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

For most Americans, Gilded-Age America still conjures up the golden age of laissez-faire. Perhaps they just don't know where to look to find government activism, for as Gaines M. Foster shows in Moral Reconstruction, the Christian lobbyists were becoming an increasingly effective force in making the national government into a vice squad of last resort.

In this path-breaking study, Foster, a highly respected scholar of the Lost Cause, has focused in on the one place where white southerners came to welcome an active Federal government: the imposition of morality. In a more atomized, urbanized, impersonal world, evangelicals had come together to impose a social order that churches increasingly found themselves unable to build on their own.

In time, the Anthony Comstocks, Joseph Cooks, and Frances E. Willards wielded more influence than most lawmakers. They could enlist voters by the thousands, launch petition drives, and force their own issues onto the national agenda. With increasing confidence and organizational ability, the lobbying groups turned to Washington to fight against smut and lottery-gambling, desecration of the Sabbath, and a slackening rigor in divorce. Their agenda was as big as the nation itself. They wanted laws suppressing polygamy in Mormon Utah and birth control literature everywhere else. They battled against boxing and strove for laws to raise the age of consent (and some even objected to the term itself), called on Congress to outlaw "white slavery." In their greatest triumph, the nation went dry, and saloons closed their doors, many of them for good. Most of all, they had created something of a consensus on Capitol Hill, that morality was too important to be left to the church, or, for that matter, to the states. Good government was expected to help in making a better people. With all their failures, frustrations, and half-won measures, the Christian lobby had performed what, from the perspective of 1865, would have seemed like a miracle.

And so it might seem to readers. Foster has delved into the organizational records of the lobbyists, and he tells many a story fallen out of the historical record. It is well worth doing, and, written with fluidity and a clear organization, well worth reading. All the same, skeptics may be more agnostic about the Christian lobby's impact than Foster seems. They may spot not how much the moralists strove for, but how little they got: a defeat, an empty concession, or a dead-letter law. Indeed, some of the biggest Federal advances into moral legislation were crusades that the Christian lobby came to belatedly, leaping aboard a bandwagon already moving ahead full-throttle. Other bills never even came up for debate on the House floor.

Gradually, it becomes clear that the difference between victory and defeat lay in how many allies outside of its own ranks were piling up on the same enemy, for reasons all their own. The Christian lobby celebrated a win when post offices shut down on Sundays; but the real credit went to postal workers, who, with the coming of parcel post and rural free delivery, clamored for shorter hours—and got them. Indeed, by the early 1900s, the Christian lobby's support for a reform became a liability—so much so that sponsors had to ascribe its origin elsewhere. Nor is it by chance that the willingness of Congress to legislate morality burgeoned even as it shed old laissez-faire notions about the economy—such as they were. One may glean all this context from Foster; he plays scrupulously fair with the evidence. But a broader use of sources outside those of the Christian lobby might have tempered the book's tone.

What of it? Moral Reconstruction is no misconstruction. It is a much-needed correction of Gilded Age stereotypes&#8212...