God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan 0674045688, 9780674045682

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God in Gotham

God in Gotham THE MIRACLE OF RELIGION IN MODERN MANHATTAN

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Jon Butler

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts London, ­England 2020

 Copyright © 2020 by Jon Butler All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Cover design: Graciela Galup Jacket photo: New York at Night/Berenice Abbott/Getty Images 9780674249721(EPUB) 9780674249738(MOBI) 9780674249745(PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Butler, Jon, 1940–­author. Title: God in Gotham : the miracle of religion in modern Manhattan / Jon Butler. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020002231 | ISBN 9780674045682 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: God. | New York (N.Y.)—­Religion. | New York (N.Y.)—­Religious life and customs. Classification: LCC BL2527.N7 B88 2020 | DDC 274.7/1082—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020002231

 For my grandchildren, Caroline, Naomi, Maia, Samuel, and Olivia



CONTENTS

Introduction: Are You ­There God?

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1 Spiritual Terror and Sacred Awe in the Capital of American Secularism

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2 Organ­izing God

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3 Sacralizing the Urban Landscape

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4 Modernizing God in Jim Crow Manhattan

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5 God’s Urban Hot­house

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Conclusion: Moving Out, Moving On

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Notes

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291

Acknowl­edgments Index

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God in Gotham

Introduction Are You ­There God?

Judy Blume’s controversial 1970 teen fiction bestseller, Are You ­There God? It’s Me, Margaret, focused on a sixth-­grade girl born and raised in Manhattan. Margaret Simon had just moved to the New Jersey suburbs and was anxious about boys, her first bra, and her eagerly anticipated first period. But Blume’s title caught Margaret’s main worry: religion. She had none. But her suburban classmates did. Her parents’ “mixed marriage”—­her ­mother Protestant, her ­father Jewish—­turned religion upside down. Her ­mother’s parents ­were so angry that they all but disowned both their d ­ aughter and grand­daughter. Margaret’s Jewish grand­ mother seemed more malleable but kept calling her “my Jewish girl,” as though saying so could make her one. Amidst the tensions, Margaret’s parents punted. She could “choose” a religion as an adult. Margaret quickly realized that religious belonging opened doors in her new suburb, though she ­wasn’t sure which ones or where they led. She already saw the complications in her Manhattan grand­mother’s pestering. Sylvia Simon is a lot of fun, considering her age, which I happen to know is sixty. The only prob­lem is that she’s always asking me if I have boyfriends and if t­ hey’re Jewish. Now that is ridicu­lous ­because number one I d ­ on’t have boyfriends. And number two what would I care if ­they’re Jewish or not?1

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Yet Margaret cared about God. She took her frightened expectations about puberty and her new suburban life to God, and she prayed to God regularly, sometimes about mundane ­matters and sometimes about crises. She called it “talking with God.” She sought solace in a Catholic confessional a­ fter she derided her rival, the prematurely voluptuous Laura Danker. But she fled when the priest said, “Yes, my child?” The incident made her physically ill. That eve­ning, her talk with God revealed how deftly a preteen could raise transcendent concerns about abandonment, shame, and responsibility. I ­really hurt Laura’s feelings. Why did you let me do that? I’ve been looking for you God. I looked in t­emple. I looked in church. And ­today, I looked for you when I wanted to confess. But you ­weren’t ­there. I d ­ idn’t feel you at all. Not the way I do when I talk to you at night. Why God? Why do I only feel you when I’m alone?2

Margaret’s guilt about hurting Laura Danker and anxiety over her parents’ determined irreligiosity seem strikingly innocent t­ oday, when religion engenders such ­bitter po­liti­cal tensions. But looking backward from Margaret’s adolescence, her suburban religious dilemmas offer a con­ve­ nient place from which we might begin to consider the surprising history of American religion between the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s and the 1960 Kennedy election. That Margaret still could feel the pull of religion in the 1960s when she thought about Laura Danker or her ex­pec­tant period points to religion’s often unexpectedly power­ful per­sis­tence in and around Manhattan. Eighty years ­earlier, religious leaders and secular observers alike worried that ­there would be no religion for a Margaret to turn to, as traditional faith drowned in an onslaught of urbanization, industrialism, and unstable pluralism, all of it starkly epitomized in Manhattan and New York City. What happened that encouraged religious thinking in Margaret and in other New Yorkers and suburbanites in the 1950s and 1960s? Did religion itself change as new prob­lems and new trends emerged? And for whom did religion change—­religious leaders, lay worshipers, the curious, the indifferent? The bet ­here is that the history of religion in Margaret’s birthplace, the epicenter of one of the world’s largest cities, can help us unravel the

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remarkable power of religion in modern Amer­i­ca through two-­thirds of the twentieth ­century. True, Blume’s New York–­New Jersey settings carry the tinge of East Coast provincialism. ­After all, dynamics among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants might have been dif­fer­ent in Atlanta, Minneapolis, or Seattle and their suburbs. But no place and time is typical of e­ very place and time, especially in Amer­ic­ a, and larger themes about the American experience often thrust past particularities of place. This is as true of religion and the questions religion has prompted in Amer­i­ca as it is of other issues. Even if the story of religion in Manhattan cannot bring clarity to ­every question of religion in ­every American place, it offers impor­tant lessons about the relationship between religion and its perceived threats from twentieth-­century urban modernity. Of course, religion is not the subject that jumps to mind when thinking about modern Manhattan. The borough has long exemplified secular worldliness for Americans and visitors alike. Religion might seem reasonably associated with Manhattan’s quaint seventeenth-­century Dutch past, antebellum-­era Protestant social reform and abolition, and the increasing numbers of German Jews and German and Irish Catholics who deepened the island’s long-­standing religious diversity in the early republic. Indeed, Manhattan even spawned a “prophet” in the 1830s—­ Mathias, other­wise Robert Mathews. And an 1857 Protestant revival demonstrated that non-­Catholic Christians could still dominate the city’s religious atmosphere, even if the revival also reflected Protestant worries about maintaining their sway.3 But a­ fter the Civil War and especially a­ fter 1880, religion scarcely registers as a key feature of Manhattan. Instead, every­thing inimical to religion comes to mind. In 1914 the New York Times summarized evangelist Billy Sunday’s view of the city as a “hell hole—­rotting, corroding, corrupt, hell-­r idden, God-­defying, [and] devil-­ridden.” (No ­matter that Sunday routinely called nearly all American cities “hell holes,” including relatively innocent Milwaukee.) A few Eu­ro­pean rabbis saw Amer­ic­ a itself as rife with threats. Rus­sian rabbi Jacob David Willowski called Amer­i­ca a “trefa land where even the stones are impure.” Hungarian rabbi Moses Weinberger, appalled by lax ritual practice in New York City, advised Jews still in Eu­rope to “stand firm, and stay where you are. ­Don’t wander away.” Israel Zangwill, the British Zionist, argued in 1910 that Jews ­were falling away from their “duty” amidst New York’s urban chaos

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and that the city was not a “Jewish center” at all but “a dissolving pa­ norama of old Jewish life, a snowball which can only melt.” Instead Zangwill urged Jews to consider Galveston, Texas, a gateway to the “­great empty spaces of Amer­i­ca.” Indeed, religious casualties mounted as Jews left Eastern Eu­rope’s face-­to-­face shtetl communities for the freedom of Lower Manhattan’s anonymity. Some Jews embraced irreligious socialism, some took up atheistic Marxism, and some pursued naked American materialism, a route Abraham Cahan traced in his bracing 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky.4 Protestants and Jews w ­ ere not alone in feeling the city’s challenge. New York archbishop Michael Corrigan could blame some of his flock’s prob­lems on Eu­ro­pean failures, citing Italian bishop Jeremias Boromelli’s admission that, despite a plethora of priests in Italy, many Italian ­children could not “make the sign of the cross properly or say the Our ­Father or answer one word about God and Jesus Christ.” Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, another Italian bishop, founded the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo to serve Italians in Amer­ic­ a betrayed by immigrant priests “prostitut[ing] their sacred ministry.” Scalabrini worried that American priests ­were “becoming true merchants of gold rather than pastors of souls.”5 Many late nineteenth and early twentieth-­century religious leaders worried that, beyond New York, the modern city in general all but precluded religion, leading to an unstoppable ­future of spiritual degradation. John Lancaster Spalding, Catholic bishop of Peoria, Illinois, summarized this view in 1880: “In the city old age and childhood are thrust out of sight, and the domestic morals and s­imple manners, which are above all price, cease to be handed down as sacred heirlooms.” Urbanization suffocated religion by shattering rural face-­to-­face community and obscuring nature, God’s divine creation that preceded mankind.6 Intellectuals ­were no more optimistic about religion’s endurance, in part b ­ ecause they rejected it. Sigmund Freud cast religion as an “illusion” powerfully rooted in the ­human past and fought against religion’s historical importance as a cultural determinant. In his 1927 ­Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that “our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our re­spect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization.” Freud argued that religion re-

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tarded the pro­gress of humanity and that socie­ties built on more rationally insightful understandings of ­human psy­chol­ogy would be unlikely to need and retain the myths of religion. Max Weber, for his part, was neither an ­enemy of religion nor a sentimentalist about it. But he was concerned about modernity’s threats to religion and its integrative function in society. Weber’s most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, mostly written between 1900 and 1910, described how early modern Protestant attitudes about work and profits had ­shaped the origins of capitalism. But modernity threatened ­those attitudes and their religious expression. In a 1917 Munich speech given on the eve of Germany’s defeat in the G ­ reat War, Weber ominously observed that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ ” Miracles and magic, communal unification through time-­honored rituals, and faith in the wisdom of ancient religious texts ­were fading amidst the soullessness of modern capitalism, science, technology, and bureaucratization.7 But what do we mean by religion? Its traditional importance might incline us to follow Justice Potter Stewart’s pronouncement about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Religion, however, is not wisely discerned with impulse. Rather, should we not, guided by some scholarly notions of what religion is or might be, ask what the residents of Manhattan meant by religion between the Gilded Age and the Kennedy election? The crudest answer would center on ­simple institutional identity, the approach Henry Fielding ridiculed in his novel Tom Jones (1749), when his officious Parson Thwackum opined, “When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of E ­ ngland.” Modern New Yorkers would have added Jews, Catholics, Presbyterians, African Methodist Episcopalians, black and white Baptists, Christian Scientists, and any of the hundreds of religious groups that populated Manhattan between the 1870s and the 1960s. Still, Fielding made a point. For many, if not for Thwackum, religion meant traditional worship and institutions that ­were familiar and had been “established” at least in practice, if not always in and by the law.8 But if early twentieth-­century Gothamites had been asked ­whether any of the groups they regarded as religious shared anything in common,

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most might have replied that the adherents of t­hese many faiths all believed in a super­natural being or beings—­God—or at least in super­natural forces that shape daily life. This is what religious-­studies scholars would call a “substantive definition” of religion—­one that seeks to identify the distinctive content or character of the word and concept. This emphasis on belief in a super­natural being or beings or in super­natural forces is the most traditional understanding of religion. It is also the one most obviously, and perhaps most narrowly, tied to Western religion, specifically Judaism, Chris­tian­ity, and Islam. Almost ironically, the power of this rather traditional way of thinking about religion was vividly expressed by an African American author whose most famous book attacked religion and Amer­i­ca together. In The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, James Baldwin described his adolescent religious conversion: I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word ‘religious’ in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, His blazing Hell.9

By the mid-­twentieth ­century—in part due to the writings of one of Manhattan’s most famous intellectuals, the German émigré theologian Paul Tillich—­some New Yorkers also might have said that religion was what constituted their “ground of being” or “ultimate concern,” the essence of what they lived for and what ­shaped their individual lives and collective existence. This too is a substantive definition of religion, even if it is not specifically tied to super­natural beings or forces or linked to specific Western religions.10 A quite dif­fer­ent and distinctly academic understanding of religion can be found in what religious-­studies scholars label a “functional definition.” Such a definition emphasizes the tasks that religion accomplishes rather than beliefs or theologies. What­ever integrates the world and provides believers and socie­ties with an overarching sense of individual and collective purpose and history can be regarded as religious. Functionalism’s most famous proponent, the early twentieth-­century French sociologist Émile Durkheim, proposed that the integrative capacity of the sacred gives religion its special power to incorporate individuals into cohesive

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socie­ties. If sometimes teasingly, critics note that a functionalist definition of religion would qualify obsessive followers of most anything as religious, irrespective of what is being “worshiped”—­whether Marxism, sports, or fashion. Fi­nally, a few early twentieth-­century New Yorkers might have been persuaded by the conceptualization of religion proposed in William James’s 1902 Va­r i­e­ties of Religious Experience. James saw the nature and origin of religion not in ancient revelations but at the intersection of broad h ­ uman needs and a w ­ ill in each person to shape meaning. James argued that “the word religion cannot stand for any single princi­ple or essence but is rather a collective essence.” He defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what­ever they may consider the divine.” James acknowledged that “theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organ­izations may secondarily grow.” But they remained just that—­secondary to the individual. It was a brave assertion to make as the anonymous urban mass was swallowing the intimate rural past, and the individual seemed less and less relevant.11 Scholars debate ­these and other meanings of religion endlessly and, sometimes, with dizzying sophistication if not always crystalline clarity. Indeed, as the late Jonathan Z. Smith observed twenty years ago, scholars hoping to demonstrate the impossibility of defining religion often have enlisted in their cause James H. Leuba’s 1912 Psychological Study of Religion, which illustrated the absurdity of the proj­ect by assembling no fewer than fifty candidate definitions. But as Smith observed, “The moral of Leuba is not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined, with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways.” Without fully succumbing to Smith’s cleverness, God in Gotham offers a historical probe into the ways that millions of Gothamites understood religion and practiced it from the Gilded Age to the Kennedy election, particularly as something called “the modern” seemed to threaten the existence and relevance of religion altogether.12 If we need to consider what religion might mean, we also need to think about the meaning of modernity. ­Virginia Woolf famously, perhaps hyperbolically, dated the modern to 1910: “On or about December 1910, h ­ uman character changed,” she maintained. O ­ thers have traced the modern, variously, to the Re­nais­sance, the Reformation,

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the Enlightenment, the French revolution, and the industrial revolution, among other key moments in history.13 Still, if we are not tasked with determining modernity’s birthdate, we are tasked with saying something about its character. The British sociologist and Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall has set out four defining features of modern socie­ties: “secular forms of po­liti­cal power and authority,” a “monetarized exchange economy,” the “decline of the traditional social order,” and most ominously, “the decline of the religious world-­view typical of traditional socie­ties and the rise of a secular and materialist culture, exhibiting t­ hose individualistic, rationalist, and instrumental impulses now so familiar to us.”14 For Matei Călinescu, the Romanian-­American literary critic, the modern involves “a major cultural shift from a time-­honored aesthetics of permanence . . . ​to an aesthetics of transitoriness and imminence, whose central values are change and novelty.” More succinctly, the French poet Charles Baudelaire notes that “modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.” In turn, historians, especially urban historians, emphasize the growth of cities, dense housing, industrialism, and mass society, conditions that typified nineteenth-­century Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope and seemed to augur poorly for traditional religion no m ­ atter how it is, 15 or was, conceived. Informed by notions of religion and modernity, God in Gotham also is bounded in space and time. It is not a general history of religion in modern Manhattan, a history of religion in all the city’s boroughs, or a history from preconquest native socie­ties and the Eu­ro­pean colonial period to the pre­sent. If it w ­ ere, it could easily run to 1,400 pages, as does Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edmund G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; or, with Wallace’s Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, 1,200 pages. The recent three-­volume City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, by Howard Rock, Annie Polland, Daniel Soyer, and Jeffrey Gurock and edited by Deborah Dash Moore, runs a thousand pages. And surely any of t­ hese more capacious versions of God in Gotham would equal the six hundred pages of Thomas J. Shelley’s Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York: 1808–2008. Even then, I would be knee-­deep in unused documents tracing hundreds of additional men, ­women, congregations, and episodes.

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Rather than aim for comprehensiveness, this book sticks close to the classic, European-­derived mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism that dominated Manhattan’s religious development from the 1880s to the 1960s. It does not systematically pursue subjects that might have been treated in a more expansive book, such as Adventist and Mormon proselytizing or the post-1980 rise of Hinduism, Islam, and megachurch Protestant evangelicalism. Nor does it probe Asian religious practice in the city or religion’s links to Manhattan’s electoral politics and economic conditions. This book does not even take on the deliciously complex subject of secularization. How wonderful it w ­ ill be when other historians pursue ­these subjects with the success that Wallace and Burrows have achieved in their general histories and that Rock, Polland, Soyer, Gurock, Moore, and Shelley have accomplished in their histories of the city’s Jews and Catholics. (Where is the synoptic history of Protestantism in Manhattan and the other boroughs?) ­There is so much more to say. The question of God in Gotham is ­simple: How did religion confront the challenge of modernity in the most prominent borough of what, by 1925, was the world’s largest city? Traditional, or­ga­nized Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism entered de­cades of profound change and challenge beginning in the 1880s, our starting point. The endpoint is post-­World War II suburbanization and the election of the nation’s first Catholic president in 1960. This book is a midstream down payment on more about religion in Amer­i­ca’s twentieth-­century cities and suburbs, “cities on modern hills,” to update the Boston Puritan John Winthrop. Of course, Manhattan’s sheer scale and diversity, plus its urban belligerence, could be said to place it beyond the experience of other American cities and the nation. Indeed, between the 1880s and the 1960s most other American cities—­Cincinnati, St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and Minneapolis, for example—­were small towns compared to Manhattan, to say nothing of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, if not Staten Island. Chicago approached Manhattan’s complexity but did not achieve it, and Los Angeles’s emergence as a megacity occurred mainly a­ fter 1945. Catholics and Jews outnumbered Protestants in Manhattan more thoroughly than in any other American city. And, among metropolises, only Manhattan saw Episcopalians and the Dutch Reformed outrank Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, at least before 1920. Yet Manhattan’s

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sheer uniqueness and weight, and frankly, its iconic cultural status, make it more fascinating to study, not less.This is especially so when Manhattan-­ born Margaret Simon’s anxious worries about religion suggest that something is quite amiss in all the theorizing and assumptions circulating around the commonplace notion that religion would collapse in moder­ idn’t. nity’s grasp. God in Gotham tries to figure out why it d

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12 Spiritual Terror and Sacred Awe in the Capital of American Secularism

Joseph Stella found religion in New York ­after imbibing Futurism in Eu­rope. He left Naples for Manhattan in 1896, as a nineteen-­year-­old intending to study medicine. But soon ­after he arrived, he ditched scalpels for brushes, enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, then kept busy as a magazine artist. With the photographer Louis Hine, he illustrated The Pittsburgh Survey, Paul U. Kellogg’s path-­breaking so­cio­ log­i­cal study. But industrial and urban Amer­i­ca slowly disillusioned Stella. “Tortured by the constant pain of an enforced stay among enemies, in a black funereal land over which weighed . . . ​the curse of a merciless climate,” he returned to Eu­rope in 1909.1 Eu­rope not only transformed Stella’s art, but also introduced the possibility of an urban spirituality. Encounters with Futurism, Cubism, and Fauvism—­what Stella termed “the revolution of modern art”—­changed every­thing. Returning to New York in 1913, he embraced an unapologetic transcendental urbanism. He extolled the city’s carefree modernity in ­Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island (1913–1914). Then he asserted a startling, technologically infused spirituality in his Brooklyn Bridge (1919–1920) and in his massive five-­panel Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (1920–1922). Stella had ­earlier seen cities and urban-­industrial technology as the nadir in life. But confronting them anew, he found “the eloquent meeting

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In Brooklyn Bridge (1919–1920), Joseph Stella expressed his vision of the spirituality embedded in New York’s concrete and steel. The g­ rand structures of the city left him “deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.” Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

point of all the forces arising in a superb assertion of their powers, in APOTHEOSIS.” That “weird metallic Apparition ­under a metallic sky,” the Brooklyn Bridge, became Stella’s evangelist. “Many nights I stood on the bridge,” he wrote, “deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY. . . . ​At the end, brusquely, a new light broke over me, metamorphosing aspects and visions of ­things. Unexpectedly, from the sudden unfolding of the blue distances of my

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youth in Italy, a ­great clarity announced PEACE—­proclaimed the luminous dawn of A NEW ERA.” William James might have smiled.2 Even as Stella’s hard-­won spiritual ecstasy demonstrated the numinous potentialities of modern American urbanism, it also signaled the strug­gle to realize them. Few knew ­these strains better than Manhattan’s worshipers and clergy. Many, like Stella, began in disillusionment. Some succumbed. But o ­ thers, paralleling Stella, transformed what twentieth-­ century religion would come to mean in Amer­ic­ a, not only for Gothamites but for Americans everywhere.

In December 1887, thirty years before Stella found divinity where he least expected it, 1,200 leading American Protestants gathered in Washington, DC, for an Evangelical Alliance conference on “National Perils and Opportunities.” The alliance president, William Dodge, head of the Phelps Dodge mining empire, and Methodist bishop Edward Andrews welcomed the attendees in speeches dark with worry about “American Chris­tian­ity and American Society.” Andrews especially did not mince words. He decried “the city disproportionately enlarging; immigration increasing beyond our powers of assimilation; . . . ​a foreign church, hostile to American princi­ples, fortifying itself among us; . . . ​[and] alienation of g­ reat masses of the ­people from the Church, . . . ​facts portentous of disaster and, if unchecked, of ruin.”3 Brooklyn’s Samuel Lane Loomis, whose Modern Cities and Their Religious Prob­lems had just been published, expressed relief in the opening session that no one had yet proclaimed the modern city “an evil ­thing, an evil beast, a monstrous, inhuman ­thing. . . . ​in and of itself.” But Loomis must not have been listening to Andrews or to Chicago’s Simon J. McPherson, who preceded Loomis to the lectern. McPherson’s talk, “The City as a Peril,” did not disappoint. H ­ uman nature might be the same everywhere, McPherson said, but “the city stimulates and intensifies all the natu­ral dispositions and tendencies of man.” When a city’s “artificial congestion of population . . . ​is forced or arrested on its course, a fever breaks out,” McPherson proclaimed. “Gradually the city deposits the shell of conventional and artificial life, which divorces action from reflection. . . . ​The arrows of truth are parried from the conscience. . . . ​ Learning is shackled with pedants; society, with mannerists; the church,

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with Pharisees.” Then comes the “peril of skepticism, which seems indigenous in cities,” followed by “the witchery of easy new theories.” 4 When Protestant ministers convened in Manhattan a year ­later, the New York Times made a headline of their mission: “To Combat City Evils: A Conference of Evangelical Churches Trying to Find the Means and Methods Whereby All Bad Influences S ­ hall Be Kept Down.” Held at elegant Chickering Hall on Fifth Ave­nue and 18th Street, the conference involved major New York Protestant clergymen. An impor­tant presence was Reverend Josiah Strong, the national secretary of the American Evangelical Alliance and author of the well-­known 1885 anti-­immigrant and anti-­Catholic book Our Country: Its Pos­si­ble ­Future and Its Pre­sent Crisis. The Times reported that the ministers would “study thoughtfully and carefully the religious needs of New-­York City” and “work to reclaim the city for Christ.”5 A few speakers projected cheerfulness, Strong among them. He complimented his audience as “optimistic Americans” and urged the ministers to pursue “cooperative work” and “united action.” He even proposed collaborating with Catholics, but cautiously: “Though he refuses to fellowship me, I must love him in spite of himself,” he said. Reverend Frank Russell promoted “house-­to-­house visitation” in an effort to reach out to tenement dwellers. Bishop Andrews, who had spoken at the Washington conference, stressed the “latent power” of New York’s hundred thousand Protestants, urged their renewed “personal effort,” and celebrated the sheer “power of wealth” evident in Protestant missions, charity, sick care, and education.6 Yet most of the conference talks, published as The Religious Condition of New York City, read like spiritual autopsies. Reverend James King laid out stark views of religious conditions in Manhattan. Using “large maps displayed on the stage,” King showed how saloons choked off Protestant congregations even in the relatively affluent wards above 14th street. In the 16th ward, the number of saloons had increased from 264 for ­every Protestant congregation in 1880 to 463 for ­every Protestant congregation by 1888. Congregations w ­ ere poorly apportioned around the city. Although the wealthier areas above 14th Street ­were “well supplied with church accommodations . . . ​the eastern and western sections, where the population is most dense and the need the greatest, are all poorly supplied,” King reported. Protestants fleeing immigrant-­laced Lower Man-

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hattan swamped northern Manhattan congregations. In the 16th ward, a Protestant congregation that might have served about four thousand ­people in 1880 would serve nearly five thousand p ­ eople by 1888, an increase of almost 25 ­percent in just eight years.7 Conditions below 14th Street challenged ­every religion. A few small wards seemed reasonably provided with Protestant congregations. But populous wards w ­ ere not, and the paucity could be felt everywhere. Reverend Adolphus Schauffler estimated that scarcely 127 synagogues and Catholic and Protestant churches served over six hundred thousand ­people, about five thousand for each sanctuary. By contrast, many blocks ­housed up to fourteen saloons breeding “mischief and vice and crime.” ­These areas of the city ­were rife with poverty as well and brought vice, crime, and irreligion. “Slam-­bang” tenements lacked win­dows, ventilation, and light. “Peddlers and Jews and the city missionaries all go in and out,” stumbling “through the pitch darkness that pervades the place,” Schauffler said of one tenement. He claimed he nearly crushed a small child as he ascended a pitch-­black stairwell.8 Ethnic and racial complexity furthered the ministers’ anxiety. Many spoke alarmingly about the New York’s “peculiar cosmopolitan population” and offered detailed descriptions of German, Italian, “colored,” and Bohemian immigrants (meaning ­those speaking in “Slavonic dialects,” not the charming characters of Puccini’s La Bohéme). German Protestants exhibited “hopeful” be­hav­ior, but German Catholics did not. And though Bohemian Catholics rejected their immigrant priests’ false “miracle-­making,” they did not respond by embracing Protestantism. Instead they inveighed “against all religion.” An Italian Protestant minister, Reverend Antonio Arrighi, lamented his countrymen, especially the Catholics among them who ignorantly equated Amer­i­ca’s “­free form of government” with “licentiousness.” He prescribed training “in American law and American institutions, but, above all, in our holy Chris­tian­ity,” meaning Protestantism.9 Only Reverend Henry A. Monroe, minister of Manhattan’s oldest black Methodist Episcopal congregation, St. Mark’s, suggested that the city’s religious prob­lems stemmed from the actions of its white population rather than the urban condition. Over 40 ­percent of the city’s African American worshippers w ­ ere mi­grants from the rural South, forced by white prejudice into segregated housing at “a higher rent than any

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other class pay[s] for the same accommodation.” They ­were denied jobs even as “coachmen, waiters, and caterers” and instead w ­ ere pressed into ­labor so poorly paid that parents could hardly clothe their ­children and felt embarrassed to send them to church in rags. Even so, African Methodist Episcopal churches ­were “filled to the doors at ­every Sabbath eve­ ning ser­vice,” Monroe explained. That was a stark contrast to the affluent congregations of northern Manhattan, which left their ­houses of worship half empty. “We use ours,” Monroe chided. Still, he worried that “we barely hold our own.” As ministers at the event sought support for a Young Men’s Christian Association for German and Bohemian immigrants, Monroe was moved nearly to beg on behalf of his own flock. “How much more should I appeal to you to open a similar place for the colored youth?” he asked.10 No one answered. The conference approved a committee “for more efficient cooperation in aggressive Christian work” and then wrapped up. A concluding address by Bishop Andrews skipped over three days of urban real­ity, woe, and tribulation to assure ministers that hope for the ­future of Chris­tian­ity lay in a city laden with trou­bles, even an apocalyptic f­ uture. Ah, ­there is a city which God builds. Its walls are righ­teousness, its gates salvation. And why may not this New York City become, as it ­were, a New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven?11

The fears for Protestant authority expressed at the Washington and Manhattan conferences ­were mirrored on the other side of the ocean. For de­cades, British and Eu­ro­pean prelates had grumbled about urbanized modernity’s threat to traditional practice and belief. Leaders of the Church of ­England, for example, had been concerned about public indifference to religion since the early nineteenth c­ entury, particularly in cities. A unique 1851 census of religious attendance throughout Britain only increased their agitation. Roughly half of Britain’s population failed to attend religious ser­vices at all, and only a quarter attended ser­vices of the Church of E ­ ngland. The remaining quarter w ­ ere working-­class Irish immigrants who jammed into Catholic churches; nonconformist Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists; and a handful of Jews, mostly in London. Alarmingly, this rejection of the En­glish Church was most obvious in in-

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dustrial towns and cities. In London’s poverty-­stricken districts, most residents ignored churches and church ser­vices. Horace Mann, the En­ glish barrister who led the 1851 survey (not the famous American educator), put the challenge succinctly: the “working classes” ­were “never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations.” The consequence seemed clear. “The classes which are most in need of the restraints and consolations of religion are the classes which are most without them.”12 Mann took solace in the possibility that the poor would find their way to the Church eventually. Workers might be “estranged” from Chris­ tian­ity, he admitted, but “the prevalence of infidelity has been exaggerated.” The irreligious w ­ ere most likely not atheists but rather “unconsciousness Secularists—­engrossed by the demands, the t­rials, or the pleasures of the passing hour, and ignorant or careless of a f­ uture.” Mann attributed indifference to religion largely to church failures in the context of urban living. The “vice and filth which riot in [workers’] crowded dwellings” precluded the “frequent opportunities of solitude” that fostered “religious sentiments.” Mann urged “better dwellings . . . ​as a most essential aid and introduction to the l­abours of the Christian agent.” He chastised congregants who made workers feel inferior and showed them ­little sympathy. And he lamented the social distance that kept workers “stubbornly aloof ” from, and suspicious of, ministers.13 Britain’s stoutest nineteenth-­century defenders of traditional religion joined Mann in attributing irreligion to the failure of churches to address urban conditions. If growing numbers of city dwellers w ­ ere living without formal Protestant Chris­tian­ity it was not ­because they agreed with Thomas Paine’s infamous rejection of all institutionalized religion or ­because they espoused the tenets of the National Secular Society. Nor was t­here some unchangeable personal defect in the disaffected. What was needed w ­ ere new techniques that would sustain congregations and underline their centrality to a deep, personal spiritual life in times of unpre­ce­dented and rapid cultural, economic, institutional, intellectual, and po­liti­cal change.14 ­There is some question as to w ­ hether numbers like Mann’s actually represented a sudden decline in attachment to or­ga­nized religion. His conclusions presumed that, in an e­ arlier time, religious practice was consistent and belief unquestioned. In truth, however, Medieval and early modern Eu­rope presented mottled and complex models of religious

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be­hav­ior that deeply upset priests before the Reformation and both priests and ministers a­ fter it. Of course, it is reasonable to presume that a dominant Catholic Church, horrendous penalties for blasphemy and unbelief, and the closeness of life in rural villages reinforced conformity before 1500. However, it is also pos­si­ble that religious indifference was simply masked by t­ hese forces. And a number of other forces, pre­ sent before 1800, would have begun the pro­cess of unmasking it. ­These included the Reformation and the cascading schisms that continually multiplied Protestant groups; the disaffection brought about by officious, uncaring, and morally corrupt local ministers and priests; the intellectual challenges brought about in part by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; and the quiet but steady growth of cities.15 What­ever the vagaries of religious practice and belief before 1800— or even before 1500—­nineteenth-­century En­glish and continental Eu­ ro­pean observers understood mass urbanization as a cause of religious indifference far beyond anything known ­earlier. In Britain, any doubts about the c­ entury’s urban religious implosion w ­ ere dispelled in the 1890s by a massive survey personally conducted by the London shipping magnate and amateur sociologist Charles Booth. Booth’s research suggested a strong association between religiosity and class. London’s upper classes exhibited strong churchgoing patterns, but industrial workers did not. It seemed that they associated religion with an aristocratic comfort they did not possess. Although outright atheism was uncommon, just as Mann had suggested ­earlier, hostility to overweening ministers and gossipy, censorious congregations was not. An alarmed Anglican minister told Booth, “The Church (using the word in its widest sense) has lost its hold over the ­great bulk of the ­people, if, indeed, it ever had a hold at all; thousands are living lives of practical heathenism.” Booth blamed patronizing and critical church communities: the poor and working classes wanted marriages solemnized and babies baptized but faced unwelcoming congregants and ministers. When poor and working p ­ eople did attend church, ministers might demean them. One clergyman explained to Booth that “the crowding in on the last night of the Old Year [and] for a harvest thanksgiving, are simply due to superstition.” Unimpressed, the preacher said, “They do it to keep or change their luck.”16 A massive 1902–1903 survey of London worshipers conducted by the journalist Richard Mudie-­Smith for the Daily News confirmed the pat-

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tern Booth observed. According to Mudie-­Smith, only one in four Londoners attended religious ser­vices. Around 12 ­percent attended in poor areas, between 13 and 18 ­percent in working-­class districts, 23 ­percent among middle-­class residents, and almost 37 ­percent in wealthy neighborhoods. Catholics and nonconformists accounted for more than half of attendees, and the Church of E ­ ngland could claim only a minority of London’s worshippers. In short, as industrialization, urbanization, and modernization swept the Victorian age, few of the Queen’s subjects attended her Church. If the comforts of upper-­middle and upper-­class urban neighborhoods reinforced church attendance and participation, the difficulties of life in lower-­middle-­class, working-­class, and poverty-­ stricken neighborhoods made for empty pews.17 Continental Eu­rope was similar. Sabbath attendance declined substantially in late nineteenth-­ century rural and urban Scandinavia. Christian worship revived in France a­ fter the Revolutionary government collapsed, but it did so unevenly. At midcentury, Easter Mass attendance in Paris’s rapidly expanding working-­class sections scarcely topped 15 ­percent despite strenuous outreach and parish reor­ga­ni­za­tion led by Archbishop Marie-­ Dominique Sibour. Sabbath attendance in late nineteenth-­century Berlin dived even lower than in London but with similar differences among economic and social groups: in 1877 just u ­ nder 5 ­percent of poor Berlin Protestants joined church ser­vices, compared to 16.5 ­percent of the city’s wealthiest Protestants. Historians believe that similar lethargy characterized Berlin’s Catholics, but their churchgoing habits are not precisely documented. By common acknowledgement, ­causes ranged from a shortage of congregations and clergy in Berlin, the perception that Lutheranism and Catholicism ­ were dominated by aristocrats, inroads by secular socialism and po­liti­cal radicalism, and a loosening sense of religious obligation a­ fter rural mi­grants settled in the metropolis. “Cities” may have been central to the sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-­ Reformation, and the historic Jewish diaspora, but they w ­ ere small towns compared to the mammoths emerging at breathtaking speed in nineteenth-­century Eu­rope and, soon, in Amer­i­ca.18 London previewed the Western world’s nineteenth-­century transformation ­because it already had a million residents by 1800—­a population that tripled by 1850. Paris grew from about 500,000  in 1800 to

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The density of Charles Dickens’s London, conveyed in F. J. Smyth’s two-­panel 1845 panoramic view. Church of E ­ ngland authorities despaired of sustaining religious life in the city, and an 1851 religious census confirmed their fears that poorer Londoners w ­ ere leaving the church. Courtesy Wellcome Collection.

approximately a million in 1850, Berlin from less than 200,000 in 1800 to something over 400,000  in 1850, and New York from about 100,000  in 1800 to 750,000 by 1850. But it was population growth ­after 1850 that created the modern city of staggering density and breadth. Between 1850 and 1900 the population of London doubled to 6 million ­people. Paris expanded from about a million p ­ eople to 2.6 million, and Berlin added a staggering 1,500,000, nearly quintupling in size in just fifty years. The growth of New York and Manhattan accelerated rapidly ­after the Civil War. The cities and counties that consolidated in 1898 to create the modern city of New York w ­ ere home to 3.5 million p ­ eople by 1900, and Manhattan alone grew from about 60,000  in 1800 to 500,000 in 1850, then to almost 1.9 million by 1900.19 Eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century maps and images visualized the dramatic change that created the massive modern city. A 1720 London

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Julius Hermann Kummer and Wilhelm Heine’s 1851 panoramic New York City pastorale owed much to the Hudson River School of paint­ers with its billowy clouds, quietly busy sea traffic, and not-­so-­distant river bluffs and farmlands. The abstractions of Manhattan’s already-­teeming blocks are broken only by the city’s spired Protestant churches. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photo­g raphs Division, LC-­DIG-­ppmsca-08310.

map still could show intimate detail of buildings, streets, and parish bound­aries, as though the city w ­ ere just an enlarged face-­to-­face community where every­one knew where every­thing was or could find any location with only modest guidance. But by 1845 it took eight pages of pa­noramas to depict the vastness of a city that seemed to stretch beyond comprehensibility. A New York City map printed in 1813, but drawn with a resident’s “perfect and correct recollection” of the small city in the 1740s, detailed individual streets and the city’s principal religious structures from Trinity Church to its tiny synagogue. But in the pa­norama that William Heine and Julius Kummer drew in 1851, urban detail surrendered to endless summer skies, liquescent streets, and busy l­ittle ships, bringing the Hudson River School of landscape painting to a markedly urban setting.

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New York might have been much smaller than London, but it was similarly impossible to convey at granular resolution.20 The cities that aroused awe in some artists and cartographers evoked terror in many ­others. In Oliver Twist (1838), Charles Dickens wrote of London’s live-­cattle market with unconcealed disgust: “The ground was covered, nearly ankle-­deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the ­cattle, and mingling with the fog . . . ​unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly r­ unning to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.” Honoré de Balzac caught Paris’s ­human urgency, without ­cattle, in his 1833 The Girl with the Golden Eyes, the city “a vast field in perpetual turmoil . . . ​beneath which are whirled along a crop of ­human beings” whose “twisted and contorted ­faces give out at e­ very pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant.”  All are “alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity.” “What is it they want?” Balzac asks. “Gold or plea­sure?”21 Certainly not faith. Rural mi­grants, then their c­ hildren, could pursue new politics, ignore the moral standards of rural towns where every­one knows every­one, and absent themselves from traditional worship. Disappearing into the seething urban mass, unnoticed by f­ amily, friends, and acquaintances, they had no need to worry about the affections afforded and constraints imposed by rural neighborliness. A 1902 report on New York’s urban conditions proclaimed, “In a g­ reat city one has no neighbors. No man knows the d ­ oings of even his close friends; few men care what the secret life of their friends may be. Thus, with his own moral sensibilities blunted, the young man is left f­ree to follow his own inclinations.”22 The American with the deepest understanding of modern urbanization’s challenge to traditional religious practice and belief—­and to Protestantism’s standing—­was Loomis. A gradu­ate of Amherst College and Andover Theological Seminary and minister of the Tompkins Ave­nue Congregational Church in Brooklyn, Loomis published Modern Cities and Their Religious Prob­lems in November 1887, just a month before the Washington meeting and a year before the Chickering Hall conference. Perfectly timed, Loomis’s book s­ haped much of the dialogue at both conferences.23

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Where Mann, Booth, and Mudie-­Smith stuck closely to their surveys, Loomis wrote expansively. Cities and their religious issues ­were part of a rising “modern civilization” Loomis traced to the invention of the steam engine a ­century ­earlier. It “revolutioniz[ed] the w ­ hole system of h ­ uman industry” and fostered unending inventions that si­mul­ta­neously transformed agriculture and the engineering of massive urban buildings. Factories prospered, wealth multiplied, and demand for manufactured products increased, even as “better methods of banking, telegraphic communication, mails, [and] expresses” brought about a “revolution of commerce second only to that of manufacture,” a revolution “power­ful in its tendency to build up the cities.”24 “­Great cities,” Loomis believed, offered distinct “advantages for philanthropic work and Christian fellowship,” as well as m ­ usic, art, libraries, lectures, and, “above all, the perpetual stimulus of contact with many minds.” But even reasonably well-­off residents experienced difficulties. Rents ­were high, pure ­water was difficult to get, and furnaces belched “their foul breath out into the sky.” Yet ­there was an even greater difficulty with which to contend. In de­cades of roiling social and po­liti­cal change, when “the nation’s civilization depends upon the purity of its faith,” British and American cities had become epicenters for an ignominious failure: “the Protestant churches, as a rule, have no following among the working men.”25 Like his British colleagues, Loomis understood that class played a major role in religious participation. In Amer­i­ca, ­lawyers and physicians, teachers and salesmen, and even “a certain proportion of educated mechanics” filled urban Protestant congregations. “But the workingman and his ­house­hold are not ­there,” Loomis observed. Protestants rarely met the multiplying working population with new congregations and often treated them “with positive rudeness” or at best “cold politeness.” The conditions of abject poverty rampant from London and Berlin to New York and Chicago—­filthy and crowded housing, if any; lack of ­running ­water and toilets; diets drawn from scraps and garbage—­solidified the gulf between comfortable Protestant congregations and the poor and working men and ­women who composed the bulk of nineteenth-­century urban populations.26 Loomis’s proposals to redress Protestantism’s failures in Amer­i­ca’s cities drew heavi­ly on conversations with Anglican, Methodist, Baptist,

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Presbyterian, and Congregational ministers in London; Protestant leaders in Berlin; and a Protestant missionary in Paris. Loomis felt that American Protestants woefully understaffed their urban outreach efforts. “Over against [Britain’s] corps of clergymen, missionaries, Bible readers, deaconesses, and trained nurses stands our pastor, single-­handed, or, in exceptional cases, with one or two assistants,” he wrote. Among Catholics, “half a score of priests” commonly oversaw parish ser­vices and ministry. Loomis’s observations led him to several recommendations. Ser­vices should be shorter and more frequent, he believed, not l­imited to Sundays. They should be more “vital,” less “liturgical,” with more singing and always in the listeners’ “mother-­tongue.” Protestants also needed to cultivate “a spirit of sympathy with workingmen which is broader, truer, and more profoundly Christian than that now prevalent.” For Loomis, London’s condition indicated why this change in attitude was crucial. London’s Protestant outreach to workers and the poor dwarfed that of the United States, yet ­these populations remained “poorly represented in the churches, compared with the m ­ iddle and upper classes.” The cause rested in the city’s Protestant culture, not in any deficits of the outreach itself. Against the “aristocratic spirit” of Protestant communities, Loomis looked to the model of Minnesota’s Catholic bishop John Ireland, whose notions of almsgiving secured “in the ser­vice of charity what is most valuable and most difficult to be obtained,—­the sweetness and tenderness of love.”27 On the surface, Loomis’s analy­sis found warm support at the Washington and New York conferences. Speakers endorsed his analy­sis of the urban religious crisis and the usefulness of Eu­rope’s models for addressing it. They agreed that Protestants must expand missions to workers and the poor, train lay men and ­women to assist ministers, stress personal visitation in the homes of targeted individuals, encourage interdenominational “co-­operation in Christian work,” employ Christian wealth as a “consecrated power of ser­vice,” and change the tenor of worship ser­vices. They also considered Loomis’s suggestion that Protestants take “a lesson from the Roman Catholics” by adopting a geo­graph­i­cal parish system and creating the position of “deaconesses,” who could “be called to tasks for which ­others are too weak.”28

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But while Protestant leaders of the late 1880s ­were fairly unified in their diagnosis of the urban religious nightmare, and while they even had a strong collective sense of the remedies, changing the situation was no easy task. ­There ­were two principal obstacles. One was a straightforward prob­lem of per­for­mance: everyday Protestants and their local leaders had a hard time implementing the recommendations the conferences produced. The Washington conference had called on communities “to meet and carefully study the needs and prob­lems of their special locality,” but this proved a tall order. Just two years a­ fter the conference, Evangelical Alliance Secretary Strong reported a fitful response from the faithful. Ministers and congregations found h ­ ouse­hold visitations unnatural; some tried but did not know what to do, and o ­ thers ­were indifferent to the effort. Protestants divided Rochester, New York, into eighty districts for ­house­hold visitations, but few cities followed. Leaders of the 1888 New York conference likewise found success elusive. Reverend C. S. Harrower of Manhattan’s Central Methodist Episcopal Church suggested “any kind of meeting to attract the religiously indifferent ­whether Protestant or Catholic” and opening “inexpensive halls” where ­people could “sing, listen, and pray” and “think of better ­things than swearing, gossiping, and playing for drinks.” But outreach was lackluster. And the household-­visitation effort languished; just a few city wards reported pro­gress. By February 1889 the New York Times reported that scarcely a dozen ministers had attended the committee meeting to continue the work of the conference, that some ministers refused to cooperate, and that other members had resigned due to “divided allegiances” and “other engagements.”29 If implementation was challenging, the more serious obstacle lay in the Protestants’ goal. They sought a homogeneity that had never existed, ­whether in colonial or post-­Revolutionary Amer­i­ca. In truth, New Amsterdam and then New York quickly became something like what we know ­today: a site of religious diversity. Turkish Muslims farmed and traded in New Amsterdam as early as the 1630s, and Jews and Lutherans emerged as Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s principal irritants in the mid-­ seventeenth ­century. By 1687 En­glish governor Thomas Dongan described New York as a nearly indecipherable religious hodge-­podge: “­Here be not many of the Church of E ­ ngland, few Roman Catholicks,

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Abundance of quakers preachers men and w ­ omen especially, Singing quakers, Ranting quakers, Sabbbatarians, antisabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some in­de­pen­dents, some jews, in short of all sorts of opinions are some, and the most part of none at all.” The religiously undiscriminating slave trade—­bodies counted, souls did not—­brought multiple ethnic African religious traditions, plus Islam, to farms and cities. Eu­ro­ pe­ans also divided. Among En­glish Protestants, differences in nationality, ethnicity, and language often separated En­glish, Scottish, Welsh, and Scots-­Irish immigrants, who could be further separated by religious identity: Baptist, Presbyterian, Church of ­England, Quaker, even Sandemanian. By the 1750s t­here was substantial Jewish presence in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Newport, Rhode Island. And Catholics could be found not just in Mary­land but scattered through rural Pennsylvania and in the growing colonial cities.30 Religious heterogeneity multiplied even more rapidly ­after the Revolution. Jewish and Irish and German Catholic immigrants flooded into the countryside and cities. Schisms multiplied Protestant groups, each new order justified through distinctive biblical interpretations. New religious groups from Shakers and Spiritualists to Mormons and Adventists emerged before the Civil War, followed by massive post-­Emancipation increases in the Southern states among the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion denominations that had been formed in Philadelphia and New York City in the early republic. Multiplying post-­Emancipation black Baptist congregations or­ga­nized the National Baptist Convention in 1895.31 Thus nineteenth-­century and even colonial Amer­i­ca ­were religiously diverse, in cities and in rural places. But nostalgic late nineteenth-­century Protestants saw the past differently and blamed cities for undermining a world that had never been. In Our Country, Strong described the city as both the “nerve center of our civilization” and the “storm center.” The source of the storm was immigration, especially Catholic immigration. By 1880, 88 ­percent of New York City residents w ­ ere foreign-­born or had foreign-­born parents. A huge proportion of t­hese immigrants w ­ ere Catholic, with only Chicago topping New York City’s numbers. Loomis’s Modern Cities and Their Religious Prob­lems recognized yet another urban complexity: multiple languages and national backgrounds. Loomis found En­glish, Welsh, Irish, Germans, French, Rus­sians, Poles, Swedes,

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Norwegians, “Hollanders,” Portuguese, Danes, “Bohemians,” and Spaniards in New York City, to say nothing of “Chinamen.” New York h ­ oused more than a third of all Rus­sian (Jewish) and Italian (Catholic) immigrants in Amer­i­ca, and a substantial percentage of the nation’s Polish (mostly Catholic) immigrants. By 1900 New York City alone was such a center of immigration that over 11 ­percent of all foreign-­born residents in the entire United States lived ­there.32 Strong, Loomis, and the ­others at the conferences simply did not know what to do about urban religious pluralism, except, in some cases, to inveigh against immigrants and Catholicism. About all they could do was ignore the difference around them, seeking instead to improve church attendance through outreach to Protestants alone. The London models they emulated had been developed for a city where foreign-­born residents barely numbered 2 ­percent of the population, where rural mi­grants generally possessed at least a crudely Protestant upbringing, and the number of Irish Catholics was small. None of the American Protestant plans involved systematic efforts to convert Eu­ro­pean Catholic and Jewish immigrants. For instance Reverend Russell, in his outline for ­house­hold visitation, described “a kindly Christian conference” that would be lost on adherents of other faiths. Russell’s suggested question for an “unchristian f­amily”—­ its sentiments undefined—­ inferred a Protestant background: “Which church would you attend if you went anywhere to church?” Russell offered no dialogues for visits to Catholic or Jewish families.33 The efforts of Protestants to resurrect a fictional era of religious uniformity ­were thus stymied in part for reasons internal to the community. Protestant leaders lacked the vision to understand and confront the challenges of lax practice and diversity. At the same time, the laity lacked the nerve to participate in their leaders’ schemes, and, when they did take part, found the schemes unworkable. But some of the obstacles Protestants faced w ­ ere coming from outside—­from the city itself. Urban life challenged ­every religious group, not just Protestants. Strong, Loomis, and the Washington and New York conference ministers often described Catholicism in envious terms, as though the Church ­were so power­ful that it faced no prob­lems in Amer­ i­ca. But while this view was useful in fortifying Protestant prejudices, it scarcely reflected realities in the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, Strong,

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Loomis, and the conference ministers d ­ idn’t know enough about Jews to recognize their difficulties, prob­ably ­because the large-­scale emigration of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews to Amer­i­ca had scarcely begun. When Reverend King snidely told the New York conference of Judaism’s “century-­walled exclusiveness,” he might have helped Protestants excuse de­cades of failed efforts to convert Jews. But neither he nor anyone ­else appeared to recognize that Jews, too, faced considerable ­trials sustaining traditional worship and culture in a bewildering American urban environment.34 For some, the conditions of urban heterogeneity did not so much threaten par­tic­u­lar religions as cast into question religion altogether. An 1879 cartoon in Puck, the national humor magazine, ridiculed all American religion with an illustrated carnival sideshow ­under the banner, “The Arcade of the True Faith: Take Your Choice.” A plump Henry Ward Beecher (of Brooklyn) reclines next to a greedy Catholic bishop, who stares at an over­eager mohel (“The Original Jacob”), who in turn f­ aces a foot-­washing Baptist, an unctuous Episcopalian, a Mormon sporting three wives, a sallow Methodist, and a naked Baptist selling salvation by immersion.35 The prob­lem of immigration also went beyond the pluralism that concerned Protestants. Immigration could be a source of strife even when the mi­grants ­were coreligionists. Longer-­settled Protestants, Catholics, and Jews often resented newer Eu­ro­pean immigrants with whom they shared a faith but not languages and national identities. German and Scandinavian Lutherans saw traditional American Protestants as self-­ righteous “pietists and enthusiasts” who believed that immigrant “ways and traditions are strange” and demanded “stricter observance of the Lord’s Day” and “total abstinence” from alcohol. Amer­i­ca’s Catholic hierarchy, largely Irish, grudgingly accommodated German and then Polish immigrants but expressed deeper qualms about rural Italians when they started arriving in the United States in large numbers. An 1888 eyed, olive-­ tinted men and Catholic World article bemoaned “dark-­ ­women” who “can sleep anywhere” and are “the worst off in religious equipment of, perhaps, any foreign Catholics what­ever.” Meanwhile established American Jews from many backgrounds resented Eastern Eu­ ro­pean and Rus­sian Jewish immigrants. New York rabbi Joseph Silverman, for example, worried that the new arrivals’ “loud ways and

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In 1879 the cartoonist Joseph Keppler lampooned Amer­i­ca’s religious diversity for the magazine Puck, ridiculing the Catholics, Jews, and myriad Protestants offering wares at a fair. Reproduced from a copy of “The Religious Vanity Fair,” Puck, Oct. 22, 1879, by Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the Ohio State University Libraries.

awkward gesticulations” w ­ ere “naturally repulsive and repugnant to refined American sensibilities.”36 Race compounded the challenge of outreach in urban religious communities of all kinds. Emancipated slaves rushed to join in­de­pen­dent black Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal congregations ­after the Civil War, but this was ­little solace to white Protestants. At the Washington conference, Reverend W. E. Hatcher could not refrain from criticizing “older traces of their superstition” as well as backwardness “in the moral aspects of their religious lives.” In spite of their concerns to augment Protestant numbers, New York’s white congregations comfortably maintained “traditional” Christian racial separatism, as did white congregations in other cities south and north.37 Anti-­Catholicism likewise found replenished soil in the cities, adding to the conflict over religion. In 1844 anti-­Catholic riots engulfed Philadelphia. New York might have succumbed as well had Bishop John Hughes not placed armed guards at Catholic churches. L ­ ater, Hughes

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protested against the use of the Protestant King James Bible in public school bible readings. The bishop lost that fight, which led to the creation of the city’s extensive Catholic parochial school system. ­After 1860, Protestant artisans fought immigrant Irish laborers over jobs, and evangelical Protestant ministers antagonized Catholics with street sermons on the “Whore of Babylon,” meaning the Catholic Church. In 1870 Irish Catholics attacked Irish Protestant marchers during an Orange Day parade, killing eight. The next year, a riot broke out; New York police shot into crowds of Catholic parade watchers, killing over 60 and injuring 150.38 Antisemitism in New York also worsened during the nineteenth ­century. Since the colonial era, urban Jewish success brought a respectability that undoubtedly muffled antisemitism’s harsher tones. But sharper anti-­Jewish sentiments appeared as Rus­sian and Eastern Eu­ro­ pean Jewish immigrants began arriving in the 1880s. The New York magazine Frank Leslie’s Weekly described Manhattan’s largely Jewish East Side in 1892 as “a g­ reat and coherent population of foreigners of a low order of intelligence, speaking their own languages, following their own customs, and absolutely blind or utterly indifferent to our ideals, moral, social[,] and po­liti­cal.” The New York Tribune editorialized in 1898 that, unlike other va­ri­et­ ies of immigrant, a Jew “is contemptuous of the p ­ eople of his adoption.” When Manhattan’s American Hebrew surveyed leading American clergymen in 1890 to learn if Sunday schools taught c­ hildren that “Jews crucified Christ,” the response from Morgan Dix, the elegant minister of Manhattan’s wealthy Trinity Church, dismayed the editors. Dix insisted that Trinity Church c­ hildren w ­ ere not “trained to loathe and detest the Jewish ­people.” But his view of history seemed contradictory: “I do not doubt that pious Israelites t­ oday revere the character of Christ and abhor the act of their forefathers in killing him.”39 The spiritual exhaustion seemingly intrinsic to cities; the influx in Amer­i­ca of non-­Protestant, non-­Christian immigrants speaking strange languages and living out their diverse national and ethnic traditions; and the destabilizing, ever-­renewing bigotry and religious tension ironically entwined with Amer­i­ca’s promise of religious freedom also spoke ominously to parties concerned with the continuation of religion. Protestants feared losing a presumptive national identity they had themselves created. Long-­settled Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their descendants looked askance even on new arrivals who shared their faith, disdaining

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their unfamiliar cultures and habits. And t­hose arrivals worried that strange, anonymous American cities—­with their hostile authorities and anxious older residents—­threatened the customs that Amer­i­ca’s vaunted religious freedom suggested they w ­ ere ­free to preserve in their new homes. ­These conditions and fears might have left every­one feeling powerless. New immigrants might have succumbed to anomie despite their expectations about Amer­i­ca as a citadel of openness, prosperity, and religious freedom. The urban descendants of ­earlier immigrants might have given up as well, even though their grandparents and ­great grandparents had built a national spiritual hot­house that preserved, transformed, and created religions. Instead New Yorkers responded to the looming crises facing urban faith in intriguing, unexpected, and vibrant ways. Often they embraced the modernity and the mass that so many religious leaders feared. Some New Yorkers adapted grudgingly, but o ­ thers did more than tolerate the new. With Joseph Stella—­though perhaps never achieving his ecstasy—­ they w ­ ere fascinated by modern possibilities. They opted for aspiration, the city, immigrants, religion, and Amer­i­ca together. Their religious and cultural answers emerged more in a ­jumble than according to a plan. But from that ­jumble evolved the new and modernized face of or­ga­nized religion in Gotham. The next chapters peer closely into that face to discern its history and its character. Far from a casualty of the modern, religion in Manhattan became quintessentially modern. It was as much institutional and bureaucratic as theological, and it was fueled by international and domestic migration well into the 1930s. It was this system that brought Manhattan’s traditional or­ga­nized religion past the challenges of the early twentieth ­century and the Depression and laid the groundwork for its proliferation into the postwar suburbs, where Margaret Simon could so expectantly ask, “Are you ­there God?”

TWO

12 Organ­i zing God

In August 1904 the distinguished German sociologist Max Weber and his wife Marianne arrived in Manhattan on the ship Bremen. They had come to the United States for a three-­month visit, occasioned by an invitation to address the Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis. The Bremen also carried Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish émigrés, their lives to be transformed in Amer­i­ca. Unlike the Jewish immigrants, the Webers would return home in November. But their American trip, too, was consequential, full of opportunities to see the world anew. They met famous Americans—­Jane ­Addams, William James, W. E. B. Du Bois. They visited German immigrant communities in upstate New York and backcountry settlements in Appalachia. They toured Bryn Mawr and Wellesley and research libraries at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Harvard. They attended white Protestant ser­vices in Appalachia and a black Baptist ser­vice in Washington, DC. They met American Indians in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and toured the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where they missed Booker T. Washington, who was on a fund­rais­ing trip.1 The Webers circled back to New York City in November for a busy two-­week stay. They found the city’s settlement ­houses fascinating, met the reformers Lillian Wald and Florence Kelly, visited boys’ clubs, and toured a newspaper printing plant. Max engaged Columbia University faculty and researched at its library. But religion in the city left sour impressions. Max endured a Christian Science sermon “presented without pathos u ­ ntil it became boring.” He worried that “the tremendous increase in the clubs and ­orders ­here substitutes for the declining organ­ization of the churches.” Marianne was not impressed by Felix Adler, founder of



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the secular Ethical Culture Society; his talk on “­Mental Health as a Religion” was, she said, “rather dull.” Her comment about Lower Manhattan’s St. Paul’s Chapel, built in the 1760s, perhaps unintentionally summarized the Webers’ judgment of religion in New York: a “­little church” with a “gothic tower that tries to assert itself like an island of peace amid the untamed din of the streets.” Max’s l­ater essay on “ ‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North Amer­i­ca” contrasted Brooklyn, “regarded as ‘pious,’ ” to “New York proper,” meaning Manhattan. He employed only rural American examples to document his essay, which bypassed city religion altogether.2 Manhattan may have raised doubts about religion in an urban f­ uture, but Amer­i­ca’s swirl of ­peoples, cultures, and religions, exotic compared to Germany’s relative homogeneity, quickened Max Weber’s spirit and scholarship. Over the next fifteen years, he produced books on the religions of ancient China and India and on ancient Judaism. He plunged into the study of religion amid modernity. The best-­known result of t­ hese ­labors is his November 1917 Munich University lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” given as Germany faced defeat in the G ­ reat War. Weber argued that modernity was leaving humanity “disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity.” Won­ders, spirits, and the miraculous ­were giving way to bureaucracy, science, and technology. “The fate of our times,” Weber foresaw, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ ”3 William James was similarly apprehensive about the ­future of religion in an urban and scientific age, although not for quite the same reasons as Weber. James’s Va­r i­e­ties of Religious Experience, the most renowned book ever published on religion by an American, did set out a conception of religion that Weber might have found compatible. Religion, James wrote, concerned “the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness”—or, put more formally, “the feeling, acts and experience of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what­ever they consider to be divine.” ­These notions encompassed Weber’s own emphasis on enchantment, won­ders, and miracles within imperfect ­humans yearning for sight of the transcendent.4

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However, while Weber saw religious institutions as central to that experience of transcendence—­and threatened by the modern condition—­ James saw institutions as an unnecessary burden on the experience of the divine, a burden that would only grow in the age of modern organ­ ization. “Churches,” he wrote dismissively, “when once established, live at second hand upon tradition.” “The found­ers of ­every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine,” James argued, “so personal religion should still seem the primordial ­thing.” As a result, “ecclesiastical organ­ization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-­betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place.”5 If James and Weber had lived longer—­Weber died in 1920, James a de­cade before—­they prob­ably would have been surprised by religion’s prosperity, much less survival, in twentieth-­century Manhattan. All of the city’s principal religious groups deepened their traditional ritual, theological, and spiritual identities by committing to institutional o ­ rders and employing modernity in their ser­vice. Where Weber saw modern organ­izations as rigid and suffocating, New York’s religious institutions offered mechanisms through which religious p ­ eople grappled with anonymity, mobility, density, and indifference. Where James saw religious institutions of all kinds living “second hand upon tradition,” most New York ­children came to religion through institutions and made their adult religious lives inside institutions. If James implicitly was stressing religious “originals,” each of Gotham’s Jews and Christians could see themselves as an original in the sight of God. As the Psalms put it centuries ­earlier, Even the bird has found a home, and the swallow a nest for itself that puts its fledglings by Your altars, Lord of Armies, my king and my God.6

New York’s religious institutions w ­ ere far from perfect, of course. Many ­were wracked by disputes, and many failed. Some ­were overbearing, suffocating. Men, especially wealthy or at least well-­heeled men, dominated most religious organ­izations. Separation by race proliferated.



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But New York’s religious institutions ­were not merely imperfect. ­Women and minorities employed them to create and shape group and personal identity. Congregations challenged their rabbis, priests, ministers, and denominations. One, then two, then more individuals formed new institutions to advance new spiritual ends and shore up old ones. Novel ideas also bloomed inside older institutions willing to adapt. Far from pallid, religious institutions exhibited the colors and variety of their individual members, and just as individuals changed by engaging the vagaries of life, institutions changed amid the shifting expectations of worshipers, existing and would-be. The histories of ­these organ­izations may seem unsexy and boring, a common view of institutional history. But that view ignores the real dynamism between common worshipers and religious institutions. Religious institutions ­were supple enough to further many worshipers’ aspirations. What­ever William James thought of them, these institutions w ­ ­ ere the instruments through which most New Yorkers—­most Americans—­approached God. Modernity enlarged and magnified the power of institutions in society but did not invent them, certainly not in the area of religion. James’s criticisms notwithstanding, institutions had stood for centuries at the center of all major Western religions and their many dif­fer­ent expressions of spirits, ritual, and theology. The multiple diasporas that cast Jews about the ­Middle East, Asia, Eu­rope, and then the New World led to profuse institution-­building, as congregations created structures to protect and further their religious traditions amid official hostility. Poland offers a representative case. A Council of Four Lands oversaw affairs of diasporic Jews in Poland and Galicia from the 1500s to 1764, when the Polish Diet disbanded it. That strug­gle, one of many with Christian authorities, deepened the importance of local Jewish life and local institutions in carry­ing Judaism across centuries. Christian institution building looked very dif­ fer­ent but was no less significant. The centuries following Chris­tian­ity’s triumph as the official religion of the Roman Empire witnessed the creation of formidable institutional structures overseen by the Papacy and Church, even as won­der and miracles stood at the center of Catholic theology and ritual. Protestants excoriated Catholic institutional bloat but quickly crafted their own denominational foundations as they divided over doctrine, theology, and ritual. They sustained and defended their

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revised and re-­revised Christian faiths using a welter of new institutional ­orders competing with the Catholic Church and each other, each claiming Godly sanction.7 Protestant denominational institutions emulating Old World models flourished in the Eu­ro­pean colonies of mainland North Amer­i­ca. New Amsterdam’s Dutch Reformed and Lutheran congregations maintained denominational ties with authorities in the Netherlands, a pattern that continued for several de­cades past the En­glish conquest in 1674. Homegrown authorities emerged as colonial congregations multiplied. Philadelphia became the incubator of the British mainland colonies’ Protestant denominations and a major site for religious centralization. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers) or­ga­ nized in 1695, the Presbytery of Philadelphia in 1706, and the Philadelphia Baptist Association in 1707. The authority of each was recognized by New York City’s Quaker, Presbyterian, and Baptist congregations, respectively. Almost ironically, it was the Church of ­England that never established a denominational institutional presence in the colonies. No Anglican bishop ever was appointed in the colonies, and Anglican congregations took direction instead from the bishop of London as well as London’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which supported infant Anglican congregations throughout the colonies.8 ­After the Revolution, New York Protestants took part in the many national and regional denominational groups that flowered in the new United States. The city’s several Church of ­England congregations became part of the new Episcopal Church. Methodists—­originally Anglican dissidents who supported the king in the Revolution and withdrew their colonial missionaries to Britain—­returned in the 1780s with enthusiastic proselytizing, especially of poor and modest Americans. With startling orga­nizational prowess, Methodists became the largest Protestant denomination in both the city and the nation by the 1830s. Baptist and Presbyterian congregations likewise multiplied as the city grew, new congregations accepting the authority of regional associations and presbyteries that, in turn, formed part of larger national denominations. Black Methodists began worshiping separately in Manhattan in 1796 and dedicated their own building in 1800 as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but they still met u ­ nder white Methodist Episcopal auspices. In the 1820s, ­after an in­de­pen­dent African Methodist Episcopal



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denomination or­ga­nized in Philadelphia in 1816, leaders of Manhattan’s Zion Church formed a separate African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination. Their congregation quickly became known, and is still known, as ­Mother Zion church.9 Soon the city became a focal point for cross-­denominational Protestant institutions. The American Bible Society made New York its headquarters in 1816, and the American Temperance Union did the same in 1836. The American Home Missionary Society demonstrated how local became regional became national. The society’s origins lay in early work by the Young Men’s Missionary Society of New York and the New York Evangelical Missionary Society. ­These led to the founding of the United Domestic Missionary Society in 1822, to serve the New York area, then to the establishment of the national American Home Missionary Society at an 1826 convention in New York City. ­These organ­izations w ­ ere professionalized before professionalization became part of management vocabulary in the late nineteenth ­century. Each had a paid director and staff, who developed strategies, raised and spent increasing sums of money, and regularly issued reports of their activities for purposes of both accountability and publicity. ­These socie­ties also drew on the support of boards comprising urban Protestant elites. By 1830 Amer­i­ca’s Protestant voluntary socie­ties, many headquartered in New York City, could boast that, since the 1790s, they had expended about $2.8 million to promote their religious interests. That was a huge sum, not much less than the federal government’s $3.6 million of outlays on “internal improvements” during the same period.10 New York’s denominations themselves also exhibited deepening institutional complexity. By 1832 the city’s Methodist Conference had divided into two cir­cuits, east and west. ­These steadily produced more congregations, then more subdivisions, all leading to a larger denomination of more ministers and worshipers. Over the years, the scale of the Methodist operation kept mounting. Come 1886 the Methodist New York East Conference could meet for an entire week of planned activities. Attendees heard sermons and reports; voted on procedural motions and resolutions about subjects like poorly paid pastors, polygamy, and the National Temperance Society; and submitted detailed information on congregational finance and membership. ­These last occupied twelve of the conference’s hundred pages of minutes, which also included advertisements from

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seminaries and firms such as Eddy’s Standard Refrigerator, which hawked a decidedly non-­Methodist “wine closet.” By 1914 the conference minutes had doubled to 190 pages, including 27 of finance and membership statistics, plus advertisements touting stereopticons, slides, typewriters, and insurance for clergymen.11 New York Presbyterians took a similarly complex path but often ­were propelled by internal disputes. In 1822 the Associate Reformed Presbytery of New York became a dissident Second Presbytery of New York, congregations withdrew from one presbytery to join another, and t­ here ­were “intimations” about further division. “What ­shall be done with ministers and churches who have seceded from the Presbytery?” asked S. D. Alexander in his 1888 history of New York’s presbyteries, subtly reveling in the excitement of Presbyterian argument.12 Denominations played keys roles in spreading the faith, as it was they, rather than individual congregations or ministers, that typically or­ga­nized outreach to the unchurched and poor. For instance, the Southern New York Baptist Association spurred the organ­ization of the Second German Baptist Church in 1885 to reach German immigrants clustered in Hell’s Kitchen, the West Side Manhattan slum that stretched from 30th  to 59th  streets. Walter Rauschenbusch, who became the Social Gospel’s most famous theologian, drew his convictions directly from the eleven wrenching years he spent as the Second German minister. But the extreme poverty of Hell’s Kitchen demonstrated the limits of what a single minister might do, and it scarcely was surprising that Rauschenbusch moved to the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1896 to write. ­There, his Hell’s Kitchen experiences ­shaped his major Social Gospel works, from Chris­tian­ity and the Social Crisis (1907) to A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917).13 The statewide Presbytery of New York likewise noted in 1880 that the need for missions in several New York cities, particularly New York City itself, was so broad that the presbytery, not individual congregations, had to assume responsibility for sponsoring them. New York’s Episcopalian diocese sponsored a City Mission and workingmen’s club. This is not to say that individual congregations had no impact on outreach. William Rainsford’s ministry at St. George’s Church took Episcopalian denominational efforts in new directions by promoting an “institutional church,” which abandoned fees and rents for church pews, promoted



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education, and offered worshipers social ser­vices that emphasized the potentially transformative impact of religion on the city’s most destitute residents.14 Protestant authority flowed from denomination to clergy and congregations, not up from the bottom. Denominations established broad policy, which ministers and congregations ­were expected to support. For instance, before the Civil War, the denominations established their churches’ stances on slavery and split into northern and southern bodies when their conventions disagreed. Denominations also maintained careful control of w ­ omen. Even when laypeople ­were allowed to attend denominational meetings—­which ­were dominated by clergy—­women overwhelmingly ­were excluded. Most denominations, not congregations, set ordination standards and considered only men. The exceptions ­were Baptists, whose congregations could ordain clergy; Quakers, who approved ­women as “public friends”; and Freewill Baptists, who approved itinerant female preachers.15 Protestants delighted in attacking Catholic hierarchical authority but eagerly exercised their own ever-­enlarging hierarchical muscles, most sensationally in ecclesiastical t­ rials of alleged wayward clergy. ­These t­ rials signaled not only the denominations’ disciplinary zeal but also their institutional fortitude. Some t­ rials became famous, even infamous—­the 1893 Presbyterian heresy trial of Union Theological Seminary professor Charles Augustus Briggs, the denomination’s threat to try Manhattan pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick for heresy in 1924. (Fosdick resigned his pastorate at First Presbyterian Church.) Some ­trials w ­ ere mundane, such as the Methodist trial of an upstate New York minister who married a ­couple without the bride’s parents’ consent. And some ­trials carried po­ liti­cal implications, subtly in conservative Presbyterian attacks on Briggs and Fosdick but directly in 1920, when Episcopalians engaged in red-­ scare tactics against a Manhattan clergyman who dared compare the Pilgrims’ “voyage on the Mayflower with the expulsion of . . . ​Rus­sian anarchists from this country.” Newspapers relished the events—­the ecclesiastical “crimes,” the denominational squabbling, and the atmosphere of scandal. The NewYork Times reported on over twenty Protestant ­trials in the New York area from the 1890s to the 1920s.16 Local Protestant congregations likewise deepened their embrace of institutions across the nineteenth c­ entury, with special implications for

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­ omen and congregational life. Most Protestant denominations not only w restricted the ministry to men but expected that only men would serve as church trea­sur­ers; trustees, who hired ministers and bought and sold church property; and sextons, who cared for church property. ­Women or­ga­nized in and among congregations around issues of Christian endeavor outside the bound­aries that kept them from formal church offices. ­Women ­were central to the rise of Sunday schools ­because increasingly they dominated the teaching ranks even when men headed the schools. They or­ga­nized socie­ties to aid the destitute. For example, ­women established the Dorcas socie­ties that emerged from Manhattan’s Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church, which followed the example of Dorcas, a w ­ oman described in the Book of Acts. Black w ­ omen or­ga­nized Dorcas socie­ties out of the ­Free Schools, and the AME Zion Church’s Juvenile ­Daughters of Ruth raised funds to ameliorate the poor.17 Broadly based Protestant organ­ izations crossed denominational bound­aries, adding to the complex matrix of religious institutions in New York City. The best-­known example may be the ­Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the most controversial w ­ omen’s organ­ization in nineteenth-­century Amer­ic­ a. Though the temperance u ­ nion was especially strong in small towns and cities, it also developed chapters in New York City. Members crusaded not only for total abstinence from alcohol but also the ­women’s vote, child care, and the prohibition of child ­labor. All ­these reforms, they argued, would make Amer­ic­ a the Christian, moral society it should be.18 Indeed, New York’s Christian moralizing energy found many outlets. The Young Men’s and ­Women’s Christian Associations, which came to Amer­i­ca from ­England in the 1850s, stressed Protestant values as the basis for social ser­vice and personal ethics and by 1900 had more than a dozen branches focused on the youth of the city. The Salvation Army, also a British import, arrived in New York City and the United States in 1880, promoting conversion, attacking drunkenness and prostitution, and ameliorating hardship through an aggressively faux-­military institutional structure and appeal. The army became a newspaper favorite, as its uniformed male and female “soldiers” raucously battled Satan in front of saloons and brothels with tambourines, cornets, and drums. The NewYork Times alone published hundreds of tantalizing army stories each year throughout the 1880s and 1890s—­“Satan’s Forces in Flight,” “The



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Salvation Army Fights,” “A Hallelujah Wedding: Two Salvation Army Soldiers Marry.” But the army’s compassionate work was also noticed, as when it distributed “3,200 uncooked dinners for families of five” on Christmas day in 1899 and fed another five thousand p ­ eople at Madison Square Garden “with all the turkey and plum pudding they could eat.”19 As time passed, New York proved hospitable not only to traditional Old World Protestantism but also to American derivatives and inventions. For example, ­after 1880, congregations associated with the holiness movement popped up alongside Manhattan’s mainline Protestant churches. A.  B. Simpson led one of the most impor­tant. A Canadian Presbyterian émigré, Simpson pastored in Kentucky and moved to a Manhattan congregation in 1879. Two years l­ater, Simpson resigned. He had developed doubts about infant baptism and was edging t­oward a belief in divine healing. Both views put him at odds with Presbyterians. Rather than endure a drawn-­out denominational dispute, Simpson developed his own path, the Four-­Fold Gospel. He stressed conversion, personal holiness, divine healing, and missionizing across the world. In 1883 he opened a faith healing practice in Manhattan, the Berachah Home. Simpson also toured the region giving speeches on divine healing, and he brought ministers to Manhattan for conventions on “Christian Life, Divine Healing, Evangelistic and Missionary Work, and the Lord’s Coming.” In 1890 he opened a thousand-­seat sanctuary just off Times Square, the Gospel Tabernacle. From ­there, he led the creation of a new evangelical denomination in 1897, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and led its Manhattan missionary training school u ­ ntil his death 20 in 1919. Another new arrival was American Pentecostalism, which stressed the presence of the holy spirit in con­temporary life, speaking in tongues, and divine healing. Manhattan’s first white Pentecostal evangelists appeared in 1907 and preached in rented quarters through the 1910s. In 1921 they acquired a former Baptist church on West 33rd Street, which they named the Glad Tidings Tabernacle. Glad Tidings was so successful that it paid off its mortgage in 1925. Two years ­later it hosted Los Angeles’s famed Pentecostal evangelist, megachurch innovator, and Christian radio pioneer Aimee Semple McPherson, who vowed to “purge the city,” as the Times put it. Black Pentecostalism came to Manhattan in 1910, when

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an Apostolic Faith Mission began holding “Pentecostal latter rain revival meetings.” In 1919 the Louisianan R. C. Lawson founded what would become Harlem’s principal black Pentecostal congregation: the Refuge Church of Christ. Just five years l­ater, the church dedicated a renovated sanctuary on West 133rd Street.21 Healing was also central to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement. Eddy saw healing as a “lost ele­ment” of the faith, which could be restored through new teachings. In 1886 she sent an acolyte, Augusta Emma Stetson, to proselytize in Manhattan. The First Church of Christ, Scientist found a ready audience among New York’s affluent whites. Within ten years the community had acquired an impressive space: the former All Souls Church on West 48th Street. Then, in 1906, the First Church opened a two thousand–­seat sanctuary on West 96th Street. At Eddy’s direction, Manhattan’s Second Church of Christ, Scientist, opened in 1891. It moved into a new and luxurious beaux arts sanctuary on Central Park West ten years ­later. Eddy excommunicated Stetson in 1909 ­after more than a de­cade of personal tension and theological disagreement, but both congregations continued to prosper for de­cades. Worshippers ­were almost entirely white; the first Christian Science congregation focused on black New Yorkers did not open u ­ ntil 1921, in 22 Harlem. Smaller, largely white, “mind cure” religious meetings and congregations proliferated in Manhattan ­under the banner of the New Thought movement. From the 1890s into the mid-twentieth ­century, a novel lit­ er­a­ture on the mind’s centrality to health inspired Manhattan groups such as the ­Mental Science ­Temple, the Society of the Inner Life, the League for the Larger Life, and the Unity Church. All regularly advertised meetings and lectures held in theaters and rented rooms.23 Yet however actively Protestant-­derived groups multiplied in Manhattan—­and the nation—­after 1880, numbers could not disguise Protestantism’s decline as a majority faith in the city. A crude but rudimentarily accurate study of New Yorkers’ religious backgrounds by the City Census Bureau in 1922 found that Protestants’ share of city worshippers had fallen to 35 ­percent, down from 50 ­percent in 1900. By 1920, according to the study, Catholics accounted for 35 ­percent of worshipers and Jews for 30 ­percent. Church rec­ords quietly confirm that Protestants slid as a proportion of the city’s booming population. Between 1895 and



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1914, New York City Methodists reported only a slight rise in “full members,” from about forty-­ four thousand to just u ­ nder fifty thousand, while the number of congregations shrank from 238 to 226. Baptists had fourteen thousand members in the city in 1885 and just three thousand more in 1915.24 With the city’s Catholic and Jewish populations rising, Protestant conversion organ­izations had plenty of work. ­These w ­ ere longstanding proj­ ects. The American Tract Society, headquartered in New York City, had formed in 1814 and the New York Protestant Association in 1831. Both groups sponsored books and lectures attacking Catholicism. The city also ­housed the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews—­the condition being their rejection of Chris­tian­ity. An 1852 annual report suggested its Sisyphean task: in the previous six months, its dozen urban missions, including one in New York, had converted only six Jews. Conversion did not become easier ­after 1880, even as efforts increased. The Times breathlessly reported controversies that speak to the ferment surrounding conversion. Headlines included, “East Siders Stone Dunlap: Missionary Who Is Trying to Convert Jews Forced to Flee,” “Renounced Catholicism: ­Brother Philemon Myers becomes a Protestant,” and “Returns to His Old Faith: Le Pere Bouland Rejoins the Catholic Church.” In 1902 New York City was home to ten of the thirty-­two US organ­ izations dedicated to worldwide missions to Jews and five of the eleven US periodicals supporting them. But if ­these conversion proj­ects gave some Protestants a sense of solidarity amid increasing diversity, they never produced significant results.25 This zeal to convert did produce one fascinating, if failed, attempt to systematize and facilitate the house-­to-­house visitations advocated at the 1888 Chickering Hall conference. The New York City Federation of Churches and Christian Workers developed a “systematic method in reaching ­people outside the church”—­a “so­cio­log­i­cal canvass” that dwarfed ­others of its kind. Led by the federation’s executive secretary, Reverend Walter Laidlaw, the 1896 poll reached thousands of h ­ ouse­holds 26 in Manhattan’s fifteenth legislative assembly district. Laidlaw, a Canadian Presbyterian, had studied sociology in Berlin, possibly with W. E. B. Du Bois, who cited Laidlaw’s surveys in his pathbreaking 1899 book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Laidlaw

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brought unsurpassed ambition, state-­of-­the-­art technology, and financing from the staunch New York City Baptist John D. Rocke­fel­ler to his federation surveys. A report that Laidlaw produced in 1896 in his journal Federation was just the first of ten; by 1903, his canvassers had visited 100,000 ­house­holds. The polltakers gather detailed information using printed forms containing forty to fifty questions about ­house­hold size, religious preference, Bible owner­ship, baptismal status, occupation, earnings, insurance status, and other subjects. Polltakers also rated the cleanliness of the homes and apartments they visited. Federation staff members keypunched the data on large cards pro­cessed by Hollerith machines—­tabulators used in the 1890 Federal Census and in­ven­ted by Carl Hollerith, whose com­pany l­ater became part of IBM. The federation was able to rapidly produce results down to the block level. Laidlaw extolled the “electric machine [that] seeks out the secrets recorded on the cards” as a way of approaching Jesus’s “exact knowledge” of Jerusalem.27 But while Laidlaw’s surveys provided a granular lay of the land, they failed to inspire change. Fascinated by his data and the Hollerith machines pro­cessing it, he drowned readers in paralyzing pages of population numbers, pie charts, and tax-­exempt church property valuations. Maps compared the density of saloons and churches. Federation delivered the dizzying statistics to city ministers, but the journal contained ­little guidance on how to use the results. Ministers and congregations largely ignored them, and Rocke­fel­ler’s exasperated advisers cancelled Laidlaw’s funding in 1913. Laidlaw’s one real success was an innovation in demography. In 1910 the US Census ­adopted his concept of a census tract, whose unvarying physical bound­aries permitted meaningful comparisons of population changes across time. The tract has been central to censuses ever since.28 Although Rocke­fel­ler was convinced that Laidlaw could not do the job, he still wanted the job done—he wanted systematic studies of communities and congregations that would support their growth and prosperity. To this end, in 1921 he engaged a mid-­career minister, H. Paul Douglass, to direct a new Institute for Social and Religious Research, also headquartered in Manhattan. By the mid-1930s the institute had published more than seventy book-­length studies based on new social science methods, with clear suggestions to apply their findings. The best-­



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known ­were three consecutively published books, 1000 City Churches (1926), The Church in the Changing City (1927), and How to Study the City Church (1928). All three stressed ways that congregations could understand and adapt to modern urban conditions. But in 1934 Rocke­ fel­ler again withdrew funding, and the institute closed. This time Rocke­ fel­ler was less concerned with his surveyor than with the continuing failure of Protestant congregations and denominations to use the results. Douglass, however, pressed on. He continued to direct social research for Protestant groups and l­ater joined with clergy and social scientists who studied religious demography in Amer­i­ca’s post-1945 suburbs.29 The Laidlaw and Douglass surveys reflected and reinforced a broad post-1880 Protestant emphasis on efficiency and congregational management. The Sunday school movement was an early mover on ­these fronts. ­After emerging in late eighteenth-­century Britain, Sunday schools swept across American Protestant denominations. Classes often focused on increasing literacy among poor ­children through Bible lessons, which ultimately might produce well-­educated church members. The American Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine, first published in New York City in 1824, featured several sections “On the Management of Sunday Schools.” Over time the movement shifted from instructing poor c­ hildren outside congregations to the more self-­interested goal of educating each congregation’s own c­ hildren. But the discussion among educators of administration, curriculum, and teacher training remained methodical throughout.30 By the 1890s Manhattan had become a center for the application of modern business models to Protestant congregational life. George Whitefield Mead’s Modern Methods of Church Work, published in Manhattan in 1897, proclaimed, “We are in an age of organ­ization. . . . ​Yet thousands of our churches are literally falling to pieces b ­ ecause of loose, haphazard, unbusinesslike ways.” In forty-­four chapters on subjects ranging from “ushers associations” to “church rolls and rec­ords,” Mead laid out “new methods” for responding to the distinctive conditions urban churches faced. Extensive statistics documented growth in city congregations and Sunday schools that implemented Mead’s management approaches.31 An Episcopal minister nicely summarized the benefits of modern management in terms that the devout could recognize: “Organ­ization and administration, dear friends, are to be the fishers of men [just as] nets

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­ ere to the plain fisher-­folk . . . ​of Galilee.” In concrete terms, this manw agement looked much like that of a corporation. Boards systematized financial practices, hired trained accountants to replace clergy and laymen as trea­sur­ers, and reor­ga­nized programs and staff in search of efficiency. ­These staff and orga­nizational leaders increasingly reviewed results and revised per­for­mance standards. Proselytizing also could be modernized. In The Open Church for the Unchurched, published in Manhattan in 1905, Nashville minister James McCulloch urged urban congregations to adopt systematic “training in the princi­ples and methods of city evangelization.” Only then might they truly effect “the promise of a Christian city.”32 Two Manhattan publishers, Fleming H. Revell and George H. Doran, ­were especially influential in the Protestant management boom of the 1910s and 1920s. Revell’s An Efficient Church (1907), The Prob­lem of Lay Leadership (1914), and The ­Future of the Churches: History and Economic Facts (1921) and Doran’s Efficient Religion (1912), Efficiency in the Sunday ­ entury Methods in ReSchool (1912), and Publicity and Pro­g ress:Twentieth C ligious, Educational, and Social Activities (1915) advocated systematic changes in ­every aspect of congregational management. It was also Revell who published McCulloch’s Open Church for the Unchurched and Douglass’s 1000 City Churches.33 The clergyman Charles Stelzle became New York City’s star proponent of Protestant management. Raised by a widowed ­mother on the Lower East Side, Stelzle dropped out of school, worked as a machinist, attended Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, and ministered informally among workers in Minneapolis, New York City, and St. Louis in the 1890s. He was ordained as a Presbyterian in 1901. In 1903 the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, headquartered in Manhattan, established a Workingmen’s Department run by Stelzle, who had a reputation for giving speeches to the American Federation of ­Labor. Three years ­later Revell issued Stelzle’s Messages to Workingmen. Stelzle acknowledged the gap between Protestantism generally and working men and w ­ omen and challenged congregations to “open e­ very night and nearly all day” with a gospel incorporating athletics, education, medical assistance, and clubs for both sexes. He also served on a Presbyterian committee that studied a 1910 Bethlehem Steel strike and declared the “12-­hour day and a 7-­day week . . . ​alike a disgrace to civilization.”34



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Stelzle promoted not only l­abor rights but also modern marketing techniques. It was the latter that constituted his larger contribution to New York’s and Amer­ i­ ca’s evolving denominations. In 1908 Stelzle published Princi­ples of Successful Church Advertising, again with Revell, arguing that “men must be reached where they are.” Stelzle noted that publicity had been central to Protestant revivals from George Whitefield’s in the eigh­teenth c­ entury to Dwight Moody’s. And he provided guidance for ministers and congregations, teaching them how to take advantage of newspaper advertising, billboards, and “electric signs.” He even offered advice on which fonts to use in ads and how to achieve “half-­tone screens and effects” in illustrations. Presaging the l­ater profession of media relations, Stelzle further instructed readers on “assisting the reporter.” ­After the book came out, the New York Presbytery authorized Stelzle to conduct a two-­year experimental program to attract New York City laborers. He was granted the use of a former Presbyterian congregation building on East 14th Street, where he claimed he had once watched Moody preach to ­little avail. But Stelzle was confident that he could succeed where even the g­ reat Moody h ­ adn’t.35 To compete with neighboring marquees, he attached to the corner of the Romanesque sanctuary a neon sign with letters two feet high spelling out “­LABOR ­TEMPLE.” In case that ­wasn’t noticeable enough, he added bulletin boards “studded with electric lights.” But the signage intended to attract engagement, not merely notice. To that end, Stelzle courted Italian Catholics and Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews for Tuesday eve­ning meetings where audiences could discuss politics, social welfare, socialism, and Marxism. He studied the “methods of motion-­picture ­houses and vaudev­ ille theaters” to attain “life and snappiness” in worship and capped ser­ vices with evangelical sermons aimed at the “hearts of men.” But he refused to establish a congregation, fearing its formalities would destroy his fluid approach to evangelism.36 Stelzle’s ­labor activism brought Presbyterian censure and, ultimately, his resignation. Some Presbyterian authorities w ­ ere sure he was a socialist, ­others just that his ­Labor ­Temple too much tolerated socialists. The authorities also w ­ ere concerned about his unwillingness to establish a formal congregation. Meanwhile, neighboring congregations saw

The Presbyterian minister Charles Stelzle published Princi­ples of Successful Church Advertising in 1908 and practiced what he preached with an illuminated sign at his ­Labor ­Temple on 14th Street in Manhattan. Reproduced from a copy of Outlook, July 22, 1911 by Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.



