506 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
economic affairs, but his experiences as a minister in
Springfield, Massachusetts, and Columbus, Ohio,
exposed him to the realities of life in industrial cities,
and his views changed. In Applied Christianity
(1886) and in other works he defended laborers’
right to organize and strike and denounced the idea
that supply and demand should control wage rates.
He favored factory inspection laws, strict regulation
of public utilities, and other reforms.
Nothing so well reveals the receptivity of the pub-
lic to the Social Gospel as the popularity of Charles M.
Sheldon’s novel In His Steps(1896), one of America’s
all-time best-sellers. Sheldon, a minister in Topeka,
Kansas, described what happened in the mythical city
of Raymond when a group of leading citizens decided
to live truly Christian lives, asking themselves “What
would Jesus do?” before adopting any course of
action. Naturally the tone of Raymond’s society was
immensely improved, but basic social reforms fol-
lowed quickly. The Rectangle, a terrible slum area,
“too dirty, too coarse, too sinful, too awful for close
contact,” became the center of a great reform effort.
One of Raymond’s “leading society heiresses” under-
took a slum clearance project, and a concerted attack
was made on drunkenness and immorality. The moral
regeneration of the entire community
was soon accomplished.
The Settlement Houses
Although millions read In His Steps,its
effect, and that of other Social Gospel
literature, was merely inspirational. On
the practical level, a number of earnest
souls began to grapple with slum prob-
lems by organizing what were known as
settlement houses. These were commu-
nity centers located in poor districts that
provided guidance and services to all
who would use them. The settlement
workers, most of them idealistic, well-to-
do young people, lived in the houses and
were active in neighborhood affairs.
The prototype of the settlement
house was London’s Toynbee Hall,
founded in the early 1880s; the first
American example was the Neighborhood
Guild, opened on the Lower East Side of
New York in 1886 by Dr. Stanton Coit.
By the turn of the century 100 had been
established, the most famous being Jane
Addams’s Hull House in Chicago (1889),
Robert A. Woods’s South End House in
Boston (1892), and Lillian Wald’s Henry
Street Settlement in New York (1893).
While some men were active in the movement,
the most important settlement house workers were
women fresh from college—the first generation of
young women to experience the trauma of having
developed their capacities only to find that society
offered them few opportunities to use them. The set-
tlements provided an outlet for their hopes and ener-
gies, and they seized upon the work avidly.
The settlement workers tried to interpret American
ways to the new immigrants and to create a community
spirit in order to teach, in the words of one of them,
“right living through social relations.” Unlike most
charity workers, who acted out of a sense of upper-class
responsibility toward the unfortunate, they expected to
benefit morally and intellectually themselves by experi-
encing a way of life far different from their own and by
obtaining “the first-hand knowledge the college class-
room cannot give.” Lillian Wald, a nurse by training,
explained the concept succinctly in The House on Henry
Street(1915): “We were to live in the neighborhood...
identify ourselves with it socially, and, in brief, con-
tribute to it our citizenship.”
Lillian Wald and other settlement workers soon
discovered that practical problems absorbed most of
their energies. They agitated for tenement houseProstitution was not only an urban phenonmenon. “The Club” was one of 100 brothels in
Creede, Colorado, a frontier town in the 1880s.