The Professional-Managerial Class The middle class expands in size, deepens in self-awareness, elaborates distinctive patterns of domesticity, education, religion, amusement, and politics.

In the seventies confidence was reinforced by organization. Before the war many professions had

been on the defensive, their efforts to set standards and control access to their ranks traduced as

aristocratic. Now, newly nerved, they strengthened existing professional bodies and created new

ones. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, and architects came together to restrict membership to candidates

they designated as qualified and who pledged allegiance to a common code of conduct.

Lawyers multiplied rapidly in the postwar era, though firms remained relatively small. Bidwell

and Strong, which represented Steinway and Sons, Wells Fargo, and Western Union Telegraph,

consisted of six attorneys and four assistants in 1878. Lawyers served many functions in the new

order: defending railroads in court, serving as board directors, working as lobbyists (bridging the

worlds of business and government), representing speculators and empire builders, managing real

estate interests, advising social and cultural organizations, and handling trusts, estates, and, especially

in New York City, the complicated affairs of the new nationally oriented corporations.

Involvement in corporate warfare, however, brought the Bar into serious disrepute. Drew, Fisk,

and Gould hired a team of forty-plus attorneys to run legal interference for them in the Erie War,

while an opposing regiment of lawyers handled Vanderbilt’s machinations. The Bench too had been

tarnished by its abetting of financial and political skullduggery: in 1867 the distinguished attorney

James T. Brady accused Tweed crony Judge Barnard of corruption, to his face in open court.

Many lawyers, notably George Templeton Strong of Bidwell and Strong, blamed not corporate

capitalism but the 1846 state constitution, which had abolished the old distinctions between attorneys,

solicitors, and counselors, placed all lawyers on the same nominal footing, and adopted simplified

and unexacting licensing procedures. It had also made judgeships elective rather than appointive

positions. The result, Strong believed, had been a “progressive debasement of the Bar & Bench.” The

swollen legal fraternity was no longer “learned & dignified” but rather ranked “next below that of

patent-medicine mongering.” Strong believed reform required replacing apprenticeship with a law

school education. He devoted himself accordingly to expanding Columbia College’s School of Law,

and by the 1880s it was one of the two largest in the United States.

Other reform-minded lawyers—Samuel Tilden and William Evarts chief among them—decided

that only a new and exclusive group restricted to “the more worthy of the profession” could remedy

the situation, given their inability to control access to the field itself. If New York City were to

remain the commercial and monetary capital of the United States, Tilden warned, “it must establish an

elevated character for its Bar, and a reputation throughout the country for its purity in the

administration of justice.” To police their own ranks, define the boundaries of acceptable conduct,

aid attorneys in standing up to judges (and the political machines that elected them), and make the law

a “noble profession” and not merely a “trade with the rest,” they and others created the Association of

the Bar of the City of New York (1870). Rigorous admission procedures and hefty fees allowed the

“worthy” to exclude the “uncouth in manners and habits, ignorant even of the English language,

jostling and crowding and vulgarizing the profession.” A year after its formation, the self-selected

and overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders had admitted only 450 out of New York’s

approximately four thousand lawyers to their ranks. Grievance and screening committees were

established to exercise some control over the behavior of attorneys and judges. The association’s

pioneering effort at self-regulation was swiftly and widely copied throughout the country, and

Manhattanites proved instrumental in forming the American Bar Association in 1878.

The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, under the presidency (after 1869)



of Richard Morris Hunt, similarly sought to winnow out those it considered unprofessional and to

impose order and standards on practitioners. It recruited only trained architects—often from well-todo families able to pay for their education—while rejecting older craftsmen who had worked their

way up from the ranks of carpenters and masons. The group thus denied membership to John Kellum,

perhaps the most employed architect of the day, on the ground that he was merely an unskilled

draftsman. Indeed Kellum’s very popularity counted against him: the new men found him too

“commercial,” too willing to defer to the wishes of his prosperous clients, too reluctant to improve

his employers’ tastes by bringing to bear the authority of his professional credentials.

