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By Root 7837 0

moral mantle over the public at large, some Protestant reformers concentrated on protecting their coreligionists’ ranks. Benjamin DeCosta, a New York Episcopal minister, met with purity reformers, including Stead, on a visit to England. Their work seized his imagination, particularly the efforts of the White Cross Society, newly established by the Church of England. This organization had already converted thousands of respectable workingmen to the cause of a single standard—chastity for both sexes—and DeCosta hurried home to establish the White Cross Army in New York. The organization recruited young people, who pledged themselves to sexual abstinence before marriage. Once enrolled—and a single White Cross meeting in 1888 attracted a thousand members—participants were sent out (often in tandem with YMCA cadre) to disseminate purity literature to other youth groups in the city. White Cross counselors also provided sex education, which consisted chiefly in assisting young men to refrain from illicit activities.

Refuges that provided alternatives to commercial culture were central to this strategy. In January 1887 the YWCA began to offer home-havens in the dangerous city. The first Y, at 7 East 15th Street, provided educational classes, a free lending library, and wholesome entertainments. The Children’s Aid Society expanded its program of lodging houses for newsboys and industrial schools for working-class boys and girls.

In 1884 Grace Hoadley Dodge, wealthy young philanthropist and Sunday School teacher, organized the 38th Street Working Girls Society to isolate members from exposure to the street, cheap dance halls, theaters, and, in general, male cupidity. Adopting the model of the burgeoning women’s club movement, Dodge provided clubhouses—nineteen of them within ten years—salted with moral education (emphasizing “purity of life, dutifulness to parents, faithfulness to employers and thrift”) and peppered by exposure to the “refined influences” of ladies of her class. These retreats also provided more tangible benefits: libraries, entertainment, doctors, insurance, and classes in cooking, sewing, hygiene, childrearing, and household management. The clubs attracted mainly American-born women—carpet and silk factory workers, salesgirls and dressmakers, telegraph operators and stenographers—who were more open than the immigrants to the Anglo-American ideals of the reformers.

DECENTEST NATION

For many in the Protestant middle class, Culture itself came to constitute a refuge—albeit a somewhat secularized one—especially after Matthew Arnold came to visit in 1883. The celebrated English poet and essayist was well known in the city for his 1869 indictment, in Culture and Anarchy, of Britain’s fragmentation into selfish class fractions. English workers, Arnold had said, threatened social chaos by demanding greater power, as did aristocrats by their complacent defense of a privileged status quo. The British middle class, which should have been a stabilizing force, had abandoned the public good for an individualistic and spiritually impoverished pursuit of riches. Chaos might yet be forestalled, Arnold argued, if Anarchy were combated by Culture—the pursuit of beauty and intelligence, “sweetness and light.”

Arnold brought a similar warning and appeal to New York, beginning with a leeture in Chickering Hall. As the New World was even more complacent, philistine, and anarchic than the Old, it was the duty of America’s saving remnant—its cultivated gentlefolk—to promote the “elevated and beautiful” and to ennoble the public by transforming “the administration, the tribunals, the theatre, the arts.” When Arnold took this message on the national lecture circuit, he would be condemned as just another snooty Englishman disparaging American manners. But many of New York’s genteel intellectuals received him warmly, for they saw his prescriptions as legitimating a mission they had already embraced: ennobling, elevating, and purifying the metropolitan literary scene.

One of Arnold’s many admirers was Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the