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Union Made
Union Made
Working People and the Rise of
Social Christianity in Chicago
z
HEATH W. CARTER

1
 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, Heath W.
Union made : working people and the rise of social Christianity in Chicago /
Heath W. Carter.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–938595–9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Labor unions—Religious aspects—
Christianity. 2. Labor unions—Illinois—Chicago—History. 3. Labor movement—
Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Labor movement—Illinois—Chicago—History.
5. Christian sociology—Illinois—Chicago—History. I. Title.
HD6338.2.U52C553 2014
261.09773'11—dc23
2015000066

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Alan Bloom
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
1. “Is the Laborer Worthy of His Hire?” Christianity
and Class in Antebellum Chicago 9
2. “Undefiled Christianity”: The Rise of a
Working-Class Social Gospel 28
3. “It Pays to Go to Church”: Ministers, “the Mob,”
and the Scramble for Working-Class Souls 49
4. “With the Prophets of Old”: Working People’s
Challenge to the Gilded Age Church 73
5. “The Divorce between Labor and the Church”: Working
People Strike Out on Their Own in 1894 Chicago 97
6. “To Christianize Christianity”: Labor on the Move
in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago 129
7. “Social Christianity Becomes Official”: The Rise
of a Middle-Class Social Gospel 150
Epilogue 170

Notes 183
Bibliography 251
Index 269
 Acknowledgments

i could not have completed this book without funding from a vari-
ety of institutions. I am deeply grateful for support from the History
Department and Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame; the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation;
and the Creative Work and Research Committee, Provost’s Office, and
College of Arts and Sciences at Valparaiso University. A grant from Notre
Dame’s Institute for the Study of the Liberal Arts went directly to the
hire of five translators—Ian Rinehart, Jessica Szafron, Alex Meyer, Joela
Zeller, and Stina Bäckström—whose able work opened an illuminating
window into Chicago’s vast foreign-language periodical literature.
My research benefited immeasurably from the resourcefulness of a
number of archivists, librarians, and curators, including: Martha Briggs
and Katie McMahon at the Newberry Library; Catherine Bruck at the Illinois
Institute of Technology; Julie A. Satzik and Peggy Lavelle at the Archives
and Records Center of the Archdiocese of Chicago; Elaine S. Caldbeck at
Garrett-Evangelical & Seabury-Western Theological Seminaries; Richard
Harms and Lugene Schemper at Calvin College; John Hoffman at the
University of Illinois; James Holley at the International Brotherhood
of Boilermakers; Eddie L. Knox, Jr., at Pullman Presbyterian Church
(Chicago); Kevin Leonard at the United Methodist Church’s Northern
Illinois Conference Archives; Frank Levi at St. Andrew’s Anglican
Church (Tinley Park, Illinois); Patrick Gorman at the Lee County (Illinois)
Historical Society; Dianne Luhmann at the First Presbyterian Church
(Chicago); Ruth Tonkiss Cameron at Union Theological Seminary’s Burke
Library Archives; and Frances Bristol and Dale Patterson at the United
Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History.
I logged hundreds of hours in the Research Center at the Chicago History
Museum and am thankful for its entire staff. I accrued especially large
x Acknowledgments