In the 1870s “regular” doctors made another effort to impose their methods and approaches on the

practice of medicine. The New York Medico-Legal Society prepared a bill in 1872 authorizing the

County Medical Society to license all physicians, thus allowing the American Medical Association’s

allopathic physicians to define their homeopathic rivals as quacks, effectively putting them out of

business. The bill passed, but, heeding widespread opposition, Governor Hoffman vetoed it, arguing

that only the marketplace should regulate medical practice. A compromise measure passed in 1874,

but physicians remained dissatisfied. In the meantime their public-oriented colleagues organized

separately: Dr. Edward H. Janes, the city’s sanitary inspector from 1866 until his death in 1893,

helped found the American Public Health Association in 1872.

New Yorkers and Brooklynites were particularly prominent in the movement to professionalize

civil engineering, as so many leading practitioners were graduates of the area’s many public works

projects. Faced with a flood of self-proclaimed engineers in the late 1860s, promoters pushed to

create a “proper association, admission to which should only be possible to accomplished and

competent men.” In 1867 they established the American Society of Qvil Engineers (ASCE). J. P.

Kirkwood and Julius Adams, the engineers of Brooklyn’s sewer system, served as the ASCE’s first

president and vicepresident, respectively, and Alfred W. Craven, John B. Jervis, and other Croton

veterans became prominent members. Indeed seven of the first eight presidents were either permanent

employees of New York City or did consulting work for it. The organization established its

permanent home in Manhattan, holding meetings and social functions in offices at the Chamber of

Commerce Building, and started regular publication of a professional journal in 1872.

The ASCE thrived, boasting 212 members by 1871. Participation was restricted to men who had

been actively employed for five or more years in a supervisory capacity, though less experience was

acceptable for those who had completed a college course of study. Before the war New York’s

engineers had trained on the job or in apprenticeships; mastery of the fundamentals of math, physics,

and mechanics had been deemed unnecessary to solving most technical problems. In 1864, however,

Thomas Egleston founded Columbia’s School of Mines, which, despite its name, pioneered broadbased scientific education for engineers as well as geologists, and in 1869 the school began offering

four-year courses in civil engineering. Mechanical engineers too, most of whom had emerged from

machine shops, set about distinguishing themselves from mere “mechanics,” by forming in New York

City the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1880).

One of the greatest obstacles to even organized engineers’ winning professional autonomy was

their continuing subordination to the political authorities who controlled public works, but here too

there were breakthroughs. In 1860, when Mayor Wood fired Alfred W. Craven, chief engineer of the

Croton Aqueduct, Craven fought back vigorously, arguing that he had the technical know-how

required to run the city’s water and sewer systems, and the mayor did not. Craven won his point both

legally (he was reinstated) and in the court of public opinion, where the mayor was denounced for



putting politics above efficiency.

Professionalization spread among corporate managers too, particularly in the expanding railroad

industry. Managers of competing companies, striving to rationalize a hodgepodge system, came

together to standardize operating procedures and equipment, then continued to meet regularly. A

growing sense of professional kinship transcending corporate loyalties gave rise to groups like the

American Society of Rail Road Superintendents and the National Association of General Passenger

and Ticket Agents.

At the other end of the middle-class spectrum, which consisted of employees rather than

professionals and managers, postwar developments in the municipal economy swelled the ranks of

clerical and sales forces. Insurance companies, banks, mercantile and stock exchanges, post offices

and express agencies, credit rating firms, shipping and railroad companies, newspapers, large-scale

manufacturers, and wholesaler jobbers—all these required sizable numbers of bookkeepers, cashiers,

accountants, and clerks to staff them. The burgeoning of department stores, fashion and piano

show​rooms, and elegant retail outlets similarly required growing numbers of stockroom employees

and salesmen—and, gradually, saleswomen: in 1869 A. T Stewart’s began to employ “American

ladies of refinement and culture” to stand behind the counters.

Such workers seldom organized on the model of the professional organizations; most didn’t

organize at all. What bound them together, rather, were common experiences and shared values. Most

worked in “clean” environments—the giant new downtown office buildings—rather than grubby

factories, grimy warehouses, or messy construction sites, and most of them dressed accordingly.

