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Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
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Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”
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References
Notes
1. London War Cry, April 4, 1880, 4. Railton and the seven Hallelujah Lasses (including Captain Emma Westbrook, Rachel Evans, Clara Price, Mary Ann Coleman, Elizabeth Pearson, Annie Shaw, and Emma Eliza Florence Morris) were the first “official” contingent sent to the United States from Britain. The first permanent branch of the Salvation Army was planted by the Shirley family in 1879. It was this effort that Railton was Coming to take over. As early as 1871, however, two followers of the Christian Mission, James and Ann Jermy, tentatively began the North American phase of the Booths’ Christian Mission, first in Canada and then in Cleveland. In 1875, plagued by financial problems probably caused by the depression that began in 1873, Jermy and his family returned to England. The Cleveland Christian Mission did not last long after the departure of the Jermys. The five mission stations, which they had opened in Cleveland between 1871 and 1875, lasted only a year after their return to England. See Commissioner Carey, Edward, “Mission Flag Hoisted in Cleveland,” War Cry, February 9, 1980, 11 Google Scholar; St. Ervine, John G., God's Soldier: General William Booth, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 2:481 Google Scholar; and Sandall, Robert, The History of the Salvation Army, 3 vols. (New York: Salvation Army Supplies and Purchasing Department, 1950), 2:231.Google Scholar
2. McCabe, James D. Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life: or, The Sights and Sensations of the Great City (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872), 600–601 Google Scholar; Gorn, Elliott J., The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 183.Google Scholar
3. Quoted in Chesham, Sallie, Born to Battle: The Salvation Army in America (New York: Rand McNally, 1965), 60.Google Scholar
4. London War Cry, April 4, 1880, 4.
5. New York World, quoted in McKinley, Edward H., Marching to Glory: The History of the Salvation Army in the United States of America, 1880-1980 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 13–14 Google Scholar; London War Cry, April 4, 1880, 4; Chesham, , Born to Battle, 60.Google Scholar
6. In basic nineteenth-century minstrel format, all of the performers sat on stage in a semicircle, which formed the setting for the various jokes, dances, and serious and comic songs that the players would perform. See Toll, Robert C., Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 52, 137.Google Scholar By the post-Civil War era, minstrelsy added features from other forms of entertainment, including tableaux vivants or living pictures in which “human figures [were] arranged to imitate paintings or statues.” Allen, Robert C., Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 92.Google Scholar Allen provides an excellent discussion of living pictures and other features of nineteenth-century burlesque.
7. When the Salvation Army embraced military Symbols, they used military language to indicate a person's relationship to and Status within the organization. A “soldier” referred to a rank-and-file member; “captives” referred to people who were being recruited to the movement; an “adherent” was one who was attending Services regularly but had not yet become a soldier. In addition, local corps (church or mission) appointed their own local officers who might be called “sergeants.” A field officer (usually a captain) was responsible for organizing, financing, and preaching at each local corps. Nearly all officers began their Army careers as field officers. Staff officers held administrative positions, usually with provincial, district, or national head- quarters. For more on the English development of the Salvation Army, see Ervine, God's Soldier; Norman H. Murdoch, “The Salvation Army: An Anglo-American Revivalist Social Mission” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1985); and Pamela Jane Walker, “Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: Gender and Popular Culture in the Salvation Army, 1865-1895” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 1992). There are also many works published by the Salvation Army itself on every phase of the organization and its major Personalities. For more on the organization in the United States, see McKinley, Marching to Glory.
