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Moralists & Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers by Steven Mintz Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995   Review by Larry DeWitt December 2003 Social reformers never want for work. The need to reform various aspects of human society is as old as human society. Indeed, in many cultures, the two preeminent myths are some variety of The Creation and The Fall. This is no doubt to explain two of the most pervasive facts of human life--the mysterious fact that we are here and the confounding fact that we are very flawed creatures indeed. The impulse to reform, then, along with the need, is ancient, and the idea of beginning the story of reform anywhere short of the beginning of a society must be somewhat arbitrary. Steven Mintz in his book, Moralists and Modernizers, begins the story of American social reform in the period prior to the Civil War. Mintz insists that in the antebellum period is to be found the beginnings of many modern secular reform movements, even some which appear in their most successful forms during the Progressive Era and New Deal. Mintz describes this period as the "first age of reform" and claims the antebellum period as the time of "the first secular efforts in history to remake society through reform." [1] In post-Victorian England when "common dustman" and contented drunkard Alfred P. Doolittle put the touch on Professor Henry Higgins for a five-pound note (in the Hollywood film My Fair Lady) Higgins impulsively offered Doolittle a double-dose of prosperity, proffering a 10-pound bill instead. Doolittle adamantly declined, fearful that if he ever became too prosperous he would become ensnared in the reforming clutches of "middle class morality." Sobriety, marriage and work were among the dangers Alfred P. Doolittle found lurking in middle-class morality. And indeed, it was this very "middle class morality" (found on both sides of the Atlantic) which earlier informed one of the major threads of antebellum reform-the Moral Reformers. For Mintz, the reformers of the period come in three broad types: Moral, Social and Radical. Moral reformers were generally those motivated by religious values. They tended to concentrate on issues involving moral conduct, such as temperance and sexual vice. Bible societies, missionary organizations, Sunday schools, campaigns against prostitution, all fit in this category. Social reformers tended to be somewhat (although only somewhat!) more secular in their motivations and in the institutions they sought to create. Modern prisons, insane asylums, camps for slum children, and a particular focus on the problems of poverty, characterize these reformers. Radical reformers wanted fundamental structural change in America society. All of the various utopian movements of the period, and especially much of the agitation for the abolition of slavery, can be grouped in this category. Part of Mintz's larger thesis is that despite their differences, all three reform groups were modernizers in the sense that they sought to build institutions (often secular, but also often religious) which would serve as the structures through which reform would be carried out. In this key respect they were different than earlier generations of American moralists whose primary focus was on reforming the internal character of those thought to be in need of reform. While the antebellum reformers certainly placed great stress on character reform in this traditional way, they were more modern reformers (indeed the first generation of modern reformers in Mintz's view) precisely because they expanded this personal realm into the realm of social structure and institution-building. It is instructive to place Mintz's work within the larger structure of the historiography of the reform story in American history. For the first generation of historians of this period (whom I will call liberals)-writing roughly up to the end of World War II-the antebellum reformers were fanatics and extremists, but they were also forerunners of authentic reform, the type of reform which would appear in a mature way in the Progressive Era and New Deal. These liberal historians viewed the antebellum reformers an as immature stage in the lineage of progress, as precursors of the liberal impulse in America history which produced a more just and equitable society when it finally appeared on the scene in subsequent eras. After the War, revisionist historians reinterpreted this first period of reform more cynically, and tended to depict the reformers as fanatics and disaffected zealots whose beliefs in the perfectibility of society were tragically naive-which the horrors of World War II had made self-evident to them. For the revisionists, like the liberals, the antebellum reformers were extremists; but unlike the liberals the revisionists had little faith in liberal progress and so they saw the antebellum reformers as mere extremists, for no real purpose. By the 1960s, leftist historians began to lodge two types of complaints against antebellum reform. One group agreed the antebellum reformers were zealots, and celebrated them for it-arguing that the evils of their age required a zealous response-without having to justify themselves by reference to some later more tepid liberal tradition. The other group questioned the whole idea of reform-antebellum, Progressive and New