Junius Browne, watching the morning ferry passengers disembark in 1869, noted that the first

contingent—“mechanics with their flannel and check shirts”—was followed by platoons of salesmen,

accountants, and clerks after seven A.M., at which time “the shirts of the passengers begin to whiten

and raiment to improve.” Many of these white-collared workers believed, as an 1868 commentator in

Galaxy put it, that “manual labor is disreputable” even though it often paid better than head work

(masons earned twice what clerks did). To further distinguish themselves from mechanics and

laborers, the lower middle classes adopted appropriate modes of personal conduct—taking their

cultural cues from professionals and managers when deciding how and where to live their lives.

HOME SWEET APARTMENT



Manhattan’s middle classes had their own territorial enclaves, spatially distinct from both Hell’s

Kitchen and Fifth Avenue. They settled in the West Village, in Chelsea, along cross streets in the

rectangle bordered by 14th, 59th, Eighth, and Second, and on the Upper East Side and Harlem. Their

travels to and from work downtown helped swell the annual ridership on New York’s thirteen

streetcar lines to 150 million by 1873, up fourfold since 1860, despite crammed conditions on the

commuting cars (it “would not be decent to carry live hogs thus,” huffed Horace Greeley). Shopping

soon followed them northward, and dry-goods stores spread up Third, Sixth, and Eighth avenues,

making them the commercial thoroughfares of middle-class neighborhoods.

When they could afford to, middling New Yorkers purchased their own homes. In the postwar

years, however, clericals and even professionals found this increasingly difficult to do. Soaring land

prices put single-family twenty-five-foot-wide row houses out of reach. Middle-class salaried

employees making two thousand dollars a year could seldom afford a ten- to eighty-thousand-dollar

town house, and for a skilled mechanic making an annual thousand dollars it was quite impossible.



Many abandoned private ownership altogether and became boarders. As commerce marched into

Union Square, the rich decamped northward, and their elegant town houses along lower Fifth and

Madison avenues were subdivided and converted into respectable boardinghouses for doctors,

lawyers, professors, and smaller merchants. Rooms here might cost from twelve to fifteen dollars a

week in 1869. Hotels were another option, and those willing to settle for modest accommodations

had a wide choice. By 1869 the construction boom had boosted the total number of metropolitan

hotels to between seven and eight hundred, many of which offered rooms for residents as well as for

transients. Boardinghouses on side streets offered even cheaper accommodations, which salaried

clerks could afford. As Dickens observed on his 1867-68 visit, there were “300 boarding houses in

West 14th Street, exactly alike, with 300 young men, exactly alike, sleeping in 300 hall bedrooms,

exactly alike, with 300 dress suits, exactly alike, lying on so many chairs, exactly alike, beside the

bed.”

But the growing middle class did not like such housing. Respectable people lived in a “home” of

their own, not jumbled up with strangers. Multifamily dwellings smacked of tenement life.

Boardinghouses, with their centrally cooked and commonly eaten meals, threatened family integrity;

wives might mingle promiscuously with others while husbands were off at work. Enforced intimacy

mocked middle-class values of family privacy and the sanctity of the home.

The first “apartment houses” were built to solve this spatial and cultural conundrum. New Yorkers

had been hearing about so-called French Flats, the grand buildings lining Haussmann’s new

boulevards, and most of what they heard was negative. French Flats were too public; they came with

a nosy concierge; they lacked most features of a proper Anglo-Saxon home. Some magazine writers

did note their advantages: everything was on one floor, eliminating the need to squeeze up and down a

brownstone’s narrow stairway; they were more spacious and easier to clean; the nosy concierge

looked after things when owners summered out of town. Still, prevailing opinion was opposed.

“Gentlemen,” as one of the breed irately put it, “will never consent to live on mere shelves under a

common roof!”