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l­ ittle membership gain from Stelzle’s audiences. Worn down by the criticism, Stelzle stepped aside at the L ­ abor ­Temple and l­ater departed the Board of Home Missions, although he was placed on the Presbyterian Social Ser­vice Commission four years ­later.37 If Stelzle did not personally achieve ­g reat results, his advice about cutting-­edge outreach methods still resonated. Christian Reisner, a Manhattan Methodist minister, published Church Publicity: The Modern Way to Compel Them to Come In and formed a Church Advertising Group that was still lunching at Manhattan’s Advertising Club in 1930. Reisner, too, promoted publicity and relationships with newspaper editors and reporters. As a Philadelphia minister told him, successful clergy “cultivate editors and reporters, and are careful to prepare full accounts of [church] affairs, saving reporters and editors time, and insuring accuracy.” By 1921 a Chicago Methodist, Francis Case, suggested that the proverbial tide had turned. Clergy and denominations had overcome suspicions about advertising, and the advertising community had overcome suspicions about religion. Case’s 1921 Handbook of Church Advertising, published by the Methodist Abingdon Press, noted that the book had emerged from meetings of the Church Departmental division of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World.38 Advertising epitomized modernity, and urban mainline Protestants found it a comfortable fit with ideals and goals that ­were themselves adaptations to a new age.

Amer­i­ca’s Protestants ­were sure that Catholic hierarchical authority, centered on the pope, produced a Church of unparalleled uniformity. Yet US Catholic institutions ­were in fact highly complex and varied. Although they by no means replicated Protestant denominational divisions, Catholic prelates and worshipers, especially in Manhattan, experienced the kind of diversity that continuously ­shaped American religious life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Almost ironically, while ­every Protestant denomination had formed a US national body by at least 1810, such centralization never happened within Catholicism. No single national organ­ization of the Catholic Church ever emerged in the United States, and American Catholics have never had a single bishop or archbishop to lead them. Rather, ever

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since Pope Pius VI named the first Catholic bishop in the United States—­Reverend John Carroll, who became bishop of Baltimore in 1789—­American bishops and archbishops ­were ­free to develop individual relationships with each other and the pope. Historically, American bishops corresponded with each other and with Catholic authorities in Rome. They held plenary councils in Baltimore in 1852, 1866, and 1884. But the bishops did not or­ga­nize nationally ­until 1917, when they established the National Catholic War Council to support US participation in the ­Great War as well as ministries to Catholic soldiers. When the war ended, the bishops transformed the War Council into the National Catholic Welfare Council. But the council only supported Catholic social reform, immigrants, and open immigration policies. It did not exercise ecclesiastical authority, and many of its social efforts w ­ ere defeated with passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which sharply ­limited Catholic and Jewish migration from Southern and Eastern Eu­rope and banned Asian immigration altogether.39 The failure to establish a unified ecclesiastical system in the United States reflected American Catholics’ longstanding commitment to devolution of spiritual authority. For a c­ entury, Catholics had been establishing dioceses separately and naming bishops to head them. In 1808 Pope Pius VII divided Bishop Carroll’s Diocese of Baltimore into five regional dioceses: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Bardstown, Kentucky. By 1847 Western New York became a new Diocese of Albany and Buffalo. The diocese headquartered in New York City became an archdiocese in 1850, suggesting its singular prestige. It had direct responsibility for Catholics in the boroughs (then only Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island), plus seven counties north of the city: Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, ­Sullivan, Westchester, and Ulster.40 In 1853 separate dioceses ­were created for Brooklyn and Newark. The Archdiocese of New York had long been a profoundly immigrant church, an identity that crystalized further between the 1880s and 1920s. Its early nineteenth-­century parishioners w ­ ere overwhelmingly Irish and German immigrants, who faced anti-­Catholic prejudice from city Protestants. ­There ­were also tensions among the Irish and Germans stimulated by the former’s domination of the city’s Church hierarchy. ­These tensions lingered through the Civil War, at which point new issues arose as Italian, Polish, Bohemian, Slovakian, Hungarian, and French Cana-



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dian immigrants joined the mix. The archdiocese’s Catholic population exploded from about two hundred thousand in 1850 to 1.2 million by 1910, the growth overwhelmingly occurring in the city and much of it through immigration.41 The Church responded to multiethnic Catholic immigration a­ fter 1870 by establishing parishes and congregations from the top down. Parishioners pleaded for new congregations, but archbishops, not worshippers, created them—­a ­simple reflection of the Church’s hierarchical organ­ization. The archbishops of New York carved out large congregations of several thousand worshippers, who attended ser­vices in substantial buildings. The number of large parishes and congregations r­ ose remarkably. In New York, t­ here ­were 30 of ­these parishes in 1850, 80 in 1875, and about 110 in 1900. As we w ­ ill see below, this was in stark contrast to the approach of New York’s Jews, who dealt with similar challenges of mass migration by renting worship space or even using congregants’ apartments. New York’s Catholic immigrants and their early descendants tended to coalesce by language, nationality, race, and even disability rather than simply mix together as members of the Church Universal. As the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia put it, “Besides ­those for English-­speaking Catholics, ­there are now churches and priests in New York for Germans, Italians, Poles, French, Hungarians, Bohemians, Lithuanians, Greek Albanese, Greek Syrians, Greek Ruthenians, Slovaks, Spaniards, Chinese, for coloured ­people and for deaf mutes.” 42 This was a longstanding American Catholic practice. Beginning in the early nineteenth c­ entury and accelerating as immigration increased, archbishops allowed “national parishes” to exist alongside traditional territorial parishes created by archdiocesan officials. Thus Catholics in New York could choose between attending ser­vices in a territorial parish church, such as Holy Rosary Church established in Harlem in 1884 (no ­matter its German orientation), or a national one, such as Our Lady of Mount Carmel, an Italian parish established in 1881. Catholics in Greenwich Village could attend St. Ann’s Church, established as a territorial parish and by the 1870s well known for its members’ wealth. But an Italian Catholic might more comfortably attend St. Anthony of Padua and a German St. Alphonsus, both inside the territorial bound­aries of St. Ann’s. The complications did not end ­there, however. In the 1870s and 1880s, St. Alphonsus began to

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function more like a territorial parish, as it regularly attracted neighborhood Irish and English-­speaking worshipers as well as Germans. In contrast, Holy Rosary, the Church of the Transfiguration in Lower Manhattan, and St. Lucy in Italian Harlem all changed from territorial to Italian parishes, again speaking to the orga­nizational flexibility within a global Church better known for resisting life’s fluidities and modernity together.43 Religious ­orders added yet another dimension to the New York Archdiocese, especially between 1870 and 1920. Such ­orders ­were not new, of course. Since the fifth c­ entury, men and ­women had taken vows of chastity and obedience and separated into o ­ rders dedicated to the examples of par­tic­ul­ar saints, with authorization from the Vatican. But by 1900 New York City exhibited a breadth and depth of Catholic religious ­orders found nowhere e­ lse except, possibly, Rome. The volume and variety of Catholic immigrants arriving in late nineteenth-­century New York obviously increased the numbers of ­these ­orders. But so too did the fears of the archdiocese, Roman officials, and the Eu­ro­pean ­orders themselves. Archdiocesan officials worried that national pluralism, urban density, anonymity, moral corruption, anti-­Catholicism, and lack of government support for the Church—or any church—­would undermine the faith in Amer­i­ca. They demanded Catholic action in New York and the United States broadly, and religious ­orders responded to that demand.44 The ­orders themselves had an intricate relationship with the rest of the Catholic hierarchy. Priests in religious o ­ rders supplemented diocesan or “secular” clergy (so called ­because they officiated in the secular world, rather than in monasteries or convents) and had been pre­sent in New York irregularly since the colonial period. The ­orders established congregations or, more often, assumed responsibility for existing congregations and parishes—­either way, with permission from the archbishop. Priests reported to their superiors within the o ­ rders, who in turn conferred regularly with archdiocesan authorities about congregational or parish affairs. The Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, one of the Church’s most power­ful ­orders and sometimes its most controversial, offers an object lesson in ­these complications across chains of command. Jesuits first established a congregation in the city in 1847, the Congregation of the Holy Name of Jesus. ­After thirty years and several moves, they built a large church



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accommodating 2,500 worshippers. As time went by, responsibility for congregations shifted between diocesan clergy and the order’s priests. Initially Jesuits managed St.  Joseph’s Church, which opened on the Upper East Side in 1874, but the archdiocese assumed responsibility for the congregation fourteen years ­later.45 Religious ­orders had a variety of specialties, which reflected the worldly needs of city dwellers. Redemptorists, founded by the Italian Alphonsus Maria de Liguori in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, ministered to German, Bohemian, and Czech Catholics, the latter at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on the Upper East Side. But the order was best known for its revival missions, ostensibly directed ­toward potential Catholic converts but principally seeking to draw nominally Catholic immigrants back to the Church. Assumptionists, or Augustinians of the Assumption, ministered to Spanish immigrants. Priests from the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament served French Canadians. The Salesians of Don Bosco worked with the poor. Scalabrini F ­ athers, whom we met in the introduction, ministered to Italian immigrants. The De La Salle B ­ rothers, founded in Ireland as ­Brothers of the Christian Schools, managed and taught in schools, as did some Jesuits. Archbishops sometimes found the o ­ rders and their priests more supportive than diocesan clergy. In the late 1890s, the theologically and po­ liti­cally conservative Archbishop Michael Corrigan enlisted Jesuit and Redemptorist help in opposing the “Americanist heresy”—­the term used by conservative American Catholic leaders to castigate the views of prelates who seemed too willing to accommodate the Church to American conditions, especially the US abnegation of formal support for Chris­ tian­ity, much less Catholicism.46 The growth of Catholic ­women’s religious ­orders in late nineteenth-­ and early twentieth-­century New York City dwarfed that of male religious ­orders. Documenting their importance is not easy, ­because the authority, functions, and stature of male priests and prelates in Catholic governance and liturgy often obscured w ­ omen’s presence, w ­ hether in religious ceremonies, Church publications, or s­ imple notices. But nuns clearly had an outsized role in the Catholicism of late nineteenth-­ century New York City. Most obviously, they outnumbered priests by substantial margins. By 1910 the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn had between 2,500 and 3,000 ­women serving as nuns

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compared to approximately 1,200 priests. The diversity of ­women’s ­orders—­many small, some large, and all marked by differences in dress—­ increased their visibility to worshipers and outsiders and their own sense of distinctiveness. Brooklyn, for example, ­housed about twenty ­orders of ­women, all with their own unique identity. Most o ­ rders ­were small and had narrow responsibilities. The S ­ isters of the Holy F ­ amily of Nazareth served Polish immigrants, and the Ladies of the Sacred Heart of Mary taught deaf students and managed Brooklyn’s Ozanam Home for Friendless ­Women. A few o ­ rders ­were large and assumed massive tasks. The ­Sisters of St. Dominic, with “478 Professed S ­ isters, 16 Novices, and 28 Postulants” in 1908, oversaw fifteen schools and two hospitals in Brooklyn alone. In 1900 over 1,100 nuns belonged to the ­Sisters of Charity, a dif­ fer­ent order than the S ­ isters of Christian Charity, who oversaw more than seventy schools and the New York Foundling Hospital.47 Nuns transformed the Catholic presence in the city. They w ­ ere central to the expansion of Catholic schools, hospitals, and institutions for orphans, the homeless, and the poor. The growth of the schools ­after their founding in the 1850 was dramatic. By 1900 the archdiocese reported 121 parish schools with about forty thousand students, slightly more girls than boys. Just ten years ­later t­here w ­ ere 180 schools with about sixty thousand students, still slightly more girls than boys.48 Without nuns New York City’s Catholic schools never could have developed, since ­women in religious o ­ rders supplied almost all the teachers. By 1910 nuns both administered and staffed most of the city’s Catholic social-­services organ­ izations, which included schools for the deaf, fifteen homes for immigrants, four homes for the el­derly, thirty-­six “industrial and reform schools” for the poor and wayward, and seven “asylums” for orphans and two for the blind. Through their many efforts, nuns experienced firsthand Catholic Manhattan’s ethnic mix, and some o ­ rders quietly welcomed the resulting diversity. The Missionary ­Sisters of the Sacred Heart, an Italian order, recruited a few ­daughters of Irish immigrants. When the order ­stopped receiving novitiates from Italy and began training ­women already in the United States, it became still more varied, inviting German and Polish postulants.49 Nuns also thrust Catholicism directly into modern medicine through their administration of hospitals. The S ­ isters of Charity opened St. Vincent’s, the city’s first Catholic hospital, in 1849. By 1910 New York was



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home to twenty-­three Catholic hospitals administered and staffed by nuns who operated on a day-­to-­day basis with ­little input from the archdiocese. Nuns also typically outnumbered archdiocesan officials and priests on hospitals’ corporate and advisory boards. Major policy and financial decisions, however, typically required archdiocesan approval. The arrangements ­were not unlike ­those in the city’s parishes, where priests and archdiocesan officials held sway even as s­ isters taught huge numbers of students and w ­ ere essential to fund­rais­ing, especially for care of the poor. New York’s nuns not only mastered modern techniques of medical administration, they also responded to changing standards of practice. ­After encountering criticism that the undeniably empathetic nuns had insufficient medical training, the ­Sisters of Charity opened a nursing school at St. Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn in 1889, followed by St. Vincent’s in 1891, and St. Catherine’s in 1894. Professional nursing training became the twentieth-­century norm for s­ isters assisting physicians, even if training as physicians still eluded ­sisters, as it would for all but a few American ­women well into the twentieth c­ entury.50 ­Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini exemplified the nuns’ commitment to the needy as well as their capacity to lead. She arrived in New York City from Italy in 1889 with six ­sisters of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an order she founded to promote education back home. In New York she intended to work with Italian immigrants. Initially undermined by faulty, even deceptive, “planning” by sponsors in both Italy and New York, Cabrini and her ­sisters ­were advised by Archbishop Corrigan to return home. But Cabrini stayed. She began teaching among immigrants and worked with Corrigan to establish an orphanage for immigrant ­children. She then negotiated with Scalabrini by mail to assume direction of a hospital for immigrants, a fa­cil­it­ y that had been hobbled by squabbling among Catholic officials. She reopened it as Columbus Hospital in 1891. Success came quickly: the hospital served 6,000 outpatients in 1896 and 13,500 in 1899. Over the next two de­ cades Cabrini helped found more than sixty institutions in the United States and Central Amer­i­ca, despite the other obstinate priests and bishops who tried to stand in her way. She died in 1917 and was canonized in 1946 as the patron saint of immigrants. She was the first American to become a Catholic saint.51

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Joe Schwartz’s photo­g raph Elderly Nun on a Train, c. 1940, captured the nonchalance with which many Manhattanites embraced religious pluralism. © Joe Schwartz Photo Archive, www​.­joeschwartzphoto​.­com

Nuns dramatically s­ haped Catholic experience and the public face of the Church in a city alive with religious and cultural change. Male priests and prelates administered all the impor­tant rituals, such as Mass, confession, marriage, and funeral rites, and they determined the development of the Church’s ecclesiastical system. But day a­ fter day, week a­ fter week, ­sisters explained Catholicism and Amer­i­ca, not to mention reading, writing, and arithmetic, to c­ hildren whose mostly immigrant parents sought a Catholic way in a turbulent new world. The ­sisters’ dress, usually heavy black gowns set against starched white collars and sleeves, quickly became commonplace in New York. So prevalent and easily spotted ­were nuns that, as early as 1890, the Times could report matter-­ of-­factly that “it would not be easy to decide who worked the hardest”



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to rout a fire at the Catholic orphanage at 51st Street and Fifth Ave­nue: “the officials, the nuns, [or] the c­ hildren.” They halted the blaze without a single injury. L ­ ittle won­der that in 1940 photographer Joe Schwartz had no difficulty capturing young men un­perturbed by an aging nun on the New York subway.52 For a time, all this institutional complexity—­multiplying parishes, secular priests and priests in ­orders, w ­ omen’s religious ­orders, schools, immigrant homes, orphanages, and hospitals—­mounted as Church leaders showed ­little inclination to clarify and rationalize. ­There was plenty of opportunity for discord. Priests disputed priests and sometimes the archbishop, and both disparaged nuns. O ­ rders competed with each other, and complaints arose about priorities in giving. When New York Archbishop Cardinal Patrick Hayes refused to rescue Fordham University’s financially troubled medical school in 1919—­contending that the Jesuits who operated Fordham had enrolled too many non-­Catholic medical students—­the school simply closed.53 Eventually the archdiocese was prompted to centralize, improve efficiency, and maintain modern professional standards, but its approach was very dif­fer­ent from that of New York’s Protestants. Protestants met the challenge of modernity by managing their worshippers and ministry and developing new forms of outreach to potential congregants. New York’s Catholics, by contrast, focused less on ecclesiastical issues and the parish. Nor did they rethink the priesthood or men’s and ­women’s religious ­orders. Institutional reform was directed elsewhere: at Catholic charities. Undoubtedly, the archdiocese had long been concerned about overlap and duplication among ­orders and agencies, but the inspiration for reform came rather suddenly, as the public became bitterly critical of orphanages, including Catholic orphanages. In par­tic­u­lar, the findings of the 1916 Strong Commission, which had been impaneled to investigate state charities, embarrassed the archdiocese. One newspaper headline on the commission report read, “Orphans and Pigs Fed from Same Bowl” and specifically criticized Catholic orphanages. Catholic leaders all over the United States ­were similarly concerned about the seeming confusion, if not chaos, within the plethora of in­de­pen­dently operated local Catholic charities. By 1918, following a recommendation from the Conference on Catholic Charities, seventeen dioceses from Baltimore to San

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Francisco had established centralized bureaus to coordinate Catholic social outreach.54 In 1920 Cardinal Hayes, just a year into his administration of the New York Archdiocese, undertook a survey of Catholic charities. The survey, based on techniques developed by early quantitative sociologists, found a range of prob­lems. Charities w ­ ere badly coordinated, funds distributed unevenly, and organ­izations insufficiently attentive to new areas of need. Hayes used the report’s findings to bring the city’s 212 Catholic charities ­under the authority of a centralized archdiocesan Office of Catholic Charities, which was given substantial control over agencies and o ­ rders accustomed to ­going their own way. This new agency subtly introduced modern professionalization in care and social work and regularly assessed the results. Suddenly institutions governed by empathy w ­ ere required to put efficiency much higher on their list of priorities.55 While many changes came to Catholic New York between the 1880s and the 1920s, some ­things stayed the same. The Mass remained the center of Catholic parish life, standing above all e­ lse. And, as in Eu­ro­ pean cities, most Catholics worshipped en masse in large parishes with large churches serving large numbers of worshippers. But lax attendance could be a challenge in Amer­ic­ a as much as in Eu­rope, occasionally encouraging innovation. To compensate, priests said Mass frequently. On Sundays large parishes especially ­were inclined to hold ser­vices e­ very hour from 6 to 11 a.m., with a vespers ser­vice in the eve­ning. Mass was offered again e­ very weekday morning and daily to c­ hildren in Catholic schools. Some priests went further. In the 1880s Reverend Edward McGlynn introduced a noon Mass at St. Stephen’s Church in Greenwich Village, which drew, he claimed, 2,500 worshippers. But Archbishop Corrigan criticized McGlynn for sponsoring a Mass the slothful might find con­ve­nient. McGlynn replied, “Churches are for the ­people, and not the p ­ eople for the churches.” This was especially so, he said, of worshipers laboring long, irregular hours. But within a year, McGlynn and his Sunday noon Mass ­were gone. The reverend was too much a po­liti­cal activist, suspended by Corrigan for his association with Progressive reformer Henry George and his “single tax” movement.56 An array of parish-­centered institutions pulled Catholics into church-­ related activities and, ultimately, worship. By the 1880s, ­these socie­ ties—­typically or­ga­nized and led by lay Catholics with a priest serving



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as spiritual adviser—­had become standard in city parishes in New York and elsewhere, and their importance only increased in the next de­cades. The St. Vincent de Paul Society (for distributing aid), the Rosary Society (which served w ­ omen), and Holy Name Society (which served men) could be found in most city churches. So could socie­ ties serving ­children—­the Sodality of the C ­ hildren of Mary and the Sodality of the Holy Angels. ­These socie­ties ­were explic­itly spiritual in nature, whereas ­others—­burial socie­ties, educational clubs, fraternal associations—­were “secular” and often linked to par­tic­ul­ar immigrant nationalities. But that designation belies their essential support of religious collectivity. The vari­ous socie­ties would meet in church basements and banquet halls and sometimes, when composed exclusively of men, saloons. An impor­tant invention of nineteenth-­century New York was Catholic fairs. ­These originated in the 1830s and grew rapidly from the 1870s to around 1900. The fairs offered a mix of worship, fund­-­rais­ing, and activities fostering ethnic cohesion. Lay ­women or­ga­nized most fairs, directing men and ­women who sold food and offered carnival-­like games. ­There w ­ ere flags, canvas murals, flowers, musicians, dances, even caged birds and demonstrations of new technology like the telephone. All of the pomp and excitement was accompanied by religious banners and portable displays honoring saints. Parishes could raise $5,000 and even $10,000 for their schools or church repairs and additions. None of it would have been pos­si­ble without the phalanx of Catholic organ­izations small and large that marshaled volunteers to arrange exhibits, staff booths, and encourage the attendance that made the fairs financially, culturally, and religiously successful.57 The forty-­day ­Grand Fair celebrating the near-­completion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in October 1878 vividly demonstrated the Church’s orga­nizational reach across New York. Each of the city’s forty-­five parishes maintained a booth at the fair, enabling the city’s many Catholic ethnicities to proclaim pride in Church—­represented in the cathedral’s monumentality—­and parish alike. The booths included religious and secular displays meticulously crafted by lay ­people, most of them ­women. ­Children played games of chance. ­There was also an electric-­railroad display and a living exhibit of Rebecca at the well.58 Individual parishes also developed fairs that helped them maintain cohesion and solvency in the midst of the urban ferment. For example,

Each of New York City’s forty-­five ethnically diverse Catholic parishes proudly assembled booths to celebrate the opening of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1878. Over the next half-­century, the Archdiocese continued to support “national parishes” that catered to immigrant communities and their descendants. Reproduced from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Nov. 9, 1878, page 161, by Library Ser­vices, Pennsylvania State University.



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Daniel Celentano’s Festival (1934) depicts the Festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Italian Harlem, an animated affair that sustained Italian Catholic religious identity and ethnic consciousness in Manhattan well into the twentieth c­ entury. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum,Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY.

with festas, or feast days, Italian immigrants ­shaped new ritual cele­ brations of deep religious and ethnic significance. Emerging between 1880 and 1920, the festas featured Masses, pro­cessions of lay worshipers carry­ing saints’ statues through Manhattan neighborhoods, booths overflowing with ethnic foods, and musical accompaniment. The original organizers w ­ ere mutual-­aid socie­ties tied to par­tic­ul­ar Italian towns and cities. One of the largest fairs, the festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, patron saint of Polla, in Salerno, Italy, began in 1882 as a ­simple cele­ bration in a tenement courtyard without a priest. Two years ­later the organizers acquired a statue of the Madonna directly from Polla and received sanction from the Pallotine Order, whose priests worked among

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the Italian immigrants. Archbishop Corrigan at least tolerated the introduction of the statue, and he presided that year at the consecration of the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street. By 1903 the festa had truly evolved. That year Pope Leo XIII approved the coronation of the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel—­just the third such coronation in the New World. Archbishop Cardinal John Farley conducted the ceremony before 50,000 witnesses at Jefferson Park in July 1904. Immigrant donations funded a crown of gold with “a large emerald, surrounded by diamonds, the gift of the Pope.” Worshipers piled personal gifts “so high that it was necessary to remove them in order to keep them from hiding the patron saint completely.” That a Catholic festival in Manhattan could grow so extravagantly, and that the initiative of its lay organizers could win over Leo XIII himself, spoke to dynamic fusions of worshipers, parishes, archdiocese, and the Papacy. The urban setting sometimes baffled Catholics, but they celebrated enormous success ­there.59

The term “ecclesiastical” brings to mind structured, authoritative institutions that define and enforce religious doctrine, ritual, and behavioral expectations. It is seldom employed in descriptions of nineteenth-­or twentieth-­century American Judaism, and with good reason. Whereas Catholicism was rigidly hierarchical, and whereas Protestant denominations undertook widely varied top-­down practices, the character of American Judaism was s­ haped largely by bottom-up pro­cesses from colonial times well into the twentieth c­ entury. Jewish laity or­ga­nized congregations and managed their own ser­vices. First they found cantors, then, ­after 1840, they began to hire rabbis for their expanding congregations. For de­cades, they accomplished t­ hese tasks for de­cades without any direction from any central authority. Even the national Jewish religious associations that emerged in the late nineteenth ­century ­were relatively demo­cratic. They ­were not the products of rabbinical authority, but rather grew out of agreements among congregations and rabbis—­agreements that w ­ ere not always easy to reach or sustain. Associations offered guidance and defended Jews and Judaism in a nation that often reviled both. But ­these Jewish organ­izations never



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had the disciplinary power of most Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church. The results of all this decentralization ­were vividly evident inside late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Manhattan Judaism. Modernity and immigration—­the latter an especially potent engine of the former—­ produced complex Jewish religious and ethnic multiplicities without dissolving into chaos. Modernity challenged Jews and Judaism as it challenged the practices of Catholics and Protestants, leading to plenty of debate and sometimes strident disagreement. Yet even a diverse ­people nineteen centuries in diaspora would find spiritual footing in urban institutions reasonably suited to both tradition and modern survival. Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, where Governor Peter Stuyvesant forthwith sought to expel them as “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” But West India Com­pany authorities rejected Stuyvesant’s demand, and the Jews w ­ ere allowed to stay. By the 1680s, they ­were sufficiently numerous to hold at least some ser­vices, and by 1703 they ­were holding ser­vices regularly in a rented ­house. In 1730, with strong support from New York’s prominent Jewish merchant families, the community erected a small synagogue. The congregation, Shearith Israel, followed Sephardic ritual practices distinctive to Jews from Spain and Portugal. Ashkenazi Jews from Northern and Western Eu­rope prob­ably outnumbered Sephardic Jews by the mid-­eighteenth ­century, but Shearith Israel remained New York’s only Jewish congregation ­until 1825.60 The first Ashkenazi congregation was B’nai Jeshurun, and more followed rapidly: five more by 1840, another nine by 1850, a dozen more by 1860. Their proliferation was driven in part by familiar ­factors: rising population, and, within that population, ethnic and linguistic diversity, which tended to fracture the larger religious community. But ­there ­were also two f­actors distinctive to Judaism and the diaspora. First was the ability of any ten Jewish men to form a minyan—­the quorum necessary to or­ga­nize and conduct worship, with or without a rabbi or cantor (hazan). This made it s­imple for small groups to sustain congregations. Second was the lack of Jewish denominational bodies. This meant that, unlike Protestant and Catholic congregations, Jewish congregations did not have to seek anyone’s seal of approval. At the outbreak of the Civil

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War, over twenty-­five Jewish congregations had been founded in New York. Shrearith Israel, B’nai Jeshurun, and Shaaray Tefila, another early presence, ­were still ­going strong. Prominent laymen or­ga­nized and led all the New York City congregations. Well-­supported Manhattan congregations might appoint a cantor to lead ser­vices and, as with Gershom Mendes Seixas at Shearith Israel and Samuel Isaacs at Shaaray Tefila, give sermons. And B’nai Jeshurun was fortunate to engage Morris Raphall, one of the city’s first ordained rabbis, throughout the 1850s and 1860s. But even in ­these cases, administration largely rested with the male laity. Ordained rabbis did not regularly serve city congregations ­until the 1870s, and, still, no Jewish denominational organ­izations existed to guide Jewish affairs in Amer­i­ca.61 Even before the immigration of the late nineteenth ­century dramatically expanded Jewish diversity, Jews all over the United States held a wide array of views about adapting their practice for modern times. German Jews in par­tic­ul­ar ­adopted a reformist mindset that advocated mixed seating for men and w ­ omen, introducing organs and choirs, and regularizing and sometimes simplifying ritual. Among the most influential reformist thinkers was Cincinnati rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who published a modernized prayer book (siddur), Minhag Amerika, in 1857. Efforts at orga­nizational cohesion brought more tension. Even as many Jews wished for a more unified voice to defend their place in Amer­ic­ a, that voice was stifled by their commitment to the in­de­pen­dence of their congregations. Thus, two conferences intended to promote a more united American Judaism—an 1855 gathering of mostly liberal Jews or­ga­nized by Wise and an 1859 meeting of more traditional Jews initiated by Congregation Shaaray Tefilla—­produced as much disagreement as harmony. At the gatherings even attendees who supported some kind of u ­ nion si­ mul­ta­neously expressed concern for congregational autonomy.62 Not surprisingly, the American Jewish denominational organ­izations that emerged over the next few de­cades reflected considerable variation in viewpoint and mission. By 1915 American Jews had developed three separate organ­izations for congregations and three for clergy. ­These organ­izations established seminaries to train rabbis and offered guidance on religious ser­vices, practices, and values. But well into the twentieth ­century, they avoided claims to broad disciplinary authority—­prob­ably a wise move ­because they in fact had ­little sway in this re­spect. Congre-



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gations and rabbis could ignore or reject any advice or ruling with ­little consequence. Such in­de­pen­dence was unthinkable among Catholics and uncommon among Protestants. New Yorkers ­were relatively disconnected from the first successful Jewish denominational bodies. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, or­ga­nized in Cincinnati in 1873, and the supporting Central Conference of American Rabbis, ­were reformist. The Union established Hebrew Union College to train reform rabbis, published revised editions of Wise’s Minhag Amerika, emphasized the intellectual importance of modern science, and advocated mixed seating. The central conference named retired Manhattan ­Temple Emanu-­El rabbi Samuel Adler as its honorary president, but no New York City congregants or rabbis attended the founding sessions of the ­union and the central conference, and for many years their principal officers came from places such as ­Little Rock, Cincinnati, and Chicago.63 The massive post-1880 emigration of Rus­sian and Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews not only transformed Judaism in New York but also reshaped Jewish American denominationalism. Unlike the migration of Eu­ro­pean Jews between 1820 and 1880, especially t­ hose from Germany, a huge proportion of the post-1880 Jewish immigrants to Amer­i­ca stayed in the city. New York’s Jewish population swelled from about eighty thousand in 1880 to six hundred thousand in 1900, then to almost 1.8 million by 1930. To Protestants and Catholics, and even to some older third-­and fourth-­generation New York Jews, the post-1880 migration seemed like a uniform mass—­poor and of low character. In fact, the migration brought forth exceptional heterogeneity. New Jewish arrivals had wide-­ ranging views about religion, politics, gender, and other aspects of social life, which led in turn to a deluge of orga­nizational inventiveness.64 In the freedom Amer­i­ca seemed to offer, some immigrants sought freedom from religion altogether, and not least from the Judaism in which they had been raised. Famously, or infamously, ­these Jewish atheists energized socialism, communism, and anarchism in NewYork and the nation—­ often in fact, sometimes in anti-­immigrant imagination. ­Others, ­women and men, became mainstays in Amer­i­ca’s emerging ­labor movement in a city where massive numbers of Jewish immigrants worked in factories and sweatshops, as well as tiny apartments where they sewed buttons on coats to be purchased by middling sorts of Americans across the country. Often

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tied into ­labor organ­izing w ­ ere associations of immigrants who shared a hometown or region. ­These Landsmanschaftn served multiple purposes si­mul­ta­neously, participating in po­liti­cal activism as well as providing insurance, burials, fraternal association, health care, medicines, charitable relief, and loans. Sometimes they served as worship venues.65 Indeed, immigrants drastically multiplied the number of places where Jews might worship, from imposing synagogue sanctuaries to rented or borrowed rooms. Tracking their numbers was not easy in the 1880s and 1890s. It is especially difficult to count the tiny chevras (literally “friends”), groups that emerged and dis­appeared so rapidly that they scarcely rippled the skein of public life. But surveys in the 1910s, and l­ater historical investigations, suggest that 600 to 800 chevras prob­ably formed and disbanded in the city between 1880 and 1900 alone. Virtually all would have been or­ga­nized by lay worshipers without a cantor, much less a rabbi. Some of t­hese immigrant associations survived the churning and claimed a more permanent place among Manhattan’s spiritual communities. An influx of immigrants allowed Beth Hamedrash Hagodol, formed in 1852, to purchase a large Baptist Church on Norfolk Street, which, suitably renovated, became their synagogue. An enlarging membership at Beth Haknesseth Anshe Bialystok, which or­ga­nized in 1878 with worshipers from Bialystok, Poland, purchased a new building in 1905. In 1892 two small chevras with worshipers from neighboring Polish towns merged to form Congregation Chasam Sopher and acquired the sanctuary of the affluent Congregation Rodeph Sholom, which moved to East 63rd Street.66 Manhattan’s hundreds of late nineteenth-­century Jewish congregations, old and new, not only reflected but also augmented the variety of ritual, language, and tradition in the diaspora. B’nai Yisrael, on 149th Street in Washington Heights, held ser­vices “in strict Orthodox manner” but also introduced “sermons in En­glish and congregational singing.” Rabbi Jacob Kohn reported in 1911 that Ansche Chesed Congregation, founded in 1829, “used the traditional prayer book” but also “introduced ­family pews, an organ and choir and conducted certain portions of the ser­vice in En­glish.” Congregations formally supported adherence to the dietary laws (kashruth) but seldom disciplined worshipers who ignored them, neither the congregations nor individual worshipers seemingly concerned about compromising tradition or faith.67



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­ fter 1880, New Yorkers spearheaded four major efforts to bring coA herence to this kaleidoscopic landscape. Through both their failures and their successes, ­these proj­ects determined the ­future of US denominational structures. The first was the appointment of a chief rabbi for New York City Jews. In the 1880s a small group of traditionally minded Jews formed the Association of American Orthodox Hebrew Congregations to appoint the chief rabbi. Like the name of their organ­ization, their aspirations ­were grandiose: they wanted a rabbi who would not just “inspire re­spect” and “impart confidence” but “silence all disaffection and end all cavil and dispute” within the Jewish community of New York. Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Vilna, Poland, took up the position in 1888 a­ fter ­others declined. But while Joseph was much admired, he had l­ittle institutional backing, was unable to establish authority, and was easily ignored. Butchers disregarded his authority to set kashruth standards, and when they did seek his approval refused to pay the fee he demanded in exchange. Rivals challenged his status as chief rabbi. When Joseph died in 1902, fifty thousand Jews joined the funeral pro­cession to honor his “estimable qualities and the blameless life he led,” as the Jewish Gazette put it. (The pro­cession became a notable episode in the history of antisemitism in New York, as factory workers threw stones, and the police, brought in to quell the brewing riot and protect the mourners, instead assaulted them.) Despite the high personal regard in which Joseph was held, the position of chief rabbi effectively died with him. ­Those who appointed him saw ­little use in maintaining the office and moved to solidify traditional American Judaism by other means, such as supporting seminary education and denominational institutions.68 A second New York–­based denominational effort was the establishment of a rabbinical training institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, in 1886. Or­ga­nized by many of the same traditionalists who brought Rabbi Joseph to Amer­i­ca, the seminary was intended to compete with Cincinnati’s reformist Hebrew Union College. Although the seminary would go on to become a major presence in Jewish education, its first years ­were rocky. It was poorly funded, and the deaths of impor­tant supporters weakened its leadership. It was too moderate for some, too traditional for ­others, and not unrelatedly had a hard time attracting and keeping students. The seminary produced just seventeen gradu­ates in its first fifteen years. By 1902, when new leadership arrived, the seminary

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was in serious trou­ble. What saved it was a dramatic move away from orthodoxy ­under the direction of Solomon Schechter, a distinguished British rabbi and scholar recruited from Cambridge University. The seminary continued to face serious challenges, but, with Shechter at the helm, it muddled through and, as discussed below, helped to create the organ­izing bodies of what would become Conservative Judaism.69 The third proj­ect came in three parts. New York’s most traditional Jews sought to establish their own seminary, an association of congregations, and an association of rabbis. The Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary began offering advanced Talmud studies in 1896, though it was not u ­ ntil 1906 that it turned out its first three ordained rabbis. The Orthodox Jewish Congregational Union of Amer­i­ca emerged from an 1898 New York conference, where delegates from the city’s congregations ­were joined by ­others from Louisville, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Syracuse, and elsewhere. Four years ­later, on the same day that Rabbi Joseph’s funeral pro­ cession wound through the Lower East Side, nearly fifty European-­trained rabbis formed the Agudath ha-­Rabbanim, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. The body set stricter standards than some congregations of the Orthodox Jewish Congregations of Amer­i­ca might have favored. In the next de­cade Agudath ha-­Rabbanim bolstered the small Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary by acquiring a building for it and hiring a full-­time director, Bernard Revel, who began his Talmudic studies with prestigious teachers in Rus­sia. Revel transformed the seminary and Orthodox Judaism in Amer­i­ca. He strengthened the seminary’s faculty and founded Yeshiva College for men in 1928. Yeshiva became a university in 1945 and added the Stern College for ­Women in 1954. Then came business, law, and medical schools, solidifying Yeshiva’s place as Orthodox Judaism’s premier institution of higher learning.Yeshiva also incorporated the seminary, which ­today is Orthodox Judaism’s principal rabbinical school.70 The fourth, and perhaps most transformative, effort ­toward American Jewish denominationalism flowed directedly from Schechter’s tenure at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Although Schechter resuscitated the seminary, he failed in what may have been his greater goal: to bridge differences between liberal and traditionalist Jews. Erudite, charismatic, and articulate, Schechter was as well suited to that endeavor as anyone.



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When he arrived in New York in April 1902, he brought an international reputation secured by his position at Cambridge, his books on early Judaism, and his rescue of extraordinary medieval Jewish manuscripts ritually stored for centuries in the genizah (repository) at Cairo’s principal synagogue. In addition to renewing the seminary’s rabbinical training, Schechter promoted a learned outreach to lay men and ­women and labored to produce a Jewish Encyclopedia and a new En­glish bible translation that could be accepted by all Jews. Much of this work promoted what Schechter called a “Catholic Israel”—­a united Jewish p ­ eople. But Reform Jews exhibited no inclination to curtail their renovations, while traditionalist Jews rejected Schechter’s worldliness, embrace of modern biblical scholarship, and emphasis on English-­language preaching. By the early 1900s, the Reform and Orthodox parties—­now buttressed by their respective congregational and rabbinical associations—­were strong enough to hold their own.71 Unable to bring together the two camps, Schechter set out to create his own. In 1913 he founded the United Synagogue of Amer­ic­ a, a third congregational organ­ization that might bring about a Catholic Israel in the United States. Insisting that “culture combined with religion was the rule with the Jew,” Schechter sought a faith that embodied Orthodoxy’s “enthusiasm and intensiveness” and Reform’s “organ­ ization and method.” The United Synagogue would emphasize training in the Talmud and Hebrew lit­er­a­ture but also scientific research and “decorous ser­vice.” Understanding that “nothing in this country can exist without proper organ­ization”—­a phrase Catholics and Protestants could have written as well—­the leaders of the United Synagogue instituted something more than a superficial yearly gathering of congregational delegates. The United Synagogue would support the Jewish Theological Seminary and its already-­renowned teacher training institute and maintain “constant communication” with congregations about issues from the “choice of rabbis” to the “religious education of ­women.” The United Synagogue also established a Synagogue Extension division that aimed to sustain the “Jewish home” by advising communities in kashruth and preparing “textbooks ­under the supervision of experts” for the religious education of ­children and adults.72 The United Synagogue won strong support in New York. Schechter’s stature, and the strong reputation of the renewed seminary and its

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gradu­ates, earned the re­spect of New York City’s second-­generation Jews, who ­were looking for just such an institution. They ­were leaving ­behind the chevras of their youth and instead rallying b ­ ehind large congregations with substantial facilities and emphasis on education and culture. That was an impor­tant ele­ment of Schechter’s vision. Then, while lecturing at the seminary in November 1915, Schechter died from an apparent heart attack. The unexpected death—he was a vigorous sixty-­seven year old, at the height of his c­ areer—­brought an end to hopes for a Catholic Israel. But if Schechter was unable to unify Amer­ i­ca’s Reform and Orthodox Jews ­under a single denominational umbrella, the institutions he developed would endure as the basis of a third way. The United Synagogue was thriving, the seminary’s well-­placed rabbinical gradu­ates w ­ ere propagating its message, and many congregations ­were seeking a path between Reform Judaism and Orthodoxy. The result was Conservative Judaism, the label referring to its position relative to the liberal Reform movement, not to its politics. The United Synagogue became the official denominational body organ­izing Conservative Judaism, with the seminary’s alumni association forming the basis of its Rabbinical Assembly. Thus the force and dynamics of New York City’s post-1880 Jewish immigration had created the three principal American Jewish o ­ rders now so familiar—­yet also so distinctive when compared to the structures of the Christian majority. All three Jewish denominations exhibited patterns in authority and membership markedly dif­fer­ent from ­those of the Catholic Church and most Protestant groups: a Jewish congregation chose which denomination to join rather than the denomination determining the standing of the congregation.73 ­Today, the United Synagogue and Rabbinical Assembly remain the denominational focal points of Conservative Judaism in Amer­ic­ a. But they had competition in their early days. One of the most prominent was the Kehillah experiment. Loosely modeled on Jewish organ­ization in Eu­ rope’s medieval ghettos, the Kehillah was intended to foster cultural and religious cohesion among New York City Jews. Founded in 1908, the Kehillah initially drew support from a range of prominent city Jews as well as many of the larger local congregations—­some Orthodox, some Reform, and some that would embrace the Conservative movement as it emerged in the 1910s. The Kehillah aimed to confront an extensive



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list of challenges that its supporters regarded as central to Jewish culture and life. ­These included rabbinical standards; “mushroom synagogues,” which opened for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and then dis­appeared; education; employment; ­labor; and antisemitic ste­reo­types, which the Kehilla sought to combat through the “suppression of objectionable advertisements, moving picture films, and theatrical per­for­mances.”74 The Kehillah was governed by an unwieldy convention of two hundred and more delegates from New York City synagogues, schools, federations, and vari­ous charitable, fraternal, and mutual-­benefit socie­ties. But a twenty-­five-­member executive board elected by the convention managed most business. The board secured the leadership of Judah Magnes, a liberal rabbi possessed of a savvy, charm, and realism that Rabbi Joseph lacked. Magnes sought to re­spect and sustain New York’s multiple va­ri­e­ties of Judaism. To t­ hese ends, the Kehillah or­ga­nized professionally staffed bureaus of education, industry, municipal research, philanthropic research, social hygiene, and social morals. ­There was also a School for Jewish Communal Work and a Board of Orthodox Rabbis to oversee kashruth and arbitrate disputes. But voluntary contributions never provided adequate bud­gets, and the complexity of the many-­branched Kehillah sapped its momentum. Some bureaus succeeded while ­others flailed, and some warred with each other. “Rabbinical Meeting Declares War on the Kehillah’s Bureau of Education,” the Yiddishes Tageblat exclaimed when the Kehillah’s Bureau of Orthodox Rabbis complained that its Bureau of Education was rejecting Orthodox oversight, was imposing modernized methods in Talmud Torah schools, and was tolerating and perhaps even encouraging religious indifference among teachers.75 Ultimately, internecine conflict and the lack of formal authority overwhelmed the Kehillah. New York City Jews moved on, pursuing individual and community interests in multitudes of settings and institutions they or­ga­nized and ­shaped with ­others. By 1922 the Kehillah had effectively collapsed. Magnes left for Palestine, where he eventually became the first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.76 While institutions worked to centralize New York City’s Jews, a contrasting pattern of diffusion also played out. A remarkable survey of city congregations completed by the Kehillah in 1918 demonstrated that well over 250 new chevras and other small congregations formed between

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1900 and 1920 and many a­ fter 1910. Their members included, among ­others, the last waves of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish immigrants. ­These ­later groups brought new traditions and ways of life. Like their pre­de­ces­sors from Germany, Poland, Galicia, Rus­sia, and Romania, they sought to preserve their heritage and culture through ethnic, national, and linguistic cohesion, leading to a profusion of small, tight-­knit congregations. Walter Laidlaw, the Protestant survey taker, also documented the breadth of Jewish migration to New York City and, in 1905, found Jewish immigrants from at least seventeen nations. The 1910s brought yet more diversity, such as Greek Jews who arrived in numbers sufficient to form two congregations in Manhattan. One of them, Kehila Kedosha Janina, first met in temporary quarters in 1916, then constructed a small sanctuary in 1927. Worshipers followed the Greek Romaniote liturgy, rather than Manhattan’s dominant Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions.77 The chevras formed ­after 1900 took vari­ous evolutionary paths, some opened by the changes in Jewish life brought about by their pre­de­ces­ sors. Even very small chevras, with perhaps twenty or thirty members, commonly had rabbis, who w ­ ere newly plentiful thanks to the expansion of Jewish education. One chevra had its own school, with fifty-­five students. Most post-1900 chevras still met in rented or borrowed quarters, and the larger new congregations appear to have rented halls for ser­vices. A few, like Kehila Kedosha, built their own synagogues and survived for some de­cades. Other post-1900 congregations merged with older synagogues in ways that benefitted both. Congregation Pincus Elijah, or­ga­ nized in 1905, purchased properties on West 95th Street in 1922 and 1923 for its growing congregation and then merged into the older and larger Hungarian Orthodox congregation Ohab Zedek. Together they created what American Israelite considered “the largest Jewish Orthodox congregation in Amer­i­ca.” This enabled construction in 1926 of Ohab Zedek’s new synagogue on Pincus Elijah’s 95th Street properties, a preview of the real estate dynamics that would transform congregations in ensuing years. Most tiny chevras collapsed by the 1930s, their ends coming not in mergers but in the silence of ­dying members.78 Larger formal synagogues supported by the assimilating c­ hildren of New York’s post-1880 immigrants supplanted the disappearing chevras. The congregations ­were led by American-­trained rabbis, who fostered extensive family-­oriented programs. ­These rabbis had studied at Hebrew



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Union College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Seminary. They often possessed US undergraduate degrees and sometimes gradu­ate degrees. Unevenly but inexorably, they found their place in Manhattan’s congregations: Beth Israel Bikur Cholim in 1903, B’nai Jeshurun in 1908, ­Temple Emanu-­El in 1912, Shaaray Tefila in 1915, Ohab Zedek in 1932. ­After 1935 almost all Manhattan rabbis serving all three American Jewish denominations w ­ ere trained and or79 dained in the United States. Manhattan’s post-1910 congregations increasingly regarded the synagogue as the center of Jewish life and culture. In a modernizing twentieth ­century, the synagogue had to provide for more than just prayer and worship. Building on eclectic sources—­nineteenth-­century synagogue day schools, sisterhoods, and men’s organ­izations; immigrant chevras that offered loans and sick benefits; Talmud Torahs and Jewish ­Free Schools; YMHAs and YWHAs; the Christian social gospel movement; and the settlement ­house movement—­post-1910 Manhattan synagogues became large-­scale meeting and gathering places. They had classrooms, social halls, libraries, gymnasiums, and even swimming pools. Appropriately, many ­adopted the name “synagogue center.”80 Manhattan Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, one of several figures central to the development of synagogue centers, articulated their purpose more vividly and, perhaps, more idealistically than anyone e­ lse. He spoke of a “spiritual laboratory” whose “program of Jewish life w ­ ill be big enough and heroic enough, to thrill our souls, to captivate our imagination and to hold our allegiance.” Kaplan’s eight-­story Jewish Center and Herbert Goldstein’s Institutional Synagogue, two Orthodox centers that opened on the Upper West Side in 1917–1918, offered the amplest facilities. The model became pervasive, extending as well to Reform and Conservative communities. The Congregation of the Covenant’s 1920 synagogue in Washington Heights served a Reform congregation with “rooms for recreational purposes, social ser­vice activities, occupations extensions and religious and Hebrew schools.” ­Temple Israel’s 1922 synagogue on 91st Street had an “auditorium seating 400, to be used for assemblies, social affairs, and athletic purposes, . . . ​a splendid Sisterhood Parlor, . . . ​ and a large number of club, domestic science, lecture and class rooms.” Detractors decried the “shul with a pool,” with its seeming emphasis on the social rather than the spiritual. But the expansive programming at

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the heart of the synagogue center transformed Jewish congregational life for the next half-­century, in Manhattan and the nation at large.81 As congregations and synagogues grew, so did Jewish ­women’s organ­ izations. In 1900 the rabbinate remained closed to ­women, and only men served as synagogue officers and trustees. But Manhattan’s Jewish ­women ­were not short on influence. They resolutely expanded their institutional presence within synagogues and denominations. In 1889 the “sisterhood” shifted from a description of Jewish w ­ omen collectively to an orga­nizational idea with clear bound­aries. The ­women of Manhattan’s ­Temple Emanu-­El ­were the first to grasp the mantle, when they filed ­legal incorporation papers for a Sisterhood for Personal Ser­vice. By 1891 seven other Manhattan synagogues hosted sisterhoods, and by 1894 ­Temple Beth-­El’s reported five hundred members. The idea spread across the country. By that same year sisterhoods had formed at synagogues in Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Rochester, New York. In 1896 the New York socie­ties formed the Federation of Sisterhoods to work with the United Hebrew Charities in distributing aid to the needy. In 1900 the Federation of Sisterhoods opened “home circles” for “young working girls,” where members taught lit­er­a­ture and oversaw “dancing, singing, and games” to “relieve the monotony of work.”82 New national organ­izations for Jewish w ­ omen paralleled the rise of the synagogue sisterhoods, then surpassed them in both purpose and capacity. A National Council of Jewish ­Women was founded in Chicago in 1893, but New York became the center of its activities as the council’s emphasis on immigrant issues grew. Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut brought forceful leadership to the council’s New York division, and the organ­ ization’s cofounder and corresponding secretary, Sadie American, made her way to Manhattan in 1900.83 ­Women in Reform congregations from Manhattan to the Midwest formed a National Federation of ­Temple Sisterhoods in 1913. Yet modernization’s orga­nizational impulses had contradictory implications for ­women. Just as sisterhoods and other w ­ omen’s organ­izations ­were growing, ­women w ­ ere finding themselves less welcome in an increasingly professionalized world of charitable aid. A 1917 survey of sisterhood relief efforts conducted by the Kehillah’s Bureau of Municipal Research found inconsistent standards and uneven performance— at least in the bureau’s judgment. The sisterhoods w ­ ere soon removed



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from United Hebrew Charities’ f­amily relief work. As Jewish charities consolidated, they took on male-­dominated management tasked with winning the support of exceptionally wealthy male donors. ­Women’s traditional centrality in American Jewish benevolent enterprises suffered as a result.84 Still, while w ­ omen w ­ ere to a degree muscled out of charity work, they continued to or­ga­nize around issues of importance in the community. One of the most impor­tant woman-­led institutions in the history of American Judaism met for the first time at ­Temple Emanu-­El in 1912. The group was assembled by Henrietta Szold, a Baltimorean and one of the first ­women to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. They called themselves the ­Daughters of Zion and initially focused on supporting nurses in Palestine, a ­matter of special concern to Szold, who had made a moving visit to the territory. As the organ­ization turned its focus to po­ liti­cal Zionism and Jewish settlement in Palestine, its appeal increased. In 1914 representatives from eight chapters, in cities from Baltimore to St. Paul, ­adopted the name by which the organ­ization is still known: Hadassah. Just three years ­later, ­there w ­ ere forty-­one chapters, and by 1924, seventeen thousand Jewish ­women across the United States ­were counted as members, making Hadassah the most power­ful ­women’s Zionist organ­ization in the world.85 Sisterhoods also continued to work t­oward institutional change at home. In 1915 ­women ­were central to organ­izing the New Synagogue in Manhattan, but many ­women remained frustrated by their place in the structure of synagogues everywhere. The following year, when the American Hebrew invited essays on the question, “What can ­women do for the synagogue?” Kohut spoke for many—­albeit ­under her husband’s name, Mrs. Alexander Kohut, per the editors’ policy. She put the ­matter bluntly: ­women could “guide the destinies of the synagogue as successfully as men!” and should serve as trustees and congregation presidents. A meeting of New York Reform sisterhoods renewed the call for ­women trustees in 1919, perhaps prodding ­Temple Israel to name a ­woman trustee in 1921.86 The depth of the institutional turn among Manhattan and New York City Jews by 1910, w ­ omen and men alike, emerged in one of the Kehillah’s g­ reat successes: its massive Jewish Communal Register, published in 1918. The Kehillah’s Bureau of Jewish Education hired students fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew as canvassers, advertised the survey in immigrant

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newspapers, produced “elaborate questionnaires,” and sent out mailings to known socie­ties. The result proved as unmanageable as Laidlaw’s Manhattan Protestant surveys. The Register was 1,597 pages and five pounds, too daunting to attract the sort of popu­lar readership that the Kehillah’s leaders hoped would elevate the organ­ization to a position overseeing New York City Jewish life. But for t­ hose who could lift it, the Register exhaustively described what, by then, was the world’s largest Jewish community.87 Not only that, but the Register made clear the enormous intricacy of Jewish organ­izing u ­ nder urban conditions. ­Here w ­ ere detailed descriptions of 858 city synagogues, 1,031 additional “religious and cultural agencies,” 1,010 mutual-­aid socie­ties, 965 Jewish lodges, 277 “miscellaneous” agencies, and 164 “philanthropy and correctional agencies.” The Register also documented the still-­vital presence of small immigrant chevras. Estimating the city’s Jewish population at about 1.5 million, including ­children, the Register counted twenty-­four Jewish organ­izations “per 10,000 population in the entire city.” Of the two thousand organ­ ization presidents the editors could identify, 94 ­percent w ­ ere men and only 7.8 ­percent had been born in the United States. In all, the Register counted 3,637 Jewish organ­izations in New York City but conceded that the true number was bigger. Some groups refused to respond, “afraid that giving the information would entail an expenditure on their part,” and some wondered “why anyone should be interested to find out anything about them.”88 The Register was laid out in modern fashion with plenty of numbers, graphs, and other visual displays. A bar graph depicted the density of organ­izations in eigh­teen city neighborhoods, with the bars shaded according to orga­nizational type. A US silver dollar became a pie graph showing how the city’s Jewish organ­izations spent money. In 1918 their collective expenditures totaled $17.56 million (nearly $300 million in 2020 dollars), including $4 million for religious affairs and institutions, $1.36 million for religious education, and $4 million for “philanthropic and correctional institutions.89

Between 1880 and 1920, New York City’s Jews, Catholics, and Protestants embraced modern organ­ization, institutional structure, and modes



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of outreach. No one forced them to. They did what they did ­because ­these activities responded effectively to the real and perceived crises of urban faith. Catholics moved beyond their infamous papal hierarchicalism by expanding the numbers of women-­religious and lay-­managed sodalities and socie­ties, transforming New York City parish life. Two major instruments of modernity, hospitals and schools, w ­ ere especially impor­tant in t­hese efforts. New York’s Jews turned to organ­izations small and large in almost incalculable numbers to create New World denominations, foster direct philanthropy, and elevate w ­ omen’s issues. Some of t­ hese proliferating institutions, regardless of denomination, employed and evangelized on behalf of modern methods of study and administration. Protestants—­ whether loosely structured like Baptists or hierarchically inclined like Methodists and Episcopalians—­expanded the range of denominations and voluntary organ­izations to support urban proselytizing, outreach to laborers, and engagement with the poor. They championed efficiency and advertising, hallmarks of modernity. The likes of Max Weber and William James misjudged the resilience of modern religion and mistook what its emerging textures and energies could mean. Where James saw institutions, including congregations, as living “second hand upon tradition,” worshipers across three faiths interpreted the religious experience as powerfully collective, rooted in joining with ­others to share ritual, beliefs, and practice. Their actions, individual and institutional, created community, revived and even created religious identity, and refined what worshipers thought was impor­ tant in religion. Where Weber saw rigidity and, usually, secularity in bureaucracies, corporations, and modern institutions, religious groups saw tools for confronting the density, anonymity, and mobility that so many feared would be the death of faith. Far from exclusive agents of secularization, modernizing institutions continued religion’s long historical pro­cess of adaptation to changing social conditions, w ­ hether ­those of the Jewish diaspora or the shifting po­ liti­cal dynamics of medieval and early modern Eu­rope. Every­one who left that continent for the New World found their lives transformed; superficial Old World familiarities could only mask life’s surprises. One of ­these was the urban landscape, which ­people of all faiths confronted with equal gusto and staggering results.90

THREE

12 Sacralizing the Urban Landscape

“I know a synagogue that was once a saloon.” In 1929 Sarah Schack described how prohibition “drove one O’Leary out of his Old Landmark,” then “ushered a Jewish congregation in.” The new congregants carried O’Leary’s bar to the street, “daily specials” still on its mirrors. They found benches for worship and sal­vaged a brass rail to hang the curtain separating the sexes. A Torah scroll appeared, as did its “red velvet cover embroidered with two gold lions,” plus a sign announcing three ser­vices each day.When the congregation moved to a fancier building several years ­later, worshipers still called it “O’Leary’s Schul.”1 O’Leary’s was not unique. Schack, who is best known for her 1924 book Yiddish Folksongs, described “bakeries, fruit stands, haberdasheries, and radio emporiums” that had become synagogues. Empty property could stir the religious imagination. “Vacant stores have a way of putting ideas into the heads of distracted, amiable old Jews with economic prob­lems,” Schack wrote. Who among them still could not teach c­ hildren to pray, translate Hebrew, or gloss the Torah, if only they had a place to set up shop? Up went Yiddish and En­glish signs in previously empty storefronts: “Confirmation Speeches Are Taught ­Here.” When t­ hese efforts failed, ­there would be fresh signs reading, “To Let,” and the community would await the next grocer, the next rabbi.2 In the modern city, just about any space—­from a former barbershop to a subway car to a classified ad—­could be sacred. In Manhattan, fluid real estate markets furnished opportunities to build, buy, sell, and finance



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sanctuaries ­great and small. Religion occupied ­whole buildings or bits and pieces; some communities owned, some leased, and some rented by the day. Streets became sites of religious display and, sometimes, religious anger. Newspapers devoted considerable attention to religious issues, which they covered with vigor and sometimes intrigue, but largely in ways that legitimatized mainstream faith and faith communities. Specialized religious journals and book publishers, headquartered in Manhattan, deepened and strengthened denominational identities. New York’s prestigious trade publishers, and l­ater radio and tele­vi­sion producers, deepened the national interest in religion as they exploited it. Even public schools promoted the sacred and its institutions, albeit controversially and indirectly. For much of the early twentieth ­century, an interfaith cross-­section of New Yorkers agitated for “released time”—­one hour per week during which students would be released from school and instead receive religious instruction at nearby churches and synagogues. In 1940 the activists got their wish. Opportunities for sacralization w ­ ere not only numerous but also, thanks to new technologies at the heart of modernization, easy to access—so easy that religion was able to penetrate the lives of more ­people more deeply than in the past. Electricity illuminated religious buildings and signs, albeit not with the grandiosity of theaters and nightclubs. Buses and subways carry­ing New Yorkers to Times Square and Coney Island also whisked worshipers to distant churches and synagogues, some of the faithful drawn by religious advertising and publicity. Phonographs that lofted the voices of Bessie Smith, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor from apartment win­dows on warm summer eve­nings also conveyed recordings by the African American gospel singer ­Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, and the New York Tabernacle’s Billy Sunday Chorus. The monumental 2,500-­member choir was recorded, if poorly, by the Victor Talking Machine Com­pany as early as 1917. Enterprising ministers, priests, and rabbis ­adopted radio as quickly as stations took to the airwaves. Rabbis broadcast in Yiddish on WEVD, a socialist station named for Eugene V. Debs, the politician and ­labor or­ga­nizer who largely eschewed religion. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen made the move from radio to TV, his Life Is Worth Living drawing national audiences of millions to signals broadcast by the New York–­based ABC and Dumont networks.3

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Even cynical New Yorkers, reluctantly accustomed to the religious din, must have been startled when Billy Graham’s publicity team tagged New York City “Sodom on the Subway” in 1957. New York may not have been a sacred city like Mecca or the Vatican, but it was not for lack of trying. Religion resonated throughout the world’s most populous place, sacralizing e­ very kind of space and linking faith to the press of modern life.4

St. Patrick’s Cathedral epitomized New York’s physical, visual, and aural sacralization a­ fter 1880. When construction began in 1858, the projected size of the sanctuary alone made St. Patrick’s an iconic structure-­to-be. When it was fi­nally completed and dedicated in 1879, it occupied the entire block between Fifth and Madison Ave­ nues and 50th  and 51st Streets. Renovations brought spires, chapels, a school, an archbishop’s residence, ornate win­dows, electricity, and additional organs, confirming the cathedral’s status.5 St. Patrick’s was by far the grandest place of worship that New York had to offer, and was for some time the largest sanctuary in the nation. One of t­ hose chiefly responsible was the fiery Archbishop “Dragon” John Hughes, who spent years acquiring enough contiguous property to accommodate the enormous ambition of the building’s designers. He wrote to a correspondent in Rome that the cathedral would be “322 feet long, 97 feet wide” with “a transept of 172 feet and an elevation from floor to crown point of ceiling . . . ​of 100 feet.” It would also be expensive. “I suppose it ­will cost one million dollars,” Hughes wrote. To realize all this splendor, Hughes hired the well-­regarded Episcopalian architect James Renwick Jr. Renwick had already produced two soaring New York Episcopal churches, Calvary Church and Grace Church. But he would give Hughes a Gothic cathedral dwarfing ­those—­“a public architectural monument” clad in white marble and honoring “the pre­sent and prospective crowns of this metropolis of the American Continent,” Hughes said. Like the cathedrals “at Milan, Pisa, [and] Florence,” St. Patrick’s would “never fail to attract attention, and satisfy the taste of the learned as well as the unlearned in architecture.” Only a truly outstanding sanctuary could recognize Catholics’ “increasing numbers, intelligence, and wealth” in New York, Hughes explained.6



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Hughes’s fund­rais­ing methods w ­ ere distinctly modern. In June 1858 he began what ­today’s fund­rais­ing professionals call the “­silent phase”: he quietly sought thousand-­dollar subscriptions from wealthy New Yorkers and in scarcely two months collected $103,000. By August, the Times was gushing about Hughes’s cornerstone ceremony: “Im­mense Assembly of 100,000 Persons,” “Magnificent Ceremony, Unlimited Enthusiasm.” At the event, Hughes unveiled the 103 “first patrons” and lauded them as models for “­those who are to carry on the work for the second year”—­rivals “in zeal and generosity.” Almost all of the major early donors w ­ ere Catholics, but Hughes proudly pointed to a pair from outside the faith, who w ­ ere “ambitious to see at least one ecclesiastical edifice on Manhattan Island of which their native City ­will have occasion to be proud.” Anticipating the criticism that the largesse should be used to relieve the poor, Hughes made a very contemporary-­sounding argument, noting that construction would provide the “honest ­labor [that] is much better than alms.” Hughes would not live to see his dream realized. In 1860, amid the economic and po­liti­cal tensions of the approaching Civil War, cathedral pledges dried up and construction was suspended. Hughes became ill in 1863 and died in January 1864.7 His successor, Archbishop John McCloskey, resumed construction at St. Patrick’s in 1867, ­after the Civil War ended. Over the next de­cade, Catholic fund­rais­ing and financial management grew even more sophisticated and engaged all levels of New York’s economic structure. As wealthy Catholics made additional thousand-­dollar pledges, McCloskey and the city’s Catholic clergy personally funded the cathedral’s high altar. Pope Pius IX gave statues of St. Paul and St. Peter at the Altar of the Sacred Heart, and all but three of the cathedral’s many stained glass win­ dows ­were donated by individual clergymen and laypeople. New York City attorney Joseph Loubat sponsored four win­dows at St. Patrick’s. Catholics of more modest means contributed through local parishes. Many Irish workers plowed substantial portions of their earnings into parish accounts, which the archdiocese levied to the tune of thousands of dollars each year. The archdiocese also assumed a four-­hundred-­ thousand-­ dollar mortgage through the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, but the fund­rais­ing was so successful that the mortgage was paid off even before the 1879 dedication.8

Charles Graham’s depiction of the crowd gathered for the funeral of New York’s Cardinal John McCloskey in 1885 exaggerated the size of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Still, the sanctuary dwarfed any other in Manhattan despite its unfinished towers and symbolized Catholicism’s commanding presence in the city. Reproduced from Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 24, 1885, by Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.



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St. Patrick’s reflected the Catholic officials’ grandiose intentions, but it was not just a monument. It served the practical need for a large space of worship and symbolized the archdiocese’s centralized power. Despite the centrifugal pressure of immigrant ethnic diversity and multiplying scared ­orders, the archdiocese firmly controlled decisions about parish creation and size, and St. Patrick’s fit its growth strategy. Early nineteenth-­ century parishes could afford to be small, but by 1914 only two of Manhattan’s ninety-­plus parishes counted fewer than 1,200 “souls,” a figure that included ­children. Meanwhile twenty-­five parishes counted between two thousand and four thousand worshipers, thirty parishes had five to ten thousand, and nine had more than eleven thousand. ­These huge communities, swollen by immigration, w ­ ere facilitated by gigantic worship spaces. By 1914 Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Italian Harlem counted “25,000 Italians and 2,000 Americans.”9 Catholics’ hunger for real estate had substantial spatial effects on Manhattan. All of Manhattan’s many religious groups constructed major facilities between 1880 and the Depression, but none of the ­others came close to the multibuilding religious “plants” that Catholics managed, even as property on the island became steadily pricier. Despite the costs, Catholics ­were able to assem­ble complexes of sanctuaries; parish schools; convents, for nuns who staffed the schools; and priestly quarters. Modernized Gothic and Romanesque sanctuaries, usually more substantial than elegant, dominated Catholics’ construction efforts in New York before 1920 and reflected the archdiocese’s commitments to size and visibility. The 1898 Gothic Revival Church of the Holy Name of Jesus at West 96th Street and Amsterdam Ave­nue provided ser­vices for ten thousand parishioners. Its school next door opened in 1905, staffed by ten ­Sisters of Charity, six Christian ­Brothers, eigh­teen lay teachers, and “special teachers for m ­ usic, drawing and physical culture.” Two thousand students attended daily Mass without crossing the street. St. John the Evangelist Church, built at 55th Street and First Ave­nue in 1886, served a parish of seven thousand worshipers in 1914 and a thousand boys and girls in school. They ­were taught by eleven ­Sisters of Charity and seven lay teachers snugged just ­behind the sanctuary, an arrangement common to New York’s parishes.10 The gravity of the city’s Catholic sanctuaries, admittedly exaggerated by historical black and white photo­graphs, and their cavernous interiors

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The 1898 Gothic Revival Church of the Holy Name of Jesus at Amsterdam Ave­nue and 96th Street expressed the New York Archdiocese’s commitment to large parishes served by multiple clergy and w ­ omen religious, while its parish school (1905) quietly paralleled public school architecture. Reproduced from The Catholic Church in the United States of Amer­i­ca (1914) by Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

conveyed the sovereignty of God and the majesty of the Church. In and around them, priests, bishops, archbishops, and l­ater cardinals proclaimed Church policy and doctrine. But most simply and perhaps most importantly, they also used t­ hese spaces to conduct daily Mass—­the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which offerings of bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ sacrificed on the cross. In the course of this and other rituals, worshippers found in voluminous Catholic sanctuaries stimulus for their very personal faith. Lavish architectural details silently turned a cavernous hall into an intimate theatre of prayer, contemplation, and confession. Each interior was full of distinctive woodcarvings, pews, statues, and altars that drew out the individuality of each worshiper’s faith even as they buttressed faith generally by announcing the per­sis­tence of the sacred amid so much h ­ uman bustle. Worshipers could pray at nearly any time of day or night at side altars honoring one of the many saints, whose lives and missions touched



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a believers’ worldly concerns. The flickering light of votive candles—­and the sunlight transformed by stained glass into visual stories of Jesus and the saints—­quickened a sense of awe within spaces darkened even in the day. In confessional booths found at the rear of most sanctuaries worshipers made private accountings of faith and practice, other­wise celebrated collectively in the sanctuary that enveloped them.11 Dorothy Day, the legendary New York City crusader for justice and peace who converted to Catholicism in her twenties, captured the sense of mystery such spaces fostered. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she wrote: When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night ­there is the sound of a ­great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness. ­There is another sound too, besides that of the quiet movements of the ­people from pew to confession to altar rail; ­there is the sliding of the shutters of the l­ittle win­dow between you and the priest in his “box.”12

Importantly, Catholic parish schools ­were nothing like the sanctuaries they often adjoined. Catholic schools ­were designed not to stand out. On the outside, most parish schools resembled the public schools with which the archdiocese explic­itly endeavored to compete. For instance, in a 1914 survey of American Catholicism prepared for Pope Pius X, Holy Name of Jesus Parish praised its own “magnificent four-­story building with basement containing 31 classrooms,” a fa­cil­it­y “not surpassed by the most pretentious of the city’s most expensive public schools.” But the way to compete, Catholics de­cided, was not just to outdo but also to fit in—to build schools that proclaimed their identity more as schools, less as Catholic buildings. Thus the school in which the Holy Name community took such pride looked a lot like PS 1 on Henry Street.13 Manhattan’s Protestants and Jews also constructed large spaces of worship ­after 1880 but proceeded without centralized authority of the kind exhibited by the archdiocese. ­There was thus more variation across communities. Each did what it could, with some developing impressive structures and ­others renting rooms ­here and t­ here to gather in.

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Between 1890 and 1930 the tonier white neighborhood along the east border of Central Park south of Harlem drew major sanctuaries fitting the area’s affluence. ­There ­were three major sanctuaries along Fifth Ave­nue facing Central Park and seven on Madison Ave­nue. By the time of the Depression, Park Ave­nue was thick with imposing sanctuaries. Upper East Side cross streets, between Park and Third Ave­nues to the east, became even more crowded. In the more modest Yorkville neighborhood just to the east, Germans constructed a modest but still impressive Lutheran church in 1888, as did immigrant Czechs with Jan Hus Czech Brethren Presbyterian Church, emulating a Prague building. Hungarians followed in 1916 with the First Hungarian Reformed Church, designed by Emery Roth, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, in Viennese Secession style.14 Like immigrant minority groups in this period, blacks sought cohesion by gathering in sacred spaces. As New York’s widespread extralegal Jim Crow practices pushed blacks northward from Lower Manhattan, their churches followed. Abyssinian Baptist, Mount Olivet Baptist, St. James Presbyterian, and St. Philip’s Episcopal built major sanctuaries in Harlem. Some congregations, such as Abyssinian Baptist, resisted moving. Worshippers only agreed to leave their 40th  Street location when their leader, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, threatened to resign. It turned out to be the right choice, at least from the perspective of the church’s rolls. In 1933, ten years ­after the new church opened, Abyssinian’s formal membership topped 11,000. Clayton proclaimed it Chris­ tian­ity’s largest congregation.15 Manhattan’s congregations and architects stuffed more and more buildings into an island with less and less available room. The density could have a diminishing effect, especially on older sanctuaries. When the Episcopal Trinity Church was built in the heart of Wall Street in 1846, its spire was the city’s tallest structure. But by the 1890s, the Gothic Revival building was engulfed by skyscrapers. And not just any skyscrapers, but the headquarters of capital. ­These neighbors not only obscured the church, they also seemed to be corrupting it. The reformer Ray Stannard Baker pointed out that Trinity, surrounded by “the mightiest banks, insurance companies and other moneyed institutions of this half of the earth,” maintained tenements on its extensive Lower Manhattan properties—­residences that often lacked r­ unning w ­ ater and toilets. Some



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By 1905 Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers engulfed Trinity Church’s 1846 sanctuary, once the tallest structure in the city, leading some observers to won­der if religion itself was being effaced as modernity raced forward. Courtesy Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Com­pany photo­g raph collection.

reeked with filth. As one critic put it, “Is Trinity the church evangelical, benevolent and Christ-­like” but “Trinity the landlord avaricious, grasping and dev­ilish?” The Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration on East 29th Street took a dif­fer­ent approach. As skyscrapers shot up around them, the congregation embraced the intimacy of their small neo-­Gothic

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sanctuary. Adopting the title of an 1870 popu­lar song, they called it the ­Little Church around the Corner.16 While the Archdiocese of New York assembled large properties in which their parish complexes stood apart from the urban landscape, Protestants and Jews became experts at fitting sanctuaries into unexpected corners and blending into the urban surround. The Gospel Tabernacle just off Times Square, opened by the evangelical minister A. B. Simpson in 1890, appeared to be a typical five-­story office building. But the prosaic exterior hid a large sanctuary, where worshippers gathered ­under a stunningly beautiful eight-­sided stained-­glass dome. (In the mid1990s, the church became the sort of commercial property it originally simulated and now h ­ ouses a gigantic pizzeria where diners eat beneath the dome’s splendor.) Architect J. Stewart Barney’s Broadway Tabernacle, completed in 1905 at Broadway and 56th Street, mixed a 1,200-­ seat worship space with a ten-­story office building disguised as a church spire, its entrance angled and set back from the street to distinguish it from neighboring office buildings. Calvary Baptist on West 57th Street epitomized the urban “skyscraper church”: its thousand-­seat sanctuary was inside a sixteen-­story apartment ­hotel. Only the Gothic Tudor entrance signaled that ­there was a place of worship inside, although passersby could make out the rooftop bell tower if they craned their necks to see it.17 Less monumental sanctuaries slid into narrow lots snug against apartments and stores. The Hamilton Grange Reformed Church managed a reasonable facsimile of a freestanding sanctuary when it was constructed cheek-­by-­jowl with other buildings on West 145th Street in 1888. But by 1910, Congregation Adas Yisroel Anshe Mezeritz was left renovating a three-­story residential building, flush against neighboring apartment and office structures. As the years went by, even the archdiocese had to bow to the real­ity of density. In 1926 it authorized construction of the new Church of St. Stephen of Hungary on East 82nd Street in Yorkville, a miniaturized skyscraper church that stacked three floors of parish school classrooms, plus a rooftop playground, above the first-floor sanctuary.18 High cost and density might have foreclosed opportunities for religious institutions looking to build. Instead they embraced New York’s freewheeling real estate market and found ­those opportunities augmented.

The theologically conservative Calvary Baptist Church plunged into Manhattan moder­ nity, establishing its own radio station in 1923 and in 1931 constructing a sixteen-­story “skyscraper church” in Midtown, which it shared with a residential h ­ otel. Courtesy Milstein Division, New York Public Library.