8. See Abell, Aaron, The Urban Impact of American Protestantism, 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), 118-36Google Scholar; Bremner, Robert H., Front the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 28–29 Google Scholar; Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 742 Google Scholar; Magnuson, Norris, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Welfare Work, 1865-1920 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977)Google Scholar, passim; Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 140-41Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 83–84 Google Scholar; Chambers, Clarke A., “Toward a Redefinition of Weifare History,” Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (September 1986): 432 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brereton, Virginia Lieson, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 57.Google Scholar
9. Magnuson, , Salvation in the Slums, x.Google Scholar
10. Fones-Wolf, Ken, Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), xx Google Scholar (see also Gutman, Herbert, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” in Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History [New York: Vintage Books, 1977], 79–117)Google Scholar; Moore, R. Laurence, “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1989): 235 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bodner, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 148.Google Scholar On the “cleavages” within the working class, see Nelson, Bruce C., “Revival and Upheaval: Religion, Irreligion, and Chicago's Working Class in 1886,” Journal of Social History 25, no. 2 (1991): 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Bruce Laurie, “revivalists” advocated the strict moral behaviors encouraged by evangelical Christianity while “traditionalists” refused to give up the old ways. Laurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), passim.Google Scholar
11. I have discussed other important reasons that explain why the Salvation Army attracted its working-class constituency in Lillian Taiz, “Hot Saints and Hallelujah Lasses: Class, Gender and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1880-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1994); and Lillian Taiz, “Hallelujah Lasses in the Battle for Souls: Working- and Middle-Class Women in the Salvation Army, 1872-1896,” Journal of Women's History (forthcoming Summer 1997).
12. In a recent book, R. Laurence Moore examined the commodification of religion and suggested that the “effort to create a demand for religion committed revivalism to a market logic and … market strategies.” In the nineteenth Century in the face of an expanding commercial culture that developed new forms of “worldliness,” Americans also “developed new ways to be ‘religious.’ ” These “new ways” included bringing theatricality to the pulpit. Although Moore did not explore this dynamic within working-class religion, the Salvation Army provides an excellent opportunity to examine how a working-class evangelical Christian organization helped to develop new ways to be religious by employing working-class forms of popular culture. I would like to thank my colleague Philip Goff for alerting me to Moore's very helpful book. Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Market-place of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6, 10.Google Scholar
13. Nelson, “Revival and Upheaval,” 236. See also May, Henry F., Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 119-20, 189-90, 221-23Google Scholar; Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement”; Abell, , Urban Impact of American Protestantism, 61.Google Scholar
14. Alan D. Gilbert has suggested a similar pattern in Britain. He argues that the “rise of various sectarian movements during the Victorian era … is evidence of a demand for a kind of organised religion which was not being provided adequately either by the church of England or by the ‘traditional Channels’ of Methodism and Dissent.” Gilbert, Alan D., Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914 (London: Longman, 1976), 44.Google Scholar
15. Nelson, “Revival and Upheaval,” 237.
16. Christian at Work, quoted in War Cry, July 19, 1883, 1.
17. War Cry, July 9, 1881, 1; The Salvation Army, Disposition of United States Forces (New York: Salvation Army National Headquarters, 1898).Google Scholar A State might have only one or two corps, as in the case of Colorado, or as many as thirty-two, as did Ohio. In 1888, the majority of Salvation Army corps were located in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. There were only a scattering of corps in the Mid- and Far West and none in the Deep South. In 1898, the Army reached its peak number of 735 corps. The following year the number of corps dropped into the 600 ränge and remained there for some time.
18. The Salvation Army, Disposition of United States Forces (New York: Salvation Army National Headquarters, 1888).Google Scholar
19. Wisbey, Herbert A. Jr., Soldiers without Swords: A History of the Salvation Army in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 33–34 Google Scholar; unpublished list of corps and opening dates provided by the Salvation Army Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia; The Salvation Army, Disposition of United States Forces (New York: Salvation Army National Headquarters, 1888-1900).Google Scholar
20. After the turn of the Century, growth slowed considerably. By 1913, the number of soldiers had only grown by 6, 700 to 31, 703. Wisbey, , Soldiers without Swords, 122.Google Scholar
21. Four thousand people paid admission to see the celebration of the third anniversary of Commander George Scott Railton's arrival in the United States. When General William Booth visited the United States in 1886, he addressed more than 180, 000 people in the course of 198 hours of preach- ing. In 1894, Booth held 340 meetings where he spoke to 437, 000 people. Wisbey, , Soldiers without Swords, 42, 66, 87.Google Scholar
22. It is this latter period of Salvation Army history that most scholars use to characterize the movement. See Taiz, “Hot Saints and Hallelujah Lasses,” for more discussion of the organization's transition.