It took the combined prestige and power of the city’s most francophiliac architect and a gentleman

of unimpeachable social standing to pierce the armor of conventional opinion. Rutherfurd Stuyvesant

was as patrician as you could get in New York. His father, Lewis Rutherfurd, was merely a

distinguished astronomer. But his mother was a direct descendant of Petrus Stuyvesant and had

transmitted the family fortune to Rutherfurd (on the condition that he spurn patrilineality and adopt his

mother’s last name). Stuyvesant had admired apartment houses in Paris, and in 1869 he hired Richard

Morris Hunt, whom he had met in France, to create one for him on a fourrow-house-wide stretch of

18th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. Each of the first four floors had four separate

apartments, and the fifth was reserved for artists’ studios. To the astonishment of many, the

apartments, overseen by a French-style concierge, were rented immediately, by young couples of

impeccable “old Knickerbocker” credentials.

Hunt next constructed a far grander apartment house for Paran Stevens (whose wife’s parties were

then scandalizing more staid society matrons). The striking marbletrimmed, mansard-capped, eightstory building, when completed in 1872, occupied the entire south side of 27th Street between Fifth

Avenue and Broadway and was one of the largest buildings in the city. Stevens House had eighteen

suites, each with parlor, dining room, kitchen, butler’s pantry, bedrooms, dressing rooms, and

bathroom—along with steam elevators that rose to an attic where servants’ quarters were available.

Stevens had overreached, and his luxury operation was soon converted into a more modest apartment



hotel, but the Second Empire edifice remained a New York cultural and technological landmark.

Now socially certified, the French Flat began to catch on. By the mid-1870s, with a dozen or so up

or in the planning stages, especially around the lower border of Central Park, the New York City

Buildings Department adopted “French Flat” as an official category. The term, like “apartment

house,” implied a larger and better-quality edifice than “tenement,” and to underscore the class status

of their residents, the new buildings took toney names like Osborne, Knickerbocker, Berkeley, and

Saratoga.

The as yet limited number of apartment houses could shelter only a relative handful, however, and

many middle-class home and status seekers, in pursuit of an immedi​ate solution, decided to cross the

East River. The wealthiest professionals took up quarters in Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill,

mingling with old New England merchants and new-monied businessmen. Others settled in Fort

Greene (particularly around Washington Park, where contractor William Kingsley built his home in

1867) or in Clinton Hill (where oil magnate Charles Pratt erected a mansion in 1875). Less costly

accommodations could be found in Boerum Hill or in row houses with deep front gardens along the

streets around Carroll Park, an area developed after 1869. The least-well-paid members of the

middle class could turn to the lower Park Slope area, between Third and Sixth avenues, though it was

unattractively interlaced with the light industrial establishments spreading outward from the Gowanus

Canal.

Those willing to travel farther could settle in growing Bedford. Speculators and builders

advertised the area as the “Garden of Brooklyn,” perfect for the “refined and select” middle class.

Single-family Gothic-style frame houses with gas, hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, and, in some

cases, gardens, grape arbors, and apple trees, could be had in South Bedford for between five and ten

thousand dollars. These new homes were deliberately situated away from the LIRR stops on Atlantic

Avenue and the horsecar line on Fulton Street, even though 50 percent of Bedfordites commuted all

the way into Manhattan, a two-and-a-half-mile journey that took about an hour and cost thirteen cents.

Catching a ride to the city entailed a long walk, but it seemed worth it to preserve, for the moment, the

area’s bucolic character. To the north, by contrast, row houses and tenements clustered around the

Flushing and Myrtle Avenue lines of the Brooklyn City Rail Road. Their cars transported native-born

lower-middle-class clerical workers to Manhattan or to Brooklyn’s City Hall and Fulton Street

commercial districts.

Some professionals were drawn to the Queens suburban frontier, to places like the new railroad

community of Richmond Hill, named for a London suburb. New York attorney Albon Platt Man built

it in 1869 along the wooded hills of the terminal moraine and ensured its class character by barring

such “nuisances” as factories, warehouses, and tenements. But in the 1860s and 1870s, Kings seemed

preferable to Queens, as residents could visit local analogues of New York City’s cultural institutions

(Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Club, Mercantile Library, Long Island Historical Society)

and were close to Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, and more distant rural diversions. A

Brooklyn Heights resident could leave his Manhattan office at three o’clock, return on the Wall Street

ferry, dine at four, then take a leisurely drive to the outskirts of town. Residents and realtors began to

boast that Brooklyn was a middleclass paradise, free from urban ills and evils, a complacency that

required ignoring the tenements of detested “micks” on the flats south of the Navy Yard.

