Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T19:53:06.721Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THOMAS CHALMERS, THE ‘GODLY COMMONWEALTH’, AND CONTEMPORARY WELFARE REFORM IN BRITAIN AND THE USA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2014

JAMES J. SMYTH
JAMES J. SMYTH*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
*
History and Politics, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Current prescriptions for welfare reform and increased reliance on the voluntary sector often base their appeal on the lessons of history, in particular the apparent successes of Victorian philanthropy in combating ‘pauperism’. This article looks at how this message has become influential in the USA and the UK among the ruling parties of right and left through the particular prism of the neo-conservative appreciation of the work of Thomas Chalmers, the early nineteenth-century Scottish churchman and authority on poverty. The attraction of Chalmers, both to the Charity Organization Society then and neo-conservatives today, lies in the practical application of his idea of the ‘godly commonwealth’ in Glasgow and Edinburgh where voluntary effort, organized through the church, replaced the statutory obligations of the poor law. While Chalmers, and his followers, declared his ‘experiments’ to be great successes, modern Scottish historians have revealed these claims to be false and his efforts failures. Only by completely ignoring the evidence presented by this historiography and continuing to rely on Chalmers's own writings and earlier hagiographies can the neo-conservative approbation of Chalmers be sustained. Such wilful neglect raises questions both about their approach to history and their proposed remedies for tackling poverty today.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 845 - 868
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank colleagues at the Universities of Stirling, Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian, Oxford Brookes, and Tubingen for inviting me to give earlier versions of this article at various research seminars. I would like to recognize also the generous comments of an anonymous reader of the Historical Journal.

References

1 David Cameron, ‘The Big Society’, The Hugo Young Memorial Lecture 2009, at www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2009/11/David_Cameron_The_Big_Society.aspx. However tempting it may be to dismiss Cameron's idea as essentially vacuous, nonetheless it is likely to set the terms of debate for some time; a cabinet minister has responsibility of promoting the Big Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council has embraced the notion within its current research strategy. For the minister for civil society see www.gov.uk/government/ministers/parliamentary-secretary-minister-for-civil-society. For the AHRC, see www.ahrc.ac.uk/News-and-Events/Publications/Documents/Delivery-Plan-2011-2015.pdf (all accessed 9 Apr. 2013).

2 Blond, Philip, Red Tory: how the left and right have broken Britain and how we can fix it (London, 2010)Google Scholar. As has been pointed out, Blond's work owes much to nineteenth-century Tory paternalists and the ideas of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Jonathan Raban, ‘Cameron's crank’, London Review of Books, 17 Jan. 2010.

3 Englander, David, Poverty and poor law reform in nineteenth-century Britain, 1834–1914: from Chadwick to Booth (London, 1998), p. 29Google Scholar.

4 Humphreys, Robert, Sin, organized charity and the poor law in Victorian England (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The most thorough account of Chalmers's life is provided by Brown, Stewart J., Thomas Chalmers and the Godly commonwealth (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

7 Ibid., p. 106.

8 ‘Causes and cure of pauperism’, Edinburgh Review, 55 (1817).

9 Between 1801 and 1821, Glasgow's population doubled to 147,043. Report on the thirteenth census of Scotland (1921), vol. ii, part 2, ‘City of Glasgow’, p. 43.

10 ‘Causes and cure’, p. 8. Malthus saw equality as leading to ‘misery’ for all mankind, but he did recognize that ‘the facility of combination among the rich, and its difficulty among the poor, operates to prevent the price of labour from rising’. T. R. Malthus, An essay on the principle of population (London, 1798), pp. 35–6.

11 Malthus to Chalmers, 22 July 1822, quoted in Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 116; Malthus to Chalmers, 29 Aug. 1821, quoted in Hilton, Boyd, The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), p. 91Google Scholar.

