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By mid-century, urbanization spread to the nation’s interior as canal building, steamships, the rise of the market economy, and continuing industrialization encouraged the growth of cities like St. Louis and Pittsburgh. Urbanization and its perceived ills took on a national significance. Reformers remained frustrated by the limitations of law and government to address what they saw as pressing social and moral problems of the day.
Ideological confrontations were not rare as groups such as the Loco-Focos resented government interference into what they believed were private or personal issues. Boyer notes that the heterogeneous population itself made “legislative fiat” moot, since the difficulty remained identifying what behaviors demanded regulation among such a diverse population, <blockquote>“the patrician elites often took a more relaxed attitude toward alcohol, gambling, and the pleasures of the flesh than did the rising commercial class with its evangelical creed and self -disciplined habits. And the immigrant perspective on these matters frequently differed from that of the native-born; one man’s vice is another man’s folkway.” (77) </blockquote> As cities grew and class distinctions widened, even the Sunday school movement found itself hamstrung by economic frictions.
Though urbanization altered conditions and circumstances for reformers, they too found ways to adapt. Three organizations emerged that illustrate not only a shift in tactics but also the philosophy: the YMCA, Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and the Children’s Aid Society. Though differences between each organization remain evident, they also shared distinct similarities.
In pursuit of their goals, the “coercive moral reformers” further influenced Progressives through their application of sociology, “social analysis,” and statistical evidence, which led to a diminishment of moral appeals and blame on personal failings for poverty. Instead, intemperance and prostitution came to be seen as by-products of an urban environment in need of reform. [i.e., “shift from social purity to social hygiene”] Even if the studies sounded a tad more scientific, the connection between the reformers and the reformed had become “fragile but authentic.” (202)
Research required some level of intimacy with subjects. Though leadership presented simplistic explanations for prostitution and intemperance, reports describe more nuanced and understanding perspectives. However, many of the reformers themselves lacked any interaction with the spaces, places, and people they hoped to improve, which meant, unlike nineteenth-century reforms who restrained some of their stricter impulses because the concrete reality of living among the masses, their later counterparts did experience this limitation. Boyer presents the hardliners of the period as: <blockquote>“socially marginal people who in these same years were being drawn into the fundamentalist churches with their literal Biblical creeds and their rigid codes of personal morality. Viewing the immigrant poor across barriers not only of physical distance but also of class and culture, they responded with alacrity to reform proposals that promised to purify and control “the city” – without requiring direct contact with the actual inhabitants of one‘s particular city.” (214)</blockquote/>
“Positive environmentalists” shared many of the concerns of their stricter sibling, but believed that repressive legislation solved little. Instead, they hoped to create “the kind of city where objectionable patterns of behavior, finding no nurture, would gradually wither away.” (221) Like previous iterations of reform, the poor environment was blamed for the prostitution, gambling, and so forth. While the idea of nature remained a net positive, reformers believed nature needed regulation as well in the form of parks. Though later entire park systems came to be seen as the solution rather than one immense one like New York’s Central Park, parks and spaces of recreation emerged as one clear goal.