1. The failure of dialogue is the more striking since there have been in recent years a number of studies which should have vitalized investigation of the nexus between the spheres of the sacred and the profane. Anthony Wallace's magisterial account of Christian capitalism in an early textile community comes to mind, and so do Paul Johnson's provocative analysis of revivalism and economic development in an Erie Canal boom town, Mary Ryan's remarkable monograph on evangelical ideology and socioeconomic structure in Utica, and Barry Levy's brilliant interpretation of Quakerism and family farming strategy in the Philadelphia region. See Wallace, Anthony, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1978)Google Scholar; Johnson, Paul, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar; Ryan, Mary, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Levy, Barry, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

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7. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1930)Google Scholar. It should, of course, be clear that Weber always admitted that religion was “only one” of “the determinants of the economic ethic.” He was enough of a Marxist to acknowledge that “no economic ethic” was ever “determined solely by religion,” and he redoubled that disclaimer by conceding that religion was always “itself profoundly influenced by economic and political factors.”

See “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 267–301Google Scholar; quotations on pp. 267–68.

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9. See, e.g., Faler, Paul, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Johnson, , Shopkeeper's MillenniumGoogle Scholar; Laurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Montgomery, David, “The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844,” Journal of Social History 5 (1972): 411–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13. The evidence is extensive and embarrassing. In 1877, for example, Henry Ward Beecher denounced the railroad workers for walking off their jobs when management arbitrarily cut their wages by 10 to 20 percent: “The necessities of the great railroad companies demanded that there should be a reduction of wages. … It is true that $1 a day is not enough to support a man and five children if a man would insist on smoking and drinking beer. Was not a dollar a day enough to buy bread. Water costs nothing. [Laughter] Man cannot live by bread [alone], it is true, but the man who cannot live on good bread and water is not fit to live. [Laughter.]” In 1875 he simply declared “that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault — unless it be his sin” (McLoughlin, , Henry Ward Beecher, pp. 98–99, 150)Google Scholar; see also pp. 140–42.

14. Staudenmaier, John, Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass.: Society for the History of Technology/MIT Press, 1985), pp. 192–201Google Scholar; and Staudenmaier, , “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” in Cutcliffe, Stephen and Post, Robert, eds., In Context: History and the History of Technology (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1989), p. 164.Google Scholar

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16. Quoted in Thompson, , Making of the English Working Class, p. 355.Google Scholar

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19. Levy, , Quakers and the American FamilyGoogle Scholar; and Brooke, John, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Central Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Daniel Scott Smith makes similar claims for New England more largely — see “‘All in Some Degree Related to Each Other’: A Demographic and Comparative Resolution of the Anomaly of New England Kinship,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 44–79Google Scholar — but his argument is strained and unconvincing. Peter Dobkin Hall advances a more intriguing argument for the importance of the New England corporatist tradition, derived of course from the region's covenanted Congregationalism, as a source of that section's long economic lag and ultimate leadership in creating the new corporate forms of the 19th Century; see The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

20. See, e.g., Baritz, Loren, City on a Hill: A History of Ideas and Myths in America (New York: John Wiley, 1964)Google Scholar; Cherry, Conrad, ed., God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971)Google Scholar; Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 5Google Scholar; and Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar. The pattern precedes the 19th Century: see, e.g., Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Kibbey, Ann, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).Google Scholar

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22. Johnson, , Shopkeeper's MillenniumGoogle Scholar; and Ryan, , Cradle of the Middle ClassGoogle Scholar. For comparable Catholic recourse to religious affiliation as a means of marking middle-class respectability, see, e.g., Clark, Dennis, The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Wangler, Thomas, “Catholic Religious Life in Boston in the Era of Cardinal O'Connell,” in Catholic Boston: Studies in Religion and Community, 1870–1970, ed. Sullivan, Robert and O'Toole, James (Boston: Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, 1985), pp. 239–72.Google Scholar

23. The point was pioneered by Gutman, Herbert in “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” American Historical Review 71 (1966)Google Scholar, reprinted in, and hereafter cited from, Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Knopf, 1976)Google Scholar. The quotation is from Schultz, Ronald, “God and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia's Working Class, 1790–1830,” in Religion in a Revolutionary AgeGoogle Scholar, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert (Charlottesville, Va., forthcoming).