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Not only did they site creatively designed sanctuaries and complexes in unexpected places, but they also took over and renovated each other’s buildings when they became vacant. Churches became synagogues and synagogues became churches, mostly Protestant but occasionally Catholic. The First Methodist Church, constructed in 1845 at 87 Attorney Street in Lower Manhattan, became the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1850s, then the Erste Galitzianer Chevra in 1884. The New York City Mission and Tract Society sold its space to Congregation Ohab Zedek in 1882. Abyssinian Baptist Church purchased the Fourth German Mission Reformed Dutch Church on West 40th Street in 1902, then sold the church in 1922 for $200,000. “The buyers plan to improve the property with a high-­ class commercial building,” the Times announced, meaning the sanctuary would be demolished. In 1916 Chevra B’nai Levi purchased the nineteenth-­century St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church on East 55th Street. In 1926 Congregation Kol Israel Anshe Poland sold its 1892 synagogue at 27 Forsyth Street to the St. Barbara Greek Orthodox congregation, which still worships ­there ­today. In 1921 the New York Bible Society transformed the old Svenska Kyrkan on East 48th Street with a neo-­Gothic facelift, the building still serving religious purposes but no longer as a church.19 One obstacle to such transactions was racism. As a white Congregational minister in Harlem noted, worshipers ­were panicked about the “danger of being engulfed by the negro invasion.” Especially a­ fter 1900, they responded by drawing up restrictive covenants to prevent Manhattan’s growing black population from moving in next door. They asked their churches to aid in the effort. When the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer went on the market in 1914, the selling congregation sought a five-­year ban on the use of the building “by colored p ­ eople.” In one case, the minister of Harlem’s white St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church supported a black church, St. Philip’s Episcopal, moving nearby, but only ­because it would relieve pressure to enroll black ­children in the St. Andrew’s Sunday School. As the St. Andrew’s minister put it, “It is not for the best interests of e­ ither the whites or the blacks that they should attend the same Sunday Schools, or the same churches.” ­After St. Philip’s relocated, the white St. Luke’s Episcopal Church joined St. Andrew’s in deflecting black families to the St. Philip’s Sunday School.



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But as Harlem’s black population grew, the sale of sanctuaries to black congregations went ahead, if awkwardly. Caught between perceived economic necessity and their racial prejudices, congregations cleansed the transactions by first selling to white agents, who then sold to black congregations. This was the strategy that the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer employed. A white buyer took over the church property and then sold it to M ­ other Zion, the founding congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination.20 In 1927 a white Seventh Day Adventist ­temple on 120th Street became the black Mount Olivet Baptist Church; the space had originally been ­Temple Israel, a synagogue. By 1930 most Harlem synagogues had become black churches. Congregation Ohab Zedek’s 1908 synagogue on West 116th Street became Baptist ­Temple Church in 1926, and in 1927 Congregation Anshe Chesed on West 114th Street became the Church of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, which ministered to Manhattan’s increasing Spanish-­speaking immigrants. It was one of only two known instances in which a Manhattan synagogue became a Catholic church.21 Protestants and Jews financed sanctuaries using e­ very means Catholics employed but largely without authoritative direction. Congregations focused their campaigns on their communities, and individual contributions prob­ably accounted for a significant portion of the funds required to purchase and construct sanctuaries. For Congregation Ohab Zedek, that meant a slow march ­toward the million dollars it needed for the sanctuary and educational center it opened on West 95th  Street in  1926—­a thousand dollars h ­ ere, five thousand t­here. Some New Yorkers famously provided far more. John D. Rocke­fel­ler alone contributed $10 million to the construction of the massive Riverside Church, which opened in 1930. Gifts from heiresses Julia and Serena Rhinelander in the 1890s allowed the architect Stanford White to redesign the interior of the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Ave­nue at 10th Street. The church was furnished with a marble altarpiece by the sculptor Louis St.  Gaudens as well as a mural, The Ascension of Our Lord, by John La Farge. But Church and synagogue financial campaigns could be successful even when individual members possessed few resources. Reverend Adam Clayton Powell proudly announced in June 1922 that Abyssinian Baptist Church had raised $227,500 of its $300,000 opening costs.22

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An 1878 Times analy­sis of debt and property values among more than 300 Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations in the city provides a rough estimate of overall finances in the era. Not surprisingly, immigrant and minority congregations incurred more debt than most mainline Protestant denominations. Congregational indebtedness, as compared to the estimated value of church property, varied from zero among the Society of Friends to 17 ­percent among Methodists, 20 ­percent for Jewish synagogues and “colored congregations,” and 27  ­percent for Catholic churches. The Archdiocese of New York clearly saw short-­term indebtedness as a successful strategy for funding costly but substantial sanctuaries. Regrettably, neither the Times nor other New York newspapers repeated the 1878 congregational indebtedness survey in l­ater de­cades.23 Manhattan’s expanding banks and savings and loan institutions provided mortgages. In the 1870s and early 1880s, Emigrant Savings Bank, founded by Irish immigrants in 1850, handled accounts and mortgages for several Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations. The bank was a longtime player; in July 1929 the Times reported that it had underwritten a five-­hundred-­thousand-­dollar mortgage for Congregation Rodeph Shalom. Still, individuals prob­ably gave substantial private mortgage support for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations, although their names seldom became public. Only an 1896 lawsuit over the mortgage of Tabernacle Baptist Church revealed that John  D. Rocke­fel­ler held $53,000 of the congregation’s $80,000 debt.24 Some of the money flowing into Manhattan’s sanctuaries was invested in new technologies, which slowly transformed spaces of worship. Nineteenth-­century churches and synagogues had sought to reduce the danger of fires from candles by installing electric lights, but the expense and awkwardness of electrification stalled many efforts. Electric lights illuminated a new font at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1897, but full electrification, which required seventy thousand feet of copper wiring and over a thousand lamps, arrived only in 1904. Charles Stelzle’s 1908 Princi­ples of Successful Church Advertising advocated electric signs as a “good investment, especially for a down-­town church,” but his illuminated “­Labor ­Temple” sign was forever a rarity in Manhattan. Yet exterior lighting, if not electric signs, appealed, and the illumination of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1912 showed why. What better way to highlight its increasingly prominent Midtown location, the reach of its towers,



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and the sheer grandeur of the Church and faith it proclaimed in the world’s largest city? Eventually such displays entered the interior of churches. In 1921 the Illuminating Engineering Society and American Institute of Architects installed “diffuse colored lights” in the Episcopal St. Mark’s in the Bowery to emulate “a forest at night or a vast cave dimly illuminated,” an experiment they hoped “marked a step forward in the development of church illumination.”25 Proper sound has always been more impor­tant in churches than bright lights, and some Manhattan sanctuaries w ­ ere models of modern acoustical techniques. Voluminous, quasi-­medieval spaces such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral w ­ ere overly reverberant, suitable for chanting but not sermonizing. This inspired l­ater engineers to invent novel solutions. When Episcopal St.  Thomas Church reconstructed its medieval-­style building, which had been destroyed by fire in 1905, architects Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson and the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Com­pany spared no expense in developing porous, sound-­absorbing tile. In the new St. Thomas, a clergyman’s voice could be heard without a microphone and loudspeakers—­a necessity of the medieval milieu—­while remaining ­free of distracting echoes. For ­those who turned to the new technology of sound amplification, success did not always come easily. In 1932 the National Association of Organists was treated to a demonstration of the “amplification of sound” at Riverside Church, but two years l­ater, archdiocesan officials w ­ ere still testing sound systems for cavernous St. Patrick’s. Retrofitting early structures for electronic amplification was a serious challenge, and the Times described a seemingly puzzled Cardinal Patrick Hayes and cathedral trustees “moving from place to place to listen to the amplification of the speaker’s voice” during a Sunday ser­vice.26 For ­those congregations that ­couldn’t obtain sufficient financing or donations for ­grand buildings, architectural novelties, and the fruits of new technology, ­there ­were always the rented rooms and apartments endemic to Manhattan’s urbanization. The use of rented rooms escalated ­after 1880 with the arrival of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews. Chevras lodged alongside or above barbers, saloons, and butchers. For the most part, it is impossible to know where t­ hese ephemeral communities took up quarters, but we do have certain information. For instance, Chevrah B’Nai Yitzchak found a second-­floor space above the famed Hester Street

The Edison Light Com­pany illuminated St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1912 to celebrate Archbishop John Farley’s appointment as a cardinal in 1911. Courtesy H. N. Tiemann & Co. Photo­g raph Collection, Collections of the New York Historical Society, nyhs_PR129_b-05_176-01.jpg.



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Hundreds of Jewish chevras rented spaces in Lower Manhattan from the 1880s to the 1920s, among them the Lemberger Chevra, which attached its sign to the second-­floor balcony at 80 Attorney Street. Courtesy New York City Municipal Archives.

market and ­later prob­ably moved down the road to 93 Hester. A 1908 photo­graph by Eugene de Salignac documented the Lemberger Chevra above the laundry at 80 Attorney Street. Its sign, in Yiddish, Hebrew, and En­glish, dated the organ­ization to 1894 and advertised ser­vices on “Sabbaths, holidays, and the Days of Awe.” In the photo, a cat crouches on the chevra’s balcony, beside which the chevra’s sign is dwarfed by an advertisement for J. C. Cohen’s “new patent corsets and garters.” This was a typical scene on Attorney Street. Though only four blocks long, by 1930 it was home to more than fifty Jewish congregations only two of which met in synagogues.27 The religious rental market l­ater mushroomed in Harlem, with its famed black storefront churches. When Urban League sociologist Ira D. Reid assessed Harlem congregations in 1926, he found that “house churches” comprised 90 of Harlem’s 140 congregations. Like the chevras of Lower Manhattan, Harlem’s storefront churches met in rented rooms,

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although usually on the ground floor. Like chevras, they moved often and could emerge and fade away in a flash. Six weeks a­ fter Reid’s survey, seven of the storefront churches he documented had dis­appeared.28 Photog­raphers unintentionally caught this mobility in motion. In 1936 Lucien Aigner—­the Hungarian émigré photojournalist who became famous for capturing Emperor Haile Selassie, Albert Einstein, and Mussolini in the act of sneezing—­photographed Reverend Elden J. Johnson at his Pilgrim Pentecostal Church of God, a chalk notice for “Wednesday Night Preaching and Divine Healing” on one side, a Pepsi-­Cola advertisement on the other. Another advertisement, for the well-­known Harlem undertaker Bertie Dade, occupied the center of the scene. Soon Johnson acquired more prosperous quarters: in December Berenice Abbott, who would become one of the ­century’s ­great art photog­raphers, captured Johnson descending from a generous 132nd Street brownstone. Now the chalkboard announced “­Sister Huggins, President,” discussing “How ­shall we work out our soul” at a “Missionary Ser­vice.” Johnson was evidently, and understandably, proud to show off his congregation’s good fortune. Abbott ­hadn’t asked him to pose on his brownstone steps, but “he came out and that was that.”29 Midtown and Lower Manhattan ­hotels, their meeting rooms prob­ably more elegant than e­ ither of Reverend Johnson’s quarters, also became vibrant sanctuaries for eclectic ser­vices that attracted largely white worshipers. Willie Melmoth Bomar’s breathlessly titled I Went to Church in New York (1937) described Ada Cox Fisher’s I AM congregation, part of Guy Ballard’s Ascended Master movement, and the Center of Truth, which both gathered in the ­Hotel Roo­se­velt; the “Dranah group,” which met in the McAlpin ­hotel to teach “teach the law of love” drawn from “the book of nature and the authority of the h ­ uman Soul”; the Church of the Truth gathered at the ­Hotel Commodore; and the Church of Divine Science, led by the Irish émigré and New Thought spokesman Emmet Fox in the ­grand ballroom of the H ­ otel Astor. Fox sometimes went all out, engaging the 5,300-­seat New York Hippodrome at Sixth Ave­nue and West 43rd Street when it ­wasn’t hosting circuses, vaudev­ ille, or Harry Houdini.30 In addition, Car­ne­gie Hall occasionally rented small rooms to religious groups, and Rabbi Stephen Wise’s Reform, upper-­middle-­class ­Free Synagogue congregation rented Car­ne­gie’s prestigious concert hall for over two de­cades.31

Lucien Aigner photographed the modest storefront Pilgrim Pentecostal Church of God and its minister, Reverend Elden J. Johnson. Courtesy Lucien Aigner Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Reverend Elden J. Johnson in December 1936, a­ fter his Pilgrim Pentecostal Church of God moved into a brownstone at 25 East 132nd Street in Manhattan. Courtesy Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photo­g raphs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library.

Advertisements in the NewYork Times, Eve­ning Post, Herald Tribune, and Sun confirm that Bomar had caught onto a pattern of long standing. In 1910 the Times listed the Baha’i and a Theosophical group meeting at Genealogical Hall. In 1922 the paper advertised meetings of New Thought at the Selwyn Theater, a new Community Church at the Lyric Theater, Divine Science at the Waldorf Astoria H ­ otel, other religious groups at the ­Hotel Majestic and ­Hotel Astor, and William Jennings Bryan speaking on “God and Evolution” at the Hippodrome. In 1930 the Herald Tribune listed Divine Science, Sears Philosophy, and the Universal Spiritual Church all at the Biltmore ­Hotel and the Metaphysical School of Health at Steinway Hall.32 Such advertising was key to drawing worshipers. By the 1910s the Saturday “religious notices” carried in the city’s newspapers since before the Civil War had increased noticeably. Almost all ­were placed by



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Manhattan’s Protestant, Reform Jewish, and eclectic religious congregations, who sought to appeal to the newspapers’ upper-­middle-­class readers. Few listings w ­ ere placed by congregations in other boroughs and none by Catholic and Orthodox Jewish congregations.33 Advertisements for Saturday, February 2, 1924, a weekend in which former President Woodrow Wilson lay d ­ ying, typified their content. The Times carried more than 130 notices from more than twenty-­five dif­fer­ent Protestant, Reform Jewish, and eclectic religious traditions. They ranged in size from Sarah Schofield’s miniscule three-­line notice for classes on the “symbolical interpretation of the Bible” to two-­column display advertisements from Central Presbyterian Church (for a per­for­mance of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah) and the United Lodge of Theosophists (for lectures on “Fate and ­Free ­Will” and a class on the “Ocean of Theosophy”). Broadway Tabernacle’s Reverend Charles Jefferson offered a five-­part sequence on “controversial” issues including “Evolution and the Book of Genesis” and “Roman Catholicism and the Ku Klux Klan”; Swedenborgians pitched a sermon on “God the Savior from Sin”; Episcopalian ministers spoke on “Immortality” and “Character”; two Reform rabbis discussed the Broadway revival of The Miracle, a provocative 1911 German play about a doubting nun; and a Reformed minister discussed George Eliot’s Silas Marner.34 The four Brooklyn congregations that advertised listed subway stops for Manhattan residents crossing the East River, pointing to the importance of mass transit—­another product of modernity—in expanding the reach of religious institutions. The Times also highlighted Sabbath pre­sen­ta­tions in a Sunday news column, “­Today’s Programs in City Churches.” H ­ ere the range of options was more l­ imited. An August 1927 article listed sermon topics and other pre­sen­ta­tions from dozens of Protestant congregations, two Reform Jewish congregations, and no Catholic churches. Though eclectic congregations could advertise in the Times, they gained no publicity from the column.35 The streets that brought worshipers to sanctuaries and storefronts offered equal opportunities for sacralization—­some pleasant, some pointedly sectarian, some controversial. Most city parades w ­ ere po­liti­cal and civic, celebrating foreign dignitaries and other nonreligious figures and events. But the use of streets for religious purposes occurred as early as 1766, when British soldiers from Ireland held the colonies’

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first street gathering commemorating St. Patrick’s Day. By 1852 the Times could report that St.  Patrick’s Day would “be celebrated with the usual splendor”—­a pro­cession that asserted Irish nationalism no less than Catholicism and gained importance as demonstrations of ethnic and religious identity became commonplace in the city.36 Manhattan’s famous Easter parade initially celebrated a broader sort of Christian piety, although vaguely Protestant. It emerged in the 1870s, when worshipers encouraged by elaborate flower decorations at prominent sanctuaries like St. Patrick’s and St. Thomas strolled outside their churches displaying their finery. L ­ ater the holiday emerged as a vernacular cele­bration. Fodder for Irving Berlin’s song, “Easter Parade,” and the 1948 Judy Garland, Fred Astaire movie of the same name, this secularized Easter Parade bypassed the crucifixion and substituted fashion for theology. Good cheer and expensive taste swept past criticism of the Easter Parade’s commercialism. A Boston cleric captured the sense best: “As the city shops and streets break out into fragrant and beautiful bloom, one realizes the close kinship between heavenly and spiritual ­things and ­things material and earthly.”37 Nothing in Manhattan compared with Brooklyn’s massive Sunday school parades, however. Begun in 1829 by the Protestant Brooklyn Sunday School Union, in 1905, ­after Brooklyn’s incorporation into New York City, the state legislature made the parade a public school holiday. Upward of 75,000 ­children marched, usually on the first Thursday in June, asserting Protestantism’s presence in the borough. Manhattan Protestants offered only tepid approximations. White Protestant congregations in Harlem sponsored Sunday school parades in the 1890s, before the influx of African Americans, but they soon petered out. Episcopalian parades of the 1930s stuck close to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at 112th Street and Amsterdam Ave­nue.38 By contrast, Catholics regularly used Manhattan’s streets for church commemorations, fairs, and parades celebrating the anniversaries of saints. The Times reported in 1918 that decorations on the streets near 96th  and Amsterdam bore a “holiday air” to commemorate the fifty-­ year jubilee of the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus. In 1925 “flags and bunting” greeted a church pro­cession laying a cornerstone for the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix on Broome Street. Well into the 1960s, Italian parish fairs spilled into Manhattan’s streets.39



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Religious pro­cessions attracted plenty of gawking, but—­with the notable exception of Rabbi Jacob Joseph’s 1902 funeral parade—­little trou­ble. Without incident, a Lower Manhattan chevra marched across the Williamsburg Bridge to a Brooklyn cemetery in 1907 carry­ing eigh­ teen fire-­damaged Torah scrolls “wrapped in a white cloth” for ceremonial burial. “Italian girls and Italian boys in sailor suits” marched from a convent on Charlton Street to Washington Square in 1908 to celebrate the American arrival of the Catholic Order of the Reparatrice. In 1909 Columbus Day became a state holiday, and for de­cades thereafter the Knights of Columbus and Catholic parishes or­ga­nized large parades to mark the occasion. A hundred thousand New Yorkers marched in or watched the 1916 funeral pro­cession forYiddish author Sholem Aleichem, which began at Ohab Zedek on 116th Street. Ten years l­ater, ­after Ohab Zedek sold that synagogue to a black Baptist congregation, its members carried Torah scrolls across Manhattan streets to their expansive new facilities on 95th Street.40

For generations, Manhattan’s physical spaces have spawned a meta­ phorical one: the sphere of media. This, too, was sacralized, as the island became a center for traditional religious publishing through journals, magazines, and books. And when new technologies emerged, Manhattan maintained its position, becoming the leading source of recorded religious media, audio, and video. Among the early successes of Manhattan’s religious publishing landscape was Catholic World, from the Paulist Press, founded in 1865. Catholic News followed in 1886, touted as “New York’s leading Catholic home weekly paper.” Then came the Jesuit Amer­i­ca in 1909 and in 1917 The Official Catholic Directory, the principal yearly digest of the Catholic Church in the United States. In 1919 the Christian Press Association, also headquartered in Manhattan, touted its status as “publishers of over 450 Catholic Books.” 41 New York also became the locus of Jewish publishing in Amer­i­ca. In 1918 the Jewish Communal Register offered a “composite picture” of the city’s Jewish newspapers and journals: at least 175 had come and gone since the 1880s, and 1918 alone featured 50 active publications. Many of ­these—­such as American Hebrew, which originated in 1879, and American

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Jewess, published briefly between 1896 and 1899—­focused on Jewish religious practice. O ­ thers—­such as Kasriel Sarasohn’s Yidishe Tageblatt, which began in the 1880s, and the socialist Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward)—­ were more news oriented but also published both critically and empathetically on religious m ­ atters. Religion was a ­matter of increasing concern to Forverts a­ fter Abraham Cahan became editor in 1903.42 A vibrant lit­er­a­ture produced by immigrant Jews glossed the past, pre­ sent, and ­future of modern Judaism in New York, the city home to more Jews than any other. The Yiddish fiction of Sholem Abramovitch, I. L. Peretz, Jacob Dinezon, and especially Sholem Aleichem radiated religious themes. ­These works often provided a warm, sentimental look back to Old World practice and community—­a perspective that raised questions about New World conditions. Still, not all was critical. Cahan, whose quietly ­bitter Rise of David Levinsky mourned the emptiness of material success, also wrote empathetically about post-­immigration religion in stories for the New York Commercial Advertiser—­“Dead ­After Purim,” “Passover on Clinton Street,” “When Angels Shudder.” 43 Protestant publishing boomed in post-1880 Manhattan. Old publishers and journals largely flourished, with many lasting into the Depression era and beyond. The American Bible Society, which first occupied its 28,000-­square-­foot “Bible House” at 3rd Ave­nue and 9th Street in 1853, per­sis­tently expanded its bible publishing program. The Methodist Christian Advocate began publishing in 1826 and ­didn’t stop ­until 1973. The Episcopal Spirit of Missions published from 1836 to 1938, and the Baptist Examiner, which originated in Manhattan in 1823, absorbed a Boston publication to form the Watchman-­Examiner in 1913. ­These ­were joined by new journals such as the Christian Herald, which set up shop in 1878 but dated its success from Louis Klopsch’s editorship beginning in 1890. Missions, a Baptist journal, first published in 1910, and the Episcopal American Church Monthly printed its first issue in 1919. The Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower magazine moved from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn in 1909.44 Klopsch demonstrated how Protestant publishing could intersect with modern journalism. Klopsch emigrated from Germany to New York as a child and had a rough adolescence. In his twenties he served two years in Sing Sing prison for forgery and fraud, then converted to evangelical Protestantism in the 1880s. Aided by Brooklyn Tabernacle’s T. DeWitt



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Talmage, he purchased the weekly Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Talmage edited the magazine from offices in Bible House, while Klopsch took on publishing duties, refined distribution techniques, and in­ven­ted and patented improved printing methods. In the mid-1890s, having taken over as editor, Klopsch added photo­graphs and colorized covers. He wrote empathetically about Protestants, Jews, and “Mohammadans” and stressed Christian aid to ­people around the world suffering from famines, floods, and earthquakes. By 1900 Christian Herald readers had raised more than $3 million for Christian relief, in recognition of which Klopsch received medals from Britain’s King Edward VII and the emperor of Japan. By 1900 the Christian Herald had become the most popu­lar religious magazine in Amer­ic­ a, with a circulation of two hundred and fifty thousand. Klopsch’s Red Letter New Testament and Red Letter Bible, with Jesus’s words standing out in red ink, became best-­selling scriptures. Klopsch had had the good sense to copyright them, and together they made him a wealthy man. When he died in 1910, he left an estate valued at six hundred and forty thousand dollars, or about $17 million in 2020 dollars.45 Klopsch scarcely was the only Protestant publisher in the city. Lentilhon & Com­pany published Handbooks for Practical Workers in Church and Philanthropy and many Baptist books. The Episcopal Church founded its Church Publishing com­pany in 1918 to print hymnals, yearly reports, and religious books by Episcopal clergy and laity. The Fleming H. Revell and George H. Doran firms, publishers of the many books on “church efficiency,” carried extensive lists of Protestant titles at least into the 1930s, but their paths diverged in in­ter­est­ing ways. The Revell firm survived the mortifying and widely publicized 1929 divorce of its found­er’s son and remains a major twenty-­first-­century evangelical imprint. The Doran firm continued active religious publishing in the 1920s but also developed a list of major literary figures, including Somerset Maugham, ­Virginia Woolf, Sinclair Lewis, and H. L. Mencken. Bringing along its attractive crop of writers, Doran merged with the ­g iant Doubleday in 1927. At the same time, general publishers such as Harper and Macmillan ­were diving into religious publishing. Harper purchased the Sunday School Times in 1927 and issued many religious titles, while Macmillan published religious books by Manhattan’s Harry Emerson Fosdick and Brooklyn’s S. Parkes Cadman, among other Protestant clergymen.46

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Early in the twentieth c­ entury, new technology expanded the scope of all media, the religious variety very much included. Again, New York was at the heart of production. Among the earliest recordings made in Manhattan ­were Victor’s 1907 gramophone pressings with the choir of Congregation Ohab Zedek and its cantor, Isaiah Meisels. Soon Yossele Rosenblatt succeeded Meisels at Ohab Zedek and eclipsed his recorded achievements. Known as “the Jewish Caruso,” Rosenblatt made over two hundred recordings for Victor and Columbia, most representing the cantorial repertoire. But Rosenblatt’s public recognition came from his popu­lar recordings of “The Last Rose of Summer,” “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” and occasional arias; his eclectic programs at the New York Hippodrome and Madison Square Garden; and a singing role—as himself—in Al Jolson’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Although a poor man­ag­er with bad financial luck, Rosenblatt was easily the most recognizable cantor, and possibly the most recognizable Jew, in Amer­i­ca. In 1933 he journeyed to Palestine, where he died of a heart attack.47 Columbia, headquartered in Manhattan, and Victor, headquartered across the Hudson in Camden, New Jersey, quickly recorded extensive libraries of religious ­music. A Victor advertisement for the 1918 Easter season touted a cata­log of over 350 “Easter anthems that w ­ ill delight lovers of sacred ­music,” and Victor’s 1920 cata­log included multiple rec­ords by the choir of Manhattan’s Trinity Church and even a recording featuring Trinity’s bells. Columbia’s 1925 cata­log listed the New York Oratorio Chorus performing se­lections from Handel’s Messiah, multiple recordings of Christmas hymns, sixteen of Rosenblatt’s Jewish liturgical recordings, nine more by other cantors, and over twenty rec­ords of “Hebrew-­Jewish folk songs.” For affluent worshipers enamored of classical ­music, Victor offered the first complete recording of Bach’s two-­ hour Mass in B Minor, which Manhattan’s Gramophone Shop sold in 1930 for $30.75 (about $465 in 2020 dollars). The 78-­rpm disks, all seventeen of them, w ­ ere packaged in two seven-­pound sets for easier lifting 48 and storage. Victor and Columbia also broke ground in recording black spirituals. In 1909 Victor recorded the Fisk Quartet, four men from the 1898 reincarnation of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had formed in the 1870s and 1880s and been commemorated in W.  E.  B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk in 1903. By the 1930s Victor’s and Columbia’s 1910s recordings of



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black spirituals had sold over 2 million copies. The recordings increased the audience and critical appeal of black spirituals, creating space for black singers in concert halls that other­wise invited only white performers. ­These early successes also inspired more black singers and groups to rec­ord. The black soprano Edna Thomas recorded ten spirituals for Columbia, and the white opera stars John McCormack and Nellie Melba recorded “Deep River” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” respectively. ­After losing the Fisk Quartet to Columbia, Victor recorded the Tuskegee Institute Singers and Manhattan’s Hall Johnson Negro Chorus. The Hall Johnson recordings ­were prompted in part by the group’s success in the context of another New York institution: Broadway. In 1930 they took part in a well-­reviewed all-­black play, The Green Pastures.49 Sermons ­were also recorded, almost exclusively by blacks. Racial discrimination meant that, while white ministers could be heard for ­free on the radio in the 1920s, black preaching was largely excluded from the airwaves.50 Puzzlingly, two of the nation’s principal producers of recorded black sermons, Columbia and fellow Manhattan firm Okeh Rec­ ords, recorded black clergy in southern cities and Chicago but not Manhattan. It may be that producers thought the formal preaching style of New York’s most prominent black ministers w ­ ouldn’t sell to an audience expecting more dramatic and performative speaking. In addition, black denominational leaders w ­ ere sometimes dubious about the ­whole enterprise of recorded sound. They tended to oppose secular “race rec­ords,” whose ­music they associated with night clubs, drinking, and sex. If “ragtime m ­ usic makes ragtime character,” as one of Boston’s black ministers lamented, race rec­ords offered even less subtle moral challenges. To rec­ord for Columbia or Okeh would be to support an ethically suspect industry.51 Okeh recorded most of its black sermon rec­ords on location but brought Atlanta’s James M. Gates to Manhattan to rec­ord ten sermons in 1926. Columbia recorded thirty-­two sermons from J. C. Burnett in its Manhattan studios when Burnett lived in the city between 1926 and 1929, and Blind Gary Davis recorded for the American Rec­ord Com­ pany in Manhattan in 1935. He then recorded for Folkways and Prestige Rec­ ords in Manhattan ­ after moving to Harlem in the 1940s, where he preached in churches and sang on the streets. The Amsterdam News, a black newspaper, regularly featured advertisements for Okeh’s

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recorded sermons in 1926. Harlem residents could purchase Okeh’s recordings of Gates’s sermons “Death Might be Your Santa Claus” and “God’s Wrath in the St. Louis Cyclone” for seventy-­five cents each at no fewer than seven rec­ord shops. Four ­were on Lenox Ave­nue alone, within easy walking distance of M ­ other Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church and other Harlem black churches.52 Radio drew attention from white ministers, priests, and rabbis as quickly as stations drew listeners, and by 1930 Manhattan was an impor­ tant center for nationally distributed religious broadcasts. A 1923 Times article headlined “Radio a Value to Religion” noted that ser­vices broadcast in “clubs in cities, hospitals, [and] soldiers’ barracks” would reach listeners “who would other­wise lose contact with the church.” That same year Calvary Baptist’s sexton cobbled together a low-­wattage broadcast fa­cil­i­ty in the church’s basement; John Roach Straton, Calvary’s fundamentalist minister, hoped the station “would be so efficient that when I twist the dev­il’s tail ­here in New York his squawk w ­ ill be heard across the continent.” Jehovah’s Witnesses began WBBR in Manhattan in 1924. WHAP, a religiously eclectic, anti-­Catholic, and antisemitic station led by an excommunicated Christian Scientist began broadcasting in 1925, as did a Paulist F ­ athers station, WLWL. A station sponsored by a short-­ lived Pentecostal Pillar of Fire church first broadcast in 1931.53 But broadcasting by individual churches largely stalled by 1925, as radio professionalized and low-­wattage, hobbyist stations ­were overtaken. Calvary Baptist sold its call sign to WHN, owned by Loews Theaters, and WHAP dis­appeared in 1932 a­ fter internal strug­gles and protests against its antisemitic and anti-­Catholic broadcasts. Although the small stations managed by the Paulist F ­ athers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pillar of Fire Church lasted longer, weak signals l­imited their audiences.54 Local stations did not pick up the slack. The Times radio schedule for Sunday, August 7, 1927, for example, listed many famous clergy broadcasting nationally but only a few local Protestant programs: a “studio religious ser­vice” and “sacred musicale” on WEAF, Christian Science worship on WMCA, and four short religious ser­vices plus a sacred ­music program stuffed into a single hour on WBNY.55 To the extent that Manhattan’s religious radio broadcasts featured local programming, many of the stars ­were Jewish. Between the mid1920s and late 1930s, as many as half of New York’s radio stations offered



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Yiddish language broadcasts, many of them religious. Short, live broadcasts by cantors and rabbis proved especially popu­lar, particularly when the presenters commented on daily life in Amer­ic­ a and the city. Stations broadcast the religious and popu­ lar recordings of Rosenblatt and other cantors, and several female cantors developed strong followings long before they could obtain positions in synagogues. The best-­known was Jean Gornish, who performed u ­nder the name Sheindele die Chazente—­Sheindele the Lady Cantor. Rabbi Samuel Rubin’s American bord sholom v’tzedek, “The American Board of Peace and Justice,” which began broadcasting in the 1930s, featured a rabbinical panel that drew on Jewish law to ­settle disputes concerning jobs, landlords, merchandise sales, and funerals.56 Christian radio in Manhattan was dominated by syndicated ­broadcasts—​of Manhattan-­based preachers. When the American Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal and Social Science digested “Radio and Religion” in its 1935 Annals, eight of the ten “distinguished” clergy it identified as deeply involved in religious radio broadcasting ­were Manhattan ministers, their messages carried on the dominant radio networks. ­These included the Protestants Fosdick (Park Ave­nue Baptist), Ralph Sockman (Methodist Christ Church), Daniel Poling (Marble Collegiate), and Karl Reiland (St. George’s Episcopal), and two priests—­Reverends Fulton J. Sheen and James M. Gillis. Rabbis Stephen Wise (­Free Synagogue) and Nathan Krass (­Temple Emanu-­El) also ­were heard in syndication.57 Sheen hosted national broadcasts of the Catholic Hour from 1930 to 1951, when he turned to tele­vi­sion. His Life Is Worth Living and Fulton Sheen Program drew enormous national audiences into the late 1960s. Rabbi Wise offered Message of Israel broadcasts sponsored by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations from 1934 u ­ ntil his death in 1949. The Jewish Theological Seminary also got involved in syndication. In 1944, and for a de­cade thereafter, it produced Eternal Light broadcasts for the National Broadcasting Com­pany (NBC) network. NBC also carried Sockman and Fosdick, sponsored by the mainstream Federal Council of Churches. The council also sponsored Norman Vincent Peale’s The Art of Living broadcast, a twenty-­year preface to his 1952 Power of Positive Thinking, which sold millions of copies and made his brand of “practical Chris­tian­ity” a touchstone across Protestant Amer­i­ca.58

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Although Manhattan emerged between 1945 and 1960 as a major center for religious tele­vi­sion, the startling cost of the medium hobbled denominational broadcasting. Only one of New York’s major clergy noticeably thrived on tele­vi­sion. Positive Thinking with Norman Vincent Peale, a thirty-­minute program, did not garner especially strong ratings; somewhat ironically, Peale was too taciturn to win over viewers. What’s Your Trou­ble, a fifteen-­minute Christian advice program with Peale’s wife Ruth lasted more than a de­cade, but in its last years, it was frequently relegated to less attractive timeslots. It was Sheen who r­ eally took off on tele­ vi­sion. He was the first priest many non-­Catholics had ever heard, and his charisma, wit, and pointed learning won as much regard for religion broadly as it did for Catholicism specifically.59

Along with the built environment and the media, sacralization came to another key space of life in New York: schools. The historical details of public school bible reading in New York are hazy, which is somewhat surprising given the city’s critical role in bible publishing. We do know that teachers commonly read from the Protestant King James bible in colonial and early nineteenth-­century schools. The state then regularized the practice in 1844. Schools could require bible reading, but verses ­were to be read “without note or comment,” and each district could choose the bible its teachers would use. In 1903 New York’s state superintendent of schools observed that the bible had been read for years in New York City schools as the law stipulated, but he provided few details about the practice. Sixty years l­ater, one ­woman still unhappily remembered the military-­style bible reading she experienced as a child at a New York City public school assembly in the 1910s. Writing to the Banner of Bennington, Vermont, ­after the US Supreme Court declared public school bible reading unconstitutional in 1963, Florence Winchell recalled an “austere teacher or the principal”  who “gave instructions on the position of each child that would suggest reverence. To be sure that all was as it should be, she stepped to the left front corner, then to the right . . . ​then stood in front and read from the Bible.” 60 Assemblies prob­ably ­were the most common forum for bible reading in New York’s public schools from the 1890s to 1963, although the



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evidence for that claim is incomplete. At some point the city’s Board of Education ­adopted a bylaw stipulating that “regular assemblies of all schools ­shall be opened by reading to the pupils a portion of the Bible without comment,” but it is not clear when exactly this came about. A 1917 Board of Education pamphlet on school assemblies included a sample of bible verses read at PS 64 in Lower Manhattan but did not specify that schools w ­ ere required to use the par­tic­u­lar verses. In 1951 the New York State Board of Regents recommended that all public schools open each day with a twenty-­two-­word prayer, which quickly became known as the “Regents’ Prayer.” But this was optional. For two years the New York City Board of Education heard vigorous support for and heated opposition to the prayer, then sidestepped the contretemps with m ­ usic. Schools ­were ordered to open with students reciting the pledge of allegiance, a­ fter which they would sing the odd and prayerlike fourth stanza of the patriotic song “Amer­ic­ a”: Our ­father’s God to Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee we sing. Long may our land be bright, With freedom’s holy light, Protect us by Thy might, ­Great God, our King!61

None of the city’s major newspapers appears to have covered the ­actual practice of school bible reading, w ­ hether in the 1890s or the 1960s, or the singing of the verse from “Amer­i­ca.” Nor did newspapers explore the consequences for city schools when the Supreme Court declared public school prayers, including the Regents’ Prayer, unconstitutional in 1962. Similarly t­here apparently was no reporting on the effects of the 1963 bible-­reading decision in New York schools. What we do know is that religious leaders and civic notables offered mixed reactions, with Catholic leaders and many mainstream Protestant clergy denouncing the Court’s rulings and liberal Protestants and most Jews backing them. This was no g­ reat surprise, as public school bible reading had long divided Protestants in New York and elsewhere. Alongside supporters

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­ ere Protestants who opposed the practice in princi­ple and ­others who w opposed it in implementation. Critics saw school prayers as perfunctory—­ “dog-­ trotted,” one wrote—­ leaving indifferent students unmoved and pious ones unfulfilled. As for bible readings, a chagrinned “Protestant authority” told the New York Post in 1962 that the exercise, in city public schools, was a shambles, “unintelligible if not inaudible . . . ​rushed through by rote and no one knows what’s being said. It’s a farce.” 62 Against the superficiality of school prayer and bible reading, New Yorkers helped to create a separate mechanism for sacralizing public schools, one that survived court challenges. In 1904 George Eckman, minister at Manhattan’s St. Paul’s Methodist Church, conceived what became known as “released time”: a program in which participating students would be dismissed from school to attend religious classes in nearby churches. Pastor George Wenner of Christ Lutheran Church in Lower Manhattan then developed a substantial proposal for released time, which he introduced at the 1906 Protestant Inter-­Church Conference at Car­ne­gie Hall. In his 1907 book Religious Education and the Public Schools, Wenner justified the initiative: since teaching religion in public schools that enrolled such a “cosmopolitan population” was impossible, schools should “restore to the church a portion of the time which has been surrendered.” Wenner cited support for the proposal from Protestants but also from Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes at Shearith Israel Synagogue and ­Father Thomas McMillan at St. Paul the Apostle Church. “Give us Wednesday after­noon,” Wenner pleaded.63 But New York officials ­didn’t bite. Instead, released time took off elsewhere—­first in Gary, Indiana, in 1914, then in hundreds more towns and cities across the Midwest and Northeast. A 1915 effort to bring the “Gary plan” to New York City met vociferous opposition. John Dewey, then a professor at Columbia University, opposed it, as did a speaker at a boisterous Bronx meeting who “jumped upon a chair and said that he had two c­ hildren who had never heard of God and yet got double A in their examinations, and that churches and religions ­ought to be abolished.” Further, smaller, efforts emerged in the 1920s, then faded. In 1931, with support from major Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy, the Greater New York Interfaith Committee proposed a Bible Study Plan that would give high school credit for bible courses taught in synagogues and churches ­after school. But the plan collapsed amid substantial opposition and the



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Interfaith Committee’s apparent inability to work out teacher accreditation and curriculum issues with the state department of education.64 Success fi­nally came a de­cade ­later, as Catholic, Protestant, and supportive Jewish groups coordinated around a more civic-­leaning message. Religious education would not only provide instruction in faith and practice but also in “character” and “morals.” Amid the advance of socialism and fascism in Eu­rope, the co­ali­tion pressed concerns about “ideologies inimical to all the faiths.” In 1940 a law facilitating released-­time religious education passed in the New York state legislature with huge majorities, and the following year, parents w ­ ere empowered to require that their ­children be discharged for an hour each week to offsite locations “for religious observance and education.” Volunteers would chaperone the students from the schools to the designated churches and synagogues.65 The law did not provide the full after­noon of religious study that George Wenner had wanted, but it was enough for many New York State families. Beginning with just three thousand students in 1941, by May 1943 the program had expanded to more than a hundred thousand, including about twenty ­percent of all elementary school students. Some Protestants wanted more, expressing concern three years ­later about “800,000 ‘pagan’ young p ­ eople” who w ­ ere not taking part in released time. But most Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders involved in the program seemed satisfied. It was, in any case, not clear that churches and synagogues could h ­ andle more students. This limitation, however, turned out to be a saving grace for the program. In 1948 the US Supreme Court ruled in McCollum v. Board of Education that released-­time religious instruction on school property was unconstitutional, but the decision did not affect New York’s program of instruction held in churches, synagogues, and community centers. ­Today released time continues in New York City, and throughout New York State, but in drastically reduced numbers and breadth.66

By the 1940s religion of nearly incomprehensible variety was everywhere in Manhattan—­stuffed visually, aurally, and tactilely into the metropolitan landscape and the minds of t­ hose who called it home. Religion was not inescapable.Yet it could be said that religion presented itself in Manhattan and New York City more vigorously, with greater innovation and

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comprehensiveness, than in any Eu­ro­pean city and at least as thoroughly and creatively as in any other American city. Urbanization, so feared by religious leaders in the 1880s and 1890s, in fact created conditions and opportunities that inspired religious activity and expression in Manhattan. Highly varied institutional styles encouraged multiple groups and individuals to tackle the conditions of the moment in diverse ways. New Yorkers had no trou­ble finding places to worship, w ­ hether ­grand, permanent, and technologically sophisticated or ­humble and temporary. Concentrated population made religious advertising effective, and public transit ensured that worshippers could access the congregations whose messages appealed to them. Religion’s vigorous presence in newspapers, journals, magazines, books, rec­ords, and radio and tele­vi­sion programs—­produced in and around Manhattan—­brought faith far beyond traditional institutional bound­ aries. Rather than compromise traditional worship and identity, the instruments of modernity stimulated religious sensibilities, helping to preserve and extend faiths seemingly threatened by unpre­ce­dented urban pluralism and density.

FOUR

12 Modernizing God in Jim Crow Manhattan

In May 1953 the prominent New York City publisher Alfred A. Knopf released James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Its dust jacket wistfully posed Baldwin’s principal characters, the Grimes ­family, on a quiet Harlem block before their storefront church, the “­Temple of the Fire Baptized.”1 Go Tell It on the Mountain told an empathetic story about ravaged adults and a hopeful child seeking redemption in a Harlem holiness congregation. The nearly startled New York Times reviewer caught Baldwin’s benevolent toughness about religion: “He has a curious attitude t­ oward religion. He re­spects it. He does not find it comical, or anthropological, or pathetic. At his most grotesque, he ­will still have us know it in its own terms.”2 By 1963 Baldwin’s re­spect was gone. In The Fire Next Time, he denounced Amer­ic­ a, racism, and Chris­tian­ity with a rage that still stings. Baldwin renewed the critique of Harlem’s storefront churches that had flourished since the 1910s by describing his own experience as an adolescent preacher: “I knew how to work on a congregation u ­ ntil the last dime was surrendered—it was not very hard to do—­and I knew where the money for ‘the Lord’s work’ went.” But Baldwin reached far beyond wayward preachers and even Chris­tian­ity to the divine itself. In the realm of power, Chris­tian­ity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty. . . . ​If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.3

The dust jacket of James Baldwin’s 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain misnamed the novel’s storefront church as ­Temple of the ­Free Baptised. The correct name, ­Temple of the Fire Baptized, may have been inspired by a real Harlem storefront church, Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God. Courtesy Penguin Random House LLC. Image provided by Givens Collection of Black Lit­er­a­ture and Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.



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The transformation of black religious life in Manhattan between the 1880s and the era of Baldwin’s adolescence in the late 1930s and early 1940s captures one effect of urban modernity. Religious expression inside Manhattan’s poorest community was ­shaped and reshaped by migration from the Ca­rib­bean and the American South, and by the effects of discrimination. Many of the transformations in black religious and secular life paralleled t­ hose of Manhattan’s varied Eu­ro­pean immigrant communities. But while Eu­ro­pean immigrants, over time, w ­ ere more or less assimilated into the white world, race prejudice against blacks in New York has endured since Africans’ first appearance in the city. As a result the black strug­gle with urban modernity, including religion, looked substantially dif­fer­ent from the strug­gles of Manhattan’s other immigrant Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Across the period of our concern, the culture of Jim Crow—if not the law—­pervaded New York, forcing urban blacks to adapt and follow unique paths to salvation, civic and spiritual.

Modernity transformed blacks’ historical presence in New York City. In 1820 ­there ­were eleven thousand black New Yorkers, comprising about 9 ­percent of the population. But by 1860 their number had grown to just 12,500, while the white population topped 800,000. Thirty years ­later the black population had doubled to twenty-­four thousand, while the white population had jumped to 1.5 million, leaving the black proportion of the population stagnant at about 1.5 ­percent. Then, ­things changed. On the heels of massive Jewish and Catholic migration from Eastern and Southern Eu­rope came the first rush of blacks from the US South and the Ca­rib­bean, pushing New York’s black population to thirty-­six thousand in 1900. By 1920 the number of blacks had tripled to one hundred and ten thousand, about 5 ­percent of the city’s population. At first, they lived mostly in Lower Manhattan. But while ­there was no Jim Crow legislation in New York, informal housing segregation was rampant, and soon enough blacks ­were moving northward to the Tenderloin. When the Tenderloin whitened and was rebranded as Midtown, Manhattan’s blacks went north once more, this time to what would become Amer­i­ca’s largest and most famous black ghetto: Harlem.4 A ­century before, in the Revolutionary and early national periods, black Manhattanites formed their first in­de­pen­dent congregations. That

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they saw fit to do so was itself a marker of segregation and discrimination at a time when black New Yorkers ­were enslaved; the state did not end slavery u ­ ntil 1827. Tensions with majority whites in the John Street Methodist Church led blacks to withdraw in 1796 and to acquire their own building in 1801. They remained within the larger Methodist Episcopal denomination ­until 1821, when they joined in creating the new African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion. Abyssinian Baptist Church became the city’s first black Baptist congregation in 1808, when the largely white First Baptist Church refused to abandon segregated seating. St. Philip’s Episcopal was or­ga­nized in 1809, Asbury Methodist in 1813, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal in 1819, First Colored (­later Shiloh) Presbyterian Church in 1821, Zion Baptist in 1832, and the Colored Congregational Church in 1845. ­ These remained the city’s principal black congregations well into the late nineteenth c­ entury. They ­were scattered across Lower Manhattan, serving black residents not yet isolated in a single ghetto.5 As Manhattan’s black population expanded substantially between the 1880s and the 1920s, three locations north of Lower Manhattan each developed a substantial black presence. One was the West Side district between 23rd and 53rd Streets, known as the Tenderloin ­because of its brothels. Like a good steak, an illegal brothel was a fine source of nutrition—­for policemen, nourished by the bribes of proprietors. Another site of settlement for blacks driven from Lower Manhattan was San Juan Hill, on the West Side between 59th and 65th Streets. ­Today, this is the area of Lincoln Center. Fi­nally, some trekked much farther north, to Harlem, beginning at about 96th Street on the East Side and moving diagonally west at 155th Street.6 Congregations followed as worshipers moved. By 1906 the New York Charities Directory listed no “colored” congregations anywhere in Lower Manhattan. All of the old churches had e­ ither shut down or moved out. Mount Olivet Baptist, only or­ga­nized in 1876, constructed a sanctuary on West 53rd Street in the late 1880s. St. Philip’s Episcopal moved to West 25th Street in 1886, and Bethel AME to the same street in 1894. St.  Benedict the Moor, the city’s first black Catholic congregation, opened in 1869 and moved to West 53rd Street in 1898. Union Baptist, barely or­ga­nized in 1898, moved to West 63rd Street in 1901. Manhattan’s two oldest black congregations moved shortly ­after, Abyssinian Bap-



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tist to West 40th  Street in 1902 and ­Mother AME Zion far north to 89th  Street in 1904. The Third Moravian Church opened on West 63rd Street between 1900 and 1903, and St. Cyprian’s Chapel, an Episcopal mission, constructed a small sanctuary on West 63rd Street about 1905.7 The relocation of Manhattan’s black congregations transformed their character and presence in the city. Visual and physical changes stood out most obviously. Black congregations acquired larger, more impressive sanctuaries. Like many white Protestants and Jews whose Manhattan congregations moved, black congregations often repurposed sanctuaries that originally served other religious groups. Mount Olivet Baptist’s new sanctuary was doubly repurposed, in a way. Formerly occupied by the white Fifty-­third Street Baptist Church, the building had been constructed from granite sal­vaged from the demolished Church of the Puritans in 1870. Abyssinian Baptist occupied the Fourth German Mission Reformed Church. St.  Philip’s Episcopal had been the West Twenty-­ fifth Street United Presbyterian Church. St.  Benedict the Moor had been the Second German Church of the Evangelical Association. When ­Mother AME Zion moved from West 89th Street to Central Harlem in 1914, it purchased a building previously used by several white Episcopal congregations.8 Building and buying t­ hese monumental sanctuaries was an expensive proposition. In 1912 ­Mother Zion AME’s trustees faced criticism about extravagant spending in the face of high mortgage costs and had to defend themselves at the denomination’s New York annual conference. The Crisis, a magazine published from the Manhattan offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored P ­ eople (NAACP), discouraged “extravagant building and mere ostentation.” The New York Age, a black newspaper, made the same point, criticizing preachers’ emphasis on “church building and money raising.” As James Weldon Johnson—­the poet, essayist, and, in the 1920s, NAACP executive director—­put it, black Chris­tian­ity too often had a “gross mercenary spirit” enamored of “costly ­temples.”9 Such criticism, however, did l­ittle to deter ministers. ­After all, post1880 black congregations ­were growing in numbers and aspirations, and the clergy w ­ ere not about to tut-­tut communities for taking pride in their accomplishments. What is more, the grandeur of black spaces elevated

Mount Olivet Baptist’s elegant sanctuary on West 53rd Street, purchased from a white church about 1884, was sold to a Florida developer and demolished a­ fter the congrega­ tion moved to Harlem in 1925, its history erased. Reproduced from Daniel W. Wisher, Echoes from the Gospel Trumpet: Three Sermons and a Paper (1896) by Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.



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the stature of t­hose clergy at a time when they w ­ ere taking on greater civic importance. Late nineteenth-­century black preachers—­all ­were men, since none of the black denominations yet ordained w ­ omen—­worked hard to engage with the press, especially the New York Freeman, Globe, and Age. And ­because discrimination stalled development of urban black business, philanthropy, and education, ­there ­were few other institutions to which residents could turn. As a result, clergy remained the most power­ful figures in the city’s black communities well into the twentieth ­century.10 Manhattan’s post-1880 black clergy, many of them mi­grants from the South, took more and less formal paths to the pulpit. Some, especially Baptist ministers, had only their experience and self-­taught wisdom to draw on. Baptist congregations, white and black, authorized preachers on the basis of their sermonizing and other abilities, regardless of ­whether they had college or seminary training. Daniel Wisher arrived in Manhattan in 1876 with no degrees, but he did have preaching licenses from ­Virginia Baptist congregations. Within two years, he was the founding minister at Mount Olivet Baptist, which became one of the most prominent black churches in the city—­a distinction it still holds. Another Virginian, George H. Sims, walked a ­middle road. He migrated to Manhattan as an adolescent and received private instruction from faculty at A. B. Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance training school, where he also worked. Eventually he was ordained in one of Manhattan’s black Baptist congregations. He then rented storefronts on West 63rd Street, where he formed what would become Union Baptist Church. Other clergy migrating from the south a­ fter 1880 studied at established colleges and seminaries. Among them w ­ ere Charles Satchell Morris of Abyssinian Baptist, who studied at Newton Theological Seminary, outside Boston.Thomas Henderson of Bethel AME studied at Oberlin. Charles T. Walker, who succeeded Wisher at Mount Olivet Baptist, received his degree from Atlanta’s Augusta Institute. Pierce Butler Thompkins, who founded St. James Presbyterian in 1895, studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Union Theological Seminary.11 The re­spect afforded Manhattan’s black clergy was clear from their prominent roles in denominations otherwise d ­ ominated by southerners. Although the bulk of the congregations represented at the National Baptist Convention’s 1903 meeting ­were from the South, the final Sunday

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morning sermon was delivered by Abyssinian Baptist’s Charles Satchell Morris. ­Mother Zion’s initiative in forming the AME Zion denomination gave the congregation and its ministers special recognition in both African Methodist Episcopal and AME Zion denominations. Post-1880 black congregations appealed to the local and regional loyalties of their largely mi­grant communities, just as white congregations did. St. Cyprian’s Episcopal in San Juan Hill reached out specifically to mi­grants from the British West Indies, where many of the recent arrivals had worshiped in Church of ­England congregations. The Third Moravian Church on 63rd  Street attracted Ca­rib­bean mi­grants from the Danish West Indies, where Moravians had conducted missions since the mid-­eighteenth ­century. In 1906 Bethel AME held a South Carolina Day, with the sermon delivered by a Charleston minister. The church’s South Carolina Circle was prominently featured in its hundredth-­anniversary book in 1919. Elsewhere, Union Baptist’s Virginia-­born minister George Sims recruited a thriving membership of Southern mi­grants.12 Mount Olivet Baptist staged easily the most affecting effort to re­create a region and culture that would feel like home to Southern mi­grants. In 1884, when Wisher’s congregation rededicated its newly purchased sanctuary on 53rd Street, it brought in the ­Virginia Jubilee Singers and three white New York City abolitionist clergy, including Henry Ward Beecher. ­ ere surrounded by “300 According to a report from the Age, the guests w pounds of sugar, bales of cotton and watermelons from the South, all to commemorate the old days of slavery, in which nearly all the members of the pre­sent congregation ­were born.” Fifteen years l­ater W. E. B. Du Bois observed that Mount Olivet still was appealing to Georgia and ­Virginia mi­grants.13 Manhattan’s black Protestant clergymen joined white counter­parts in focusing on Christian doctrine, salvation, and morality. Thus in January  1892 a visiting minister at M ­ other Zion AME “delivered an old fashioned and inspiring sermon from Rev. i, 18: ‘I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore.” This was followed by another visitor at the eve­ning ser­vice, who “preached from I John iv, 8: ‘God is love.’ ” Methodist and Baptist congregations held frequent revivals that would go on for days at a time. St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal reported in February 1905 that its “revival continues with g­ reat interest.” A week ­later Union Baptist Church closed a successful revival



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a­ fter bringing fifty-­eight new members. In March Abyssinian Baptist began a two-­week revival.14 Black clergy also confronted moral issues, especially drunkenness. Again, white preachers shared the concern, but black clergy had a distinctive proj­ect: to combat negative white stereotyping of black be­hav­ior. H. A. Monroe, the minister at St. Mark’s, was appalled by the “horrible poverty, depravity and drunkenness of the lower o ­ rders” he witnessed during a summer in E ­ ngland in 1890, which he saw as evidence against “the ‘Superior race’ theory” that underwrote American bigotry. But t­ hese concerns ­were also directed inward. An eve­ning ser­vice at Shiloh Presbyterian in 1888 featured what the Age described as “a most impressive talk on ‘­Woman’s Work in the Cause of Temperance.’ ” Twenty years l­ater St. Mark’s gave its Sunday pulpit to an Anti-­Saloon League “superintendent” and allocated its Sunday offerings to support the League’s work. The Age, which printed endless stories that bound drunkenness to f­ amily dysfunction, assaults, crime, and general mayhem, highlighted the work of “colored ­women” in the largely white ­Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.15 Clergy believed that men posed special concerns and w ­ ere accordingly harsh in their criticism. In 1906 Bethel AME’s Thomas Henderson “denounced the wickedness prevailing in our city” and warned that men, including black men, might be “justly imprisoned” for their vices. “If our young men continue to frequent dens of evil and get into trou­ble,” Henderson thundered, “we must leave them to pay the penalty.” St. Philip’s hosted the ­women’s White Cross Society, whose advocates promoted “absolute personal purity” reinforced by “the princi­ple that the law of purity was equally binding on men and w ­ omen.” Ministers in all the denominations preached on the duties men owed to ­women. In 1890 St. Philip’s offered sermons “preached especially for men” during Advent, as did St. Benedict the Moor in 1910.16 Ministers and congregations also invested considerable energy in uplift—­the effort to improve conditions for blacks as a w ­ hole by promoting education and emphasizing the accomplishments of blacks who managed to succeed in white-­dominated society. When Reverdy Ransom of Bethel AME encouraged personal growth “along moral, spiritual and intellectual lines,” he was articulating a theme that underwrote the activities of many congregational organ­izations. The larger congregations especially

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formed lyceum socie­ties offering musical programs and lectures by church members. Bethel’s Literary Forum heard the orator and journalist Roscoe Conkling Simmons speak on “Signs of the Times” in 1908. St. James’s “young members” revived their literary society in 1909. Metropolitan AME touted its lyceum as “quite an addition to the church,” especially b ­ ecause it kept “young men and ­women interested in the good ­things.” ­Toward that end, the lyceum announced that a March  1909 meeting would feature “a paper, written by one of [our] young ­women,” on the subject, “What Good Is a ­Woman.” “All gentlemen who do not know what good a ­woman is ­will please come to this meeting.”17 Large and mid-­size black congregations moving into Harlem took the lyceum model with them. Salem Methodist’s literary society met Sunday after­noons through the 1920s, Mount Olivet’s Young ­People’s Union literary society met Wednesdays, and on Tuesdays Union Baptist offered “Literary [Fare] and Socializing.” Often, if not always, programs stressed blacks in the arts and po­liti­cal worlds. In November 1922 M ­ other Zion AME’s J. C. Price Lyceum presented a “sacred concert” with ­music “by colored composers only.” In January of the following year, congregants heard the editor of the Chicago Defender. To celebrate a c­ entury of city Presbyterianism, Rendall Memorial Presbyterian Church heard alumni from Howard and Lincoln Universities and representatives of the Lucy Laney League, all touting education. Rendall’s Henry Highland Garnet Forum, named for the black antebellum abolitionist minister, heard the black poet Louise Alston—­the wife of Harry T. Burleigh, a famous arranger of black spirituals.18 If congregations asked members to better themselves, it is not ­because black Manhattanites w ­ ere blind to external sources of the economic and social hardships they faced. Manhattan’s post-1880 black clergy and congregations responded vigorously to white bigotry and could be found at the forefront of the era’s civil rights activism. Chris­tian­ity was hardly incidental to their antiracist goals, as Abyssinian Baptist’s Charles Satchell Morris illustrated. In 1904 Morris protested the injustice of the Times’ crime coverage, which featured frequent and lurid stories about black New Yorkers. Rather than report on black achievements, Morris observed, the paper preferred to focus on the “one in one hundred thousand” who did wrong. “How un-­Christlike,” the minister lamented. The Times’ voy­eur­is­tic accounts ­were yet another expression of “the relent-



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less caste of color that begins at the cradle and pursues us to the grave.” A year ­later Morris attended the first Niagara Movement meeting, which led to the creation of the NAACP.19 The relentless caste of color indeed pursued blacks everywhere in the city. In the absence of formal Jim Crow, theaters still tried to seat blacks only in balconies. And if the law ­wouldn’t segregate housing, the public would. A retired white policeman led Harlem’s Property ­Owners’ Protective Association in securing restrictive covenants that prohibited real estate sales to blacks. Financiers got involved, too. An unexceptional Times classified advertisement offered “$23,000 to be invested in 5-­story tenements (no colored).” Insurance companies refused to cover black-­ owned business, and employers refused to hire black workers. Most job advertisements did not need to be explicit about the point, but some employers took extra precautions, resulting in listings such as, “Cook, white, experienced” and “Cook (white) wanted by a f­amily of 3 adults in an apartment where another in help is employed.” Blacks who w ­ ere hired by whites could expect to be abused. The diary of Karl Feininger—­a violinist, m ­ usic theorist, and committed follower of the New Thought religious movement—­offers a win­dow into the mind of a white employer of black domestics. Between 1911 and 1914, he filled his diary with anti-­ black invective. “Very few of ­these ­people are above the child state of mind,” he wrote. Blacks ­were “monkey-­like in their mischievousness . . . ​ petit graf­ters and blackmailers . . . ​unteachable.” For some reason he hired them anyway, even though they “­won’t work or want to be paid for not working.” Evidently Feininger’s servants did not see themselves as loafers so much as exploited and underpaid. He described how one cook rebelled, calling his wife, the pianist Jane Pottinger Feininger, a “ ‘slave driver’ who would take the last drop of blood out of a poor girl.” The consequence? “Jane discharged Alice.”20 White Christians of several denominations resisted the growing black presence in Harlem. We have already seen that St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, a white congregation, supported moving the all-­black Episcopalian St. Philip’s congregation nearby in 1907 to avoid integrating St. Andrew’s. The Colored American Magazine, published from Manhattan offices, pointed up the hy­poc­risy. Christ commanded followers “to preach the Gospel to ALL men.” Perhaps the St. Andrew’s minister thought Christ “was ­running his missionary propaganda with a ‘Jim Crow’

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a­ ttachment,” the magazine ruminated. In 1914, as the black St.  James Presbyterian was preparing to move from 51st Street to Harlem, the Age reported that a New York Presbytery meeting about the move rivaled “in bitterness the many debates of the Presbytery on the heresy and unsound faith of Union Seminary gradu­ates.”21 As the most influential figures in New York’s black communities, clergy ­were at the forefront of protests against racism, ­whether propagated by white churches or any other white-­dominated institution. Black clergy led a mass meeting at Shiloh Presbyterian Church in 1890 to protest discrimination by the New Jersey Steamboat Com­pany. William H. Brook, minister of St. Mark’s, formed the Citizens Protective League to demand an investigation of a vicious 1900 white riot that left seventy blacks injured and crippled. In 1905 black clergy denounced Thomas Dixon’s racist play The Clansman and unsuccessfully petitioned the police to close the play on the ground that it was “immoral.” (A month ­earlier the police had shut down George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a play featuring a character who is a former prostitute, on the basis of immorality.) In 1906 ministers at St.  Mark’s and Mount Olivet joined ­lawyers, physicians, and social reformers to or­ga­nize the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of the Negro in New York, which prefaced formation of the National Urban League in 1910.22 In the aftermath of race riots in East St. Louis, Waco, and Memphis, black New York ministers led the famous July 1917 ­Silent March to protest Southern disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, and the wider panoply of Jim Crow indignities. Between five and ten thousand blacks marched silently from Midtown to Lower Manhattan. They w ­ ere a power­ful sight, with a line of c­ hildren in the lead, followed by ­women dressed in white and fi­nally men attired in suits. The NewYork Tribune reported that “virtually e­ very negro church, Sunday school and society in New York was represented.” Many marchers carried signs that bore religious messages: “Suffer ­little ­children and forbid them not,” “We have Church property worth $76,000,000,” “­Mother, do lynchers go to heaven?”23 The cross currents of alienation, poverty, and discrimination buffeting Manhattan’s black mi­grants and congregations also made for complicated regional, class, and educational tensions within the churches. Mount Olivet was a case in point. Wisher, its first pastor, was one of the city’s most prosperous blacks in 1890s. He owned homes in Harlem and



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lived in Jersey City, where, according to a New York Times profile, “his carriages and livery are among the [city’s] most stylish.” But in 1898, when Wisher declared himself a Demo­crat and cast his lot with Tammany Hall, it was Mount Olivet’s poorest worshipers who backed him. “Hisses broke out” among the rest of the community. Critics termed Wisher’s supporters “largely of the more ignorant class of members, most of whom are natives of the South.” The Times effusively conveyed their dialects, exemplifying the racial voyeurism that Abyssinian Baptist’s Satchell Morris would denounce a few years ­later: “What yo’ doin’ t­ here obstructin’ de road to the New Jerus’l’m so’s we ­can’t get t­ here even by shov’n’ an’ push’n?” Mount Olivet expelled Wisher, who formed a new Baptist congregation. Eventually he was dismissed ­there as well and briefly led a mission church sponsored by the AME Church Zion. He closed his ­career as minister of the Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, New Jersey.24 The tensions at Mount Olivet persisted a­ fter Wisher’s tenure. Five years ­after Wisher left, the catalyst was a proposal to raise the salary of his successor, M. W. Gilbert. Gilbert, who held a doctorate in divinity and had founded Florida Baptist Acad­emy, made clear the gap in learning and cultivation between himself and his flock. They thought it “a crime for a minister of the gospel to be intelligent,” he charged. They wanted “the old plantation ‘whangdoodle’ style of oratory . . . ​someone who w ­ ill pander to their emotions and have what they call a revival all through the year.” They also rejected ministers “who ­will take a high moral stand in the pulpit and who w ­ ill condemn immorality, whiskey drinking and reckless disregard of their marital obligations.” Gilbert forced a confrontation by offering his resignation. Ultimately, he continued as minister ­until 1910, when he accepted a pulpit in Knoxville. Shortly thereafter he became president of Selma University, in Alabama.25 One way to smooth out frictions within church communities was to gather congregants in clubs devoted to their worldly interests. Like their white counter­parts, black churches ­were inventive in this re­spect. Alongside its Sunday school, Mount Olivet Baptist boasted a “young p ­ eople’s association,” a “Flower committee of ladies,” a ­women’s committee “­under the supervision of the ever faithful and active Mrs. Mary Buttler,” and the “Excelsior Musical and Literary Association.” In 1913 Harlem’s well-­heeled St. Philip’s Episcopal publicized two men’s organ­ izations, including a Boy Scout troop, and four ­women’s. Twenty-­nine

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church clubs at Abyssinian Baptist, from the Young Converts to the Sunshine Band, raised over $4,500 for the congregation in 1905. Emmanuel Church, a new congregation formed in 1913 ­after a dispute within ­Mother Zion AME, was enormously active. In less than two years, with the “Optimism and Unseen Support” of Minister Richard M. Bolden, the church or­ ga­ nized a Ladies Progressive Club, Literary Society, Morning Glory Circle, Ladies Orchestra, Energetic Circle, Emmanuel Social Center, and “L. L. and H.” and “S. M. and I.” socie­ties. It also had the sorts of religious sub-­organizations—­Sunday school, missionary society—­characteristic of ambitious communities.26 Church fairs became as ubiquitous among black congregations as they did among white Catholics and Protestants. Typically held just before Christmas, fairs offered goods and games that supported congregational activities, mortgage payments, and savings funds for anticipated moves. Shiloh Presbyterian proudly proclaimed that visitors who attended its November  1885 fair could “buy goods very cheap for the holidays.” St. Mark’s hailed its November 1890 fair as “the event of the season.” Two de­cades ­later the St. Mark’s fair was still ­going strong, selling holiday items and regaling attendees with per­for­mances by its “first-­class musical ­union.” Even in the 1880s and 1890s congregations reported fair receipts of up to six hundred dollars, and in 1905 Abyssinian’s fair contributed almost a thousand dollars to its building fund alone, equal to over twenty-­five thousand dollars t­oday. That was a remarkable sum in Manhattan’s poorest community.27 The fairs and clubs highlighted a state of affairs familiar to white Christians and Jews as well: w ­ omen played vibrant roles in congregational life, while receiving unequal recognition. Among Protestants, white and black alike, w ­ omen dominated membership roles. In 1906 white Methodists reported that about 65 ­percent of their members across the nation w ­ ere ­women (roughly 1.7 million ­women and 1 million men). Among white Baptists, 61 ­percent of members w ­ ere ­women (3.3 million w ­ omen and 2.1 million men). The proportions ­were similar in the AME and AME Zion Churches. Both w ­ ere 63 ­percent w ­ omen: 304,000 w ­ omen and 177,000 men in the AME Church and 113,000 ­women and 67,000 men in the AME Zion Church. Photo­graphs of Bethel AME’s “classes,” taken for its one hundredth anniversary in 1919, illustrate the pattern. (AME congregations ­were divided into classes of a dozen to thirty mem-



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­ omen dominated the membership rolls of Bethel African American Episcopal Church W as fully as they did in most Protestant churches, white or black. Bethel’s Class Two, shown ­here, is a representative section of its membership. Reproduced from Centennial Cele­ bration, Bethel A.M.E. Church (1919) by Drew University Methodist Library, Madison, NJ.

bers, and each class received separate spiritual guidance.) ­Women predominated throughout Bethel’s more than thirty classes, sometimes strikingly so: twenty-­three ­women and four men comprised Class Two, and sixteen ­women and five men comprised Class Three.28 However, denominational regulations usually l­imited formal leadership positions to men. ­After years of debate, AME Zion agreed in princi­ple to ordain ­women in 1900 but did so infrequently. Other black denominations, like most white counter­parts, did not ordain ­women ­until the 1960s—if they ever did so. Denominational rules also typically ­limited trusteeships and Sunday school directorships to men. Even auxiliary jobs ­were for men alone. ­There ­were neither female sextons to care for church grounds nor female stewards to manage financial contributions and church rec­ords. The 1896 Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church specified that stewards “must be men of solid piety” and “of good natu­ral or acquired ability to transact the temporal business of the church.” Ministers might appoint ­women as “stewardesses,” but only

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“to assist the stewards in the discharge of their duties.” Alongside formal restrictions, informalities underlined ­women’s subservient roles in black church governance. When Mount Olivet’s “ladies of the church prepared a collation” for a ministerial conference, “the ministers appreciated . . . ​ with their usual display of appetite.”29 Yet ­women ­were enormously devoted to their churches. Having documented the miserable wages black ­women typically received in early twentieth-­century New York, the reformer Mary White Ovington was all the more struck by their commitment to the lives of their congregations. “I know a young ­woman engaged in an exacting, skilled profession who spends her day of rest attending morning ser­vice, teaching Sunday-­ school, taking part of the young ­people’s lyceum in the late after­noon, and listening to a second sermon in the eve­ning,” Ovington wrote.30 ­Women staffed most Sunday school classes in black congregations, even when men headed the schools. Eight ­women and one man served as officers of Abyssinian Baptist’s “­children’s church” created in 1905. A photo­graph of Bethel AME’s 1919 Sunday school teachers and officers shows twenty-­two ­women and four men. The ­women ­were mostly teachers and directors of divisions within the school; among the men ­were the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and trea­surer. Congregations sought both male and female audiences for their lyceums and literary socie­ties, but event announcements suggest a focus on w ­ omen. Weekly accounts of church d ­ oings in the Age and Amsterdam News usually opened with accounts of ministers’ sermons but then often gave way to accounts of socie­ties and the ­women so frequently in charge. “Ladies Aid” socie­ties provided food for church occasions.31 Men headed many congregational and the formal denominational missionary socie­ties, but w ­ omen’s missionary organ­izations ­were more vigorous. This pattern held all over the country. As Mamie Steward, a black Kentucky Baptist observed in 1898, although “men are often associated with the work, . . . ​missionary enterprises are encouraged to look to w ­ oman as its most ardent friend and advocate.”32 And while in 1925 men held ­Mother Zion’s ministerial and trustee positions and occupied all twenty-­five positions as class leaders, ­women headed forty-­four of ­Mother Zion’s “auxiliaries” responsible for the congregation’s activities. By the 1930s Salem Methodist Episcopal counted more than 40 organ­ izations inside the congregation, most headed by ­women.33



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Well into the twentieth c­ entury, w ­ omen taught most Sunday school classes in both black and white Protestant congregations, although most Sunday school administrators w ­ ere men. At Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1919, twenty-­two ­women served as teachers and four men as administrators. Reproduced from Centennial Cele­bration, Bethel A.M.E. Church (1919) by Drew University Methodist Library, Madison, NJ.

All of this activity required considerable orga­nizational savvy, and black denominations had it. From early days, they embraced the precision of modern management. The AME’s 1896 Doctrine and Discipline, its “Twenty-­First Revised Edition,” approached five hundred pages of heavy detail. It laid out every­thing from AME theological princi­ples to precise responsibilities of church officers and even “regulations for singing.” The 1892 AME Zion version was over 250 pages. Yearly denominational meetings could last more than five days. ­There w ­ ere so many committee and orga­nizational reports to get through that, in 1905, the National Baptist Convention sought to corral them through meticulous time management. Organizers set the exact duration of each speech, sermon, and report. For instance, one after­noon featured twelve segments spaced across two and a half hours: a “Song Ser­vice” was allotted twenty minutes, a proposal for “Systematic Missionary Money-­ getting” ten.34

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With solid denominational institutions b ­ ehind them, Manhattan’s black congregations responded reasonably, if never perfectly, to the gentrification that forced their worshippers into Harlem ­after 1900. Over the course of the teens and twenties, the Tenderloin’s modest housing, saloons, brothels, and gambling dens w ­ ere torn down, replaced by large office buildings, expensive apartments, ­hotels, and block-­sized department stores—­Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bergdorf-­Goodman, Saks. Thus the Tenderloin became Midtown Manhattan, where increased housing costs and discrimination kept blacks at bay. By the end of the 1920s, the center of a relatively brief black life in the old Tenderloin had become almost entirely white. The October 31, 1928, issue of the Age advertised 130 apartments, only 5 of them below 100th Street. Two of the five sought “colored tenants” for apartments located in one of the only parts of Midtown that still welcomed blacks—­seedy Hell’s Kitchen, on the far west ends of 52nd and 55th Streets.35 By 1925 almost all of the Tenderloin’s black congregations had moved to Harlem, their once-­prominent physical presence in the Tenderloin effaced. St. Philip’s became a twelve-­story loft, and Abyssinian Baptist made way for a “high-­class” commercial building. Only the small Catholic Church of St.  Benedict the Moor remained on the far West Side, its black worshipers giving way to Hispanic Catholics de­cades ­later. The church was closed in 2017. Justice, if t­ here was any, came from the same rising real estate prices that ­were forcing black residents out of the Tenderloin. Congregations sold their properties at high prices that often drew headlines in both black and white newspapers: “St. Philip’s Sells Property on 25th Street for $140,000,” the Age reported in 1909; “Old Negro Church Sold: Abyssinian Baptist Edifice Brings $200,000—­To Move Uptown,” ran a 1922 Times headline; “Church May Sell 53d St. Property for $215,000,” the Herald Tribune announced in 1925, referring to St. Mark’s.36 Midtown’s loss was Harlem’s gain. By the mid-1920s, its array of congregations matched that in any Manhattan neighborhood, their sanctuaries conveying pride and accomplishment. St. Philip’s pointedly commissioned two black architects, Vertner Woodson Tandy and George Washington Foster, to design its nine-­hundred-­seat neo-­Gothic sanctuary on 134th Street in 1911. Its minister’s residence, church offices, and parish facilities ­were located in an extensive row of four-­story brownstones a



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St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church opened its substantial sanctuary and community center in Harlem in 1926. Courtesy New York City Municipal Archives.

block away. The church also owned ten “new-­law ­houses” built in response to municipal tenement reforms. The buildings contained 230 apartments and 30 shops. Mount Olivet’s 53rd Street sanctuary had already signaled its prominence, but its 1925 acquisition of the exquisite ­Temple Israel sanctuary at Lenox Ave­nue and 120th Street surely erased any doubts.37 St. Mark’s building, dedicated in 1926, consumed the entire block between 137th  and 138th  Streets at Edgecombe. With its semicircular sanctuary, gymnasium, Sunday school classrooms, meetings spaces, and full kitchen and dining fa­cil­i­ty, St. Mark’s immediately became one of Harlem’s largest religious facilities, as it remains ­today.38 The Crisis, the NAACP magazine, gloried in Abyssinian’s sanctuary and attached community building: The buildings are Gothic and Tudor in design, constructed of New York stone, trimmed with terra cotta, and make a striking appearance. The main auditorium has a seating capacity of 2000 and the

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lecture room, 1000. The pulpit platform is made of Italian marble. The ­Castle Com­pany of London executed the stained glass win­ dows. . . . ​The three manual pipe organ was built by the M. P. Moller Com­pany of Hagarstown, Md., especially for this church and is one of the largest and most modern of its kind. . . . ​It is estimated that 2500 ­people sat and stood for two hours during the [dedicatory] Recital and that more than 1000 failed to gain admittance.39

Black Harlem was also thick with smaller churches. Like the rest of Manhattan, only a few Harlem blocks lacked a sanctuary of some kind by the time Abyssinian, St. Mark’s, St. Philip’s, and Mount Olivet opened. Some blocks had two or three. West 129th Street may have been the most crowded. Salem Methodist and Metropolitan Baptist w ­ ere kiddy-­corner at 129th and Seventh Ave­nue (now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard), and if you walked ­toward Sixth Ave­nue, you’d pass St. Ambrose Episcopal, Rendall Memorial Presbyterian Church, and a Church of God before reaching the intersection.40 ­These spaces of worship routinely changed hands, reflecting the dynamism of Harlem’s religious life. A small sanctuary at 144 131st Street served four dif­fer­ent congregations in its first fifty years: the white Baptists who built it in 1883, then the Jewish Congregation Anshe Emeth, followed by a Seventh Day Adventist mission to Harlem blacks, and fi­nally Friendship Baptist, which purchased the space in 1937 and still worships ­there. The sanctuary at 37 West 119th Street likewise served four congregations: the Reformed Presbyterian community that built it in 1887, a Disciples of Christ congregation, the Jewish Congregation Mount Zion, and Emanuel AME, which still worships t­ here a­ fter moving from San Juan Hill in 1926.41 It was not unusual for congregations to bounce around. Walker Memorial Baptist rented three dif­fer­ent halls before purchasing a sanctuary on 122nd street in 1908. Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness, formed in 1918, worshipped in an apartment on 126th Street and an Eighth Ave­nue hall, which also served at dif­fer­ent times in the 1920s and 1930s as a ­women’s clothing store, a casino, an event space, a butcher shop, and a meeting room for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. In 1943 Mount Olive Fire fi­nally purchased a small sanctuary of its own on 122nd Street. The congregation still worships ­there, in what used to be the white Second Reformed Presbyterian Church.42

The members of Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church, founded in 1918, moved from one rented space to another for a quarter-­century before purchasing this former Presbyterian sanctuary, where the congregation still worships. Courtesy Christopher Brazee, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, 2009.

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Harlem’s expanding congregations employed all the techniques of fund­rais­ing and finance learned in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill before 1880. The larger congregations, such as Abyssinian Baptist, St.  Philip’s, and St.  Mark’s, undertook long-­range fund­rais­ing plans that achieved remarkable success. Some bought Harlem properties several years before they moved. St. Philip’s purchased Harlem lots in 1906, raised funds for four years, then constructed a new sanctuary in 1910–1911. Abyssinian Baptist purchased Harlem lots in 1920, watched fund­rais­ing flourish, then falter, then recover before laying the first cornerstone for its new 138th Street sanctuary and community center in 1922.43 In Abyssinian’s case, church leadership and systematic modern fund­rais­ing went hand in hand. ­After Abyssinian’s building committee bought the Harlem lots in 1920, it asked members to cover the costs by tithing. For a year, donations came in at an acceptable rate. But then substantial increases in construction costs and residual re­sis­tance to the impending Harlem move stalled pro­gress. What turned the proj­ect around was Reverend Adam Clayton Powell’s charisma. In the m ­ iddle of a Sunday sermon, with no warning, he announced that he was leaving the church. What good could he do if the community w ­ ouldn’t pay for its collective needs? The dramatic move galvanized the congregation. Worshipers rejected Powell’s resignation then and t­here and renewed the tithing program. They also started a new effort, fund­rais­ing from beyond the membership and even beyond the city. Blacks and whites contributed. Within a year Abyssinian had enough money to burn the mortgage on its existing 40th Street sanctuary and sell it debt-­free. The campaign, plus two hundred thousand dollars received from the sale, left Abyssinian with a small mortgage of sixty thousand dollars on its new five-­hundred-­ thousand-­dollar Harlem complex. The community repaid that mortgage six years early, in 1928.44 Most Harlem congregations lacked Abyssinian’s resources, but they got by, at least u ­ ntil the Depression. Churches held “mortgage rallies,” issued bonds, and took out loans. In the 1920s Mt. Olivet Baptist issued at least twelve thousand dollars in bonds to supplement its mortgage. A 1924 column in the Age pointed out that savings banks lent to quite a few Harlem churches, suggesting that they w ­ ere “held to be one of the 45 most reliable forms of investment.” 