12 The works of Thomas Chalmers, xiv:On the Christian and economic polity of a nation (Glasgow, 1840), pp. 397–8.

13 Mandler, Peter, ‘The making of the new poor law redivivus’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), p. 147CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Chalmers's impact in England from 1817, see Boyd Hilton, Age of atonement, pp. 55–63.

14 Brown, Godly commonwealth, pp. 122–4.

15 New statistical account of Scotland, ix (Edinburgh, 1845), ‘Kilmany’.

16 McCaffrey, John, ‘Thomas Chalmers and social change’, Scottish Historical Review, 60 (1981), pp. 32–60Google Scholar.

17 Mary T. Furgol, ‘Thomas Chalmers, poor relief theories and their implementation in the early nineteenth century’ (Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh, 1987), pp.136–9; Cage, R. A. and Checkland, E. O. A., ‘Thomas Chalmers and urban poverty: the St John's parish experiment in Glasgow, 1819–1837’, Philosophical Journal, 13 (1976), p. 43Google Scholar.

18 Quoted in Furgol, ‘Chalmers’, p. 137.

19 Ibid., p. 266.

20 Brown, Stewart J. and Fry, Michael, eds., Scotland in the age of the disruption (Edinburgh, 1993), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

21 Brown, Stewart J., ‘The disruption and urban poverty: Thomas Chalmers and the West Port operation in Edinburgh, 1844–1847’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 20 (1978), pp. 65–89Google Scholar.

22 Drummond, A. L. and Bulloch, J., The church in late Victorian Scotland, 1874–1900 (Edinburgh, 1978), p. 128Google Scholar.

23 Cheyne, A. C., The transformation of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland's religious revolution (Edinburgh, 1983), p. 135Google Scholar.

24 Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 369.

25 Furgol, ‘Chalmers’, p. 348.

26 Quoted in Checkland, Olive, ‘Chalmers and William Pulteney Alison: a conflict of views on Scottish social policy’, in Cheyne, A. C., ed., The practical and the pious: essays on Thomas Chalmers, 1780–1847 (Edinburgh, 1985), p. 133Google Scholar. For the government's secret efforts at aiding the distress, see Smout, T. C., ‘The strange intervention of Edward Twistleton: Paisley in depression 1841–3’, in Smout, , ed., The search for wealth and stability, (Basingstoke, 1979), pp. 218–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 352.

28 Aspinwall, Bernard, Portable utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820–1920 (Aberdeen, 1984), p. 18Google Scholar; Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 376.

29 Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 376.

30 Humphreys, Sin, p. 147.

31 Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 376.

32 Glasgow Herald, 24 Mar. 1899.

33 Hilton, Age of atonement, pp. 89, 104.

34 Loch, Charles S., Charity and social life (London, 1910), pp. 198, 345–6Google Scholar.

35 Noll, Mark A., ‘Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) in North America (ca. 1830–1917)’, Church History, 66 (1997), p. 773CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Crandall, L. A., review of ‘The Christian and civic economy of large towns’, American Journal of Sociology, 7 (1901), p. 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Henderson, Charles, ‘A half century after Thomas Chalmers’, American Journal of Theology, 4 (1900), p. 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Henderson, Charles, ‘Rise of the German inner mission’, American Journal of Sociology, 1 (1896), p. 593Google Scholar. For a similar appraisal, see Gilman, Elizabeth, ‘Thomas Chalmers’, Charities Review, 7 (1897), p. 565Google Scholar.

39 Pimpare, Stephen, The new Victorians: poverty, politics and propaganda in two gilded ages (New York, NY, 2004), pp. 15–17Google Scholar, passim.

40 Oliphant, Margaret, Thomas Chalmers (London, 1893), p. 126Google Scholar.

41 Similarly the West Port, ‘Begun in 1845 this enterprise had become a great success before his death in 1847. Its subsequent history has been most encouraging.’ Blaikie, W. G., ‘Thomas Chalmers’, The dictionary of national biography from the earliest times to 1900 (London, 1895–1901), iii, p. 1359Google Scholar.

