Promulgating the Kingdom: Social Gospel Muckraker Josiah Strong

Abstract

Social gospel leaders in the United States and England edited newspapers to educate the masses on key social issues in hopes of ushering in the kingdom of God, both prior to and alongside their secular muckraking peers. US Congregationalist Josiah Strong, much maligned for the pro-Anglo-Saxon nature of his domestic missions book Our Country, spent his last seventeen years documenting the problems cities faced and possible solutions. He fought for factory safety, as well as eight-hour days, living wages, worker's compensation benefits, and social secretaries to care for employees' needs. An examination of Strong's journals, Social Engineering, Social Service, and Gospel of the Kingdom, shatters stereotypes about the reformer and shows how he used muckraking techniques to promote social reform.

Notes

1 Judith Serrin and William Serrin, Muckraking! The Journalism That Changed America (New York: New Press, 2002); Arthur and Lila Weinberg, Muckrakers: The Era in Journalism That Moved America to Reform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961).

2 Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 1.

3 Ronald R. Rodgers, in looking at the social gospels' critique of the press, also examined the press work of Charles Sheldon, Lyman Abbot, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch; see Rodgers, “The Social Gospel and the News,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 13, no. 2 (2011): 69–134. Other exceptions are works on Sheldon's weeklong Jesus newspaper experiment or W. T. Stead's investigative work, as journalism was his main profession. For Sheldon, see Michael Ray Smith, The Jesus Newspaper: The Christian Experiment of 1900 and Its Lessons for Today (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002); Billie Barnes Jensen, “A Social Gospel Experiment in Newspaper Reform: Charles M. Sheldon and the Topeka Daily Capital,” Church History 33 (1964): 74–83. Denominational studies are more abundant; see Leonard I. Sweet, ed., Communication and Change in American Religious History (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1993), 26; For Stead, see W. Sydney Robinson, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W. T. Stead, Britain's First Investigative Journalist (London: Robson Press, 2012).

4 Scholars have not agreed precisely on what the goal of muckraking was or who the muckrakers were. Scholars have portrayed them as liberal reformers, crusading for the people against big business and corrupt politicians, and as upholders of middle-class sensibilities, friendly toward business and conservatively addressing only the most pressing issues of the Gilded Age. Filler has long argued for the unison of the muckrakers and the Progressives. Hofstadter championed the preservation thesis. David Mark Chalmers pushes against attempts to make the muckrakers a monolith, indicating the complicated ideological, economical, and theological spectrums of the most famous muckrakers. See Harry H. Stein, “American Muckrakers and Muckraking: The 50-Year Scholarship,” Journalism Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 9–17; Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (New York: Collier Books, 1961); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 186–210; David Mark Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (New York: Citadel Press, 1964).

5 Underwood, From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 76–87.

6 Stein reviewed fifty years of scholarship on the muckrakers in his 1979 article. For more recent efforts, see Roy J. Harris Jr., Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2010); Gerry Lanosga, The Press, Prizes, and Power Investigative Reporting in the United States, 1917–1960, Dissertation Abstracts International (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2011); Jon Marshall and Bob Woodward, Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

7 Robert Miraldi, Muckraking and Objectivity: Journalism's Colliding Traditions (New York: Praeger, 1990); Miraldi, The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

8 Chalmers; Christopher B. Daly, Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation's Journalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 143–148; Filler, Crusaders; Hofstadter, 186–210; Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 575–576; Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (Boulder: Westview, 2012), 83–92. How much muckrakers directly impacted legislation has been an ongoing source of debate; see Stein, 9–17. See also David L. Protess, The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Setting in America (New York: Guilford Press, 1991) for more recent work questioning the impact of investigative journalism.

9 Bruce J. Evensen, “The Evangelical Origins of Muckraking,” in W. David Sloan, The Media and Religion in American History (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2000), 186–205; Hofstadter, 204–214; Robert Miraldi, The Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders, (New York: Praeger, 2000); Rodgers, “The Social Gospel and the News,” 69–134; Rodgers “The Press, Pulpit and Public Opinion: The Clergy's Conferral of Power and the Concomitant Call for a Journalism of Advocacy in an Age of Reform,” Journal of Media and Religion 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–18; Doug Underwood, “Transcending the News: Religious Ambivalence Among the Famous Journalist-Literary Figures and Literature as the Uncertain Path to Immortality,” Journal of Media and Religion 6, no. 4 (2007): 249–250; Doug Underwood, “Religion in Print Media,” in Diane Winston, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media (New York: Oxford University Press: 2012), 122–123.

10 Donald K. Gorrell, The Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era 1900–1920 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988), 37.

11 Ibid.

12 Underwood, From Yahweh to Yahoo, 76–77.

13 Ibid.

14 Critical works on the American social gospel include Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Hopkins; Ralph Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Martin Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970); Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1996).

15 Rodgers, “The Social Gospel and the News,” 91; Rodgers, “The Press, Pulpit, and Public Opinion,” 5.

16 Weinberg, xviii.

17 Luker noted the ubiquitous nature of Strong's supposed racism in an extensive footnote, 325–326, though he presents a more nuanced account. For other nuanced accounts, see Dorothea R. Muller, “Josiah Strong and American Nationalism: A Reevaluation,” Journal of American History 53 (December 1966): 487–503; Ronald C. White Jr. and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 101.