debts to Debbie Vaughan and Lesley Martin, expert guides to the collec-
tions, whose unremittingly good humor made CHM a delightful place
to while away the days; to Michael Featherstone and Tom Guerra, whose
diligent work made mine so much easier; and to Michael Glass, whose
warm greetings brightened the beginning and end of nearly every day
I was there.
Along the way I have been astounded by the kindness of academic
colleagues. During my apprenticeship, which took me from Georgetown
University to the University of Chicago, and finally to the University of
Notre Dame, I was privileged to work closely with world-class scholars
such as Beth McKeown, Scott Pilarz, Jim Walsh, Catherine Brekus, Dan
Graff, George Marsden, and John McGreevy. I am indebted, above all, to my
doctoral adviser, Mark Noll, whose generosity is justly legendary. Others
shared invaluable insights and rigorously engaged my ideas in various
stages of development. I am especially grateful to Rosemary Adams, Bruce
Baker, Gail Bederman, Ed Blum, Dave Burns, Chris Cantwell, Kathleen
Conzen, Joe Creech, Jake Dorn, Janine Giordano Drake, Bob Elder, Leon
Fink, Tim Gloege, Danny Greene, Jim Grossman, Luke Harlow, Suellen
Hoy, Kevin Kruse, Hugh McLeod, Emily Nordstrom, Susan O’Donovan,
Dominic Pacyga, Laura Porter, Amanda Porterfield, Paul Putz, Jarod
Roll, Nick Salvatore, Ellen Skerrett, Robert Weir, and David Zonderman,
as well as the participants in the Colloquium on Religion and History
at the University of Notre Dame, the Religions in America Workshop at
the University of Chicago, the History Department Research Workshop
at Valparaiso University, and the Urban History Dissertation Group and
the Labor History Seminar at the Newberry Library. Eric Arnesen, Darren
Dochuk, Ken Fones-Wolf, Paul Harvey, Tom Kselman, and Rima Lunin
Schultz offered extensive comments on entire drafts, and in so doing
helped to enhance greatly the quality of the ideas and narrative. It has
been a delight to work with my editor, Theo Calderara, and the staff at
Oxford University Press; together they have also, in ways large and small,
made this a better book.
While many friends have sustained me through the writing process,
a few have had a decisive impact on this book’s shape. These include Lisa
Cockrel, Keith Cox, Aaron Johnson, Marty LaFalce, Micah Lott, Adam
Phillips, and John and Susan DeCostanza. I would never have had the
opportunity to write in the first place had it not been for the unfailing
support of my parents, Clyde and Jacque Carter, and for the love and nur-
ture of my wider family, especially Primrose Langer, whom I still miss
 Acknowledgments xi

after all these years. I met Thais Pietrangelo Carter in the autumn of
2001 and soon intuited what I now know to be true: there is no one with
whom I would rather walk through life. Our journey has been delightfully
unpredictable and is the source of a singular joy, which has somehow,
miraculously, increased with the arrival of three beautiful boys, Isaiah,
Samuel, and James. Thanks be to God.
I started at Valparaiso University in the fall of 2012 and was immedi-
ately conscious of my great fortune to have ended up with such congenial
colleagues, both in the Department of History and across the university.
I remain ever grateful for them, and for the support I have received from
Jon Kilpinen, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as
the three different department chairpersons with whom I have worked to
this point: Colleen Seguin, Alan Bloom, and Ron Rittgers. When I arrived
three years ago I could never have imagined how fully Colleen and Alan,
and their own brood of boys—Zeke, Jin, and Kuo—would invite me into
their lives. Alan and I were different in many ways and yet, almost before
I knew it, we had become the best of friends. He was a brilliant thinker,
teacher, mentor, and conversationalist. He was a devoted father and citi-
zen, who would always say that he was working to make Valparaiso the
kind of town in which he wanted to raise his kids. In the spring of 2013
we took a group of students to Selma, Alabama, where we heard Martin
Luther King III exclaim, “If, when you die, you haven’t left the world a
little bit better off than you found it, you should be ashamed.” Alan loved
that line. Alan lived that line. The fact that his ebullient spirit no longer
walks this earth remains hard to fathom, let alone accept. I dedicate this
book to him.
H.W.C.
Union Made
Figure I.1 Portrait of Agnes Nestor, circa 1913
Credit: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-67688. Photographer—Clinedinst Studio.
 Introduction

“Hoodwinking Clergymen,” screamed the headline, emblazoned

across the pages of dozens of American newspapers in the week leading
up to Labor Day 1910. The sprawling text below explained, “Ministers of
the gospel are essentially and fundamentally honest but, like all men who
work for the public good, they are at times misled by false statements.”
The point of contention was an American Federation of Labor (AFL) press
release entitled, “Interest in Labor Sunday,” which appeared “harmless”
but was in fact “as dangerous to the peace and liberty of the citizens as
a coiled rattlesnake in the grass.” The article went on to assert, “We see
here a demand on the ministers of God, that they endorse and help build
up the strike-producing, boycotting and violent American Federation of
Labor.” It was signed and syndicated by cereal magnate Charles W. Post,
who was beside himself at organized labor’s latest attempt to evangelize
the churches.1
The idea for “Labor Sunday” was not new. An Episcopal organization in
New York had pioneered a similar observance as early as 1890 and, in the
intervening years, the Presbyterian Church had also taken up the initiative.2
But the day had never amounted to much, so the delegates to the AFL’s
1909 convention at Toronto had resolved to push for wider recognition.3
The organization’s many local affiliates responded in kind, though few
with as much gusto as the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). Early in the
summer of 1910, it appointed a seven-person special committee to oversee
plans. Margaret Dreier Robins, a member of that body and the president
2 In t roduc t ion