24. The implication is not made explicit, so far as I know, in the secondary literature, but it seems to me irresistible in the conjunction of the literature of evangelical individualism and the literature of the emergence of market society. On the latter, the most powerful evocation is still Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; rept. Boston: Beacon, 1957).Google Scholar

25. Cross, Whitney, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

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29. Boyer, , Urban Masses, pp. 23–26Google Scholar; on the revivals as big business throughout the 19th Century, “organized and conducted by businessmen who have put money into it on business principles,” see pp. 133–34, and also McLoughlin, , Henry Ward Beecher, pp. 177–78Google Scholar. And of course the churches also had their economic uses for every ethnic entrepreneur who could capture the patronage of his immigrant church and its clergy, as innumerable accounts testify.

30. See, e.g., Johnson, , Shopkeeper's MillenniumGoogle Scholar, and Ulrich, , “‘Daughters of Liberty.’”Google Scholar

31. Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974)Google Scholar; and Lears, T. J. Jackson, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1954), vol. 1, p. 310Google Scholar. See also Boyer, , Urban MassesGoogle Scholar; Horlick, Allan, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Mathews, , “The Second Great Awakening,” esp. p. 27Google Scholar; McLoughlin, , Henry Ward Beecher, p. 151Google Scholar; and Moore, R. Laurence, “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly 41 (1989): esp. 236CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In economic argot, the process might be construed as a provision of externalities on which the market depended, but which it was powerless to accomplish for itself.

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34. For the Puritans, see Foster, Stephen, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Greene, Jack, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar. For the Quakers, see James, Sydney, A People among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tolles, , Meeting House and Counting HouseGoogle Scholar. For the colonies more generally, see Perkins, Edwin, The Economy of Colonial America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. The quotation is from Cotton, John, “Christian Calling,” in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of their Writings, ed. Miller, Perry and Johnson, Thomas, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 325.Google Scholar

35. Miller, , New England Mind, esp. ch. 2Google Scholar; and Bercovitch, , American Jeremiad.Google Scholar

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38. For an epitome and synthesis of this outlook, see Ahlstrom, Sydney, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

39. The man was not a hypothetical man. He was Henry C. Carey, a central figure in Wallace, Anthony, RockdaleGoogle Scholar, and, quite by chance, in Wallace, 's companion study, St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry (New York: Knopf, 1987)Google Scholar. Since Rockdale and St. Clair were situated hardly a hundred miles apart, and since Wallace studies them at essentially the same period in American history, Carey's contradictory conduct is intriguingly inexplicable on any religious grounds. The best examination to date of the relation between religious divisions and uneven economic development is Laurie, , Working People of PhiladelphiaGoogle Scholar, but Laurie's study barely breaks the surface.

40. Gaustad, Edwin, Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)Google Scholar; McLoughlin, , Henry Ward Beecher, p. 55Google Scholar; and Dolan, Jay, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985).Google Scholar

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43. Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915; rept. New York: Free Press, 1965).Google Scholar

44. Laurie, , Working People of Philadelphia, p. 39.Google Scholar On the religious litany of free will at the very time a majority of the population ceased to be self-employed, see Kariel, Henry, The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 31.Google Scholar On increasing inequality, see Williamson, Jeffrey and Lindert, Peter, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York: Academic Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and, in a very different vein, Pessen, Edward, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1973).Google Scholar On deepening occupational differentiation, see Katz, Michael, Doucet, Michael, and Stern, Mark, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, in another aspect, Gordon, David, Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar On the emergence of unprecedented gender differentiation, see Cott, Nancy, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In analogous fashion, urban evangelicals preached meritocratic mobility at a historical moment of “lreceding opportunities for men of humble origins” (see Laurie, , Working People of Philadelphia, pp. 198–99).Google Scholar

45. Virginia has been the best studied in this regard. See, e.g., Isaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Upton, Dell, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).Google Scholar

46. Mathews, Donald, “Women and Evangelicalism in the Early 19th Century U.S.,” paper presented at the fifth biennial conference, Milan Group in Early United States History, Milan, Italy, 06 22–25, 1988, p. 4.Google Scholar Testimony to churchchanging and backsliding is inescapable in the 19th Century, not least in the realization of the revivalists that they were preaching primarily to the previously converted. See, e.g., Boyer, , Urban Masses, pp. 79–80, 136.Google Scholar