Deal alike-seeing them all as bourgeoisie instruments of social control and class, gender and race domination. For these historians the problem with the antebellum reformers was that they were reformers and not revolutionaries. Blinded by their own middle-class prejudices (in this view) the antebellum reformers were oblivious to the varieties of repression and inequality which their reforms still tolerated. Mintz wants to rehabilitate the reputations of the antebellum reformers. He resists, throughout the book, the suggestion that matters are so simple that we can agree with the historians who despise the antebellum reformers. Mintz clearly admires them; and while admitting a portion of the earlier critiques to be valid, he wants to insist that the glass is somewhat full no matter how skeptically we look at it, and that this fullness is admirable. He expresses his judgment on the period in a powerful passage: "Beyond their specific achievements, America's pre-Civil War reformers left an even more lasting gift: they reinvigorated American ideals and reinforced the nation's commitment to equality and social justice. If Americans today recognize the various forms that oppression, inequality, exploitation, and tyranny can take, this is largely on account of past reformers who stuck thorns in the side of indifference and dared to dream of a better world." [2] So Mintz wants to further refine the historiography of this period by straddling all the earlier schools of thought: he agrees with the liberals that the antebellum reformers are part of the liberal tradition; he agrees with all three groups that the reformers of this period were zealots; he even agrees with the critical leftists that in many ways they were reactionaries. All of this is true, he concedes, but ultimately they were genuine reformers, sincerely motivated, who accomplished pioneering work, and whose efforts are to be admired. Mintz is not pretentious enough to name a school of historiography for himself; but let us call it, on his behalf, the modified liberal viewpoint. Although Mintz characterizes the antebellum period as involving the rise of secular efforts at reform, the story he tells about those efforts is suffused through and through with religion. Indeed, it is religion, in many flavors and forms, which is the engine pushing essentially all of the reform movements Mintz describes. It is Christian religious ideology-the Moralists in his title-which give this period both its energy and its pertinent description as a period of zealous and fanatical reform movements. The Modernizers of his title refers to the fact that the aim of many of these reform movements was to create more modern institutions for the amelioration of social problems-institutions such as public schools, penitentiaries, hospitals for the mentally ill, asylums for children, etc. But even here, the proponents of all these modernizing institutions were almost invariably working from a Christian religious ideology which they were trying to translate into practical social structures. The impulse to reform, in Mintz's view, came from three sources, the first being fear of social unrest and disintegration. Following the high expectations of the Revolution, America in the post-war period settled into an extended period of social dislocation. Crime became a persistent and serious problem. Poverty and child delinquency were spreading. Drunkenness was a chronic problem. Irreligion was on the rise. Economic dislocation was everywhere in evidence. Mintz does not really attempt to explain why all this social disruption happened-as, for example, Charles Sellers seeks to do in his work The Market Revolution, in which he would account for all these social changes by pointing to the rise of the capitalist market as the driver behind these social dislocations. [3] Mintz takes the litany of social disorders as the given of his analysis; he is only interested in observing the fact of it, rather than explaining it, because the fact of it helps explain the rise of the reform movements, which is his goal. A second major driver was the ideals of the Revolution itself, which many people came to see as being honored more in the breach than in practice in the new nation. Equal rights for women was promoted in this spirit. Slavery, especially, was seen as an obvious affront to republican democracy. How, these reformers wondered, could a nation founded on the principle that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" tolerate such grotesque forms of social injustice as slavery? The various anti-slavery reform groups were widespread and persistent. Indeed, we could say that they never gave up until the Civil War settled the matter. Of this second driver of antebellum reform, however, we must observe that it was a relatively small portion of the reform movements (apart from the abolitionists, who came from all three groups and were significant). In Mintz's account, Republican sensibilities, while present and influential were nowhere near as prominent as the other two factors. The third driver was religion-which took two seemingly antagonistic forms. As the nation finally began to come out from under the stifling burden of his Calvinist heritage, Americans began to have faith in the idea of improving society. The Calvinists-with their doctrines of the sinful nature of humankind and the salvation of only the elect-were ill-suited