Brooklyn was indeed something of a paradise for the African-American middleclass. Though the

vast majority of black Brooklynites consisted of manual laborers, the city was also home to a small



elite of professionals (doctors, lawyers, journalists, ministers, and teachers) and businesspeople

(dressmakers, undertakers, carpenters, barbers, tailors). Some were affluent enough to invest in real

estate during the 1870s, via the Excelsior Land Association of Brooklyn, and some owned substantial

middle-class dwellings, complete with pianos, libraries, and pictures of Lincoln, John Brown, and

AME Bishop Richard Allen.

The presence of this African-American elite was felt most strongly in Brooklyn’s black churches,

which moved away from religious enthusiasm toward a more urbane and intellectual Christianity.

Their trained and educated ministers focused heavily on promoting learning, literacy, and culture.

Concord Baptist, Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal (AWME), and Siloam

Presbyterian took the lead in providing libraries, classes, lectures, and concerts of classical music.

The black Brooklyn community also developed autonomous institutions, like the Howard Colored

Orphan Asylum (1866), the African Civilization Society, which began publishing the newspaper

Freedman’s Torchlight the same year, and the Zion Home for Colored Aged (1869).

THE CULTIVATED LIFE



In the 1870s Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote novels about New York life—like We and Our

Neighbors; or, the Record of an Unfashionable Street (1875), which featured heroines like Eva, “a

child of wealth and fashion” whose father had gone bankrupt. Eva married a journalist, moved to an

unfashionable street, made do with only one servant, and moderated her expectations to middle-class

levels-. Referring to the posh Elmores she said: “We must keep in sight of them. All I ask is to be

decent. I never expect to run into the extremes those Elmores do.”

Middling New Yorkers adhered to values that, like their jobs and residencies, set them off from

vulgar lower classes and dissipated upper ones. “Decent” was an imprecise term, more or less

interchangeable with “genteel,” “cultured,” “refined,” “civilized,” “respectable,” and “cultivated,”

but all the near-synonyms suggested an earned status. “Cultivation” implied self-development, a

purposeful pursuit of “higher things.” It prized intellect and sensibilities tutored in arts, letters, and

manners. It was an identity rooted in education rather than in labor or wealth.

Not that the middle class had anything against wealth as such: prosperity was an indispensable

precondition for gentility. Indeed it was the growing purchasing power of the postwar middle class

that allowed ever greater numbers of New Yorkers to acquire the trappings of gentility: to live in

tasteful homes in good neighborhoods, wear respectable clothes, attend refined schools, cultivate the

arts and graces. Only “mere” or “vulgar” wealth was objectionable, wasted as it was on display

rather than development, squandered in private hedonism rather than promotion of the public good.

Wherever they settled, therefore, middle-class New Yorkers decorated their quarters with objects

that betokened their cultivation. Art galleries á la A. T. Stewart were out of the question, but massproduced artwork was readily available. In his studio at 212 Fifth Avenue, John Rogers fashioned

sculptural tableaux in clay, then churned out reproductions in plaster and bronze, which sold

throughout the city and, via advertising and railroad delivery, across the continent. Rogers used

industrial methods to evoke preindustrial life—The Village Post-Office, Coming to the Parson—

along with more topical, even political themes, which balanced realism and sentimentality.

Contemporary critics noted that his was not a “high art” but lauded the “Rogers groups” for their

“elevated meaning” and “true feeling,” which were “alike satisfying to head and heart.” Metropolitan

middle-class parlors were embellished as well with Currier and Ives chromolithographs that limned



the triumphal expansion of Christian American civilization out west and hailed the triumph of a

middle-class order in New York City.