of the local chapter of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), drafted
a letter, sent out to six hundred Christian ministers across the city, inquir-
ing as to whether, on September 4th, they would consider preaching on
“What Has Organized Labor Accomplished for Social Progress.” Or even
better: allow a worker to do so in their stead. When more than three hun-
dred clergymen replied in the affirmative, Robins and CFL President John
Fitzpatrick were sent scurrying to find workers to speak.4 Overwhelmed
by the struggle to meet such high demand, they left it to the churches and
wage earners to work out the details. Arrangements were still being final-
ized when Post’s screed hit the newsstand. Who knew what Labor Sunday
would bring?5
Remarkably, across the city that day union representatives, standing
before congregations swelled by larger-than-usual numbers of workers,
preached the word. To a person they insisted that the aims of the labor
movement were fully consonant with the teachings of Christianity. At
Sedgwick Street Congregational, Leopold P. Straube, the secretary of
the Allied Printing Trades Council, argued that unionism was in fact
just Christianity translated into concrete, practical form.6 Many workers
preached on “the workingman’s alienation from the church,” a subject
weighing heavily on middle-class Christian minds.7 In the estimation
of Swedish painter A. C. Anderson, the source of this alienation was not
especially mysterious. As he informed the respectable women and men
of Ninth Presbyterian, “Some of the worst enemies organized labor has
are very ardent church goers.”8 A. A. Allen, the editor of the Union Labor
Advocate, made the point even more emphatically. He startled the peo-
ple of Seventy-Seventh Street Methodist Episcopal Church by waving in
their faces a contract that many Chicago employers forced female work-
ers to sign; “No bill of sale of a chattel slave in ante-bellum days was as
cruel or exacting,” Allen exclaimed.9 Yet too many church members were
out of touch with such realities, lamented the lone female homilist this
day, Agnes Nestor, secretary of the International Glove Workers Union
(figure I.1). The Catholic Nestor unflinchingly informed the members of
the North Shore’s fashionable Winnetka Congregational Church, “You
are so far removed from the life of the factory girl that you cannot under-
stand the view she takes of life.”10
While a number of Chicago divines stayed planted in the pews, soak-
ing in these hard-hitting sermons, others assumed the prophetic role
themselves. At Ravenswood Presbyterian, the Reverend Duncan Milner
excoriated “organized capital,” even while touting trade unionism as “one
 Introduction 3

of the mightiest forces of today in the uplift of human society.” Milner

went on to offer his own thoughts on the vexed relationship between
Chicago’s churches and wage earners. Decrying “persistent and malig-
nant efforts to persuade men that the churches are class institutions,”
he reminded his audience, “Jesus Christ was known as a carpenter, was
born and reared in poverty and as a teacher, ‘the common people heard
him gladly’ ”; as a result, Milner insisted, “a true church of Jesus Christ
cannot be a class church.”11 While the Reverend Austin Hunter of Jackson
Boulevard Christian saw Jesus in a similar light, he was not as quick to let
the churches off the hook. “The reason why workingmen are not found in
larger numbers in the church,” he declared, “is not due to the coldness of
the church, nor to the dress parade, but primarily to the fact that the church
has been more often upon the side of capital than upon the side of labor.”12
Milner and Hunter were not the only ones to raise their voices. Across
the city, ministers of nearly every confession—Catholic, Congregational,
Episcopal, Reformed Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran,
Swedenborgian, Baptist, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian—addressed
the labor question this day.13 The next morning the Tribune announced,
“Gospel of Unions Told in Pulpits.”14
That was news indeed. Historically, the churches had favored capital
over labor and many leading Christians still harbored suspicion of trade
unions. This hostility sprung in part from close and long-standing ties
between the Protestant and industrial elites.15 In Chicago, the newspapers
failed to mention that Labor Sunday was not celebrated in any of the city’s
most exclusive churches. While the local Episcopalian bishop urged his
priests to observe the day, there is no record that the patricians at St. James
did; nor did those at upscale First Congregational or Second Presbyterian.16
At Winnetka Congregational, meanwhile, Agnes Nestor encountered cap-
ital’s strong hand when, after her sermon, she was accosted by a mem-
ber of the church wielding anti-labor propaganda.17 Nestor’s own Church
had an uneasy relationship with labor in its own right. While the Catholic
hierarchy’s rhetoric was often friendly, its worries about the creeping
influence of radicalism had long precluded a more fulsome embrace.18
Labor Sunday found Chicago Archbishop James E. Quigley on his way
to Montreal, but in his absence he would have been gratified to hear that
the bishop of nearby Rockford had taken the occasion to declare, “Catholic
men, I admonish you to fight against socialism in the labor unions.”19
Even given these countervailing currents, there could be no mis-
taking the change. Workers were preaching to ministers, and a strong,
4 In t roduc t ion