42 Richmond, Mary E., Social diagnosis (New York, NY, 1965), pp. 28–9Google Scholar; see also Noll, ‘Chalmers in America’, p. 773.

43 Watson, Frank D., The charity organization movement in the United States (New York, NY, 1922), pp. 37–8Google Scholar.

44 Watt, Hugh, Thomas Chalmers and the Disruption (Edinburgh, 1943), p. 63Google Scholar.

45 Drummond and Bulloch, Late Victorian Scotland, p. 128. Elsewhere, the same authors have argued that the efforts at St John's simply proved that the old poor law ‘could not cope with the ills of industrial society’. Drummond, A. L. and Bulloch, J., The church in Victorian Scotland, 1843–1874 (Edinburgh, 1975), p. 80Google Scholar.

46 Mechie, Stewart, The church and Scottish social development, 1780–1870 (Oxford, 1960), pp. 47, 59–60Google Scholar.

47 McKay, J., The Kirk and the kingdom: a century of tension in Scottish social theology, 1830–1929 (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Marwick, W. H., Economic developments in Victorian Scotland (London, 1936), p. 24Google Scholar.

49 Saunders, Laurance James, Scottish democracy, 1815–1840: the social and intellectual background (Edinburgh, 1950) pp. 217–18Google Scholar.

50 Ferguson, William, Scotland: 1689 to the present (Edinburgh, 1968), p. 313Google Scholar.

51 Mitchison, Rosalind, A history of Scotland (London, 1982; 1st pub. 1970), p. 387Google Scholar.

52 Cage and Checkland, ‘Chalmers and urban poverty’, pp. 44, 52. See also Cage, R. A., The Scottish poor law, 1745–1845 (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 90–110Google Scholar.

53 Brown, ‘Disruption and urban poverty’, p. 87.

54 Brown, Godly commonwealth, pp. 143–4.

55 Furgol, ‘Chalmers’, p. vii.

56 Smith, Donald C., Passive obedience and prophetic protest: social criticism in the Scottish church (New York, NY, 1987), pp. 113–20Google Scholar. This study appeared originally as a PhD thesis in Edinburgh in 1964.

57 Cheyne, A. C., ed., The practical and the pious: essays on Thomas Chalmers (Edinburgh, 1985)Google Scholar.

58 Roxborogh, John, Thomas Chalmers: enthusiast for mission, the Christian good of Scotland and the rise of the missionary movement (Carlisle, 2000), p. 125Google Scholar.

59 Donald Macleod, ‘Thomas Chalmers and pauperism’, in Brown and Fry, Disruption, p. 68.

60 Betchaku, Atsuko, ‘Thomas Chalmers, David Stow and the St John's experiment: a study in educational influence in Scotland and beyond, 1819–1850’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 27 (2), 2007, pp. 170–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Cage, Poor law, p.105; see also Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 377; Furgol, ‘Chalmers’, pp. vi–vii.

62 ‘Education assumed a central position in his vision’, Brown, Godly commonwealth, pp. 138, 358.

63 Checkland, Olive, Philanthropy in Victorian Scotland: social welfare and the voluntary principle (Edinburgh, 1980), p. 321Google Scholar.

64 Cage and Checkland, ‘Chalmers and urban poverty’, p. 47.

65 Chalmers kept secret the donations he received from a wealthy New Yorker for the West Port, but this was not to his own pecuniary advantage, rather to sustain the operation and disguise the amount of external support that was needed. Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 362.

66 Cage and Checkland, ‘Chalmers and urban poverty’, p. 53.

67 Young, A. F. and Ashton, E. T., British social work in the nineteenth century (London, 1956)Google Scholar; Woodroofe, K., From charity to social work in England and the United States (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Mowat, Charles Loch, The charity organisation society 1869–1913: its ideas and work (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

68 Mowat, The COS, p. 10. In his work, Prochaska briefly refers to Chalmers in relation to his influence upon the practice of visiting the poor. See Prochaska, F. K., Women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century England (Oxford, 1980), p. 134Google Scholar; Prochaska, F. K., The voluntary impulse: philanthropy in modern England (London, 1988) p. 43Google Scholar.

