The Saloon and the Mission: Addiction, Conversion, and the Politics of Redemption in American Culture

2. “What a Radical Found in Water Street”

[ 52 ] 2 “What a Radical Found in Water Street” E The saloon furnishes material to be saved faster than the settlement or residence or Rescue Mission work can save it. —Charles Sheldon, In His Steps: “What Would Jesus Do?” (1897) The individualistic gospel has . . . not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. —Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) The conversion narratives told by drunkards in the rescue missions of Lower Manhattan were popular stories in the Protestant America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to appealing to religious sentiments, they showed middle-class society how it could affirm its own righteousness by redeeming the outcast and even the degenerate, and in doing so safely open its ranks to a broader social spectrum in a time of economic and demographic transformation. In this manner, the sanctification of formerly drunken men and women did some needed cultural work in Gilded Age America, helping imaginatively to make sense of how once-untouchable people (whether drunkards or merely immigrants) could now be members of the working and middle classes. But this was not the whole story of the drunkard’s conversion in this era, nor even perhaps its most historically significant role. Its more lasting influence did not come in terms of how the middle class viewed the poor and the addicted, whether with these new sympathies or, as some have suspected, with voyeuristic fascination. The drunkard’s conversion had a second life in the ways that social reformers and intellectuals in the Progressive Era used it as a model, both for overcoming their own spiritual crises and for imagining [ 53 ] “What a Radical Found in Water Street” solutions to the problems afflicting society as a whole. The stories that nonalcoholic writers told about the influence of drunkards’ conversions on their lives and ideas played an important role in reform culture and eventually helped make the tropes of addiction and conversion central to both popular psychology and political rhetoric. In personal, political, and scholarly interpretations of the drunkard’s conversion, post-religious recovery narrative was taking shape as a method of communicating simultaneously Americans’ deepest private experiences and their most pressing public concerns. In an evangelical culture not yet associated with reactionary fundamentalism , one of the most revealing examples of this influence can be found in the writings of a pioneer of feminist economics. Helen Stuart Campbell, the domestic reformer who documented the work of the McAuleys in New York, understood and publicized her experience there as a secular conversion , one that both launched her professional reform career and also formed the foundation of her progressive ideas about personal and societal transformation . This chapter examines closely the role of the drunkard’s conversion in Campbell’s thought, situating it among contemporaries in both Social Gospel Christianity and secular progressive activism. Among the former, Charles M. Sheldon and Ray Stannard Baker followed Campbell’s lead in looking to the rescue missions for the spiritual passion and new social relationships necessary to imagining Christianity playing a leadership role in the era of progressive reform. Among the latter group, Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Campbell’s own friends and protégées, adopted the dynamics of personal-political transformation Campbell had established in her work at the rescue missions and beyond. Examining Campbell’s evolving theory of “conversion” sheds light on the deep structures by which both religious and secular progressives came to believe in, and practice, forms of activism at once more radical and more practical than they had been taught to believe were possible. The drunkard’s conversion narrative was the source of an essential trope in progressive thinking, illustrating (and proving possible) the inner, moral revolution needed to uproot and displace the deeply ingrained habits of mind and body sown by the seemingly intractable forces of the modern world. The material changes brought on by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, under the pressure of the long-lasting economic stagnation that commenced in 1873, created the conditions under which drunkards like McAuley and Hadley had enacted the language of eternal salvation in newly physical and social ways. These same conditions brought Campbell and her ilk to the slums, where they experienced the secular revelation that Chapter 2 [ 54 ] they could not hope to alleviate these crises without changing the foundations of...