to the role of reformers since they did not really believe reform possible. But the emergence of both Protestant evangelism and Christian liberalism (in the form of Unitarians and the Social Gospel tradition for example) opened a new door for reform. Although radically different in aims and values, both these great religious movements had the common idea of the perfectibility of humankind. Rejecting Calvinism with its pessimistic view of the human circumstance, both the liberal religionists and the evangelicals were in agreement that reform was not only possible, but was in some sense obligatory. Social reform became part of one's obligations as a Christian. Thus Christian morality was a major driver-no, it was THE major driver-of the reforms of the antebellum period. Returning to the critique of the antebellum period as a reactionary one, there is certainly evidence in Mintz's account for this view, especially among the Christian proselytizers-as in the example of the antebellum minister who for a donation of $12 a head offered the giver the privilege of renaming Native American children when they were baptized. Ample evidence can be found of hegemonic agendas as well-as in the case of Baptist minister Richard Furman who told an 1814 Baptist convention that non-Christian religions were "absurd, sanguinary, and obscene" and who assured his co-religionists that they had a responsibility to subdue "the world to the obedience of Christ."[4] Also, there was a considerable amount of anti-Catholic (and anti-Semitic) prejudice among the antebellum reformers, which led, among other things, to the rise of parochial schools as a uniquely Catholic variety of reform. Yet Mintz insists that examples can be found of a more liberal religious ethic, as in Rufus Anderson, senior secretary of the country's largest missionary organization who called on missionaries "to respect indigenous economies and patterns of 'family government, [and] social order.'"[5] There was however, we must note, a presumption of cultural superiority at the heart of the missionary enterprise itself. One does not labor to convert others to one's religion unless one believes it is superior in some fundamental way. This presumption of superiority was itself offensive to many-in the antebellum era every bit as much as today. Mintz's book has an excellent Introduction-one of those introductions which gives a complete summary of the book, leaving out only the supporting detail. He also offers his readers an interesting Epilogue. In the Epilogue he is concerned yet again with deflecting recent historiographical criticisms of this period of reform which see it as highly reactionary. Rather, he argues, it should be understood as being of a piece with the finest traditions of liberal reform-in effect, as starting a thread which runs straight through to the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Mintz means by liberalism at least one of its straightforward definitions, "the term refers to an impulse to ameliorate the harsher aspects of capitalism through collective efforts at reform and a willingness to use the government as an instrument of social betterment." [6] In that sense, we can guardedly concur, although Mintz is quick to point out that many of these antebellum reformers can best be described as reactionaries, if ever there were any. In the big picture of the philosophies of governance, this period certainly provides numerous examples of liberal reform: public schools, asylums for various social "outcast" groups, modern prisons, temperance laws, etc. Yet Mintz chooses not to mention in his Epilogue the many examples he provides of strictly private reform efforts: Bible and religious tract societies, missionary programs, Sunday schools, the YMCA, and so on. These would have to be seen as expressions of at least some versions of conservatism-those which emphasize private-sector charitable undertakings as an alternative to government action. So the more complete description of the period would be to say that both liberal and conservative varieties of reform appear in the antebellum period-although what is unique, as Mintz notes, is the tendency of both types of reformers to be institution builders. But we could grab hold of the liberal thread, if we wanted, and trace it without too much oversimplification to the Progressive Era and the New Deal. But we could, with equal ease, grab hold of the conservative thread and trace its path, perhaps all the way to the Reagan Era. In any case, what is absolutely beyond doubt is that the antebellum period reminds us once again of that even larger truth with which we began our consideration of this work: social reformers never want for work. Endnotes: 1. Mintz, pg. xiii. 2. Mintz, pg. xiii. 3. It is instructive to observe that whereas Sellers tries to convince his readers that the capitalist market was directly or indirectly the driver of most of history during the antebellum period, Mintz shows that another important thread in the story is the rise of reformers and modernizers-mostly religiously motivated, but also motivated by reactions to concerns about social injustice. These drivers of history are every bit as primitive as Sellers' vaunted market and they illustrate the folly of trying to reduce an entire period of American history to the frame of a single explanatory factor. 4. Mintz, pg. 63. 5. Mintz, pg. 65. 6. Mintz, pg. 154.