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Even so, three of Harlem’s largest congregations, Mount Olivet, St. Mark’s, and St. Philip’s experienced near-­disastrous economic setbacks in the Depression. St. Mark’s faced foreclosure on its mortgage, entered receivership in 1934, then secured a restructured mortgage in 1935 ­after satisfying all its lapsed obligations. Mount Olivet’s strug­gle with $260,000 in mortgages nearly split the congregation. Its minister resigned in 1932, citing poor health and the church’s financial difficulties. The worshipers spent two years arguing over a successor, but when he arrived, the new minister overcame dissidents, confronted creditors, and by 1938 had obtained a renegotiated mortgage. St. Philip’s, like many secular landlords, hit the skids in 1933, as rent started g­ oing unpaid at its 135th street apartments. Worshipers ­were asked for special contributions “to cover deficits in the church bud­get.” The nature of the mortgaged properties prob­ably helped the three congregations survive their crises. It surely was better for Manhattan’s Title Guarantee and Trust Com­ pany, the principal lender for both St. Mark’s and Mt. Olivet, to restructure church mortgages than suddenly acquire two substantial sanctuaries in Manhattan’s largest, poorest, and most segregated neighborhood.46 The size of some of Manhattan’s black congregations might have been overwhelming: Abyssinian Baptist had eleven thousand members in 1934, Union Baptist attracted more than seven thousand new members between 1899 and 1924, and Salem Methodist had three thousand congregants in 1932.47 To maintain intimacy, communities such as Bethel AME and Roger Williams Institutional Colored Methodist Episcopal Church embraced the “institutional church” movement that emerged in white Social Gospel circles in the 1890s. Institutional congregations viewed education, athletics, social ser­vices, and social activities not as secular interventions but as fulfilling the w ­ hole Christian person. As Bethel’s Reverdy Ransom put it, the conditions of black life required dramatic outreach “to keep the church open seven days in the week, and make it a center of educative influence in the neighborhood in which it is situated.” 48 D ­ oing so made the church a kind of neighbor whose door was always open, helping to combat the feeling of anonymity thick in Manhattan. As Harlem’s congregations expanded and consolidated their roles as centers of community and education, the ministry continued professionalizing. By 1900 new se­nior ministers in Harlem’s larger Protestant

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congregations almost always ­were gradu­ates from theological seminaries, and several held doctoral degrees. They proudly used “Dr.” before their name or “D.D.” and “Ph.D.” ­after it, as did many white Manhattan pastors. St. Philip’s may have been Manhattan’s first black church with multiple clergy. By 1910 Abyssinian, St. James, and St. Mark’s had at least one assistant minister. Salem Methodist, Metropolitan Baptist, M ­ other Zion, 49 and Union Baptist had hired assistant ministers by 1925. The larger Harlem churches also professionalized programs and staffs. For instance, training of Sunday school teachers became commonplace ­after 1910. The Harlem League, a branch of the New York City Federation of Churches, formed the Harlem Community Training School for Religious Education in 1917. In cooperation with the Columbia University Teachers College Religious Education Program, the Community Training School offered courses for Sunday school teachers well into the 1940s. Teachers could enroll in courses on the New Testament, “A Study of the Pupil,” and “Prob­lems of ­Children and Youth in New York City,” among ­others.50 The director of religious education and community ­house activities that Abyssinian Baptist appointed in 1923 held degrees from Benedict College, Oberlin, and Yale. He restructured Abyssinian’s Sunday school programs, stressed teacher training, and expanded adolescent and adult community programs to include a range of offerings from basketball and drama to lit­er­a­ture and civics. St. James hired a religious education gradu­ate of Boston University in 1931. Abyssinian Baptist, ­Mother Zion, St. Philip’s, and Williams Institutional Church all employed professional social workers on their staffs by 1924. The Harlem League and Columbia brought church finance committees, trea­sur­ers, and trustees together to promote “better methods in church finance” and improve the “business side of the Church.”51 Atop the institutions t­hese professionals busily served, ministers reigned supreme. As in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill, sermons delivered from Harlem’s pulpit ­were dominated by themes of salvation. In December 1922, sixteen Harlem churches sponsored a “­Great Revival” featuring “premiere evangelist” Dr. S. L. Johnson and promising “Salvation ­EVERY WEEK NIGHT.” In January 1926 the erudite minister Frederick Asbury Cullen of Salem Methodist spoke on “Grace—­The Fountainhead of Our Salvation.”52 George Sims’s 1928 recorded sermon,



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“The Resurrection,” one of the few made by a black minister in Manhattan, offered a traditional Southern call-­and-­response dialogue. A soaring contralto lifted Sims and several members of his Union Baptist congregation, who had crowded into the recording studio. They crafted a vivid singing sermon in which Christ’s empty tomb is discovered in the ­middle verse.53 Biblical exegeses reinforced the churches’ stress on uplift, propriety, and learning. Worshipers could thumb their Bibles as Abyssinian’s Powell spoke of “The Unconquerable Convictions of Job,” ­Mother Zion’s J. W. Brown preached from Zacharia on the fountain that cleansed Jerusalem’s “sin and uncleanness,” and John W. Robinson of St. Mark’s excavated from Proverbs 27:8, a subject that Harlem’s black worshipers knew something about: “Modern Restlessness.”54

With the profusion of churches in black Harlem came denominational diversity and eclectic religious expression as well. Not every­one welcomed the competition. In 1930 W. E. B. Dubois wondered if Harlem w ­ asn’t “overchurched”— too much invested in “handsome, architecturally uneconomic church buildings.” But a 1931 New York City Federation of Churches survey suggested a dif­fer­ent prob­lem. ­There ­were indeed too many churches, but the difficulty was not the big, handsome ones—it was the small, disreputable ones. The survey counted an astonishing 160 congregations in Harlem and opaquely recommended a “better distribution of ­houses of worship.” What this meant became clear at a roundtable on the survey, which assembled participants only from Harlem’s oldest, most established churches. Mount Olivet Baptist’s W. P. Hayes charged that only thirty of Harlem’s churches met the “standards of first-­rate organ­izations.” A real estate agent and parent-­teacher association president complained about “racketeering preachers” and “hole-­in-­the-­wall institutions of prey.”55 But like white New Yorkers who gathered to hear proselytizers from the League for Larger Life and the Theosophical movement, many Harlem worshipers w ­ ere unmoved by the condemnations of traditional churchmen. In the 1920s and 1930s black Harlem took to booming “storefront” churches, led by nondenominational clergy. Blacks also

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in­ven­ted, adapted, and ­adopted quasi-­Christian and non-­Christian religions. Their Holiness and Pentecostal congregations exploded in number. ­There ­were ­women evangelists and black Jewish groups, faith healers and religiously imbued black nationalist movements.56 Storefront churches often embarrassed Harlem’s religious and cultural establishment. The widely criticized “emotionalism” of some of ­these churches—­shouting, swooning, fainting—­was especially upsetting to mainline denominational ministers, the Urban League, and the black press. As early as 1921 the Age was criticizing “two-­by-­four” churches and their members as inferior. Untrained preachers “too lazy to work at an honest trade, but loth[e] to starve,” bamboozled followers with “hugger-­mugger proceedings.” The worshipers, “mostly w ­ omen,” ­were said to “hang upon [the preachers’] words as a divine inspiration.” The Urban League’s Ira D. Reid ridiculed the church’s names—­the Metaphysical Church of the Divine Investigation, St. Matthew’s Church of the Divine Silence and Truth, and so on. The preachers’ real mantra, he claimed, was “let us prey,” an enduring epithet, as demonstrated by the Harlem real estate agent who used it at the roundtable on the Federation of Churches survey a de­cade ­later. And, indeed, t­here ­were some ill-­meaning ministers involved. In 1935 New York police arrested a Baptist minister, James Williams, for assaulting a widowed Sunday school teacher at his 146th Street storefront when she demanded the return of her late husband’s three-­thousand-­dollar death benefit, which Williams had “borrowed.”57 But the principal “crime” of many storefront churches was just modesty. Small congregations heard preachers with intense religious commitments and substantial biblical knowledge, even if they lacked formal theological training and denominational ordination. Storefront ministers took jobs driving trucks or cutting hair to supplement their small church salaries, if they received any. Though themselves poorly paid, worshipers did what they could to support their churches. Elden Johnson, the Pilgrim Pentecostal Church minister photographed by Lucien Aigner and Berenice Abbott in 1936, told Abbott that he lived in the study of the brownstone where the church operated and sold insurance to support himself. To help pay the rent, his twenty-­eight-­member congregation ran the Pentecostal Barbershop from the brownstone’s lower level.58



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But, the reproaches of elites and journalists notwithstanding, modesty ­didn’t entail backwardness. As a 1942 Union Theological Seminary bachelor’s thesis based on extensive interviews with East Harlem storefront ministers found, storefront churches partook of many trends in modern urban churches. Almost all except the tiniest maintained Sunday schools, a few had assistant ministers, and several had missionary socie­ ties, youth groups, and ­music groups, including one with a choir and an organist who played a parlor organ. The Missionary Band at Noah’s Ark House of Prayer and Baptist Mission had its own president, and the 500-­member Allen-­Becton Memorial Church, a spiritualist congregation, had an officer slate that would have been familiar in the denominational congregations—­except that ­women occupied all the offices.59 Storefront churches often appropriated Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and Catholic names, although they lacked denominational ties. ­Little Abyssinia Baptist Church drew on an obvious local model. Ebenezer Wesleyan Methodist Church and Community Center participated in the 1932 Wesleyan Methodist New York denominational conference but l­ater lost its affiliation. When the Union Theological Seminary student pressed Ebenezer’s minister about the lost denominational link, the clergyman responded sharply that his storefront was the “Ebenezer Wesleyan Methodist” church.60 A long-­lived storefront church, Paradise Baptist, almost did not survive its first de­cade and a half. Henry W. Stanley founded the church in 1925. Like many young black congregations, his initially met in a residential building. It prospered and moved to larger residential quarters in 1929. Notices in the Age often mentioned its choir, Sunday school, missionary group, young p ­ eople’s ­union, assistant minister, and association with Baptist denominational bodies.61 But the notices lagged ­after 1930, then s­ topped in 1936. When Ellen Tarry, a researcher with the Works Pro­g ress Administration and l­ater an author of c­ hildren’s books, visited Paradise Baptist in 1938, she found a congregation in disarray. Tarry described scarcely thirty worshipers using “seats of all descriptions . . . ​benches, camp chairs, [and] parlor chairs.” The piano was “decorated with an elephant plant, faded artificial flowers of all hues, [and] a big-­ben clock.” Stanley still led the congregation but told Tarry that “he h ­ adn’t been very well” and would have a visitor give the

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Ebenezer Wesleyan Methodist Church and Community Center opened in the late 1930s and continues to operate in the same East Harlem space. Courtesy Shira Weinberger Photography.

next Sunday sermon so he could save “all of his strength to be able to preach, ‘Dry Bones in the Valley’ ” in two weeks.62 But Stanley’s health improved, and with it his church. He joined a del­ e­ga­tion to Washington, DC, to protest housing discrimination, then led additional del­e­ga­tions to the White House in 1940 and 1942, “his face radiated by smiles of triumph at his return.” Notices reappeared in the Age: references to a se­nior choir, deacon board, and Sunday school. In 1951, two years before Stanley’s death, the congregation purchased a substantial residential building on 143rd Street with an enlarged worship space and twelve rental apartments. It renovated the sanctuary in 1964 and in 1978 moved to a former theater turned synagogue on Fort Washington Ave­nue near 159th Street. No longer consigned to an apart-



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ment building, Paradise Baptist still worships at the Fort Washington space ­today.63 If ste­reo­types about storefront church communities w ­ ere often wrong, so ­were the critics who thought of ministers as charlatans and thieves. Many ­were in fact ambitious community leaders. Consider George C. Violenes. ­After arriving in New York as a seventeen-­year-­old immigrant from the Dutch West Indies, Violenes graduated from Dewitt Clinton High School. He studied at City College and theological schools in New Jersey and Chicago and spoke Dutch, En­glish, Spanish, and French. In 1935 he opened Inter-­Denominational Pentecostal Church, a storefront church at 424 Lenox Ave­nue. Five years l­ater he became minister of Christ Community Church, a Church of God in Christ Pentecostal congregation operating out of a brownstone on West 128th Street, where it remains ­today. In the course of a long and influential ­career, Violenes belonged to Harlem’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, the New Harlem Tenants League, and the 28th Precinct Youth Council. In 1958 he conducted a vivid four-­month written debate with the Chicago Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in the Amsterdam News.64 Thanks to their freewheeling nondenominationalism, some storefront churches w ­ ere able to try ­things that mainline churches c­ ouldn’t. In par­ tic­u­lar, storefront congregations experimented with female leadership. When Ebenezer Wesleyan’s founding minister died in 1947, the congregation ordained its long-­time organist, Sunday school superintendent, and missionary leader Jennie Clarke, who became its minister and reconnected with the Wesleyan Methodist denomination. ­Today, Ebenezer Wesleyan still worships at its longtime Lexington Ave­nue location, where it continues to be led by a ­woman, Lenell Young.65 Clarke had celebrated pre­de­ces­sors, such as “­Mother” Rosa Horn, Josephine Becton, and Ruth Dennis. In the 1920s and 1930s, they drew widespread attention as Harlem preachers. Dennis and Horn ­were also the first Harlem preachers to appear on the radio. Dennis broadcast on and off for two de­cades, beginning in 1926 on WGBS, a station owned by the Gimbels department store. She pointedly emphasized ­women in a 1927 radio series, “­Women in the Bible.” Horn founded her own Pentecostal Faith Church in Harlem in the late 1920s. By 1934 she was preaching on WGN, where she advanced her fame through conflicts with noted religious figures including F ­ ather Divine and the black “Happy

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Am I” evangelist Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux. In the late 1930s, she converted the adolescent James Baldwin, which he acknowledged by modeling the fictional evangelist Margaret Alexander on Horn in his 1954 play The Amen Corner.66 Baldwin made Horn famous, but Josephine Becton prob­ably was better known in her own time and illustrated how relations between storefront churches and mainline congregations and ministers could be affable despite religious and cultural differences. A former stage singer, she studied for four years at the White ­Water Spiritualist College in Wisconsin and married a black evangelist, George Becton. But she or­ga­nized her own Christian Spiritualist congregation in a 137th Street brownstone. Soon the community, known as the Allen Memorial Church of Love, Truth, and Light, occupied a larger and more prominent corner storefront at 120th Street and Lenox Ave­nue. Becton believed her spiritualism fulfilled Chris­tian­ity. “The churches teach the resurrection of Christ and life a­ fter death,” she said. She proved t­ hose doctrines “through the communication of the spirit.” 67 Becton eventually separated from her evangelist husband, who was mysteriously murdered in Philadelphia in 1933, and engaged in highly publicized disputes with his followers. The disputes and her views might have made her suspect in respectable Harlem society. Yet she took part in Harlem’s Preachers Interdenominational Meeting; spoke and preached at AME, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches in the neighborhood; and belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star and the Elks ­women’s auxiliary. On the twentieth anniversary of Becton’s ministry in 1938, the Age noted the praise she received from “prominent ministers of vari­ous denominations as well as business and professional men and ­women of the community.” The photographer James Van Der Zee confirmed Becton’s respectability in his striking 1934 portrait of her. Seated in her smart Harlem apartment, replete with ­grand piano, tailored drapes, flowers, and choco­lates, Becton looks nothing like popu­lar ste­reo­types about frantic Harlem storefront preachers. Almost hiding in Van Der Zee’s portrait is an intriguing clue about the sweep of Becton’s spirituality. Hanging on her far living room wall is a print of Cyrus Dallin’s 1909 ­ reat Spirit, which depicts an American Indian sculpture Appeal to the G on ­horse­back with his head thrown to the sky. Perhaps between Becton’s

James Van Der Zee’s sumptuous 1934 portrait of Josephine Becton scarcely depicts a ste­reo­typical storefront Christian spiritualist. She is surrounded by boxed choco­lates, velvety drapes, and a print of Cyrus Dallin’s 1909 American Indian sculpture, Appeal to the G ­ reat Spirit, hanging on the wall. © Donna Mussenden Van Der Zee. Image provided by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.

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childhood Chris­tian­ity, her Spiritualist college education, and Harlem, she also had found spiritual truth in native American religions.68 While Becton, Horn, and ­others revised notions of who could be a religious leader, other Harlemites revised notions of the divine itself. Between 1910 and 1940 many white eclectic religious groups did, too. But in the black community, new spiritualities could also mean a new sense of collective and personal identity. One impor­tant development in this regard was the establishment in Harlem of Black Israelite communities. The first, the Commandment Keepers, was formed by a Bahamian immigrant in 1919. They derived from the wider Black Israelite movement, the origins of which are difficult to trace. The story of the lost tribes of Israel, who allegedly dis­appeared in the eighth ­century BCE and possibly found their way into Africa, fascinated nineteenth-­century En­glish evangelicals, American evangelicals, Mormons, and ­others, who speculated on the possibility that American Indians w ­ ere directly descended from the lost tribes. Beginning in the South, some black churches, often with connections to the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, asserted African Americans’ Jewish origins. This made for a dramatic shift in self-­ conception, as followers commonly rejected the racial term “Negro,” which reflected Western oppression, and instead claimed descent from a noble ­people of the book. The Commandment Keepers ­were hardly alone in New York. A 1929 New York Sun story headlined, “Negro Sect in Harlem Mixes Jewish and Christian Religions,” focused on the Commandment Keepers but also informed readers about the groups Talmud Torah Beth Zion and B’nai Beth Abraham. All claimed descent from the lost tribes in Africa, not New York’s white Jews, who descended from the second-­century Jewish diaspora. At the same time, t­ hese black Jews spoke of parallels between the African slave diaspora and the white Jewish diaspora, as well as the discrimination faced by each group over the centuries. One Black Israelite group called its leader “bishop,” but o ­ thers employed the title “rabbi.” Several retained an essentially Christian faith but observed the Saturday Sabbath, emphasized Hebrew learning, and a­ dopted Jewish ritual dress. ­Others incorporated ele­ments from West Indian Rastafarianism as well as the largely white New Thought movement.69 Islam also came to Harlem in the 1930s and ­later challenged Chris­ tian­ity directly, rather than through reform or syncretism. True, several



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­ iddle Eastern Muslims sought converts in New York before 1920, but M or­ga­nized Islamic worship in Harlem is difficult to document in that period. Like the Black Israelite movement, Black Islam could involve large shifts in identity. Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science movement asserted Africans’ broad “Moorish” nationality and imbibed Islamic and Christian beliefs together. It attracted followers mostly in Detroit and Chicago, although the Amsterdam News reported “400 Moorish-­Americans” parading from a “headquarters” on Lenox Ave­nue in 1937.70 Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Nation of Islam movement opened ser­ vices at the Harlem YMCA in 1946, and some of Drew’s former adherents may have joined in. The Nation languished in Harlem ­until 1954, when the vigorous, often-­confrontational leadership of Malcolm X earned the movement widespread admiration and fear. But Malcolm X’s disavowal of Elijah Muhammad in 1963, and his provocative embrace of Sunni Islam, embittered former followers. Three of them ­were ­later convicted of assassinating him at the Audubon Ballroom on 165th Street in February  1965. Sunni Islam did not find permanent residence in Harlem for another de­cade, when Warith Deen Mohammed, son of Elijah Muhammad, recast his f­ather’s movement. In 1975 Warith Deen Mohammed renamed Harlem’s Mosque No. 7 the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz to honor Malcolm X.71 Alongside the Black Israelite, Moorish Science, and Islamic movements, Harlem fostered new eclectic Christian groups and Christian-­ tinged po­liti­cal movements that took on outré personalities, at least from the perspective of the mainstream. Among the most controversial ­were ­Father Divine’s International Peace Mission, Sweet ­Daddy Grace’s United House of Prayer for All ­People, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, all of which w ­ ere headquartered in Harlem. All w ­ ere marred by scandal. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and was deported in 1927. Divine was briefly jailed for disturbing the peace with his worship ser­vices on Long Island—­charges that ­were widely disparaged then and since. Grace was convicted of violating the Mann Act by taking a Brooklyn follower to New Jersey for sex and was privately charged in a paternity suit, but an appeals court reversed the Mann Act conviction and the paternity suit was dismissed. The Times and Herald Tribune each published over 300 stories on Divine in the 1930s, and the Age and Amsterdam News lavished attention on Divine

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and Garvey. The Age published only two stories on Grace before 1940, however, prob­ably as part of an unsuccessful strategy to weaken him.72 Divine and Grace developed vibrant healing ministries that challenged Harlem’s relatively sedate mainstream churches and its storefront congregations alike. In ­doing so, the preachers w ­ ere following the footsteps of ­others; healers had been active in Harlem for several de­cades before they arrived. A mi­grant from Alabama advertised “healing amulets, seals, [and] lucky charms” in 1913. In 1922 “Prof Akpan Aga,” the “wonderful magician and spiritualist,” offered to heal “all manners of sickness in the name of God.” That same year, Liberty Spiritual Church first advertised healing ser­vices. A minister at the Episcopal St. Luke’s mission offered healing ser­vices in 1923, although with “no claim of miraculous power.” Offering no such disclaimer, Elder R. C. Lawson tendered his healing ser­vices at a tent revival sponsored by the Refuge Church of Christ. In 1926 “Prophet Bess” promised healing “through the power of God” from the third floor of an Eighth Ave­nue building.73 Divine wound up far from his Mary­land black Methodist roots. His ministry combined self-­fulfillment themes—­which strongly paralleled ­those of the white New Thought movement—­with holiness and Pentecostal sentiments. Apparently he first acquired t­ hese in 1906 during Los Angeles’s Pentecostal Azusa Street revivals. ­There, Divine explained, “the HOLY GHOST . . . ​came into expression in My light of understanding.” He then itinerated through the South with several other black evangelists, calling himself “The Messenger.” In 1914, now in Brooklyn, Divine established a strict religious community that forbade alcohol, gambling, and sex outside marriage. He ­adopted a quasi-­military name, Reverend Major Jealous Divine. Two years ­later Divine moved to Sayville, on Long Island, where he became F ­ ather Divine and drew a growing band of Harlemites to what he now called his Peace Mission. It was then that irritated local white authorities charged him with disturbing the peace. Divine was convicted and jailed for a month before being released on appeal. He moved to Harlem in 1932.74 Divine asked followers to treat him as God, and headline writers bellowed when they did: “Chanting Throng Parades in Harlem . . . ​‘He is God, God, God!’ ” the Times reported in 1934. Divine taught Peace Mission followers to realize capacities within, bringing fulfillment and healing life’s afflictions through transformations of their own making. He



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merged the New Thought’s emphasis on ­mental discipline and self-­ actualization with Christian notions of holiness and sanctification. He purchased residential h ­ otels, which served as “heavens” where followers lived communal and celibate lives. Men and w ­ omen ­were separated, and all ­were subject to an “international modesty code,” though it constrained ­women’s dress more than men’s. The Peace Mission rejected banks, or­ ga­nized parades to protest high rents, decried segregation, and briefly pursued what proved to be a frustrating alliance with the American Communist Party in support of civil rights. The movement also reached into quotidian dimensions of follower’s lives through low-­priced Peace Mission restaurants, grocery markets, and clothing stores. For all its austerity, the Peace Mission also knew how to celebrate, even in the midst of the Depression. Divine’s most popu­lar and perhaps most affecting events ­were lavish yet highly decorous Holy Communion banquets, where followers could commemorate the personal transformations pos­si­ble through divinely inspired discipline. Ultimately, however, financial mismanagement forced the sale of the Peace Movement’s Harlem headquarters, Number One Heaven, in 1938. Divine’s movement faded. He moved to Pennsylvania in 1942 and died in 1965.75 The man who bought the former Number One Heaven was ­Daddy Grace, a noisy competitor of Divine’s who was only too happy to make his gains at his rival’s expense. Long before he was ­Daddy, the teenage Marcelino Manuel da Graca followed his parents from Portugal’s Cape Verde Islands to New Bedford, Mas­sa­chu­setts. Spiritually, he migrated from his native Portuguese Catholicism to the Holiness Protestantism he encountered in Boston. Pursuing an in­de­pen­dent ministry, Grace established several prayer centers in Mas­sa­chu­setts, which w ­ ere l­ater called the United House of Prayer for All ­People on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith. He claimed the title of bishop and led revivals in Savannah, Charlotte, and Washington, DC. During his Southern tours, worshipers credited Grace with healing their leprosy, blindness, and other maladies. Grace even claimed to have raised his s­ ister Jennie from the dead. Eventually he took the name D ­ addy, in addition to the title of Bishop, and described his followers as “my ­children.” He sometimes occupied an opulent throne where “maids” might fan him in hot weather. Grace’s healing came only to the believer, however. “I can heal only the strong in faith,” he said. “You doubters can never be healed.”76

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In addition to physical healing, Grace’s worship featured musicians, tambourines, speaking in tongues, and above all, spontaneity: “If we are directed to sing we sing; if we are given the inspiration to testify we testify; and if we are called upon to exhort we exhort,” he explained. Grace embodied Pentecostal convictions about God’s indwelling among believers and embraced the breadth of religious truth emanating from the biblical era. Van Der Zee, the photographer, fused several ele­ments of Grace’s ministry in late 1930s photo­graphs. In one, Grace held a child while clothed in what might have been thought of as biblical Palestinian dress. They ­were surrounded by more c­ hildren, while a vision of Jesus gathering ­children emanated from the upper left corner.77 Grace brought modern public-­relations techniques to his Southern revivals by enticing extensive newspaper coverage. He won breathless newspaper accounts describing 600-­person riverfront baptisms, confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan, contretemps with local clergy, and arrests for mixing blacks and whites at a ­Virginia revival. He also became known for embezzling money from a Charlotte congregation. He developed Grace Magazine to circulate his message beyond his revival audiences—­and to further the aims of his mail order business, which first sold healing cloths, then shoe polish, cookies, coffee beans, stationery, and other products. By 1938 Grace was ready for his ostentatious arrival in Manhattan. He not only bought Number One Heaven but also flamboyantly removed Divine from the headquarters he had made famous. Grace’s empire grew across the de­cades. In the mid-1990s, three de­cades a­ fter Grace’s death in 1960, the United House of Prayer ministry still owned at least five major Harlem properties and counted 135 active congregations in twenty-­five US states.78 Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) never was foremost a religious movement, but like the Black Israelites and the several Muslim groups, the UNIA aggressively promoted a resilient pan-­African black identity of which faith was an impor­tant component. Its Black Star shipping com­pany promoted African trade, while its millinery and grocery stores and restaurants in Harlem promoted black in­de­pen­dence. All of it came bathed in a warm Christian ethos. Steeped in the preaching of his native Jamaica, Garvey quoted the Bible extensively, advocated for a “Negro Christ,” and printed



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church news from Harlem and across the country in the UNIA newspaper Negro World. He repeatedly quoted Psalms 68:31—­“Ethiopia s­ hall soon stretch out her hands”—to emphasize the redemption of Africa. UNIA had a chaplain general, the West Indian Episcopal priest George Alexander McGuire, and found a comfortable association with Harlem’s African Orthodox Church, spiritualists, and black Israelites. UNIA’s motto was “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!” and supporters conferred exalted standing on Garvey as a deliverer of the faithful: they called him the Black Moses.79 UNIA’s Chris­tian­ity and its full-­throated challenge to discrimination encouraged a few Harlem clergy and church members. An AME minister and two Baptist clergymen spoke at Harlem UNIA meetings in the early 1920s, Harlem’s Christian Science congregation advertised in Negro World in the 1930s, and Harlem’s UNIA chapter met at ­Mother Zion AME several times in 1930. But Garvey’s self-­promotion, marriage prob­ lems, questionable finances, and advocacy of a black God—­combined with his alliances with eclectic religious groups—­turned most ministers and congregational leaders away. This was as true in Harlem as in other black urban centers in Amer­i­ca.80

Grace, Divine, and Garvey, as well as Harlem’s massive mainstream churches and its often-­but-­not-­always fleeting storefront congregations, all testified to the triumph of modern urban religion. They ­were not the faded remnants of rural religion, holding on to life in the city. Rather, they prospered by embracing new possibilities. They a­ dopted complex, professional organ­ization. Not old ways but novel expertise—­especially the expertise of ­women—­sustained them. They harnessed urban consumer culture, and their enterprises, from grocery stores and literary socie­ties to church fairs and po­liti­cal protest, bespoke the black demand for re­spect, propriety, and prosperity.81 If or­ga­nized religion proliferated in the Tenderloin and Harlem a­ fter 1880, it never escaped the American stain of racism. With urbanization and modernization came de facto Jim Crow, as vis­ib ­ le a feature of Amer­ i­ca’s modern cities as it ever was or would be in the countryside and no less so in Manhattan for all its reputed sophistication. Job and housing discrimination followed Manhattan’s blacks wherever they turned: u ­ nions

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balked at integration, white store employees hassled black customers, social clubs barred blacks, city schools w ­ ere residentially segregated, and police routinely roughed up black suspects. And blacks and whites overwhelmingly worshiped separately, even when they followed the same scriptures. The separation of black and white worship in Manhattan may even have been starker in Harlem a­ fter 1915 than it had been in the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill between 1880 and 1910 or in Lower Manhattan before 1880. When racial tensions exploded, church leaders ­were typically called on to speak for the black community. The repetition could be numbing. ­After the March  1935 arrest of a sixteen-­year-­old Puerto Rican in March 1935 for stealing a penknife led to a riot, vandalism of white-­ owned Harlem stores, three deaths, and hundreds of injuries, the Age reported that “Mayor LaGuardia made a flying trip to the meeting of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance at Salem M. E. Church.” The ministers condemned the vio­lence, but they credited it to the “long-­ pent-up passion of the mob” and warned that New York’s civic leaders ­were “reaping the harvest they have sown.” In August 1943, when a white policeman shot and wounded a black soldier at a seedy Harlem h ­ otel, the resulting riot brought six deaths, hundreds of injuries, 600 arrests, and widespread vandalism of white-­owned businesses. Several thousand city and military police ­were sent to Harlem to contain the public’s rage. Now Abyssinian Baptist’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. led the familiar response, noting how superficial equality in the World War II draft highlighted the “blind, smoldering and unor­ga­nized resentment against Jim Crow treatment of Negro men in the armed forces.” That anger was only compounded by discrimination at home, which brought about the “high rent and cost of living forced upon Negroes in Harlem.”82 Powell’s ­father put it best. In Riots and Ruins—­an extraordinarily angry book published in 1943, eight years a­ fter his retirement from Abyssinian Baptist—­Powell Sr. excoriated an Amer­i­ca in which blacks volunteered to fight in Eu­rope and Asia but ­were ­under attack back home. The 1943 Harlem riot had been preceded by fatal attacks on black workers by white mobs in Mobile, Alabama, and Beaumont, Texas, and a three-­day Detroit race riot in which two-­thirds of the dead and injured w ­ ere black. The long-­time minister of one of the largest Protestant congregations in the United States, writing eighty years ­after Emancipation amidst a



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worldwide strug­gle ostensibly waged for both democracy and religious freedom, Powell urged Americans to look inward: “The greatest danger to the civilization of the United States is not Germany, Japan, or any other foreign country but the vitriolic hate which exists between the white and the colored living within its borders.”83 Powell’s anger derived from a deep sadness about Amer­i­ca. Its promise was draining away, replaced with exhaustion. For de­ cades he had preached and strug­gled against constitutional insults, discrimination, and white hatred, yet ­there was no erasing that sadness from the urban air. Claude McKay, the Jamaican immigrant and Harlem Re­nais­sance poet, felt it twenty years ­earlier, in Manhattan’s glossiest and most modern setting. In “On Broadway,” he wrote: About me young and careless feet Linger along the garish street; Above, a hundred shouting signs Shed down their bright fantastic glow Upon the merry crowd and lines Of moving carriages below. Oh wonderful is Broadway—­only My heart, my heart is lonely. Desire naked, linked with Passion, Goes strutting by in brazen fashion; From play­house, cabaret and inn The rainbow lights of Broadway blaze All gay without, all glad within; As in a dream I stand and gaze At Broadway, shining Broadway—­only My heart, my heart is lonely.84

FIVE

12 God’s Urban Hot­h ouse

On June 12, 1945, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis issued a judgment of herem—­excommunication, or shaming. It was the first herem issued by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, founded in Manhattan in 1902, and one of the few ever promulgated in Amer­ic­ a. The target was Mordecai Kaplan, a rabbi and theologian at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The rabbis condemned Kaplan as “high handed and openly insolent” and called his newly published siddur, the Sabbath Prayer Book, “total heresy.” So insulting was the siddur, which rejected the status of the Jews as God’s chosen ­people, that the rabbis burned a copy. Kaplan even denied the existence of a super­natural God. The only option was to separate him “from the community of Israel.”1 The herem devastated Kaplan professionally and personally. “What a shattering effect this exhibition of moral degeneracy on the part of men who call themselves rabbis has upon me I can hardly express,” he wrote in his diary. He railed against the rabbis’ “immoral dealings” and “dastardly action.” Personal confrontations followed. Colleagues at the seminary declined copies of the siddur, and a Manhattan baker refused to sell bread to Kaplan’s ­daughter, saying he could not associate with “that heretic Mordecai Kaplan.”2 The Union of Orthodox Rabbis faced its own difficulties. The New York Times taunted it for overreaching: “Orthodox Rabbis ‘Excommunicate’ Author of Prayer Book Though He Is Not a Member.” Without approving of Kaplan’s Sabbath Prayer Book, seminary chancellor Louis Finkelstein defended his right to publish it. The Conservative Rabbinical Assembly declared the Orthodox herem offensive to “a genuine re­



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spect for the freedom of man’s conscience.” Reform Judaism’s Central Conference of American Rabbis surprised no one when it observed that the Orthodox rabbis w ­ ere “out of touch with the modern spirit.” But its charges went farther than that, declaring the herem un-­American. “This shocking action violates the very spirit of freedom of thought and the tolerance which we cherish in our country,” the Reform group asserted. “It is an expression of bigotry.”  The ­union rabbis “make themselves ridicu­lous and impair the good name of the entire rabbinate.”3 The book burning increased the sting, especially as Americans ­were learning about conditions in Eu­rope’s newly liberated concentration camps. Book burning was associated with Nazis. The ­union ­later claimed that the book burning occurred spontaneously when the herem ceremony ended, but its original description of the ceremony suggested other­wise. News of the book burning spread far. A Boston rabbi serving as a chaplain in the Philippines wrote in July that “the excommunication of Dr. Mordecai Kaplan and the burning of his books by N. Y. Orthodox rabbis was a bad pill to take.” 4 The herem reflected more than tensions inside diasporic Judaism. It also testified to Manhattan’s status as a theological hot­house. ­After all, Kaplan’s ­great sin lay not in abandoning Judaism but in attempting to change it doctrinally. The rabbi who oversaw the first bat mitzvah in the United States and helped to found what became known as Reconstructionism was realigning ele­ments of Jewish thought and practice with modern sensibilities of pluralism. He was taking part in the g­ rand old tradition of religious renewal, which could bring im­mense discord even to twentieth-­century Amer­ic­ a’s most urban setting, and he was far from the only Manhattanite in that position. Not every­one noticed the local spiritual ferment. The Herald Tribune ignored a raft of New Yorkers who could have filled out its 1925 essay series, “My Religion.” Instead the paper lazily reprinted British writers publishing in London’s Daily Express. And it is true that modern Manhattan’s religious renewal could not match that of nineteenth-­century Amer­i­ca, which brought forth Shakers, Spiritualism, Mormonism, Adventism, Seventh-­Day Adventism, New Thought, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostalism; multiple Protestant schisms over

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theology, ecclesiology, and slavery before the Civil War; and rapidly expanding black Baptist and Methodist denominations.5 Yet between the 1920s and the 1960s Manhattan stimulated an outpouring of individual and institutional religious creativity unsurpassed in any other twentieth-­century American locale, urban or rural. Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik recast understandings of Judaism. Dorothy Day, Adam Clayton Powell, and his son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. asserted the worldliness of religion, finding in it a power­ful motivation to po­liti­cal action. Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, and Norman Vincent Peale transformed theological and cultural conceptions of religion in ways that have had enormous, lasting impact. ­These figures seldom worked alone; institutions extended and deepened their messages. The attractiveness of Manhattan lured formidable faculties to the Union and Jewish Theological Seminaries especially. Manhattan publishers continued to turn out religious books, which ­were eagerly publicized by the New York–­based Publishers Weekly. The journal Chris­tian­ity and Crisis started up in Manhattan in 1941. Pastoral counseling, combining psychotherapy and religious advising, was born in Manhattan in this period and spread across the nation. The remarkably spiritual Alcoholics Anonymous emerged in Manhattan in the late 1930s. The island was the center of idealistic movements for interfaith harmony, such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews founded in 1927. The American Bible Society, headquartered on the island since 1816, distributed more than 7 million Bibles to American troops during World War II. Manhattan’s pre-1960 spiritual hot­house thrived on continuing waves of migration, international and domestic. Four of its leading lights came from Eu­rope ­after 1920: Soloveitchik in 1932; Tillich, Heschel, and Maritain in flight from Nazism. Powell Sr. arrived from ­Virginia and Peale from Ohio. Niebuhr grew up in Missouri and came to New York via Detroit. Kaplan spent his first years in Lithuania, before his parents brought him to Manhattan at the age of eight. Of all the major figures of New York’s twentieth-­century spiritual revival, only Dorothy Day was born in the city, in Brooklyn. But her peripatetic parents moved across the country many times during her childhood. As an adult, Day lived in Staten Island and Los Angeles before settling in Manhattan in her early thirties.



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No single “Manhattan theology” emerged from ­these thinkers and prac­ti­tion­ers. Most leaned liberal, but in such dif­fer­ent ways and with so many qualifications that the word almost becomes meaningless. Some developed friendships—­Niebuhr and Heschel famously, Niebuhr and Maritain briefly, and Maritain and Day intermittently—­and some, such as Niebuhr and Tillich, broke them. Peale and Soloveitchik operated largely within their own religious circles, and the city’s racial divide meant blacks and whites seldom ­were brought together, which the Powells protested. Most addressed their inherited traditions, but all found audiences outside ­those traditions. Tillich and Maritain arrived with substantial reputations, while Niebuhr, Heschel, Soloveitchik, and Day all saw their profiles rise, the impact of their work amplified by the opportunities Manhattan provided. Together, yet without even a hint of coordination or collective intent, they fostered passionate new religious visions amid the bustle of the world’s largest city. From that allegedly inhospitable spiritual environment, they changed what God and religious life meant to millions of ­people.

Reinhold Niebuhr might have seemed an unlikely candidate for a faculty appointment at Union Theological Seminary. Born into an immigrant German Protestant minister’s f­ amily in Missouri in 1892 and educated at unaccredited Missouri and Illinois schools, he heeded a faculty member’s urging to seek better recognized degrees in the East. At Yale Divinity School, Niebuhr acquired worrisome debts and felt like a “mongrel among thoroughbreds.” But he roughed out bachelor’s and master’s degrees, improved his written En­glish, and discovered an ability to craft vivid, challenging sermons as a student preacher in a pastorless Connecticut congregation. Although the congregation eagerly offered him a permanent position upon his graduation, Niebuhr dutifully turned back to the Midwest and his f­amily denomination, accepting a post at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit. The three-­year-­old German mission church counted scarcely seventy members.6 What came next was an extremely productive de­cade in which Niebuhr ­rose from obscurity to influence as a writer, speaker, and fi­nally professor at Protestantism’s most prestigious seminary. Early in his Detroit c­ areer,

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he was noticed for his oratorial skills and for his articles promoting Americanization in Evangelical Herald magazine. He was named to the national War Welfare Commission in 1917 and spoke before troops and congregations supporting the ­Great War. He led his Detroit congregation to adopt En­glish ser­vices. Although many other immigrant communities w ­ ere torn apart by such reforms, Niebuhr’s grew dramatically ­under his care, and his dramatic preaching eventually attracted a membership of nearly seven hundred. As time went by, Niebuhr moved on from the Evangelical Herald to the nationally prominent, Manhattan-­ based Christian ­Century. He made friends with influential Protestant leaders and lay figures, such as the YMCA’s Sherwood Eddy. His speeches to students in Ann Arbor and elsewhere won praise and familiarized him with collegiate audiences. It was at a student conference in Milwaukee that Niebuhr met his f­ uture boss, Union Theological Seminary president Henry Sloane Coffin.7 Niebuhr’s appeal was obvious. In his essays and sermons, he eschewed pedantic scriptural exegesis. Rather, in muscular prose, he scrutinized topics that mattered to p ­ eople: politics, ­labor, pacifism, Jewish-­Christian relations, “The Church and the M ­ iddle Class.” His June 1926 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Puritanism and Prosperity,” won the first spot in the Times’ monthly digest of worthy magazine articles.8 Niebuhr’s first book, Does Civilization Need Religion?, maintained the humane concerns of his magazine works. Appearing in 1927 from the major Manhattan publisher Macmillan, its opening chapter dissected “The State of Religion in Modern Society.” The book closed on a discussion of “A Philosophical Basis for an Ethical Religion.” Niebuhr wrote pungently—­“Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt,” he explained. “Liberalism tries vainly to give each new strategic retreat the semblance of a victorious engagement.” He directly confronted the difficulties of religion exhibited in modern cities, echoing concerns familiar among American Protestant leaders since the 1880s: Religion is not in a robust state of health in modern civilization. Vast multitudes, particularly in industrial and urban centers, live without seeking its sanctions for their actions and die without claiming its comforts in their extremities.9



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In other words, Niebuhr was a fine public communicator, and Coffin, ­eager to elevate Union Theological Seminary’s standing with the wider public, pounced. In 1928, with a one-­vote majority of the faculty, he brought Niebuhr on board to teach part-­time and edit the seminary journal World Tomorrow. Opponents of the hiring criticized Niebuhr’s forwardness and his insufficient credentials; he lacked a PhD. ­After he arrived, his detractors ­were not pleased when students jammed his classes and called him “Reinie” rather than “Professor.” But by 1929 Niebuhr had a second book, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, a bracing account of his spiritual maturation at Bethel Church that elevated his intellectual reputation. Soon Yale Divinity School was trying to hire him away. Amid the competition Coffin easily obtained a full-­time, endowed appointment that kept Niebuhr at Union.10 Niebuhr thrived on Union’s intellectual excitement; the challenge of its inquisitive, demanding students; and the connections the seminary furnished with Manhattan’s intellectual elite. His spirits w ­ ere lifted and his writing emboldened. He continued to be a student favorite, won over at least some early seminary opponents, and made friends with new faculty. Over the course of de­cades at the school, he met and married an En­glish theological student, Ursula Keppel-­Compton; deepened his interest in Marxism; became a spectacularly unsuccessful Socialist Party candidate for Congress; and lectured extensively across the East and South. Alfred Akamatsu, a Union Seminary gradu­ate who became minister of Manhattan’s Japa­ nese Methodist Church, vividly recounted Niebuhr’s bold lecture style in a 1946 sermon: Dr. Niebuhr is indeed an unforgettable character. He is tall, rather lanky, with sharp nose and piercing eyes. But what makes him r­ eally unforgettable is his mannerism when he speaks. He is one of ­these machine-­gun speakers, ­going through a thick theological discussion at 75 miles an hour. . . . ​And as he goes through his ultra speed[y] discourse, he twist[s] his body, wrings his hands, and scratches his head, never like this, but like this. And the most amazing t­hing is that practically all of the students who studied u ­ nder him for two [or] three years take on some of the mannerisms of Professor Niebuhr, unconsciously, but decisively.

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Akamatsu had his own embarrassing encounter with Niebuhr emulation. Puzzled by his “­little nephew [who] had a strange way of scratching his head,” Akamatsu confessed that “it fi­nally dawned on me that [he] was copying the mannerism that I had acquired in Niebuhr’s classroom.”11 In 1932 Niebuhr published what would become his most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. As the Nazi menace loomed and the Rus­sian revolution turned sour, he argued that the po­liti­cal collective was dangerously compounding the flaws that the Christian doctrine of original sin saw as inherent in individuals, wetting the soil for authoritarianism. He denounced Nazi persecution of Jews and, in 1939, promoted the Volunteer Christian Committee to Boycott Nazi Germany. In 1942 he helped or­ga­nize a Christian Council on Palestine to support creation of a Jewish homeland t­ here. More books flowed: The Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1937), Chris­tian­ity and Power Politics (1940), The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1943), The ­Children of Light and the ­Children of Darkness ­ entury’s isolationist foreign policy (1944). Disillusioned with Christian C leanings, he helped found the journal Chris­tian­ity and Crisis, which encouraged US intervention against the Nazis.12 Religious thinkers of all stripes wrestled with Niebuhr’s ideas. His reemphasis of original sin and humanity’s capacity for evil earned him the label “neo-­orthodox” and brought optimistic Protestants and social gospel advocates up short. Critics argued that he posed moral dilemmas to which he offered no solutions and that his gloomy books stymied Christian social engagement. By contrast, more recent commentators have treated him as a theological “neo-­liberal,” who pushed for ­human betterment while recognizing humanity’s capacity for corruption and failure as well as the need for moral judgment. In all ­these writings, Niebuhr maintained a remarkable fealty to the challenge he had posed in a 1927 Atlantic Monthly article, “Can Chris­tian­ity Survive?”: If religion is to be restored as a force in modern life, it must be able to gauge the evil in h ­ uman life and yet maintain its faith in the spiritual potentialities of ­human nature. . . . ​Nothing less than a transcendentally oriented religion is equal to this task, but it must be a religion which fearlessly ­faces the moral implications of its faith.13



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Philippe Halsman’s severe 1960 portrait of Reinhold Niebuhr might have seemed a cari­cature, but it quickly became an iconic repre­sen­ta­tion of the theologian and the tough Protes­tant “neo-­orthodoxy” he espoused. © Philippe Halsman / Magnum Photos.

By the late 1930s Niebuhr had become Union Seminary’s most famous faculty member. That stature was indelibly confirmed in 1948, when Time magazine put him on the cover of its twenty-­fifth-­anniversary issue. The coverline captured Niebuhr’s stress on ­human imperfection and the need for honest faith: “Man’s story is not a success story.”14

In 1930 Paul Tillich was well known in Germany and in the prime of his ­career. A Lutheran theologian with advanced degrees and ser­vice as a World War I chaplain, he had steadily advanced in university appointments in Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt. He was especially noted for his 1926 book, Die religiöse Lage der Gegenwart (The Religious Situation of the Pre­sent). In The Religious Situation, Tillich blamed the failures of Eu­ro­pean religion on the emptiness of capitalism. In its

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place he advanced socialist and Marxist convictions while rejecting Bolshevism’s vio­lence. As Germany’s po­liti­cal difficulties worsened, Tillich spoke out against Nazism. In Frankfurt in 1932, he helped rescue Jewish students and socialist activists from an assault by Nazi students. Early the following year, he published Die sozialistische Entscheidung (The Socialist Decision), which rejected Nazi antisemitism and associated his brand of ethical socialism with the Jewish prophetic tradition. Not surprisingly, Tillich was included in the Nazis’ nationwide April 1933 purge of Jewish and leftist faculty. In May a group of Frankfurt Nazis publicly burned copies of The Socialist Decision.15 Fortunately for Tillich, he had power­ful allies in the United States. ­These included Reinhold Niebuhr and his ­brother, Yale Divinity’s H. Richard Niebuhr. Reinhold had heard much about Tillich during a week in Germany in 1928; Richard had heard Tillich lecture in 1930 and translated The Religious Situation. In May 1933, at a hastily arranged meeting of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, Coffin and colleagues at Columbia University agreed to pursue a joint appointment for Tillich at the seminary and in Columbia’s philosophy department. At this point Tillich still held out hope that the Nazi movement might collapse, and he met with German officials in an effort to salvage his Frankfurt appointment. But a­ fter he was turned down, his friends, his wife Hannah, and even a Ministry of Culture official urged him to leave the country. Tillich accepted the Union-­Columbia offer and arrived in New York with Hannah in November.16 Tillich flourished at Union, if not without difficulties, many of them private and largely hidden in his lifetime. He strug­gled with spoken En­ glish, though Union students and audiences found his malapropisms and heavy German accent charming. He had a warm, ­eager personality; the psychologist Rollo May considered him “a very sensuous man” with “­great joie de vivre.” He also had awkward dalliances with ­women and reputed affairs, and he took drugs—­painful facts that Hannah exposed in her 1973 memoir, From Time to Time. Published eight years a­ fter Tillich’s death, the book was vigorously criticized by his friends and supporters.17 Tillich embraced Manhattan intellectual life. He developed a close personal and intellectual friendship with Reinhold Niebuhr, although it



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frayed in the 1940s, Niebuhr distraught by Tillich’s promiscuity. Tillich, like Niebuhr, quickly emerged as one of Union’s most beloved faculty members, notwithstanding his frustration at his colleagues’ lack of language competency and, sometimes, sophistication. He conversed with other Germans exiled in the city, such as the Frankfurt economists Adolph Lowe and Kurt Riezler, who had been drawn to what became the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research. Tillich also participated in discussions between Union and Jewish Theological Seminary faculty. Most productively, he plunged into conversations about psy­chol­ogy and religion through a group or­ga­nized by the Federal Council of Churches. This, in turn, spawned the religiously imbued strain of New York psy­chol­ogy propounded by the likes of May, Seward Hiltner, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, and the anthropologist Ruth Benedict.18 Above all, Tillich’s fame stemmed from the intellectual stature he attained as the twentieth c­ entury’s principal exponent of philosophical and psychological understandings of Chris­tian­ity. He took his place among Amer­i­ca’s leading phi­los­op ­ hers of religion through his 1936 autobiographical Interpretation of History; the dense, three-­volume Systematic Theology, published between 1951 and 1963; and his popu­lar Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957). He wrote nearly a dozen other books, plus essays for popu­lar magazines such as the Protestant Digest and Saturday Eve­ning Post. In 1959 Tillich’s portrait also graced the cover of Time, as Niebuhr’s had a de­cade ­earlier.19 Tillich argued that Chris­tian­ity’s true and pressing calling was to confront the issue over which so much religious activity stumbled: “What is the meaning of life? Where do we come from, where do we go to? . . . ​What should we become in the short stretch between birth and death?” Tillich questioned the “concrete religions” of multiplying sanctuaries, bulging congregations, and a clergy a­dept at assuring congregants about God. Anxiety—­the gnawing condition of modern humanity, and so evident in Manhattan—­demonstrated that the offerings and assurances of concrete religions ­were not so much wrong as deceptive and inadequate.20 If Tillich emphasized fulfillment and Niebuhr conscience and moral judgment, they agreed that the central meaning of religion was strug­gle, not facile assurances about a glibly defined God who largely sanctioned our prejudices. Religion “is not the God of traditional theism” Tillich wrote—­the God so easily packaged to comport with what­ever our nations,

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Philippe Halsman deftly captured Paul Tillich’s warmth and playfulness. The photo­g raph was one of the many included in Halsman’s gimmicky 1959 “jumpology” series. © Philippe Halsman / Magnum Photos.

cultures, and personal experiences led us to believe. Religion, Tillich argued, is “the ‘God above God’ ”—­the “ground of being”—­and “faith is the state of being ultimately concerned . . . ​the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern.” Tillich’s language could be convoluted, doubling over on itself, and critics contended that he was far more philosophical than theological or even Christian. Perhaps Tillich was implicitly pantheistic. But he per­sis­tently brought readers back to biblical texts that illustrated the difficulties and dilemmas constituting the ­human experience.21



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Tillich’s writings won an exceptional following. A West ­Virginia minister explained part of their appeal some years a­ fter Tillich’s death and the revelations about his personal foibles: “I have never fully understood Paul Tillich, ­either his theology or his private life, but I have always had the feeling that he would understand me.” Tillich’s fusion of psy­chol­ogy, philosophy, and religion, accomplished principally during his years at Union Theological Seminary, allowed him to comprehend what the West ­Virginia minister termed the “­human strug­gle to understand.” An enormous audience of Protestants, unchurched Americans, and even atheists found in Tillich’s ideas a means to approach that strug­gle.22

Unlike Niebuhr and Tillich, who arrived in Manhattan with promising reputations that exploded in the next de­cades, Jacques Maritain’s fame was sealed before he got to the island. By the time of his exile, he was Eu­rope’s best-­known Catholic intellectual. Maritain was born into a comfortable Protestant ­house­hold in Paris in 1882 and studied at the Sorbonne. ­There he met Raïssa Oumansoff, ­daughter of a Rus­sian Jewish émigré, who, like Maritain, sought out meaning amidst the seeming chaos of modernity. They married and searched together, at one point contemplating suicide if their quest failed. But they found uplift in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and converted to Catholicism. ­After leaving the Sorbonne, Maritain pursued the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, and in 1914 he accepted a position at Paris’s Institut Catholique. The search for meaning brought Maritain to Charles Maurras’s Action Française movement, which promoted the old monarchy. Maritain was attracted to the movement’s traditionalism, but he disavowed it a­ fter Pope Pius XI condemned Action Française in 1926. Thereafter Maritain and Raïssa turned to a Catholic “personalism” that rejected atomistic liberalism and the materialism of both liberalism and Marxism. The ­couple stressed the dignity of each person as a creature of God ennobled in natu­ral law—­irrespective of individual religious commitments—­a perspective espoused by St. Thomas Aquinas. Though they observed traditional Catholic worship, with all its hierarchy, they sought to foster demo­cratic politics—­a seeming contradiction also seen in the life and work of Dorothy Day.23

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By 1939 Maritain’s essays and books—­a general history of Western philosophy; major work in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic; a treatise on Christian humanism—­had established him as Eu­rope’s premiere Catholic thinker. The Herald Tribune mentioned Maritain as early as 1923 in a column on Pa­ri­sian intellectual life. Maritain made three North American lecture tours in the 1930s, speaking at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Toronto’s prestigious Institute of Medieval Studies. In Toronto he met Day and prob­ably Peter Maurin, who together led a Catholic Worker movement steeped in personalism. Charles Scribner’s Sons published four of Maritain’s books in En­glish, earning reviews from the Herald Tribune and the Times. The ­great critic Alfred Kazin reviewed Maritain’s Freedom in the Modern World (1935).24 In 1938, as Eu­rope boiled t­ oward war, Maritain denounced antisemitism in Les Juifs Parmi les Nations, Questions de Conscience (­later published in En­glish as A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question.) He excoriated the racial superstitions under­lying anti-­Jewish bigotry and viewed antisemitism as a Christian heresy b ­ ecause Christ’s faith took form in Judaism. Critics ­later argued that Maritain cast his denunciation of antisemitism too narrowly—as Christian heresy rather than as an offense against humanity. But Maritain’s polemic was remarkable for its bravery and defiance at a time when popu­lar Catholicism and its official representatives often indulged a tradition of Christian theological antisemitism (distinguished from the racial antisemitism of the Nazis). He specifically condemned the vivid antisemitism long tolerated throughout Catholic Poland, where the results of that prejudice would prove so catastrophic.25 Accompanied by Raïssa and her s­ ister, Vera, Maritain anxiously began a fourth North American lecture tour in January 1940. Germany had conquered Poland in September, and while Maritain and his ­family w ­ ere abroad, invaded France. They w ­ ere stranded in Manhattan. From the moment of his arrival ­until his return to a liberated France in late 1944, Maritain exploited and expanded Manhattan’s intellectual and religious resources. His immediate interests ­were understandably patriotic. He made short-­wave talks to the French re­sis­tance, became a regular speaker on Manhattan radio programs and at events supporting the Allied war effort, and conducted an often-­cagey correspondence with General Charles de Gaulle. He helped form the Belgian-­French Ecole Libre de Hautes



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Etudes at the New School for Social Research. He discussed the F ­ ree French movement at a 1942 French-­American Club dinner where he followed Eleanor Roo­se­velt as a speaker. In 1943 he or­ga­nized a conference envisioning a postwar Eu­rope with the Italian diplomat Carlo Sforza and the German novelist Thomas Mann.26 In Manhattan Maritain had opportunities to engage with influential Jewish thinkers. His 1938 book on antisemitism had drawn attention from the likes of Rabbi Stephen Wise and other local notables, and in September 1940, Maritain was invited to join the Jewish Theological Seminary’s conference on “Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life.” He was not a shy guest. On the conference’s first after­noon, he implicitly confronted no less than Albert Einstein. Einstein argued that belief in a “personal God” caused major tensions between religion and science and could not usefully serve as the foundation for a demo­cratic society. But Maritain pushed back. Privileging science “over philosophy and theology” could well result in “fascist education,” he said. Democracy required a deep religious and philosophical basis not to be found in the coldly rationalist “scientific spirit.”27 Brazen though he was, Maritain got invited back to the Jewish Theological Seminary. He also lectured on totalitarianism at Prince­ton in the spring of 1941, taught two semesters at Columbia in 1942 and 1943, and offered lectures at Marquette and the Universities of Pennsylvania, ­Virginia, and Chicago. At Yale he delivered the prestigious Terry Lectures. He and Raïssa wrote for the Manhattan-­based Catholic journal Commonweal. They developed a friendship with the Niebuhrs, even if Reinhold found Maritain “a ­little bound by his scholastic categories,” as Ursula Niebuhr remembered. They “talked about politics a good deal, . . . ​­after all it was war­time and the fate of the world was in the balance.” Maritain also reacquainted himself with Catholic Worker efforts. Day knitted socks for him before he returned to Eu­rope.28 Alongside his extensive lecturing, Maritain’s publishing continued unabated in New York. He wrote on St. Paul and published the Terry Lectures ­under the title Education at the Crossroads. He oversaw En­glish translations of older volumes. In 1941 he published his most heartfelt book: France, My Country,Through the Disaster, which offered an agonized account of the conditions that underwrote France’s downfall to the Nazis. He bitterly condemned Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy

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regime for its false nationalism and distorted Catholic teachings. The book, published in French and En­glish, circulated surreptitiously in French re­sis­tance networks.29 The two most consequential books of Maritain’s Manhattan exile w ­ ere Chris­tian­ity and Democracy, published in 1944, and The Rights of Man and Natu­ral Law, published in 1943. The books offered Catholic arguments for broad demo­cratic politics and for the emerging worldwide ­human rights movement—­intellectual proj­ects that surprised many, given Catholicism’s seeming incompatibility with the two ideals. If Chris­tian­ity and Democracy was a lament for their dual failure to stem Nazism, it also asserted Chris­tian­ity’s fundamental role in sustaining democracy, on the grounds that democracy could not survive the kind of unjust society that true Chris­tian­ity precludes. Democracy “springs in its essentials from the inspiration of the Gospel and cannot subsist without it,” Maritain wrote. George Orwell ­later noted the “loneliness” of Maritain’s position given Church authorities’ long-­held fear of democracy and support for authoritarian regimes. For its part, Maritain’s Rights of Man and Natu­ral Law employed the Thomistic natu­ral law tradition to argue for the dignity individuals possess irrespective of religion and circumstance. What is “the dignity of the h ­ uman person?” Maritain asked. “The expression means nothing if it does not signify that by virtue of natu­ral law, the ­human person has rights to be respected, is the subject of rights, possesses rights.” Drawing on ­these ideals, Maritain helped draft the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. He also wrote the introduction to the UN volume explaining the Declaration’s significance and lectured extensively on the Declaration in Eu­rope, Latin Amer­i­ca, and the United States into the 1960s.30 Maritain’s torrid Manhattan engagement ended almost as abruptly as it began. The Allied victories in France w ­ ere still fresh in November 1944, when he returned to Paris with Raïssa and Vera. At de Gaulle’s request, he served as France’s ambassador to the Vatican between 1945 and 1948 while pursuing the ­human rights issue. ­Later he taught as a visiting professor at Prince­ton and published Reflections on Amer­i­ca (1958), a nation he romantically saw as “entirely turned t­oward the f­uture, not ­toward the past.” Maritain stayed on the minds of many: Supreme Court



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Rabbi Simon Greenberg, left, welcomed Jacques Maritain, right, back to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1948 during the French phi­los­o­pher’s extensive post–­World War II lecture tour. Ratner Center Photo­g raph #2164. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Justice Felix Frank­furter quoted him, liberal French Catholics criticized him, and he was dubiously admired by Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Nhu, who had been educated in a Pa­ri­sian Catholic school. One perhaps-­unexpected relationship that began in Manhattan continued to Maritain’s death: a correspondence with the radical Chicago or­ga­nizer Saul Alinsky. Maritain and Alinsky met at a Hunter College lecture, and the two remained fond of each other for de­cades thereafter. Maritain saw in Alinsky a humanism that inspired common men and ­women to effect social change. Alinsky saw in Maritain a religious advocate for ethical democracy. In one of his letters, Alinsky wrote, “Jacques Maritain, you are so filled with love and humility and compassion for

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your fellow man that you annihilate my defenses of skepticism and cynicism.” They w ­ ere the same qualities that also had won Maritain friends in Manhattan, however short his stay.31

Abraham Joshua Heschel arrived in Manhattan in March 1940, about the same time as Maritain but ­under markedly dif­fer­ent circumstances. Maritain was a fifty-­eight-­year-­old Eu­ro­pean Catholic celebrity. Heschel was a thirty-­three-­year-­old Jewish refugee living with his ­sister. Heschel was en route to Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, one of eight Eu­ro­pean Jewish scholars rescued during World War II through the intercession of the college’s president, Julian Morgenstern. Although Heschel was not well established, he had peculiar intellectual promise. By the time he was thirty, he had already published books on the Hebrew prophetic tradition, biographies of Maimonides and the Portuguese Jewish statesman Don Isaac Abravanel, and serious Yiddish poetry. He was heir to generations of Hasidic spiritual leadership; his deceased f­ ather Moshe had been a well-­known Hasidic rabbi, and t­ here w ­ ere more rabbis on both sides of his f­ amily. At the same time, Heschel was more worldly than the relatively isolated Polish Hasidic community would allow, and his thinking went in directions that circumspect Hasidim did not follow. ­After graduating from a traditional yeshiva, he sought a larger personal and intellectual community in Berlin, an opportunity enabled by his ­mother, who had rejected a customary Hasidic early marriage for him. But while Heschel departed from aspects of tradition, he was thoroughly motivated by religious thought. For his entire ­career, he pursued the mysterious relationship between God and humanity.32 Heschel’s life was one of escape, devastation, and renown. He was in Frankfurt when the Nazis’ hatred and intimidation became too much to bear. Following the 1938 Anschluss—an episode that deeply humiliated his rabbi brother-­in-­law in Vienna—­Heschel desperately sought out positions in Prague and the United States. Then, ten days before Kristallnacht, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Warsaw along with several thousand other Polish Jews who had been residing in Germany. While in Warsaw, he learned that he had secured the appointment at Hebrew Union in Cincinnati, but he lacked a visa to get to Amer­ic­ a. Fearing an imminent German invasion of Poland, he bolted for London,



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where his ­brother and ­family had arrived months e­ arlier. The German invasion came six weeks ­later.33 ­After some months, Morgenstern wrangled Heschel’s visa. In April 1940 he arrived in New York on the Lancastria. (Ten weeks l­ater the vessel, with three thousand aboard, was sunk during rescue operations off St.  Nazaire in France.) The war had already reached Heschel’s ­family; his ­sister Esther Sima was killed by German bombing during the Polish invasion. In 1942 his s­ ister Gittel would be killed in the Nazi attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. His s­ ister Devorah and her husband w ­ ere murdered at Auschwitz. Only Heschel, his s­ ister Sarah in Manhattan, and his ­brother Jacob in London, survived. He could never return to Eastern Eu­rope. As he remarked ­later, “If I should go to Poland or to Germany, ­every stone, e­ very tree, would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of ­children killed, of m ­ others burned alive, of ­human beings asphyxi34 ated.” Hebrew Union College, a seminary renowned for modernizing Judaism in Amer­i­ca, reached out to the son of a Hasidic community and saved his life. As much as Heschel appreciated Union, the awkwardness of life in Cincinnati, the desire to be near his ­sister and her ­family, and the more traditional faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary beckoned him to Manhattan ­after the war’s end. He settled down ­there, marrying the pianist Sylvia Strauss in 1946. Although the seminary was neither Orthodox nor Hasidic, Heschel could count on its support, the traditional worship it promoted, and the kosher food in its cafeteria. He remained at the seminary ­until his death at age sixty-­five in December 1972.35 Heschel answered the Holocaust’s darkness and modernity’s perceived threat to the spirit by asserting something seemingly impossible: the mutual interdependence of God and humanity. His two principal books of the 1950s, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, published in 1951, and God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, published in 1955, reset the framework through which many Americans understood both the implications of religion and the resources needed for its apprehension in modern times. Pursuing themes embedded in Hasidic piety yet not exclusive to it, Heschel went to the heart of m ­ atters impor­tant to Jews and non-­Jews alike: God and possibility of a h ­ uman experience of God. That possibility rested in recognizing what lay beyond doubt and reason, and especially for Heschel, beyond what posed as modern scientific

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certainty. Only through what Heschel termed “radical amazement”—­the ­simple yet complex ability to be awed by life’s won­ders—­could humanity comprehend its own existence and grasp “all of real­ity.” Radical amazement, he wrote, referred “not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing.” We could be awed not just by what we perceive in the world but the very existence of anything to be perceived.36 Such a view was challenged, Heschel believed, by the spurious self-­ sufficiency modern ­people had come to embrace. Interpersonal alienation pitted individuals against each other, while politics set groups against groups. Men and ­women became means to ends, and their estrangement produced manipulation, slaughter, and despair. Heschel reversed the paradigm. “The only way to avoid despair is to be a need rather than an end.” “Happiness,” Heschel wrote, “may be defined as the certainty of being needed.” But, he asked, “Who is in need of man?”37 God. “This is the mysterious paradox of Biblical faith.” God is not “­silent, hidden, and unconcerned with man’s search for Him.” “God is pursuing man,” Heschel insisted, citing Job and Genesis. “Thou does hunt me like a lion,” Job exclaimed. And when Adam and Eve hid from God, “the Lord called: Where art thou. It is a call that goes out again and again.”38 Heschel’s demand for religious faith in the face of the Holocaust and twentieth-­century rationalism resonated far beyond Hasidism. When he published Man Is Not Alone in 1951, almost no Christians and few Jews had heard of him. Yet Reinhold Niebuhr proclaimed that Heschel would “become a commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of Amer­i­ca.” Niebuhr was right. More books—­including a hugely expanded version of his Berlin dissertation, The Prophets (1962); Who Is Man? (1965); The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on H ­ uman Existence (1966); and A Passion for Truth (1973)—­brought Heschel enormous religious and intellectual notice. ­There w ­ ere detractors, of course. Orthodox and Hasidic Jews believed he slighted halakah, divine law. Some seminary colleagues ­were skeptical about his inattention to textual analy­sis. Other Jews worried about an excess of interfaith activity. Christian biblical specialists noted a lack of “critical austerity.” Yet Heschel’s soaring prose, his pursuit of ultimate questions about meaning and faith, and his ability to connect with non-­Jews and nonreligious ­people effaced t­ hese criticisms. In this Heschel was not unlike Niebuhr, Tillich, and Maritain, all of whom faced pushback but over-



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Abraham Heschel, second from right, famously said he felt his “legs w ­ ere praying” during the march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery in March  1965. He was joined by John Lewis, S ­ ister Mary Leoline, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, and Fred Shuttlesworth at the head of the march. Courtesy Matt Herron / Take Stock / The Image Works.

came it by eruditely and passionately speaking to universal concerns about the role of the divine in modern life.39 Heschel was also much applauded for his public persona, especially his vis­i­ble engagement with civil rights and anti–­Vietnam War protests. Through activism he became the most recognized religious Jew in Amer­ i­ca. His charming, charismatic speaking and his intellectual reputation quickly garnered him speaking invitations, even to the far-­away University of Minnesota in 1960, where a rabbi joked that the clean-­shaven Heschel might not look “mystic enough” to propound on the prophets. Heschel responding by growing what became his iconic goatee.40 Heschel’s repartee could slay critics. In response to doubters who suggested that Amer­i­ca’s civil rights crisis was “too grave for us to do much about it,” Heschel wrote, “It was good that Moses did not study theology ­under the teachers of that message; other­wise, I would still be in Egypt building pyramids.” ­After a photo­g raph of Heschel marching in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King circulated worldwide,

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Heschel o ­ bserved that “even without words our march was worship. I felt my legs w ­ ere praying.” When his anti–­Vietnam war protests drew criticism, he quoted Leviticus 19:16: “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor.” He supported the Berrigan ­brothers, the dissident Catholic priests convicted for burning draft files, and he took a leading role in the antiwar organ­ization Clergy Concerned about Vietnam.41 A 1969 heart attack barely slowed Heschel, at least at first. ­After he recovered, he renewed his antiwar protests, had occasional tussles with the seminary, published a two-­volume book in Yiddish on the nineteenth-­ century Hassidic rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, attended a conference in Jerusalem, and vigorously supported George McGovern, the 1972 Demo­cratic presidential candidate. But failing health fi­nally caught up with him, and he died that December. The funeral drew major Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant figures; the presidents of the nation’s principal Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform seminaries; Elie Wiesel; New York Mayor John Lindsay; and hundreds more. The Times published a three-­column obituary for the most famous rabbi in Amer­ic­ a.42

In his long c­ areer Joseph Dov Soloveitchik achieved relatively l­ittle renown beyond the ranks of Orthodox Judaism. But his role in mid-­ twentieth-­century Manhattan’s spiritual renewal was profound. The energetic community outreach and institutional creativity, and the force of his ideas, served to invigorate Orthodox Judaism at a time when it was other­wise likely to recede. That Soloveitchik led this charge, from 1941 into the 1980s, while making weekly round trips from Boston offers yet another testimony to the ac­cep­tance of technology and the modern commuting life in a religious group for which tradition stood as the essence of faith. Soloveitchik’s early ­career paralleled Heschel’s. Born in 1903, Soloveitchik descended from distinguished rabbis—­his Lithuanian grand­ fathers w ­ ere major figures in the so-­called Brisker method of precise Talmudic analy­sis. Like Heschel, Soloveitchik received a traditional yeshiva education and might have been expected to ­settle into a familiar rabbinical ­career. But a­ fter his f­ather, Moses, moved the f­amily to Warsaw to join the faculty of a new seminary, Soloveitchik enrolled at the ­Free Polish University, then moved to Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in



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1926. ­There, he wrote a PhD dissertation on the nineteenth-­century neo-­Kantian phi­los­o­pher Herman Cohen’s metaphysics and epistemology; met and married a Jena University PhD student, Tonya Lewit; and pursued Talmudic study privately and through the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary.43 In 1929 Moses emigrated to Amer­i­ca to head Manhattan’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Three years ­later Soloveitchik also emigrated, intending to teach at Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. When the job offer fell through, Vaad Ha’ir, an umbrella group of Boston Orthodox congregations, engaged Soloveitchik to lecture on the Talmud. Soloveitchik lectured extensively and in 1937 worked with his wife and local figures to establish the Maimonides School, Boston’s first coeducational Orthodox day school. (The school continues to operate ­today, from a campus in nearby Brookline.) Soloveitchik’s frustrations seeking reform in Boston’s kosher poultry industry brought worrisome reminders of Jacob Joseph’s failed attempts to reform the Manhattan kosher industry in the 1890s, but Soloveitchik’s stunning lectures, personal warmth, and success with the Maimonides School encouraged Boston’s Orthodox Jews. By his mid-­thirties he was their unofficial chief rabbi. When Moses died in New York in 1941, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, by then part of Yeshiva University, appointed the younger Soloveitchik to succeed his ­father. For the next forty years, Soloveitchik headed the seminary in Manhattan while continuing his leadership at the Maimonides School and among Boston’s Orthodox Jews. Soloveitchik traveled to Manhattan weekly, then back, originally by train, then plane.44 At the seminary he delivered oral discourses—­shiurim—on the Talmud, the halakah, and Jewish tradition. Initially he offered two shiurim per week, each lasting two to four hours. ­Later he added a third, and some lasted as long as five hours. Soloveitchik was a magnetic speaker, who would deftly shift from Yiddish to Hebrew to En­glish and back. “He was demanding, he was rigorous, he was terrifying,” one student remembered. With unparalleled command, he brought the vast lit­er­a­ture on Hebrew scriptures and Jewish law into dialogue with Western philosophy, theology, and psy­chol­ogy from Aristotle and Socrates to Maimonides, Kant, and Freud. As one student put it, when Soloveitchik spoke, “no one fidgeted or budged. He was absolutely riveting. To follow his argument

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was to be caught up in an intellectual adventure that accelerated one’s pulse.” Soloveitchik’s shiurim quickly became legendary, and Orthodox Jews soon referred to him simply as the Rav, someone who epitomized the meaning of a rabbi. He carried that honorific for the remainder of his life.45 Soloveitchik ­shaped the essentials of what is known as Modern Orthodoxy. He stressed the mysteries and possibilities of Jewish law when many ­others saw rigid certainties. As he put it, “Halakhic man,” rather than secreting himself away amidst modernity, “longs to bring transcendence down into this valley of the shadow of death—­i.e., into our world—­and transform it into a land of the living.” The halakah enabled Jews to live faithfully in modern times, just as it had in the age of the ancients. The same was true of the commitment to live faithfully. The “lonely man of faith”—­lonely ­because of his intense commitment to God—­was not a modern creation but an ancient one persisting since the Garden of Eden. Just as the ancient p ­ eople of God lived in the world, so Jews in modern times could live in the world guided by the law and propelled by their commitments, yet open to learning that makes the world a better place. “Man’s task in the world, according to Judaism, is to transform fate into destiny, a passive existence into an active existence.” 46 For Soloveitchik, openness to learning did not entail any dilution of the uniqueness of Judaism. While adherents of Modern Orthodoxy did not join haredi (“ultra-­Orthodox”) Jews in seeking isolation from the secular world—­through uniform dress, separate housing, alternatives to civic governance structures, and other mechanisms—­ Soloveitchik’s movement rejected assimilation and was passionately devoted to Jewish law. In a power­ful 1964 speech to the Rabbinical Council of Amer­i­ca, where he chaired the Halakah Commission, he passed harsh judgment on the con­temporary language of ecumenism. “We do not revolve as a satellite in any orbit,” he said, “nor are we related to any other faith community as ‘brethren’ even though ‘separated.’ ” As “a totally in­de­pen­ dent faith community” obligated by a difficult history and a pledge with God to sustain its “otherness as a metaphysical covenantal community,” committed Jews could not share religious ser­vices and activities with other religions or with Jews who did not follow the law.47 Yet if Jews w ­ ere to maintain religious otherness, this was not at all contrary to a healthy, engaged approach to the world. Rather, Soloveitchik



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argued, “we Jews have been burdened with a twofold task . . . ​a double confrontation. We think of ourselves as ­human beings, sharing the destiny of Adam in his general encounter with nature, and [also] as members of a covenantal community which has preserved its identity ­under most unfavorable conditions.” Soloveitchik spoke of Jews’ “common interests” with ­others “in the realm of . . . ​the secular”: “in all fields of constructive ­human endeavor” apart from religion, “we may discuss positions to be taken, ideas to be evolved, and plans to be formulated.” By preserving their religious uniqueness, Jews met their obligations as a covenantal community, and by engaging the world they met their obligations in sharing the destiny of Adam.48 At no point did Soloveitchik attempt to impose his vision through anything like a denominational body, yet that hardly l­imited his influence. He may have told a Times reporter in 1972 that he declined the chief rabbinate of Israel ­because he “­didn’t like the idea of an institutionalized rabbinate,” but the roughly two thousand rabbis he taught at the seminary extended Modern Orthodoxy across the United States. They filled de­cades of Orthodox rabbinical vacancies, creating a vast network of devoted alumni ­eager to invite Soloveitchik for lectures at their synagogues. He was especially popu­lar along the East Coast. He never achieved the fame of a Niebuhr, Tillich, Maritain, or Heschel; newspapers reported on their lectures but ignored Soloveitchik’s. Yet news of Soloveitchik’s talks circulated in tight-­knit Orthodox communities, and he could easily draw a thousand listeners. More often, though, he quietly conducted shiurim at Orthodox synagogues. ­These w ­ ere perhaps less intense than his orations at the seminary, but they offered an inspiring and educational “exercise in participatory pedagogy,” as one listener put it. “The Rav explains, analyzes, ‘synthesizes,’ pulls disparate strands together and weaves them into a beautifully patterned fabric.” So stimulating ­were Soloveitchik’s interpretations that, for two hours, audiences ­were enthralled by a shiur that “covered perhaps half a dozen lines.” Then, the class was over. “The Rav rises and so do we. And we hurry out to car, bus, train, or taxi,” back to urban and suburban lives.49 Unlike other celebrated Manhattan clerics, Soloveitchik published sparsely. However, his listeners sometimes published for him. Notes from his shiurim and public lectures circulated extensively from the 1940s into the 1970s, when edited books of sometimes-­inaccurate lecture transcripts

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and digests began appearing. When Soloveitchik did publish, his works ­were not easy to find. His earliest writings appeared only in Hebrew, and no substantial work was available in En­glish ­until 1965, when “The Lonely Man of Faith,” written in the 1940s, appeared as an article in a small Orthodox journal. Halakhic Man and The Halakhic ­ ere not published in En­glish Mind, also mostly written in the 1940s, w ­until 1983 and 1986 respectively. A 1940s manuscript Soloveitchik regarded as his most impor­tant, And from ­There ­Shall You Seek, was not published in Hebrew u ­ ntil 1978 and in En­glish u ­ ntil 2008, fifteen years 50 ­after his death. Soloveitchik’s ideas ­were deeply embedded in Talmudic discourse, but in the thirty years that passed ­after his emigration, his arguments quietly incorporated distinctly American themes. His notion of “double confrontation” mirrored W. E. B. Du Bois’s evocation of the “double consciousness” that forever burdened blacks: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts.” Soloveitchik also picked up on the cultural pluralism advocated by the phi­los­o­pher Horace Kallen. A decidedly secular Jew, Kallen argued that Amer­i­ca never had been homogeneous, not even in the Puritans’ time, and so ­there was nothing illegitimate about minority rights in the country. Indeed, even Soloveitchik’s cherished “covenanted communities” had profound connections to the American past. As the Harvard historian Perry Miller explained in the very years Soloveitchik was commuting between Boston and New York, covenanted communities ­were central to the seventeenth-­century New ­England Puritan experience.51 As a man in the ­middle, charting a course between rigid traditionalism and reformist instincts, Soloveitchik attracted ample criticism. Some Orthodox Jews disparaged even his anti-­ecumenical 1964 pronouncement as overly liberal. Meanwhile some Conservative and Reform Jews, as well as Christians, regretted Soloveitchik’s conservatism. More liberal strands of Orthodoxy joined in the attack when he upheld separation of the sexes in ser­vices and opposed ­women’s prayer groups. Yet Soloveitchik also advanced ­women’s study of the Talmud, first among adolescents at Maimonides School, then at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for ­Women, where he personally led the first shiur ever held for ­women in a formal Orthodox setting. Critics immediately proposed a herem against both Soloveitchik and the college for violating traditional Orthodox standards.



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Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik delivered the first shiur at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for ­Women in October 1977. Courtesy Yeshiva University Archives, Public Relations Photo Events Collection.

But the pique dissipated when the college explained Soloveitchik’s Talmud program for ­women was not a prelude to ordination. The criticisms—­not unlike ­those leveled against Niebuhr, Tillich, Heschel, and Kaplan—­reflected the power of Soloveitchik’s vision. Few would have both­ered contesting Soloveitchik had he not been both creative and influential. No one ­else spoke so forcefully to and for American Jews who yearned for traditional religious community within the diversity and hustle of modern life.52

Dorothy Day stands out from her compatriots, and not merely ­because she was a w ­ oman. Among the individuals traced h ­ ere, she and Maritain ­were the only lay figures. She also had the least formal religious training and the edgiest relationship with the religion she embraced. Fi­nally, she was the most spiritually and po­liti­cally radical. For de­cades, Day was the most famous Catholic w ­ oman in Amer­i­ca and perhaps the most famous religious ­woman in Amer­i­ca—or the most infamous, to her detractors.

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Day strayed far from her early religious background. Born in Brooklyn in 1897 ­because it was the momentary locale of her ­father’s newspaper job, she read the Bible, stories of the saints, even the Puritan Jonathan Edwards. She was confirmed in a Chicago Episcopalian church as an adolescent. Her early interest in religion may have come in part in reaction to her parents’ indifference. It also is not hard to see how engagement with immovable truths might have salved the insecurities caused by her ­family’s frequent relocation. She attended the University of Illinois for two years, moved to New York City, read avidly, became a socialist, developed strong friendships with American Communists, engaged in several love affairs, became pregnant, had an abortion, married, divorced, and wrote a novel, The Eleventh Virgin. The book gained l­ittle attention, but a Hollywood film studio still optioned it, and the resulting funds enabled Day to purchase a Staten Island beach cabin. ­There, she began a new relationship with an antireligious biologist and anarchist, Forster Batterham.53 Day’s relationship with Batterham inadvertently led to her conversion to Catholicism. Concerned that her abortion had ended her capacity to have ­children, Day was startled to become pregnant in the summer of 1925. She was ecstatic, but Batterham was not. He was opposed to bringing more ­children into the world and pressed Day to have another abortion. His demand ran aground on Day’s deep desire to have the child, which was fortified by a renewed interest in religion, Catholicism specifically. She began attending Mass and, ­after refusing the abortion, named her baby Tamar Teresa, ­after St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She read William James’s Va­r i­e­ties of Religious Experience, the medieval devotional text The Imitation of Christ, and Dostoyevsky. At one point Day saw a nun on the street, “went up to her breathlessly and asked her how I could have my baby baptized.” The sympathetic nun met Day three times weekly for catechism lessons, and Tamar was baptized in July 1927. Batterham came and went through that summer and fall amidst escalating arguments about religion and Tamar’s baptism. Though she had loved him dearly, Day ended their relationship in December, and shortly thereafter received Catholic baptism herself. She raised Tamar by herself.54 Day’s renown as both a Catholic and a reformer stemmed from an intense religious personalism focusing on the poor. Maritain espoused related ideas, but Day’s most impor­tant ally was the French Catholic layman Peter Maurin, whom she met in Manhattan in December 1932.



