Hallelujah Lads & Lasses: Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880-1930 (review)

This brief book adds to our understanding of the Salvation Army in America by focusing on class and gender over the course of the organization's well-known transformation from a noisy, parading band of evangelicals to a bureaucratized social-service agency. In the late nineteenth century, according to Taiz, the American branch of the Army created a "working class-dominated cross-class organization" (5). Taiz mobilizes what little occupational data she can to support that claim, but she relies ultimately on cultural evidence. Before the turn of the century, Salvationists exhibited "a democratic and highly experiential religion," whereas they later manifested "a much more orderly and decorous style of religious expression" (10). The early group took to the streets in an overt appeal to the lower classes. The later group catered to the more refined appetites of the middle classes, including many second- and third-generation members of the Army itself. The later group also joined hands with "government and industry." This momentous departure opened up new sources of funding but put an end to the robust rituals of solidarity that more and more Salvationists, along with other respectable Americans, judged anachronistic, if not silly (145).

According to Taiz, the late nineteenth-century Army was "surprisingly democratic" in both religious practice and institutional operation (74, 95). She concedes that the organization was rigidly hierarchical but asserts that the leadership was unable to put its autocratic aspirations into practice. Local units found ways of resisting centralized decision making. It seems a stretch to see such resistance as evidence of "democracy," but Taiz makes a plausible case for a dispersal of actual power within the Army. She is more persuasive, however, in her stress on measures that moved the Army to unusual degrees of gender equality. Women in the Army were encouraged to preach publicly as well as evangelize privately. The category of "officer-wife" was created to keep women, at least formally, at the same "rank" as their husbands. She notes that the Army rule imposing endogamous marriage on members was an attempt to ensure that female soldiers would be paired with men who wished them to continue working for the cause after marriage.

The book tries to fuse institutional history with a social analysis of the Salvationist membership and a cultural analysis of Salvationist religion. Taiz goes a long way toward successfully joining them. But one puts the book down knowing much more about institutional and social questions than about religious ones. Taiz tends toward equating the Salvationists' spirituality with their social rituals, and seeing the early working-class rituals as more authentically religious than the later social-service campaigns. By putting so much emphasis on ritual rather than belief, the book misses an opportunity to show that working-class piety, like middle-class piety, was thought as well as acted out. Lived experience comprised ideas as well as practices. If the early working-class rituals of the Army were robust, it was not only because they made noise but also because they made sense. By the early twentieth century, the Army's urgent evangelical appeal was losing its power to persuade in the alleys of urban America.