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Early movements utilized religious arguments and spaces to counteract what they saw as the corrupting influence of the city. Religious tracts imploring temperance, chastity and the like could be found throughout the city while Sunday schools became a common feature of urban society. Staffed by middle and upper-class citizens whose instruction reached a primarily lower income audience, Sunday schools attempted to facilitate cross-class interactions, instill traditional values, and prepare students for the tougher aspects of nineteenth-century living, notably death. Boyer explains:
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“The graphic reminders of mortality in the antebellum Sunday school were attempts to establish in advance an intellectual context for death, so when children encountered it they would feel its moral power and social meaning.” (44) </blockquote> (44) Even the schools’ strict physical orderly layout and procedures were meant to contrast with the sprawling, spontaneous city. Moreover, the hierarchical order of the schools themselves intended to “inculcate with young scholars habits of deference, restraint, and self-control that would last a lifetime.” (49) Perhaps one of Boyer’s key insights regarding the Sunday School movement lay in its assignation of blame, “all of this, of course, was a striking inversion of the traditional order in which parents were seen as transmitters of the community’s moral values of their offspring. Now it would be the child, shaped, and molded by his Sunday school experience, who would have a transforming influence on his elders.” (52)
Many of these early efforts illustrate not just a preoccupation with morality and social order, but also a sense of community. Boyers points out that the growing middle class in urban areas seemed to yearn for a sense of belonging not unlike that found in villages of the time. Associations, organization, and societies addressed this desire while also imbuing in members a broader purpose. Boyer notes:
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.