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Day and Maurin almost immediately formed what they called the Catholic Worker movement, establishing what they called a House of Hospitality for the destitute in Manhattan in 1933. Their advocacy focused on pacifism and re­distribution of wealth. Before her conversion Day had been interested in po­liti­cal change to benefit the poor, and her life as a Catholic only intensified that commitment. The p ­ eople she saw tumbling out from Mass each Sunday “­were of all nationalities, of all classes, but most of all they ­were the poor.” Si­mul­ta­neously, Day saw the timelessness of the Mass—­“the age, the antiquity”—­transcending the weariness of the moment. The liturgy, with its “complicated ritual,” offered “­great joy” b ­ ecause it reified the dignity of the person and the love at the heart of Chris­tian­ity. ­Here was Christ’s body, given up for death, resurrected, and now given again through the host to e­ very worshiper. Each one was redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice in love, none more than any other.55 The Catholic Worker movement’s po­liti­cal radicalism sometimes gains more attention than its religious focus, but the movement was not a po­ liti­cal crusade with religion thrown in. Day and Maurin’s social and po­ liti­cal advocacy followed from their understanding of Christ’s love for the least in society—­including workers crushed by low cap­i­tal­ist wages and men and w ­ omen hobbled by disabilities, drinking, drugs, and prejudice that precluded rich, fulfilling lives. Maurin described the movement’s disarmingly ­simple approach in 1935. 1. The Catholic Worker believes in the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism. 2. The Catholic Worker believes in the personal obligation of looking ­after the needs of our ­brother. 3. The Catholic Worker believes in the daily practice of the Works of Mercy. . . . 6. The Catholic Worker believes in creating a new society

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within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old that it looks like new.56

The movement built more Houses of Hospitality. They occupied plain rooms rented in deteriorating neighborhoods closest to t­hose in need. Day lived in a House of Hospitality on Mott Street near Chinatown in Lower Manhattan and Maurin in one at Seventh Ave­nue near 124th Street, in Harlem. Each morning a supportive priest said Mass for anyone who might come. Volunteers provided dispossessed visitors meals, clothes, and conversation. The ­houses sheltered however many they could. “The daily practice of the Works of Mercy,” not Catholic conversion, was paramount.57 Through talks and the success of the weekly CatholicWorker newspaper, Day and Maurin expanded their movement. The number of ­houses multiplied, slowly at first, then more rapidly in the mid-1930s. By 1939 twenty-­two ­houses could be found scattered across New York, Boston, St. Louis, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and elsewhere, including seemingly unlikely places, such as the Louisiana Bayou town of Houma. An additional thirteen urban Catholic Worker cells lacked kitchens and sleeping quarters but sponsored discussions and strike activities. The movement also operated several farm communes that gardened and raised chickens and pigs for eggs and slaughter. Maurin saw in this work an anticapitalist Green Revolution that would unite farmers, small shop­ keep­ers, and artisans.58 A wide gulf separated the movement’s traditional Catholicism and its vigorous support for strikes, pacifism, and critiques of capitalism. Neither Day nor Maurin advocated radical structural change in the Church. They accepted its hierarchical authority, the male priesthood, and liturgical Catholicism. Their challenge to orthodoxy lay in the ethics they believed traditional Catholicism required. Day made the argument poignantly in well-­received books such as House of Hospitality, her 1939 account of the movement’s first de­cade, which New York Cardinal Patrick Hayes placed on that year’s archdiocesan Christmas reading list. Her



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A convivial 1939 Catholic Worker farm gathering in Pennsylvania, with Dorothy Day speaking with a priest at center. Joseph Zarella Collection. Used with permission of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.

1952 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and her 1963 reprise of the movement, Loaves and Fishes, ­were also celebrated, not least for their emphasis on caring for the poor.59 In addition to providing charity, the Catholic Worker movement sought justice. In the 1930s movement members protested antireligious policies in Mexico, Nazi discrimination against Jews and Catholics, Soviet forced atheism, and the lynching of blacks in the American South. The movement supported the Archdiocesan Catholic Interracial Council, striking Woolworth’s workers, Newark ­labor protests, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, an interfaith organ­ization. The movement’s pacifism, loudly announced in 1933, ran against traditional Catholic just-­war theory but garnered relatively l­ittle notice u ­ ntil 1941. Despite overwhelming public support for war against Germany, Japan, and Italy, Day, Maurin, and Catholic Worker volunteers criticized the military draft and refused to take part in the war. ­After the war, when the draft was renewed in 1948, they again protested. They rejected New York state’s compulsory air raid drills in the 1950s, a move for which Day was jailed. L ­ ater they vigorously opposed the Vietnam War,

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picketing draft offices and burning draft cards and rec­ords. The movement backed civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s and castigated American racism.60 The Church generally stayed out of the movement’s affairs, which ­were managed entirely outside its confines. Movement workers practiced a spiritual regimen focused on individual prayer, daily Communion, and personal devotions drawn from traditional liturgical practice, but they eschewed the Church ceremonialism so splendidly conducted in Manhattan’s many ornate sanctuaries. When conservative Catholics complained about Day’s left-­wing activities, she deftly avoided archdiocesan retribution. For instance, in 1951, when the archdiocese demanded that her newspaper abandon the Catholic Worker name or stop publishing, she acknowledged errors, promised greater oversight, and then awaited a final archdiocesan order that never came.61 But lay critics w ­ ere not so compromising. William Buckley, the conservative Catholic editor of National Review, protested “the grotesqueries that go into . . . ​the Catholic Worker movement” and was at his patronizing best in complimenting “the slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic, anti-­Catholic doctrines of [the] good-­hearted w ­ oman” at its forefront. Many per­sis­tently questioned ­whether movement members understood much about Catholicism. But what proved most costly was the movement’s pacifism, especially a­ fter 1941. The Catholic Worker newspaper lost two-­thirds of its subscribers, contributions faded, and schools and congregations s­topped welcoming Day for talks. The Times and ­ ntil 1949, refusing Herald Tribune shunned Day and Maurin from 1942 u to publicize Catholic Worker war re­sis­tance. When Maurin died the Herald Tribune’s headline scarcely could have been more dismissive: “Peter Maurin Dead, Roamed U.S. and Wrote.” 62 The ­bitter reproach to Catholic Worker pacifism hurt, but a­ fter 1970 it gave way to admiration for Day’s relentless focus on the poor and her conviction that ameliorating poverty was the central and true message of Chris­tian­ity. The Catholic Worker movement has quietly continued to grow. In 2019 more than two hundred Houses of Hospitality operated in thirty-­eight states, with forty more abroad. American archdioceses, parishes, colleges, and universities fund facilities named for Day, which provide temporary and long-­term housing for the homeless, as well as meals, groceries, and social ser­vices for the poor. Although Day fa-



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mously quipped, “­Don’t call me a saint, I ­don’t want to be dismissed so easily,” the US Conference of Catholic Bishops formally endorsed her nomination for sainthood in 2012. Such an honor may well be deserved. No Manhattan reformer left a more enduring call for a consequential modern faith nor an institutional legacy to rival Day’s, an irony for a woman and a movement that so thoroughly shunned pomp and authority.63

In contrast to Day, a Catholic outsider whose good works taught the Church what being an insider should mean, Mordecai Kaplan was an insider whose quest to salvage Judaism in modern times turned him into an outsider. Kaplan confronted modernity directly and sometimes exasperatingly. His major systematic effort, Judaism as a Civilization:­Toward a Reconstruction of American-­Jewish Life (1934), stands as the most trenchant exposition on the clash between Judaism and modernity ever written in Amer­ i­ca. Indeed, it may be the most profound American text on modernity’s test of religion generally. Most of Kaplan’s colleagues rejected his analy­sis of “the pre­sent crisis in Judaism.”Yet he remade much in American Jewish life. Even his failures mark him as one of Amer­i­ca’s most significant and challenging religious reformers, irrespective of tradition.64 The seeds of Kaplan’s reformist outlook could be found even in his Manhattan adolescence. Eight years old when he arrived from Lithuania in 1889, Kaplan was beckoned to the rabbinate, albeit without the distinguished lineage of a Heschel or Soloveitchik. His ­father, Israel, did receive rabbinical training in Lithuania, but like many other immigrant rabbis, he never found a congregation to lead in New York and oversaw ritual slaughtering instead. Kaplan studied Talmud with his f­ather, attended several yeshivas, enrolled at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and City College in the 1890s, received Orthodox ordination in 1902, and fi­nally attended Columbia University for a master’s degree.65 Challenges to traditional Judaism came at school and unintentionally at home. The well-­known biblical scholar Arnold Ehrlich often visited Israel Kaplan and, much to his irritation, introduced Mordecai to textual criticism that questioned authorship of the Torah. At seminary Kaplan raised doubts about biblical miracles. Then, at Columbia,

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a course with ethical culture movement founder Felix Adler piqued his interest in the social dimensions of religion. He went on to read William James, John Dewey, and Emile Durkheim ­under the distinguished sociologist Franklin Giddings, deepening his focus on religion and community life.66 In 1909, Solomon Shechter, newly arrived at the seminary, hired Kaplan as a professor of homiletics and head of the new Teacher’s Institute, which was expected to revive and reshape the seminary. Thus began a five-­decade ­career at the seminary, which unspooled in three stages. In the first, from 1909 to 1920, Kaplan determined to recast Jewish education and congregational life for modern times. During a sometimes-­ awkward six-­year rabbinical stint at the Orthodox congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, and through his collaboration with the Jewish educational reformer Samson Benderly in the ill-­fated Kehillah, Kaplan came away with new ideas. In 1915 he laid out some of them in two articles in Menorah Journal: “What Judaism Is Not” and “What Judaism Is.” He believed that Jews should reduce their traditional emphasis on theology and instead turn to the language of “psy­chol­ogy and social science, history, and ­human experience.” It was in t­ hese arenas that a modern communal sense of ethical and moral Jewishness would be fostered. In 1916 Kaplan started putting ­these ideas into practice by joining with largely second-­generation Manhattan Orthodox business and community leaders to or­ga­nize a new congregation. They opened the Jewish Center on West 86th Street. The center was not just a place of worship: it was an unpre­ce­dented nine-­story space with meeting rooms, social halls, auditoriums, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool. The center became the model for large-­scale synagogue construction across the city and country. In such a place, Kaplan proclaimed, Judaism could be lived “as a civilization and not merely as a religion or as a system of creeds and ceremonies.” 67 The synagogue center had its critics—­recall the “shul with a pool” dismissal—­but Kaplan d ­ idn’t ­really start taking heat u ­ ntil 1920, in response to his bracing new Menorah Journal article, “A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism.” This marked the beginning of phase two of his reforming ­career. No longer content to provide a place for Orthodox “civilization,” Kaplan tackled Orthodoxy itself. He charged that Orthodoxy’s overriding commitment to the infallibility of tradition made it



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“altogether out of keeping with the march of h ­ uman thought” and incapable of coping with modernity. Although Kaplan also claimed “even more pronounced” dissent from Reform Judaism—­which “shifted the center of spiritual interests from the Jewish p ­ eople to the individual Jew,” bypassing community life and “gulping down ill-­understood modern slogans” along the way—­his equanimity gained him few supporters. Jewish Center board members ­were outraged by his attack on basic Orthodox princi­ples they had thought he honored. ­After some efforts at negotiation, Kaplan resigned as the center’s rabbi in 1921. The following year he formed another new congregation, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. He took about half the center’s families with him.68 The Society for the Advancement of Judaism was all but awash in lectures from seminary and Columbia faculty on art education, Jewish education, m ­ usic, and Jewish history. The society opened a beth din (rabbinical court) to adjudicate marriages, divorces, and financial disputes and strongly supported Zionist ­causes, a lifelong commitment of Kaplan’s. He also began ritual experiments. He had been publicly raising questions about the equality of w ­ omen and men since 1918, and in March 1922 he called his twelve-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old ­daughter Judith to the pulpit to recite from the Torah. It was the first bat mitzvah, which was much like the bar mitzvah ceremony marking the ascension of thirteen-­year-­old boys to accountability within Jewish communities. By the 1960s, the ceremony had become commonplace in Conservative and Reform congregations, and Orthodox congregations ­were beginning to adopt it. Years l­ater Judith recounted that when she r­ose for her bat mitzvah, “no thunder sounded, no lightning struck.” Yet an impor­tant step was taken ­toward the equality of w ­ omen in American Judaism.69 Twelve years later Kaplan’s seminal Judaism as a Civilization elaborated on a concept he broached in the mid-1920s. The book capped the second phase of his work. Its opening sentence was meant to shock, and it did: “Before the beginning of the nineteenth ­century all Jews regarded Judaism as a privilege; since then most Jews have come to regard it as a burden.” In Judaism as a Civilization, Kaplan rejected the traditional Jewish conception of a super­natural, historical God, arguing that this view was commonplace in the early stages of many cultures and was not uniquely Jewish. He also rebuffed the Jews’ claim to be God’s “chosen p ­ eople.” This position may have been reassuring in the

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context of diaspora, but it was unsuited to a demo­cratic society. Traditional Jewish custom and law ­were so poorly tuned to modern life that “no amount of reinterpretation w ­ ill enable them to exert a spiritualizing influence upon the Jew.”70 Instead, Kaplan stressed reconstructing Judaism as a “civilization” within a demo­cratic Amer­i­ca where many identities could thrive. This proj­ect entailed a focus on the f­ uture rather than the past. The past could supply memories on which community belonging was based in part, but the ­future was in modern Jewish “folkways,” not efforts to mimic e­ arlier practices or honor laws designed for distant ancestors. Lit­er­a­ture, m ­ usic, art, and intellectual life would “provide the folk with memory of its past and aspirations for the f­ uture.” What Kaplan was saying was that Judaism would have to meet the expectations of the modern Jew—­that the Jewish ­people would resuscitate a vibrant Jewish religion, not the other way around. “The Jew w ­ ill have to save Judaism before Judaism w ­ ill be in a 71 position to save the Jew,” Kaplan concluded. The final phase of Kaplan’s c­ areer was dominated by defending, realizing, and expanding upon the ideas contained in Judaism as a Civilization. The book caused a firestorm. Newspapers from Akron, Ohio, to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to Honolulu printed notices of the book, which received a positive review in the Times. But mostly Kaplan was met with anger or ­else the suffocating silence of ­those who refused to engage his thinking. “­There is no God and Kaplan is his prophet,” one Orthodox rabbi said, summarizing his communities’ dismissal of Kaplan’s life’s work. As for Conservative Jews, if Reform Jews w ­ ere too radical for them, then Kaplan was a wayward fanatic. Even Reform Jews disliked Kaplan’s displacement of religion by “civilization.” Prominent Protestants, Catholics, phi­los­o­phers of religion, the Herald Tribune, and almost all religious journals simply ignored the book.72 Kaplan persevered, however. In 1935, a year a­ fter Judaism as a Civilization was published, he started a journal, The Reconstructionist. He wrote for almost ­every issue for over thirty years, promoted his ideas through extensive correspondence with Jews across the nation, and spoke incessantly in synagogues and colleges. He furiously published books—­Judaism in Transition (1936), The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937), The ­Future of the American Jew (1948), Questions Jews Ask (1956), Judaism without Supernaturalism (1958), and The Greater Judaism in the



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Mordecai Kaplan, shown ­here preparing for a Jewish Theological Seminary event in the 1950s, was a founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and perhaps the most controversial American rabbi of the twentieth c­ entury. Ratner Center Photo­g raph #3231. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Making (1960). He also published a modernized Haggadah, the Passover text, and a two-­volume book of prayers for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And ­there was his infamous Sabbath Prayer Book that inspired the Orthodox herem in 1945.73 The herem both­ered Kaplan but not enough to stem his productivity. More disappointing was the loss of personal relations. His friendship with Heschel turned sour, and some seminary colleagues never forgave him. Over the years his hope that Conservative Judaism would embrace his

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broad program to reconstruct con­temporary Judaism also faded.Yet Kaplan found supporters, and not always in expected places. Kazin reviewed Judaism in Transition empathetically in the Times, Jerusalem’s Hebrew University asked Kaplan to teach as a visitor, and he maintained warm relations with many of his former students, such as the prominent rabbi Milton Steinberg of Park Ave­nue Synagogue.74 For years Kaplan resisted developing a fourth denominational group within American Judaism. But five years a­ fter retiring from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1963, he acceded to supporters, especially his son-­in-­law Ira Eisenstein. Eisenstein, also a rabbi, opened a Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia in 1968. ­Today Reconstructionist Judaism remains by far the smallest of the four major American Jewish denominations, but, rather like its originator, it enjoys regard, sometimes grudging, in all but Orthodox Jewish quarters. When Kaplan died in 1983 at 102 years of age, he was acknowledged as the American Jew who asked modern Judaism’s biggest questions, indeed modern religion’s biggest questions. Kaplan believed that tough but honest answers to ­those questions could ennoble Jews rightly seeking what Jews had always rightly sought, a “Jewish life abundant, rich in content, variegated in appeal, vis­i­ble and tangible as well as thinkable, occupying space as well as time.”75

The Powells, Reverends Adam Clayton Powell and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. likewise sought abundant, vis­i­ble, and thinkable lives for their community. They pursued racial justice fueled by Christian equanimity, first by protest and then by direct electoral politics. Popu­lar histories fixate on the younger Powell as a modern Icarus, who became New York’s first black member of Congress but, lacking his ­father’s probity, generated tabloid headlines for de­cades and left public life ­under a cloud of scandal. But, giving the ­father his due, from the 1920s into the 1950s, the Powells tackled Chris­tian­ity and politics in tandem, if not always in harmony. Their challenge to American racism, rooted in scripture and propelled by a power­ful and engaged Harlem congregation, transcended Congressman Powell’s personal vulgarities, becoming an impor­tant model for the fusion of religion and the tragically urgent quest for civil rights.



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Powell Sr. pursued a distinctly Christian social gospel with bite. In 1909, the same year he became Abyssinian Baptist’s minister, he became a founding member of the NAACP. In 1911 he argued for a distinctly social approach to religion. “Chris­tian­ity means more than piously ramming the word of God down the throats of men twice on Sunday,” he said. He found “more sociability and cordiality in the average barroom, poolroom, [and] ballroom, than in the average church” and urged building new sanctuaries with “reading rooms, social rooms, [and] gymnasiums.” He criticized Abyssinian’s own failure to embrace strangers, and, acting with other ministers, he publicly protested attacks on blacks by “white toughs” on 26th Street.76 In 1914 he excoriated American Chris­tian­ity as an un-­Christian “abomination,” telling ten thousand Odd Fellows at the Manhattan Casino that, unlike “true Chris­tian­ity,” “American religion enslaved 4 million ­human beings. It disfranchises, segregates and Jim Crows 10 million American citizens, [and] shoots, hangs, and burns defenseless men and ­women.” In a March 1917 sermon at Abyssinian and an April speech in Chicago, he urged all American blacks “to wage a bloodless war for their constitutional rights” and the American government “to abolish ‘Jim Crowism,’ segregation, and the lawful lynching institution, and give to colored men po­liti­cal equality.” Two months l­ater, following the S ­ ilent Protest that drew ten thousand marchers to Fifth Ave­nue decrying Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and anti-­black race riots, Powell traveled with Du Bois, several other Manhattan ministers, NAACP members, and the distinguished black businesswoman Madam C. J. Walker to pre­sent a “redress of grievances” to President Woodrow Wilson and Congress. In Washington they protested the lynching of “2,867 colored men and ­women” over the previous three de­cades and recent murders in East St. Louis of “nearly a hundred innocent hard-­working citizens . . . ​done to death in broad daylight for seeking to earn an honest living.”77 The Depression intensified Powell’s Christian social outreach as well as his rhe­toric. As Harlem unemployment ballooned in 1930, he sermonized on “A Hungry God.” “We clothe God by clothing men and ­women,” he thundered. He called for more donations from Abyssinian members and opened a job agency overseen by his son, Adam Jr. When the president of the National ­Women’s Training School in Washington, DC, Nannie Burroughs, called ministers and other black leaders “hibernating

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groundhogs . . . ​impotent in the presence economic crisis,” Abyssinian joined five other Harlem churches in opening a soup kitchen. In a column appearing in black newspapers across the country, Powell challenged the nation’s thirty thousand black ministers to give portions of their income to relief efforts. “If the churches do not answer this challenge,” Powell wrote, “they ­ought to shut up and close up.” Their clergy should “never again preach on Matthew 25, ‘I was hungry and ye fed Me; I was naked and ye clothed Me.’ ”78 The economic catastrophe of the Depression deeply ­shaped the religion as well as the politics of the younger Powell. By all accounts a handsome, gregarious, spoiled, and rebellious adolescent, he failed out of City College and transferred to Colgate University, where he won renown for partying. But during his se­nior semester, in February 1930, he had a mystical experience and told his parents he intended to become a minister. ­After he graduated, his startled ­father named him Abyssinian’s business man­ ag­ er, the congregation licensed him to preach, and by May 1931 he had been ordained and named assistant minister. His rise at Abyssinian did not come without grumbling from some members. He had no formal theological training and left Union Theological Seminary a­ fter Henry Sloane Coffin pronounced a draft prayer he had written “of no value.” Powell Jr. also dated and married a divorcee with a son, the Broadway singer and dancer Isabel Washington. To compensate for his lack of theological training, he enrolled at Columbia Teachers College, where he received a master’s degree in religious education. But what ­really mattered for the younger Powell’s ­career and his community standing was not his education or lifestyle but his status as his f­ather’s son. Both preached a Christian gospel demanding justice in Amer­ic­ a.79 Powell  Jr. moved with remarkable success through a sometimes-­ dizzying Manhattan world of pulpit and politics. An aphorism he employed in dedicating a Chicago church in 1940—­“a challenging church to meet a challenging day”—­summarized his approach. He understood that “religious adventure” was never “practiced ­under ideal or adverse conditions,” and adversity was never far away. He hosted a mild-­mannered Negro Business League conference as an extension of Abyssinian’s job placement efforts but also launched a boisterous crusade demanding improvements at the scandalously bad Harlem Hospital. He praised Communists at a public meeting but also supported a vigorously anti-­



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Communist Republican candidate for the New York Assembly. If he urged Harlem blacks to show support for German Jews victimized by Nazis, he also supported a boycott of the Jewish-­owned Blumstein Department Store on 125th Street u ­ ntil it hired black employees. He or­ga­ nized the New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which successfully confronted Woolworth’s, Kress, and other businesses on employment discrimination. On his watch, Abyssinian continued to hold frequent mass meetings for larger protest campaigns. He used Abyssinian as one of two staging grounds for a boycott to win jobs for blacks at city bus companies.80 Beginning in 1941 the younger Powell merged religiously fueled protest with electoral politics, outmaneuvering major leaders such as Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph to win a seat on the New York City Council. He was the first Harlem minister to win an election. He founded a new weekly newspaper, ­People’s Voice, to support his ­causes, and, prompted by the devastating 1943 Harlem riots, joined his f­ ather in excoriating local and national race prejudice and economic discrimination. The elder Powell said his piece in the scathing Riots and Ruins and the younger in Marching Blacks: An Interpretive History of the Rise of the Black Common Man. When Powell Jr. ran for Congress in 1944, his personal standing and Abyssinian’s power­ful presence in Harlem carried him through the primaries. Despite rumors about a relationship with another singer, Hazel Scott, and pos­si­ble divorce from Isabel, no one stood to oppose him in the fall. As the public learned ­after the election, both rumors ­were true.81 Powell Jr.’s is a classic story of rise and ruin. Amid all his womanizing, divorces, tax evasion, and deceptions, he remained in the House of Representatives ­until 1967, when he was ejected for reasons of corruption. He also belittled Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. Late in life, surrounded by enemies, he retreated to the Ca­rib­bean island of Bimini. He died of prostate cancer in 1972, at the age of sixty-­five. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the younger Powell was a force for much positive change. He persuaded his fellow members of Congress to stop saying “n****r” in the House and became famous for his repeated “Powell amendments,” which sought to ban racial discrimination and segregation in federal endeavors. Though t­hese proposals w ­ ere unsuccessful, they served as power­ful reminders that discrimination in federal

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Austin Hansen photographed an early 1950s Abyssinian Baptist Church dinner held in the church gymnasium featuring church officers, retired minister Adam Clayton Powell seated at center, and his son, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., seated with his son in his arms. Used by permission of Joyce Hansen. Image provided by Photo­g raphs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

proj­ects was legally sanctioned, which embarrassed and irritated many of his colleagues. In t­ hese re­spects, the younger Powell was a g­ reat deal like his passionately antiracist f­ather. Similarly, the younger Powell possessed his f­ ather’s institutional acumen. Despite his “radical” reputation and assertive bearing, Powell Jr. successfully steered major legislation through the House of Representatives, including President Lyndon Johnson’s ­Great Society wage and education proposals, laws making lynching a federal crime, and a constitutional amendment banning the poll tax.82 At the same time, opponents of civil rights reveled in the younger Powell’s trou­bles and torched him with invective. In a June 1957 National Review article, “The Ordeal of Adam Clayton Powell,” William Buckley’s twenty-­four-­year-­old ­sister Maureen leveled charges of a “strange racist extremism” and demeaned his congregation as “Abyssinia” Baptist Church, a name it had never used. Her article was a preface of sorts to



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William Buckley’s infamous August 1957 National Review editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail,” by which Buckley meant the white South. Published anonymously but since confirmed as Buckley’s work, the editorial complained about “Negro backwardness.” Buckley asserted that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such mea­sures as are necessary to prevail, po­liti­cally and culturally” b ­ ecause “for the time being, it is the advanced race.” When the Eisenhower administration halted an investigation of Powell’s taxes nine months ­later, Buckley tried to meddle by sending copies of a National Review issue critical of the move to a ­grand jury member who had asked for them, a violation of ­grand jury rules. When the ­grand jury investigated that action, Buckley claimed freedom of the press.83 Still, many clergy and laypeople saw power­ful examples in the Powells and their pursuit of equality founded in faith. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who comprised Clergy and Laity Concerned; and the suburban New Jersey and Long Island congregations that sent marchers to Selma followed the same path the Powells cleared into the streets, the polls, and elected office. When the City of New York named forty-­five blocks of Seventh Ave­nue north of Central Park Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in 1974, it might have thought more historically about both Powells. A simpler “Powell Boulevard” would have recognized the dual achievements of a ­father and son who, together and in their best days, called on their faith to demand justice in an Amer­i­ca too long unwilling to grapple with the consequences of slavery and its ongoing racism.84

Alongside Powell Jr. the most commonly disparaged clergyman in postwar Amer­i­ca was prob­ably Norman Vincent Peale—­Powell for his dissolute life, Peale for his shallow theology. Peale’s intellectual standing never improved, and his disastrous involvement in an anti-­Catholic effort to prevent the election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 became a deep embarrassment even to him. But in the minds of the wider public, he was Amer­ic­ a’s second cleric, ­behind only Martin Luther King. Long before his death in 1993 at age ninety-­five, Peale had become Manhattan’s best-­known popu­lar religious figure, with a devoted following all over the country.

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Peale was and still is most famous for his 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking, which spent three years on the Times bestseller list and remains in print seventy years a­ fter it was first published. At least ten other books by Peale are also still in print. Yet Peale’s well-­known writings can overshadow two other impor­tant facets of his work: his embrace of modern psy­chol­ogy as a significant component of congregational life and his turn to modern tools of religious institution-­building, especially communications technology. Peale’s background paralleled that of other Manhattan reformers. He too was a minister’s son. From his Methodist ­family, he left for schools familiar to members of his denomination: Ohio Wesleyan University and Boston University School of Theology. The elitism of t­hese institutions irked him, but he made it through graduation and ordination. His early preaching and success in organ­izing Methodist congregations in Brooklyn (1924–1927) and especially Syracuse (1927–1932) made him an ideal candidate for more prestigious positions, especially during the Depression. In 1932 Peale turned down a lucrative offer from Los Angeles’s First Methodist Church to accept a more challenging position at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, a congregation of the Reformed Church of Amer­ic­ a. Marble Collegiate presented two difficulties. First, at least in theory, it required Peale to shift doctrinally from free-­grace Methodism to the predestinarian Calvinism of the Reformed Church. Second, Marble’s membership was lagging. But the congregation also presented two attractions. Marble Collegiate was the oldest Protestant church in New York City, and it was comfortably ensconced in the shadow of Wall Street, with the potential to bring in a much larger membership of affluent, educated businesspeople—if Peale could succeed.85 At Marble Collegiate, Peale simply bypassed the Reformed Church’s formal Calvinism to develop what he termed a “personal ministry” focused on worshippers’ life concerns. Early sermons that offered standard-­ issue religious criticism of the “ephemeral” character of “material ­things” or, more dramatically, hope that “the depression w ­ ill continue till we realize how empty our aspirations are,” scarcely assuaged listeners worried about evaporating jobs and produced only small gains in membership. But Peale shifted ground. He began proclaiming the “Power of Religion” to discover “secret, inward sources of strength” and “reservoirs of power” inside ­every individual. He mixed traditional Methodist em-



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phases—on the power of prayer, for instance, and the conviction that ­every faithful individual can live a reasonably Godly life—­with “personality building,” a strain of ideas quietly drawn from the mind-­cure approach of the New Thought movement. The result of this concoction was a therapeutic “practical Chris­tian­ity” that helped men and w ­ omen overcome frustrations of life and business. Worshipers responded positively to Peale’s sermons focused on success and overcoming difficulties, and membership started climbing faster. Soon Peale had a nationally syndicated weekly radio show that could reach millions of listeners receptive to his assertion that success in life and business reflected Christ’s care for individuals. He also became a popu­lar public lecturer making appearances across the country.86 Peale soon won attention for inspiring books. His blandly titled first effort, The Art of Living (1937) and his more effusive You Can Win (1938) sold only modestly, perhaps ­because the chapters meandered despite dramatic titles such as “The Escape from Fear” and “You Have It in You to Succeed.” But he picked up the pace in A Guide to Confident Living, published in 1948, and perfected it in The Power of Positive Thinking. Chapters w ­ ere shorter, with titles that gave advice, even commands: “Believe in Yourself,” “How to Have Constant Energy,” “Relax for Easy Power.” In de­cades rife with talk about anxiety, Peale assured, soothed, energized, and emancipated. The Power of Positive Thinking made him famous, wealthy, and one of the iconic figures of the 1950s.87 Peale also became one of the early advocates of employing professional psy­chol­ogy in pastoral counseling and, in the pro­cess, helped to transform mid-­twentieth-­century pastoral roles. Only two years a­ fter arriving at Marble Collegiate, Peale’s interest in personal religion led him to Smiley Blanton, a psychotherapist who had trained u ­ nder Freud. Together they began a psychological clinic in Marble Collegiate’s basement. Although Peale initially shared counseling duties with Blanton, in the 1940s he gave the clinic over entirely to Blanton while keeping it a part of Marble Collegiate’s ministry. In 1951 the clinic became the American Foundation for Religion and Psychiatry and moved to larger offices on Park Ave­nue, funded by Peale’s royalties and by prominent donors, such as J. H. Kresge of the Kresge dime-­stores. The clinic saw several thousand individuals a year even by the early 1940s, and by 1960 its greatly expanded staff was counseling over twenty thousand p ­ eople

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An advertisement for Norman Vincent Peale’s lecture at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in January 1951. Courtesy Norman Vincent Peale Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries.

annually. O ­ thers followed the clinic’s model of psychology-­based pastoral counseling, and seminaries across the country—­Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—­began training students in the practice. In 1957 a critical observer wondered if counseling had not become “the pastoral care of the Church,” and by the 1960s Americans prob­ably saw clergymen for personal prob­lems more often than they consulted psychologists or psychiatrists.88 Peale also embraced mid-­twentieth-­century technologies and communication systems and was the beneficiary of modern institutional development strategies pursued by Ruth Stafford Peale, his wife. While continuing his enormously successful radio broadcasts, he developed what became a specialized ministry to businessmen at Marble Collegiate, in part to redress the predominance of w ­ omen in Marble’s membership. He extended the message of optimistic dynamism and “winning” that attracted businessmen from salesmen to executives. In 1945 he founded



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an inspirational magazine, Guideposts, to increase his national audience and proclaim a “­great, positive Christian movement” that was culturally conservative, anti-­Communist, and gung ho about Amer­i­ca and “­free enterprise.”89 Ruth Stafford Peale provided the institutional acumen and leadership that underlay her husband’s blossoming appeal. She oversaw the printing and distribution of Peale’s weekly sermons to what quickly became a nationwide subscription list in the 1940s. She headed Peale’s Foundation for Christian Living, formed in 1950  in Pawling, New York, about seventy-­five miles northeast of New York City, where the Peales maintained a country estate. The Peale Foundation oversaw Guideposts and Sermon Publications, which distributed Peale’s sermons, managed his extensive public appearances, guided Positive Thinkers Clubs across the country, and maintained connections with the American Foundation for Religion and Psychiatry in Manhattan. By the late 1950s, the Peales had together turned Norman into a religious industry.90 Fame brought criticism. The mammoth publicity accorded The Power of Positive Thinking quickly gave way to humiliating dismissals of its superficiality. Its author was a “confidence man” who offered a mere “pretension to mastery.” He was the originator of a “cult of reassurance” oblivious to the “contradictoriness of h ­ uman nature”—­a preacher who abandoned the “rhe­toric of the sermon” for the “short punchy sentences and atrocious jargon of the advertisement.” His Manhattan neighbors ­were no less contemptuous than far-­flung critics. Niebuhr paired Peale with Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen as “dubious and even dangerous manifestations of [a] modern religiosity” that avoids the “mystery and meaning of freedom, sin, and grace.” Tillich thought Peale bypassed the “true religious question of our period.” He simply made readers “fit again for the demands of the competitive and conformist society in which we are living,” without addressing the structural ills that induced such conformity.91 Peale’s leadership of the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, a Protestant anti-­Catholic co­ali­tion formed to defeat Mas­sa­ chu­setts senator John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, further tarnished his reputation. Niebuhr charged that Peale’s group had “loosed the floodgates of religious bigotry.” A Bronx rabbi called their arguments “pious fraud.” Adlai Stevenson undercut Peale with humor,

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quipping, “I find St. Paul appealing and Peale appalling.” Peale literally went into hiding, resigned from the group, offered to resign his Marble Collegiate pulpit (an offer that was rejected), and claimed that he actually had no hand in the group’s offensive pronouncements. So thorough ­were the denunciations that several years l­ater the columnist James Reston joked that Richard Nixon might have won the presidency “if Norman Vincent Peale had only done a ­little ‘positive thinking’ instead of getting himself involved in that attack on Kennedy in Washington.”92 Neither the brevity of Peale’s engagement—­the effort lasted one week—­nor his public acknowl­edgment that he had been “just stupid” won him mercy from his detractors. Perhaps that is b ­ ecause, protestations aside, Peale almost certainly believed in the proj­ect of taking down Kennedy. What­ever his cheery books said, Peale had a long history of less-­noticed and quite angry conservative po­liti­cal activism. He fulminated against the New Deal in the 1930s, believed that Franklin  D. Roo­se­velt’s third term presaged an “American dictatorship,” and a­ fter World War II participated in hard-­edged anti-­Communist and anti-­union organ­izations such as the Committee for Constitutional Government and the Christian Freedom Foundation. Thus, Peale’s opposition to the liberal and Catholic Kennedy came with ample baggage. As Peale explained at the press conference announcing the National Conference’s formation, its members, all of them Protestant ministers, worried that a Catholic president would be vulnerable to “extreme pressure” from the Church hierarchy. He also questioned the Catholic public’s support for the “wall of separation of church and state.”93 Peale’s election fiasco sealed his dismal standing among theologians and intellectuals, but his followers weathered the storm. His books continued selling, and he wrote more, tallying forty by his death. He lectured extensively to large audiences for years. Guideposts magazine continued growing and claimed more than 2 million subscribers by the 2010s. The Peale-­Blanton Institute and Counseling Center went from strength to strength, inspiring similar facilities throughout the United States and beyond. The Wall Street Journal may not have been right that by 1969 Peale was having the proverbial last laugh—­the criticism never ­stopped, as columnists like William Lee Miller observed that Peale’s ­earlier books w ­ ere “all alike,” but “the ­later ones are worse.” Yet Peale’s messages that positive thinking and financial success ­were Christian



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values continued to attract millions. Recently they have found expression in the ministries of Joel Osteen, Paula White, and the late Bishop Eddie Long. President Donald Trump frequently attended ser­vices at Marble Collegiate as an adolescent and young adult and was married to his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková, by Peale in 1977. Trump has often acknowledged Peale’s influence, especially his emphasis on “winning.”94 In the broad history of American culture, Peale may indeed have had the last laugh. Though his intellectual influence came nowhere near that of modern Manhattan’s other religious reformers, his effect on the experience of religion in the United States—­and its overlaps with politics—­was almost certainly greater.

Niebuhr, Tillich, Heschel, Maritain, Kaplan, Day, Soloveitchik, the Powells, and Peale ­were hardly the full range of Manhattan’s major religious figures between the 1920s and the 1960s. Among their contemporaries w ­ ere Harry Emerson Fosdick of Riverside Church; the sometimes-­ quirky Unitarian John Haynes Holmes of Community Church; two particularly influential rabbis, Wise and Steinberg; Cardinals Patrick Joseph Hayes and Francis Joseph Spellman; Frederick A. Cullen of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church and William Lloyd Imes of St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem; Louis Finkelstein, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary; Samuel Belkin, who turned Yeshiva College into Yeshiva University; and Bishop Sheen, whose Life Is Worth Living led tele­vi­sion ratings on the DuMont and ABC networks from 1952 to 1957. Each sought within their own traditions “a modern church with a modern message for the modern age,” as the Harlem Unitarian socialist minister Ethelred Brown put it. Of course, they also would have disagreed on many points, including the meaning of both “modern” and “message.”95 For ­women seeking positions of religious authority, pro­g ress came slowly and mostly ­after 1960. One of the exceptions was Evangeline Booth, who jumped queues when she immigrated to Manhattan from London in 1904 and become the Salvation Army’s commander for the United States. She obtained US citizenship in 1923 and administered the army’s national operation and its New York City ministries ­until 1934, when she returned to London to become Salvation Army general.96

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­ here ­were also ­women involved in major fund­rais­ing efforts, even T though late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century professionalization diminished w ­ omen’s roles in the activity. Still, ­women such as Louise Zabriskie of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies and Eva Garson Levy of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies guided w ­ omen’s divisions in their federations and achieved substantial growth across several de­cades. Levy’s division in­de­pen­dently raised over $4 million of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies’ funds in 1946. Elsewhere, laywomen effectively led support for Protestant and Catholic missions, although the missionary impulse waned in mainline Protestant denominations. Nuns continued to lead New York City’s Catholic hospitals even as facilities modernized medically and administratively. They kept up with the times, augmenting their spiritual ministries with technological and bureaucratic skills. Hadassah, the Jewish ­women’s Zionist organ­ization founded in Manhattan in 1912, witnessed spectacular growth across the nation well past the 1960s, promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine and strengthening Jewish identity. New York ­women ­were frequently tapped for its presidencies and board positions.97 Unknown and little-­known Manhattanites also pursued and proclaimed religious truth. Karl Feininger, the same Manhattan musician who bitterly denigrated his black cooks, hoped to undo Mary Baker Eddy as a New Thought apostate and “ignoramus” in a never-­published book for which he wrote a dozen chapters in 1912 and 1913. Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein led “Jewish Science” meetings in the ­Hotel Majestic, where he touted the views of a Southern rabbi, Alfred Moses. Moses’s Jewish Science: Divine Healing in Judaism (1916) paralleled New Thought and Christian Science approaches to anxiety and illness exacerbated by a “mad desire to ‘keep up’ . . . ​that has made our generation neurotic and restless.” Manhattan also had its share of street prophets. A white street prophet captured by the photographer Harold Corsini in 1939 deftly placed himself near movie posters in Harlem advertising films with Bette Davis and Al Jolson while preaching from a sidewalk manhole. His chalkboards proclaimed “new ­things that are good for the wellfar[e] of living . . . ​and happier for the ­human Soul.”98 Another Manhattan prophet was the black Pentecostal evangelist Ida Bell Robinson, who experienced conversion in Florida as an adolescent and preached extensively in the United Holy Church. When its leaders



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The photographer Harold Corsini captured this street preacher holding forth in a Harlem manhole in 1949, his chalkboards placed near movie posters to attract more attention. © Harold Corsini. Image provided by Eastman House Museum.

ended ­women’s public ministries in 1924, she fasted, received a message from God to “come out on Mt. Sinai and loose the ­women,” and founded the new Mt. Sinai Holy Church of Amer­i­ca, which she led u ­ nder the title of bishop. She or­ga­nized more than a hundred congregations along the East Coast, including Harlem’s Bethel Holy Church in 1932. Eventually she made her headquarters in Harlem, where she broadcast hour-­ long ser­vices on WNEW radio for a de­cade and accumulated an FBI file detailing her mixed-­race congregations and World War II pacifism. In 1944 she claimed to have died and been resurrected. She recounted being taken “out of this body for three hours,” with Angels “all around me ready to appoint me a place . . . ​but God sent me back.” Her warning? “If ­you’re ­going—­really ­going, ­don’t be around folks who can pray you back,” as her Harlem congregants did. When she died for the last time

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in 1946, the Age and Amsterdam News ignored her passing, just as they and all of Manhattan’s newspapers had long ignored her preaching, congregation-­building, and resurrection.99 In contrast, Carl Kunz, a white Baptist street preacher, won public attention in Manhattan, mainly as a crank. Kunz became known ­after World War II for his Manhattan sidewalk sermons maligning Jews as “Christ-­killers” and the pope as the antichrist. In an effort to get rid of him, New York City police began refusing to grant him a license to preach on public streets, a little-­known requirement dating from the mid-­ nineteenth ­century. ­After he was arrested for unlicensed street preaching, Kunz appealed and brought his case all the way to the US Supreme Court. In 1951 the Court sided with Kunz and overturned the permit system as a violation of the First Amendment. Excelling at confrontations, Kunz, with seven other Protestant evangelists, was convicted a year ­later for obstructing traffic on Broadway during a “street meeting.” He repeated the offense in 1954, then dis­appeared from the public rec­ord.100

Manhattan was also home to earnest interfaith efforts during and ­after the 1920s. As World War I ended, goodwill committees of the Protestant Federal Council of Churches and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a Reform organ­ization, sponsored a welter of conversations in Midwestern and Eastern cities. Amid sustained antisemitism and anti-­ Catholicism, and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, they sought a more respectful religious climate. But mutual suspicions hobbled their effectiveness. Catholics resented Protestant po­liti­cal and cultural dominance, Protestants w ­ ere reluctant to discontinue missions to Jews and Catholics, and some Jews wondered if goodwill was not itself a disarming conversion tactic. Tillich—­rather surprisingly, given the thrust of his theology and psy­chol­ogy—­appears to have defended Protestant missionizing among Jews. According to Mordecai Kaplan’s diary, during a small eve­ ning gathering in the 1940s “at the home of a wealthy Jewish refugee ­family,” Tillich argued in front of Maritain, Fosdick, and the Hebrew literary scholar Shalom Spiegel that “Jews who believed in Jewish religion ­were not ­violated” by missionaries, and “only ­those who had ceased believing in any religion and had become atheists had Chris­tian­ity offered to them.” He made no mention of lapsed Catholics and Protestants.101



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Perhaps the most star-­studded of the interfaith efforts was the National Conference of Jews and Christians, or­ga­nized in 1927 by liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. (In 1938, it became the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and in 1998 the National Conference for Community and Justice.) Led by Manhattan residents committed to Christian-­Jewish understanding—­two members of the Federal Council of Churches Goodwill Committee, the ­future head of the New York publishing firm Farrar Straus & Co., and a Paulist priest newly arrived at the Catholic Newman House at Columbia University—­the conference recruited an executive board comprising the top names in Manhattan’s liberal religious scene including Fosdick, Kaplan, Niebuhr, and F ­ ather Wilfred Parsons, editor of the Jesuit magazine Amer­i­ca.102 The conference acquired funds quickly and appointed a Presbyterian minister, Everett Clinchy, its first director. In January 1929 it held a two­day event at Columbia on “social, economic, and religious relationships of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.” The meeting took a civic approach to interfaith issues, engaging the cultural realities of American religious pluralism and avoiding theological questions. This was, broadly, the mission of the conference generally, and it encouraged local chapters to join in the work by organ­izing roundtables of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish speakers—­some clergy, some laity; some homegrown, some visitors—to discuss religious “understanding.” During the conference’s tenth anniversary in 1938, “trios” of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish speakers traveled across the country promoting religious goodwill, and the nation’s major radio networks obliged by broadcasting their speeches. Over ten thousand sermons about religious goodwill ­were given in churches and synagogues in two thousand American cities and towns. The conference also inaugurated a yearly “brotherhood week” intended to promote racial as well as religious harmony, which became a staple in American civic life endorsed by American presidents from Franklin Delano Roo­se­velt to John F. Kennedy and beyond. Such efforts could claim at least some credit for the real yet incomplete decline in antisemitism and anti-­Catholicism, if by no means in American race prejudice.103

Alcoholics Anonymous, modern Amer­i­ca’s ubiquitous personal transformation organ­ization, first emerged in Ohio but developed a unique

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and quietly power­ful spiritual ethos in Manhattan. Early supporters in the borough wrote what became AA’s bible, its “Big Book”—­the four-­ hundred-­page Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism.104 AA rightly considers Akron its point of origin b ­ ecause the organ­ization stemmed from a near accidental 1935 meeting ­there of two men hobbled by their drinking: William Wilson, a former Manhattan stockbroker, and Dr. Robert Smith, an Akron physician. Both had separately sought numerous medical treatments and had attended meetings of the nondenominational Protestant evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group in an attempt to cure their drinking prob­lems. The Oxford Group’s regimen combined religious commitment, prayer, and a program of six steps to achieve a fulfilled Christian life. Participants also acknowledged their own and each other’s sinfulness as a way to inspire change. ­After talking in Akron, Wilson and Smith concluded that an Oxford-­like setting might provide the steady personal support that they believed an alcoholism cure required. Smith then led a group in Akron and Wilson gathered a similar group in Manhattan.105 The distinctive spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous emerged from three developments. First, the Oxford approach proved a failure, as its unquivocal Christian witness discomfited even alcoholics raised as Christians. Second, Wilson came to believe that the nascent AA could not reach the broad swath of New York City alcoholics without accepting their economic, occupational, and religious pluralism. Third, Wilson and the early Manhattan group members found their task bolstered by embracing broad spiritual imperatives that, they believed, lay beyond any par­tic­u­lar religious tradition. As a result, Wilson and his fellow Manhattan alcoholics slowly distanced themselves from the Oxford system, then poured themselves into writing what became the Big Book.106 Published in 1939, the Big Book advanced an amorphous “spirituality.” Its famous twelve-­step program expanded the six steps of the Oxford Group’s while emphasizing spirituality broadly rather than Chris­ tian­ity specifically. As Wilson and his colleagues proceeded, they realized that they “­were powerless over alcohol” (step one). They “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” (step two). Then, in step three, they “made a decision to turn our w ­ ill and our 107 lives over to the care of God as we understood him.”



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The italicized words, emphasized in the original Big Book and printed this way ever since, allowed spirituality and God to soar through Alcoholic Anonymous without tripping across the strictures of par­tic­u­lar religious traditions. The words sanctified the individual’s right to define God’s meaning and detached the concept from official and doctrinal understandings. God appeared on a fourth of the original Big Book’s pages, often multiple times on the same page, and many of the steps outlined a constant relationship with the divine, however defined. Drunks seeking recovery would assem­ble a “moral inventory.” They would admit “to God, to ourselves and to another h ­ uman being the exact nature of our wrongs.” They would ask that “God remove all ­these defects” and “make amends” to “all persons we had harmed.” They would seek “through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, . . . ​praying only for knowledge of His ­will for us and the power to carry that out.”108 AA’s spiritualized twelve-­step program distilled much, but not all, in the religious urgency of Manhattan a­ fter the 1920s. The program moved away from traditional denominational and doctrinal focuses and t­ oward broad issues of ­human responsibility and ethics, as Tillich and Heschel did. AA’s emphasis on the tough, steady work required to overcome per­ sis­tent ­human defects would have been familiar to anyone who had read Niebuhr. A “Power greater than ourselves” and “God as we understood Him” could accommodate both biblical notions of divinity and an individual’s idiosyncratic sense of the transcendent. AA’s interest in aiding alcoholics from any background paralleled the open programs of Catholic Worker Hospitality Houses. The 1942 adoption of a kind of official AA prayer, which almost immediately was taken up in weekly meetings, solidified the movement’s religious aura. The tiny prayer was promulgated from the group’s Manhattan office by a member who had noticed it in a May 1941 Herald Tribune “Public Notices” column. The staff began printing the prayer on small cards distributed at AA meetings and included it in newsletters: God grant me the serenity to accept the ­things I cannot change, courage to change the ­things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

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Slightly dif­fer­ent versions of the prayer had circulated anonymously in the 1930s, some attributed to Niebuhr. Niebuhr prob­ably was its originator; he also expanded the prayer a bit and claimed it publicly as the “Serenity Prayer” in a 1943 pamphlet written for American soldiers. The prayer’s capacious God and tranquil plea for humane values of “serenity,” “ac­cep­tance,” “courage,” and “wisdom” exemplified AA’s vivid yet nebulous religiosity. It was scarcely surprising that when forty-­four thousand members celebrated AA’s fiftieth anniversary in Akron in 1985, the group’s principal historian evinced not the slightest awkwardness in noting how the members’ “Sunday morning ‘Spiritual Meeting’ seemed to tap the deepest roots of their sense of ‘the spiritual,’ ” a spiritual sense birthed in Manhattan on the eve of World War II.109

Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, the annual Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life never held a fiftieth-­anniversary cele­bration. But its brief and peculiar history testifies to Manhattan’s achievements, and some of its failures, as a religious and intellectual hot­house in the first half of the twentieth ­century. First held at Jewish Theological Seminary in 1940, the conference was a spectacular gathering of American social and physical scientists, phi­ los­op ­ hers, theologians, and clergy. They ­were assembled by Louis Finkelstein, the seminary’s president, as part of an effort to secure Judaism’s place and the seminary’s influence in American religious, cultural, and intellectual life. Finkelstein had taught at the seminary since 1920, becoming its provost in 1937 and president in 1940. His strategy stressed interfaith efforts, especially conferences, and his Institute for Religious and Social Studies sponsored talks by leading New York City Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Deeply troubled by the rise of Hitler and worried about the eclipse of religion in modern public discourse and politics, Finkelstein moved to create the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life in 1939. The first meeting occurred in September 1940.110 A Times headline captured the high ideals of the meeting: “79 Leaders Unite to Aid Democracy. Men of Science, Philosophy, and Religion Issue Call to Safeguard Freedom.” The initial all-­male program included,



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among ­others, Einstein, Maritain, writer and literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, sociologists Robert MacIver and Pitirim Sorokin, classical scholar Moses Hadas, theologian Anton Pegis, po­liti­cal scientist Harold Lasswell, biologist William Ritter, and Finkelstein. Almost 150 institutions, from the American Association of Jesuit Scientists to Yankton College, sent delegates, who heard twenty-­four papers on topics ranging from “Science, Religion, and Democracy” to “God and the Professors” and “God and the World.”111 From the beginning, the conference was full of tension—­not among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews but over the reconciliation of science and religion. Adler, Sorokin, and Maritain sought to privilege religion against the agnosticism and even godlessness they perceived in the physical and social sciences, views represented by the phi­los­o­phers Sidney Hook and Brand Blanshard. During the 1942 symposium, one speaker linked the social sciences with fascism, while another tied fascism to nations with strong religious traditions, ­whether Catholic or Protestant. Finkelstein and ­others sought to bridge differences, but in 1943 Hook and several allied physical and social scientists withdrew and or­ga­nized the Conference on the Scientific Spirit and Demo­cratic Faith, sponsored by the Humanist Society.112 Despite its abandonment by Hook and o ­ thers, Finkelstein’s conference expanded. For several years it attracted new luminaries, from anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, to the black phi­los­o­ pher Alain Locke, literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch, attorney David Lillienthal, and the pianist and ­music critic Olga Samaroff Stokowski, who discussed “The Art M ­ usic of Western Civilization.” The Indian activists and writers Taraknath Das and Krishnalal Shridharani presented on Indian ethnic and po­liti­cal tensions and East-­West relations. The 1945 symposium, “Approaches to Group Understanding,” brought the enlarged group to Columbia University, where a hundred papers w ­ ere circulated in advance to two hundred participants. Papers and comments ­were presented in seven long sessions held over three days, and the proceedings appeared in an eight-­hundred-­page small-­print volume not published ­until 1947.113 Breadth and size did not preclude lacunae. Notwithstanding the presence of Benedict, Mead, Jewish Theological Seminary’s Jessica Feingold, and the rare black or brown scholar, the conference epitomized

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American academia’s narrow profile of white men. Powell Jr. offered his support for the inaugural 1940 conference but raised an obvious prob­lem: “­There is no Negro speaker. This is sort of a bad start for a conference on the Demo­cratic Way of Life, d ­ on’t you think?” Despite meeting just blocks away from Amer­i­ca’s largest and most famous black ghetto, none of the 1940 speakers discussed race or Jim Crow segregation. Fi­nally Jewish Theological Seminary’s Simon Greenberg eloquently raised the centrality of race at the third conference in 1942. The issue lay “not in what we thought of the spiritual and intellectual capacities of the negro,” Greenberg argued, “but rather what we thought regarding the character and distinction of Americanism.” Greenberg’s challenge to the conference was met with silence. The conference did not discuss anti-­black discrimination ­until a 1944 symposium on “Approaches to National Unity,” and ­later considerations of the topic ­were fitful. The conference never heard any of Harlem’s well-­known religious or po­liti­cal leaders, including the Powells. Locke, the black phi­los­o­pher who spoke at the second conference in 1941, presented an elegant and broad paper on “Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy,” which only obliquely spoke to links between religion, democracy, and race.114 As the event continued past World War II into the 1950s, it became a standard academic conference. Subjects like “Learning and World Peace” (1948) gave way to “Symbols and Society” (1954). The “demo­cratic way of life” was soon excised from the conference title. Colleges and universities dutifully purchased its annual proceedings, but the sheer number of talks and comments defied synthesis. Even Hunter College’s sympathetic president and Catholic layman, George Shuster, had to describe the printed 1943 proceedings as “portly” at 438 pages, and he expressed doubt about “the conference method” as an effective tool for achieving lofty goals like cross-­cultural understanding and democ­ratization. In 1949 the conference agreed to abandon “big words” for “plain En­glish” and “short sentences” to attract readers beyond academia, but the words remained big, the sentences long, and the audience small. Newspapers ignored the published proceedings, and even academic reviewers w ­ ere puzzled. An American So­cio­log­i­cal Review commentator described the 1954 proceedings as a “hodge-­podge of special pleadings.” Perhaps it was appropriate that when the end came in 1969, conference speakers just



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focused on themselves, discussing “Approaches to Education for Character: Strategies for Change in Higher Education.”115 Finkelstein’s conference never reset American thinking on science, philosophy, and religion, much less their relationship to the demo­cratic way of life. But it captured a subtle yet substantial shift in modern American religious and intellectual life that t­ oday seems modest but then was unusual: a real advance in religious tolerance among intellectuals if not society at large. Argument over religion and science perhaps overshadowed the fact that, for almost two de­cades, leading American theologians, clergy, scientists, sociologists, po­liti­cal scientists, and phi­los­o­phers of ­every religion and none at all met ­under the sponsorship of a small Jewish seminary, where they discussed religious issues without rancor. Of course that was an insufficient achievement—­there was so much more to be done. The conference did not inspire denominations to ordain ­women, nor universities and colleges to appoint black and ­women faculty. Anti-­Catholicism, antisemitism, and race prejudice still roiled American politics. But, equally, it would be too much to expect one conference to do so much, even if its organizers ­were in fact so idealistic. At the very least, however, in one place at one conference, a quiet religious tolerance prevailed. That meaningful accomplishment could be traced at least in part to Manhattan’s peculiar role as both an urban religious hot­house and the capital of American secularism.116 Not surprisingly, but usually neglected, Manhattan’s early twentieth-­ century religious re­nais­sance also played major roles in creating the new, sometimes controversial, religious configurations that emerged in mushrooming postwar suburbs across Amer­i­ca. Suburban religion looked dif­fer­ent from city religion and frequently was. But even the differences often had urban origins.

 Conclusion Moving Out, Moving On

When Bertrand Russell published his first and only book of short stories in 1953, Satan in the Suburbs, he had in mind the towns surrounding London, and his Satan was entirely British. Still, a witty Christian ­Century columnist ran with the American possibilities. Imagine “Satan in Scarsdale, in Evanston and Winnetka.” The book might be “a special boon to a preacher in a suburb who may wish to move,” worn down by “too much like-­mindedness, which acts like a handkerchief soaked in chloroform on the mind and spirit.”1 The columnist tapped into mushrooming criticisms of Amer­i­ca’s booming post–­World War II suburbs. Some concerns w ­ ere material. By 1950 the Times was reporting all the standard municipal ills: inadequacies of transportation, the schools, hospitals, parks, sewage, w ­ ater supply, and tax revenue. Other complaints, of greater concern h ­ ere, ­were cultural and psychological. The journalist John Keats’s Crack in the Picture Win­dow (1956) labeled the suburbs “fresh-­air slums.” William H. Whyte’s The Organ­ization Man (1956) lamented suburban group think—­a society of the uncreative, who ­were satisfied to collect their paychecks. In The Split-­Level Trap (1961), psychologists Richard and Katherine Gordon labelled Bergen County, New Jersey, “disturbia” and argued that suburbanites’ obsession with status and upward mobility was collapsing their ­mental health. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) explored Amer­ i­ca’s postwar “other-­directedness”: the tendency, apparently prevalent in the suburbs, to seek approval from ­others rather than draw on reservoirs

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of inner confidence. And  C. Wright Mills’s White Collar: The American M ­ iddle Classes (1951) portrayed the suburbs as a dreary landscape of identical homes inhabited by deflated salesmen and corporate secretaries, who commuted lifelessly to city jobs, then home again, day in and day out.2 Amer­i­ca’s postwar Satan had arrived not as a fallen angel in a ­human body but as modernity in its latest form. The suburban home and garden germinated suffocating conformity, as in the Malvina Reynolds song “­Little Boxes,” which Pete Seeger pop­ul­ar­ized in 1963: ­ ittle boxes on the hillside L ­Little boxes made of ticky-­tacky ­Little boxes on the hillside ­Little boxes all the same ­There’s a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And ­they’re all made out of ticky-­tacky And they all look the same.3

Other critics also saw suburban religion as ticky-­tacky. In Protestant–­ Catholic–­Jew (1955), ­Will Herberg asserted that Amer­i­ca’s three principal religious groups increasingly focused on an amorphous “American Way of Life” rather than on spiritual concerns. Suburban residents, congregations, and clergy embraced materialistic mass culture while seemingly leaving ­behind traditional denominational identities. A young University of Chicago Divinity School professor, Gibson Winter, told Christian ­Century readers that Protestant congregations organ­ized nonstop youth activities in an effort “to get parents into church” by leveraging their ­children. A disconsolate Winter noted how the constant social programming complemented suburban obsessions with occupational advancement and social status. When Winter expanded his essay into a book, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (1961), he added a new complaint: Protestants ­were “losing touch with the central city.” Instead, Protestant leaders ­were enamored of the “high potential areas of the suburbs,” but “they do not mean potential for prayer.” Protestants ­were selling their urban souls for suburban comfort.4 Suburbanization marked a turning point in American fears about the viability of religion. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

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Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders worried that their faiths might falter in the face of density, anonymity, and pluralism. They feared as well what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world,” whereby bureaucratization, professionalization, and science would sound the death knell of the mystery at the heart of religion. Post-1945 critics, by contrast, ­were not concerned that religion was disappearing. Rather, they feared that it had become vacuous. With suburban growth came plenty of congregational expansion; the trou­ble was what went on in ­these congregations. Critics believed it only looked like enchantment—­a religious masquerade. Rather than stimulate spiritual engagement with a complicated, imperfect world, suburban religion appeared to be a middle-­class accoutrement. It was suspicious in its popularity, glib in its theologies, and unthinking in its embrace of consumerism.5 But what if the suburbs only looked dif­fer­ent? Certainly, endless rows of nearly identical homes, almost-­treeless streets, and strip malls reached only by car could provoke a visual startle from any Gothamite venturing into the portions of the New Jersey and Long Island suburbs developed ­after 1945. But that did not mean nothing of the city was in them, including the vibrant religiosity it had cultivated. Indeed, from the standpoint of history, m ­ atters look rather dif­fer­ent than con­temporary detractors charged. Manhattan’s post-1880 religious development left a strong imprint on postwar suburban religion. The urban modernization that religion underwent in Manhattan extended outward, where yet more transformation occurred. In so many ways, the half-­century of urban evolution was necessary to the thriving that came ­later and elsewhere. Without the urban encounter, suburban religion would have failed as quietly as seed cast in drought.

People formed the most obvious link between the city and the suburbs. New residents arrived in the suburbs in enormous numbers—­from the city. Between 1940 and 1950 the population of Bergen County increased by 31 ­percent, from 410,000 to 536,000. Long Island’s Nassau County grew by 63  ­percent from 407,000 to 666,000, most of the population increase occurring ­after 1945. Between 1950 and 1960 the growth only accelerated. Bergen County’s population increased 45 ­percent to 780,000 and Nassau County’s by 93 ­percent to 1.3 million. By most accounts, the

Cartoonist Roy Doty ­imagined white New Yorkers shot Sputnik-­like from Manhattan into the Long Island and New Jersey suburbs. Reproduced from “­Today’s Living,” New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 29, 1957, by Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

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increases came at the expense of older cities in New York and New Jersey. Heavi­ly urban Hudson County, New Jersey, lost almost 6 ­percent of its population between 1950 and 1960. The population of New York City declined by only 1.5 ­percent during the same period, but that ­doesn’t mean p ­ eople ­weren’t leaving. Two months a­ fter the Soviet Union’s startling Sputnik launch in October 1957, the Herald Tribune ran a cartoon from the whimsical Roy Doty, who depicted Gothamites propelled Sputnik-­like into the suburban counties of New York and New Jersey. But it ­wasn’t for reasons of whimsy that Doty drew all ­those sputniks white. While whites w ­ ere leaving New York City in droves, its population was buoyed by large-­scale minority migration from the American South and the Ca­rib­be­an.6 The race prejudice that segregated Manhattan blacks inside Harlem largely kept them out of the suburbs as well. New York’s swelling Puerto Rican population also stayed in the city. As late as 1960, a quarter c­ entury ­after the suburban migration began, minorities comprised only 3 ­percent of Nassau County’s population and only 2 ­percent of Bergen County’s. Poorer city dwellers ­were priced out of even the cheapest suburban housing. And t­hose minority residents who might have been able to ­handle a suburban mortgage ­were frequently undermined by discrimination. Government lenders and loan guarantors such as the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration promulgated regulations that allowed developers to bar black purchasers. Developers, regardless of their prejudices, went where the business opportunity was strongest, and that meant whites-­only real estate. Thus in Nassau County and the Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, William Levitt openly restricted his massive “Levittowns” to whites. In 1958, four years ­after the US Supreme Court had ruled public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, Levitt still casually announced that his new development near Burlington, New Jersey, “would be for white purchasers only.”7 The few blacks who did s­ ettle in the Long Island and New Jersey suburbs typically clustered around smaller historical black communities, such as Amityville in Nassau County, where in 1950 a developer opened a thousand-­home community to purchasers “regardless of race, creed or color.” New homeowners joined existing congregations, such as Bethel AME Church, founded in 1843 and the oldest black congregation on

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Long Island. Or they joined Holy Trinity Baptist Church, founded in 1928. With their membership swollen by the black migrations of the 1950s, both congregations constructed new sanctuaries in the 1960s. Similarly, two older Bethel AME churches in Morristown and Vauxhall, New Jersey, outside Newark, built new sanctuaries to accommodate membership growth stemming from postwar black migration, Vauxhall in 1956 and Morristown in 1967.8 But even enlarged suburban black congregations counted no more than about five hundred members, making them substantially smaller than even a middling Harlem congregation. Segregation had lasting effects in ­these areas. For one ­thing, it continued unambiguously, long a­ fter the Brown decision. For instance, the Nassau County Sanitarium did not desegregate ­until 1961. School districts dithered in implementing the Court’s order, such that in 1962 Amityville received an “F” in school integration from the NAACP. Even in 2006 New York gubernatorial candidate and f­uture US Congressman Thomas Suozi could call Nassau County “one of the worst segregated suburbs in Amer­i­ca.” He was right. In 2015 the Atlantic focused a national report about suburban segregation on two Nassau County towns, Garden City, which was 88 ­percent white with a median ­house­hold income of $150,000, and Hempstead, which was 92 ­percent black and Hispanic with a median ­house­hold income of $52,000.9 Skewed demographics ­shaped suburban congregational life. Migration from the city to the suburbs mostly involved a narrow band of white, married protestants and third-­and fourth-­generation descendants of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. Almost all of the mi­grants ­were in their twenties, thirties, or forties, and most had young ­children. The new arrivals also had a strong desire to reproduce in the suburbs the religiosity of their lives in the city.10

Urban emigrants instigated a religious revival that extended from the late 1940s into the 1970s. Strained during the Depression and para­lyzed by World War II, American church and synagogue membership and affiliation had declined in the de­cades before suburbanization. That trend reversed between 1945 and 1960. In 1940 roughly 50 ­percent of Americans ­were members or affiliates of a church and synagogue. In 1960 that

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figure had risen to about 60 ­percent. Attendance at ser­vices also increased; Gallup proclaimed that 1955 set “an all-­time high in church attendance”—by which the pollster actually meant church and synagogue attendance. All denominations enjoyed growing interest, as did religion in and of itself. College students packed courses on religion broadly, not just Chris­tian­ity. Polls reported unpre­ce­dentedly high numbers of Americans who “believed in God” or just “believed,” with nothing said about a par­tic­ul­ar God. In December 1952 President-­elect Dwight Eisenhower provoked controversy when he declared, “Our form of government makes no sense u ­ nless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I d ­ on’t 11 care what it is.” His claim, though shallow and problematic, was in tune with the times. The principal denominations active in the city responded to the suburban religious rush with dispatch, and largely by reprising their ­earlier scripts. ­After 1945, Protestants flexed the church-­management muscles they had developed in the previous half-­century. And they picked up where H. Paul Douglass and his Institute of Social and Religious Research left off in the 1930s, turning to modern demography in an effort to guide their growth. In 1945 and 1946 the National Council of Churches’ Home Missions Council undertook a study of Sussex County, New Jersey’s churches. In 1948 Manhattan’s Cooperative Field Research reported on Social Change and Church Trends in Nassau County. The National Council of the Churches of Christ published A Case Study of Procedures in Planning and Adjustment for Protestants in Livingston, New Jersey, a town whose population more than doubled to over twenty thousand between 1950 and 1960. Such reports could be off-­base, as when Douglass—­still at it—­told a 1949 Protestant conference that recent New Jersey and New York surveys revealed “­little need for more new churches.” “The suburban areas are more over-­churched than central cities,” he said. He was wrong, as many other reports on the Protestant community into the 1970s would show.12 The Jewish congregations that first moved to the suburbs tended to be of the Reform and Conservative variety, denominations that emerged ­after 1880. Orthodox groups followed. As in the past, Reform and Conservative denominational organ­izations provided advice and guidance but never established congregations or funded them. In 1954 the Union of American Hebrew Congregations published An American Synagogue for

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­ oday and Tomorrow, with essays on synagogue design, acoustics, art, and T heating systems. An essay on “­Legal and Financial Prob­lems of Synagogue Building” summarized lessons learned in the first de­cade of postwar suburbanization. A Jewish Social Agencies study group offered expert advice on creating Jewish nursery schools. A department of the National Jewish Welfare Board consulted with Jewish groups across the country, including Bergen County’s Young Men’s Hebrew Association, about meeting Jewish religious and social needs in expanding suburbs.13 The Catholic hierarchy, with the efficiency that centralization can allow, created thirty new Long Island parishes between 1945 and 1960. The expansion was such that in 1957 archdiocesan officials de­cided to cut the overgrown Brooklyn diocese in half and split off a separate Rockville Centre diocese solely for Long Island.14 The real estate skills of de­cades past came in handy. The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn began St. Bernard’s Parish in newly settled Levittown on Long Island by purchasing a former aircraft ­hangar and an adjoining home to use as a temporary church and rectory in 1948. Suburbanizing Protestants, too, brought creativity to their real estate decisions. In 1949 the New York City Baptist Society used a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the Baptist Church Extension Program to purchase three “pre-­f abricated temporary portable chapels” and construct two new permanent churches for the “fast-­ growing districts in Long Island.” The Presbytery of Brooklyn-­Nassau purchased four acres of farm property on which to construct the Presbyterian Church of Levittown, which it financed with a twelve-­thousand-­dollar mortgage.15 Competition for suburban space became still fiercer as the years went by. In just the two years between 1961 and 1963, the newly or­ga­nized ­Temple Beth Tikvah in Wayne, New Jersey, met in an American Legion hall, a temporarily empty Christian Reformed Church, a store in a vacant shopping center, a summer camp, and the local high school. While awaiting permanent spaces, New Catholic congregations on Long Island met in theaters, fire­houses, farm buildings, American Legion and VFW halls, and a Saks Department Store basement.16 The space crunch resulted in ecumenism by default. Levittown was a case in point. In 1951 the school board barred congregations from worshiping in school buildings, ­after a classroom piano tipped over and killed a girl attending Sunday school. Facing a scarcity of sanctuary space, the

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newly formed Reform ­Temple took up residence in the Protestant Levittown Community Church. The First Presbyterian Church hosted Christian Scientists, the First Baptist Church worshipped in the American Legion hall, and the municipal Levittown Community Hall held Jewish and Catholic ser­vices. A Jewish congregation held an early morning Sunday school at the Community Hall, followed by Catholic Mass at 11 a.m. A Levittown priest explained the accommodation simply: “­They’re all young G. I.’s [with] their l­ittle families, and they all want to help each other.”17 Expanse marked an enormous obvious difference between the sacralization of the suburban and city landscapes. Suburban sanctuaries w ­ ere sited on large lots surrounded by lawns and shrubs tended by landscaping businesses, an industry that exploded with the development of the suburbs. Large, child-­friendly facilities including sanctuaries and educational and associational spaces expressed urban emigrants desire to build on the religious traditions in which they had been raised and pass them along. The availability of land in suburban real estate markets—­often carved out of forests and former agricultural areas—­was especially helpful to Catholics, who built churches and rectories as well as elementary and high schools. Often they added convents for nuns teaching in the parish elementary schools, since the suburbs lacked the older convents that ­housed nuns collectively in the city.18 Thus the suburban “church boom” regularly proclaimed by the Herald Tribune and Times was not mere headline hyperbole. The F. W. Dodge Corporation, which analyzed national construction trends, estimated in 1957 that seventy thousand sanctuaries had been built across the United States between 1945 and 1955. In the Eastern United States, sanctuaries accounted for 7 ­percent of the value of all nonresidential construction, totaling $128 million. Almost all of this money was spent in suburbs, where in 1946 sanctuaries accounted for just 2  ­ percent of nonresidential construction, valued at $17 million. The New York Federation of Reform Synagogues reported in 1954 that “100 new ­temples” had been completed in the previous de­cade, most in the suburbs. The New York Archdiocese announced that it would spend $30 million just that year on construction of church-­complex and hospital facilities, largely in suburbs. The “Go to Church Sunday” section of the Long Island paper Newsday listed some 50 Christian and Jewish ser­vices on Long

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Island in September 1945, 150 Christian ser­vices in January 1947, and 180 in September 1951.19 The church boom offered opportunities to create a new architecture expressing religious belief and practice in modern times, an enchantment of the new suburban world, as Weber might have put it. A 1954 article in the Herald Tribune quoted suburbanites who thought new “religious buildings should be esthetic, modern and worshipful.” The architects quoted in the story understood their task as “translat[ing] ancient symbol into con­temporary expression without producing an architectural cliché.” Many turned to the “plain and functional” style now called midcentury modern.20 Most architecturally creative sanctuaries w ­ ere found in special settings or affluent suburbs. The circular seating surrounding the altar in Marist College’s eight-­sided Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Chapel, dedicated in 1954, reflected the influence of the Catholic liturgical movement, which sought to bring worshipers closer to priest and altar. It also bespoke the freedom conferred by financial in­de­pen­dence from diocesan authorities. Sponsored by the Marist ­Brothers, who governed the college, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom was no run-­of-­the-­mill parish church.21 Percival Goodman’s widely praised 1949–1951 Congregation B’nai Israel Synagogue in Milburn, New Jersey, was another modernist triumph that showed what a wealthy community could achieve. The façade, thrusting forward t­ oward an expansive manicured lawn, was dressed with a sculpture by Herbert Ferber. The interior featured murals and hangings w ­ ere painted by Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb. Elsewhere, the interior of the spire in Joseph Salerno’s 1962 United Church of Rowayton, Connecticut, demonstrated the freedom of spiritual expression available to architects with money at their disposal. The upward-­ twisting latticework visualized the strug­gle required and the joy achieved in the effort to reach God.22 Even modest congregations sometimes achieved innovation. A short-­ lived partnership between the Finnish-­born, American-­trained architect Reino Aarnio and MIT-­graduate Keith Hibner produced an efficient and quietly sleek sanctuary, social hall, and educational building in 1953 for the newly or­ga­nized Reform ­Temple of Levittown at a cost of just seventy-­five thousand dollars. The director of the New York Federation

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The 1953 Levittown, New York, Reform ­Temple, designed by Reino Aarnio and Keith Hibner, offered an eco­nom­ical and sophisticated realization of a common postwar suburban synagogue configuration, albeit without the gymnasium and pool that a more affluent congregation might have enjoyed. Reproduced from “Levittown Reform ­Temple, Levittown, L.I.,” Architectural Rec­ord 114, No. 6 (Dec. 1953), page 135, by Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

of Reform Synagogues praised the building’s “clean plain lines,” which derived beauty “from use rather than from ornament.”23 But most postwar suburban sanctuaries ­were modestly “traditional” and architecturally commonplace, pleasant and relatively familiar spaces where worshipers and clergy nurtured inherited understandings of religion. To that end, a few almost startlingly replicated distinctively urban sanctuaries. Among ­these was Our Lady Queen of Peace, a Catholic church dedicated in 1950. To one side, it tightly hugged the parish’s new

The twisting spire of Joseph Salerno’s 1962 United Church in suburban Rowayton, Connecticut, photographed by Pedro Guerrero, conveyed the strug­gle to understand God—as well as the artistry that suburban wealth could commission. © Estate of Pedro E. Guerrero.

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The anomalous Our Lady of Queen of Peace Church in Maywood, New Jersey, was sited on seven spacious acres of former farmland but seemed as though it was designed for a dense Manhattan block. Courtesy MitsRia Photography, Hackensack, NJ.

school. The other side, unadorned, was ready for an adjoining building that never appeared. Its flat, vertical front pushed forward for maximum volume, the better to take advantage of ­every available inch of a tiny, hemmed-in city lot. And the front steps ­were steep, which would ease the discharging of worshipers onto a teeming block.Yet Our Lady Queen of Peace was in the northeast New Jersey borough of Maywood. It opened onto an expansive lawn, not a bustling concrete sidewalk. The ample seven-­acre property accommodated a gymnasium, rectory, convent, and school. All of them served migrating Catholics who helped double Maywood’s population from 4,000 to over 8,500 between 1945 and 1950.24 Suburbanization could drastically shift the ground ­under established congregations. In 1950 the community of Commack Methodist Church in Suffolk County, Long Island, still met in a chapel built in 1789. By 1957 the influx from the city had inspired the congregation to construct a separate education building. (The building was financed in part by rent

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payments from the local school district. Similarly pressed by population growth, the district desperately need elementary school classrooms.) The congregation then expanded the education building in 1961, doubling its size. Fi­nally, the congregation built a new sanctuary in 1964, opting for a quasi-­A-­frame design fash­ion­able in the era, although mainly in the Midwest. The 1789 chapel remains as a historical artifact, proudly maintained alongside its modernist sibling.25 If rapid suburbanization could jar older congregations, it could also reward precocious ones. Manhasset’s ­Temple Judea was founded in 1955 and constructed a sleek sanctuary just five years l­ater. Its architecture was similar to that of Levittown’s Reform ­Temple, but the complex was much more spacious, with a larger sanctuary and more ample classrooms. In the next de­cade the synagogue added two more educational buildings to accommodate its expansive youth programs. ­Temple Judea was an exemplary synagogue center. The model had originated in the city but came to typify suburban synagogues, which had so much more room to grow.26

Suburban sanctuaries represented infinite va­ri­e­ties of good, bad, and indifferent taste as well as the planning styles and financial commitments of denominations, banks, savings and loan institutions, and thousands of individual donors. But most importantly—­and often poignantly—­the sanctuaries and their typically ample facilities revealed the commitment of young parents to pursue their own errand into the wilderness by extending to the suburbs the religious experience they knew from the city. It was not just increasing population but also the demand for familiar forms of worship that fueled the proliferation of suburban churches and synagogues: rather than join growing, established communities, small groups might go through years of fund­rais­ing to furnish their own. This was as common a path among suburban Jewish congregations as it had been in the city. Decentralization meant that synagogues emerged through worshipers’ initiative, as was the case for ­Temple Beth Tikvah. The Reform congregation, whose early members wandered so extensively before occupying their own synagogue, emerged in 1956 from a group of fifteen families. The adults ­were mostly in their thirties. They gathered support from 150 additional families, hired a rabbi in 1960, and fi­nally

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moved into their newly constructed synagogue in 1963. On Long Island, most congregations began with support from scarcely twenty-­five families. Yet t­hese groups—­and even a few that began with less than the required minyan of ten men over the age of thirteen—­quickly gained commitments from other newly settled families, all likewise e­ ager for the synagogues, rabbis, and worship they had known in the city.27 It can seem as though Catholics took an entirely dif­fer­ent route, owing to the Church’s hierarchical ecclesiastical structure. New suburban congregations ­were authorized by the Diocese of Brooklyn and, a­ fter 1957, by the Diocese of Rockville Centre, as well as the Archdiocese of Newark. But worshippers themselves could also play a significant role in the origin of their communities. Our Lady Queen of Peace in Maywood is a premier example. Initiative for the new parish came in 1948 from three local Catholics who gathered four hundred signatures to petition the Archdiocese of Newark. Within a year, the Archdiocese created the parish, assigned a priest, purchased land, and constructed a sanctuary, school, rectory, and convent for the w ­ omen who would manage the school. The urban-­like sanctuary bespeaks the mi­grant status of the community: although now in suburbia, the worshippers had come from the city, and their sense of the sacred was based on its model. Parish histories provide less detail about the origins of Long Island communities, but the speed with which new parishes, such as at St. Bernard’s in Levittown, ­were established suggests a dialogue between suburban arrivals and Catholic authorities.28 Once formed, suburban congregations rushed to reconstitute the array of ­women’s, men’s, and youth groups that had energized Manhattan’s modernizing congregations between 1900 and 1940. ­There was no substantial difference between urban and suburban in the scope or purpose of t­hese groups and their activities; they followed exactly the urban example. Presbyterian f­ amily nights, Methodist youth dances, synagogue-­ based Hadassah chapters, ­Women’s Christian Temperance Union meetings, and St. Anthony Altar Socie­ties and Holy Name Socie­ties point to the ubiquitous congregational activities that followed worshipers from city to suburb. The almost-­yearly Hadassah conferences in Manhattan and Atlantic City attracted suburbanites no less than city dwellers. An eight-­day “leadership training program” at Long Island’s Pinecrest Dunes Camp in August 1954 welcomed two hundred Luther League youth

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from urban and suburban congregations. ­These activities made clear that congregations in the city and its outskirts largely wanted the same sort of spiritual and congregational life.29 Interfaith efforts pioneered by Manhattan’s religious intellectuals reached a degree of fruition in the suburbs. In fact, greater de facto religious toleration prob­ably prevailed ­there than in the city, as third-­and fourth-­generation adults emigrated from tight-­knit communities into suburbs segregated by race but less so by religion and ethnicity—in the suburbs, all manner of whites lived together. Rabbi Max Grunwald of Millburn, New Jersey’s ­Temple B’nai Israel spoke on “Our Combined Heritage” at the Diamond Hill Community Church Guild. ­Women from New Jersey Jewish, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Catholic, and even AME congregations gathered for national Brotherhood Week in 1949. Many but not all suburban New Jersey and New York boys’ “church leagues” included athletic teams from white Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations. Long Island’s Religious Council of the Rockaways and Five Towns was formed in 1932 but matured in the 1950s and 1960s, when it fostered Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic opposition to racial segregation, gambling (specifically, bingo), and in-­school recitation of the “Lord’s Prayer.” Throughout the 1950s, World Sodality Day at Fordham University in the Bronx welcomed twenty-­five thousand young ­women, including Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from suburban congregations. They gathered to discuss faith, theology, ethics, ser­vice, and, sometimes, the scourge of bigotry and the value of civil rights.30 This is not to say that the suburbs w ­ ere ­free from disputes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the suburban focus on childrearing, ­these differences over religion often played out in the arena of schools. Many new Long Island suburban school districts a­ dopted the 1951 Regents Prayer without much controversy, but o ­ thers did so only a­ fter heated debate. The Levittown school board could not come to come to a conclusion ­after a “stormy meeting,” so it did something unique among New York school boards: it polled residents. As it turns out, while opposition was fervent, it was also narrow, as 1,400 residents voted in f­avor and only 130 opposed.31 The district then descended into a de­cade of quarrels over religion and morality in the schools. M ­ usic by alleged Communist composers was banned, as was William Inge’s play, “Come Back, ­Little Sheba.”

