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Harbingers of Progressivism: Responses to the Urban Crisis in New York, c. 1845–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

M. J. Heale
M. J. Heale
Affiliation:
University of Lancaster
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Extract

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 1976 , pp. 17 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

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16 Hartley was born in England and brought up in upstate New York; Brace was the son of a Connecticut private schoolteacher; Pease had been a Massachusetts clergyman; Russ (agent of the Prison Association and later Superintendent of the Juvenile Asylum) was the son of a Massachusetts physician; Enoch C. Wines (who became agent of the Prison Association in 1862 and established an international reputation as a penologist) was born in New Jersey and brought up in Vermont. For their early lives see Hardey, (ed.), Memorial of Hartley, pp. 17–55Google Scholar; Brace, (ed.), Life of Brace, pp. 1–58Google Scholar; Barnard, , Forty Years at the Five Points, pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Lamb, , John Dennison Russ, pp. 3–12Google Scholar; entry on ‘ Wines ’ by Blake in the Dictionary of American Biography. For their views on the rich, see Hartley, Robert M., Intemperance in Cities and Large Towns; showing its physical, social, and moral effects … (New York, 1851), pp. 134, 139–40, 145Google Scholar; Brace, , The Dangerous Classes, p. 136Google Scholar, and on the agent's role, Hartley, ‘ 15 Remarks on the Qualifications of the Secretary and General Agent ’, Mr. Hartley's File of Original Documents, pp. 36–9, typescript in Community Service Society Archives, and Brace, op. cit., pp. 368, 374–5.

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