23. Lt.-Col. A. M. Damon, Provincial Officer, to Colonel R. E. Holz, “Brief on the Atlantic Coast Province,” July 1, 1908, unpublished report, Salvation Army National Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia, Acc. 89-35.
24. For the more than 30 percent of Salvation Army officers who were foreign born, memoirs suggest that many (especially the English, Canadians, and Swedes) had either belonged to or been familiar with the Army before immigrating to the United States. The Army served them as did other immigrants’ churches—by sustaining traditions and assisting in the adjustment to a new environment.
25. By 1908, the Atlantic Coast Province included most of Pennsylvania (with thirty-five corps), Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Damon, “Brief on the Atlantic Coast Province.”
26. Most of the Scandinavian Salvationists were Swedish, smaller numbers were Norwegian. These corps held Services in their native languages and published a Swedish language Version of the Salvation Army's newspaper, the War Cry. The data suggest that the Salvation Army had little success among both southern and eastern European immigrants and African Americans. For more on Salvation Army officers, see Taiz, “Hot Saints and Hallelujah Lasses,” chaps. 3 and 4.
27. The Scandinavian corps could be found in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The Italian corps was in New York City, and the Chinese corps were in Oakland and San Francisco. See Damon, “Brief on the Atlantic Coast Province”; Colonel and Mrs. R. E. Holz, Provincial Officers, “Brief on Ohio, Pittsburgh and Southern Province,” 1908, unpublished report, Salvation Army National Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia, Acc. 82-75: McKinley, , Marching to Glory, 50, 104.Google Scholar
28. Eighty percent of the soldiers who went on to enter officer training were quite young, 55 percent of them were between seventeen and twenty-two, and an additional 25 percent were between twenty-three and twenty-seven. Men and women applied for officership in nearly equal numbers until the early twentieth Century, when more men than women served as field officers. The Salvation Army generally has very little personal information about their soldiers. Most of the available material deals with the men and women who chose to become officers in the organization. See Taiz, “Hot Saints and Hallelujah Lasses,” 73-75, 112-17, for more detailed discussion of male and female officers.
29. Marsden, , Fundamentalism and American Culture, 73–74, 75.Google Scholar Other “radical” holiness denominations in the post-Civil War era include the Church of God and the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
30. Ibid., 49.
31. Ibid., 45-46.
32. Brereton, , From Sin to Salvation, 63.Google Scholar Phoebe Palmer took her evangelical message to Europe between 1859 and 1863. It was during that time that Catherine and William Booth came in contact with her particular interpretation of holiness. For more on the religious influences on the Salvation Army and Salvationist theology, see Murdoch, “The Salvation Army,” 1-102; and Roger Green, “The Theology of William Booth” (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1980). By 1850, Palmer had helped to found the Five Points Mission, which began “Protestant institutional work in the slums.” Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 170 (see also 140-41).Google Scholar For a discussion pf the institutionalization of the nineteenth-century holiness movement, see Jones, Charles Edwin, Perfectionist Persuasion: The Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867-1936 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974).Google Scholar Other works that discuss the holiness movement include Dieter, Melvin Easterday, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, (Metuchen, N.J.: Scare-crow Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, chaps. 8-11; Ahlstrom, , Religious History of the American People, 477-81Google Scholar; Smith, Timothy L., Called unto Holiness: The Story of the Nazarenes: The Normative Years (Kansas City, Mo.: Nazarene Publishing House, 1962)Google Scholar; and Blumhofer, Edith Waldvogel, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 24–29.Google Scholar
33. Jones, , Perfectionist Persuasion, 85–86, 87.Google Scholar
34. The General [William Booth], Orders and Regulations for Soldiers of the Salvation Army (London: Salvation Army, 1890), chap. 1.
35. Pamela Walker, “ ‘I live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me’: Men and Masculinity in the Salvation Army, 1865-1890,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 95.
