Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [776]
RAGS TO ‘SPECTABILITY RELIGION
More than ever, middle-class families hewed to distinctively middle-class creeds and denominations, clustering in neighborhood Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian churches and having little-to do with Catholicism unless they were Irish or German. Middling New Yorkers harkened particularly to the teachings of three theologians whose messages resonated with special force within their social stratum: the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the Rev. Dwight L. Moody, and the Rev. Horatio Alger Jr.
In the postwar years Henry Ward Beecher was at the top of his form. His exuberant oratorical performances pulled crowds of Manhattanites across the river on Sunday mornings (on “Beecher boats”) to drink in his Plymouth Church sermons alongside Brooklyn brokers, small businessmen, professionals, clerks, bookkeepers, and skilled laborers. The “Hercules of American Protestantism” made twenty thousand dollars a year—equal to the president’s salary—supplemented with income from writing articles for the secular and religious press, penning a bestselling novel, and giving lectures.
Part of Beecher’s attraction lay in his long-standing ability to successfully negotiate tensions in middle-class ideologies, as in his continuing reassurances to privileged audiences that social inequalities generated by the free market system were divinely sanctioned and morally justifiable. Now, in the postwar age of Darwin, Beecher demonstrated a capacity to reconcile religion with reason—coequal polestars for his middle-class followers. Confronted with hard evidence from geologists, paleontologists, and biologists that challenged traditional biblical teachings, Beecher responded by accepting the new findings, formally embracing Darwin in 1882, though implicitly he had done so much earlier. Beecher argued that Science and Religion were not really in conflict, as evolution was God’s work. God was imminent in Nature, and His Laws might be grasped by the rational mind, but His Divine Essence was Love, and that could only be captured by contemplation of Nature’s beauty. God could therefore be best discerned, Beecher suggested, by the refined and the sensitive, attributes that (like knowledge and education) could be cultivated. It was possible, accordingly, for people to “ripen” by their own efforts to a “nobler plane,” attaining a level at which they were naturally attracted to love and goodness and cleaved to proper behavior as a matter of course, not coercion.
Organizing the process of elevating masses of middling men and women to such an exalted status was central to the work of Dwight L. Moody, the era’s most influential evangelical preacher, and in 1875 Moody decided to undertake a jumbo-scale revival in Beecher’s Brooklyn, one that would dwarf the efforts of prewar predecessors like Charles Grandison Finney. As a young man, Moody had moved from Massachusetts to Chicago, become a successful shoe salesman and usurious moneylender, and worked for the Chicago YMCA. After a conversion experience, he became an itinerant revival preacher in the midwest, then rocketed to fame after a successful 1873-75 tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland, along with Ira D. Sankey, his musical director, who led congregants in old hymns and taught them new ones.
On his return, Moody launched the revival in Brooklyn. Demonstrating a mastery at organizing urban camp meetings, the evangelist converted a huge skating rink to a six-thousand-seat auditorium, advertised extensively with posters and newspapers, and accommodated reporters on the platform who in turn related the services at great length. The following year, 1876, he worked out of New York City’s mammoth Hippodrome, the remodeled Harlem Railroad Depot at 26th and Madison whose adaptation cost a substantial ten thousand dollars, plus a fifteen-hundred-dollar weekly rental.
Moody’s ministry was financed by