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Levittown prohibited screenings of a sex education film that contravened “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” A Catholic principal at an elementary school caused a firestorm when she wrote parents urging that each student receive “religious training in the church of his choice” to uphold “honesty, obedience, truthfulness and re­spect for authority.” With seven other Long Island school districts, Levittown sought to circumvent the US Supreme Court’s decision in Engel v. Vitale (1962), which declared the Regents Prayer unconstitutional. The districts simply wrote an alternate prayer.32 Yet, ­after that, the energy devoted to religion in the schools appears to have been largely exhausted. A year ­later, when the Court outlawed school Bible reading in Abington School District v. Schempp, Levittown and the other recalcitrant Long Island districts abandoned their re­sis­tance. Just four years ­later, on Levittown’s twentieth anniversary, the priest at St. Bernard’s Catholic Church declared the old controversies “no longer apparent.” Levittown’s public school officials attended parochial school graduation ceremonies that spring, and interfaith relations appeared promising. “Next year,” the priest said, “we hope to have the rabbis and ministers.”33 In the suburbs as in the city, interfaith toleration and cooperation—­and the separation of church and state that it arguably necessitated—­proceeded in fits and starts, but it did proceed. Likewise, the growing importance of ­women in congregational life extended from the city to the suburbs. Men continued to dominate boards of trustees and the ranks of clergy and denominational officials, but suburban ­women pursued congregational activities with even greater fervor than their urban ­mothers and grand­mothers had, and the suburbs’ increasing po­liti­cal, economic, social, and cultural importance made ­later generations’ congregational engagement all the more influential. ­Women took over full management of Saturday and Sunday schools and many youth activities, but also wanted responsibility over areas from which they ­were traditionally excluded. Thus did leadership itself become a focus. Long Island’s Lynbrook Baptist Church operated an eleven-­week “leadership training institute” in 1945 with a session on “child evangelism” conducted by a w ­ oman. In 1959 Nassau and Suffolk Counties held events for Catholic Girl Scout leaders. Suburban New York and New Jersey Hadassah chapters held numerous courses on leadership throughout the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans,

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Reform Jews, Episcopalians, and the Reformed Church in Amer­i­ca at last began ordaining w ­ omen. Conservative Jews following in 1985.34 If ­there was one urban inheritance that the suburbs clearly lacked, it was the creativity and prestige that distinguished Manhattan from the 1920s ­until the 1960s. That Manhattan’s religious hot­house did not follow its p ­ eople to the suburbs serves to isolate the conditions that made the borough truly special—­the sort of place that could nurture spiritual reawakening and ingenuity and spread them across the nation. Manhattan’s density of ­people, media organ­izations, and major religious institutions; its vibrant and elite intellectual atmosphere; and its enormous wealth fostered wide-­ranging expressions of religiosity and ensured that many of t­hese expressions would be replicated and find vehicles for dissemination. The New Jersey and New York suburbs had plenty of money, and they mirrored Manhattan’s religious pluralism. But that money was spread around more; ­there ­were no Rocke­fel­lers championing massive efforts that could expand a good idea from local congregations to the nation at large. And while the suburbs ­were bursting with educated professionals, the intellectual elite who stimulated Manhattan’s remarkable religious ferment stayed in the city.

Lacking Manhattan’s attainments, w ­ ere New Jersey and New York’s suburban congregations the narcissistic salons and theological wastelands portrayed by critics? Was ­there r­ eally, as Gibson Winter wrote, a common suburban “state of mind” focused on “advancement in life,” “overactivity,” and “constant tension” that precluded true religiosity? ­Will Herberg castigated postwar Amer­i­ca as a place of “religiousness without religion.” In suburbs and cities, religious traditions ­were being obscured and denominations devalued as residents instead worshiped an “American way of life.” Americans ­were choosing “sociability or ‘belonging’ rather than re­orienting life to God.” They imbibed a “religiousness with almost any kind of content or none . . . ​a religiousness without serious commitment, without real inner conviction, without genuine existential decision.”35 Or did they? So­cio­log­i­cal studies from the 1960s offer a markedly dif­ fer­ent portrait of postwar suburbs. They found substantial differences in suburban economies, cultures, and religion, rather than the homogeneity

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Herberg and Winter stressed. They also found wide va­ri­e­ties of religious expression and opinion, not some uniform indifference to tradition or ­ ere not wrong to discern an commitment.36 Herberg and Winter w emerging American obsession with materialism and status. And ­others, such as the sociologist Herbert Gans, agreed that “status hierarchy” could be reflected in church communities, such as that of Levittown, New Jersey, where one low-­status congregation worshipped in a building “considered ugly,” with “a gas station next door.” But ­there is not much reason to believe that ­these status concerns undermined religiosity or the esteem in which tradition was held. In t­hese re­spects, the critics’ rhe­ toric was better honed than their research.37 Suburban newspaper notices of 1950s sermon topics are full of traditional topics. Newsday’s final, September 15, 1951 installment of the “Go To Church” column—­prob­ably discontinued ­because its sheer size made it time-­consuming to assem­ble—­listed Long Island sermon topics such as, “The Secret of Worship,” “Lovest Thou Me?” and “A Private Study of the Power of the Almighty,” although one Methodist minister spoke on “Counting the Cash.” On March  13, 1955, Sunday worshipers in Chatham, New Jersey, which doubled its population between 1940 and 1960, heard clergy speak on “Abide in Me—­John 15:4,” “The Inward Way,” and “The Church for the F ­ uture”—­the last topic less traditional but also reminiscent of recent de­cades’ offerings in the city. One church provided an eve­ning dinner at its community ­house “followed by a talk and discussion by a psychiatrist,” but this again signaled postwar religious decay only if one rejected Manhattan’s religious modernism, too. Indeed, Manhattan clergy at this time ­were d ­ oing much the same t­ hing. They discussed biblically laden topics such as “Three Appearances of Christ” and “God’s Workmanship,” while also pursuing novel ave­nues. In 1955 prestigious Riverside Church called on Reinhold Niebuhr to sermonize on “Faith’s Triumph Over Prosperity and Adversity,” and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine hosted the Episcopal bishop James Pike on “Religion and Psychiatry ­Today.” In the suburbs as in the city, a concern for the modern necessitated neither the compromise of religious commitment nor the slow, osmotic elevating of an American way of life over depleted Judaisms, Catholicisms, or Protestantisms.38 When Billy Graham opened his famous “crusade” at Madison Square Garden in May 1957, he substituted Gotham for Sodom, calling out,

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“Hear the word of the Lord ye rulers of New York.” But the audience included more than New Yorkers. It was full of suburban Protestants bussed in for the event. Their religiosity evidently was not so shallow as to dissuade their participation. ­After Graham drew an audience of a hundred thousand to Yankee Stadium in July, the Herald Tribune noted the large contingent of New Jersey listeners, who all but “took possession” of the roads heading west, “perplexedly searching a way to get to the George Washington Bridge.”39

Graham’s Yankee Stadium ser­vice was a study in irony—­proof that the modernity so feared by turn-­of-­the-­century defenders of religion had become religion’s engine. Graham’s disarming vocabulary of “crusades” evoked medieval passions, and his nightly request for men and ­women to come forward and “accept Christ as their Savior” suggested the spontaneity of an old-­time revival. Yet the w ­ hole affair hinged on modern institutions and technology and was the product of three years of systematic preparation by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis. Its professional staff arranged radio and tele­vi­sion broadcasts, cultivated relationships with doubtful Manhattan reporters, recruited urban and suburban ministerial groups to promote Graham’s appearances among their flock, and planned for e­ very conceivable logistical snafu that might beset the massive events from Madison Square Garden to Harlem. As the Times noted, even the “counselors” who walked revival “inquirers” down the aisles of Madison Square Garden to accept Jesus ­were “trained Graham workers.” 40 Much noise was made about the Graham crusade, but it was only a fleeting manifestation of larger patterns in twentieth-­century American religion. Unusual in its size and the media attention it received, it nonetheless took its place in a continuum of religious experience that was, in modern times, as powerfully collective as it had ever been, rooted in joining with o ­ thers to share ritual, beliefs, and practice through a broad array of institutions. Through institutions individuals created community and uplifted identity and connections to the beliefs and ethics they understood as central to religion. Rather than Trojan h ­ orses of secularization, twentieth-­century institutions continued the historical pro­cess of adaptation that has forever

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been transforming Western religion and society. ­Those who feared modernity perhaps had forgotten how much change had come before: the centuries of Jews who grappled with ever-­widening diasporas, the early Christians who built a religion by adapting the structures and cultures of the Roman Empire, the Catholics and Protestants who at the 1555 Peace of Augsburg agreed to the princi­ple of “whose prince, whose church.” Even that last, monumental change—­which instantiated the idea that dif­fer­ent nations could have their own official church—­was of course not the end of the m ­ atter, as the descendants of t­ hose Catholics and Protestants went on to debate whose prince and whose church would shape religion in the New World. Like the “civilizing” developments that preceded it, modernity extended an eternal pro­cess of revision, scarcely always for good but everywhere with profound effect.41 The centrality of institutions in the religious experiences of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants throughout Manhattan and all its suburbs raises questions about the concerns of Weber and William James in par­tic­u­lar. Where Weber saw rigidity and, usually, secularity in bureaucracies, corporations, and modern institutions, the religious institutions of Manhattan and the post–­World War II New York and New Jersey suburbs w ­ ere pliant and soulful. They w ­ ere mechanisms through which individuals and groups could explore and fulfill their spiritual needs in spite of anonymity, mobility, density, and perceived indifference. And where James saw institutions, ­whether denominations or congregations, as living “second hand upon tradition,” most New Yorkers inside or outside the city came to religion as ­children in institutional settings. ­Those who left the city worked hard to bring the specifics of their childhood institutions with them, suggesting that they saw t­ hose institutions as essential to religion, not parasitic upon it. And when existing institutions proved unsatisfying, New Yorkers turned to tools of modernity—­mass media, commercial lending, new building technology, professional psy­chol­ogy, and so on— to foster worlds of spirit that did satisfy. In all their glories and pronounced flaws, modern religious institutions ­were instruments through which twentieth-­century New Yorkers, urban and then suburban, engaged belief, won­der, and the enchanted. Indeed, to the extent that pluralism is a modernist value, modernity was a prerequisite for the energy of urban and suburban religion in the twentieth c­ entury. Religious toleration proved imperfect in New York and

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its suburbs, but a strong-­enough commitment to pluralism nonetheless enabled the searching of Manhattan’s religious seekers, from academics and street prophets to heterodox rabbis and social-­movement Catholics. That same commitment was even more apparent in the workaday interfaith communities of the suburbs, which could thrive with l­ittle intention or fanfare. But perhaps now, in the twenty-­first c­ entury, the old fears w ­ ill fi­nally come true. On the surface, the signs of religion’s demise in Amer­i­ca seem as obvious as t­hose spotted a c­ entury ago, although the symptoms are largely new or seem new. ­These include the sexual-­abuse crisis, not just among Catholics but among Southern Baptists and other religious groups. Jewish, Protestant, and white Catholic communities have seen substantial declines in worshipers and membership. Polls about religious belief and commitment indicate the rise of the “nones”—­Americans, especially young ones, claiming to have no religious beliefs. Congregations are merging in an effort to stay afloat, and religious schools are closing. ­These trends have been dramatic in the Archdiocese of New York but are common across the nation, particularly within mainline denominations.42 Yet signs of twenty-­first-­century religious renewal seem equally pre­ sent. As mainline denominations have sputtered, evangelical Protestant communities have grown in numbers and militance. Evangelical megachurches appear not only in the suburbs but also in New York City and other urban places. Religion is of enormous importance in voting, ­whether among Orthodox Jews in New York or Protestant evangelicals across the nation. (Indeed, as Catholics in Poland and Hindus in India demonstrate, religion remains a vibrant force in nationalist politics the world over.) Immigrants to the United States continue to coalesce around religion.43 ­Those who fear for the ­future of religion would do well to keep in mind all the ways that Weber, James, Winter, Herberg, Graham, and so many ­others got it wrong. For all their rich insights and moving rhe­toric, their sense that religion was not keeping up with surrounding society—­ that it was ­either collapsing or changing so completely as to become meaningless—­was misplaced time and again. For evidence, just look at a small corner of the internet, the website Early Levittown NY and Beyond. In 2011 the site’s editors asked readers,

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“What do you remember about your religious education growing up in Levittown?” The twenty-­one responses from readers who grew up in Levittown in the 1950s and graduated from Levittown’s three high schools between 1960 and 1966 meet no research standard. But they bear their authors’ truths, all the more ­because, like Judy Blume’s Margaret Simon, they recount religious realities, not pious encomiums.44 Respondents revealed how religion crossed their lives in striking ways, for better and worse. A number of respondents came from mixed marriages, and they perceived the difficulties involved. Some nominally Protestant and Catholic parents sent their ­children to church but stayed home themselves, “preferring to spend Sunday morning at St. Mattress,” as one correspondent put it. Several Jewish adolescents discovered that their nonpracticing parents had joined a synagogue mainly to pressure them into bar and bat mitzvahs, and the b ­ rother of one “never forgave [his] parents for this torture.” Nothing had changed one gradu­ate’s view that “the only good t­hing to come out of thousands of years of or­ga­ nized religion is Friday night Bingo.” Protestants liked dances at Levittown Community Church but recalled boring ser­vices and a dyspeptic Sunday school teacher. When told that one of their friends ­wouldn’t be returning to their church, the teacher blurted out, “Robert needs it more than all of us.” Catholics could remember the “talon grip of S ­ ister Mildred during catechism class,” avoiding the “mean priest” for confession, and priests interrupting “pedantic Sunday sermons” with a ­bitter “reprimand to ­mothers with crying babies, summoning them to the ‘crying room.’ ” One respondent described how she learned “next to nothing about other faiths ­because ­there was the threat of ­going straight to Hell if we so much as entered the church / ­temple of another religion.”Yet another described the won­der of her first communion, the “smell [of] carnations” still bringing her “right back to that day.” She was always happy when she received communion from ­Father Donovan, who “would make a funny face at me to try to make me laugh.” It was Levittown’s religious diversity that particularly struck many who came ­there from the city. A seven-­year-­old raised in a Catholic neighborhood in Queens found herself unexpectedly plunged into friends’ “christenings, confirmations, and bar / bat mitzvahs,” without ever com-

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promising her Catholic identity. Fifty-­five years a­ fter a Catholic boy helped his closest friend master enough Hebrew to complete his bar mitzvah, they met for lunch, where the Catholic man “proudly rattled off in Hebrew the Bible passages” he had helped his Jewish friend learn de­cades ­earlier. Another Catholic boy described how he learned about Judaism at a Levittown delicatessen while eating “pastrami and Hebrew Nation[al] hot dogs,” then how his friends learned about Catholicism at Caruso’s Italian restaurant. Some encounters proved unexpectedly moving. A “Jewish kid [originally] from the lower east side of Manhattan” described why the basement of Levittown’s St. Bernard’s Catholic church was ­etched in his memory: his Boy Scout troop met ­there. When his beloved Scoutmaster suffered a deadly heart attack, he was suddenly seated in the sanctuary upstairs, staring at an open casket and “the massive image of Christ ­behind the altar. Then came my first experience with death and its many rituals. . . . ​That day I learned many lessons about religion, life, death and the value of friendship. I also learned how we are all interwoven to each other no ­matter how we worship.” As one respondent put it, “The mix of religions in Levittown schools has been a source of tolerance throughout my life . . . ​something our parents who came from a more ‘ghettoized’ city ­didn’t experience.” The Catholic girl who had moved from Queens and, like Margaret Simon, found herself surrounded by friends with other religions, also experienced a poignant suburban religious awakening. Only two years ­after arriving, she chose for her Lenten sacrifice to walk to church alone each day to attend early Mass. It was a creative idea in an age when the standard sacrifice was to abstain from tele­vi­sion. Arriving in the morning dark, she found the parish church “warm and cozy, with candle light.” She was “the only child at the mass.” The effect stuck with her throughout her life. My daily journey for six weeks instilled in me a sense of being special, a won­der at the signs of God in the natu­ral world all around me (it amuses me to think of my finding nature in this most planned and artificial of communities), a sense of being close to God, and a ­great sense of confidence and in­de­pen­dence.

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Might Abraham Heschel have appreciated her sense of won­der? Might Paul Tillich have been touched by her childhood confidence? Might Dorothy Day have hoped that her closeness to God would bend her ­toward goodness and compassion? The sentiments of ­these grownup ­children suggest how deeply religion’s embrace of modernity ­shaped their lives. It is no won­der that millions of teenage readers found Margaret Simon’s question natu­ral. They, too, ­were asking, “Are you t­ here God?” and not b ­ ecause they had given up on religion or ­because religion had given up on them. They asked for God precisely b ­ ecause they retained the sense of awe and of divine yearning that ­others had preserved before them. That the kids of suburban Levittown still asked for God is a quiet testament to eight de­cades of strenuous, passionate ­labor that made religion speak and be heard across the maelstrom of American urban modernity.

Notes Acknowl­e dgments Index

NOTES

Introduction 1. Judy Blume, Are You ­There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Bradbury Press, 1970), 3. 2. Blume, Are You ­There God? 120; Jonathan Krasner and Joellyn Wallen Zollman, “Are You T ­ here God? Judaism and Jewishness in Judy Blume’s Adolescent Fiction,” Shofar 29 (2010): 22–47; Mark Oppenheimer, “Why Judy Blume Endures,” New York Times Book Review, Nov. 16, 1997. 3. Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and En­glish Culture in the ­Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1957); Paul  E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th  ­Century Amer­ic­a (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Kathryn Teresa Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4. Billy Sunday referenced in “Some Hope for Us,” New York Times, Jan. 30, 1915; Rabbi Jacob David Willowski quoted in Jonathan  D. Sarna, American Judaism: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 155; Moses Weinberger and Jonathan D. Sarna, ­People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 60; Israel Zangwill, “Dispersion,” American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, March 25, 1910; Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 145–147; Jacob Kabakoff, “The View from the Old World: East Eu­ro­pean Jewish Perspectives,” in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41–59. 5. Excerpt from letter by Bishop Giovanni Batista Scalabrini to Canon Camillo Mangot, Aug.  9, 1901, in For the Love of Immigrants: Migration Writings and Letters of Bishop John Baptist Scalabrini (1839–1905), ed. Silvano  M. Tomasi (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2000), 298; “Memorial of Bishop G. B. Scalabrini on a Commission for Catholic Mi­grants (Pro Emigratis Catholicis), Piacenza,” May 4, 1905, in For the Love of Immigrants, 218–230, quotation on 227.

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6. John Lancaster Spalding, The Religious Mission of the Irish ­People and Catholic Colonization (New York: Catholic Colonization Society, 1880), 87. 7. Sigmund Freud, The ­Future of an Illusion, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 64; Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation [1919],” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.  H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–156, quotation on 155. 8. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Founding (London, 1749), chapter three. 9. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), 15–16. 10. On Paul Tillich, start with Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). 11. William James, The Va­r i­et­ies of Religious Experience: A Study in H ­ uman Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natu­ral Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 by William James (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), 31. 12. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–284, quotation on 281; Daniel L. Pals, Eight Theories of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Daniel Pals, ed., Introducing Religion: Readings from the Classic Theorists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Paul  J. Griffiths, “The Very Idea of Religion,” First ­Things 103 (2000): 30–35; Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Melford Spiro, “Religion: Prob­lems of Definition and Explanation,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Banton (London: Routledge, 1966), 85–126. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Macmillan, 1915). For recent books that apply definitions of religion to a specific scholarly proj­ect, see Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Lit­er­a­ture and Religion since 1960 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2010); and Robert  N. Bellah, Religion in ­Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), esp. ix–­xvii, 1–43. My own brief engagement with theory on religion can be found in Jon Butler, “Theory and God in Gotham,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 47–61. 13. ­­Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The ­Virginia Woolf Reader: An Anthology of Her Best Short Stories, Essays, Fiction, and Nonfiction, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984), 192–212, quotation on 194; Jene  M. Porter, “The Birth of Modernity,” Review of Politics 62 (2000): 795–808; Ferenc Fehér, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Ralph  M. Leck, Georg Simmel and Avant-­Garde Sociology: The Birth of Modernity, 1880 to 1920 (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 14. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Socie­ties (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 8. 15. Matei Călinescu, Five ­ Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-­ garde, De­ cadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 3, Baudelaire quotation on 4–5; themes of population growth, dense housing, anonymity, and industrialism run through urban histories, such as Eric  H. Monkkonen, Amer ­i­ca Becomes Urban: The Development of U. S. Cities and Towns 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).



N O T E S T O P A G E S 11–17

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1. Spiritual Terror and Sacred Awe in the Capital of American Secularism 1. Joseph Stella quoted in Irma B. Jaffe, Joseph Stella (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 26. 2. Joseph Stella, The Brooklyn Bridge: (a page of my life), volume presented to Katherine S. Dreier, unpaged, 1928, fol. 3–4, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Za D813 +Zz928S 3. Edward G. Andrews, “Address of Welcome,” in National Perils and Opportunities: The Discussions of the General Christian Conference of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States of Amer­i­ca (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1887), 9–18, quotations on 13; Philip D. Jordan, The Evangelical Alliance for the United States of Amer­i­ca, 1847–1900: Ecumenism, Identity, and the Republic of Religion (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), 166–171; Wendy Jane Deichmann, “Josiah Strong: Practical Theologian and Social Crusader for a Global Kingdom” (PhD diss., Drew University, 1991), 84–90; Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 72, no. 1 (1985): 45–62. 4. “Remarks by Rev. Samuel L. Loomis, of Brooklyn,” in National Perils, 48–50, quotation on 48; Simon J. McPherson, “The City as a Peril,” in National Perils, 38–47, quotations on 38, 41. 5. “To Combat City Evils: A Conference of Evangelical Churches Trying to Find the Means and Methods Whereby All Bad Influences S ­ hall Be Kept Down,” New York Times, Dec. 4, 1888. 6. J[ames] M. King et al., The Religious Condition of New York City (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1889), 157–165, 166–174, 175–188, quotations on 164, 170, 179; Jordan, Evangelical Alliance, 171–172. 7. James M. King, “Pre­sent Condition of New York City Above F ­ ourteenth Street,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 5–14; quotations on 7, 9. 8. A[dolphus] F. Schauffer, “Pre­sent Condition of New York City Below ­Fourteenth Street,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 15–25, quotations on 20, 21. 9. Vincent Pisek, “The Bohemian Ele­ment,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 35–46, quotation on 40; Antonio Arrighi, “The Italian Ele­ment,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 47–55, quotation on 48. 10. H. A. Monroe, “The Colored Ele­ment,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 56–64. 11. “Remarks of Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, D.D.,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 188–192, quotation on 188; Edward  G. Andrews, “The Latent Power of the New York Churches,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 175–187, quotation on 187. 12. Horace Mann, Census of ­Great Britain, 1851: Religious Worship in ­England and Wales (London: G Routledge, 1854), 93; K.  S. Inglis, “Patterns of Religious Worship in 1851,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 11, no. 1 (1960): 74–86. Debates over methodological issues and the validity of the 1851 religious census are superbly described in K. D. M. Snell and Paul  S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–53; and Douglas A. Reid, “Playing and Praying,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3: 745–808. Richard Dennis, “Modern London,” in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 3: 95–132, is particularly helpful on London’s urban evolution. 13. Mann, Census of ­Great Britain, 1851, 93–96, emphasis in original.

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 17–22

14. Historians and sociologists especially have developed an enormous lit­er­a­ture about the meaning, scope, and historical pro­gress of “secularization,” to the point now of debating con­temporary “post-­secular” society. One of the most subtle, sophisticated, and enlightening historical treatments remains Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty:Working-­Class Religion in Berlin, London, and NewYork, 1870–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996), especially xxi–­xxv, 175–200. Interested readers can enter the debates by consulting Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001); and Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 15. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American P ­ eople (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 7–36; Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Charles Taylor argues in A Secular Age that faith was “axiomatic” before about 1500. I have argued that it was not, pointing out that faith was imposed by social and governmental coercion before 1500 and for a long time thereafter. See Jon Butler, “Disquieted History in A Secular Age,” in Va­r i­et­ies of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Craig Calhoun, and Michael Warner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 193–216. 16. Charles Booth, Life and ­Labour of the P ­ eople of London, Series 3: Religious Influences, Vol. 4: South-­East and South-­West London (London: Macmillan, 1902), 19, 67; T.  S. Simey and M. B. Simey, Charles Booth: Social Scientist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 138–155. 17. Richard Mudie-­Smith, The Religious Life of London (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904). 18. Hugh McLeod, ed., Eu­ro­pean Religion in the Age of ­Great Cities, 1830–1930 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17; Jacques-­Olivier Boudon, Paris, Capitale Religieuse sous la Second Empire (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 195–242; McLeod, Piety and Poverty, 10. 19. Kenneth T. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1019; “Historical Overview of London Population,” London Online, http://­www​.­londononline​.­co​.­uk​/­factfile​/­historical; “Demographics of Paris,” Wikipedia, http://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Demographics​_­of​_­Paris#Historical​_­population; “History of Berlin: Historical Population,” Wikipedia, http://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­History​_­of​ _­Berlin#Historical​_­population. 20. The London maps can be found at “Mapco: Map and Plan Collection Online,” http://­mapco​.­net​/­london​.­htm. The New York City maps can be found at https://­www​.­loc​.­gov​ /­maps​/­​?­fa​=­partof:american+memory%7Csubject:maps%7Clocation:new+york%7Csubjec t:new+york%7Clocation:new+york+city&sp​=­2. 21. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Penguin, 2003), 217; Honoré de Balzac, “The Girl with the Golden Eyes,” in The Works of Honoré de Balzac:The Thirteen, trans. Ellen Marriage (Philadelphia: Avil Publishing Com­pany, 1901), 25: 281. 22. Committee of Fifteen, The Social Evil with Special Reference to Conditions Existing in the City of New York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 9; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in Amer­ic­ a, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 206. 23. Samuel Lane Loomis, Modern Cities and Their Religious Prob­lems (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1887). The publisher’s summary of Loomis’s book in “New Publications,” Bal-



N O T E S T O P A G E S 23–29

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timore Sun, Nov.  3, 1887, suggested that it was available a month before the Protestant meeting in Washington, DC, Dec. 7–9, 1887. 24. Loomis, Modern Cities, 17–53, quotations on 42, 48. 25. Loomis, Modern Cities, 18, 32, 34, 80, 82, emphasis in original. 26. Loomis, Modern Cities, 82. 27. Loomis, Modern Cities, 182–211, quotations on 160, 183, 185, 191–192, 204, 205, 206. Loomis’s references to his undated visits to London, Berlin, and Paris are found on 95, 138, 141, 144, 157, 186, and 205. Loomis prob­ably quoted from an ­earlier version of a talk that Bishop John Ireland gave at the National Conference of Charities and Correction in St. Paul, Minnesota, in July 1886, “Charity in the Catholic Church,” that was printed in John Ireland, The Church and Modern Society: Lectures and Addresses (Chicago: D. H. McBride, 1896), 309–328. 28. Loomis, Modern Cities, 198–199; National Perils, 89, 118–119, 345–379; Alexander Mackay-­Smith, “The Episcopal City Missions,” in King et al., Religious Condition, 90–106, ­quotation on 104. 29. Josiah Strong, “Pro­gress of Christian Co-­operation since the Washington Conference,” in National Needs and Remedies (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1890), 11–21; “Division of the ­Labor: City Districts Assigned to Members of the Evangelical Alliance,” Rochester Demo­crat and Chronicle, Jan. 20, 1888; “To Buckle on Their Armor,” New York Times, Dec. 6, 1888; “City Religious Needs: Suggestions Made by the Rev. Dr. C. S. Harrower,” New York Times, Dec.  17, 1888; “City Missionary Work: Obstacles Met by the Church Conference Committee,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 1889; “Indifference in Religion: Steps to Be Taken to Induce ­People to Go to Church,” New-­York Tribune, Dec.  10, 1888; “Chickering Hall Conference Committee,” New-York Tribune, March 26, 1889. 30. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in Amer­i­ca: From the New World to the New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9–10; Jennifer Schuessler, “For a Colorful Brooklyn Real-­Estate Pioneer, a 376-­Year-­Old Receipt,” New York Times, Dec.  3, 2019; Governor Thomas Dongan to Lords of Trade and Plantations, CO 1 / 61, No. 75, |CO 5 / 1113, 1–117|CO 1 / 61, Nos. 75, 75I.-­XIII., March 1687, 309, Colonial State Papers, National Archives, Kew, ­ England; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 64, 98–129. 31. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 225–288; William E. Montgomery, ­Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree:The African-­American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 142–252; Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-­day Adventism and the American Dream (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 32. Loomis, Modern Cities, 75–76; Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 79. 33. Frank Russell, “House-­to-­House Visitation,” in King et  al., Religious Condition, 166–174, quotations on 166, 170. 34. King, “Pre­sent Condition of New York City,” 11. 35. Joseph Kepler, “The Religious Vanity Fair,” Puck, vol. 6, no. 137, Oct. 22, 1879, 526–527. 36. Loomis, Modern Cities, 76; Bernard J. Lynch, “The Italians in New York,” Catholic World 47 (1888): 67–73; Joseph Silverman, “The Hebrew Educational Fair and Its Bearing on the Immigrant Question,” American Hebrew, Dec. 6, 1889; Sherry Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York, 1880–1924 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 30–31.

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 29–36

37. W. E. Hatcher, “The Christian Resources of Our Country,” in National Perils, 285– 293, quotation on 287. 38. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 263, 267, 268, 276; Ray Allen Billington, “Maria Monk and Her Influence,” Catholic Historical Review 22, no.  3 (1936): 283–296; Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xviii–­xix; Michael A. Gordon, The Orange Riots: Irish Po­liti­cal Vio­lence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1003–1008. 39. Frank Leslie’s Weekly, Feb. 27, 1892, and New York Tribune, June 19, 1898, quoted in Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-­Semitism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 143, 147; Morgan Dix to editors, Feb. 26, 1890, American Hebrew, April 4, 1890.

2. Organ­izing God 1. Lawrence  A. Scaff, Max Weber in Amer­i­ca (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 25–38; Scaff digests the Webers’ American itinerary on 253–256. 2. Scaff, Max Weber in Amer­i­ca, quotations from Max and Marianne Weber on 166, 167, 169. Scaff’s research in the Weber manuscripts is critical to establishing that Weber was commenting on clubs and o ­ rders in New York. As Scaff puts it, “While stating [Max’s] claim in clear language, Marianne’s selected passages are unfortunately cobbled together and lifted from dif­fer­ent letters and contexts, making this passage appear to come from the Webers’ Sunday after­noon in Mt. Airy, North Carolina,” when “it is actually one of Max Weber’s summations about New York” (170). The quotation about Brooklyn and Manhattan comes from Max Weber, “ ‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North Amer­ic­ a: An Ecclesiastical and Sociopo­liti­cal Sketch,” in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 203–220, quotation on 204. 3. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129– 156, quotations on 148, 155; Scaff, Max Weber in Amer­i­ca, 191–193. 4. William James, The Va­r i­e­ties of Religious Experience: A Study in H ­ uman Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natu­ral Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 by William James (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), 29, 31. 5. James, Va­r i­e­ties of Religious Experience, 29, 30. 6. Psalm 84, in Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 297–298. 7. S[olomon] Zeitlin, “The Council of Four Lands,” Jewish Quarterly Review 39 (1948): 211–214; David Biale, David Assaf, et  al., Hasidism: A New History (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2018), 28–29, 169–170; Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam  J. Zohar, and Madeline Kochen, eds., Jewish Po­liti­cal Tradition: Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 401–404, 430–431. Although not the center of his interest, Weber discussed some aspects of institutional development within the traditions he described in Ancient Judaism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York: ­Free Press, 1952); The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, IL: ­Free Press, 1958); and The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. Hans H. Gerth (New York: ­Free Press, 1968).



N O T E S T O P A G E S 36–38

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8. On the Eu­ro­pean churches in the New World, see Jon Butler, New World Faiths: Religion in Colonial Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denominational Order: The En­glish Churches in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1730, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009). 9. Samuel  A. Seaman, Annals of New York Methodism: Being a History of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the City of New York from A.D. 1766 to A.D. 1890 (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1892), 101–191; Theodore Fiske Savage, The Presbyterian Church in New York City (New York: Presbytery of New York, 1949), 1–20; ­Will  B. Gravely, “The Rise of African Churches in Amer­ i­ ca (1786–1822): Re-­ Examining the Contexts,” Journal of Religious Thought 41 (1984): 58–73; Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30–32. 10. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in Amer­ic­ a, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 21–33; Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian Amer­i­ca, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 216–217; Donald G. Mathews, “The Second ­Great Awakening as an Organ­izing Pro­cess,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 23–43; Ronald E. Seavoy, The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784– 1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Ser­vice during Industrialization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 4–7, 9–12; R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12–39; John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popu­lar Chris­tian­ity in Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21–79, 192–193; Methodist preachers quoted in Richard Carwardine, “Methodists, Politics, and the Coming of the American Civil War,” Church History: Studies in Chris­tian­ity and Culture 69 (2000), 604; Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 6–22; H[iram] Chamberlain, “The American Home Missionary Society; Its Origin—­ Letter from One of the Early Found­ers,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 1860; David G. Horvath, “Biographical Note” in “American Home Missionary Society Rec­ords, 1816–1907,” Amistad Research Center, http://­amistadresearchcenter​.­tulane​.­edu​/­archon​/­​?­p​=­collections​ /­findingaid&id​=­9&q​=­&rootcontentid​=­2218. 11. Seaman, Annals of New York Methodism, 266–267; Calvin B. Ford and Nathan Hubbell, eds., Minutes of the New York East Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, (Thirty-­Eighth Session), De Kalb Ave­nue Methodist Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., April 1 to 7, 1886 (Brooklyn, NY: Phillips and Hunt, 1886); Minutes of the Sixty-­Sixth Session of the New York East Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, March  25–31, 1914, at Mount Vernon, New York, ed. Ralph Welles Keeler (New York: New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1914); Christian F. Reisner, Church Publicity: The Modern Way to Compel Them to Come In (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1913). 12. Samuel Davies Alexander, The Presbytery of New York, 1738 to 1888 (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Co., 1888), 90–92; Savage, The Presbyterian Church in New York City, 15–20. 13. George H. Hansell, Reminiscences of Baptist Churches and Baptist Leaders in New York City and Vicinity, from 1835–1898 (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1899), 175; Christopher Hodge Evans, The Kingdom Is Always But Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (­Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 74–127; C. Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 215–232; Gary  J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 73–128.

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14. Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 127–133; Aaron I. Abell, The Urban Impact upon American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 178, 118–136; Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 154, 160. 15. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American P ­ eople (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 118–128, 272–275. 16. For a sample of the New York area’s Protestant ecclesiastical ­trials, see “Another Clerical Trial: Charges Against the Rev. Nevin Woodside,” New York Times, May 5, 1880; “The Beast of Revelation: Trou­ble among Baptist Preachers,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1879; “What the Charges Are: Issues of the Coming ­Great Trial for Heresy [of Rev. Charles Augustus Briggs],” New York Times, Nov. 1, 1891; “Bishop May Order Dr. Grant to Trial . . . ​ Rector of Church of the Ascension Must Be Loyal, Declares Dr. Burch,” New York Times, Jan. 13, 1920; “Minister Expelled in Moor Church Row,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 1922; “Trial for Dr. Fosdick: New York Pastor to Face Presbyterian General Assembly,” New York Times, Nov. 18, 1922. 17. Boylan, Sunday School, 114–123; “Anniversaries of the Female Assistance and Dorcas Socie­ties,” New York Tribune, Nov.  11, 1857; Daniel Perlman, “Organ­izations of the ­Free Negro in New York City, 1800–1860,” Journal of Negro History 56, no. 3 (1971): 181–197. 18. Regrettably, the history of the ­Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in New York City remains unwritten, but the urgency of the temperance issue among New York City Methodists, for example, can be gathered from the many references to it in the Minutes of the New York East Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church . . . ​Sixty-­second Session, March 30–­April 5, 1910 (New York: New York East Annual Conf., 1910), and the Minutes of the Sixty-­Sixth Session of the NewYork East Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, March 25–31, 1914, at Mount Vernon, New York, ed. Ralph Welles Keeler (New York: New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1914). See also Ruth Bordin, ­Women and Temperance:The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 19. Melissa M. Merritt, “YMCA,” in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1429–1430; Lillian Taiz, Hallelujah Lads & Lasses: Remaking the Salvation Army in Amer­ic­a, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Diane Winston, Red-­Hot and Righ­teous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); “The Salvation Army Fights,” New York Times, Nov. 15, 1892; “A Hallelujah Wedding: Two Salvation Army Soldiers Marry—­A Unique Ceremony,” New York Times, July 31, 1891; “Salvation Army’s Bounty: Thousands of the Unfortunate Fed at Madison Square Garden,” NewYork Times, Dec. 26, 1899; quotation from “­Great Feast in Garden: The Salvation Army Feeds City’s Poor and Hungry,” New York Sun, Dec. 26, 1899; David Huyssen, Progressive In­equality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–4, 9, 84, 89–106. 20. Daryn Henry, A.  B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2019), 132–206; Heather  D. Curtis, Faith in the G ­ reat Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 122–130, 169–191; a Simpson speech on divine healing, in Buffalo, is reported in “Through New York State,” New-­York Tribune, Oct. 29, 1885; “A Christian Convention,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 1886; “The Christian Alliance,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 1887; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.



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21. Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865–1920 (­Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 14–20; Heather D. Curtis, “A Sane Gospel: Radical Evangelicals, Psy­chol­ogy, and Pentecostal Revival in the Early Twentieth ­Century,” Religion and American Culture 21 (2011): 195–226; Wacker, Heaven Below, 38, 72, 93, 115. “Aimee M’Pherson ­Here to ‘Purge City,’ ” New York Times, Feb.  19, 1927; “­Woman Celebrates 43  Years as Pastor,” New York Herald Tribune, May  8, 1950; “Glad Tidings Tabernacle Is Marking Its 53d year,” New York Herald Tribune, April 30, 1960; Apostolic Faith Mission advertisement in “The News of Greater New York,” New York Age, Sept. 15, 1910; “Refuge Church of Christ Holding Month’s Ser­vice Dedicating Its Building,” NewYork Age, Nov. 29, 1924. 22. Mary Baker G. Eddy, Manual of the ­Mother Church,The First Church of Christ Scientist (Joseph Armstrong: Boston, 1904), 17; Mary Farrell Bednarowski, The Religious Imagination of American ­Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 150–159; Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1998), 533–548; Rolf Swensen, “ ‘You Are Brave but You Are a ­Woman in the Eyes of Men’: Augusta E. Stetson’s Rise and Fall in the Church of Christ, Scientist,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24 (2008): 75–89. David W. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 74–75, 255; Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 283–329; the first advertisement for Christian Science ser­vices in Harlem appeared in “Where to Go to Church,” New York Age, Jan. 29, 1921. 23. Examples of New Thought meeting notices are found in New York Times church advertisements of May 19, 1900; Nov. 10, 1900; and Feb. 23, 1918. 24. Walter Laidlaw, Statistical Sources for Demographic Studies of Greater New York, 1920 (New York: The New York City 1920 Census Committee, 1922), 828. The Laidlaw mea­sures ­were crude and surely inaccurate in detail but offer reasonable assessments of ethnic patterns from which one can draw broad if tentative inferences about the sizes of vari­ous religious groups. Calvin  B. Ford and Nathan Hubbell, eds., Minutes of the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1895), see Section 12, “Statistical ­Tables”; Ralph Welles Keeler, ed., Minutes of the Sixty-­Sixth Session of the New York East Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Alfred Hodgetts and C. E. Barto, 1914), see “Statistician’s Report”; Fifteenth Anniversary [Meeting] of the Southern New York Baptist Association . . . ​October 6th, 7th, and 8th, 1885 (New York: Judson Printing Co., 1885), 40–48; Forty-­Fifth Anniversary [Meeting] of the Southern New York Baptist Association (New York: Schulte Press, 1915), 48–49. The author is deeply indebted to Janet Winfield of the American Baptist Historical Society at Mercer University, Atlanta, for providing copies of the 1885 and 1915 Southern New York Baptist Association minutes. 25. Yaakov S. Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen ­People: Missions to the Jews in Amer­i­ca, 1880– 2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 22–54, 69–76; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The American Jewish Response to Nineteenth C ­ entury Christian Missionaries,” Journal of American History 68 (1981): 35–51; A. E. Thompson, A ­Century of Jewish Missions (Chicago: Fleming  H. Revell, 1902), 277–278, 283–284; “Moral and Religious: Church and Missionary Intelligence,” New York Times, Nov.  27, 1852; “Renounced Catholicism: ­Brother Philemon Myers Becomes a Protestant,” New York Times, July 18, 1892; “Returns to His Old Faith: Le Pere Bouland Rejoins the Catholic Church,” NewYork Times, Dec. 2, 1895; “East Siders Stone Dunlap: Missionary Who Is Trying to Convert Jews Forced to Flee,” New York Times, June 19, 1899; Pamela Douglas Webster, “John Neander—­The Presbyterian Board

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of Foreign Missions and Proselytizing the Jews, 1848–1876,” Journal of Presbyterian History 75, no. 1 (1997): 1–12; Theodore Fred Abel, Protestant Home Missions to Catholic Immigrants (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933) analyzed Protestant missions to Catholics in the early 1930s. 26. Walter Laidlaw, First So­cio­log­ic­ al Canvass: Fifteenth Assembly District, Supervised and Tabulated by Walter Laidlaw (New York: Greater New York Federation of Churches, 1896); Robert Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 16–21. For more on Laidlaw, see Jon Butler, “Protestant Success in the New American City, 1870–1920: The Anxious Secrets of Rev. Walter Laidlaw, Ph.D.,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 296–333, where I describe his work more positively than I have ­here. 27. Butler, “Protestant Success in the New American City,” 304–313; Laidlaw quotations on 296. 28. Butler, “Protestant Success in the New American City,” 306; Nancy Krieger, “A ­Century of Census Tracts: Health and the Body Politic (1906–2006),” Journal of Urban Health 83, no. 3 (2006): 355–361; Robert C. Klove, Census Tract Manual, 5th ed. (Washington DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1966), 1–4; Laidlaw’s proposal for a census tract system is found in “Federation Districts and a Suggestion for a Con­ve­nient and Scientific City Map System,” Federation 4, no. 4 (1906), 2–6; Walter Laidlaw, Statistical Sources for Demographic Studies of Greater NewYork, 1920 (New York: New York City 1920 Census Committee, 1922); Laidlaw, Population of the City of New York, 1890–1930 (New York City: Cities Census Committee, 1932); Kenneth W. Rose, Rocke­fel­ler Archive Center, to author, Oct. 12, 2010. 29. Harlan Paul Douglass, 1000 City Churches—­Phases of Adaptation to Urban Environment (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1926); Douglass, The Church in the Changing City; Case Studies Illustrating Adaptation (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1927); H. Paul Douglass, How to Study the City Church (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928); Jeffrey K. Hadden, “H. Paul Douglass: His Perspective and His Work,” Review of Religious Research 22 (1980): 66–88; Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion, 38–39; Albert F. Schenkel, The Rich Man and the Kingdom: John D. Rocke­fel­ler, Jr., and the Protestant Establishment (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 148–155; Yoshio Fukuyama, “Social Research and the Churches,” Review of Religious Research 28 (1986): 71–82. 30. Boylan, Sunday School, 61–63, 166–170; The American Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine 1, no. 1 (1824), 70–72, 85–92, 347–349. 31. Ben Primer, Protestants and American Business Methods (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1978), 1–41; George Whitefield Mead, Modern Methods in Church Work: The Gospel Re­nais­sance (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1897), vii–xv, xx, 11–12, 336–344. 32. Primer, Protestants and American Business Methods, 65–91, quotation on p.  70; Charles  F. Thwing, The Working Church (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1888), 70–85; James E. McCulloch, The Open Church for the Unchurched: or, How to Reach the Masses (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1905), 170, 174. 33. Allan Fisher, Fleming  H. Revell Com­pany: The First 125  Years, 1870–1995 (­Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 1995), chaps. 1–2; Carl Gregg Doney, An Efficient Church (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1907); Ernest Eugene Elliott, The Prob­lem of Lay Leadership (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914); Roger W. Babson, The ­Future of the Churches: History and Economic Facts (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1921); George Arthur Andrews, Efficient Religion (New York: George H. Doran, 1912); Henry Frederick Cope, Efficiency in the Sunday School (New York: George H. Doran, 1912); Herbert Heebner Smith, Publicity and Pro­g ress: Twen-



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tieth ­Century Methods in Religious, Educational, and Social Activities (New York: George  H. Doran, 1915); Douglass, 1000 City Churches. 34. George H. Nash, “Charles Stelzle: Apostle to L ­ abor,” ­Labor History 11, no. 2(1970): 151–174; Richard  P. Poethig, “Charles Stelzle and the Roots of Presbyterian Industrial Mission,” Journal of Presbyterian History 77, no.  1 (1999): 29–44; Richard  P. Poethig, “Charles Stelzle and the Workingmen’s Department,” Church and Society (Jan. / Feb. 2003): 5–17; Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 254–265; Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York: George H. Doran,1926), 119; Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 517–518. 35. Charles Stelzle, Princi­ples of Successful Church Advertising (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908), 6, 14, 21–22, 47, 73, 90–91, 111, 135–137, 159–164; Ronald C. White Jr. and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1976), 51–66. “Population Research Bureau of the Federation of Churches and Christian Organ­izations in New York City,” Federation 6 (1910), n.p., describes Charles Stelzle’s interest in using federation surveys to inform the work of the ­ Labor ­ Temple. On the American revival tradition, publicity, and advertising, see Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991); and Bruce J. Evensen, God’s Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 36. Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery, quotations drawn from 117–133. 37. Poethig, “Charles Stelzle and the Roots of Presbyterian Industrial Mission,” 43. 38. Reisner, Church Publicity, quotation on 107; “Business Men Unite in Religious Group,” New York Times, May 29, 1930; Francis H. Case, Handbook of Church Advertising (New York: Abingdon Press, 1921), 9–10. 39. James F. Mooney, “Archdiocese of New York,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, ed. Charles  G. Habermann (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913), 11: 20–29; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Pre­sent (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 112–113; Richard M. Linkh, American Catholicism and Eu­ro­pean Immigrants (1900–1924) (Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1975), 147–184. 40. Thomas J. Shelley, The Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 1808–2008 (Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2007),170–173. 41. Jay  P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815– 1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 11–26; Florence D. Cohalan, A Popu­lar History of the Archdiocese of New York (Yonkers, NY: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1983), 153–158; Shelley, Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 212– 261; Mooney, “Archdiocese of New York.” 42. Mooney, “Archdiocese of New York,” 29. 43. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 159–163; Thomas J. Shelley, Greenwich Village Catholics: St. Joseph’s Church and the Evolution of an Urban Faith Community, 1829–2002 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 2003), 68; see the parish maps in Shelley, Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 217, 228. 44. Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 13–52;

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Bernadette McCauley, Who S ­ hall Take Care of Our Sick? Roman Catholic ­Sisters and the Development of Catholic Hospitals in NewYork City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 16–38; Raymond A. Schroth, The American Jesuits: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 86–101; Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 287–290, 365–366. 45. Shelley, Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 155, 215, 357; Dolan, The Immigrant Church, 150–154. 46. Robert E. Curran, Michael Augustine Corrigan and the Shaping of Conservative Catholicism in Amer ­i­ca, 1878–1902 (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 479–504; Robert D. Cross, The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 27, 39, 49, 90. 47. Shelley, Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 351–357; Cohalan, A Popu­lar History of the Archdiocese of New York, 58, 93, 116, 185; Margaret M. McGuiness, Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in Amer­ic­ a (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 15–40; Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns S ­ haped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 129–158; Official Catholic Directory and Clergy List for the Year of Our Lord 1908 (Milwaukee: M. H. Wiltzius Co., 1908), 250–252. 48. Mooney, “Archdiocese of New York,” 29. 49. Mooney, “Archdiocese of New York,” 29; McCauley, Who S ­ hall Take Care of Our Sick? 1–15; Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 87. 50. McCauley, Who ­Shall Take Care of Our Sick? 37–38, 50–53, 95. 51. Michael Stephen Di Giovanni, “­Mother Cabrini: Early Years in New York,” Catholic Historical Review 77, no.  1 (1991): 56–77; Mary Louise ­Sullivan, ­Mother Cabrini: Italian Immigrant of the ­Century (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1992). 52. “Fire Caused by Rats: Excitement at the Catholic Orphan Asylum in Fifth-­Avenue,” New York Times, Feb. 13, 1890. I encountered the Schwartz photo­graph in Bernadette McCauley, “Apart and Among: S ­ isters in the Lives of Catholic New Yorkers,” in Catholics in New York: Society, Culture and Politics, 1808–1946, ed. Terry Golway (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 103. 53. McCauley, Who ­Shall Take Care of Our Sick? 78–79. 54. Marguerite T. Boylan, Social Welfare in the Catholic Church: Organ­ization and Planning through Diocesan Bureaus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 45; Donald  P. Gavin, The National Conference of Catholic Charities, 1910–1960 (Milwaukee: Catholic Life Publications, Bruce Press, 1962), 14–45; Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion, 215; Report of Charles H. Strong, Commissioner to Examine into the Management and Affairs of the State Board of Charities, the Fiscal Supervisor and Certain Related Boards and Commissions to Governor [Charles S.] Whitman ([New York], 1916), 114. 55. Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us, 53–55, 217n8. 56. Shelley, Greenwich Village Catholics, 109. 57. Colleen McDannell, “­Going to the Ladies’ Fair: Irish Catholics in New York City, 1870–1900,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Baylor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 234–251. 58. McDannell, “­ Going to the Ladies’ Fair,” 242; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,  Nov.  9, 1878, 154, 161. The 1878 cathedral fair opened October  22 and closed November 30. 59. Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 50–65; “Quaint Italian Customs of



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Summer Vestal Days,” NewYork Times, July 12, 1903; “Archbishop Crowns a Miracle Statue,” NewYork Times, July 11, 1904; George Enrico Pozzetta, “The Italians of New York City, 1890– 1914” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1971), 289–295. 60. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), Stuyvesant quotation on 2; Howard B. Rock, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 5–69. 61. Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­i­ca, 1945), 472–473; Rock, Haven of Liberty, 137–149, 205–225. 62. Sarna, American Judaism, 111; Allan Tarshish, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites (1859–1878),” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society 49 (Sept. 1959): 16–32. Illustrating the fluidity of American Jewish congregational and individual life, Congregation Shaaray Tefila ­later became associated with Reform Judaism and in 1921 joined the principal national organ­ization of Reform Judaism, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. 63. Sarna, American Judaism, 129–132; Anne  M. Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 79–89. Officers and delegates to the meetings of the ­union and central conference are named in some newspaper accounts, including “A New Chapter in the History of the American Israel,” Israelite, July 18, 1873; “The Cleveland Convention,” Jewish Messenger, July 17, 1874; “Central Conference of American Rabbis: Proceedings of the Executive Committee,” American Israelite, Feb. 6, 1890; “Conference of Rabbis,” Jewish Exponent, July 18, 1890. 64. C. Morris Horo­witz and Lawrence J. Kaplan, The Estimated Jewish Population of the New York Area, 1900–1975 (New York: Demographic Study Committee of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1959), 15; Laidlaw, Population of the City of New York, 1890–1930, 270. 65. Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880– 1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 49–112. 66. Jo Renee Fine and Gerard R. Wolfe, The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side (New York: Washington Mews Books, 1978), 43–47, 52, 60, 70, 99–101; Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in Amer­ic­ a: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 124–128. 67. Michael R. Cohen, The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 53–54, Kohn quotation on 54. 68. Abraham J. Karp, “New York Chooses a Chief Rabbi,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 44 (1955): 129–198, Jewish Gazette quotation on 181; Jeffrey  S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in Amer­i­ca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 113– 116; quotations about Rabbi Joseph’s preaching from Sarna, American Judaism, 183; “Riot Mars Funeral of Rabbi Joseph,” New York Times, July 31, 1902; Edward T. O’Donnell, “Hibernians versus Hebrews? A New Look at the 1902 Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6, no. 2 (2007): 209–225. 69. Hasia R. Diner, “Like the Antelope and the Badger: The Founding and Early Years of JTS, 1886–1902,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ed. Jack Wertheimer, 2 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 1: 1–42; Sarna, American Judaism, 184–187; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 375–376. 70. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in Amer­i­ca, 118–119, 143–145; Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Men and ­Women of Yeshiva University: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (New

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York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 8–66; “The Conference of Jews,” New York Times, June 10, 1898; “The Orthodox Convention,” American Hebrew, June 17, 1898; “New York Happenings: [Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary First Commencement],” American Israelite, Nov.  15, 1906; “Dedicate Rabbinical College,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Dec. 10, 1915; “The City: United Orthodox Rabbis,” American Hebrew, Aug. 8, 1902; “United Orthodox Rabbis,” American Israelite, Aug. 14, 1902; Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 54–57; Sarna, American Judaism, 189–193. ­Today the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminar is usually referred to as RIETS. The acronym became common only in the 1970s, so I have not employed it in this book. 71. Abraham J. Karp, “Solomon Schechter Comes to Amer­ic­ a,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 53 (1963): 42–62; “Reception to Dr. Schechter,” New York Times, May 11, 1902; Cohen, The Birth of Conservative Judaism, 15–68; Gurock, Orthodox Jews in Amer­i­ca, 134; Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Shocken, 2011), 3–19; David  B. Starr, “Catholic Israel: Solomon Schechter, A Study of Unity and Fragmentation in Modern Jewish History” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003), 245–289. 72. Starr, “Catholic Israel,” 330–338; Solomon Schechter, “The United Synagogue of Amer­i­ca,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Feb. 28, 1913. 73. Cohen, The Birth of Conservative Judaism, 44–68; “Dr. Schechter Dead, Noted as a Scholar,” New York Times, Nov.  20, 1915; Joseph Jacobs, “Solomon Schechter as Scholar and as Man,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Nov. 26, 1915. 74. Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Wallace, Greater Gotham, 686; quotation about censorship from Judah L. Magnes, “Charter of the Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, April 5, 1914,” in The Jew in the American World: A Source Book, ed. Jacob Rader Marcus (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 334–335; “The Yom Kippur Jews,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Aug. 25, 1905; “Warned of Fake Synagogues,” New York Times, July 26, 1909. 75. Judah L. Magnes, “Annual Report [of the Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City], Nov. 8, 1914,” in The Jew in the American World: A Source Book, ed. Jacob Rader Marcus (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 335–337; Sarna, American Judaism, 200–201. 76. Daniel  P. Kotzin, Judah  L. Magnes: An American Jewish Nonconformist (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010) is the most recent biography. 77. “List of Congregations, Manhattan and the Bronx,” in The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917–1918, 2nd  ed. (New York: Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City, 1918), 145–248. A synopsis of the Kehillah’s congregational survey, which often included the names of rabbis, appeared as the “Directory of Jewish Local Organ­izations in the United States [Manhattan and the Bronx],” in American Jewish Year Book, 5680 (September 25, 1919, to September 12, 1920), ed. Harry Schneiderman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­ic­ a, 1920), vol. 21: 454–481; Walter Laidlaw, “The Jews of New York as Observed in Ten Years Investigations,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, May 19, 1905; Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum, at https://­www​ .­kkjsm​.­org. 78. Moore, At Home in Amer­i­ca, 123–147; “List of Congregations, Manhattan and the Bronx,” describes Congregation Pincus Elijah in 1918 on 227 and First Hungarian Congre-



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gation Ohab Zedek on 199; “West 95th Street Site Enlarged for Synagogue,” New York Tribune, Jan. 13, 1923; “Synagogue Site Assembled,” NewYork Times, Jan. 13, 1923; “Two Synagogues Merge: Ohab Zedek and Pincus Elijah Congregations Unite,” New York Times, May 25, 1923; “Correspondence: New York Happenings,” American Israelite, May 31, 1923; Chaim Steinberger, First Hungarian Congregation Ohab Zedek: Founded in 1873 (New York: First Hungarian Congregation Ohab Zedek, 2005), 8–9. I am indebted to Mr. Steinberger for his help with Congregation Ohab Zedek’s history. 79. Educational backgrounds for rabbis at the several Manhattan synagogues can be  found in the following sources: for Beth Israel Bikur Cholim’s Aaron Eiseman, see “Dr. Aaron Eiseman Dead at 85,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1964; for B’nai Jeshurun’s Benjamin Tintner, see “Pulpit Topics,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Jan. 17, 1908, and “Rabbi Tintner Resigns,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Dec. 2, 1910; for ­Temple Emanu-­El’s Hyman Enelow, see “Dr.  Enelow Coming to ­Temple Emanu-­El,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Feb. 16, 1912; for Shaaray Tefila’s Nathan Stern, see “Rabbi Stern’s ­Career,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Aug.  20, 1915; for Ohab Zedek’s William Margolis, see “Miss Margareten’s Bridal,” in New York Times, Aug. 10, 1932, and “Dr. Margolis Installed as Rabbi,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1932. 80. David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-­Center” in American Jewish History (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press / University Press of New ­England, 1999), 2–4, 166–193. 81. “Religious Centers Down-­ Town,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Feb.  5, 1904; “The Institutional Synagogue,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Jan. 18, 1918; “Jewish Centre to Open,” NewYork Times, March 18, 1918; “For a New Community Center on Washington Heights,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Jan. 23, 1920; “Dedication of ­Temple Israel,” American Hebrew, Sept. 29, 1922; Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews, 45, 47– 48; Kaufman, Shul with a Pool, xvii, 227, 236. 82. Jenna  W. Joselit, “The Special Sphere of the Middle-­ Class American Jewish ­Woman: The Synagogue Sisterhood, 1890–1940,” in The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 203–230; Felicia Herman, “From Priestess to Hostess: Sisterhoods of Personal Ser­vice in New York City, 1887–1936,” in ­ Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives, ed. Pamela Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 148–181. Hannah B. Einstein and Joseph Jacobs, “Sisterhoods of Personal Ser­vice,” in Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isidore Singer (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), 398. The notice of ­legal incorporation for the sisterhood at ­Temple Emanu-­El is among the news items in “New York,” American Israelite, May 30, 1889. References to sisterhoods in other cities can be found in local news columns of the American Israelite, such as “Milwaukee,” May 24, 1894; “Buffalo, N.Y.,” Oct. 4, 1894; and “Rochester, N.Y.,” Nov. 22, 1894. Home circles are described in “From the Metropolis,” American Israelite, June 7, 1900, and “The City: Sisterhood’s Home Circles,” American Hebrew, May 17, 1901. 83. Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish ­Women, 1893– 1993 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 9–35, 39–40; Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis, 147–149; on Kohut’s early leadership in New York see “New York: National Council of Jewish ­Women,” American Israelite, March 28, 1895. 84. Herman, “From Priestess to Hostess,” 167–168; Beth S. Wenger, “The Masculine World of New York Jewish Philanthropy, 1880–1945,” American Jewish History 101, no. 3 (July 2017): 377–399.

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85. Joyce Antler, “Zion in Our Hearts: Henrietta Szold and the American Jewish ­ omen’s Movement,” in American Jewish ­Women’s History: A Reader, ed. Pamela Nadell W (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 129–150; “Jewish ­Women Active,” Baltimore Sun, June 26, 1917. Hadassah’s 1924 achievements are reported in “To Transfer Zionist Headquarters to Palestine,” American Israelite, July 10, 1924. 86. “Of Interest to ­Women: The Federation of Sisterhoods,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Jan. 26, 1912, refers to the “sixteenth annual meeting” of local New York sisterhoods. “A Federation of Sisterhoods,” American Israelite, June 16, 1913; [Rebecca] Kohut, “­ Women and the Synagogue: A Symposium,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, April 14, 1916; “The Youn­gest Child of Liberal Judaism in New York,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Dec. 2, 1921; “­Temple Israel Elects ­Woman Trustee,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, Dec. 30, 1921. 87. Meir Isaacs, “How the Jewish Communal Register Was Compiled,” in Jewish Communal Register of New York City 1917–1918, 2nd ed. (New York: Kehillah—­Jewish Community—of New York City, 1918), 91–98, quotations on 98. 88. “Number of Organ­izations per 10,000 Jews in the Vari­ous Districts,” Jewish Communal Register, 99, and “­Table Showing a Study of 2000 Biographic Notes of Presidents of Jewish Organ­izations in New York City,” Jewish Communal Register, following 107; Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 236. 89. Jewish Communal Register of New York City 1917–1918, [101], 107. 90. Irving M. Zeitlin, Jews: The Making of a Diaspora ­People (New York: Polity, 2013); Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 bc–117 ce) (Edinburgh: T. Clark, 1996); Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Chris­tian­ity in the West, 350–550 AD (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2012); Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform (1250– 1550): An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Eu­rope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

3. Sacralizing the Urban Landscape 1. Sarah Schack, “O’Leary’s Schul—­and O ­ thers,” Menorah Journal 16 (1929): 462– 466; Sarah Schack and Ethel Cohen, eds., Yiddish Folksongs (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1924). Schack wrote that the congregation was “known by some such grandiloquent name as ‘The Gates of Heaven,’ ” whose Hebrew translation likely would be Shaarey Shoumayim. But “O’Leary’s Schul” clearly was not the Roumanian-­American Congregation Shaarey Shomayim, which occupied a beautiful former church building at 89–93 Rivington Street in Lower Manhattan from 1902 ­until 2006 when structural damage forced the building’s de­mo­li­tion. It is pos­si­ble that Shack picked one of many pos­si­ble “grandiloquent” Manhattan synagogue names to disguise “O’Leary’s” plebian origin. “Shul” is the more common spelling of the Yiddish word for synagogue or worship space, but Schack spelled it “schul” in her essay. 2. Schack, “O’Leary’s Schul,” 462–463. 3. Gayle Wald, Shout, S ­ ister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-­and-­Roll Trailblazer ­Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 41–43; Jeffrey Shandler, “Sanctification of the Brand Name: The Marketing of Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt,” in Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism, ed. Rebecca Kobrin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 255–271; “Billy Sunday Chorus,” in Cata­log of Victor Rec­ords:With Bio-



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graphic Material, Opera Notes, Artist’s Portraits (Camden, NJ: Victor Talking Machine Com­ pany, 1921), 25; Thomas C. Reeves, Amer­i­ca’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 78–82, 223–231. 4. Curtis Mitchell, God in the Garden: The Story of the Billy Graham New York Crusade (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 9; Marshall Frady, Billy Graham, A Parable of American Righ­teousness (Boston: ­Little Brown, 1979), 293; George Burnham and Lee Fisher, Billy Graham and the New York Crusade (­Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1957), 52. It is pos­si­ble that the phrase “Sodom on the subway” derived from a nickname ­earlier applied to Coney Island; see Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson, Sodom by the Sea: An Affectionate History of Coney Island (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1941). 5. John M. Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (New York: Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 1908), 111–152. 6. Thomas  J. Shelley, Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 1808–2008 (Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2007), 210–211; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 199–200; “James Renwick,  Jr.,” in Robert Packard, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1995), 543–545; Archbishop John Hughes to Bernard Smith, June 16, 1858, in Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 122; Hughes to “leading Catholic gentlemen,” June 14, 1858, in Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 119–121. 7. “­Great Catholic Ceremony,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1858. 8. Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 174, 235–254; Tyler Anbinder, “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’: New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts,” Journal of American History 99 (2012): 741–770; Marion R. Casey, “Refractive History: Memory and the Found­ers of the Emigrant Savings Bank,” Radhare (2002): 55– 96, n99. 9. The survey of Manhattan parishes is found in “The Parishes in the Archdiocese [of New York]: Borough of Manhattan,” in The Catholic Church in the United States of Amer­ic­ a, Undertaken to Celebrate the Golden Jubilee of His Holiness, Pope Pius X (New York: Catholic Editing Com­pany, 1914), 3: 303–380, quotations on 304 and 359. 10. “Parishes in the Archdiocese [of New York]: Borough of Manhattan,” 331–333, 339– 340, quotation on 333. 11. Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 51–55, 84–90; Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude:­Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless ­Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 14–22. 12. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (New York: Harper, 1952), 9. 13. ­­Little systematic attention has been paid to the history of New York City Catholic and public school architecture. However, examples of Catholic schools can be found in Shelley, Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 364–365; and Hannah Frishberg, “The Man Who Built New York City’s Schools,” Narratively: ­Human Stories, Boldly Told, Oct. 22, 2014, http://­narrative​.­ly​/­the​-­man​-­who​-­built​-­new​-­york​-­citys​-­schools​/­ , describes New York City public schools designed by Charles B. J. Snyder. Quotations describing schools at Ascension and Holy Name of Jesus parishes are from The Catholic Church in the United States of Amer­i­ca, 3: 316, 333. 14. David W. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 29, 62, 75, 96–97, 116, 135, 172–174, 210, 297; Vilém Ŝiller, Václav Průcha, and R. M. De Castello, Memorial of Czech Protestant

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Congregations in the United States [1900], trans. Jan Dus and Anna Dus (Chicago: Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International, 2012), 8–14, a source kindly provided by my friend David Pavelka; Steven Ruttenbaum, Mansions in the Clouds: The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth (New York: Balsam Press, 1986), 52. 15. A. Clayton Powell,  Sr., Upon This Rock (New York: Abyssinian Baptist Church, 1949), 14–24; Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 6, 212, 226, 242–243. Genna Rae McNeil, Houston Bryan Roberson, Quinton Hosford ­Dixie, and Kevin McGruder, Witness: Two Hundred Years of African-­American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 163, 169. Both Abyssinian Baptist and Mt. Olivet Baptist are listed as member congregations of the Southern New York Baptist Association in Fifteenth Anniversary [Meeting] of the Southern New York Baptist Association . . . ​October 6th, 7th, and 8th, 1885 (New York: Judson Printing Co., 1885), 41; and Forty-­Fifth Anniversary [Meeting] of the Southern New York Baptist Association (New York: Schulte Press, 1915), [45]; Abyssinian Baptist also apparently belonged to the National Baptist Convention formed by African American Baptist churches in 1895, since its minister, Rev. Charles S. Morris, spoke at the Convention’s 1903 meeting; ­Music and Official Program, National Baptist Convention, Philadelphia (1903), 67. The claim about Abyssinian’s membership is in “Programs ­Today in the Churches of the City,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 1933. 16. “Trinity Gives Reasons: Not Responsible for Its Tenants’ Buildings, Col. Cruger Says,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1894; Jacob A. Riis, A Ten Years’War: An Account of the B ­ attle with the Slum in New York (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1902), 108; Ray Stannard Baker, The Spiritual Unrest (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Com­pany, 1910), 1–48, quotation on 19; Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 118–120, quotation on 118; “That ­Little Church Around the Corner,” words by Dexter Smith, m ­ usic by C. A. White (Boston: White, Smith, and Perry, [1870]); G. H. Houghton, Forty-­and-­Five Years: An Anniversary Sermon Preached Sunday Morning, October 1st, 1893, at the Church of the Transfiguration in the City of New York (New York, 1893); Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 131. 17. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 35, 37, 52; Nick Carr, “The Largest Pizzeria in the United States Is in a 19th ­Century Times Square Church,” Scouting NewYork website, Sept. 29, 2014, http://­www​.­scoutingny​.­com​/­americas​-­largest​-­pizzeria​-­is​-­in​-­a​-­19th​-­century​-­times​ -­sq​-­church​/­ . Lewis  S. Judd, The Broadway Tabernacle Church, 1901–1915 (New York: Broadway Tabernacle Church, 1917), 28; “New Calvary Church, in ­Hotel, Is Dedicated,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1931. 18. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 7, 154, 245; “Mount Zion Lutheran Church,” New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, http://­www​.­nycago​.­org​/­Organs​ /­NYC​/­html​/­MtZionLuth​.­html; “Meserich Synagogue,” Wikipedia, https://­en​.­wikipedia​ .­org​/­wiki​/­Meserich​_­Synagogue; East Village / Lower East Side Historic District Designation Report, Oct. 9, 2012 (New York: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, 2012), 23–24. 19. East Village / Lower East Side Historic District Designation Report, 22, 194; Gerard R. Wolfe, The Synagogues of NewYork’s Lower East Side: A Retrospective and Con­temporary View, 2nd  ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 115–118, 163–166; Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 6, 267; “Old Negro Church Sold,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 1922. 20. Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890– 1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 97–120, quotations on 104, 113. 21. McGruder, Race and Real Estate, 114–115; Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 14, 20, 151, 152, 215; Dunlap, “Vestiges of Harlem’s Jewish Past,” New York Times, June 7, 2002;



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Chaim Steinberger, First Hungarian Congregation Ohab Zedek: Founded in 1873 (New York: First Hungarian Congregation Ohab Zedek, 2005), 27, a source kindly provided by Mr.  Steinberger. St.  John Nepomucene Catholic Church purchased the synagogue of Congregation Shaarey Beracha on 57th Street in 1911. 22. “Beautifying a Church: The Rhinelander Memorial Unveiled,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 1888; “Gifts to New Synagogue,” New York Times, May 11, 1926; “Community House for Harlem,” New York Times, June 11, 1922; Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 17. Jewish congregational finances, but not mortgages, are discussed in Daniel Judson, Pennies for Heaven: The History of American Synagogues and Money (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018). 23. “Church Property and Debts,” NewYork Times, Jan. 28, 1878. The study assumed the crude accuracy of congregational property valuation and debt figures. Note that the indebtedness for Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1922 is mea­sured against its mortgage, not its extensive property holdings. 24. Marion  R. Casey, “Emigrant as Historian: Rec­ords, Banking, and Irish-­American Scholarship,” American Journal of Irish Studies 10 (2013): 145–163; New York City Baptist Mission Soc. v.Tabernacle Baptist Church, in The NewYork Supplement Containing the Decisions of Rec­ord of NewYork State, 41 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1897), 513–518; Emigrant Savings Bank rec­ords, 1850–1883, are available at the fee-­based website http://­search​.­ancestry​ .­com​/­search​/­db​.­aspx​?­dbid​=­8760; “Permits Synagogue Mortgage,” New York Times, July 10, 1929. 25. Charles Stelzle, Princi­ples of Successful Church Advertising (New York: Fleming H. Revell Com­pany, 1908), 110–111; “Font for the Cathedral,” NewYork Times, Aug. 28, 1897; Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 315–317; “St. Patrick’s Cathedral illuminated at night, Fifth Ave­nue and 50th Street, New York City, 1912,” H. N. Tiemann & Co. Photo­ graph Collection, 1880–1916, New-­York Historical Society; “Colored Lights in Church,” New York Times, Nov. 18, 1921. 26. Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in Amer­ic­ a, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 180–190; “Organists of Nation ­Here for Convention,” NewYork Times, Sept. 8, 1931; “Christian Home Likened to Heaven,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1934. 27. Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880– 1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 56–66; Anne  M. Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 86–101, 111–129; Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 7–8, 89; David Kaufman, “Constructions of Memory: The Synagogues of the Lower East Side,” in Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, ed. Hasia  R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 113–136; Wolfe, Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side, 173–174. I am deeply indebted to David Kaufman for additional information on Chevrah B’Nai Yitzchak, to Kenneth  R. Cobb of the New York City Municipal Archives for help in acquiring the 1908 photo­graph by Eugene de Salignac, and to Jenna Weissman Joselit for translating the sign for the Lemberger Chevra on Attorney Street. On Salignac, see Eugene de Salignac, New York Rises: Photo­g raphs by Eugene de Salignac, ed. Michael Lorenzini and Kevin Moore (New York: Aperture, 2007). The website of the Museum of F ­ amily History Education and Research Center, “Synagogues of New York City,” at http://­www​.­museumoffamilyhistory​.­com​/­erc​ -­syn​-­manhattan​.­htm; and Oscar Israelowitz, Synagogues of New York City: History of a Jewish

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Community (Brooklyn: Israelowitz Publishing, 2000), 73–82, document successive congregations on Attorney Street and the Lower East Side. 28. Ira De A. Reid, “Let Us Prey!” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 4 (1926): 274–278. 29. Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (New York: New Press / Museum of the City of New York, 1997), 388; Abbott quotation from Hank O’Neal, Berenice Abbott, American Photographer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), 146; Lucien Aigner, Aigner’s New York (­Great Barrington, MA: Lucien Aigner Museum,1993). Julia Van Haaften’s Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 235–237, notes that Abbott’s photo­graph “depicting a Harlem Pentecostal minister springing down the storefront’s stairs” was excised from Abbott’s Changing NewYork (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937) at the last minute. 30. Willie Melmoth Bomar, I Went to Church in New York (New York: Graymont Publishers, 1937), 29–46, 56–62, 88–98, 99–108. 31. Stephen Wise, ChallengingYears:The Autobiography of Stephen Wise (New York: Putnam, 1949), 82–108; Melvin I. Urofsky, A Voice That Spoke for Justice: The Life and Times of Stephen S.Wise (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 65; Robert D. Shapiro, A Reform Rabbi in the Progressive Era: The Early C ­ areer of Stephen S.Wise (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 181. 32. “Church Ser­vices To-­morrow,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1910; “Religious Ser­vices,” New York Times, April 1, 1922, and Feb. 1, 1930; “Health Needs ‘Divine Spark,’ ” New York Times, April 19, 1937; “Religious Announcements,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 1, 1930; “Religious Notices,” New York Sun, May 24, 1930, and Sept. 30, 1933; “Church Notices,” New York Eve­ning Post, May 31, 1930. 33. See the classified advertisements for “Religious Ser­vices” in the New-­York Daily Tribune, Aug. 6, 1842; “Religious Notices,” New York Times, Dec. 27, 1851; “Church Ser­vices To-­day,” NewYork Times, Dec. 13, 1903; “Religious Ser­vices,” NewYork Times, April 1, 1922; “Religious Notices,” New York Telegraph, Feb. 2, 1924. 34. “Religious Ser­vices,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 1924; many of the Times religious advertisements also appeared in “Church Notices” in the New York Eve­ning Post, Feb. 2, 1924. Rev. Charles Jefferson published his Broadway Tabernacle sermons as Five Present-­Day Controversies (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1924); R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 204–237. 35. “­Today’s Programs in City Churches,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1927. 36. “Parades,” in Kenneth  T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd  ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 971–973. 37. New York Times, March 15, 1852; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display,” Religion and American Culture 4 (1994): 135–164; William C. Doane, The Book of Easter (New York: Macmillan, 1910), quoted in Schmidt, “The Easter Parade,” 159. 38. Abby Goodnough, “School’s Out? H ­ ere’s a History Lesson about Brooklyn-­ Queens Day,” New York Times, June 5, 2003; “Church Activities of Interest in City,” New York Times, May 19, 1934; “­Children to Meet in Cathedral Nave,” New York Times, May 20, 1939; “A Sunday School Parade,” New York Times, May 28, 1890; “Above Harlem Sunday School Parade,” New York Times, May 26, 1892. 39. “Church’s Golden Jubilee,” New York Times, May 31, 1918; “Broome Street Lays Stone for Church,” New York Times, Dec.  28, 1925; Colleen McDannell, “­Going to the Ladies’ Fair: Irish Catholics in New York City, 1870–1900,” in The New York Irish, ed.



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Ronald H. Baylor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 234–251; Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–13. 40. “Riot Mars Funeral of Rabbi Joseph,” New York Times, July 31, 1902; Arthur Aryeh Goren, “Sacred and Secular: The Place of Public Funerals in the Immigrant Life of American Jews,” Jewish History 8 (1994): 269–305; Edward T. O’Donnell, “Hibernians versus Hebrews? A New Look at the 1902 Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6 (2007): 209–225; “Jews on East Side Bury Their Scrolls,” New York Times, June  17, 1907; “All Hail Columbus Day,” New-­York Tribune, Oct.  12, 1909; “Vast Crowds Honor Sholem Aleichem,” New York Times, May  16, 1916; “New Synagogue Is Opened,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1926, which erroneously located Ohab Zedek’s old synagogue on 118th rather than 116th Street. 41. Official Catholic Directory (New York: P.  J. Kennedy and Sons, 1919), advertising pages 43, 89, 167; Joseph H. Meier, “The Official Catholic Directory,” Catholic Historical Review 1, no. 3 (1915): 299–304. 42. Samuel Margoshes, “The Jewish Press in New York City,” in Jewish Communal Register of New York City 1917–1918, 2nd ed. (New York: Kehillah–­Jewish Community–of New York City, 1918), 596–633. 43. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth ­Century (New York: Schocken, 1970); Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Alyssa Quint, “ ‘Yiddish Lit­er­a­ture for the Masses’? A Reconsideration of Who Read What in Jewish Eastern Eu­rope,” AJS Review 29 (2005): 61–89. 44. Kyle Roberts, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of NewYork City, 1783–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 122–133; P. Mark Fackler and Charles  H. Lippy, eds., Popu­lar Religious Magazines of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), 16–32, 101–109, 129–135, 452–457, 506–514. 45. Heather D. Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 1–12, 21–26, 28, 115–117; Charles Melville Pepper, Life-­Work of Louis Klopsch: Romance of a Modern Knight of Mercy (New York: Christian Herald, 1910), digests Klopsch’s c­ areer; “A Mohammadan Festival,” Christian Herald, Jan. 18, 1893, 43; “Modern Judaism in New York City,” Christian Herald, March 22, 1899, 222–223; “New Movement of Hebrew Benevolence,” Christian Herald, June 14, 1899, 467; “The Premiere of the Jewish World [Herman Adler],” Christian Herald, Nov. 13, 1899, 879; A. Benjamin, “Modern Judaism,” Christian Herald, Dec. 13, 1899, 974. “Dr. Klopsch Dead ­after an Operation,” New York Times, March 7, 1910. The earliest Christian Herald colorized cover appears to have been that of Nov. 6, 1895. “Dr. Louis Klopsch Left $643,239 Net,” NewYork Times, Aug. 1, 1916; Klopsch’s estate prob­ably equaled about $17,000,000 in 2020 dollars following the “US Inflation Calculator” at http://­www​.­usinflationcalculator​.­com. 46. Lentilhon’s books included A. H. McKinney, The Bible-­School: A Manual for Sunday-­ School Workers (New York: Lentilhon, 1898); Edward Judson, The Institutional Church: A Primer in Pastoral Theology (New York: Lentilhon, 1899); and C. R. Henderson, Social Settlements (New York: Lentilhon, 1899). Allan Fisher, Fleming  H. Revell Com­pany: The First 125  Years, 1870–1995 (­Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 1995); “Mrs.  Revell Guilty,” New York Times, April 3, 1929; John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: R.  R. Bowker, 1975), 3: 331–344, 447, 350–554–556; 4: 107–113, 543; Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Bound­aries of American Religious Publishing in the Early Twentieth ­Century,” Book History 2 (1999): 207–217.

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47. “Ohab Zedek Choir, First Hungarian Congregation, New York,” in Discography of American Historical Recordings at http://­adp​.­library​.­ucsb​.­edu​/­index​.­php​/­talent​/­detail​/­44254​ /­Ohab​_­Zedek​_­Choir​_­First​_­Hungarian​_­Congregation​_­New​_­York​_­Vocal​_­group. A[braham] B. Makover, “From a Zionist in Khaki,” Kadimah 1 (1918): 31–46, describes hearing Meisels and the Ohab Zedek choir recording at his army training camp. Jeffrey Shandler, “Sanctification of the Brand Name: The Marketing of Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt,” in Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism, ed. Rebecca Kobrin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 255–271; Samuel Rosenblatt, Yossele Rosenblatt: The Story of His Life as Told by His Son (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1954), 369– 372; “Cantor Rosenblatt’s First Concert,” American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, May 24, 1918, 66; “Bright Acts Feature the Palace’s Bill,” New York Times, March 27, 1928; “Young Pianist Appears,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 1921; “City Hopes to Give F ­ ree Opera in Mall,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1924; “Concerts of a Day,” New York Times, April 21, 1919. 48. Victor display advertisement, New York Herald Tribune, May 21, 1918. The alphabetized but unpaginated 1920 Cata­logue of Victor Rec­ords (Camden, NJ: Victor Talking Machine Com­pany, 1919) lists the Trinity Choir recordings u ­ nder the letter “T.” Columbia Rec­ords [Cata­log] 1925 [New York: Columbia Rec­ords, 1925], 109, 121–122, 135–137. Victor’s “New Bach” display advertisement, New York Herald Tribune, May 18, 1930, described the London Symphony Orchestra recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor conducted by Albert Coates as containing “thirty-­four 12[-­inch] His Master’s Voice rec­ords in two volumes.” Anonymous rec­ord collectors on “SymphonyShare@googlegroups,” March 14, 2019, confirmed that the Victor advertisement should have specified thirty-­four “sides” on seventeen rec­ords, the weight of the two a­ lbums totaling fifteen pounds. 49. Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers, Who Introduced the World to the ­Music of Black Amer­ic­ a (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), xiii–­xiv, 109–121; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 250–264; Tim Brooks, “ ‘Might Take One Disk of This Trash as a Novelty’: Early Recordings by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Popularization of ‘Negro Folk ­Music,’  ” American ­Music 18 (2000): 278–316; Columbia Rec­ords [Cata­log] 1925, 110; 1920 Cata­logue of Victor Rec­ords, unpaginated, Tuskegee Institute Singers recordings listed ­under the letter “T”; Eugene Thamon Simpson, Hall Johnson: His Life, His Spirit, His ­Music (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 5–14. 50. Lerone A. Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 30–31; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints:Vocal Traditions on Race Rec­ords (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8–15. The name of Okeh rec­ords has sometimes been spelled “OKeh”; I have followed Martin and Oliver in using the “Okeh” spelling. 51. Martin, Preaching on Wax, 29, 32–61, quotation on 43. 52. Martin, Preaching on Wax, 1–3, 95–108, 132–136; Ross Laird and Brian Rust, Discography of OKeh Rec­ords, 1918–1934 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 349; Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 168, 298–299; Inter-­State Tattler, March 23, 1928, 16; Okeh display advertisements for James M. Gates’s sermons, “Death Might Be Your Santa Claus,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 8, 1926; and “God’s Wrath in the St. Louis Cyclone,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 14, 1927, which also lists at least seven Harlem rec­ord shops; “Harlem ­Music Shops Feature Colored Artists,” NewYork Amsterdam News, May 16, 1923, listed nine Harlem rec­ord shops. 53. “Radio: Qua­dru­ple Broadcast Next Thursday,” New York Times, June 3, 1923; Bill Jaker, Frank Sulek, and Peter Kanze, The Airwaves of New York: Illustrated Histories of 156

a.m.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 106–110

259

Stations in the Metropolitan Area, 1921–1996 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 36–37, 39–40, 79–80, 117–118, 168; Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popu­lar Culture in Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 21–36. 54. Jaker, Sulek, and Kanze, The Airwaves of New York, 168. 55. “Radio Programs Scheduled for Current Week,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1927. 56. Ari Kelman, Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 71, 95–100, 103, 121–126. 57. Spencer Miller Jr., “Radio and Religion,” Annals of the American Acad­emy of Po­liti­cal and Social Science 177 (1935): 135–140; “Dr. Wise on Air Weekly,” New York Times, Sept. 27, 1928. 58. A Finding Aid to the Message of Israel Broadcasts, 1934–1993, Manuscript Collection No. 299, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, at http://­collections​.­americanjewisharchives​.­org​/­ms​/­ms0299​/­ms0299​.­html; Jeffrey Shandler and Elihu Katz, “Broadcasting American Judaism: The Radio and Tele­vi­sion Department of the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of Amer­i­ca, 1997), 2: 363–401; Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in Amer­i­ca (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 57–62; Carol  V.  R. George, God’s Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 85–86; Robert Moats Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 380–382; Reeves, Amer­i­ca’s Bishop, 79–80, 238–239; Ralph Jennings, “Policies and Practices of Selected National Religious Bodies as Related to Broadcasting in the Public Interest” (PhD diss., New York University, 1968), 118–119, 259. 59. Anthony Burke Smith, “Prime-­Time Catholicism in the 1950s: Fulton J. Sheen and ‘Life Is Worth Living,’ ” U. S. Catholic Historian 15 (1997): 57–74; Mark S. Massa, Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad Pub. Co., 1999), 82–101; Charles H. Lippy, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popu­lar Religiosity in the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 201. “Mr. Peep’s Diary,” Baltimore Sun, Feb. 20, 1963; and R. H. Gardner’s review of the 1964 Hollywood film of the Peales’s life, One Man’s Way, in Baltimore Sun, March 7, 1964, describe the broadcast of the Peales’s “What’s Your Trou­ble?” program at 2 a.m. on the Baltimore tele­vi­sion station WJZ. 60. Joseph T. McCadden, “Bishop Hughes versus the Public School Society of New York,” Catholic Historical Review 50, no. 2 (1964): 188–207; Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 260–268; “­Will Permit Bible Reading,” New-­York Tribune, Jan.  19, 1903; Florence Winchell to the editor, Bennington [VT] Banner, Aug. 29, 1963. 61. The New York City Board of Education bylaw requiring bible reading at school assemblies is described in Terry Ferrer, “Public School Bible Reading—­‘Illegal,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, Feb.  6, 1962; Eugene  A. Nifenecker, The School Assembly: A Handbook for Auditorium Exercises (New York: William G. Willcox, President, Board of Education, 1917); John Webb Pratt, Religion, Politics, and Diversity: The Church-­State Theme in New York History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 290–297. 62. “School Prayer ‘Unconstitutional’: Mixed View of Churchmen,” New York Herald Tribune, June 26, 1962; “From All Faiths,” New York Herald Tribune, June 26, 1962; George Dugan, “Protestant Preachers in City Assay Court Decision Barring Prayer in Public Schools,” New York Times, July 2, 1962; Hope M ­ acLeod, “The Bible in the Schools, Pro and Con,” New York Post Magazine, March 18, 1962.