36. Allen, , Horrible Prettiness, 73–74 Google Scholar; Moore, , Selling God, 182.Google Scholar For more on concert saloons, dance halls, and music saloons, see Peiss, Kathy Lee, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 141-42Google Scholar; “Capt. Daniel E. Smith: A Grand Life Record,” “Capt. Ed. Fellers of Wheeling, Va.,” War Cry, May 25, 1890; “Adjutant John Bovil,” War Cry, March 31, 1891; “Almost Drowned but God Had Need of Him: Life of Capt. Hunton,” War Cry, May 31, 1890; and “ A Printer's Devil Gets Saved and Develops into a Salvation Army Officer,” War Cry, May 25, 1890.
37. Fones-Wolf, , Trade Union Gospel, 30–31.Google Scholar
38. Davis, Susan, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 123.Google Scholar
39. Chicago Blade, reprinted in War Cry, Jury 14, 1894, 16.
40. “California San Jose,” War Cry, November 13, 1884, 2.
41. Philadelphia News, quoted in London War Cry, January 31, 1880, 1; “Salvation Army Methods,” Paterson Daily Guardian, quoted in War Cry, June 3, 1881, 3.
42. Allan Whitworth Bosch, “The Salvation Army in Chicago, 1885- 1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1965), 60.
43. Lt.-Col. Arthur Jackson, “Reminiscences of Lt. Colonel Arthur Jackson,” unpublished MS, 1939, Salvation Army Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia.
44. “Pickles,” War Cry, July 17, 1883, 4.
45. Capt. Bayley and Cadet Alice Farrell, “Who Gets the Money?” War Cry, June 5, 1884, 4.
46. “Hints for Testimony Meetings,” War Cry, December 25, 1886, 3.
47. War Cry, September 22, 1894, 12, cited in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 71.
48. These Special events brought in desperately needed funds that were shared between the national headquarters, divisions, and local corps.
49. McKinley, , Marching to Glory, 23 Google Scholar; Cresham, 69.
50. McKinley, , Marching to Glory, 24.Google Scholar
51. War Cry, February 7, 1891, 14, cited in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 67-68.
52. Barth, Gunther, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 226 Google Scholar; Chesham, , Born to Battle, 69.Google Scholar
53. “Three Odd Salvation Soldiers,” Harper's Weekly, August 11, 1894, 759.
54. See “Notes” in letter to Fannie Lawson from Charlie McAbee, dated February 20, 1889, in McAbee Letters, Salvation Army Western Territorial Museum, Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
55. War Cry, April 25, 1891, 8.
56. Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1886, 3, cited in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 35-36.
57. War Cry, January 18, 1890, 8.
58. Jackson, “Reminiscences.”
59. “Capt. Daniel E. Smith of St. Paul, Minn. A Grand Life Record,” War Cry, January 4, 1890. On saloon culture, see Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 52–53.Google Scholar
60. The National Baptist, reprinted in London War Cry, Jury 10, 1880, 4.
61. “Look Here!” War Cry, Jury 3, 1884; see also Commissioner Richard E. Holz, “Bringing Them to the Street Corner: Early Day Music of the S.A.,” unpublished paper, Salvation Army Historical Commission biennial meeting, June 8, 1984, 9.
62. Ash-Barrel Jimmy, aka James Kemp, got his nickname when “he was found by a policeman dead drunk in a barrel, his hair frozen to the bottom, and was dragged thus embarrelled to the police court.” McKinley, , Marching to Glory, 14.Google Scholar
63. War Cry, December 26, 1885, 5. Other songs included religious lyrics set to “Them Golden Slippers” and “Grandfather's Clock.” See Murdoch, Norman H. and McMains, Howard F., “The Salvation Army Disturbances of 1885,” Queen City Heritage 45 (Summer 1987): 16.Google Scholar
64. The Chicago Inter-Ocean was “staunchly Republican, a real party organ, and an influential paper during the late 1880s and the 1890s.” H-SHGAPE message from Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College, 1996.
