Philadelphia Quakers in the Industrial Age 1865-1920 (review)

110QUAKER HISTORY writer of polemic verse to a much loved poet of nature and a man of deeply felt religion and something close to a saint with a sense of humor. Though his life-long bad health kept him confined to his small frame house in the village of Amesbury, Mass., where his fellow villagers knew him chiefly as a member of the school board and pillar of the small Friends Meeting , his correspondents, his interests and his influence ranged far over die world. His many letters to John Quincy Adams, to Henry Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner and Caleb Cushing, as well as the entire block of 196 letters written during the two years, 1838-1840, that he spent in Philadelphia editing The Pennsylvania Freeman, are especially interesting to students of the abolition movement. The letters to James T. Fields, his publisher of Ticknor and Fields, as well as those to Bayard Taylor, Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes and others have literary interest. His letters to women have especial charm: to Elizabeth Lloyd Howell, with whom he was deeply in love and whom he came nearer to marrying than anyone else; and after his sister's death to a number of younger women friends who helped to fill the lonely places in the nearly thirty years remaining of his long life; to Gail Hamilton, the lively and irreverent journalist who addressed him as Dear Angel, Dearly Beloved or My dear Sheikh; Celia Thaxter, the novelist and poet, Annie Fields (James T. Fields' widow), and Sarah Orne Jewett, author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, who was like a daughter to him in his last years. The three volumes, widi their many well-chosen illustrations and large clear type, are necessarily expensive. Comparatively few people will buy them to keep on the table and dip into at leisure, but every university library and many public libraries should have them, and they are well worth taking home one at a time to read. For a student of Whittier, of the abolition of slavery, of nineteenth century history and literature, they are of unusual interest and value. Kendal at LongwoodElizabedi Gray Vining Philadelphia Quakers in the Industrial Age 1865-1920. By Philip S. Benjamin . Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. 1976. ix, 301 pages. Appendixes, bibliography, index. $12.50. While scholars and antiquarians have devoted copious amounts of time and energy to unearth the history of colonial Quakers, there has been no comparable research upon the nineteenth century. Deterred by the acrimonious relationships of Friends after the split, their loss of influence as a dominant political force in Pennsylvania, and the numerical insignificance of Friends, historians have ignored the response of Hicksite and Orthodox alike to the problems of industrialism, urbanization, and immigration. Now we will have no sufficient excuse for bypassing this period, for Philip Benjamin has provided a well written and extensively researched account of Philadelphia Friends. By concentrating upon the activities of die two yearly meetings and the three principal monthly meetings in the city, Benjamin has provided an account whose significance extends beyond the Society of Friends to such major themes in American history as race, political reform in the Gilded Age, the social gospel, progressivism, and the impact BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES1 1 1 of World War I. Philadelphia Quakerism was in numerical decline most of the late nineteenth century with a similar percentage of loss for Hicksites, who were easing the discipline, and Orthodox who were not. Reformers identified the causes for decline with disownment for marriage out of unity, plain dress and speech, and distrust or hostility towards the arts. All of these badges of differences between Friends and the world's people had been repudiated by 1920. A main feature of the period was the growing similarity of both branches. It becomes clear, that the reunification of Hicksite and Orthodox in this century was made possible because both branches resembled each other more than either cared to admit. Differences in wealth, urban orientation , and sophistication so prominent in the 1820's Were' greatly muted by the 1870's. Both groups ignored the masses of immigrants, looked upon outsiders as people to be benevolent towards but not...