260

N O T E S T O P A G E S 110–113

63. “Religious Teaching in Schools,” New-­York Tribune, Oct.  3, 1904; “Would Teach Religion in School-­Day Time,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 1906; George U. Wenner, “Week­Day Instruction in Religion,” United Brethren Review 17 (1906): 159–167, printed Wenner’s speech at the January 1906 Inter-­Church Conference in Manhattan. The David Greer quotation is found in “Religion for C ­ hildren,” New-­York Tribune, Dec. 20, 1906; Wenner, Religious Education and the Public Schools: An American Prob­lem (New York: Bonnell, Silver and Co., 1907), vii, 111–115; Robert Michaelsen, Piety in the Public School: Trends and Issues in the Relationship between Religion and the Public School in the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1970), 170–181; Laura Smith, “A Quest for ­Children in the Churches,” New York Times, Jan. 3, 1909, described Wenner’s work with c­ hildren and his proposal for Wednesday after­ noon religious training. 64. Steven C. Rocke­fel­ler, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Demo­cratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 265–269; “Gary Plan Meeting Ends in Verbal Riot,” New York Times, Nov. 10, 1915; “Gary Plan Vicious Dr. W. M. Hess Says,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 1915; “Rabbi Opposes Gary Plan,” NewYork Times, Nov. 7, 1915; “Plans Lessons in Religion for Public School Pupils,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 1921; “Hayes ­Favors Plan to Teach ­Children Religion [­after School] in Church,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 2, 1925; “Nudd Opposes Religious Instruction in Schools,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 25, 1925; Stuart Hawkins, “On the Radio: Skirmish over Religious Instruction Broadcast,” New York Herald Tribune, May 21, 1927; “Religious Teaching ­Will Begin This Fall in Two City Schools,” New York Times, June 6, 1931. 65. “Spiritual Front Urged against Isms in Schools,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 16, 1939; “Veto Coudert Bill Governor is Urged,” New York Times, March 30, 1940; “Religious Classes Start Next Week . . . ​Good Citizenship an Aim,” New York Times, Jan.  27, 1941; Pratt, Religion, Politics, and Diversity, 271–280; Remalian M. Cocar, “Between a Righ­teous Citizenship and the Unfaith of the ­Family: The History of Released Time Religious Education in the United States” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2011), 80–86; Leo Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 372–373. 66. “3,000 C ­ hildren Start Religious Study Program,” New York Times, Feb. 6, 1941; “Released Time Religious Study to Be Resumed,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 30, 1944; “Time Out for Religion,” New York Herald Tribune, April 9, 1944; “25% of School Pupils Now Get Religious Study,” New York Herald Tribune, Oct.  26, 1947; “800,000 ‘Pagan’ ­Children Found in City Schools,” New York Herald Tribune, March 2, 1946; Rex M. Butterfield, “Released Time Religious Education: A Primer,” Religious Education 112, no.  5 (2017): 465–476; “Court Religious Ban Held Not to Affect City Schools,” New York Times, March  10, 1948; Marcia Biederman, “Fewer Pupils in Catechism Programs,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 2000; Fernanda Santos, “School Day has Time to Make the Matzo,” New York Times, April 13, 2011.

4. Modernizing God in Jim Crow Manhattan 1. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). The name “Fire Baptized” may have been inspired by Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God, which existed in Manhattan since 1918 and advertised in the New York Amsterdam News. “Guide to Churches in NewYork City,” NewYork Amsterdam News, March 22, 1947; Donald  G. Presa, “Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church . . . ​ Landmarks Preservation Commission, June  23, 2009,” at http://­www​.­fbhchurch​.­org​/­mtolive​_­ny​.­html,



N O T E S T O P A G E S 113–119

261

“Historical Designation”; David W. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 152. 2. Donald Barr, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” New York Times, May 17, 1953. Two days ­after Barr’s review appeared, the Times’ principal book reviewer, Orville Prescott, also reviewed Go Tell It on the Mountain. Prescott dismissed the “primitive, naïve, and frequently hysterical variety of religion in the lives of American Negroes” and described Baldwin’s story as “almost as remote as a historical novel about the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets.” However, Prescott praised Baldwin’s style, “an elaborate, cadenced prose that reflects the Biblical language that constantly runs through the minds of the saints of the ­Temple of the Fire Baptized” and ended his review with one of Baldwin’s beautifully ­shaped paragraphs. 3. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993), quotations on 38, 47. 4. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 36, 77, 133. The decline in the proportion of blacks in New York City began before the American Revolution, falling from roughly 20 ­percent of the city small population of 11,000 in 1741 to about just over 10 ­percent of the population of about 33,000 by 1790 (8, 18). Sherrill D. Wilson and Larry A. Greene, “Blacks,” in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 10–13; Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 807–810. 5. A few other congregations—­Dutch Reformed, Episcopal, and Presbyterian—­were or­ga­nized in the antebellum period but failed. Jonathan Greenleaf, A History of the Churches, of all Denominations, in the City of New York, from the First Settlement to the Year 1846 (New York: E. French, 1846), 45, 79–91, 97, 152–154, 240–241, 259–260, 320–330, 367; Theodore Fiske Savage, The Presbyterian Church in New York City (New York: Presbytery of New York, 1949), 154–155; 194–195; Genna Rae McNeil, Houston Bryan Roberson, Quinton Hosford ­Dixie, and Kevin McGruder, Witness: Two Hundred Years of African-­American Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem (­Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 4–22. 6. Marcy S. Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 39–41, 74–76; Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 15–44; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 811. 7. New York Charities Directory, 16th ed. (New York: Charity Organ­ization Society of the City of New York, 1906), 317–422. The moves and formation of Manhattan’s black congregations can be traced in Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion. The Third Moravian Church, designated as “colored,” was first listed in New York Charities Directory, 13th ed. (New York: Charity Organ­ization Society of the City of New York, 1903), 331. 8. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 6, 148–149, 195, 242–243; “Fifty-­Third-­Street Baptist Church Dedication—­Memorial Ser­vices Yesterday,” New York Times, Dec. 15, 1870; “Church for Colored Baptists,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1884. 9. “Zion Trustees Deny Extravagance Charge,” New York Age, July 4, 1912; “The Negro Church,” The Crisis, May  4, 1912, 25; “The Real Business of a Preacher,” The Crisis, April 30, 1914; James Weldon Johnson, “What’s the ­Matter with Church,” in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, ed. Sondra K. Wilson, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1: 141–143. 10. Sacks, Before Harlem, 179–186; W.  E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Black North in 1901,  A Social Study: A Series of Articles Originally Appearing in The New York Times,

262

N O T E S T O P A G E S 119–122

November–­December  1901, ed. St.  Clair Drake (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 16–17. 11. The education of Manhattan’s black clergy before 1920 is difficult to track, but see George  W. Krygar, “Introduction,” in Daniel  W. Wisher, Echoes from the Gospel Trumpet: Three Sermons and a Paper (New York: E. Scott Co., 1896), 5–16; “At 81, Dr. Sims Works 6 Days Each Week Plus,” New York Age, Nov. 15, 1952 (Sims prob­ably received an honorary doctorate ­later in the course of his long c­ areer); Wallace, Greater Gotham, 829; McNeil et al., Witness, 61; Richard  T.  W. Smith, “Militant Negro Churchmen: Fighters in the World’s ­Battle for the Triumph of God’s Kingdom on Earth [Bethel AME Church],” Colored American Magazine 12–13 (1907): 119–121; Silas Xavier Floyd, Life of Charles  T. Walker, D.D. (Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1902), 29–33; David W. ­Wills, “ ‘His Life for His Race’: The Brief Pastorate and Public Life of Pierce Butler Thompkins,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 85 (2007), 5–27; Charles Ripley Gillett, ed., General Cata­log of Union Theological Seminary in the City of NewYork, 1836–1897 (New York: Union Theological Seminary, 1898), 269. 12. Sacks, Before Harlem, 180; “South Carolina Day at Bethel,” New York Age, May 10, 1906; “South Carolina Circle,” in Centennial Cele­bration, Bethel A.M.E. Church, 52–60 West 132nd Street, NewYork City, 1819–1919 (New York: Bethel AME Church, 1919), unpaginated; Richard T. W. Smith, “Militant Negro Churchmen: Fighters in the World’s B ­ attle for the Triumph of God’s Kingdom on Earth [Union Baptist Church, New York City],” Colored American Magazine 12, no. 4 (April 1907): 257–262; Mary White Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Com­pany, 1947), 39–40 13. “Dedication of Mt Olivet Church,” NewYork Age, June 21, 1884; Du Bois, The Black North in 1901, 17. The ­Virginia Jubilee Singers who appeared at the rededication of Mount Olivet Baptist Church sanctuary in July 1884 could have been the pre­de­ces­sors of the similarly named group or­ga­nized by Orpheus McAdoo to tour ­England and South Africa in 1890, but this is uncertain. See Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight:The Rise of Black Popu­lar M ­ usic, 1889–1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 119–126. 14. “Zion A.M.E. Church,” NewYork Age, Jan. 9, 1892; “New York City News: Borough of Manhattan,” New York Age, Feb. 16, 1905, and March 16, 1905; Sacks, Before Harlem, 180. 15. “A Pastor’s Summer Abroad: Dr. Monroe’s First Impressions of the Old World,” New York Age, Sept. 13, 1890; “Shiloh Presbyterian Church,” New York Age, Oct.  27, 1888; “St. Mark’s A.M.E. Church,” New York Age, Dec. 10, 1908. 16. “The White Cross Society,” New York Freeman, March  28, 1885; “New York City News,” New York Age, Nov. 15, 1890; “Bethel A.M.E. Church,” New York Age, Dec. 10, 1908; “St. Benedict the Moor,” New York Age, March 10, 1910; 17. “Bethel  A.M.E. Church,” New York Age, Dec.  17, 1908; “Metropolitan  A.M.E. Church,” New York Age, Dec. 10, 1908; “Metropolitan U.A.M.E. Church,” New York Age, March  4, 1909; “St.  James’ Church,” New York Age, Dec.  3, 1908; “Bethel  A.M.E. Church,” New York Age, Dec. 3, 1908; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 829–830. 18. “Salem Church and Lyceum,” NewYork Amsterdam News, May 30, 1923; “Salem M. E. Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 25, 1925; “Church Bulletin: Salem Methodist Episcopal,” New York Amsterdam News, June 16, 1926; “­Mother Zion Church Notes,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 29, 1922; “Editor Abbott ­Will Talk at M ­ other Zion,” New York Amsterdam News, Jan. 24, 1923; “Church Bulletin: Mount Olivet Baptist Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 20, 1922; “Church Bulletin: Union Baptist Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Jan. 24, 1923; “[Rendall Memorial Church] to Celebrate 100th Anniversary of Presbyterianism in New York,” New York Amsterdam News, April 11, 1923.



N O T E S T O P A G E S 123–126

263

19. “Race Question in New York: A Negro Pastor’s Recital of the Wrongs of His P ­ eople,” New York Times, June 15, 1904; McNeil et al., Witness, 73. 20. Lester A. Walton, ed., “­Music and the Stage,” NewYork Age, March 21, 1912; “$23,000 to be Invested,” classified advertisement, New York Times, Feb. 2, 1905; McGruder, Race and Real Estate, 7–9; “Making It Pay,” New York Age, June 8, 1911 “Cook, white, experienced,” and “Cook (white),” classified advertisements, NewYork Times, Sept. 14, 1919, and April 17, 1921; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 815–820; Karl Feininger diary, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, entries for May  30, 1911, April  23, 1912, and June  12, 1912. The bigotry expressed in Feininger’s diary may not have been fully shared by his wife, who advertised her ser­vices as a “pianist and accompanist” in the New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 8, 1926, four years ­after her husband’s death. 21. The incident involving St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church is discussed in Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 104–105; “Negroes in White Churches,” Colored American Magazine 12 (1907), 247; “White Landlords Make Objection to Church,” New York Age, June 11, 1914. 22. “New York City News,” NewYork Age, May 17, 1890; “For Civil Rights,” NewYork Age, June 7, 1890; “To Bar ‘The Clansman,’ ” New York Age, Dec. 21, 1905; “A Dixon Pamphlet Stirs Negro Clergy,” NewYork Times, Dec. 18, 1905; “To Win Industrial Changes,” NewYork Age, May 17, 1906; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 805–807; Sacks, Before Harlem, 185. 23. “5,000 Negroes in Race Riot Protest March on 5th Ave,” New York Tribune, July 29, 1917; “Nearly Ten Thousand Take Part in Big ­Silent Protest Parade Down Fifth Ave­nue,” New York Age, Aug. 2, 1917; “Negroes in Protest March in Fifth Av,” NewYork Times, July 29, 1917. 24. “Wealthy Negro Citizens: Several Residing in This City and Brooklyn,” New York Times, July 14, 1895. Quotations are taken from “Congregation in Uproar,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 1899; “Colored Flock in Uproar,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 1899; and “Police in Mt. Olivet Pews,” New York Times, March 13, 1899. See also “Or­ga­nize the Baptist ­Temple: Followers of the Rev. Mr.  Wisher Form a New Church,” New York Times, May  9, 1899; “A Preacher in Politics: Rev. Daniel W. Wisher, Colored, Has a Turbulent Time,” NewYork Times, Oct. 6, 1900; “Rev. D. W. Wisher Admitted: Unanimously Elected a Member of the New York African  M.E. Conference,” New York Times, June  1, 1901; “Church News by Wigwag: Mr. Wisher Was Safe on a Roof While His Church ‘Harmonized,’ ” NewYork Sun, March 29, 1899; Betty Livingston Adams, Black ­Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 34–36. 25. “Mount Olivet Baptist Church: Keep the Pastor ­Humble, ­We’ll Keep Him Poor,” New York Age, Dec. 12, 1907; “More Trou­ble at Olivet Church,” New York Age, Sept. 24, 1908; “Local Churches Hold Appropriate Ser­vices,” New York Age, Dec. 29, 1910; “Selma University Exercises,” New York Age, June  8, 1911; “Educational,” Plaindealer [Detroit], Sept. 23, 1892. 26. “Cantata at Mt. Olivet Church,” New York Age, Jan. 19, 1889; “St. Philip’s Church a Wealthy Congregation,” New York Age, Jan.  16, 1913; McNeill et  al., Witness, 71; “Emmanuel Association,” NewYork Age, Oct. 23, 1913; “First Emmanuel Church,” NewYork Age, July  9, 1914; “Emmanuel Church Holds Peace Ser­vice,” New York Age, Oct.  15, 1914; “Pastor Bolden Celebrates Birthday,” New York Age, March 8, 1917. 27. “Local Gossip,” New York Freeman, Nov. 21, 1885; “New York City News,” New York Age, Nov. 15, 1890, emphasis in original; “St. Mark’s M. E. Church,” New York Age, Dec. 3, 1908; Sacks, Before Harlem, 183; McNeil et al., Witness, 71, 72.

264

N O T E S T O P A G E S 127–129

28. Religious Bodies: 1906—­Part II Separate Denominations: History, Description and Statistics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 45, 439, 450, 458. The Religious Bodies reports issued for 1906, 1916, 1926, and 1936 raise complicated methodological prob­lems usefully discussed in Kevin Christiano, “ ‘Numbering Israel’: The  U.S. Census and Religious Organ­izations,” Social Science History 8 (1984): 341–370; and Rodney Stark, “The Reliability of Historical United States Census Data on Religion,” So­cio­log­i­cal Analy­sis 53, no.  1 (1992): 91–95. Centennial Cele­bration, Bethel A.M.E. Church, unpaginated, contains photo­graphs of Bethel AME’s “classes” in 1919. 29. “Cele­bration at Bethel: Centennial of African Methodism,” New York Age, Nov. 19, 1887, provides a complete list of the congregation’s all-­male officers. “Christian’s Minister’s Conference,” NewYork Age, Jan. 26, 1889; T. W. Henderson, The Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 21st  ed. (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1896), 391, 393; Martha S. Jones, “ ‘Make Us a Power’: African American Methodists Debate the ‘­Woman Question,’ 1870–1900,” in ­Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Per­for­mance, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 128–154; Sandra  L. Barnes, “Whosoever ­Will Let Her Come: Social Activism and Gender Inclusivity in the Black Church,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45 (2006): 371–387. 30. Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, 41; Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 118; George E. Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City: A Study in Economic Pro­g ress (New York: Columbia University, 1912), 89, confirmed Ovington’s observations about the low wages black w ­ omen w ­ ere paid in New York City. 31. “Church News: ­Mother Zion Church Notes,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 29, 1922; “­Mother Zion Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb.  18, 1925; “­Mother Zion Church,” NewYork Amsterdam News, Jan. 27, 1926; and “News of the Churches: M ­ other Zion Church,” New York Amsterdam News, June 26, 1929. 32. “New York City News: Manhattan and Bronx,” New York Age, March 22, 1906; “Officers and Teachers of the Sunday School,” in Centennial Cele­bration, Bethel  A.M.E. Church, unpaginated; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righ­teous Discontent: The ­Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47–80; Charles Spencer Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church . . . ​1856 to 1922 (Philadelphia: Book Concern of the A.M.E. Church, 1922), 110; discussion of the ­Women’s Missionary Society at ­Temple Baptist appears in “Manhattan and Bronx [News],” New York Age, Oct. 4, 1906; “Zion Church to Aid Africa,” New York Age, Aug. 12, 1909; “$5,000  in Six Months: Amount Raised by ­Women’s Mite Missionary Society of the A. M. E. Church—­$2000 Sent to Africa,” New York Age, May 12, 1910; Mamie Steward quoted in Higginbotham, Righ­teous Discontent, 75; Elisabeth Engel, Encountering Empire: African American Missionaries in Colonial Africa, 1900–1939 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015), 128–137. Despite considerable criticism, the National Baptist Convention approved separate ­women’s missionary organ­izations between 1880 and 1900. See Lewis G. Jordan, Negro Baptist History U.S.A. (Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board, National Baptist Convention, 1930), 261, 262. 33. “Dedicate New ­Mother Zion Church Sun.,” New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 16, 1925. Responsibilities of African Methodist Episcopal Zion “classes” and their leaders are outlined in The Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Amer­i­ca (New York: A.  M.  E. Book Concern, 1892), 28–29, 34, 120–121. The African Methodist Episcopal Church also divided congregations into classes. See Henderson, ed.,



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265

The Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 69–74. McNeil et  al., Witness, 70–71; Frederick Asbury Cullen, Barefoot Town to Jerusalem ([New York]: n.p., 1945), 64, 62. 34. ­Music and Official Program of the National Baptist Convention, Philadelphia, September, 1903 (Philadelphia: National Baptist Convention, 1903), 64. References to the importance of Manhattan’s M ­ other Zion Church can be found in numerous publications of the quasi-­ rival African Methodist Episcopal Church, among them “The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church,” in The Bud­get containing Annual Reports of the General Officers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church [1886–1887], 74–126, Hathi Trust digital copy from original at Emory University; Journal of the Twenty-­Fifth Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention held with the Olivet Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois, October  25–30, 1905 (Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1906), 16. 35. “Apartments for Rent,” New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 31, 1928; by comparison, display and classified advertisements for apartments below 100th Street w ­ ere abundant in the Sept. 3, 1908 issue of the New York Age; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 810–811. 36. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, “Decree on the Relegation of the Church of Saint Benedict the Moor,” June  30, 2017, at https://­ecatholic​-­sites​.­s3​.­amazonaws​.­com​/­5555​/­documents​ /­2017​/­6​/­Saint%20Benedict%20the%20Moor​.­pdf accessed March  17, 2020; “Church Sale Is Confirmed: St. Philip’s Sells Property on 25th Street for $140,000,” New York Age, Dec. 9, 1909; “Old Negro Church Sold: Abyssinian Baptist Edifice Brings $200,000—­To Move Uptown,” NewYork Times, Jan. 24, 1922; “St. Mark’s Sells 53rd St. Property for $213,000 Cash,” NewYork Age, June 6, 1925; “Midtown,” in Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City, 839. Andrew Dolkart and Kevin McGruder offered exceptionally helpful information about the development of Midtown Manhattan and black congregational issues in real estate. 37. “Mt. Olivet Pays $450,000 for Lenox Av. Edifice,” New York Age, Dec.  6, 1924. “St. Philip’s Church a Wealthy Congregation,” New York Age, Jan. 16, 1913. 38. “St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church Begins Dedication Cele­bration Ser­vice at Opening of $600,000 Church Edifice,” New York Age, Nov. 13, 1926. 39. “The Abyssinian Church of New York,” Crisis, Sept. 26, 1923, 203–205; “Abyssinian Baptist Church,” New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, http://­www​ .­nycago​.­org​/­Organs​/­NYC​/­html​/­AbyssinianBapt​.­html. 40. The Harlem maps in Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, Q–­U; and congregational information in Cynthia Hickman, Harlem Churches at the End of the 20th  ­Century (Astoria, NY: Africa Tree Press, 2001) can be used to locate Harlem sanctuaries used before 1940. 41. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 62–63, 82. 42. Presa, “Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church”; “Walker Memorial Baptist Can Claim Rise from H ­ umble Beginning to Pre­sent Status,” New York Amsterdam News, Jan. 8, 1938. The buildings first used by the Mount Olive congregation no longer exist, but neighboring surviving turn-­of-­the-­century buildings suggest that Mount Olive’s 126th Street meetings occurred in an apartment. Newspaper advertisements describe many dif­fer­ent uses of 2395 Eighth Street: see New York Amsterdam News, Oct.  28, 1925, Dec.  4, 1929, and June 24, 1939, and New York Age, Oct. 10, 1925, and Aug. 27, 1940. 43. “[St. Philip’s] Church Sale Is Confirmed . . . ​New Site Purchased Three Years Ago,” New York Age, Dec. 9, 1909; McNeil et al., Witness, 119–122. 44. Abyssinian’s complex financial maneuvers are ably described in McNeil et al., Witness, 122–134. 45. “Union Baptist Church,” New York Age, July 6, 1918; “Bonds for Church Buildings,” New York Age, Jan. 26, 1924; cf. McGruder, Race and Real Estate, 200–214, on mortgages

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for personal property in Harlem. In 1931 the Age reported that St. Mark’s Methodist held a hundred-­thousand-­dollar mortgage with the Manhattan Guarantee and Trust Com­pany (“Heavy Debt Threatens Return of Dr. J. W. Robinson to St. Marks,” April 4, 1931), but its total indebtedness appears to have been much higher, the remainder presumably financed by individuals. 46. “Church Group ­Faces Ouster: St. Mark’s Mortgage Foreclosed as St. Philip’s Totters,” NewYork Amsterdam News, Dec. 13, 1933; “Heavy Debt Threatens Return of Dr. J. W. Robinson to St. Mark’s,” New York Age, April 4, 1931; “St. Mark’s in Receivership,” New York Amsterdam News, May  19, 1934; “Rev. Wm. P. Hayes Resigns as Pastor of Mount Olivet Baptist Church, N. Y. City: Failure of Congregation to Reduce Second Mortgage and State of Health Given as Reason,” New York Age, Jan. 23, 1932; “Mt. Olivet Church Members Split,” New York Age, May  6, 1933; “Mt. Olivet Church Saves $144,000 on Mortgages: Plan Okayed by Judge Frankenthaler,” New York Age, Jan. 22, 1938; “ ‘No Individual Can Remained Saved in Lost Community,’ Says Mt. Olivet’s Pastor,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 12, 1938. 47. “Abyssinian Baptist Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 27, 1926; “Abyssinian Baptist, Founded in Days When Nation Was Young, to Mark 125th  Birthday,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 15, 1933; “Programs ­Today in the Churches of the City,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 1933; “Financial Report of Union Baptist Church,” New York Age, Jan. 22, 1921; “Union Bapt. Church Honors Pastor Who Closes 26th Year,” New York Age, Dec. 6, 1924; information on Williams Institutional Colored Methodist Episcopal is in Ira De A. Reid, “Let Us Prey!” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 4 (1926): 274–278; “Harlem Business Takes Landmark . . . ​Seventh Ave­nue Methodist Edifice Sold to Negro Congregation for $258,000,” New York Times, Nov.  5, 1922; “Ministers Who Served New York Churches More Than a Quarter of a ­Century—­A Review of Their Rec­ords,” New York Age, Dec. 24, 1932; Beverly Smith, “Harlem—­The Negro City: Score of Churches, Led by Pastors of Intelligence and Wide Training, Prove G ­ reat F ­ actor in Spiritual and Social Life of Colony,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 11, 1930. 48. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 294; “Welcome to Rev. Ransom,” New York Age, Aug. 15, 1907; Reverdy C. Ransom, The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son (Nashville: Sunday School Union, 1949), 199–208, Ransom quotation on 99; Terrell Dale Goddard, “The Black Social Gospel in Chicago, 1896–1906: The Ministries of Reverdy C. Ransom and Richard R. Wright, Jr.,” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 3 (1999): 227–246; Cornelius L. Bynum, “ ‘An Equal Chance in the Race for Life’: Reverdy C. Ransom, Socialism, and the  Social Gospel Movement, 1890–1920,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 1 (2008): 1–20. 49. “St. Philip’s P. E. Church Celebrates 40th Anniversary of the Pastorate of the Rev. Hutchins C. Bishop This Week,” New York Age, Jan. 9, 1926. Assistant ministers for Harlem congregations are mentioned in many newspaper stories, such as “City Employee Pneumonia Victim,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 18, 1925; “Henry Allen Boyd, Secretary of S.  S. Congress, to Speak ­Here Aug.  22,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug.  15, 1923; the obituary for Mary Middleton, New York Amsterdam News, Jan. 31, 1923; “Manhattan and Bronx,” New York Age, Sept. 20, 1906, which mentions “Rev. Mr. Glasco, assistant pastor to Rev. C. Leroy Butler of St. James Presbyterian Church”; “Plain Talk to the Police: Dr. Morris Tells Them Why They ­Can’t Clear Up the Tenderloin,” NewYork Age, Feb. 22, 1906, mentions Abyssinian’s assistant minister, William J. Brown. 50. “Harlem Church League for Religious Education,” New York Age, Feb.  1, 1930; “Training School for Religious Education Begins 21st Session,” NewYork Age, Oct. 15, 1938,



N O T E S T O P A G E S 136–141

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describes the teacher education program as in its “twenty-­first year.” “Harlem League: Greater New York Federation of Churches,” New York Age, June 24, 1925, describes Harlem’s summer “daily vacation Bible schools” schedules. 51. McNeil et  al., Witness, 129–130; “St.  James Pres. Church,” New York Age, Dec.  6, 1931; George E. Haynes, “Negro Migration—­Its Effect on F ­ amily and Community Life in the North,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 51: 62–75; “Church Federation Program in Harlem,” New York Age, Oct. 12, 1929. The history of the Columbia Teachers College Religious Education Program seems unstudied. 52. “­Great Revival” display advertisement, New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 6, 1922; “Salem M. E. Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 3, 1926. 53. George Sims’s sermon, “The Resurrection,” can be heard on Preachers and Congregations, Vol. 6 (1924–1936), Document Rec­ords, DOCD-5560, iTunes. 54. “Abyssinian Baptist Church Nearly Ready,” NewYork Amsterdam News, Feb. 7, 1923; “­Mother Zion Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 18, 1925; “St. Mark’s M. E.,” New York Amsterdam News, June 27, 1923. 55. W. E. B. Du Bois quoted in Smith, “Harlem—­Negro City,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 11, 1930; “Finds Harlem Leads as a Church Centre,” New York Times, May 24, 1931. The roundtable is discussed in Rienzi B. Lemus, “Churches Cost 50,000 Members $91 a Year Each, Asso. Hears,” Baltimore Afro-­American, May 30, 1931. 56. Reid, “Let Us Prey!”; George H. Hobart, The Negro Churches of Manhattan (New York City): A Study Made in 1930 (New York: Greater New York Federation of Churches, 1930). 57. “Two-­by-­Four Churches,” New York Age, July 30, 1921; Reid, “Let Us Prey!” 276; “Dr.  Ira Reid Dies: A Sociologist, 67,” New York Times, Aug.  17, 1968; “Sunday School Teacher Accuses Pastor of Assault, Fraud,” New York Times, Oct.  12, 1935; Miles Mark Fisher, “Or­ga­nized Religion and the Cults,” The Crisis: A Rec­ord of the Darker Races 44, no. 1 (1937): 8–10, 29, was unusual in its positive view of “cults.” 58. William Archer Wright, “The Negro Store-­Fronts: Churches of the Disinherited; A Study of the Store-­Front Churches of East Harlem, New York” (BD thesis, Union Theological Seminary, 1942), 53–54; Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott: Changing NewYork (New York: New Press / Museum of the City of New York, 1997), 388. 59. Wright, “The Negro Store-­Fronts,” 29–62; “We Prove What Other Churches Teach—­ Statement of Pastor of Becton ­Temple H ­ ere,” NewYork Amsterdam News, Feb. 5, 1938. 60. Wright, “The Negro Store-­Fronts,” 49; “Wesleyan Methodists Hold General Conference in New York City,” New York Age, June 4, 1932. 61. “Rev. Henry W. Stanley’s Rites Held at Macedonia,” New York Age, Jan. 24, 1953; “50th Anniversary Cele­bration,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 13, 1975; “Paradise Baptist Church,” New York Age, Nov. 2, 1929, May 9, 1931, and May 23, 1931. 62. Ellen Tarry, “Churches for Negroes in New York City: Store-­front Churches. (Personal coverage),” Sept. 15, 1938, Writers Program, New York City: Negroes of New York—­The Church in New York, Works Proj­ects Administration, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York. Ellen Tarry, The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro ­Woman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 127–153, contains allusions to the author’s engagement with the WPA and the Federal Writers Program but does not discuss her historical research. 63. “Stress Unity at Conference for Paint­ers,” New York Amsterdam News, May 27, 1939; “Paradise Baptist Church,” NewYork Age, May 18, 1940, June 1, 1940, Jan. 25, 1941, May 30,

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 141–144

1942; “Paradise Dedicates Sanctuary,” New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 12, 1964; “Church News: Moving to New Church,” New York Amsterdam News, Jan.  7, 1978; Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 172. Failure of city, state, and federal authorities to confront segregation in public housing is discussed in Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 51–60. 64. “Christ Church Minister First Was a Law Student,” New York Age, March 14, 1953; “Pre­sents Program,” New York Amsterdam News, June  22, 1935; “Interdenominational,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 26, 1936; “Rev. C. A. Johnson Heads Churchmen,” New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 18, 1948; “Churches of God in Christ Opens 11 Day Conference,” New York Amsterdam News, July  22, 1961. Newspaper columns by Violenes and Elijah Muhammad appeared frequently in the Amsterdam News between December 1957 and March 1958. 65. “Rev. Jennie Clark ­Will Get Tribune at Ebenezer,” New York Age, May 2, 1953; “Rev. Clarke Was a Pioneer,” New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 3, 1981; “Our History,” New Covenant Bible Institute, Rocky Mount, NC, http://­www​.­ncbinstitute​.­com​/­about​-­us​.­html. 66. Bettye Collier-­Thomas, ­Daughters of Thunder, Black ­Women Preachers and Their Sermons (San Francisco, Jossey-­Bass, 1998), 162–169, 173–193; “Ruth Dennis to Direct Christmas Radio Program,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 8, 1926; “Ruth Dennis to Broadcast,” New York Amsterdam News, April 6, 1927; “Pentecostal Faith Church Closes Revival Campaign,” New York Age, Sept. 17, 1932; H. Norton Browne, “You Pray for Me: Elder Horn, Latest Radio Exhorter, Is Unusual Person,” New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 13, 1934. 67. “ ‘We Prove What Other Churches Teach,’—­Statement of Pastor of Becton ­Temple ­Here,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 5, 1938. 68. “Rev. Becton Shot in Head by Gang on ‘Ride’ in His Own Car,” New York Amsterdam News, May  24, 1933; Edgar  T. Rouzeau, “Becton and the Consecrated Dime,” NewYork Amsterdam News, June 14, 1933; “­Battles for Becton Name: Evangelist’s Wife Sues Minister for Using It for Ser­vices,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 27, 1934; “In the Fraternal World,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec.  20, 1933; “Elizabeth Chapter, No.  14, O.E.W. to Hold Cele­bration,” New York Age, April 2, 1938; “­Music Notes,” New York Amsterdam News, March 12, 1938; “Spiritualist [Ser­vices,]” NewYork Amsterdam News, Oct. 29, 1930; “Holds Weekly Ser ­vices,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug.  18, 1934; “Mt. Olivet Church,” NewYork Age, May 3, 1930; “Josephine Becton Has an Anniversary,” NewYork Age, Feb. 26, 1938; “20 Years in Ministry,” New York Age, Feb. 19, 1938; “Many Ministers Join in Cele­bration of 21st Anniversary of The First Emanuel Church, Rev. R. M. Bolden, Pastor,” New York Age, Sept. 29, 1934; “Special Notice,” New York Age, Nov. 15, 1930. 69. “ ‘Live Ever, Never Die’ Prophet Runs Amuck, Atlantic City Leader of ‘Black Jews’ Arrested for Swindling Member of Cult, Branch from Harlem,” NewYork Age, July 2, 1921; Edgar M. Grey, “Harlem—­Mecca of Fakers,” New York Amsterdam News, March 30, 1927; Carl Helm, “Negro Sect in Harlem Mixes Jewish and Christian Religions,” New York Sun, Jan. 29, 1929; “Judaizing Sects Are Increasing among the Negroes in Harlem,” Jewish Daily Bulletin, Feb. 28, 1929, 3, based on part on Helm’s article; Willis M. Huggins, “Jews, Negroes, ‘Aryanism,’ ” New York Age, July 30, 1938; Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen ­People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23–181; Tudor Parfit, Black Jews in Africa and the Amer­ic­as (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 13–23, 66–101; Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-­Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the G ­ reat Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 29–42.



N O T E S T O P A G E S 145–149

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70. “Mohometans ­Will Try to Convert Negroes,” NewYork Age, July 21, 1923; Patrick D. Bowen, “The African-­American Islamic Re­nais­sance and the Rise of the Nation of Islam” (PhD diss., University of Denver, 2013), 102–124; Weisenfeld, New World A-­Coming, 42–55; “Moors Parade but No Dance,” New York Amsterdam News, July  10, 1937; Susan Nance, “Mystery of the Moorish Science ­Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago,” Religion and American Culture 12 (2002): 123–166; Jacob  S. Dorman, The Princess and the Prophet:The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in Amer­i­ca (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 181–200, 222–226. 71. Dunlap, From Abyssinian to Zion, 136–137; Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin, 2011), 110–129, 423–449; Shaila Dewan, “Biography Revives Push to Reopen Malcolm X Case,” New York Times, July  22, 2011; “Black Muslim ­Temple Renamed for Malcolm X,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 1976. 72. E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the University Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955), 133–137; Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 114–121; Marie  W. Dallam, ­Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 95–106; Jill Watts, God, Harlem  U.S.A.: The ­Father Divine Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 36–37, 72–73, 94–97, 155–166; Weisenfeld, New World A-­Coming, 16–18, 29–30. 73. “Prof. R.  D. Wester, Wester Book Com­pany” display advertisement, New York Age, Nov. 20, 1913; “Prof. Akpan Aga” display advertisement, NewYork Amsterdam News, Nov. 29, 1922; “Liberty Spiritual Church” advertisement, New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 29, 1922; “Healing Ser­vice at St.  Luke’s Mission,” New York Age, Feb.  17, 1923; “Elder Lawson’s Campaign against Sin Comes to Successful Close,” New York Age, Sept. 19, 1923; “Church Notice [Prophet Bess],” New York Amsterdam News, April  7, 1926. E. Brooks Holifield, Health and Medicine in the Methodist Tradition: Journey t­oward Wholeness (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 38–47, discusses complicated stances on faith healing taken by white and black nineteenth-­century US Methodists. 74. Watts, God, Harlem U.S.A., 21–48, quotation on 191n30. 75. “Chanting Throng Parades in Harlem,” New York Times, April  2, 1934; Watts, God, Harlem  U.S.A., 58–70, 119–121; R. Marie Griffith, “Body Salvation: New Thought, ­Father Divine, and the Feast of Material Pleasures,” Religion and American Culture 11 (2001): 119–154; Weisenfeld, New World A-­Coming, 124–127, 148–151, 182–191. 76. Dallam, ­Daddy Grace, 36–57, quotation on 68. 77. Dallam, ­Daddy Grace, 67, quotation on 45; Dorman, Chosen P ­ eople, 100, 102. 78. Dallam, ­Daddy Grace, 46–74; “The Man Who Was Sent Is Sent on His Way,” Montgomery Times, June 7, 1926; “ ‘Bishop’ Grace Baptizes 634,” Shreveport Times, Sept. 14, 1926; “Faith Healer’s Injunction against Police Dissolved,” Baltimore Sun, Sept. 19, 1926; “The Day’s News in Pictures: 600 Baptisms [Grace confronts the Ku Klux Klan],” Oshkosh Northwestern, Sept. 25, 1926; “Negro Bishop Is Summoned to Court,” Newport News Daily Press, Oct. 1, 1927; “ ‘Bishop’ Grace Lands in Jail at Charlotte,” Gaffney Ledger, April 28, 1928; Douglas Frantz and Brett Pulley, “Harlem Church Is Outpost of Empire,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 1995. 79. Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978), quotations on 25, 33, 36; Weisenfeld, New World A-­Coming, 16–17, 29–30, 244–246; Cronon, Black Moses, 177–183.

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80. “Our Thanks to the Churches,” Negro World, July 21, 1923; Christian Science display advertisement in Negro World, May 21, 1932; “New York Division,” Negro World, May 21, 1932; Byron Rushing, “A Note on the Origin of the African Orthodox Church,” Journal of Negro History 57, no. 1 (1972): 37–39. 81. Cronon, Black Moses, 78–99; Dallam, ­Daddy Grace, 78–79, 125–134, 147–152; Watts, God, Harlem  U.S.A., 104–106, 136–137, 160–164; “15,000 ‘­Father’ Divine Followers in Pro­cession on Easter Sunday,” New York Age, April 27, 1935; St. Clair McKelway and A. J. Liebling, “Who Is This King of Glory?” New Yorker, June 13, 1936, 21–28, June 20, 1936, 22–28, and June 27, 1936, 22–34, quotation from June 27, 25. 82. “Four Known Dead, Three More D ­ ying in Hospitals as Death Toll from Rioting Mounts,” New York Age, March  30, 1935; “Leaders Comment on Riot,” New York Age, March 30, 1935; “Leaders Blame Trou­ble on Rise in Harlem Costs,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 3, 1943; Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 183–206; Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or does it explode?”: Black Harlem in the G ­ reat Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 211–214. 83. A. Clayton Powell, Riots and Ruins (New York: Richard. R. Smith, 1945), 17. 84. Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Com­pany, 1922), 12.

5. God’s Urban Hot­house 1. Mel Scult, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 7–27, which includes the excommunication text on page 15; “The Excommunication of Mordecai Kaplan,” in Modern Orthodox Judaism: A Documentary History, ed. Zev Eleff (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2016), 160–161; Jeffrey  S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 140–143; Zachary Silver, “The Excommunication of Mordecai Kaplan,” American Jewish Archives Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 21–48; Sabbath Prayer Book, with a Supplement containing Prayers, Readings, and Hymns and with a New Translation (New York: Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, Inc., 1945). Scult, Gurock, Schacter, and Silver describe dif­fer­ent aspects of the excommunication and book burning, which most likely involved burning only a few pages. Thick, 500-­page books are difficult to burn without a large surrounding fire, which neither the McAlpin H ­ otel nor the New York City Fire Department would have permitted. Several historians suggest that herems ­were more often threatened than issued. See Jonathan  D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 16–17, 78; and Sheldon Godfrey and Judith Godfrey, “The King vs. Moses Gomez et al: Opening the Prosecutor’s File, Over 200 Years L ­ ater,” American Jewish History 80, no. 3 (1991): 397–407. 2. Quotations from Kaplan’s diary in Scult, Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan, 18; Manhattan baker’s quotation from Silver, “Excommunication of Mordecai M. Kaplan,” 32. 3. “Orthodox Rabbis ‘Excommunicate’ Author of Prayer Book, Though He Is Not a Member,” NewYork Times, June 15, 1945; the Rabbinical Assembly quotation is from Silver, “Excommunication of Mordecai  M. Kaplan,” 33; “Kaplan Prayer Book,” in [Yearbook,] Central Conference of American Rabbis, Fifty-­Seventh Annual Convention [1946], ed. Isaac E. Marcuson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1947), 28–29. As an ordained Or-



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thodox rabbi, Kaplan need not have been a member of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis to be subject to its herem, despite the Times’ suggestion. 4. Silver, “Excommunication of Mordecai M. Kaplan,” 24; a sample of newspaper stories on troop discoveries in German concentration camps can be found in “3d Army Overruns Reich ‘Death Camp,’ ” New York Times, April 9, 1945; “5,000,000 Reported Slain at Oswiecim,” New York Times, April 12, 1945; “Camp Horror Films Are Exhibited ­Here,” NewYork Times, May 2, 1945; Samuel Silver, “More Folipinotions,” Jewish Advocate, July 19, 1945. 5. The series “My Religion” began in the New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 5, 1925, with an essay by E. Phillips Oppenheim. The essays ­were published ­later as Arnold Bennett et al., My Religion (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1925), which was reprinted by Appleton in New York in 1926. On the nineteenth-­century American spiritual hot­house, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American P ­ eople (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 225–256. 6. Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 27–40, Niebuhr quotation on 28. 7. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 41–87, quotation on 61; Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Rapprochement between Jews and Christians,” Christian C ­ entury, Jan. 7, 1926, 9–11; “Some Liberals ­Will Meet H ­ ere Next Week,” Michigan Daily, April 6, 1923; “Reverend Niebuhr Gives Address to Large M ­ others’ Day Audience,” Michigan Daily, May  10, 1927; “Harrisonburg Represented at National Students Conference,” Harrisonburg (VA) Breeze, Jan.  8, 1927, lists Niebuhr and Coffin as conference speakers. 8. “Some Notes on Current Magazines,” New York Times, June 13, 1926. 9. Reinhold Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion? A Study in the Social Resources and Limitations of Religion in Modern Life (New York: The Macmillan Com­pany, 1927), 1–2. 10. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 115–118; Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Chicago: Clark and Colby, 1929); Robert T. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 174–176. 11. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 111–141, provides a superb account of Niebuhr’s c­ areer and publications in the 1930s; Mark Thomas Edwards, The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 14–15; Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Chris­tian­ity and Crisis Magazine, 1941–1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 17–18, 25–27; Arthur Akamatsu, “The Mind of Jesus,” a sermon delivered June 23, 1946, at the Japa­nese Methodist Church in Manhattan. I am deeply indebted to Reverend Akamatsu’s grand­son, Matthew Akamatsu, and his aunt, Norma Akamatsu, who provided a copy of the sermon. On Akamatsu, see Greg Robinson, ­After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japa­ nese American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 184–194. 12. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 435–521; Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932). 13. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Can Chris­tian­ity Survive,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1925, 88. 14. “Faith for a Lenten Age,” Time, March 8, 1948. 15. Wilhelm Pauck and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 123–132. 16. Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich, 133–138; Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 160–161; “German Teachers Come to Columbia,” New York Times, Oct.  4, 1933; John Haynes Holmes, “Old

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Faiths, New Forces [review of Tillich, Religious Situation],” New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 1, 1933; “German Scholars to Be Aided H ­ ere,” New York Times, July  13, 1933; “German Teachers Come to Columbia,” NewYork Times, Oct. 4, 1933; “German Exiles Teaching ­Here Now Total 36,” New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 28, 1934. 17. Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich, quotations on 144; Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein and Day, 1973) and her much more restrained appreciation, From Place to Place: Travels with Paul Tillich, Travels without Paul Tillich (New York: Stein and Day, 1976); Rollo May, Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) offered an entirely dif­fer­ent view of Tillich; reviews of both Hannah Tillich and Rollo May appeared in the New York Times: by Harvey Cox on Oct. 14, 1973, and by Edward Fiske on Oct. 27, 1973; quotations from Rollo May are in Eliott Wright, “Paul Tillich as Hero: An Interview with Rollo May,” Christian C ­ entury, May 15, 1974, 530–533. 18. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 257–259; Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich, 140–142, 145, 169– 171, 223–224; Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to Amer­i­ca (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 62; Terry D. Cooper, Paul Tillich and Psy­chol­ogy: Historic and Con­temporary Explorations in Theology, Psychotherapy, and Ethics (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006), 99–145; Rodney J. Hunter, “Seward Hiltner,” American National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), updated online. 19. Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, trans. N. A. Rasetzki and Elsa L. Talmey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936); Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963); Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952); Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1956). 20. Paul Tillich “The Lost Dimension in Religion,” Saturday Eve­ning Post, June 14, 1958, 29, 76, 78–79. 21. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 1, 3; Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2: 12; Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 258; Pauck and Pauck, Paul Tillich, 1: 243. 22. Lawton Posey, “Paul Tillich’s Gift of Understanding,” Christian ­Century, Sept. 30, 1981, 967–969. 23. Francis  E. McMahon, “Maritain: Was It Pos­si­ble to Update Aquinas?” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1971; Jean-­Luc Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 341–385; Samuel Moyn, Christian ­Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 68–100; John  T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 189–215. 24. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 154–159, 251–270; Maritain’s main publications and ­career are con­ve­niently digested in Donald Gallagher and Idella Gallagher, The Achievement of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: A Bibliography, 1906–1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 37–42; Lewis Galantière, “Paris News Letter,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 12, 1923; Julie Kernan, Our Friend, Jacques Maritain (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 84–101; Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929); Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, with Other Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930); Jacques Maritain, The Angelic Doctor: The Life and Thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York: Dial Press, 1931); Jacques Maritain, Some Reflections on Culture and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933); Jacques Maritain, Freedom in the Modern World, trans. Richard O’­Sullivan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1936); Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, trans. Margot Robert Adamson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938); “100 Books Selected by Catholic Clergy,” New York Times, Feb. 28, 1931; Alfred Kazin, “Jacques Maritain on Freedom,”



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NewYork Times, May 17, 1936; Mark Zwick and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (New York: Paulist Press, 2005), 177–192. 25. Jacques Maritain, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1939), 5, 19, 22, 30–31, 41–43, 60–65; John Haynes Holmes, “Tract for the Times,” New York Times, Dec.  3, 1939; Bernard  E. Doering, “The Jewish Question,” in Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals, ed. Bernard E. Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 126–167; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: ­Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 64–67; John Connelly, From ­Enemy to B ­ rother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 4, 94–146. Essays criticizing Maritain’s views on antisemitism can be found in Robert Royal, ed., Jacques Maritain and the Jews (Notre Dame, IN: American Maritain Association, 1994). 26. “French Envoy to U.S. Certain Nazis ­Will Lose,” New York Herald Tribune, June 9, 1940; “Maritain Assails Vichy Laws,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 1, 1940; “1,000 Authors ­Here Defy Nazi Power,” New York Times, May 16, 1941; “The Voice of ­Free France,” New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 9, 1941; “More Radio Chit-­Chat,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 1941; “Belgian Institute Established ­Here,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 1941; “Mrs. Roo­se­ velt Calls for World ­Free From Fear,” New York Herald Tribune, June 25, 1942; “Pan-­Europe Conference Planned ­Here March 25,” New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 15, 1943; Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-­Semitism in Poland a ­ fter Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2007), 140–141. 27. “Jews Urged to Honor Pius XI and Mundelein,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 1939; Maritain to editor, New York Times, July 29, 1940; “Einstein Urges Giving Up Idea of Personal God,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 11, 1940; “3 Faiths to Join in Institute of Religious Study,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 10, 1940; Maritain, “Science, Philosophy, and Faith,” in Science, Philosophy, and Religion: A Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life, Inc., 1941), 162–183; Fred W. Beuttler, “Organ­izing an American Conscience: The Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1940–1968” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1995), 132–134, 140–141, 161–163, 179; Sidney Hook, “The Integral Humanism of Jacques Maritain,” Partisan Review 7, no. 3 (1940): 204–229; Matthew J. Mancini, “Maritain’s Demo­cratic Vision: ‘You Have No Bourgeois,’ ” in Understanding Maritain: Phi­los­op­ her and Friend, ed. Deal Wyatt Hudson and Matthew  J. Mancini (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 133–151; Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in Amer­ic­ a, 1933–1973 (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 56. See the reference to Maritain’s participation in an undated eve­ning discussion with Paul Tillich and Shalom Spiegel in Mordecai Kaplan’s diary, Sept. 27, 1945, Mordecai Menahem Kaplan Diaries and Papers, 1910–1975, Jewish Theological Seminary Library. Kaplan’s extraordinary handwritten diaries, kept between 1913 and 1972, have been digitized and are publicly accessible through the seminary library’s website. Links can be found at shorturl.at/yBPX2. 28. An example of Maritain’s quick involvement in Manhattan’s intellectual life is described in “Three Faiths to Join in Institute of Religious Study . . . ​at Jewish Theological Seminary,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 10, 1940; Gallagher and Gallagher, Achievement of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, 37–42; “Dr. Maritain Appointed to Prince­ton Faculty,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 21, 1940; “Prince­ton Plans 5 Lectures on Totalitarianism,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb.  2, 1941; “Jacques Maritain Writes of France,” New York Times, May 25, 1941; “Theology Talks Set at ­Virginia,” NewYork Times, Oct. 26, 1941; “Gets Post at Columbia,” New York Times, July 13, 1942. John W. Cooper, The Theology of Freedom: The

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Legacy of Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), Ursula Niebuhr quotation on 13; Jim Forest, All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 142. 29. Jacques Maritain, The Living Thoughts of St. Paul (New York: David McKay, 1941); Maritain, Ransoming the Time, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941); Maritain, France, My Country, Through the Disaster (New York: Longmans, Green and Com­pany, 1941); Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943). 30. Jacques Maritain, Chris­tian­ity and Democracy, trans. Doris  C. Anson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), quotation on 27; George Orwell, “A Muffled Voice,” Manchester Guardian and Observer, June  10, 1945; Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natu­ral Law, trans. Doris C. Anson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943), quotation on 65; Reinhold Niebuhr, “A Frenchman States His Credo for Tomorrow,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1943; Jacques Barzun, “Maritain and the Pragmatists,” New York Times, Nov.  14, 1943; “Books—­Authors,” New York Times, Feb. 17, 1944; Peter A. Carmichael, “Jacques Maritain Discusses the Shortcomings of Democracy,” New York Times, June  11, 1944; Moyn, Christian ­Human Rights, 82–83; Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 87–90; Jacques Maritain, “Introduction,” in ­Human Rights: Comments and Interpretation, ed. UNESCO (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 9–17; James Chappel, Catholic Modern:The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 108–143; Marco Duranti, The Conservative ­Human Rights Revolution: Eu­ro­pean Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origin of the Eu­ro­pean Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 273–275; Piotr H. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), xxiii, 21–61, 67–68. 31. Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, 386–411; Maritain, Reflections on Amer­i­ca (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 25; “Prince­ton Stresses Liberty, Honors 23 at Bicentennial,” New York Times, Oct. 20, 1946; “Prof. Maritain to Speak ­Today,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 1951; Felix Frank­furter, “The Job of a Supreme Court Justice,” NewYork Times, Nov. 28, 1954; “Spellman [and Maritain] Honored,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 1954; “Maritain Lecture Slated,” NewYork Times, Dec. 1, 1956; “Phi­los­o­pher U ­ nder Fire: Jacques Maritain,” New York Times, March 24, 1967; “Diplomats Say B ­ rother of Diem Sees Accord as Way to Oust U.S.,” New York Times, Sept. 2, 1963; “Jacques Maritain Dies at 90,” New York Times, April  29, 1973; Bernard  E. Doering, ed., The Phi­los­o­pher and the Provacateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), xi–­xxxviii, 4, quotation from Alinsky to Maritain, n.d., 4–6; P. David Finks, The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 44, 49–50. 32. Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–208, 276–303, 364–368. 33. Kaplan and Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, 288–303. 34. Edward  K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in Amer­ic­a (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), Heschel quotation on 328. 35. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 61–96, 377–381. 36. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar Straus and Young, 1951), 3–17, quotations on 11, 13. 37. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 194–195, emphasis in original. 38. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1955), 136, 137, emphasis in original.



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39. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Masterly Analy­sis of Faith,” New York Herald Tribune, April 1, 1951; Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 79, 159, 287, 296, 328. 40. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 201. 41. Heschel, “The Religious Basis of Equality of Opportunity—­ The Segregation of God,” in Race: Challenge to Religion, ed. Mathew Ahman (Chicago: Henry Regnery Com­ pany, 1963), 55–71, quotations on 69; Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 269; Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 298– 334, Heschel quotations on 225, 299. 42. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, 339–381; “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Dead,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 1972. 43. Soloveitchik lacks a full-­ scale biography, but beginnings are found in Aaron Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, 2 vols. (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1999), 1: 21–78; Seth Farber, An American Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New E ­ ngland, 2004), 28–45; and Shulamit Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage: A ­Daughter’s Memoir (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1995), 232–260. Broad assessments of Soloveitchik’s writings can be found in David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2, no. 3 (1982): 227–272; Ken Koltun-­Fromm, Material Culture and Jewish Thought in Amer­ic­ a (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 108–140; William Kolbrener, The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); and Lawrence Kaplan, “Review Essay: Exposition as High Art,” Hakirah, 15 (2013): 61–107. 44. Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, The Rav, 1: 29–42, 2: 224–225; Aaron Rothkoff, Bernard Revel, Builder of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­ic­ a, 1972), 118–123, 213–214; Farber, American Orthodox Dreamer, 28–31; “Domestic Notes: Happenings of Interest in American Jewry,” Jewish Exponent, Sept. 6, 1935; “Soloveitchik Given Life Tenure as Chief Rabbi,” Boston Globe, Oct. 21, 1938; Aaron Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, The Silver Era in American Orthodoxy: Rabbi Eliezer Silver and His Generation (Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1981), 267–271; Aaron Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, From Washington Ave­nue to Washington Street (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 108–120. 45. Gilbert Klaperman, The Story of Yeshiva University: The First Jewish University in Amer­i­ca (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 175–176; Bernard Rosenzweig, “The Unique Phenomenon That Was the Rav,” in Mentor of Generations: Reflections on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitcik, ed. Zev Eleff (Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, 2008), 44–50, quotation on 46; Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, The Rav, quotation on 1: 43. 46. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, trans. Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­i­ca, 1983), 40; Kolbrenner, The Last Rabbi, Soloveitchik quoted on 137; Yonatan Yisrael Brafman, “Critical Philosophy of Halakha (Jewish Law): The Justification of Halakhic Norms and Authority” (PhD. diss., Columbia University, 2014), 136–230. 47. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 6, no.  2 (1964): 5–29, quotations on 21; Kaplan, “Review Essay,” 77–78; David Schatz, “The Rav’s Philosophical Legacy,” in Memories of a G ­ iant: Eulogies in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Michael A. Bierman (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2003), 310–321, esp. 315; Angela West, “Soloveitchik’s ‘No’ to Interfaith Dialogue,” Eu­ro­pean Judaism: A Journal for the New Eu­rope 47, no.  2 (2014): 95–106. I am deeply indebted to Kimmy Caplan, Arnold Eisen, Daniel Greene, Lawrence Kaplan, Ken Kolton-­Fromm, and

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Alan Mittleman for help in unraveling the fascinating complexities of Soloveitchik’s “Confrontation” essay, though none of them are responsible for my speculations. 48. Quotations are taken from Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” 17, 24, 26; Kaplan, “Review Essay,” 77–78. 49. Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, The Rav, 1: 52–64; Soloveitchik quoted in Edward  B. Fiske, “Rabbi’s Rabbi Keeps the Law Up to Date,” New York Times, June 23, 1972; Morris Laub, “Tuesday Eve­nings with the Rav,” in Mentor of Generations, 291–296, quotation on 292. 50. Rakeffet-­Rothkoff, The Rav, 1: 89–101, contains a chronological bibliography of Soloveitchik’s publications. Two summaries or digests of Soloveitchik lectures can be found in Joseph Epstein, ed., Shiurei Harav: A Conspectus of the Public Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (New York: Hamevaser, Official Publication of the Jewish Studies Divisions of Yeshiva University, 1974); and Abraham  R. Besdin, ed., Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organ­ization, 1979). A comment on Besdin’s compendium can be found in Emanuel Feldman, “Review Article: Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought, Adapted from Lectures of Rabbi Joseph  B. Soloveitchik, by Abraham R. Besdin,” Tradition 19, no. 1 (1981): 84–88. 51. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 3; Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924); and Horace Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956); Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 66; Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Mas­sa­chu­ setts, 1630–1650: A Ge­ne­tic Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Perry Miller, The New E ­ ngland Mind:The Seventeenth C ­ entury (New York: Macmillan, 1939); Harry  S. Stout, The New ­England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New ­England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–31; Michael Hoberman, New Israel / New E ­ ngland: Jews and Puritans in Early Amer­i­ca (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­ setts Press, 2011) offers the most thorough treatment of the oblique but fascinating relationship between Puritans and Judaism. 52. Aryeh A. Frimer and Dov I. Frimer, “­Women’s Prayer Services—­Theory and Practice: Part 1: Theory,” Tradition 32, no. 2 (1998): 5–118; Soloveitchik, “On Prayer in a Synagogue with Mixed Pews [1954],” in Community, Covenant and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications [of] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Nathaniel Helfgot (n.p.: KTAV Publishing House, 2005), 133–136; Saul J. Berman, “Forty Years ­Later: The Rav’s Opening Shiur at the Stern College for ­Women Beit Midrash,” Lehrhaus, https://­www​.­thelehrhaus​ .­c om​ /­c ommentary​ /­f orty​ -­years​ -­l ater​ -­t he​ -­r av’s​ -­o pening​ -­s hiur​ -­at​ -­t he​ -­s tern​ -­c ollege​ -­f or​ -­women​-­beit​-­midrash. 53. The standard biography still is William  D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), 1–199; but see also Forest, All Is Grace; Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day: The World ­Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of My Grand­mother (New York: Scribner, 2017); and, of course, Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1952), 9–151. 54. Day, The Long Loneliness, 141–144. 55. Day, The Long Loneliness, 133, 139, quotation on 107; Dorothy Day, By ­Little and By ­Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), quotation on 8; Brigid O’Shea Merriman, Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 98.



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56. Thomas C. Cornell and James H. Forest, eds., A Penny a Copy: Readings from The Catholic Worker (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 1935, quotation on 9–10. 57. Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1982), 57–143; Marc Ellis, “Peter Maurin: To Bring the Social Order to Christ,” in A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker, ed. Patrick G. Coy (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1988), 15–46. The emphasis on daily Masses fit a growing twentieth-­century American focus on Communion participation. See Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Pre­sent (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 386. 58. William  D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (New York: Liveright, 1973), 114–115; Piehl, Breaking Bread, 94–109. 59. Piehl, Breaking Bread, 83–94; Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love, 189–190; Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939); Mason Wade, “Faith in Man [review of House of Hospitality],” New York Herald Tribune, Oct.  29, 1939; Day, The Long Loneliness; Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Story of the Catholic Worker Movement (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 60. “M’Intyre Held Hayes’s Choice for Chancellor,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 22, 1934; “Church H ­ ere Scene of Mexico Protest,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 1934; “Consulate Is Picketed,” New York Times, March 24, 1935; “Demonstrators Condemn [German] ‘Religious Persecution,’ ” NewYork Times, July 27, 1935; “Smith in Anti-­Red Drive,” NewYork Herald Tribune, Sept. 16, 1936; “Catholic Press Takes Up Fight on Lynching Evils,” NewYork Age, Sept. 26, 1936; “Religion to Be Discussed, Jewish and Christian ­Women to Meet on Wednesday,” NewYork Times, Jan. 3, 1938; “Educators Assail Peacetime Draft,” NewYork Times, July 9, 1940; “Say Aid Bill Means Doom,” New York Times, Feb.  12, 1941; “Men, 25, Register for Draft, Many Are B ­ attle Veterans,” New York Times, Aug. 31, 1948; “7 Rain Drill Defendants Plead Guilty,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 29, 1955; “Burning Draft Cards,” Commonweal, Nov. 19, 1965; Miller, Harsh and Dreadful Love, 159–160, 171–174, 316–317. 61. Miller, Harsh and Dreadful Love, 85–88, 222–224; Miller, Dorothy Day, 277–278, 427; David L. Gregory, “Dorothy Day, Workers’ Rights and Catholic Authenticity,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 26, no. 5 (1999): 1371–1392; Theresa Trich, “When Prominent Catholics Opposed Dorothy Day,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 2015. 62. William F. Buckley Jr., “The Catholic in Modern Amer­i­ca: A Conservative View,” Commonweal, Dec. 16, 1960, 307–310, quotation on 307; Miller, Harsh and Dreadful Love, 171–184; “Peter Maurin, 71, Catholic Leader,” NewYork Times, May 17, 1949; “Peter Maurin Dead, Roamed U.S. and Wrote,” New York Herald Tribune, May 17, 1949. 63. Day, By ­Little and By L ­ ittle, quotation on xviii; Sharon Otterman, “In Hero of the Catholic Left, a Conservative Cardinal Sees a Saint,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 2012; Directory of Catholic Worker Communities, The Catholic Worker Movement website, https://­www​ .­catholicworker​.­org​/­communities​/­directory​-­picker​.­html. Day of course is not the only Catholic w ­ oman devoted to good works who has faced criticism. She never received anything like the invective directed at M ­ other Teresa, the most notorious assault being Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: M ­ other Teresa in Theory and Practice (London: Verso, 1995). 64. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: ­Toward a Reconstruction of American-­ Jewish Life (New York: Macmillan, 1934). 65. Mel Scult, Judaism ­Faces the Twentieth ­Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 19–58; Kaplan’s ordination is confirmed in “Jewish Theological Seminary [News],” American Hebrew, July 4, 1902.

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 184–188

66. Scult, Judaism ­Faces the Twentieth C ­ entury, 45–58. 67. Scult, Judaism ­Faces the Twentieth ­Century, 52–138; Mel Scult and David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-­Center” in American Jewish History (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press / University Press of New ­England, 1999), 1–9, rightly refutes assertions that Kaplan was the principal instigator of the “center” approach in early twentieth-­century synagogue planning. Kaplan, “What Is Judaism?” Menorah Journal 1 (1915): 309–318, quotations on 309; Kaplan, “What Judaism Is Not,” Menorah Journal 1 (1915): 208–216; Kaplan, “Judaism as a Living Civilization,” American Jewish Chronicle, April 19, 1918, 678–679. 68. Mordecai  M. Kaplan, “A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism,” Menorah Journal 6, no. 4 (1920): 181–196, quotations on 182, 183, 184; Scult, Judaism F ­ aces the Twentieth C ­ entury, 188–198 69. Scult, Judaism ­Faces the Twentieth C ­ entury, 254–263, 301–302, quotation on 302; Paula E. Hyman, “The Introduction of Bat Mitzvah in Conservative Judaism in Postwar Amer­i­ca,” YIVO Annual 19 (1990): 133–146. 70. Mordecai M. Kaplan, New Approach to the Prob­lem of Judaism (New York: Society for the Advancement of Judaism, 1924), 20–38; Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 23–24, 39, 438. 71. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, quotations on 198, 521–522; Arnold Eisen, “Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization at 70: Setting the Stage for Reappraisal,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 12, no.  2 (2006): 1–16; Noam Pianko, “Reconstructing Judaism, Reconstructing Amer­i­ca: The Sources and Functions of Mordecai Kaplan’s ‘Civilization,’ ” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 12, no. 2 (2006): 39–55; Jon Butler, “Three Minds, Three Books, Three Years: Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, and Mordecai Kaplan on Religion,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 12, no. 2 (2006): 17–29. 72. “The Bookish Quidnunc,” Honolulu Star-­Bulletin, June 16, 1934; John Selby, “Scanning New Books,” St. Cloud Times, July 2, 1934; “The Book World,” Akron Beacon Journal, July 21, 1934. Jacob J. Weinstein’s review, “Two Studies of Judaism as a Civilization,” New York Times, July  21, 1935, also dismissively reviewed Israel  H. Levinthal, Judaism—­An Analy­sis and Interpretation (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1935). Negative Reform comments can be found in “Dr. Goldenson Assails Idea of ‘Civil Judaism,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, June 26, 1935; “Pioneers Needed, Is Found­er’s Day H. U. C. Message,” American Israelite, April 2, 1936; and “How Their Minds Have Changed,” Christian ­Century, Nov. 1, 1939, which obliquely describes the reaction of Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore. The Orthodox rabbi’s quip is quoted in Scult, Judaism ­Faces the Twentieth ­Century, 343. The only review describing Kaplan’s book as relevant to “students in comparative religion and culture” appeared in the Catholic journal Commonweal, Nov. 9, 1934, 74, whose anonymous author also gratuitously expressed relief that “although distinctly Jewish in Doctrine,” the book “does not attack Chris­tian­ity as such.” 73. Gerson D. Cohen and Roberta Newman, “Complete Bibliography of the Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan,” in The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan, ed. Emanuel Goldsmith, Mel Scult, and Robert M. Seltzer (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 415–452; “Rabbi Kaplan ­Will Address Hillel Forum,” Michigan Daily, Nov. 16, 1940; “Kaplan to Pre­sent First of SRA Lecture Series Tuesday,” Michigan Daily, Feb.  21, 1943; “Dr. M. M. Kaplan ­Will Speak Tuesday,” Michigan Daily, May 10, 1946. 74. Alfred Kazin, “Judaism in Transition [review],” New York Times, June 21, 1936; “Education in Jerusalem: Appointment of Prof. Kaplan,” Palestine Post, April  21, 1937; Simon Noveck, Milton Steinberg: Portrait of a Rabbi (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1978), 28–30, 183–190.



N O T E S T O P A G E S 188–191

279

75. Scult, Judaism ­Faces the Twentieth C ­ entury, 359–362; Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism in Transition (New York: Bloch Publishing Com­pany, 1936), viii. 76. “A Graceless Church,” New York Age, Sept. 21, 1911; “Would Hold Social Meetings,” NewYork Age, June 29, 1911; “American Religion Is an Abomination with God,” New York Age, May 14, 1914. 77. “Dr. Powell and ‘The White Man’s Religion,’ ” New York Age, June 4, 1914; “Rev. George C. Powell, the Fearless and Eloquent Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City,” Chicago Broadax, April  28, 1917, which oddly misidentified Powell; “[Powell] Tells Negroes to Wage a Bloodless War for Their Constitutional Rights,” New York Age, March 29, 1917; “New Yorkers Pre­sent Wilson with Memorial,” New York Age, Aug. 2, 1917; Gary J. Dorrien, The New Abolition:W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 425–447. I am deeply indebted to Maira Liriano, associate chief librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in American Culture, New York Public Library, for creating a readable version of the impor­tant New York Age article, “American Religion Is an Abomination with God.” 78. “Hundreds of Jobless Given Work,” NewYork Amsterdam News, Dec. 3, 1930; “Dr. A. Clayton Powell Starts Drive among Abyssinian Church Members to Relieve Unemployment Situation,” New York Age, Dec.  6, 1931, which gives Powell’s sermon title as “The Hungry of God”; “Harlem Churches Open Kitchens for Feeding of Needy Poor, Each of Five Serving Dinners Daily,” New York Age, Dec.  13, 1930; “Powell Flings Challenge to Pulpit,” New York Amsterdam News, Dec. 17, 1930; A. Clayton Powell, Against the Tide: An Autobiography (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938), Burroughs quotations on 226, 229; Dorrien, The New Abolition, 439–440; Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Re­ nais­sance Theology and an Ethic of Re­sis­tance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 99–102. Many ministers resented Powell’s column, as he described in his autobiography, 229–247, and as is reflected in “Dr. A. Clayton Powell Answers His B ­ rother Pastor, Dr. Sims, and Refuses to Change Statement,” New York Age, Jan. 10, 1931. 79. This account closely follows Gary J. Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 174–181, which is the best account of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s early religious ­career. On Powell’s politics and personal life, see Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Po­liti­cal Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991); and ­Will Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). On Harlem ministers’ sons succeeding their ­f athers, see Richard Manuel Bolden, “Ministers’ Sons Who Are Making Good in New York City,” New York Age, Dec. 31, 1932, which mentions Adam Clayton Powell Jr. 80. “Rev. A. Clayton Powell, Jr., Dedicates Chicago Church,” NewYork Age, June 1, 1940; “Abyssinian Baptist Church,” New York Age, Feb. 12, 1938; “Business Leaders Radiate Optimism,” New York Amsterdam News, June  22, 1932; “Plan City Hall March in Fight on Hospital, Abyssinian Church Packed at Meeting,” New York Amsterdam News, March 8, 1933; “Rev. A. Clayton Powell Jr Declares Himself on Communism, ­Will Quit If His Church Debars Radicals,” New York Age, June  3, 1933; “Claude McKay versus Powell,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 6, 1937; “Asks That Negroes Help German Jews,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 2, 1933; The Flying Cavalier, “Carrying the Torch,” New York Age, June 2, 1934, criticizes Powell on the Blumstein boycott; Christopher Gray, “How a Black Boycott Opened the Employment Door,” New York Times, Nov.  20, 1994; Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the ­Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 133–136; Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy, 181–183, 186–189.

280

N O T E S T O P A G E S 191–196

Powell’s early theology is difficult to assess directly b ­ ecause no sermons from the 1930s appear to have survived, and the sermons in Powell’s Keep the Faith, Baby! (New York: Trident Press, 1967) date from the 1950s and 1960s. 81. Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy, 190–193; Kevin McGruder, Race and Real Estate: Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 241n39; Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., 139–157. 82. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., 175–236, 329–406. 83. Maureen Buckley, “The Ordeal of Adam Clayton Powell,” National Review, June 8, 1957, 545–547, 555. The New York Times did refer to “­Mother Abyssinia Church” in a 1929 article but other­wise used the congregation’s formal name, Abyssinian Baptist Church. See “Demands Industry Control Fashions,” NewYork Times, May 22, 1929. “Why the South Must Prevail,” National Review, Aug.  24, 1957, 148–149; “Buckley Queried on Powell Jury,” New York Times, May  14, 1958; William  F. Buckley’s claim about “freedom of the press” is in Edward Ranzal, “Powell to Enter Tax Plea ­Today,” New York Times, May  13, 1958. Neither William Buckley nor the g­ rand jury member w ­ ere prosecuted for violating ­grand jury rules. Alvin Felzenberg, A Man and His Presidents: The Po­liti­cal Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 79–82, 108–130. 84. “City May Name Street in Harlem for Powell,” New York Times, Nov.  11, 1974; “Samuel Pleads for Adam Powell Boulevard and Comes Out Winning,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 23, 1974; Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy, 217–254. 85. Carol V. R. George, God’s Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46–72; “Syracuse Minister Coming ­Here Oct. 2,” New York Times, July 18, 1932. 86. “[Peale] Calls Depression Lesson to Mankind,” NewYork Times, Oct. 17, 1932; “[Peale] Hails Power of Religion,” New York Times, Jan. 30, 1933; George, God’s Salesman, 135–136, “personality building” quotation on 63; George, God’s Salesman, 85; Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: Popu­lar Religious Psy­chol­ogy from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan, rev. ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 259–268. 87. Norman Vincent Peale, The Art of Living (New York: Abingdon, 1937); You Can Win (New York and Nashville: Abingdon-­Cokesbury Press, 1938); A Guide to Confident Living (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1948); The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1952); George, God’s Salesman, 128–132; Christopher Lane, Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 82–84. 88. George, God’s Salesman, 88–93; Lane, Surge of Piety, 39–44; E. Brooks Holifield, A History of Pastoral Care in Amer­ic­a: From Salvation to Self-­realization (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 273–275, 342–347; Gibson Winter, “Pastoral Counseling or Pastoral Care,” Pastoral Psy­chol­ogy 8, no.  1 (1957): 16–24, quotation on 16, emphasis in original; Allison Stokes, Ministry a ­ fter Freud (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1985), 91–108; Rebecca Davis, “ ‘My Homo­sexuality Is Getting Worse E ­ very Day’: Norman Vincent Peale, Psychiatry, and the Liberal Protestant Response to Same-­Sex Desires in Mid-­Twentieth C ­ entury Amer­i­ca,” in American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, ed. Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 347–365; Rebecca Davis, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 101–135. Seward Hiltner, ed., Clinical Pastoral Training (New York: Commission on Religion and Health, Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in Amer­ic­ a, 1945) contains extensive descriptions and histories of clinical training programs for Protestant ministers.



N O T E S T O P A G E S 197–200

281

89. George, God’s Salesman, 103–127. 90. George, God’s Salesman, 66–68, 150–154. 91. Donald Meyer, “The Confidence Man,” New Republic, July 11, 1955, 8–10, quotation on 8; Wayne E. Oates, “The Cult of Reassurance,” Review & Expositor 51, no. 3 (1954): 335–347; William Lee Miller, “Some Negative Thinking about Norman Vincent Peale,” Reporter, Jan. 13, 1955, 19–24, quotation on 21; Reinhold Niebuhr, “Va­ri­e­ties of Religious Revival,” New Republic, June 6, 1955, 13–16, quotations on 14, 16; Paul Tillich, “The Lost Dimension in Religion,” Saturday Eve­ning Post, June 14, 1958, 29, 76, 78–79, quotation on 79. 92. “Niebuhr and Bennett Say Raising of Religious Issue Spurs Bigotry,” NewYork Times, Sept. 16, 1960; Rabbi Maurice Bloom is quoted in “3 Rabbis Assail Electoral Bias,” NewYork Times, Sept. 11, 1960; James Reston, “If . . . ​If . . . ​If,” NewYork Times, Nov. 13, 1960; George, God’s Salesman, 200–210. Although Adlai Stevenson’s Peale putdown is widely quoted, its origin is difficult to confirm. It is variously dated as occurring in 1952, 1956, and 1960. The earliest use of the quip by Stevenson appearing in the extensive digitized editions of American newspapers as of May 2019 is in “Quotes,” Berkshire Ea­gle (Pittsfield, MA), Sept. 27, 1960, about three weeks ­after Peale’s Washington, DC, news conference announcing the formation of the group to oppose John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid. The earliest appearance of the quip itself, without mentioning Stevenson, is in a column, “MAHONEY—­‘As I See It,’ ” Alabama Journal, Dec. 4, 1959. 93. Peale’s “just stupid” confession is in “Peale Repudiates Group Backing Religious Issue,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 16, 1960; George, God’s Salesman, 168–204; “No Third Term for ANY President!” advertisement, New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 26, 1940; “Protestant Groups’ Statements,” New York Times, Sept. 8, 1960. 94. George, God’s Salesman, 221–251; Grover, “The Positive Thinker”; William Lee Miller, “Some Negative Thinking about Norman Vincent Peale,” quotation on 20; Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55–60; James Barron, “Overlooked Influences on Donald Trump: A Famous Minister and His Church,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 2016. 95. Ethelred Brown quotation in letter to the editor, New Leader, Dec. 11, 1926. 96. “A New Settlement House,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 1905; “Evangeline Booth Is Salvation Chief,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 1934; Diane Winston, Red-­Hot and Righ­teous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 143–190; Wallace, Greater Gotham, 518–520. 97. “Welfare Unit ­Will Honor Aide’s 35-­Year Ser­vice [Louise Zabriskie],” New York Times, Dec. 9, 1956; Mrs. Newman Levy, “­Women in Fund­-­Rais­ing,” Jewish Social Ser­vice Quarterly 23 (Sept. 1946), 82–86; Beth  S. Wenger, “The Masculine World of New York Jewish Philanthropy, 1880–1945,” American Jewish History 101, no.  3 (2017): 377–399; “World Leaders Cheer Hadassah,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 1938. For Ruth Stafford Peale’s involvement in Reformed Church in Amer­ic­ a domestic missions, bible socie­ties, medical education, and mi­grant ­labor see “Missions Group to Meet,” New York Times, April 15, 1939; “Galamison Speaker at Bible Meeting,” NewYork Amsterdam News, Dec. 1, 1956; “Mrs. Peale Chairman,” NewYork Herald Tribune, April 30, 1956; “Harriman Warns Camps for Mi­grants,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 21, 1957; Jeffrey M. Burns, “Catholic Laywomen in the Culture of American Catholicism in the 1950s,” U.S. Catholic Historian 5 (1986): 385–400; Bernadette McCauley, Who ­Shall Take Care of Our Sick? Roman Catholic ­Sisters and the Development of Catholic Hospitals in New York City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 72–86.

