Evangelistic Ideals Fuel 19th century Protests

U of Ideas of General Interest ó December 1998 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact: Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor (217) 333-0568; [email protected]

ARTISAN LIFE Evangelistic ideals helped fuel worker protests in early 19th century

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ó Christian teachings were potent weapons when working-class artisans faced the rapid changes brought on by early capitalism and mechanization in the 19th century.

This is the conclusion of a book by William R. Sutton that challenges the prevailing notion that religion, especially Christian evangelicalism, played an irrelevant or even ìsubmissiveî role in labor strikes and organizing efforts in the turbulent 1830s.

In ìJourneymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimoreî (Pennsylvania State University Press), Sutton argues that evangelical ideals contributed greatly to widespread protests against the rising imbalance of power between wage earners and employers.

The historical picture of evangelical influence on workersí lives is ìunremittingly negative,î and ìreally says more about the privileged status of intellectual skepticism in the late 20th century than it does about artisan life and religion in the early 19th,î wrote Sutton, a history teacher at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School.

The book, expanded from Suttonís U. of I. doctoral dissertation, won the Kenneth Scott Latourette Prize in Religion and Modern History. The book discusses the role of trade unionism in Baltimore and details the relationship of Methodist lay leaders in disputes between workers and shop owners.

Finding sources to document artisan life required Sutton to work outside normal historical channels. ìFortunately, improved printing technologies provided common Americans with unimagined opportunities to share their private, often profound, thoughts publicly, and they gratefully appropriated this potential by publishing handbills, group resolutions, short treatises or books.î Newspaper accounts were extremely valuable to Sutton in recovering the world of evangelical artisans.

Protestant morality of the 1830s expected workers, owners and buyers all to be just in their dealings and limited in their ambitions. Especially among Methodists, the critique of capitalism ñ and, interestingly enough, early consumerism ñ was based on religious principles of communal responsibility and the evils of excessive accumulation.

This led to widespread militancy as capitalist innovations challenged the power of skilled craftsmen. As a result, it was not uncommon for evangelical employers to take the side of workers against their fellow capitalists.

Growing wealth and upward mobility among evangelicals changed this equation. The hattersí strike of 1843 was a case in point. Hard-pressed journeymen went public for support as they had done a decade before. But this time their call for boycotts of employers who were not offering ìfair wagesî fell on deaf ears, in part because some of the artisans of the prior strike were themselves employers and in part because Protestant economic morality had lost some influence.

Whatís more, the public was now sold on buying hats at the cheapest possible price.

-mr-