65. Chicago Inter-Ocean, reprinted in War Cry, April 25, 1891, 8.
66. Albanese, Catherine L., “Savage, Sinner, and Saved: Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings, and the Wild Frontier,” American Quarterly 33, no. 5 (1981): 495, 497.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
67. Dissociation, according to Taves, is not limited to religious experience but can happen with ordinary “overlearned” behaviors such as driving a car. Taves, Ann, “Knowing through the Body: Dissociative Religious Experience in African- and British-American Methodist Traditions,” Journal of Religion 73, no. 2 (1993): 201-2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
68. Taves argues that, while “enthusiasm” began to die out among Euro-American Methodists, “the greater openness of traditional African culture to dissociative religious experience and the crisis of enslavement led African Americans to elaborate and institutionalize dissociative experience at the heart of their worship life.” One of her sources, however, seems to suggest that some Euro-American groups also elaborated and institutionalized “enthusiasm.” “James Monroe Buckley, a prominent late-nineteenth-century Methodist (MEC) minister and editor, wrote that ‘the cataleptic condition which occurred among Congregationalists in the time of Jonathan Edwards, certain Presbyterians and Baptists in the early part of this Century in the South and West, and the early Methodists … is still common among colored people, Second Adventists, and the Salvation Army, and not wholly unknown among others,” Buckley, James Monroe, Faith-healing, Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena (New York: Century Co., 1892), 60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted in Taves, “Knowing through the Body,” 208, 211, 213.
69. According to Price, a '‘Hallelujah wind-up’ [was] a time of rejoicing following the service when a large number of converts came forward for prayers.” James W. Price, “Random Reminiscences,” 1889-1899, RG 20.27, Salvation Army Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia.
70. National Baptist, quoted in London War Cry, July 10, 1880, 4.
71. Jones, , Perfectionist Persuasion, 54.Google Scholar
72. Jackson, “Reminiscences.”
73. After years of training officers in the field, the Salvation Army began to organize “Training Garrisons” in various cities around the nation. As the Army became more bureaucratically centralized, training was shifted to three Territorial Training Colleges.
74. War Cry, June 1, 1895, 6, cited in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 55.
75. Price, “Random Reminiscences.”
76. Brereton, , Front Sin to Salvation, 68 Google Scholar; letter to the editor by A.S.M.C, Chicago Daily News, September 4, 1885, 2, cited in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 24.
77. Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1885, 4, cited in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 22.
78. Ibid. According to Albanese, “the camp meeting stood as an institution that would ultimately enforce law and order… Even in the midst of revival “frenzy” the seeming chaos of the encampments was deceptive. There were camp rules and procedures, hours of rising and eating, times of praying, singing and hearing the Word.” Albanese, “Savage, Sinner, and Saved,” 499.
79. Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1888, 9.
80. To “open fire” in Army discourse meant to attempt to open a corps or meeting hall. While the Catholic church establishment supported some aspects of the Salvation Army program, Irish Catholic neighborhoods were often hostile to the Salvation Army not only because it was a Protestant organization but also because its roots were British. According to Allen Bosch, “[t]hough individuals who were Roman Catholic actively defied the Salvation Army, there is no evidence of any organized Roman Catholic Opposition.” Bosch also cites articles published in the Catholic World that approved of the authoritarian structure of the Army and its bringing religion directly to the people. At the same time, however, the church disapproved of “the denial of the sacraments by the Salvation Army” and the more experiential aspects of their religious practice. “ Their whole gospel is a whirl of natural excitement, with a determination to keep the mercury up to summer heat; and consequently there is no room for Christian dogma, any more than for quiet repentance and humility.’” Bosch, “The Salvation Army in Chicago,” 84, citing Marshall, A. F., “The Salvation Army,” Catholic World, September 1890, 738-46Google Scholar, and Simmons, Gilbert, “The Salvation Army and Its Latest Project,” Catholic World, February 1891, 633-46.Google Scholar
81. War Cry, April 28, 1888, 5; War Cry, November 10, 1888, 10; War Cry, January 23, 1892, 2.
82. Chicago Herald, reprinted in War Cry, September 16, 1893, 7.
83. Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1885, 4, quoted in Bosch, “Salvation Army in Chicago,” 22. It was not unusual for Salvation Army officers of the same sex to live together in the corps “barracks” or in nearby “quarters.” See letter from Fannie Lawson to Charles McAbee, October 29, 1888, Salvation Army Western Territorial Museum. The Chicago middle classes may also have been responding to the opening of “training garrisons” in a number of cities, including Chicago. Here, larger numbers of cadets lived together in single-sex housing as they trained to be Salvation Army officers. I could find no support for accusations of widespread sexual misconduct. Indeed, the Army took great pains to regulate the romantic interaction between male and female officers with rules for courtship and swift dismissal if moral codes were violated.