69 McCaffrey, ‘Chalmers and social change’, p. 60.

70 Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 379.

71 Furgol, ‘Chalmers’, p. 409.

72 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age (London, 1984), p. 174Google Scholar.

73 Brown, Godly commonwealth, p. 130; Cage and Checkland, ‘Chalmers and urban poverty’, pp. 43, 46–7.

74 Himmelfarb, Idea of poverty, p. 553.

75 Boyd Hilton, review of The idea of poverty in English Historical Review, 102 (1987), p. 689.

76 Murray's significant works include Losing ground: America's social policy, 1950–1980 (New York, NY, 1984) and, with Herrnstein, Richard, The bell curve: intelligence and class structure in American life (New York, NY, 1994)Google Scholar.

77 Murray, Charles, Losing ground (2nd edn, New York, NY, 1994), pp. 180, 232–3Google Scholar. When he first published his critique of modern American social policy in 1984. Murray admitted that this was no more than a ‘thought experiment’, but ten years later he was able to remark confidently that ‘abolishing welfare is now a live political issue’ (p. xvi).

78 Olasky, Marvin, The tragedy of American compassion (Washington, DC, 1992)Google Scholar.

79 It is revealing to note that Olasky's book was not reviewed by any academic journal when first published. See David C. Hammack, Review of The tragedy of American compassion, H-State, H-Net Reviews, Feb. 1996, www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3672851041828, accessed 1 Dec. 2011.

80 Olasky, Tragedy, p. 4.

81 Ibid., p. 91.

82 Ibid., p. 99.

83 Ibid., p. 25.

84 Chalmers, Thomas, The sufficiency of the parochial system without a poor rate (Glasgow, 1841)Google Scholar; Kellogg, D. O., ‘The pauper question’, Atlantic Monthly, 51, issue 307, (1883)Google Scholar.

85 Furgol, ‘Chalmers’, p. 230.

86 For instance, from a piece on sexual abstinence programmes, ‘Many of these good new ideas for the 1990s were the common fare of the 1890s. We do not need tests of whether such approaches can work; we know that they can, because they did.’ Marvin Olasky, ‘History's solutions’, National Review, 7 Feb. 1994, emphasis in original.

87 It has been pointed out that ‘Murray's historical work seems to stop with favourable quotation of Olasky.’ Ziliak, Stephen T., ‘Kicking the Malthusian vice: lessons from the abolition of “welfare” in the late nineteenth century’, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 37 (1997), p. 462CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Somers, Margaret R. and Block, Fred, ‘From poverty to perversity: ideas, markets and institutions over 200 years of welfare debate’, American Sociological Review, 70 (2005), p. 268CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Ziliak, ‘Kicking the Malthusian vice’, p. 449.

90 King, Desmond and Wickham-Jones, Mark, ‘From Clinton to Blair: the Democratic (Party) origins of welfare to work’, Political Quarterly, 70 (1999), p. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Quoted in King and Wickham-Jones, ‘Clinton to Blair’, p. 65.

92 Pimpare, New Victorians, p. 9.

93 Hirschman, Albert O., The rhetoric of reaction: perversity, futility, jeopardy (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 27–35Google Scholar.

94 Ziliak, ‘Kicking the Malthusian vice’; see also Ziliak, Stephen T., ‘The end of welfare and the contradiction of compassion’, Independent Review, 1 (1996), pp. 55–73Google Scholar.

