Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [582]
Beecher insisted, moreover, on Christians’ responsibility for their fellows, a position with great appeal for those who wanted to be socially respectable and socially responsible. Plymouth thus provided a welcome contrast to elite churches like Grace Episcopal, which middle-class spokesmen like journalist James Parton lambasted as little more than ecclesiastical clubs, designed “for the accommodation of persons of ten thousand a year, and upward.”
Beecher, like Finney before him, believed that people could and should contribute both to their own salvation and to society’s. Indeed he went Finney one better. The older evangelist (whom Beecher invited to preach at Plymouth in 1849) sought social reform through conversion, not legislation; he declined to “get up a Christian party in politics.” Beecher, however, engaged in direct political action. Each year, just before Plymouth’s sale of pews, he restated his outspoken support for abolition and women’s rights, so that congregants would have no cause for later complaint about their investment.
Beecher also helped parishioners negotiate the oft-conflicting claims of morality and business. He vigorously denounced speculative and corrupt practices and demanded that trade be conducted according to the highest standards. Yet he insisted that “religion and commerce stand together,” with “one working from a divine nature, and the other from a selfish; but both together conferring benefaction.” He also helped his flock deal with the prosperity attending their worldly success. Counseling against either extravagance or penuriousness, he defended frugality and discipline, while reassuring his audiences that affluence as such presented no obstacle to God’s grace and might well be a sign of divine approbation. A love of true beauty—as opposed to superficial fashion—was evidence of inner refinement. And true refinement—not mere aristocratic display—was evidence of Christian grace.
GENTEEL PERFORMANCES
Middle-class New Yorkers who set out to demonstrate refinement by acquiring beautiful commodities found handcrafted luxury items unaffordable. Mass-produced versions, however, were well within their reach—and satisfyingly beyond the grasp of cruder classes below. Their parlors now bloomed with framed chromolithographs, machine-woven floral carpets, machine-pressed glassware, mahogany bureaus, wallpaper, ottomans, sofas, chairs, tables, and books. Perhaps even a modest upright piano.
Commodities were problematic, however. Those in the middling ranks who really did hanker to keep pace with the rich were doomed to be outspent and outclassed, their imitation luxuries branding them an imitation bourgeoisie. Those who made a point of denouncing “profligacy and waste in the upper classes” (as middle-class tribune Horace Greeley put it) worried that they themselves might be succumbing to what Greeley called “the shameless ostentation which reigns in our dwellings and furniture, the boundless luxury which presides at our entertainments, [and] the premature exposure of our young men to the contact of a vicious and rotten civilization.”
In either case it was imperative to demonstrate that goods signified grace, not vulgarity. And the best way to do so was by acting in a refined manner—displaying graceful manners, polished conversation, a self-assured bearing, a genteel sensibility. Assuming such virtues, however, especially for those new to citified or bourgeois ways, required study and practice. Fortunately, a small army of experts was ready and eager to advise them. The publishing industry churned out etiquette books—over one hundred between 1830 and 1860—aimed at upwardly striving urbanites or those who were wealthy but socially challenged urbanites. The courtesy-book authors, along with popular fiction writers, codified and inculcated standards of polite behavior, counseling novices how to dress, how to dine, how to walk,