Click on title to link to the "Radical Academy" website for more information about some of the three name Boston reformers (like Oliver Wendell Holmes) mentioned in the book reviewed below.
Book Review
Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age: Social Reform In Boston 1880-1900, Arthur Mann, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966
I have reviewed many historical events and trends in this space over the past few years. Although I have concentrated on bringing some light to the struggles of workers, blacks, other emerging minorities, and women those segments of the population hardly exhaust the historical list of progressive struggles. The book under review, ‘ Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age”, sheds light on a mainly white, mainly male, mainly Protestant movement to challenge the unfettered rise of the industrial capitalist and the system that wreaked havoc on the American landscape in general, and as this is a regional case study, Boston in particular. Many of the figures presented here have faded or disappeared from the history books even in Boston and so it is noteworthy, at least to this reviewer, that the author Arthur Mann, in what appears to have been his doctoral dissertation, has uncovered some figures that I had not previously known about.
Today, with the virtual disappearance of the public intellectual, and the virtual extinction of the radical public intellectual in the Boston academic milieu it is hard to believe that during the period under study, essentially the period that ushers in the imperial age in America that there were scores of such reformers shouting from the rooftops. They ranged from academic types like Frank Parsons to religious figures of all denominations like Steven Boyle O’Reilly (Catholic), to writers and artists like Benjamin Flowers to labor agitators and leaders like Frank K. Foster. Today, beyond radical gadflies Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky one would be hard-pressed to name more, and even those two figures were intimately associated with universities during their long careers.
Of course, Boston in the 19th century was no stranger to left-wing propaganda and agitation, to speak nothing of various social experiments that dotted the region like Brook Farm. Boston basically provided the Who’s Who of the anti-slavery movement from William Lloyd Garrison to Wendell Phillips. Moreover, transcendentalism, feminism, temperance, primitive socialism, communistic efforts like the above-mentioned Brook Farm and the like got full hearings in this region. With the victory the Union forces in the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the death and despair of the key leaders those early trends lost steam.
The efforts under discussion in this book represent a revival of that vibrant milieu under the new circumstances of the late 19th century. The whole array of isms from trade unionism to anti-imperialism to Marxism had small but devoted adherents. All the motley schemes for the improvement of humankind from the single tax to temperance to women’s suffrage to various utopian plans had eager audiences. The political (and anti-political) movements that coursed through America from incipient local labor parties to the Knight of Labor to the People’s Party also had some minor traction. That these local trends, which mirrored the national trends, were defeated, and rather easily defeated, in the wave of the rise of the “robber barons” and the American imperial expansionist era does not detract from the interest that they provide today. In fact, I would imagine that in some nook or some cranny some little group today is still advocating, or thinking about advocating most of the ideas presented in this book. And in those efforts thinking that they have created something new and radical. Read on.
Note: Professor Mann has a chapter of special interest to this reviewer on “The Workers: Cooperators and Collective Individualists” which is centered on the struggles in the labor movement about whether to throw the capitalist bums out or just fight for “a piece of the pie” (sound familiar?). This chapter is a very interesting study of the defeat of the political actionists (read Marxists, or some kind of socialists) by the “realist” trade unionists who wanted to get immediate gratification of their needs (and got very little in any case, except the virtual liquidation of the independent artisan and skilled crafts into cogs in the industrial factory system. I will do a separate commentary on this chapter which fits rather nicely, as a local case study, with the “Labor’s Untold Story” series I have been running lately.
Also interesting , although somewhat less so, is a chapter on the then burgeoning women’s movement, the social base of that movement among the educated women of the upper classes of Boston, and the tensions between the rather more moderate goals of the Boston movement and the nationally, more inclusive (including working class women,) organizations. That subject will be addressed in more detail as well at a latter time.
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