18 For examples of this caricature, see Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 229; John Whiteclay Chambers, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 3; Gary J. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 29–30, 74–75; Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), xxiv, 313–314, 318–325, 328; Louis Filler, Appointment at Armageddon: Muckraking and Progressivism in the American Tradition (Westport: Greenwood, 1976), 244; Hofstadter, 82; Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin, 1984), 337–342, 351–352; George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001), 127.

19 Josiah Strong papers, Series 1: Biography drafts, Box 3, 131, Burke Library Archives, Columbia University Libraries, Union Theological Seminary, New York. His daughters started, but never completed, a biography.

20 Exceptions include Muller, “The Social Philosophy of Josiah Strong,” Church History 28 (June 1959): 183–201; Wendy Jane Deichmann, Josiah Strong (PhD dissertation, Drew University, New Jersey, 1991).

21 Biography consolidated from Muller et al., Deichmann, American National Biography; and archival research into the Josiah Strong papers and the Evangelical Alliance Archive at the Burke Library Archives, Columbia University Libraries, Union Theological Seminary, New York.

22 See Strong's statement in favor of ecumenicalism, Evangelical Alliance reception, December 27, 1886, at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University (WAB Evangelical Alliance Box 2 Executive Committee Notes, Folder 3, 1877–1886 CAGE WH13 E95 Mn (2).

23 Social Service, September 1902.

24 Social Service, October 1902.

25 See Strong, My Religion.

26 Josiah Strong, The Times and Young Men (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1901), 187.

27 See Christina Littlefield, Pursuit of the Kingdom of God and Its Influence on Late Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013) for more detail on Strong's theology.

28 Cashman, Gilded Age, Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans: The Progressive Era and World War I (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Gorrell, 2; Janette Thomas Greenwood, The Gilded Age: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

29 Cashman, Gilded Age, 121; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scribner, 1890).

30 F. M. L. Thompson, The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Vol. 1: Regions and Communities (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), 392; Thompson, The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, vol. 2: People and Their Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 132–87.

31 Hopkins; J. E. Lander, International Economic History: Industrialisation and the World Economy, 1830–1950 (London: MacDonald and Evans, 1967); Marsden; Marty, et passim; McLeod; Jeremy Morris, Religion and Urban Change (Suffolk: Boydell, 1992); David M. Thompson, Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Perennial Classics, 1999).

32 Hopkins, 67–69.

33 See Cashman et passim, Greenwood, Hopkins, Marty, et passim.

34 Gorrell, 38.

35 Cashman, Gilded Age, 138–40; Greenwood, 67–69.

36 David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

37 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1930, vols. 1–5 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, c. 1958–1968), vol. 1, 137.

38 Sweet, 46.

39 Charles H. Lippy, ed. Religious Periodicals of the United States: Academic and Scholarly Journals (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1986), xiii. See also R. J. M. Blackett, “‘To Reach the People with Abolition Doctrines': The Antislavery Press and the American Civil War,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/lincolns-press-abolition/#32, accessed October 19, 2015.

40 Mott, History of American Magazines, vol. 3, 67.

41 Mott, History of American Magazines, vol. 4, 288–290.

42 For a full account of the tactics of the abolitionist press, see Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008). This analysis owes much to D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience (London: Routledge, 2009), 17.

43 Strong, The New World-religion (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1915).

44 Strong, “Purified by Fire,” in Home Missionary XLVI (September 1874): 117–118; Strong, “The Clergy and the Problem of our Foreign Population,” Homiletic Review 31 (March 1896): 195–202.

45 Strong, Truths for the Times (New York: League for Social Service, 1899), Series A: Good Citizenship, 1–9; Series B: Abstract of Laws, 1–6; Series C: Education, 1; Series D: Anti-Mormon, 1–7; Series E: Arbitration, 1; Series F: Municipal, 1; Series G: Child Saving, 1; Series H: Nature study, 1; Series K: Village improvement, 1, SA p.v.2, no. 4–35.

46 Strong, Social Engineering (New York: League for Social Service, May, June, September, and August 1899); Strong and William Howe Tolman, and the League for Social Service, Social Service: A Monthly Review of Social and Industrial Betterment (New York: League for Social Service, January 1900–December 1906); Strong, Studies in Social Progress in the Gospel of the Kingdom (New York: American Institute of Social Service, 1908–1916).

47 Gospel of the Kingdom circulation in September 1914 issue, 142. Circulation of the Homiletic Review is uncertain. George Batten reported it as 20,000 in 1892, but circulation likely increased in the sixteen years before it started republishing “Studies in Social Christianity.” See George Batten Company, George Batten's Directory of the Religious Press of the United States (New York: George Batten, 1892), 100.

48 Gospel of the Kingdom, October 1909, 104. See also Letters, UTS1: Josiah Strong Papers, series 2, box 5, folder 39–41, 45, Burke Library Archives, Columbia University Libraries, Union Theological Seminary, New York.