As cultural possessions piled up in the parlor, along with machine-made upholstery, drapery, and

carpeting and heavily carved furniture, they demanded an increasing level of maintenance. The haute

bourgeoisie solved this problem with platoons of servants, but most of the middle class could at best

afford but one. This required the housewife to take a professional approach to increasing the

efficiency of such domestic labor as she had available. Advice books had been telling wives to

manage households scientifically since the 1840s, but now the audience for such counsel had grown

large enough to support an ongoing journalistic advocacy. Thus Eunice Beecher wrote a regular

domestic advice column for the Christian Union in the 1870s, in which she aimed to help a woman

“conduct her household as a business, prepare herself for it as a man prepared for his life work.”

When they turned from work to play, more and more middle-class New Yorkers could afford to

take in the same operatic and theatrical performances at the Rialto as did the haute bourgeoisie. But

they also enjoyed more modest pastimes, like group singing in their parlors or reading aloud from

genteel magazines like Harper’s Weekly and Scrib-ner’s. Lectures were popular too: the uplifting or

scientific ones at Chickering Hall (Fifth Avenue and 18th Street) and the effusions of humorists like

Artemus Ward at Dodworth Hall (just north of Grace Church).

The new Central Park attracted many middling Manhattanites. When flags flew on omnibuses and

horsecars, or one heard that “the ball is up in the Park,” it meant that the pond at 59th Street was

frozen over and one could go skating (at night the area was illuminated by calcium lights). Park

officials enforced respectable behavior, and regulations said that “any person observing any act of

indecorum may signalize a park-keeper by holding aloft or waving a handkerchief.” Middle-class

New Yorkers couldn’t afford private carriages, but they could rent one from a livery stable for a

dollar or two an hour, at least for special occasions. Families of clerks, prosperous shopkeepers,

young professionals, and independent artisans (especially Germans) also went for walks, strolled

through the Ramble, and took their children to the nascent zoo at the Arsenal. On summer Saturday

afternoons, when most of “the mechanic and laboring classes” were still at work, Dodworth’s band

concerts attracted crowds of forty-five thousand or more to the Mall. These assemblages, the papers

noted, were composed of the “orderly, wellconducted and respectable,” the kinds of people (said the

Tribune) “whose tastes are above grog shops and lager bier gardens but whose pockets are not equal

to Newport or Saratoga.”

Those who could afford the bicycles produced by several city manufacturers—which retailed for a

stiff fifty dollars to three times that—could take classes in biking at the new Velocinasium. Here, the

Scientific American observed in 1869, “on any weekday evening may be seen upward of a hundred

and fifty gentlemen—doctors, bankers, merchants, and representatives from almost every profession

—engaged in this training school preparatory to making their appearance upon the public streets and

fashionable promenades.”

Shopkeepers, clerks, and skilled craftsmen (especially butchers) dominated the city’s baseball

fields, hailing the sport as a healthful outdoor exercise. Amateur outfits continued to flourish, and by

1867, with the return of veterans who had played in the army, there were over one hundred clubs in

Brooklyn and Manhattan, many formed by companies and colleges. But baseball had begun its own

professionalization process during the war, when William H. Cammeyer opened the Union Grounds

in Brooklyn’s Eastern District, providing a rent-free playing field to three clubs but charging a tencent



admission fee to watch the games. His success inspired a competitor in the Capitoline Grounds (once

part of the old Lefferts farm). Now the clubs that drew the biggest crowds demanded a share of the

gate; to attract greater attendance they sought more proficient players; athletes, in turn, demanded pay

to play and proved willing to engage in “revolving”—jumping from one team to another that paid

better.

By the late 1860s baseball had become a business, an urban entertainment commodity with

Brooklyn and New York City at its center. The metropolitan area was a major market for recruitment:

when a Cincinnati Red Stocking triumph in 1869 ended the local area’s domination of baseball, most

of the Reds proved to be New Yorkers.

The huge crowds that came to contests were predominantly drawn from the city’s middling ranks.

In part this was simply because the fees (twenty-five to fifty cents) and costs of travel to out-of-city

fields effectively barred unskilled laborers. It was also due to baseball’s peculiarly white-collar

charms, its appeal to middle-class sensibilities. An extremely orderly game, full of reassuring rules

and penalties for infractions, baseball grew ever more “scientific” in nature as it professionalized.

