Evangelicals at a Crossroads: Revivalism and Social Reform in Boston, 1860–1910

6. The North End and South End in the 1890s: “Let Us Re-take the North End for Methodism”

chapter six The North End and South End in the 1890s “Let Us Re-take the North End for Methodism” Boston had become the most Catholic city in America by 1890. The evangelicals had to adapt to this changing environment. Accepting this change was not easy for Protestants even though the signs of this new demographic reality had been building for decades. The federal census of 1890 demonstrated that out of a city population of 448,477 a total of 185,188 persons (41.3 percent) identified themselves as Catholic. By 1906 the number of Catholics increased to 258,936 or 42 percent of the city’s population. By comparison, the five cities as large as or larger than Boston had significantly lower percentages of Catholic communicants in 1890: New York City, 25.5 percent; Chicago, 23.8 percent; Philadelphia, 18.6 percent; Brooklyn, 24.9 percent; St. Louis, 16.8 percent.1 The nation’s cities had changed a great deal in the post–Civil War years, and Americans increasingly recognized that they had to come to terms with these facts.2 Some people made the adjustment more easily than others. Social gospel organizer Josiah Strong’s 1893 book, The New Era, contained statistical analysis seemingly stuck in an older era; Strong ignored census data to argue that Boston was still the most Protestant of the seven largest American cities. Rather than using demographic data, he focused on comparing the number of Protestant churches to the population of the city. This method of measuring religiosity yielded exaggerated numbers for Protestants, as their churches were smaller than Catholic churches, and Strong made no assessment of the membership of the individual Protestant churches.3 Josiah Strong was too simplistic in his description of Boston Protestantism in 1893, but the census statistics do show some gains in membership from previous years; yet those gains were minimal compared with Roman Catholic growth in the city.4 Compared with population statistics from the time of Moody’s 1877 revival, Protestant churches in Boston experienced modest growth in terms of absolute numbers but a decline relative to the growth in the city’s population at large. The one exception was the Protestant Episcopal Church, which grew at a significantly faster rate than the others. The Episcopalians’ 61 percent growth between 1890 and 1906 was the only rate of increase among Protestant denominations that came close to match- The North End and the South End · 139 North End in the 1700s.7 The Home for Little Wanderers was first housed in what was the Second Baptist Church founded in 1743, and the Methodists’ first church, begun in the early 1790s, was on a street known as “Methodist Alley” in the North End (see figure 6.2).8 The North End neighborhood, of course, also had great significance for Boston’s earliest European residents, the Puritans. In an 1893 article about new evangelical mission efforts in the North End, a Boston Globe reporter made reference to the ancient Puritans interred in the Copp’s Hill burial ground, noting ruefully that “only the dead remain” after a “lingering descendant of the Puritans” recently left his North End home for the suburbs.9 Evangelicals noted the dissonant images of Italian children playing amidst the Puritan tombstones in the North End’s cemetery even if some probably conceded that it was a strangely suitable location for children’s games in the otherwise densely packed squalor of North End tenements.10 Although remaining solidly Roman Catholic throughout the late nineteenth century, the North End neighborhood in the 1880s was in the midst of a radical demographic change as Irish families were replaced by Italian and Jewish immigrants. By 1895 two-thirds of the North End was predominantly Italian, and Irish households remained only on the periphery of the neighborhood. A decade later their presence diminished further.11 The new Italian Catholics were more receptive to Protestant missionary efforts than their Irish Catholic predecessors had been. The Italians simply did not have the history of Protestant–Catholic conflict that was tearing Ireland apart, and many Italians held a more jaundiced view of the Roman Catholic Church and the Papal States that the church lost in 1870. Evangelical ministries (discussed in previous chapters) that began in the North End in the 1870s had disappeared or changed dramatically by the 1890s. The Home for Little Wanderers left the North End for the...