Martin , ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton Univ. Press 1965). Engs, Ruth Clifford, Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform (Praeger 2001). Frick, John W., Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge 2003). Higham, John , ed., Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations since World War II (Penn. State Univ. Press 1997). Homberger, Eric, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (Yale Univ. Press 1994).

Mckivigan, John, ed., Abolitionism and American Reform (Routledge 1999). Nye, Russel B., William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers (Little, Brown 1955). O'Neill, William L., Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Quadrangle Bks. 1971). Perry, Lewis, and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (La. State Univ. Press 1979). Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Harper 1965). Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience (Knopf 1984). Yellin, Jean Fagan , and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Cornell Univ. Press 1994). Young, Michael P., Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement. New Ed. (Univ. of Chicago Press 2007). Eric Homberger

2010 Johns Hopkins University

Persistent URL to the Entry: http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/jhueas/reform_movements/0

APA
Homberger, E.(2010). Reform movements. In Encyclopedia of American studies. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.wpunj.edu:2048/login? url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/jhueas/reform_movements/0

MLA
Homberger, Eric "Reform Movements." Encyclopedia of American Studies. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Credo Reference. Web. 23 April 2014.

Chicago
Homberger, Eric "Reform Movements." In Encyclopedia of American Studies. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. http://ezproxy.wpunj.edu:2048/login? url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/jhueas/reform_movements/0 (accessed April 23, 2014.)

Harvard
Homberger, E. 2010 'Reform movements' in Encyclopedia of American studies, Johns Hopkins University Press, , USA. Accessed: 23 April 2014, from Credo Reference

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