Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (review)

Moral Reconstruction offers a narrative history of various efforts to pass legislation about moral issues in post-Civil War America. Working step bystep from the 1860s through the 1920s, Foster details the goals, strategies, lobbying efforts, organizations, opponents, and big/small successes/ failures of a surprisingly diverse series of moral-reform efforts. Foster studies how movements, many of them with roots in small towns and cities of the Northeast and Midwest, made claims for federal laws. One of the volume's many strengths is the range of reform efforts that it considers: alcohol, polygamy, divorce, cigarettes, Sunday closings, gambling of many kinds, prizefighting, age of sexual consent, the content of movies, and more. Throughout the book, Foster details the forces, running counter to the reform efforts, that stressed personal liberty against the power of the government, especially the federal government.

The timing of the reform efforts is crucial, and little-known. Scholars typically discuss moral-reform efforts in antebellum America, and then again in the series of movements that constituted one wing of progressivism. But Foster shows that many movements grew up in the 1870s, at the height of federal interest in remaking part of American life. It is fascinating to learn that the first call for nationwide prohibition came in the crucial year of 1876. Regional and party issues remain important throughout the volume; white southerners tended to fear federal power for years even as they came to support some reforms on local and state levels. The leaders of most reform efforts were Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest, and Protestants more willing than ever to expand the government's influence over issues other than slavery. Foster cites the passions of "appetite," and the ability of businesses based on "avarice" to capitalize on them, as the two primary motivations behind reform.

Foster always notes the limits of reformers' achievements. Stop the sale of alcohol, but do not make it illegal to possess or drink alcohol. Make polygamy illegal, but resist efforts to have national laws about divorce. By seeing these reformers as willing to test different strategies and, often, to compromise, Foster portrays them as pragmatic, not always starry-eyed idealists. He dwells little on issues like postmillennialism, maternalism, or professionalism, three areas that scholars have seen as attempts to stretch a moral perspective to its limits.

Foster's method is a straightforward description and narrative about individuals, organizations, and lobbying efforts. He has much to say about such well-known reformers as Frances Willard and Anthony Comstock and such influential lobbyists as Wilbur F. Crafts and Joseph Cook. In analyzing their efforts, the volume does no decoding or deconstruction and offers little analysis of symbols or class or gender. Uncharacteristic of many such studies, this book tries hard to understand these reformers by taking seriously what they wrote and said about their own motives. If the reformers said that they were Christians moved to fight "avarice" and "appetite" because they found those things sinful, that is what Foster reports. One of the most striking features of the author's method, beyond the sheer thoroughness of his research, is the intertwining of numerous, often simultaneous, reform narratives. The fact that multiple reform efforts often took place at about the same time shows that reformers were willing to alter their strategies according to how well they were doing.

Thorough and thoughtful, Moral Reconstruction gains its considerable importance simply by detailing a chronology of reform that few scholars had noticed, by showing the relationships among many reformers as they moved from local to national reform efforts, and by taking seriously what reformers said about themselves.