This was reflected on the field, in growing levels of specialization, training, and discipline and in the

invention of new techniques: Dicky Pearce, the Atlantics’ star shortstop, became the first to employ

the bunt as an offensive weapon. Even fandom required new levels of cerebration. Henry Chadwick,

editor of the Chronicle, invented box scores and began calculating batting averages. Spectators could

now peruse the reports, tables, and statistics in the sporting press and follow players and teams in a

methodical fashion. The commentary of sports journalists in turn expanded the available information

pool—the New York National Police Gazette, a major source, was widely available in hotels,

barbershops, and saloons—and helped educate habitués in the finer points of observation.

The respectable middle class knew the kinds of entertainment it didn’t like, as well: the sordid

goings-on in Kit Burns’s rat pit. The American Society for the Prevention of



“City Enormities—Every Brute Can Beat His Beast!’ from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated

Newspaper, October 28, 1865. This depiction of cartmen abusing a horse is said to

have prompted the formation of the ASPGA, which used it for many years to rally

support among the urban middle classes. (General Research. The New York Public

Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)—a strictly New York City concern despite its expansive name—had

been founded in 1866 by Henry Bergh, son of wealthy shipbuilder Christian Bergh. Addressing a

crowded Clinton Hall meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, Bergh had

denounced the cruelties practiced upon urban animals, particularly by the brutish (and Irish) lower

classes, and urged New Yorkers to follow England’s example in tackling the problem

organizationally and legislatively. The backing of wealthy bourgeois gentlemen (Astor, Fish,

Belmont) and leading ministers (the Unitarian “Pope” Henry Bellows) won the ASPCA a charter and

gained passage of restrictive laws, but the rank-and-file supporters of the organization were mainly

middle class.



The ASPCA took out after lower-class blood sports, deploring both their cruelty and their waste

of working-class time. It repeatedly raided Kit Burns’s establishment, forcing sportsmen to shift to

pits in Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and Hoboken, and in subsequent decades largely succeeded in

driving animal sports from the city. Except, that is, for the upper-class pastime of fox-hunting.

In addition to denouncing particular forms of working-class play, many professionals scorned the

communal culture of the immigrant streets. Frederick Law Olmsted objected to “young men in knots of

perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes,” who rudely obstructed sidewalks or descended into a

“brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink, and eat all

manner of vile things.” Proper neighborliness did not consist in sitting about on doorsteps or

curbstones while children “dodge[d] about at play,” but rather in sitting at the “tea-table with

neighbors and wives and mothers and children, and all things clean and wholesome, softening and

refining.”

RAGS TO ‘SPECTABILITY RELIGION



More than ever, middle-class families hewed to distinctively middle-class creeds and denominations,

clustering in neighborhood Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian

churches and having little-to do with Catholicism unless they were Irish or German. Middling New

Yorkers harkened particularly to the teachings of three theologians whose messages resonated with

special force within their social stratum: the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the Rev. Dwight L. Moody,

and the Rev. Horatio Alger Jr.

In the postwar years Henry Ward Beecher was at the top of his form. His exuberant oratorical

performances pulled crowds of Manhattanites across the river on Sunday mornings (on “Beecher

boats”) to drink in his Plymouth Church sermons alongside Brooklyn brokers, small businessmen,

professionals, clerks, bookkeepers, and skilled laborers. The “Hercules of American Protestantism”

made twenty thousand dollars a year—equal to the president’s salary—supplemented with income

from writing articles for the secular and religious press, penning a bestselling novel, and giving

lectures.

Part of Beecher’s attraction lay in his long-standing ability to successfully negotiate tensions in

middle-class ideologies, as in his continuing reassurances to privileged audiences that social

inequalities generated by the free market system were divinely sanctioned and morally justifiable.