95 Somers and Block, ‘Poverty to perversity’, p. 277.

96 Ibid., p. 274.

97 The success of this myth has been so marked that many English historians accept the view that ‘industrious Scotland’ did not have a poor law at all. Jones, Gareth Stedman, End to poverty? a historical debate (London, 2004), p. 76Google Scholar. For the background on how Chalmers and the Scottish whigs reinterpreted the past to suit their own agenda, see Mitchison, Rosalind, ‘The creation of the disablement rule in the Scottish poor law’, in Smout, , ed., Wealth and stability, pp. 199–217Google Scholar.

98 Pimpare, New Victorians, p. 76.

99 He seems unaware that this would likely be because the COS in Britain had been founded on the Chalmersonian ideal; Ziliak, ‘Kicking the Malthusian vice’, p. 452.

100 Somers and Block, ‘Poverty to perversity’, p. 276.

101 The Presbyterian nature of the Church of Scotland was organized through a hierarchy of church courts, from the single parish Kirk session at the bottom through the local presbytery, provincial synod, and ultimately the General Assembly. Each year, a new moderator of the assembly is chosen and the position usually is held only once in a minister's lifetime. Chalmers was appointed moderator in 1832 and became the first moderator of the Free Church of Scotland following the Disruption in 1843.

102 Himmelfarb, Idea of poverty, p. 174. A better appreciation of Chalmers is provided by Hicks who, in his commentary on Somers and Block, has identified the critical role played in the passing of the reforms of 1834 and 1996 of ‘Christian evangelicals, plying variants of Malthusian rhetoric’. Hicks, Alexander, ‘Free market and religious fundamentalists versus poor relief’, American Sociological Review, 71 (2006), p. 503CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Mitchell, James, Conservatives and the union: a study of Conservative party attitudes to Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 119–20Google Scholar.

104 Glasgow Herald, 22 Dec. 1983. Dewar commented on how Chalmers's ‘conviction that poverty could be dealt with by private charity and self-help … sound a touch familiar.’ I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for putting me on the track of this reference.

105 Gordon Brown's ‘devotion to public service’ is usually identified with his family background and growing up as the son of a socially concerned minister of the Church of Scotland. Unlike Tony Blair, however, who is unrepresentative of Labour opinion in this respect, Brown ‘doesn't accentuate his religious leanings in his public image’. Robert Peston, Brown's Britain (London, 2005), p. 25. At the same time, Brown has been described as a ‘Christian socialist’ whose ‘political outlook [is] based more on the values of the Kirk than those of Marxist ideology’. Routledge, Paul, Gordon Brown: the biography (London, 1998) p. 94Google Scholar.

106 See King and Wickham-Jones, ‘Clinton to Blair’, and Page, Robert M., ‘With love from me to you: the new Democrats, New Labour and the politics of “welfare” reform’, Benefits, 17 (2009), pp. 149–58Google Scholar.

107 Daguerre, Anne, ‘Importing workfare: policy transfer of social and labour market policies from the USA to Britain under new Labour’, Social Policy and Administration, 38 (2001), pp. 41–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 ‘There is a clear indication in party literature that those who fail to accept the opportunities offered will be penalized by the reduction in benefits’. Noel Thompson, Political economy and the Labour party (London, 1996), p. 284.

109 Cameron, ‘Big Society’.

110 Gordon Brown, ‘On liberty and the role of the state’, The Hugo Young Memorial Lecture 2005, www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/dec/13/labour.uk, accessed 1 Dec. 2012. A couple of years later, Brown went further when, in his Introduction to the British edition of The roads to modernity, he confessed his long-standing admiration for ‘Gertrude Himmelfarb's historical work’, Gertrude Himmelfarb, The roads to modernity (London, 2008), ‘Introduction’ by Brown, pp. ix–x.

111 Brown, ‘Liberty and the role of the state’.

112 Cameron, ‘Big Society’.

113 Brown, ‘Liberty and the role of the state’.

114 Bower, Tom, Gordon Brown (London, 2004), pp. 232–3Google Scholar, ‘America inspired him’.

115 Coll, Blanche D., ‘The Baltimore Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, 1820–1822’, American Historical Review, 61 (1955), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.