Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [917]
Some evangelicals still hoped that old-time proselytizing would solve the problem. The Sunday school movement and urban revivalists pressed ahead with renewed vigor, while the New York Mission and Tract Society updated its publications and, with substantial Chamber of Commerce support, tried aggressively to convert the Jews. But the immigrant wards seemed impervious to such efforts.
There were Protestants who had more of an impact, though their successes were of limited comfort to the established ministry; their advance guard had arrived on Wednesday, March 10, 1880. A Pioneer Party of the Salvation Army had marched down the gangplank of the steamer Australia at Castle Garden, singing hymns and carrying a flag emblazoned BLOOD & FIRE NEW YORK NO. 1—to the amazement of a curious throng of bystanders and reporters who mistook them at first for a traveling concert troupe.
Founded two years earlier in England by Methodist William Booth, the Salvation Army had taken evangelical aim at the most destitute members of the London poor, then decided to expand to America. A company of seven female volunteers was dispatched under the command of trusted Booth lieutenant George Scott Railton, a former clerk turned full-time missionary. Immediately on arrival the little vanguard set out to “wed ourselves to the fate and fortunes of the so-called dangerous classes.” Spurning offers of church pulpits, they scandalized respectable opinion by accepting a proposition from the notorious Harry Hill to “do a turn” at his music hall that Sunday. The ensuing revival service—covered in the World under the headline “A Peculiar People amid Queer Surroundings”—-was treated by most of Harry’s clientele as a great joke. But one participant, a well-known Manhattan drunkard known as Ash-Barrel Jimmy, was wrested from the Devil’s grip that day, becoming the Army’s first American convert. Word of this miracle brought large crowds to hear Jimmy’s “testimony” and, soon, that of other reformed drunkards. When the Army’s rented halls overflowed, they took their meetings to the streets.
Uniformed soldiers of the Salvation Army conducting a worship service, Harper’s Weekly, April 3, 1880. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
The Army promoted its orthodox Wesleyan message of grace, forgiveness, and love—and total war on drink—with novel methods. Stirring brass bands, drums, and tambourines, clearly audible over the din of city traffic, attracted passers-by. So did the rousing versions of religious texts set to popular melodies, including barroom ballads, love songs, vaudeville ditties, and minstrel tunes. Ranks and titles gave a new sense of importance and purpose to converts. So did the handsome blue uniforms (and black straw bonnets for women), which made all soldiers, even those too poor to purchase decent clothing, equal participants in the Great Salvation War. Women, who quickly advanced to leadership positions, were attracted in great numbers. The Army displayed a Barnumesque flair for publicity, as when they burned the Devil (the Enemy Commander) in effigy. And they showed a canny, Pulitzerian grasp of effective public prose by hewing to the injunction “Everything short, sharp, striking, vigorous.”
The Army supplemented its psychic and spiritual appeal with tangible social benefits. The October 1886 issue of its weekly publication, the War Cry, announced the opening in Brooklyn of a Rescue Home for Fallen and Homeless Girls, a haven for husbandless pregnant women, the most desperate of outcasts from respectability. In 1889 they opened a “creche” on Cherry Street where infant care was provided for mothers at work or