47. Gutman, , Work, Culture, and Society, pp. 83–84.Google Scholar

48. Gutman, , Work, Culture, and Society, pp. 88, 93, 104, 102–3, 93.Google Scholar With his personal presence and magnetism, Gutman would have been the decisive influence for younger labor historians even if others had anticipated his argument. But in fact he had few forerunners. Jama Lazerow has written that only Louis Hartz among earlier generations of historians grasped the importance of Protestantism in working-class radicalism. See “Religion and Labor Reform in Antebellum America: The World of William Field Young,” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 282.Google Scholar

49. “Contested terrain” is a term taken from contemporary American labor history, and in particular from a book of that title by Edwards, Richard, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979).Google Scholar Its usage has, however, outrun any single source. In the sense I intend it, it refers to clashing understandings of apparently shared situations by employers and employees of distinctly different power to impose their definitions of those situations; at the same time it also insists that those of little or no formal power still have a very genuine capacity to compel negotiation and to achieve acknowledgment of the entitlements they negotiate. For striking applications of this approach, in studies relatively remote from conventional labor history, see Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and a battery of works beginning with Genovese, , Roll, Jordan, RollGoogle Scholar, which have reshaped the recent discourse on American slavery.

50. I write here of the path of Protestantism. I could as readily write of the course of Catholicism. Management Catholicism would then be evident in the campaigns for respectability and Americanization and in the implementation of Romish ideals of hierarchy and centralization. See, e.g., Carey, Patrick, People, Priests & Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeship (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Light, Dale, “The Reformation of Philadelphia Catholicism, 1830–1860,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112 (1988): 375–405.Google Scholar Worker Catholicism would appear less in the episcopacy than in the parishes, among the immigrants and their priests. It has not yet had its historians, but see Light, Dale, “Class, Ethnicity, and the Urban Ecology in a Nineteenth Century City: Philadelphia's Irish, 1840–1890,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1979).Google Scholar A different but not disconnected way of looking at the entire contest would take it for a war waged by capitalist Christianity on an older, non-Weberian Christianity. See Staudenmaier, John, Advent for Capitalists: Grief, Joy, and Gender in Contemporary Society (The Tenth Nash Lecture, Campion College, University of Regina, 1987).Google Scholar

51. McLoughlin, , Henry Ward Beecher, pp. 118, 151, 116–17, 94, 95.Google Scholar

52. Boyer, , Urban Masses, pp. 43, 98.Google Scholar

53. Lazerow, , “Religion and Labor Reform,” pp. 284, 265Google Scholar; and Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society, p. 93.Google Scholar

54. Lazerow, , “Religion and Labor Reform,” p. 270Google Scholar; Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society, p. 90.Google Scholar

55. Schultz, , “God and Workingmen,” pp. 16, 28Google Scholar; Lazerow, Jama, “Religion and the New England Mill Girl: A New Perspective on an Old Theme,” New England Quarterly 60 (1987): 446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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57. See, e.g., Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Faler, , Mechanics and ManufacturersGoogle Scholar; Hareven, Tamara and Langenbach, Randolph, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon, 1978)Google Scholar; Laurie, , Working People of PhiladelphiaGoogle Scholar; and Shelton, Cynthia, The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787–1837 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).Google Scholar See also, in a related and revealing vein, Cohen, Lizabeth, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885–1915,” in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Schlereth, Thomas (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History, 1982).Google Scholar

58. Significant studies include Hall, Jacquelyn et al. , Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laurie, , Working People of PhiladelphiaGoogle Scholar; Lazerow, , “Religion and Labor Reform”Google Scholar; Lazerow, , “Religion and the Mill Girl”Google Scholar; and Schultz, , “God and Workingmen.”Google Scholar The quotation is from Schultz, , “God and Workingmen.”Google Scholar

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61. An accessible reprint of one Reader is McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader: 1879 Edition (New York: Signet, 1962)Google Scholar, with a foreward by Henry S. Commager. See also, e.g., Elson, Ruth, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Mosier, Richard, Making the A merican Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in the McGuffey Readers (New York: King's Crown Press, 1947)Google Scholar; and Westerhoff, John, McGuffey and His Readers: Piety, Morality, and Education in Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1978).Google Scholar Similar emphases on modesty, submission, and self-abnegation - as antitheses of vaulting ambition, aggression, and self-seeking - are evident in most of the most popular literature of the 19th Century; see, e.g., Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).Google Scholar They even dominate a good deal of the literature that is conventionally conceived to be about striving and success; see, e.g., Zuckerman, Michael, “The Nursery Tales of Horatio Alger,” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 191–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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