Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [929]
In New York, moreover, many Episcopalian laymen were drawn from the ranks of the emerging corporate elite—the very bankers and businessmen who were rejecting laissez-faire ethics in the economic marketplace. Nowhere were the consequences of this connection exemplified more dramatically than at St. George’s Church. Erected in 1848 on then-exclusive Stuyvesant Square (and rebuilt there after it burned down in 1865), by the 1880s the brownstone Romanesque Revival church was in trouble. Its Protestant parishioners had dwindled away, leaving it adrift in a sea of Catholics and Jews, facing empty pews and mounting debts. Trinity could survive without a constituency by living off its tenement rent rolls, but St. George’s had either to reach out or move on. Digging in their heels, the remaining vestrymen—led by Senior Warden John Pierpont Morgan—named the Rev. William Stephen Rainsford as the new rector in 1883.
The thirty-three-year-old Rainsford, a Dublin native with a Cambridge education, had worked in urban ministries since the 1870s and developed strong views on the crisis of urban Protestantism. It was, he said, essential to confront the fact that “the whole aspect of the modern Protestant churches, in our large cities at least, is repellent to the poor man.” When interviewed for the position at St. George’s, Rainsford had proposed to Morgan that the church deemphasize doctrine and open itself up to the poor by abolishing pew rentals and offering a variety of secular programs. “Done,” said Morgan, who agreed to make up any resulting deficits. The vestry poured resources into recreational and educational facilities, including choirs, an industrial school, a boys’ club, and a Girls’ Friendly Society. These activities, together with Rainsford’s vigorous social preaching, attracted over seven thousand people to one or another program by the end of the decade.
CHRISTIAN RADICALS
St. George’s was an outstanding example of an “Institutional Church” designed to “reach the masses,” but there were more radical departures afoot within New York Episcopalianism. Some proposed the church go beyond providing social services to working-class parishioners, to forging an alliance with working-class activists dedicated to restructuring capital-labor relations.
In 1881 the Rev. James Otis Huntington had founded the Order of the Holy Cross, a semimonastic organization, and settled on the Lower East Side. Though a Harvard graduate from an elite background, Father Huntington startled his colleagues by joining the Knights of Labor and becoming an ardent supporter of Henry George. He began reporting on union meetings for the Episcopal press and promoting George’s single tax in church circles. In 1884 the semiofficial but prestigious Church Congress invited George to talk on the topic “Is our Civilization Just to Workingmen.” In the 1886 campaign, Father Huntington addressed street crowds from the back of trucks while wearing his priestly robes; he was second only to Father McGlynn in providing clerical assistance.
Other church leaders now began to address the issues Huntington raised. Bishop Potter himself had been dissatisfied for some time with the rabid antilabor ferocity of many theologians. He had said, apropos of the repression of the Great Strike of 1877, that “we shall not finally silence the heresies of the communist with the bullets of the militia.” In 1886 he issued a pastoral letter that, while denouncing boycotts, admitted the justice of workingmen’s demands. He particularly rejected the laissez-faire argument that labor was a commodity “to be bought and sold, employed or dismissed, paid or underpaid, as the market shall decree.”
Reminding his clerics that “in New York centers the capital that controls the traffic, and largely the manufactures, of this new world,” Potter pointed out that “in your congregations are many of those who control that capital.” It was their duty to make clear to those who employed labor and reaped its benefits that “wealth brings with it a definite responsibility. . . that luxury