84. SirBesant, Walter, London in the Nineteenth Century (London: A. and C. Black, 1909)Google Scholar, quoted in Roger Joseph Green, “Spirit Filled and Fighting Fit: Women in the Salvation Army,” unpublished paper, Salvation Army Territorial Historical Commission Meeting, June 9, 1984. See also Murdoch, “The Salvation Army.” The Grange, or Patrons of Husbandry was one of the few mixed-sex organizations that opened membership and office to men and women. Women most often exercised organizational authority only in organizations that were restricted to or dominated by women, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, women's clubs, and suffrage organizations. In fraternal organizations of the late nineteenth Century, such as the Odd Fellows, women were incorporated via auxiliaries, but these “were headed by male officers and supervised by the all-male State Grand Lodges.” Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 201.Google Scholar
85. Foot, V., “Isn't It Unwomanly,” War Cry, December 26, 1885, 5.Google Scholar See also “Two New Letters from Mrs. Booth” in which the Salvation Army Mother, Catherine Booth, advises Miss Alice Lewis to “[t]ry to throw off … the conventional notions and habits of your former life.” The Conqueror, October 1896, 461.
86. War Cry, January 14, 1893, 3; November 18, 1893, 12. For more on women in the Salvation Army, see Taiz, “Hallelujah Lasses in the Battle for Souls.” For an interesting look at nineteenth-century parades and the role women played as abstract symbols “representing the remote notions of national unity and local harmony,” see Ryan, Mary, “The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Hunt, Lynn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 150.Google Scholar In the Salvation Army, parading female officers and soldiers at times represented abstract concepts and at other times represented themselves. When they marched through the streets in “white dresses, Stars and Stripes sashes and red liberty caps,” they symbolized the Americanization of the British Salvation Army When a “squad of sisters” wearing the Army uniform marched in the streets with their brother Salvationists, they were representing themselves as members of the Salvation Army. War Cry, April 25, 1891, 8; Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1886, 9.
87. Educated middle-class men and women found themselves promoted swiftly into staff or administrative positions. Typically, Army leadership placed men with business experience in positions at the district administrative level immediately after training. Well-educated women also per-formed important administrative work for the Army, sometimes at national or international headquarters. By the mid-1890's, educated women would be increasingly filling administrative/executive positions in the Army's social welfare institutions. See Douglas, Brigadier Eileen, Elizabeth Swift Brengle (London: Salvationist Publishing and Supplies, 1922), 41 Google Scholar; Murdoch, Norman H., “Female Ministry in the Thought and Work of Catherine Booth,” Church History 53 (September 1984): 357 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Price, “Random Reminiscences,” 140.
88. Susan Swift, “The Conversion of Susan Swift,” RG 20.11, Salvation Army Archives and Research Center, Alexandria, Virginia, 6; see also Hall, Clarence W., Samuel Logan Brengle: Portrait of a Prophet (Chicago: Salvation Army Supply and Purchasing Department, 1933), 46–51 Google Scholar; “Mrs. Fannie McAbee,” War Cry, Jury 6, 1889, 3; Murdoch, “Female Ministry,” 357; and “Adjutant Charles McAbee,” War Cry, July 6, 1889, 2.
89. Hall, , Samuel Logan Brengle, 81–84.Google Scholar
90. Ibid.
91. Green, “Theology of William Booth,” 82.
92. William Booth, “The General's Address at Exeter Hall on Monday Evening,” quoted in Green, “Theology of William Booth,” 90.
93. Christian at Work, June 23, 1883, reprinted in War Cry, July 19, 1883, 1.