282

N O T E S T O P A G E S 200–202

98. Karl Feininger diary, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, entries for Dec. 11, 1911, Jan. 15, Jan. 22, Feb. 17, Feb. 28, Mar. 5, Mar. 10, Apr. 2, Apr. 6, Apr. 16, Apr. 26–28, May 3, May 28, June  7, 1922. Some pos­si­ble fragments of Karl Feininger’s unpublished manuscript on Mary Baker Eddy are found in the Lyonel Feininger Papers, 1883–1960, Special Collections, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Quotation from Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein in “Advises ­Simple Life to Cure Ner­vous­ness,” New York Times, March 23, 1925; Alfred G. Moses, Jewish Science: Divine Healing in Judaism, with Special Reference to the Jewish Scriptures and Prayer Book ([Mobile, AL]: [A. G. Moses], 1916); Ellen M. Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Information on the Harlem “street preacher” photographed in 1939 by Harold Corsini is from “Harold Corsini, Amer­ic­ a, 1919–2008, Man standing in manhole on sidewalk by chalkboards,” George Eastman Museum, https://­collections​.­eastman​.­org​ /­objects​/­107658​/­man​-­standing​-­in​-­manhole​-­on​-­sidewalk​-­by​-­chalkboards​?­ctx​=­b019da91​ -­0a42​-­4692​-­8e2d​-­e792e11dd4a0&idx​=­26. See also “Obituary: Harold Corsini, Photographer Who Chronicled Steel Industry,” Pittsburgh Post-­Gazette, Jan.  4, 2008; Steven  W. Plattner, “Harold Corsini,” in Plattner, Roy Stryker: U.S.A., 1943–1950: The Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photography Proj­ect (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 36–43. 99. Harold Dean Trulear, “Reshaping Black Pastoral Theology: The Vision of Bishop Ida  B. Robinson,” Journal of Religious Thought 46, no.  1 (1989): 17–31; Felton  O. Best, “Breaking the Gender Barrier: African-­ American ­ Women and Leadership in Black Holiness-­Pentecostal Churches 1890–­Pre­sent,” in Black Religious Leadership from the Slave Community to the Million Man March, ed. Felton O. Best (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 153–168; Estrelda Y. Alexander, “Gender and Leadership in the Theology and Practice of Three Pentecostal ­Women Pioneers” (PhD diss., Catholic University of Amer­ic­ a, 2002), 176–223, Robinson quotation on 185; Rosalie S. Owens, Come Out on Mount Sinai: Bishop Ida Bell Robinson: The Authoritarian Servant Leader ([North Charleston, SC]: [CreateSpace In­de­pen­dent Publishing Platform], 2018), 109, quotations from denominational rec­ords on Robinson resurrection, 115, 116. The only New York newspaper items on Robinson before her death in 1946 are a 1941 wedding notice and several 1942 and 1943 notices about a dinner for visiting soldiers and contributions to a ­Women’s Motor Corps ambulance fund. See “Sixty-­Five Members of Armed Forces at Bethel’s Ser­vices,” New York Age, Dec. 26, 1942; “CDVO Activities,” New York Age, Aug. 7, 1943; “End Motor Corps Drive,” New York Amsterdam News, March 6, 1943; a photo­graph of Robinson presenting a $250 check to the ­Women’s Motor Corps appears in New York Amsterdam News, March 13, 1943; “­Woman Bishop Raises Funds for Ambulance,” ­People’s Voice, March 13, 1943. 100. Kunz v. New York, 340 U.S. 290 (1951); “City’s Curb on Street Preaching Held Illegal by Supreme Court,” New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 16, 1951; “Eight Evangelists Are Convicted in Rally That Clogged Broadway,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug.  19, 1952; “Street Preacher Guilty,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 1954; “Minister to Appeal Conviction for Blocking Street,” Brooklyn Ea­gle, Feb. 19, 1954; Isaac Weiner, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 88–90, 225, 226. New York City’s permit system for outdoor preaching extended back to at least the 1850s. See, “The City Ordinance against Street Preaching,” New York Daily Tribune, Dec. 24, 1853. 101. Benny Kraut, “­Towards the Establishment of the National Conference of Christians and Jews,” American Jewish History 77, no. 3 (1988): 388–412; Yaakov S. Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen ­People: Missions to the Jews in Amer­ic­ a, 1880–2000 (Chapel Hill: University



N O T E S T O P A G E S 203–206

283

of North Carolina Press, 2000), 175–182. The undated meeting in which Paul Tillich defended missions to Jews is described in Mordecai Kaplan’s diary, Sept. 27, 1945. 102. Patrick J. Hayes, “J. Elliott Ross and the National Conference of Christians and Jews: A Catholic Contribution to Tolerance in Amer­ic­ a,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 37, no. 3–4 (2000): 321–332, esp. 325; Benny Kraut, “A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics, and the Protestant Goodwill Movement,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in Amer­i­ca, 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193–230. 103. Kraut, “­Towards the Establishment of the National Conference of Christians and Jews,” 409–412; Hayes, “J. Elliott Ross and the National Conference of Christians and Jews,” 327–331; Harold S. Wechsler, “Making a Religion of Intergroup Education: The National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1927–1957,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 47, no. 1 (2012): 3–40; “Seeks to Iron Out Church Conflicts,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 1929; “Roo­ se­velt Applauds Brotherhood Week,” NewYork Times, Feb. 19, 1938; “10,000 Pulpits to Carry Gospel of Good ­Will,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 20, 1938. The National Conference began a “Brotherhood Day” in 1934, which it expanded to Brotherhood Week in 1938; see National Conference of Christians and Jews rec­ords, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Series 4, Box 5. 104. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism (New York: Works Publishing Co., 1939). 105. Ernest Kurtz, Not-­God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1991), 7–36; Trysh Travis, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 29–36; Stephanie Muravchik, American Protestantism in the Age of Psy­chol­ogy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 112–157. Institutional histories of Alcoholics Anonymous have largely been written by members. Kurtz’s is widely regarded as accurate and insightful. 106. Kurtz, Not-­God, 37–82. 107. Alcoholics Anonymous, quotations on 71–72, emphasis in original. 108. Alcoholics Anonymous, quotations on 71–72, emphasis in original; Travis, Language of the Heart, 30–33, 107–136; Kurtz, Not-­God, 59–82. 109. “Public Notices,” New York Herald Tribune, May 28, 1941, whose first notice read, “­Mother—­God grant me the serenity to accept ­things I cannot change, courage to change ­things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Goodby.” Alcoholics Anonymous’s 1942 version of the prayer, which is in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing Co., 1957), 196, added the article “the” before “­things.” The prayer’s adoption by Alcoholics Anonymous is recounted in ‘Pass It On’: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the A.A. Message Reached the World (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Ser­vices, 1984), 252. The dif­fer­ent versions of the prayer known in the 1930s are discussed in Fred  R. Shapiro, “Who Wrote the Serenity Prayer?” Chronicle Review, April  28, 2014, https://­www​.­chronicle​.­com​/­article​/­Who​-­Wrote​-­the​-­Serenity​-­Prayer​-­​/­146159. Elisabeth Sifton, Reinhold Niebuhr’s d ­ aughter, discussed the prayer’s evolution in The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War (New York: W.  W. Norton, 2003) before many of the 1930s texts had been discovered through newspaper database searches. Kurtz, Not-­God, fiftieth-­anniversary quotation on 297. 110. Beuttler, “Organ­izing an American Conscience,” 111–188; Fred  W. Beuttler, “For the World at Large: Intergroup Activities at the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York:

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 207–211

Jewish Theological Seminary of Amer­ic­ a, 1997), 2: 667–735; James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 63–93; Terry Wotherspoon, “Knowledge and Salvation for a Troubled World: Sociology and the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion,” American Sociologist 46, no. 3 (2015): 373–413. 111. Science, Philosophy, and Religion: A Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life, Inc., 1941), vi–­ viii, 5. 112. Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, 83–89. 113. Science Philosophy and Religion:Third Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1943), vii–­x; Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, and Robert M. MacIver, eds., Approaches to National Unity: Fifth Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1945), xv–­xxiv. 114. Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s letter to Finkelstein, July 11, 1940, is quoted in Beuttler, “Organ­ izing an American Conscience,” 125; Simon Greenberg, “The Religious Background of Demo­cratic Ideas,” in Science, Philosophy and Religion: Second Symposium (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1942), 517–530, quotation on 528. The 1944 discussion of racial issues included Malcolm Ross, “Racial Tensions in Industry,” in Approaches to National Unity, 18–28; A. Rubin and George J. Segal, “Race Tensions—­A Symptom,” in Approaches to National Unity, 29–45; Charles S. Johnson, “Group Tensions: The American Negro Minority,” in Approaches to National Unity, 132–140. 115. The Conference’s publications are con­ve­niently listed in Beuttler, “Organ­izing an American Conscience,” 579–580. George N. Shuster, “Scholars Met in War Time,” NewYork Times, Sept. 5, 1943; “Scholars Win Clear Victory Over Big Words,” NewYork Herald Tribune, Sept. 10, 1949; Dell H. Hymes, review of Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, Hudson Hoagland, and R. M. MacIver, eds., Symbols and Society: ­Fourteenth Symposium of the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1955), American So­cio­log­i­cal Review 21, no. 3 (1956), 389. 116. Gerald  N. Burrow, A History of Yale’s School of Medicine: Passing Torches to ­Others (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008), 107–108; Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Stephen Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in Higher Education (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1974); John T. McGreevy, “Catholics, Catholicism, and the Humanities, 1945–1985,” in The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II, ed. David A. Hollinger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 189–216. The 1964 Civil Rights Act allowed American colleges and universities to demand faculty adherence to an institution’s stated religious preferences.

Conclusion 1. Simeon Stylites, “Satan in the Suburbs,” Christian ­Century, Nov. 26, 1952, 1375. Halford Luccock wrote ­under the pseudonym Simeon Stylites, ­after a fifth-­century saint who pontificated from a fifty-­foot-­high pillar. 2. John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Win­dow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); William H. Whyte, The Organ­ization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); Richard E. Gordon and Katherine K. Gordon, The Split-­Level Trap (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1961); David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American ­Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).



N O T E S T O P A G E S 211–216

285

3. Reynolds was inspired to write “­Little Boxes” while driving through Daly City, California, in 1962. See Christopher Hitchens, “Suburbs of Our Discontent,” Atlantic, Dec. 2008, 122–129. 4. ­­Will Herberg, Protestant–­Catholic–­Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); Gibson Winter, “The Church in Suburban Captivity,” Christian ­Century, Sept. 28, 1955, 1112–1114, quotations on 1112, 1113; Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analy­sis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (New York: Doubleday, 1961), quotations on 31, 32; James Hudnut-­Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 109–174. 5. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 148, 155. 6. “22% Population Rise in 12 Jersey Counties,” New York Times, June 24, 1950; “Jersey Population Up 16% in De­cade,” New York Times, June  3, 1950; “Nassau Population Up 63%,” NewYork Times, June 22, 1950; “Local Population Changes,” NewYork Herald Tribune, Feb. 23, 1961; Cornelius DuBois, “Whither New York, Whither Bosky Dell: New York Has Its Own Sputniks,” New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 29, 1957. 7. “Nonwhite Growth Trend in Suburbs,” NewYork Times, May 21, 1961; Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth ­Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 94–109; Louis Lee Woods II, “Almost ‘No Negro Veteran . . . ​Could Get a Loan’: African Americans, the G. I. Bill, and the NAACP Campaign against Residential Segregation, 1917–1960,” Journal of African American History 98 (2013): 392–417, William Levitt quotation on 409. 8. “ ‘Non-­Racial’ Colony of Houses at $7,000 ­Will Open Tomorrow at North Amityville,” New York Times, Jan.  27, 1950; “Bethel AME Church of Amityville,” Mapping the African American Past, http://­maap​.­columbia​.­edu​/­place​/­63; “About Us: The History of  Holy Trinity Baptist Church,” https://­www​.­holytrinityamityville​.­org​/­About​-­Us​.­html; “Our Story: In the Beginning,” Bethel Church of Morristown, http://­www​.­bethelmorristown​ .­org​/­about​-­us​/­church​-­history; “About Us,” Bethel AME Church, Vauxhall, NJ, http://­ bethelamevauxhall​.­com​/­about. 9. “Uncover Segregation Policy at Nassau County Sanitorium,” Newsday, Oct.  28, 1961; John Cashman, “Amityville: ‘F’ in School Integration?” Newsday, Feb. 21, 1962; Arnold Brophy, “Segregation Crisis Strikes Home on LI,” Newsday, Oct. 9, 1961; Valerie Cotsalas, “Two Counties, Two Fair-­Housing Bills,” NewYork Times, July 9, 2006; Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Win­dows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 171–190; Brian Res­nick and Stephanie Stamm, “The State of Segregation in the Suburbs,” Atlantic, Jan. 2015. Regrettably, no post-1950 New York City study appears to parallel Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, “The Negro as an Immigrant Group: Recent Trends in Racial and Ethnic Segregation in Chicago,” American Journal of Sociology 69 (1964): 374–382. 10. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, “Suburbanization in the United States a­ fter 1945,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, April 2017, offers the most up-­to-­ date account of the post-1945 American suburbs. 11. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of Amer­ic­ a, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 1–16; ­Will Herberg, “­There Is a Religious Revival!” Review of Religious Research 1, no.  2 (1959): 45–50, Gallup poll quotation on 46; Michael Argyle, “Religious Activity in G ­ reat Britain and the U.S.A. 1900–57,” in Argyle, Religious Behaviour (London: Routledge,

286

N O T E S T O P A G E S 216–219

1958), 23–38; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1988), 3–54; Stanley Rowland Jr., “Religious Interest on Campuses Takes Place Outside Churches,” NewYork Times, Oct. 24, 1955; Patrick Henry, “ ‘And I D ­ on’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-­History of a Civil Religion Proof-­Text,” Journal of the American Acad­emy of Religion 49 (1981): 35–47. 12. Don F. Pielstick, Sussex County, New Jersey: A Study of the Churches against the Background of the Social Resources and Pressures: Prepared during the Winter of 1945–46 (New York: Home Missions Council of North Amer­ic­ a, 1946); Everett L. Perry and R. W. Sanderson, Nassau County, Long Island, N.Y.: Social Change and Church Trends, 1910–1948 (New York: Cooperative Field Research, 1948); David W. Barry, Livingston, New Jersey: A Case Study of Procedures in Planning and Adjustment (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ, 1952); Everett L. Perry, A Survey of First,Trinity, and Westminster Presbyterian Churches of Phillipsburg, N.J.:With Reference to the Proposed Merger (New York: Board of Missions, Presbyterian Church, 1951); H. Paul Douglass quoted in “Churchmen Stress Changing Suburbs,” New York Times, May 7, 1949. Pielstick, Perry, and Sanderson w ­ ere among a dozen or so analysts who authored numerous church studies for denominational and interdenominational groups before 1960. Their materials are now ­housed in the National Council of Churches of Christ, H. Paul Douglass Collection. Microfiche copies can be found at the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, and other libraries. 13. Peter Blake, An American Synagogue for ­Today and Tomorrow: A Guide Book to Synagogue Design and Construction (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1954); “Pre-­School Study Set in Survey,” American Israelite, Oct. 13, 1955; “Y.M.H.A. to Study Jews in Bergen,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1961. 14. Archdiocese of Newark, Chronology of Parishes [1826–2016], https://­www​.­rcan​ .­org​/­offices​-­and​-­ministries​/­history​-­archives​/­chronology​-­parishes; Glen Gleason, “Pope Divides Brooklyn Diocese; Forms L. I. See, Names 2 Bishops,” New York Herald Tribune, April  19, 1957; George Dugan, “Kellenberg Gets Possession of See: Bishop of Rockville Centre,” New York Times, May 27, 1957; chronological list of Long Island Catholic parishes in “Founding Dates—­DRVC Parishes,” Diocese of Rockville Centre Archives, Rockville Centre, NY; “Levittown Plot Taken for Church,” New York Times, Nov. 4, 1948. 15. “William Warner Takes Property in Connecticut,” New York Herald Tribune, Nov.  5, 1948; “Baptists Plan Prefabricated Chapels on L.I.,” NewYork Herald Tribune, Jan. 31, 1949; “[Presbyterians] Get Levittown Church Site,” New York Times, March 11, 1950. 16.­­Temple BethTikvah, “60th Anniversary Commemoration,” at https://­templebethtikvahnj​ .­org​/6 ­ 0th​-a­ nniversary. Temporary meeting places for new Long Island Catholic parishes can be traced in “Founding Dates—­DRVC Parishes.” 17. “Levittown Shares Its Churches So All Have a Place to Worship,” New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 17, 1951. 18. Amenities in newly constructed Catholic parish facilities on Long Island can be traced in “Founding Dates—­DRVC Parishes.” 19. George Cline Smith, “Seventy Thousand Churches in Ten Years,” in Religious Buildings for ­Today, ed. John Knox Shear (n.p.: F. W. Dodge Corporation, 1957), 33; “Catholic Leader Predicts Boom in Church Building,” New York Herald Tribune, March  23, 1948; “Religious Building Sets Mark in New York Area,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 22, 1954; “Church Construction Stays in Boom Stage,” NewYork Herald Tribune, May 13, 1956; “Go to Church Sunday,” Newsday, Sept. 1, 1945, Jan. 25, 1947, Sept. 15, 1951. 20. Quotations on postwar suburban architectural expectations are from “Religious Building Sets Mark in New York Area.”



N O T E S T O P A G E S 219–225

287

21. Harvey K. Flad and Clyde Griffen, From Main Street to Mainframes: Landscape and Social Change in Poughkeepsie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 207, 261–264; Dedication Program, The Chapel of Our Lady of Wisdom, Marian College, Poughkeepsie, New York, May  2, 1954, courtesy of John Ansley, director of Archives and Special Collections, Marist College. 22. Kimberly J. Elman, “The Quest for Community: Percival Goodman and the Design of the Modern American Synagogue,” in Percival Goodman: Architect, Planner, Teacher, Paint­er, ed. Elman Giral and Angela Giral (New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2001), 53–61; Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar Amer­ic­ a (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 71–77; Michael Ziegler, “United Church of Rowayton [CT]: The House of Worship,” http://­www​.­ucrowayton​.­org​/­church​-­history. 23. “Levittown Reform ­ Temple, Levittown, L.I.,” Architectural Rec­ord 114, no.  6 (Dec. 1953), 135; quotation from director of New York Federation of Reform Synagogues in “Religious Building Sets Mark in New York Area.” 24. Stan Szymanski and Connie Szymanski, eds., “A History of Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish,” http://­olqp​-­maywood​.­org​/­history50​.­html. 25. Janice  T. Woods, “Our History [Commack Methodist Church], Rita  J. Egan, ­“Commack History: The 1789 Chapel,” https://­patch​.­com​/­new​-­york​/­commack​/­commack​ -­history​-­the​-­1789​-­chapel; see Gretchen Buggeln, The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar Amer­i­ca (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) on Midwestern A-­frame church architecture. 26. “History of ­Temple Judea of Manhasset,” https://­www​.­temple​-­judea​.­com​/­history. 27. “History: ­Temple Beth Tikvah,” Wayne, NJ, https://­templebethtikvahnj​.­org​/­history. Founding information for Long Island Jewish congregations is derived from Ira Poliakoff, Synagogues of Long Island (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2017). 28. Szymanski and Szymanski, eds., “A History of Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish.” 29. “Hadden Hts [Presbyterian] Church Lists Night Events,” Camden Courier-­Post, Sept. 25, 1954; “Scotch Plains [Activities],” Bridgewater Courier-­News, Oct. 2, 1953; “­Women’s Calendar,” Newsday, Nov.  7, 1955; “With Hadassah,” The Jewish News [of New Jersey], April  20, 1956; Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace, 114–137; “Hadassah to Convene ­Here,” New York Times, Aug. 12, 1950; “Ju­nior Hadassah to Meet [in Atlantic City],” NewYork Times, Nov. 16, 1950; “Hadassah to Meet H ­ ere,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1954; “With Hadassah,” Jewish News [of New Jersey], April 20 1956. 30. “Men’s Night Held,” Plainfield Courier-­News, April 4, 1952; “Salt on the Side,” Asbury Park Press, Feb. 13, 1949; “Housing Committee for 5 Towns Formed,” Newsday, May 26, 1944; “Rabbi Sandrow’s ­Causes Are Many,” New York Daily News, May 20, 1951; “Church Group Denounces Bingo,” New York Daily News, March 9, 1955; “Clerics Hail Workers for Integration,” NewYork Daily News, Nov. 28, 1958; “Song Replaces Prayer to End School Dispute,” Newsday, April 10, 1959; “Church League Starts Play at Liberty Street School,” White Plains Journal, Feb.  2, 1953; “Church League Title Goes to Synagogue,” Freehold Transcript and Monmouth Inquirer, April 2, 1953; “Shore Youth Earns Tryout,” Asbury Park Press, Aug.  21, 1957; “Synagogue Honors Basketball Team,” Asbury Park Press, April  7, 1960; “School Board ­Won’t Meet Clergy,” Asbury Park Press, March 13, 1964; “1,000 Attend Rights Rally,” Asbury Park Press, Aug. 4, 1964; the obituary for Reverend L. Milton Thompson, NewYork Times, June 12, 1954, confirms establishment of the Religious Council of the Rockaways in 1932; “World Sodality Sunday Marked at Fordham U.,” NewYork Herald Tribune, May  15, 1950; “25,000 at Cele­bration of World Sodality Day,” New York Herald

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N O T E S T O P A G E S 225–229

Tribune, May 11, 1953; “Sodality Day Is Marked at Fordham Ceremony,” New York Herald Tribune, May 3, 1954. 31. James  J. Morisseau, “Fixing Blame in Levittown’s ­Bitter School Wrangle,” New York Herald Tribune, Jan.  14, 1962; “Levittown Principal’s Letter Reviewed by Students-­ Parents,” Newsday, Oct. 10, 1956. 32. Bernie Bookbinder, “Levittown at 20: Controversy a Fading Memory,” Newsday, Aug. 23, 1967; Francis Wood, “Author of ‘Sheba’ Ribs L’town on Ban,” Newsday, March 15, 1958; Scott Dim, “Levittown Bans Text at Stormy Meeting,” Newsday, April  23, 1963; Martin Buskin, “The Side-­Effects of Banning School Books,” Newsday, April 29, 1963; Dim, “Voters Defeat Levittown Book Burners,” Newsday, May 9, 1963; “Textbook Ban Is Lifted by L’town Trustees,” Newsday, Feb. 2, 1965. 33. Joe Gelmis, “Levittown Adopts Prayer Substitute,” Newsday, Sept. 5, 1962; “Levittown Defends Class Bible-­Reading,” Newsday, Oct.  23, 1962; Bernie Bookbinder, “LI Schools Say They ­Will Obey Prayer Ruling,” Newsday, June 18, 1963; quotations on Levittown in 1967 from Bookbinder, “Levittown at 20.” 34. “Start 11-­Week Leadership Course at Lynbrook Church,” Newsday, Jan.  8, 1945; “Hadassah to Launch Leadership Course,” Newsday, Jan. 20, 1953; “Catholic Scout Leaders to Attend LI Conference Sunday in Hewlett,” Newsday, Oct. 21, 1959; “Mrs. Giller Leads [Leadership Training] Course,” Asbury Park Press, March 7, 1947; “[Leadership] Institute Scheduled by Ju­nior Hadassah,” Central New Jersey Home News, March 24, 1950; “Hadassah Board Told of Bond Drive,” and “Hadassah Leaders to Have [Leadership] Course,” Asbury Park Press, Oct. 10, 1951; “­Women’s Federation Slates Leadership Training Events,” Jewish News [of New Jersey], Nov.  27, 1959. On ­ women’s ordination, see “Timeline of ­women’s ordination in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org​/­wiki​/­Timeline​ _­of​_­women%27s​_­ordination​_­in​_­the​_­United​_­States. 35. Winter, “The Church in Suburban Captivity,” 1112; Herberg, Protestant–­Catholic–­Jew, 276. Herberg cited Winter’s article in a revised edition of Protestant–­Catholic–­Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 131n42. 36. Bennett  M. Berger, Working-­ Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Berger, “The Myth of Suburbia,” Journal of Social Issues 17, no. 1 (1961): 38–49; William M. Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1963). 37. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners:Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982 [orig. publ. 1967]), quotation on 84. 38. “Go to Church Sunday,” Newsday, Sept. 15, 1951; “Church Notes,” Chatham [N.J.] Press, March  11, 1955; “Religious Ser­vices,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1951, and March 12, 1955. For Niebuhr’s Riverside Church sermon, see Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43; for Pike’s sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, see David M. Robertson, A Passionate Pilgrim: A Biography of Bishop James A. Pike (New York: Random House, 2004), 56, 123. 39. “Billy Graham Opens His Crusade H ­ ere,” New York Times, May 16, 1957; “Text of Billy Graham’s Sermon Opening His Crusade in Madison Square Garden,” NewYork Times, May 16, 1957; quotation about New Jersey listeners at Billy Graham’s 1957 Yankee Stadium ser ­vice from “100,000 Persons—­One Arrest,” New York Herald Tribune, July 22, 1957. 40. Elesha Coffman, “ ‘You Cannot Fool the Electronic Eye’: Billy Graham and the Media,” in Billy Graham: American Pilgrim, ed. Andrew Finstuen, Anne Blue ­Wills, and Grant Wacker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 197–215; Grant Wacker, Amer­



N O T E S T O P A G E S 230–232

289

i­ca’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 15–16, 109–110, 124–126, 151–167; the quotation about “counselors” is in “Billy Graham Opens His Crusade ­Here.” 41. Irving M. Zeitlin, Jews: The Making of a Diaspora ­People (New York: Polity, 2013); Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 bce–117 ce) (Edinburgh: T. Clark, 1996); Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Chris­tian­ity in the West, 350–550 AD (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2012); Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform (1250– 1550): An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Eu­rope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 42. Rick Rojas, “New York Archdiocese Names 120 Clergy Members Accused of Abuse, New York Times, April 26, 2019; Elizabeth Dias, “Southern Baptists Announce Plans to Address Sexual Abuse,” NewYork Times, Feb. 28, 2019; Paul Vitello, “New York Archdiocese Says It Plans to Close 27 Schools,” New York Times, Jan.  11, 2011. Robert  D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Becka A. Alper, “Why Amer­ic­ a’s ‘Nones’ ­Don’t Identify with a Religion,” Pew Research Center, Aug. 8, 2018, https://­www​.­pewresearch​.­org​/­fact​-­tank​/­2018​/­08​ /­08​/­why​-­americas​-­nones​-­dont​-­identify​-­with​-­a​-­religion. 43. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors:The Origins of the New American Right (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2001); Michelle M. Nickerson, ­Mothers of Conservatism: ­Women and the Postwar Right (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2012); Robert P. Jones, “The Evangelicals and the ­Great Trump Hope,” New York Times, July 11, 2016; Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Stephen Ellingson, The Megachurch and the Mainline: Remaking Religious Tradition in the Twenty-­first ­Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); William Neuman, “In Demo­cratic Stronghold of New York City, Trump Finds Support among Orthodox Jews,” New York Times, Nov.  10, 2016; Michael Tackett, “Trump Fulfills His Promise on Abortion, and to Evangelicals,” New York Times, May 16, 2019; “Staunchly Catholic Party Sweeps Poland’s Elections,” LaCroix International, Oct.  29, 2015, https://­international​.­la​-­croix​.­com​/­news​ /­staunchly​-­catholic​-­party​-­sweeps​-­polands​-­elections​/­2095. Timothy  L. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in Amer­i­ca,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 1155–1185, describes the ways ­later nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean emigration tended to revive religious affection. 44. Quotations about religious experience of Levittown youth are from “Early Levittown NY and Beyond,” http://­theworldaccordingtofrankbarning​.­blogspot​.­com; “Part 1. What do you remember about your religious education growing up in Levittown?” April 11, 2011, http://­theworldaccordingtofrankbarning​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2011​/­04​/­what​-­do​-­you​-­remember​ -­about​-­your​.­html; “Part 3: ‘What do you remember about your religious education growing up in early Levittown?’ April 11, 2011, http://­theworldaccordingtofrankbarning​.­blogspot​ .­com​/­search​/­label​/­religion%20in%20early%20levittown%20ny; “Levittown provided a sense of safety to a pious young church goer,” March  3, 2013, http://­theworldaccordingtofrank​ barning​.­blogspot​.­com​/­search​/­label​/­kathy%20stahlman%20zinn.

A C K N O W L­E D G M E N T S

The possibility of a book on religion in modern Manhattan developed through conversations with my long-­time friend and fellow Minnesotan Eric Monkkonen across years of Minneapolis summers as we shepherded our boys from wading pools to basketball camps. Sadly, Eric died in 2005. It would have been so much fun to show him how the book fi­nally turned out. I am deeply indebted to all the authors whose scholarship fills the endnotes. They created the evidence that made this book pos­si­ble. Without it, and them, ­there would have been no book. One book especially has been by my side since I first encountered it: David W. Dunlap’s subtly stunning From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship. I have so frequently requested so much from vari­ous libraries and archives that I’ve worried I might wear out my welcome. But their staffs kept smiling, sending, and retrieving, and I am so thankful for their graciousness and help. ­These facilities include the New York Public Library, especially its Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the City of New York Municipal Archives; the libraries at the Union Theological Seminary and the Jewish Theological Seminary; the several libraries at Manhattan’s Center for Jewish History; the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Rockville Centre; the Archives and Special Collections at Marist College; the American Baptist Historical Society at Mercer University; the Archives of the University of Notre Dame; Columbia

292

A cknowl­edgments

University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Levittown Public Library in Levittown, NY; and Computer and Library Media Ser­vices at Division Ave­nue High School in Levittown. Staff members at the two libraries I used most heavi­ly, Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University and O. Meredith Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, deserve ­every accolade that could be offered, and I offer them all. Obtaining images and permission to reproduce them is not always easy. But many p ­ eople went out of their way to make it so, not least George Miles at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; staff at the Library of Congress; staff at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University; Paula Motlo at the Joe Schwartz Photo Archive; Robbie Siegel at Art Resource; Jennifer Claybourne at Digital Library Ser­vices, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; staff at the New York Public Library Digital Collections; Kenneth  R. Cobb at the New York City Municipal Archives; staff at the New-­York Historical Society; Brian Shetler at Drew University Methodist Library; Christopher Brazee and the staff of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; Shira Weinberger; Donna Mussenden Van Der Zee of the Van Der Zee Archive; Meredith Steinfels and Christopher J. Warren at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College; Michael Shulman at Magnum Photos; Lorraine Goonan at The Image Works; Shulamith Z. Berger at Special Collections and Hebraica-­Judaica, Yeshiva University Library; Mark  C. ­Meade at the Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University; Joyce Hansen; Phil Runkel at Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University; Grace Wagner and Nicole Westerdahl at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University; George A. Hart at the Peale History Center and Library; Deborah Corsini and the Corsini f­ amily; Lauren Lean at the George Eastman Museum; D ­ ixie Guerrero at the Guerrero Archive; and Mitesh and Ria Gala of MitsRia Photography. At the Jewish Theological Seminary, Jack Wertheimer and Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard of Special Collections went beyond any expectation by scouring for photo­graphs of Mordecai Kaplan and Jacques Maritain and arranged for high resolution images to be made on a rush schedule. I am so appreciative. ­Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Notification of any additions or corrections would be greatly appreciated.



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293

Many kind individuals answered questions, checked files, made copies, clarified murky microfilm, translated, offered intellectual leads, confirmed details, and made deft suggestions amidst busy schedules, lives, and obligations. In alphabetical order, I am especially indebted to Matthew Akamatsu, Norma Akamatsu, Jeffrey Alexander, Krista Ammirati, Margo Anderson, John  F. Ansley, Lila Corwin Berman, Fred Beuttler, Betsy Blackmar, Susanna Blumenthal, Yonatan Brafman, Mary Beth Brown, Gretchen Buggeln, Kyle Bulthuis, Randall K. Burkett, Rex Butterfield, Garnette Cadogan, Kimmy Caplan, ­ Virginia Carew, Kevin Cawley, Mark Chancey, Michael R. Cohen,Todd F. Connell, John Cooper, Heather Curtis, Daniel Czitrom, Carolyn Davis, Philip Deloria, Dennis Dickerson, Reverend Stephen  M. DiGiovanni, Andrew Dolkart, Jacob Dorman, Mark Edwards, Arnie Eisen, Rabbi Zev Eleff, Kate Feighery, Anne Flemming, Pamela Foohey, Richard Wightman Fox, Donna Gabaccia, the late Reverend Leland Gartrell, Rick Gomes, Daniel Greene, Jeff Gurock, Mike Hamilton, Daryn Henry, David Hollinger, Sally Howell, the late Paula Hyman, Joshua Jelly-­ Schapiro, Martha Jones, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Edward Kaplan, Lawrence Kaplan, David Kaufman, ­Brother Frank Kelly, Maurice Klapwald, Anne Klejment, Jim Kloppenberg, Bob Koenig, Kenneth Koltun-­Fromm, Kip Kosek, Mark Krasovic, Chuck Lamb, Emily Laverty, Maira Liriano, Colin Loader, Lisa Lowe, Lynn Lyerly, Margaret McGuinness, Paul Manton, Lerone Martin, Robert Martin, Najwa Mayer, Bernadette McCauley, Colleen McDannell, Terry McDonald, John McGreevy, Kevin McGruder, Jim Merrell, Anne Mininberg, Alan Mittleman, John Modell, Brenna Moore, Deborah Dash Moore, Glenn Moots, Aldon Morris, Richard Murdocco, Gretchen Neidhardt, Lawrence Neville, Jean O’Brien, Bob Orsi, Catherine Osborne, Derek Peterson, Noam Pianko, Benjamin Pollak, Riv-­Ellen Prell, Steve Rice, Ken Rose, the late Roy Rosenzweig, Jonathan Sarna, Lawrence Scaff, Mel Scult, Fred Shapiro, Rachel Shrock, Bob Shuster, the late Daniel Scott Smith, Ken Snowden, Daniel Soyer, Arnold Sparr, Justin Stein, Chaim Steinberger, Skip Stout, Beth Stroud, Robert S ­ ullivan, Rabbi Lance Sussman, Gayle Wald, Judith Weisenfeld, Chad Wellmon, Janet Winfield, and Bob Wuthnow. More names belong on this list; their absence stems from my carelessness in keeping track of correspondence even as I consumed the help they provided. I would also like to thank the largely anonymous correspondents of the Symphonyshare Google group.

294

A cknowl­edgments

Katie Lofton’s reading of two very early chapters helped me clarify what I wanted to do but ­wasn’t yet ­doing. Jonathan Sarna and two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press offered terrific suggestions and saved me from embarrassing errors. To say that Lisa Adams at the Garamond Agency and Kathleen McDermott at Harvard University Press have been supportive and patient beyond any reasonable expectation is ridiculously true. Simon Waxman and Anne McGuire have been the copy editors you always wanted. Kimberly Giambattisto and the staff at Westchester Publishing Services smoothed the book’s publication amid the coronavirus pandemic. Kathleen, Simon, and Anne, plus Stephanie Vyce, Mihaela Pacurar, and Kathleen Drummy, are six of the not so secret reasons why publishing at Harvard University Press is not just an honor, but also fun.

INDEX

Aarnio, Reino, 219, 220 Abbott, Berenice, 96, 138 Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), 108, 109, 226 abolitionists, 120 Abyssinian Baptist Church, 86, 90, 91, 116–117, 119–120, 121, 122–123, 125–126, 128, 130, 131–132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 150, 189–191, 192, 254n15, 255n23 Adler, Felix, 32–33, 184 Adler, Samuel, 65 advertising: congregational documents, 37–38; housing and employment, 123, 130; ­music and rec­ords, 104, 105–106, 258n48; religious ser­vices, 42, 47–49, 48, 95, 96, 97, 98, 98–99, 106, 196, 197, 201, 228 affiliation. See religious attendance; religious identity African American populations: Baptist churches, 86, 91, 116–117, 119–120, 122, 134, 254n15; Black Israelites and Black Islam, 144–145; church building sales / changes, 90–91, 116–117, 123–124, 130; clergy and preaching, 105–106, 113, 117, 119, 120–123, 124–125, 127–128, 134, 136; identity, 148–149, 176; immigration and migration, 115, 119, 120, 144, 214–215; population data, 115, 116, 214, 261n4;

publishing, 105–106, 117, 119, 123–124, 148–149; racism and effects, 15–16, 29, 86, 90, 105, 115–117, 121, 123–124, 130, 149–151, 189, 191–193, 208, 214, 215; spiritual ­music, 104–105, 122, 137; uplift movements, 121–123, 137. See also African Methodist Episcopal churches and congregations; civil rights movement African Methodist Episcopal churches and congregations: attendance and worship, 16, 126–127; history, 15–16, 26, 36–37, 91, 116–117, 120–122, 126–129, 214–215; socie­ties, 40, 121–122, 126 Agudath ha-­Rabbanim, 68 Aigner, Lucien, 96, 97, 138 Akamatsu, Alfred, 157–158, 271n11 alcohol abuse: recovery groups, 203–206; and temperance, 40, 121, 125 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 203–206 Aleichem, Sholem, 101, 102 Ali, Noble Drew, 145 Alinsky, Saul, 167–168 Allen Memorial Church of Love, Truth, and Light, 139, 142–144 Alston, Louise, 122 American, Sadie, 74 American Bible Society, 37, 102, 154 American Foundation for Religion and Psychiatry, 195 American Sunday School Teachers’ Magazine, 45

296 I ndex

An American Synagogue for ­Today and Tomorrow, 216–217 Andrews, Edward, 13, 14, 16 anonymity, 4, 7, 22, 31, 77, 135 antisemitism: Christian theology, 160, 164, 165, 166; hate crimes, 67; ignorance, and American history, 28, 30, 63; Nazism, 153, 158, 160, 166, 168–169 Archdiocese of New York: fund­rais­ing and debt, 81, 83, 92; Manhattan organ­ ization, 50–62, 60, 83, 85; suburban dioceses, 217, 224 Archdiocese of Newark, 50, 224 architecture and modernity, 86–88, 87, 89, 219–220, 220 Are You ­There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Blume), 1–3, 10, 232, 234 Arrighi, Antonio, 15 art, visual, 11, 12, 20–22 assimilation: Jewish, 72–73, 174; white immigrants, 115 attendance. See religious attendance authority and hierarchy: Catholic, 24, 49–51, 52–53, 55, 57–58, 59, 60, 62, 77, 198, 217, 224; Jewish, 62–63, 63–64, 67, 70; Protestant, 24, 39, 49, 62, 77 Baker, Ray Stannard, 86 Baldwin, James, 6, 113–115, 114, 142, 260n1, 261n2 Ballard, Guy, 96 Baptists: congregations and churches, 38, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 116–117, 118, 119–120, 122–123, 124–125, 128, 134, 135, 189–191, 192; ordination, 39; population data, 43, 126; publishing, 103; roots and history, 36, 154 bar and bat mitzvahs, 185, 232–233 Barney, J. Stewart, 88 Batterham, Forster, 178 Baudelaire, Charles, 8 Becton, Josephine, 142–144, 143 Beecher, Henry Ward, 28, 120 Belkin, Samuel, 199 Benderly, Samson, 184 Berachah Home, 41 Berlin, 19, 20, 23, 24, 43, 159, 168, 170, 172, 173

Berrigan, Daniel and Philip, 172 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, Amityville, New York, 214–215 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, Manhattan, 116, 120, 121–122, 126–127, 127, 128, 129, 135 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, Morristown, New Jersey, 215 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, Vauxhall, New Jersey, 215 Bible: passages, 34, 120, 170, 172, 233; preaching, 137; public school reading, 108–110, 226; publishing, 102, 103, 154; religious education, 45, 69, 110–111; versions, 29–30, 69, 103 Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous), 204, 205 Billy Sunday Chorus, 79 Black Israelites, 144 Black Pentecostalism, 41–42 Blanton, Smiley, 195, 198 Blume, Judy, 1–3, 232, 234 Bolden, Richard M., 126 Bomar, Willie Melmoth, 96, 98 book burning, 152, 153, 160, 270n1 Booth, Charles, 18–19 Booth, Evangeline, 199–200 Briggs, Charles Augustus, 39 Broadway Tabernacle, 88, 99 Brook, William H., 124 Brooklyn Bridge (Stella), 11–13, 12 Brooklyn Sunday School Union, 100 Brooklyn Tabernacle, 102 Brown, Ethelred, 199 Brown, J. W., 137 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 214, 215 Buckley, Maureen, 192–193 Buckley, William, 182, 192–193 Burnett, J. C., 105 Burrows, Edmund G., 8 Cabrini, ­Mother Frances Xavier, 55 Cahan, Abraham, 4, 102 Călinescu, Matei, 8 Calvary Baptist Church, 80, 88, 89, 106 Calvinism, 194 cantors, 62, 63, 64, 104, 106–107

I ndex

capitalism: congregational management, 45–46; moral critiques, 159–160, 179–180; Protestantism and, 5, 196–197, 199 Carroll, John, 50 cartoons: religious diversity, 28, 29; white flight, 213, 214 Case, Francis, 49 Catholic bishops: Catholic orga­nizational structures, 49–50, 52, 53; history, 29–30, 49–50; NY religion, 4; sainthood pro­cess, 183 Catholics and Catholicism: anti-­ Catholicism, 14, 26, 27, 29–30, 50, 106, 193, 197; churches, 51–52, 52–53, 58, 59, 61, 61–62, 80–85, 82, 84, 92–93, 94, 116, 218, 219, 220–222, 222, 224, 233; diversity, 49, 50–52, 53, 54, 60, 232–233; ethnic enclaves and prejudices, 28, 30–31, 50, 51–52; history, 17–18, 19, 35–36, 230; immigration and immigrants, 26, 27, 28, 30–31, 50–51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 61–62, 83; Manhattan religious development, 9, 50–62, 77, 80–83, 179–180; mass attendance and membership, 19, 51, 58, 179, 231, 232, 233; ministries, quality and ser­vice, 4, 24, 54–59; parish structure, 24, 51–52, 55, 57, 83; population data, 42, 51, 83; Protestant relations, 15, 27, 29–30, 35–36, 43, 50, 202, 203; publishing and media, 101, 107, 108, 165–166, 180, 182, 203; religious ­orders, 52–54, 57–58; saints, 55, 62, 84–85, 182–183; spiritual life, 58, 84–85, 178, 179, 182, 219, 232–234; theologians, 154, 163–168, 177–183 Catholic schools, 30, 53, 54, 56, 83, 84, 85, 218, 226, 232 Catholic Worker (newspaper), 180, 182 Catholic Worker movement, 164, 165, 178–183, 181 Central Conference of American Rabbis, 65, 153, 202 charities and missionaries: Catholic, 24, 54–58, 58–59, 179, 180, 182–183, 200; Christian and humanitarian aid, 103, 189–190, 200; interfaith, 202; Jewish

297

sisterhoods, 74–75, 200; laborers, focus on, 47–49; in poverty-­stricken areas, 15, 38–39, 180; socie­ties, 37, 38–39, 40–41, 54, 77, 129, 199–200 chevras: buildings and locations, 90, 93, 95, 95–96; formation, 66, 71–72, 76 Choir ­music, 64, 66, 79, 104, 139, 140 Christian Herald (periodical), 102–103 Chris­tian­ity and Democracy (Jacques Maritain), 166 Christian-­Jewish relations. See interfaith relations A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question ( Jacques Maritain), 164 Chris­tian­ity and Democracy (Jacques Maritain), 166 Christians and Chris­tian­ity: civil rights movement, 122–124, 171; denomination portrayals and ste­reo­types, 28, 29; institution-­building, 35–36, 77, 230; racial separatism and racism, 29, 90–91, 123–124, 189; social gospel, 38, 189–190; theology and ethics, 158, 160, 161–166, 179–180. See also specific denominations Christian Science, 32, 42, 106, 149, 153, 200 Church of ­England, 16–17, 19, 36 civic life and aims, 111, 203. See also community centers civil rights movement: opponents, 192–193; religious leaders and activists, 122–123, 124, 147, 171, 171–172, 181, 182, 188–193 Clarke, Jennie, 141 class. See socio­economics and religion Clinchy, Everett, 203 Coffin, Henry Sloane, 156, 157, 160, 190 Colored American Magazine, 123 Columbia Rec­ords, 104–105 Columbia University, 160, 183–184 Commandment Keepers, 144 communities. See community centers; cultures and socie­ties community centers: institutional church and social gospel, 135, 136, 189–190; nondenominational churches, 139; synagogue centers, 73–74, 184, 219–220, 223

298 I ndex

Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Demo­cratic Way of Life, 206–209 congregational management, 76–77; eclectic groups and storefront churches, 139, 147, 148, 149; gender and limitations, 127–128, 226; indebtedness, 92, 117, 134–135, 255n23; Jews, 62–64, 66–67, 69, 74–75; Protestants, 45–46, 127–128, 129, 136, 216. See also authority and hierarchy Congregation Ohab Zedek, 72, 73, 90, 91, 101, 104 Conservative Judaism: communities, 73–74, 184, 185; history, 68, 70, 186–188 consumerism and materialism, 211, 212, 228 conversion. See religious conversion Corrigan, Michael, 4, 53, 55, 58, 62 Corsini, Harold, 200, 201 Crisis, The (periodical), 117, 131–132 Cullen, Frederick Asbury, 136, 199 cultures and socie­ties: formative myths, 4–5; Jewish theology, 185–186; mass and material culture, 211, 212, 227, 228; religious identity and relevance, 6–8, 35, 77, 156–157. See also religion and “real life” Day, Dorothy, 85, 154, 163, 164, 165, 177–183, 181, 277n63 democracy and demo­cratic socie­ties, 111, 163, 165, 166, 186, 206–209 demonstrations and protests: antiwar, 171, 172; racial justice, 124, 171, 171–172, 189. See also Parades Dennis, Ruth, 141–142 Dewey, John, 110 Dioceses, Catholic, 49–54, 57–58, 217, 224 Divine, ­Father, 145–147, 148 divine healing, 41, 42, 96, 146, 147–148, 200 Dix, Morgan, 30 Dixon, Thomas, 124 Doctrine and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 127, 129 Does Civilization Need Religion? (Reinhold Niebuhr), 156

Doran, George H., 46, 103 Dorcas socie­ties, 40 Doty, Roy, 213, 214 Douglass, H. Paul, 44–45, 46, 216 draft, military, 150, 172, 181–182 Dranah group, 96 Du Bois, W. E. B., 32, 43–44, 104, 120, 137, 176, 189 Durkheim, Émile, 6–7, 184 Early Levittown NY and Beyond, 231–234 Easter, 100, 104 Ebenezer Wesleyan Methodist Church, 139, 140, 141 ecclesiastical authority, 50, 56, 62 eclectic religious groups, 41–42, 96, 138, 141, 144, 145–147, 153–154, 200–201 economic management: Catholic: Archdiocese of New York, 81, 83; congregations, 45–46, 127–128, 129, 136, 147, 148, 149; gender limitations, 127–128; real estate, 83, 92, 117, 134–135, 217–218. See also fund­rais­ing Eddy, Mary Baker, 42, 200 education. See public schools; religious education efficiency: charities reform, 58; congregation management, 45–46, 216, 217 Einstein, Albert, 96, 165, 207 Eisenhower, Dwight, 216 Eisenstein, Ira, 188 electrification and illumination, 48, 79, 92–93, 94 Engel v.Vitale (1962), 109–110, 226 Episcopal Church: congregations and churches, 30, 86–88, 87, 90, 91, 93, 130–131; missions and outreach, 38–39; publishing, 103; roots and history, 36 Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, 90, 91 Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, 52, 87–88 ethnic prejudice: against Catholics, 28, 30–31, 50, 51–52; against Jews, 28–29, 30–31, 65

I ndex

Eucharist, 84, 179, 232 Eu­rope: church history, 17–18, 19, 36, 230; old and new world denominations, 35–36, 65, 77, 230; religious attendance, 18–19, 58; urbanization, 18, 19–20. See also immigrants and immigration Evangelical Christians: national conference, 13–14; new congregations, 41–42, 138, 146–148, 231; New York City conference, 14–15, 22, 43; preachers and churches, 14, 41, 42, 96, 97, 98, 138, 141–144, 143, 146–148, 200–202; radio, 106; theory, branches, and denominations, 41–42, 148 fairs: black Protestant congregations, 126; Catholic churches, 59, 60, 61, 61–62, 100 faith: civilization and, 23, 77, 170, 174–175; eclectic groups, 147, 148–149; historical theories, 240n15; moral action and, 158; religion as personal experience, 7, 33–34, 84–85, 179, 194–195, 232; religion as “ultimate concern,” 6, 162. See also religious attendance Farley, John, 62, 94 Feininger, Jane Pottinger, 123 Feininger, Karl, 123, 200 Ferber, Herbert, 219 Festival (Celentano), 61 financing, churches, 92, 134–135. See also fund­rais­ing Finkelstein, Louis, 152, 199, 206–209 The Fire Next Time (Baldwin), 6, 113 First Amendment rights, 202 Fisher, Ada Cox, 96 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 104–105 Fordham University, 57, 225 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 39, 103, 107, 199, 202, 203 Foster, George Washington, 130 Fox, Emmet, 96 France, 19–20, 163–165, 165–166 Frank Leslie’s Weekly, 30, 60 Freud, Sigmund, 4–5 fund­rais­ing: Catholic churches, 55, 59, 61–62, 81; Christian aid, 103, 190, 200;

299

eclectic religious groups, 147, 148; indebtedness and, 92, 117, 134–135; Protestant churches, 91, 125–126, 134, 135; suburban congregations, 223–224; synagogues, 91 funerals, 67, 68, 82, 101 ­future of religion, 231–234 Garvey, Marcus, 132, 145–146, 148–149 Gates, James M., 105–106 gender and gender discrimination: Catholic religious ­orders, 53–57; female preachers, 141–144, 143, 226–227; Jewish female authority, 74, 107, 185, 227; Jewish female education, 69, 176–177, 177; men’s morality issues, 121; Protestant denominations, 39–40, 119, 126–129, 129; ­women’s ­labor and authority, 40, 54–57, 59, 74–75, 126–129, 129, 199–200, 226–227 Germany: religious populations, 33, 168; theologians and works, 158, 159–160. See also World War II Giddings, Franklin, 184 Gilbert, M. W., 125 Glad Tidings Tabernacle, 41 God, seeking: Alcoholics Anonymous, 204–205; church environments’ power, 85, 219, 221, 233; literary portrayals, 2, 234; personal spiritual experiences, 85, 178–179, 233–234; theological approaches, 161–162, 169–170; via religious institutions, 33–35. See also prayer God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (Heschel), 169–170 Goodman, Percival, 219 Gordon, Richard and Katherine, 210 Gospel Tabernacle, 41, 88 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), 113, 114, 260n1, 261n2 Gottlieb, Adolph, 219 Grace, Charles Manuel “Sweet ­Daddy,” 145, 147–148 Graham, Billy, 80, 197, 228–229, 231 ­Great Depression, 189–190, 194 Greenberg, Simon, 167, 208 Grunwald, Max, 225

300 I ndex

Guideposts (periodical), 197, 198 Gurock, Jeffrey, 8, 9 Hadassah, 75, 200, 224, 226 halakah (divine law), 170, 173–174, 176 Halakhic Man (Soloveitchik), 176 Hansen, Austin, 192 Harlem, New York: church populations, 42, 51–52, 83, 86, 90–91, 116–117, 122, 130–151, 131, 191; eclectic religious groups, 141–149, 201; population history, 115, 116, 137, 261n4; populations and media, 105–106; real estate moves and racism, 90–91, 123–124, 130; storefront churches, 95–96, 113, 114, 137–144, 140, 149 Harrower, C. S., 25 Hasidic Judaism, 168, 169–170 Hatcher, W. E., 29 Hayes, Patrick, 57, 58, 93, 180, 199 Hayes, W. P., 137 healing ministries, 41, 42, 96, 146, 147–148, 200 Hebrew Union College, 65, 67, 168, 169 Henderson, Thomas, 119, 121 Herberg, W ­ ill, 211, 227, 228, 231 herem (censure), 152–153, 176–177, 187 heresy, 39, 53, 124, 164 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 154, 155, 168–172, 171, 172, 175, 177, 183, 187, 199, 205, 234 Hibner, Keith, 219, 220 hierarchy, church. See authority and hierarchy Holmes, John Haynes, 199 Holy Name of Jesus Church, 83, 84, 85, 100 Holy Trinity Baptist Church, Amityville, New York, 215 Hook, Sidney, 207 Horn, Rosa, 141–142, 144 hospitals, 54–55, 200 Houses of Hospitality (Catholic Worker movement), 179, 180, 182 housing: church and charitable offerings, 131, 135, 140, 147, 180, 182; poor conditions for lower class, 17, 23; segregation, 15–16, 123, 130

Hughes, John, 29–30, 80–81 ­human dignity, 163, 166 ­human rights, 166, 181, 189 identity. See religious identity Imes, William Lloyd, 199 immigrants and immigration: African Americans, 115, 120, 144, 214; anti-­immigrant sentiment, 14, 26, 27, 28–29, 30–31, 50; assimilation, 72–73, 115; Catholics, 26, 27, 28, 30–31, 50–51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 61–62, 83; financial ser­vices, 92; Jews, 3–4, 27, 28–29, 30–31, 50, 63, 65–66, 72–73, 75–76, 102; Manhattan populations, 25–29, 30–31, 50–51, 115, 214; New World institution-­building, 35–36, 77, 230; outreach and ser­vice, 38, 55; religious leaders on, 3–4, 14–15, 16; settled vs. new, 28–29, 30–31, 65; US populations, 26, 32, 115, 156 individual religious experience, 7, 33–34, 84–85, 179, 194–195, 232 Institute for Social and Religious Research, 44–45 institutional church movement, 38–39, 135, 189–190 Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, 141, 150 interfaith relations: building sharing, 217–218; interfaith efforts, 165, 170–172, 202–203, 206–209, 224, 226; organ­izations, 154, 181, 202, 203; pluralism and personal relations, 230–231, 232–234; suburban environment, 224, 226; theological responses to antisemitism, 160, 164, 165, 166 Ireland, John, 24, 241n27 Isaacs, Samuel, 64 Islam, 6, 9, 26, 144–145 I Went to Church in New York (Bomar), 96, 98 James, William, 7, 32, 33–34, 35, 77, 184, 230 Jefferson, Charles, 99 Jesuits, 52–53, 57, 101, 203, 207 Jewish Communal Register, 75–76, 101 Jewish Science, 200

I ndex

Jewish Theological Seminary, 67, 68–69, 73, 75, 107, 152, 161, 165, 167, 169, 187, 206 Jews and Judaism: cantors and ­music, 104, 106–107; congregations, 62, 63–65, 66–67, 68, 69–70, 71–72, 73–74, 90, 93, 95–96, 184, 216–217, 223–224, 250n77; controversies and herem, 152–153, 176–177, 187; denominations, 68–70, 176, 186, 249n62; diasporas and institution-­building, 35, 63, 71–72, 77, 144, 230; diversity, 63, 64, 65, 72, 232–233; immigration, 3–4, 27, 28–29, 30–31, 50, 63, 65–66, 72–73, 75–76, 102; lit­er­a­ture and publishing, 1–2, 75–76, 101–102, 186–187; Manhattan religious development, 9, 62–76, 77, 153, 172, 173–177, 184, 206; NY populations, 3–4, 27, 28–29, 63, 65, 70–71, 71–72, 75–76; orga­nizational management, 62–64, 66–67, 69, 74–75; publishing and media, 101–102, 175–176; rabbis, 64–65, 67–68, 71, 72–73, 101, 107, 152–153, 167, 168–177, 183–188, 187, 250n77, 251n79; reforms and new thought, 64–65, 69, 152–153, 154, 169–172, 173, 176–177, 183–188; religious conversions, 4, 28, 43. See also antisemitism; interfaith relations; synagogues “Jim Crow Manhattan,” 115–151, 189–193 job ads, 123 Johnson, Elden J., 96, 97, 98, 138 Johnson, Lyndon, 192 Joseph, Jacob, 67, 71, 101, 173 Judaism as a Civilization: ­Toward a Reconstruction of American-­Jewish Life (Kaplan), 183, 185–186 Kallen, Horace, 176 Kaplan, Mordecai, 73, 152–153, 154, 183–188, 187, 202, 203, 273n27 Keats, John, 210 Kehillah experiment, 70–72, 74–75, 75–76, 184, 250n77 Kennedy, John F., 193, 197–198 King, James, 14, 28

301

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 171, 171–172, 191 King James Bible, 29–30, 108 Klopsch, Louis, 102–103, 257n45 Kohn, Jacob, 66 Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim, 74, 75 Kunz, Carl, 202 ­labor movements: Catholic Worker, 179–180, 181; Jewish immigrants, 65–66; opposition, 198; Protestant efforts, 46–49, 48, 92, 191 ­Labor ­Temple, 47–49, 48, 92 La Farge, John, 91 Laidlaw, Walter, 43–44, 45, 72, 245n24 Lawson, R. C., 42, 146 Leuba, James H., 7 Levitt, William, and “Levittowns,” 214 Levittown, New Jersey, 228 Levittown, New York, 217–218, 220, 224, 225–226, 231–234 Levittown Reform ­Temple, 220 Levy, Eva Garson, 200 Lichtenstein, Morris, 200 life experiences. See religion and “real life” lit­er­at­ ure: content and morality, 99, 124; race and religion in fiction, 113–115, 124; religious-­identity themes, 1–2, 5, 102, 113; socie­ties, 122, 125. See also media and publishing Locke, Alain, 207, 208 London, ­England: church populations and attendance, 16–17, 18–19, 24; growth, 19, 20, 20–21; literary portrayals, 22 “Lonely Man of Faith” (Soloveitchik), 176 The Long Loneliness (Day), 85, 180–181 Loomis, Samuel Lane, 13, 22–24, 26–28 Loubat, Joseph, 81 lyceum socie­ties, 121–122, 125–126, 128 lynching, 124, 189 Magnes, Judah, 71 Malcolm X, 145 Manhattan, New York, New York: art portrayals, 21, 21–22; buildings of worship, 21, 33, 42, 48, 61, 73–74, 78–79, 80–101, 82, 84, 87, 89, 94, 116–117, 118, 123–124, 130–135, 131,

302 I ndex

Manhattan, New York, New York (continued) 133, 137–151, 194, 233; diversity of populations and religions, 5, 9, 15–16, 25–31, 36–37, 42–43, 49, 115, 214, 227; economics and geography, 14–15, 83, 86–88, 90–92, 130; literary portrayals, 1–3, 113, 151; Midtown, 89, 92, 96, 115, 130; population growth, 20, 115, 261n4; religious history, 2–3, 31, 32–33, 34–77, 153–155, 199–209, 212, 227; religious leaders’ opinions, 3–4, 14, 80; sacralization of (urban) space, 78–112; San Juan Hill neighborhood, 116, 120, 126, 134, 136, 150; Tenderloin district, 115, 116, 130, 134, 136, 149–150. See also Harlem, New York Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (Heschel), 169–170 Mann, Horace (En­glish barrister), 17–18 Marble Collegiate Church, 194, 195, 196, 199 Marching Blacks (Adam Clayton Powell Jr.), 191 Maritain, Jacques, 154, 155, 163–168, 167, 170, 175, 177, 178, 199, 202, 207 Maritain, Raïssa, 163, 164, 165, 166 mass (Catholic), 58, 84, 179, 232, 233 mass culture, 211, 212, 227, 228 Maurin, Peter, 164, 178–180, 181, 182 McCloskey, John, 81, 82 McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), 111 McCulloch, James, 46 McGlynn, Edward, 58 McKay, Claude, 151 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 41 McPherson, Simon J., 13–14 Mead, George Whitehead, 45 media and publishing: African Americans, 105–106, 117, 119, 123–124, 148–149; media programs, 79, 106–108, 112, 141, 195, 229; press and periodicals, 46, 101–103, 112, 148–149, 154, 165–166, 175–176, 182, 197, 203; recordings, 104–106, 136–137. See also advertising medical charities and ser­vices, 54–55, 200 Methodists: AME churches, 15–16, 36–37, 116, 120, 121; NY conferences and

congregations, 37–38, 194; population data, 43, 126; roots and history, 36, 154 Miller, Perry, 176 Mills, C. Wright, 210 “mind cure” congregations, 42, 123, 146–147, 195 Minhag Amerika (Isaac Mayer Wise), 64, 65 missionaries. See charities and missionaries Modern Cities and Their Religious Prob­lems (Loomis), 13, 22–24, 26–27 modernity, 7–8; architecture, 86–90, 87, 89, 219–220, 220; art portrayals, 11–13, 31; perceived threat to religion, 2–5, 7, 8, 16–17, 76–77, 229; religions’ and churches’ responses, 9, 31, 33, 34–35, 46–49, 52, 53, 54–57, 56, 58, 63, 76–77, 79, 101–108, 112, 149–151, 174–177, 183–188, 199, 229–231; suburban life, 211, 219–223; technology, 48, 79–80, 92–93, 94, 112. See also urbanization Modern Orthodoxy, 174, 175 Mohammed, Warith Deen, 145 Monroe, Henry A., 15–16, 121 Moore, Deborah Dash, 8, 9 Moorish Science movement, 145 morality issues: Christian ethics, 158, 160, 161–162, 163–165, 166, 180, 205; in education, 111, 225–226; and racial ste­reo­types, 105, 121, 122–123, 124; temperance, 40, 121, 125 Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Reinhold Niebuhr), 158 Morris, Charles Satchell, 119, 120, 122–123, 125 Moses, Alfred, 200 Mosques, 145 ­Mother Zion Church, 36–37, 91, 116, 120, 127, 128, 136, 137 Motherwell, Robert, 219 Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church, 114, 132, 133, 260n1, 265n42 Mount Olivet Baptist Church, 86, 91, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 124–125, 128, 131, 132, 134–135, 137, 254n15

I ndex

Mudie-­Smith, Richard, 18–19, 23 Muhammad, Elijah, 141, 145 Muslims, 25, 145, 148 mutual aid socie­ties, 61, 71, 73, 76 NAACP, 117, 123, 189 Nassau County, New York, 212–215, 216, 217, 225–226, 231–233 National Conference of Christians and Jews, 154, 181, 203 National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, 197–198 National Review (periodical), 192–193 National Urban League, 124, 138 Nation of Islam, 145 natu­ral law, 163, 166 Neoorthodoxy, Christian, 158–159 New Thought movement, 42, 96, 98, 123, 144, 146–147, 153, 195, 200 New York: diversity of populations and religions, 25–27, 232–233; population growth, 20; urban-­suburban population shift, 212–214. See also Manhattan, New York, New York New York Age (newspaper), 117, 120, 121, 124, 128, 130, 134, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145–146, 150, 202 New York Amsterdam News (newspaper), 105, 128, 141, 145, 202 New York City Department of Education, 108–109, 111 New York City Federation of Churches, 43–44, 137 New York Federation of Reform Synagogues, 218, 220 New York Herald Tribune (newspaper): church architecture, 219; church real estate, 130; religion series, 153; religious coverage and commentary, 145, 164, 186; shun Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, 182 New York Tabernacle, 79 New York Times (newspaper): book reviews, 113, 186, 188, 261n2; church real estate, 90, 92, 93; crime coverage and racism, 122–123; religious conversion, 43; religious coverage and commentary, 3, 14, 25, 39, 40–41, 100, 152, 206,

303

218; religious ser­vices advertising, 99, 106, 256n34 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 154, 155–158, 159, 160–161, 165, 170, 175, 177, 197, 199, 203, 205, 206, 228 Niebuhr, Ursula, 157, 165 nondenominational churches. See eclectic religious groups; storefront churches nuns, 53–57, 56, 200, 218 Okeh Rec­ords, 105–106 O’Leary’s Schul, 178 “On Broadway” (McKay), 151 oratory and sermons: recordings, 105–106, 136–137; skill and style, 105, 119, 125, 136–137, 156, 157, 173–174, 175, 195, 197; topics and advertising, 99, 136, 228 ordination standards: Catholic ­orders, 52, 53–54; modernization and equality, 127, 226–227; Protestant, 39, 127 orga­nizational structures. See authority and hierarchy; congregational management orphanages, 54, 55, 56–57 Orthodox Judaism: herem, 152–153, 176–177, 187; history, 69, 70, 174, 184–186; schools and organ­izations, 67, 68, 175, 184; theologians, 172–177 Our Country: Its Pos­si­ble F ­ uture and Its Pre­sent Crisis (Strong), 14, 26 Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 51, 61, 61–62, 83 Our Lady Queen of Peace, Maywood, New Jersey, 220–222, 222, 224 Palestine, 71, 75, 104, 158 pan-­Africanism, 148–149 Parades, 30, 67, 68, 99–101, 146, 147 Paradise Baptist, 139–141 Paris, France, 19–20, 22, 24 Peace activism, 171, 172, 181–182 Peace Mission, 146–147 Peale–­Blanton Institute and Counseling Center, 195, 198 Peale, Norman Vincent, 107, 108, 154, 155, 193–199, 196 Peale, Ruth Stafford, 196, 197 Pentecostalism, 41–42, 96–98, 106, 138, 141–142, 144, 146, 148, 153, 200–202

304 I ndex

Philanthropy. See charities and missionaries phi­los­o­phers. See theologians and religious thought photography: churches and preachers, 96, 97, 142–144, 143, 148, 200, 201; nuns, 56, 57; theologians, 159, 162, 167, 171, 177, 187 Pike, James, 228 Pilgrim Pentecostal Church of God, 96, 97, 98 Pius VI (pope), 50 Pius VII (pope), 50 Pius IX (pope), 81 Pius X (pope), 85 Pius XI (pope), 163 Poland, 35, 66, 164, 168, 169 po­liti­cal affiliation and activism: clergy, 125, 147, 188–193, 197–198; electoral politics, 188, 191–192, 197, 216; thinkers and theologians, 172, 179, 209; voting, 231 Polland, Annie, 8, 9 Popes: Catholic orga­nizational structures, 49–50; politics, 163; statuary and gifts, 62, 81; surveys, 85 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 132, 150, 154, 155, 188, 190–193, 192, 199, 208 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 86, 91, 134, 137, 150–151, 154, 155, 188–190, 192, 193, 199 The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale), 194, 195, 197 practical religion. See religion and “real life” prayer: Alcoholics Anonymous, 205–206, 283n109; Catholic, 84–85, 179, 182; Jewish, 187; Protestant, 195; public schools, 109–110, 225 preaching. See oratory and sermons Presbyterians: black congregations, 116, 124; conferences / congregations, 38, 41, 86, 122; heresy, 39; missions and outreach, 38, 46, 47–49; roots and history, 36 Princi­ples of Successful Church Advertising (Stelzle), 47, 48, 92 “Prophet Bess,” 146 “Prophet” Mathias (Robert Mathews), 3 proselytizing and evangelism, 36, 42, 46

Protestants and Protestantism: authority structure, 24, 39, 49, 62, 77; Catholic relations, 15, 27, 29–30, 35–36, 43, 50, 197, 202, 203; churches, 86–88, 87, 89, 90–92, 93, 95–96, 97, 98, 116–137, 118, 131, 133; church ser­vices, 24, 25, 96, 97, 98–99, 135, 136; conferences and conventions, 13–14, 16, 22–23, 24–25, 26, 27, 29, 43, 92, 216, 241n27; congregations, 14–15, 23–25, 29, 36–38, 39–40, 41, 42–43, 44–46, 86, 116, 194, 201, 211, 216, 231; economic aspects, 5, 196–197; history, 17–18, 19, 26, 35–37, 153–154, 230; institution-­building, 35–36, 194, 230; leaders and clergy, 13, 14, 25, 27–28, 30, 39–40, 41–42, 49, 88, 96, 105, 107, 110, 119–123, 124, 127–128, 134, 136–137, 150, 154, 155–159, 188–199, 200–202; Manhattan religious development, 9, 14–16, 25–31, 32–33, 34–49, 77, 115–151, 153–154, 193; orga­nizational management, 45–46, 127–128, 129, 136, 216; publishing and media, 46, 102–103, 107–108, 195, 197, 201; reform recommendations, 23–25; religious uniformity and prejudices, 27–28, 29–30; socie­ties, 37, 40, 224; surveys, 43–45, 216, 245n24; theologians, 154–168, 188–199. See also specific denominations psy­chol­ogy and psychiatry, 7, 161, 163, 194–196, 210, 228 public relations. See advertising public schools: architecture / design, 85; prayer, 109–110, 225, 226; religious reading / instruction, 79, 108–111 Quakers, 16, 26, 36, 39 Rabbinical Assembly, 70, 152–153 Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, 68, 73, 173 race and racism: civil rights activism, 122–123, 124, 147, 171, 171–172, 182, 188–193; institutional and economic, 15–16, 86, 90–91, 115–117, 123–124, 130, 149–150, 191–193, 208, 214; race prejudice, 29, 105, 115, 121, 122–123,

I ndex

130, 149–151, 189, 191–193, 208, 214; recording and ­music, 105; white flight, 213, 214. See also ethnic prejudice; segregation race riots, 124, 150, 189, 191 Radio programming, 79, 106–107, 141, 195, 201, 229 Rainsford, William, 38 Ransom, Reverdy, 121–122, 135 Raphall, Morris, 64 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 38 Reconstructionist Judaism, 153, 183–188 recorded media, technology and publishing, 104–106, 258n48 redlining (real estate), 86, 90, 115, 116, 123, 130, 214 Reformation, 18, 230 Reformed Churches, 36, 194 Reform Judaism: congregations and synagogues, 73, 74, 75, 96, 216–217, 218, 223–224; history, 69, 70, 185, 186, 249n62; organ­izations, 65, 153, 202; religious colleges, 65, 67, 169; ser­vices advertising and content, 99; sisterhoods, 74, 75 Refuge Church of Christ, 42, 146 “Regents’ Prayer,” 109, 225, 226 Reid, Ira D., 95–96, 138 Reisner, Christian, 49 religion, general: ­future, 231–234; meaning and limitations, 34, 161–162; recognizing and defining, 5, 6–7, 33, 162; and science, 165, 169–170, 207, 209; super­natural beings, 5–6, 185 religion and “real life”: institutional church / social gospel, 38–39, 135, 189–190; Jewish life, 174–175, 186; Protestant preaching themes, 156, 194; religious identity and experience, 7, 33, 34, 84–85, 179, 194–195, 231–234 religious attendance: advertising / publicity, 47–49, 96, 97, 98, 98–99, 106, 196; attendee experiences, 19, 24, 84–85, 99, 179, 232; Catholic, 19, 51, 58, 179, 231, 232, 233; class links, 17, 18–19, 23, 24; urban vs. rural, 22; US population, 23, 27, 215–216, 231. See also religious education

305

religious conversion: Catholics, 163, 178; Jews, 4, 27–28, 43; literary portrayals, 6, 142; Protestant aims, 27–28, 43, 202 religious education: Catholic schools, 30, 53, 54, 56, 83, 84, 85, 218, 226, 232; character and morals, 111, 225–226; in church ser­vice, 99; clergy backgrounds and seminaries, 119, 125, 136, 156–157, 190, 194; Jewish / rabbinical, 65, 67–70, 71, 72–73, 173, 175, 176–177, 177, 183–184, 188; personal experiences, 232; public schools / instruction time, 79, 108–111; Sunday school / Protestant, 40, 45, 90, 100, 127–129, 136; of ­women, 176–177, 177; ­women’s ­labor, 40, 54, 56, 127–129, 226. See also Jewish Theological Seminary; Union Theological Seminary religious identity: vs. ethnic / national, 26, 28–29, 30–31, 50–51, 99–100, 231; evangelical, 144; Jewish, 176; of literary characters, 1–2, 113; vs. mass culture /  materialism, 211, 227; ­people and society, 6–8, 35, 77, 156–157; personal experiences, 7, 33, 34, 84–85, 179, 194–195, 232 religious ­orders (Catholic), 52–54, 57–58 religious publishing. See media and publishing religious surveys: Catholic, 58, 85; Federation of Churches, 137, 138; Jewish congregations, 71–72, 95–96, 250n77; Jewish migration and populations, 72, 75–76; membership, 215–216; Protestants, 43–45, 216, 245n24; religious attendance and experience, 16–17, 18–19, 23, 231–234 Renwick, James, Jr., 80 Revel, Bernard, 68 Revell, Fleming H., 46, 47, 103 revivals: black churches, 120–121, 125, 136; Catholic, 53; eclectic and evangelical, 41–42, 146, 148; Manhattan history, 3, 41–42, 120–121, 146; publicity, 47 Reynolds, Malvina, 211 Rhinelander, Julia and Serena, 91 Riesman, David, 210–211

306 I ndex

Rights of Man and Natu­ral Law ( Jacques Maritain), 166 Riots and Ruins (Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), 150, 191 rites and rituals: Catholic, 84, 85, 178, 179, 232, 233; class estrangement, 18; Jewish, 185, 232–233 Riverside Church, 91, 93, 199, 228 Robinson, Ida Bell, 200–202, 282n99 Robinson, John W., 137 Rock, Howard, 8, 9 Rocke­fel­ler, John D., 44, 45, 91, 92 Rosenblatt, Yossele, 79, 104, 107 Roth, Emery, 86 rural life, 22, 32 Russell, Bertrand, 210 Russell, Frank, 14, 27 Salem Methodist, 122, 128, 132, 135, 136, 150 Salerno, Joseph, 219, 221 Salvation Army, 40–41, 199–200 Scalabrini F ­ athers, 53 Scalabrini, Giovanni Battista, 4, 55 Schack, Sarah, 78, 252n1 Schauffler, Adolphus, 15 Schechter, Solomon, 68–70, 184 Schwartz, Joe, 56, 57 Science and religion, 165, 169–170, 207, 209 Secularism: Catholic responses, 52, 53, 59; historical religious indifference, 17–18; and religions’ responses to modernity, 77, 174–175; study and lit­er­a­ture, 240n14; urban conditions and, 17, 65 Seeger, Pete, 211 seeking God. See God, seeking segregation: churches / religious, 29, 90–91, 116, 123–124, 150, 189; housing, 15–16, 123, 130; schools, 214, 215; societal, 123, 149–150, 189, 191–192, 208, 215 Seixas, Gershom Mendes, 64 Selma to Montgomery march, 1965, 171, 171–172 Serenity Prayer, 205–206, 283n109 sermons. See oratory and sermons

ser­vice: religious tenets and outreach, 24, 190; urban outreach, 38, 41, 189–190. See also charities and missionaries sexual abuse, 231 Sheen, Fulton J., 79, 107, 108, 197, 199 Shelley, Thomas J., 8, 9 Shiloh Presbyterian Church, 116, 121, 124 Sibour, Marie-­Dominique, 19 ­Silent March (1917), 124, 189 Silverman, Joseph, 28–29 Simmons, Roscoe Conkling, 122 Simpson, A.B., 41, 88, 119 Sims, George H., 119, 120, 136–137 Sisterhoods, Jewish, 73, 74–75, 200 “skyscraper churches,” 88, 89 slavery, 39, 116, 120, 154, 189 Smith, Jonathan Z., 7 Smith, Robert, 204 social gospel movement: influence on Jewish congregations, 73; institutional church and, 38–39, 135; leaders and works, 38, 189–190 The Socialist Decision (Tillich), 160 socialist ethics, 160, 179–180 socie­ties, religious: Catholic, 58–59, 224; charitable, 38–39, 40, 77, 199–200; cultural (Protestant), 121–122, 125–126; fledgling congregations and, 36; national, formation of, 37; secular, 59; ­women’s, 40, 59, 122, 125–126, 129, 224 society. See cultures and socie­ties socio­economics and religion: capitalism, critiques of, 159–160, 179–180; charitable outreach, 38, 41, 179–180, 182–183, 189–190; economic conditions and religious identity, 156, 189–190; ministerial divides, 17, 18, 125; poverty areas, 15, 17, 23, 38–39, 180; Protestantism and capitalism, 5, 159–160, 196–197, 199; upper-class religiosity, 18, 19, 23, 24; working-class estrangement, 17, 18–19, 23, 24 so­cio­log­i­cal studies: American religion, 32–33, 77; Protestant church management, 43–45, 216, 286n12; religious attendance, 18–19; suburbs and religion, 227–228. See also surveys

I ndex

Soloveitchik, Joseph, 154, 155, 172–177, 177, 183, 199 Soyer, Daniel, 8, 9 Spalding, John Lancaster, 4 Spellman, Francis Joseph, 199 spiritualism, 146 spirituality: architecture and, 219, 221; Catholic, 58, 84–85, 179, 219; evangelical, 142–144, 146; and urban milieu, 154–156, 204–206; urban spirituality and art, 11–13 spirituals (­music), 104–105, 122 St. Andrew’s Episcopal, 90, 123 St. Benedict the Moor, 116, 117, 121, 130 St. Charles Borromeo, Missionaries of, 4 St. Cyprian’s Episcopal, 117, 120 St. Gaudens, Louis, 91 St. James Presbyterian, 86, 119, 124, 136, 199 St. Mark’s Episcopal, 93 St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal: church building, 130, 131, 131, 132, 134, 135; fair, 126; ministers, 15–16, 121, 124, 136, 137; revivals, 120 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 59, 60, 80–83, 82, 92–93, 94, 100 St. Patrick’s Day, 100 St. Paul’s Chapel, 33 St. Paul’s Methodist, 90, 110 St. Philip’s Episcopal, 86, 90, 116, 117, 121, 123, 125, 130–131, 134, 135, 136 Stanley, Henry W., 139–140 Stella, Joseph, 11–13, 12, 31 Stelzle, Charles, 46–49, 48, 92 Stern College for ­Women, 68, 176, 177 Stetson, Augusta Emma, 42 Stevenson, Adlai, 197–198, 281n92 Steward, Mamie, 128 Stewart, Potter, 5 storefront churches, 95–96, 97, 98, 113, 114, 137–144, 140, 149 Street preachers, 200–201, 201, 202 Strong Commission, 57 Strong, Josiah, 14, 26, 27–28 Stuyvesant, Peter, 25, 63 suburbs, American: church boom and architecture, 218–223, 221, 222;

307

congregations, 214–215, 216–217; as inconducive to religion, 210–212, 227; population shifts, 212–214, 213, 222–223; studies, 227–228; suburban vs. urban religion, 209, 211, 212, 214–225, 222, 227–231, 233–234 Suffolk County, New York, 222–223, 226 Sunday, Billy, 3 Supreme Court cases, 108, 109–110, 111, 202, 214, 215, 226 synagogues: architecture and real estate, 90, 91, 132, 217–218, 219–220, 220, 223; establishment and congregational life, 66, 71, 72–74, 75, 76, 95–96, 184, 216–218, 223–224; urban-­landscape transformations, 78, 90, 91, 95, 252n1. See also chevras Szold, Henrietta, 75 Tabernacle Baptist Church, 92 Talmage, T. DeWitt, 102–103 Tandy, Vertner Woodson, 130 technological innovations: aiding religious communities, 112; church buildings, 48, 79, 92–93, 94; publishing and media, 101, 103, 104, 229 Tele­vi­sion programming, 79, 108, 199, 229 temperance beliefs and organ­izations, 37, 40, 121, 125, 244n18 ­Temple Emanu-­El, 65, 73, 74, 75, 107 “territorial parishes,” 51–52 theologians and religious thought, 154–155, 199, 203, 209; Catholic, 154, 163–168, 177–183; Jewish, 152–153, 165, 168–177, 183–188; Protestant, 38, 154, 155–163, 159, 162, 188–199 Thomist philosophy, 163, 166 Thompkins, Pierce Butler, 119 Tillich, Paul, 6, 154, 155, 159–163, 162, 170, 175, 177, 197, 199, 202, 205, 234 Time (periodical), 159, 161 Tom Jones (Fielding), 5 tradition: hampering Judaism, 184–186; hampering Protestantism, 34, 77, 230. See also rites and rituals Trinity Church, 21, 30, 86–87, 87, 104 Trump, Donald, 199

308 I ndex

Union Baptist Church, 116, 119, 120–121, 122, 135, 136, 137 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 65, 107, 216–217 Union of Orthodox Rabbis, 68, 152–153 Union Theological Seminary, 39, 119, 139, 155–159, 160–161, 163, 190 United Hebrew Charities, 74–75 United House of Prayer for All ­People, 145, 147–148 United Synagogue of Amer­i­ca, 69–70 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 145, 148–149 urban areas and conditions: American history and populations, 9, 115, 212–214; art portrayals, 11–13, 20–22; as inconducive to religion, 17, 33, 52, 230; religious outreach, 23–25, 27, 29, 38, 40–41, 55; religious pluralism, 2, 27–31, 52, 56, 112, 230–231; “sacralizing” urban landscape, 78–112; suburban religion vs., 209, 211, 212, 214–225, 227–231, 233–234; suburban shifts, 212–214; vilified as anti-­religion, 3–4, 13–14, 15, 80. See also urbanization; specific cities urbanization: boons to religion, 112; cities’ growth, 19–22; Eu­rope, 18, 19–20; harms to religion, 4, 13–14, 18–19, 22; inventions and innovations, 23, 79; study, 13, 22–24, 26–27. See also modernity United Synagogue, 69–70 Van Der Zee, James, 142, 143, 148 Va­r i­e­ties of Religious Experience ( James), 7, 33–34 Victor Talking Machine Co., 79, 104–105, 258n48 vio­lence: antisemitic, 67, 168–169; Protestant-­Catholic, 29–30; racial, 124, 150, 189, 191 Violenes, George C., 141 Walker, Charles T., 119 Walker, Madam C. J., 189 Walker Memorial Baptist, 132 Wallace, Mike, 8, 9

Weber, Marianne, 32–33, 242n2 Weber, Max, 5, 32–34, 77, 212, 219, 230, 231, 242n2 Weinberger, Moses, 3 white flight, 213, 214 White, Stanford, 91 Whyte, William H., 210 Wilson, Willliam, 204 Wilson, Woodrow, 189 Willowski, Jacob David, 3 Winter, Gibson, 211, 227–228 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 64, 65 Wise, Stephen, 96, 107, 165, 199 Wisher, Daniel, 118, 119, 120, 124–125 ­Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 40, 121, 244n18 ­women: cantors, 107; Jewish organ­izations, 73, 74–75, 185, 227; Jewish religious education, 69, 176–177, 177; nondenominational preachers, 141–144, 143; nuns, 53–57, 56, 200, 218; Protestant denominations, 39–40, 119, 126–129, 129, 200–202, 226–227; in religious education, 40, 54–57, 59, 126–129, 129, 226–227; socie­ties, 40–41, 59, 122, 125–126, 129, 199–200, 224; theologians, 177–183 Woolf, ­Virginia, 7 World War I, 33, 50, 156 World War II: France, 164–166; Nazism, 153, 158, 160, 166, 168–169; pacifism, 181, 182, 201; preconditions, 158, 160, 164, 168–169, 206; ser­vice and race, 150–151 Yeshiva University, 68, 173, 176, 177, 183 Young Men’s Christian Association, 16, 40 Young Men’s Hebrew Association, 73, 217 Young ­Women’s Christian Association, 40 Young ­Women’s Hebrew Association, 73 youth groups and socie­ties, 122, 125–126, 224–225, 233. See also religious education Zabriskie, Louise, 200 Zangwill, Israel, 3–4 Zionist organ­izations, 75, 200