49 Gospel of the Kingdom, October 1918 and September 1922.

50 Social Service, September 1901, 71. See also Gospel of the Kingdom, May 1910.

51 Social Service, December 1903, 94.

52 Strong, Our World: The New World Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1913), 223–226; Strong, The New Era or the Coming Kingdom (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1893), 37.

53 Social Service, April 1906.

54 C. W. D., “Review of Social Progress by Josiah Strong,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 9, no. 66 (June 1904): 74–75. C. W. D. notes in the review that the book contains “a considerable amount of useful information” that was up-to-date, drawn mostly from governmental sources, and not available elsewhere. However, he noted some information came from biased, partisan sources.

55 Strong, My Religion in Everyday Life (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1910).

56 Strong, The New Era or the Coming Kingdom (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1893), 37.

57 See Social Service, June 1901, September 1901, December 1901, January 1902, October 1902, February 1903, December 1903, January 1904, July 1904, August 1906, October 1906; Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909, March 1910, August 1910.

58 See Social Service, May 1901, September 1901, November 1901, October 1902, October 1903, September 1906; Gospel of the Kingdom, February 1909, March 1910, April 1910, May 1910, July 1910, August 1910.

59 For example, see Gospel of the Kingdom, August 1909, December 1909.

60 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1910, 122.

61 Gospel of the Kingdom, June 1909, June 1910, April 1911, May 1911, June 1911.

62 Social Service, June 1901, June 1903; Gospel of the Kingdom, June 1909, April 1911.

63 Gospel of the Kingdom, June 1903, April 1913.

64 Social Service, June 1900.

65 Social Service, June 1900, September 1901, January 1905; Gospel of the Kingdom, October, November 1909, March 1911, March 1914.

66 Strong, Social Service, January 1905; Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909.

67 Strong, Social Service, February, March, April, May, August, October–December, 1900, January 1901.

68 Social Engineering, August 1899, 5.

69 Social Engineering, August 1899, 5.

70 Social Service, March 1900, 4.

71 Social Service, May 1900, 10.

72 Social Engineering, June, August, September, November 1899; Social Service, January, August, September, October 1900; March 1902; December 1903; January 1904; May, July–December 1906.

73 Strong, Our World, 101.

74 Social Service, March 1904.

75 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909, 93.

76 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909, 90.

77 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909.

78 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909.

79 Social Service, February 1901, July 1904.

80 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909, 93.

81 Gospel of the Kingdom, September 1909, 93.

82 Social Service, May and June 1900; September 1901; March, May 1903; September 1906; Gospel of the Kingdom, February, November, December 1909; February, March 1911; July 1912; March 1914.

83 Social Service, June 1900; Gospel of the Kingdom, January 1913.

84 Gospel of the Kingdom, February 1909, 36.

85 Gospel of the Kingdom, February 1909, 37–40; March 1911, July 1912.

86 Social Service, September 1906; November and December, 1911.

87 Social Service, September 1901.

88 Gospel of the Kingdom, January 1910; February, July 1911; September 1912; April 1914.

89 Gospel of the Kingdom, February 1913, 19.

90 Gospel of the Kingdom, December 1908, 21.

91 Gospel of the Kingdom, December 1908, 19.

92 Social Service, August 1900.

93 Josiah Strong papers, Series 1: Biography drafts, Box 1, 1121 11c, Part 4, “Chapter XXI: In His Thought and Work.”

94 Gospel of the Kingdom, October 1908.

95 Gospel of the Kingdom, November 1908–October 1909.

96 Gospel of the Kingdom, November 1908, 13–16.

97 Gospel of the Kingdom, October 1908.

98 Gorrell, 20.

99 Social Service, October 1899, November 1899, April 1900, February 1901, March 1901, March 1903.

100 Social Service, January 1902.

101 Social Service, May 1900, June 1900, September 1901, May 1903, September 1906.

102 Social Service, October 1902, December 1903, October 1906.

103 Gorrell, 168–175, 184; Hopkins, 317.

104 Gospel of the Kingdom, January, August–November 1910; March 1912; January 1914.

105 Gospel of the Kingdom, October 1908.

106 Gospel of the Kingdom, December 1908, February 1909, March 1909, April 1909, June 1909, September 1909, October 1909, November 1909, December 1909, August 1910, January 1911, March 1911, July 1912.

107 Gospel of the Kingdom, December 1909.

108 Gorrell, 184, quoting Rauschenbusch.

109 Strong, “The Next Step,” Gospel of the Kingdom, January 1914, 1–2, 16.

110 Gospel of the Kingdom, January 1914, 4.

111 Gospel of the Kingdom, January 1914, 4.

112 Gospel of the Kingdom, February–December 1914.

113 Gospel of the Kingdom, August 1914.

114 Gorrell, 257. He references the council's own reports.

115 Cashman, America in the Age of the Titans, 125–131.

116 Chambers, 197; Lewis Gould, America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1914 (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2001); 77; David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 182–183.

117 Chambers, 291, 293.

118 Gorrell, 341.

119 Chambers, 275–276.

120 Josiah Strong papers, Series 1: Biography drafts, Box 3, 131.