Now, in the postwar age of Darwin, Beecher demonstrated a capacity to reconcile religion with

reason—coequal polestars for his middle-class followers. Confronted with hard evidence from

geologists, paleontologists, and biologists that challenged traditional biblical teachings, Beecher

responded by accepting the new findings, formally embracing Darwin in 1882, though implicitly he

had done so much earlier. Beecher argued that Science and Religion were not really in conflict, as

evolution was God’s work. God was imminent in Nature, and His Laws might be grasped by the

rational mind, but His Divine Essence was Love, and that could only be captured by contemplation of

Nature’s beauty. God could therefore be best discerned, Beecher suggested, by the refined and the

sensitive, attributes that (like knowledge and education) could be cultivated. It was possible,

accordingly, for people to “ripen” by their own efforts to a “nobler plane,” attaining a level at which

they were naturally attracted to love and goodness and cleaved to proper behavior as a matter of

course, not coercion.

Organizing the process of elevating masses of middling men and women to such an exalted status



was central to the work of Dwight L. Moody, the era’s most influential evangelical preacher, and in

1875 Moody decided to undertake a jumbo-scale revival in Beecher’s Brooklyn, one that would

dwarf the efforts of prewar predecessors like Charles Grandison Finney. As a young man, Moody had

moved from Massachusetts to Chicago, become a successful shoe salesman and usurious

moneylender, and worked for the Chicago YMCA. After a conversion experience, he became an

itinerant revival preacher in the midwest, then rocketed to fame after a successful 1873-75 tour of

England, Scotland, and Ireland, along with Ira D. Sankey, his musical director, who led congregants

in old hymns and taught them new ones.

On his return, Moody launched the revival in Brooklyn. Demonstrating a mastery at organizing

urban camp meetings, the evangelist converted a huge skating rink to a six-thousand-seat auditorium,

advertised extensively with posters and newspapers, and accommodated reporters on the platform

who in turn related the services at great length. The following year, 1876, he worked out of New

York City’s mammoth Hippodrome, the remodeled Harlem Railroad Depot at 26th and Madison

whose adaptation cost a substantial ten thousand dollars, plus a fifteen-hundred-dollar weekly rental.

Moody’s ministry was financed by the very wealthy (William E. Dodge, Cornelius Vanderbilt II,

J. P. Morgan). As one journalist observed, a Moody revival was “a vast business enterprise,

organized and conducted by businessmen, who have put money into it on business principals for the

purpose of saving men.” They applauded his views, which, though short on doctrine, suggested that

urban suffering was due to city folk having drifted away from God and could best be addressed by

seeking personal salvation through Jesus and avoiding sins such as drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking,

and theatergoing or other “worldly amusements.”

Moody’s meetings were themselves fabulous middle-class entertainments. Immense crowds, often

ten thousand or more, jammed and overflowed his arenas, aided by the streetcar companies, which

built special tracks to their doors. The hymnbook and photograph vendors, the common singing, the

mixing with pious strangers: these afforded a social outlet sorely needed by those required to abjure

wicked commercial pleasures.

Such guilt-free get-togethers were particularly attractive to recently arrived, country-bred,

evangelically oriented young men who had perhaps secured an office job but whose status and social

networks still seemed fragile and insecure. One such newcomer was Horatio Alger, a recently

secularized man of the cloth. Born in 1832 in Revere, Massachusetts, Alger went to Harvard, tried

unsuccessfully to make a living as a professional writer for the Boston weeklies, then finally, and

somewhat reluctantly, entered Cambridge Theological School to prepare himself for the ministry.

Alger spent the war years preaching. On the side, he wrote patriotic verse and a juvenile novel,

Frank’s Campaign, “to show how boys can be of most effectual service in assisting to put down the

Rebellion.” In 1864 he settled down as a Unitarian pastor in Brewster, Massachusetts, but his

ministry ended abruptly two years later, after an investigation by church authorities determined that

the pastor had been engaging in “unnatural crimes” with young boys in the parish. Alger, admitting he

had been “imprudent,” left town on the next train.

Moving to New York, Alger rented a room in a cheap hotel on St. Mark’s Place and set about

making a career as a writer, though at first his articles and novels garnered good reviews but

disappointing sales. In the meantime he had begun to study the habits of New York’s “street Arabs”

and to aid the work of the Newsboys’ Lodging House. A project inaugurated by Charles Loring

Brace’s Children’s Aid Society, it provided dormitory space at Fulton and Nassau where newsboys