self-critical voice was emerging within the churches themselves. Seeing

reason for optimism, the CFL’s Fitzpatrick, also a Roman Catholic,
observed, “The number of churches that had special services Sunday in
observance of Labor day preliminaries was an excellent sign.”20 For work-
ing people, it was evidence that social gospels—which they had espoused
for decades—were gaining long-sought legitimacy.
This book recasts the history of social Christianity. Scholars have long used
this catchall category to describe the myriad reform impulses that together
constituted the progressive Christian response to industrial capitalism.21
The earliest histories of the movement placed white, male ministers and
theologians such as Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and
John Ryan at the vanguard.22 More recent scholarship has vastly expanded
the cast of characters, recovering the ample contributions of both white
women, who powered the settlement house and home mission move-
ments, and African Americans, whose pioneering work at the intersection
of racial and economic justice helped to humanize the Great Migration of
southern blacks to northern cities.23 But until very recently one feature of
the literature has remained constant: an almost uniform emphasis on the
centrality of the middle classes.24 I do not dispute that middle-class reform-
ers supplied some of the impetus for social Christianity’s rise. In Chicago,
the likes of Jane Addams, Reverdy Ransom, Ellen Gates Starr, Graham
Taylor, and Mary McDowell made heroic contributions to the cause of
social reform. But I do contend that working people played a much more
essential role in this story than they have typically been accorded.
Indeed, social Christianity was “union made”—and in at least two
crucial senses. The first pertains to the history of ideas. Throughout
the Gilded Age, the clergy largely failed to muster a critical analysis
of the nation’s changing economic life. As vehemently as conserva-
tives and liberals disagreed on matters of biblical interpretation, they
were often of one mind on “the labor question,” attributing the vast
disparities of wealth in their midst to the poor’s individual failings. As
the pioneering modernist Reverend David Swing wrote in 1874, “The
conflict between classes in the cities of our country is not a conflict
between labor and capital, but between successful and unsuccessful
lives.”25 Countless working people begged to differ and, during this
same era, their communities proved hotbeds of theological innovation.
Wage earners fashioned the words of scripture into searing critiques
of both the emerging industrial order and the churches that so readily
 Introduction 5

accommodated it. In the generation before Rauschenbusch published

Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)—“the magnum opus of [the
social gospel] movement”—workers hammered out social gospels in
union meetings, socialist publications, and anarchist demonstrations.26
They were not systematic theologians. But, in addition to being “lived,”
their religion was thought; and this book is in part an exploration of
their intellectual history.27
It is also more than that, for workers did not sit back on their theo-
logical laurels, but rather threw themselves into the politics of church.
They could sense the anxiety emanating from northern sanctuaries, as
leading Christians struggled to absorb the shock of the industrializing
city. Protestants were long preoccupied with the prospect of a prodigal
generation: would the unprecedented numbers of people pouring into
new boomtowns fall prey to the myriad temptations to be found there?28
By the late nineteenth century, the specter of lost sheep had influen-
tial divines of nearly every denomination on edge. Catholic priests and
bishops worried constantly about their flock’s susceptibility to socialist
incursions. Meanwhile, evangelical ministers were ever more distraught
about the paucity of working people—and especially working men—in
the pews. Were the churches, long the nation’s cornerstone, on the verge
of becoming irrelevant?
This “crisis” was belied by the facts on the ground: rates of urban
church attendance were on the rise and the American faithful had been
overwhelmingly female for centuries.29 But working people were only too
happy to add fuel to the fire. In the decades following the Civil War, they
consistently threatened to leave the fold unless the churches warmed to
labor. Workers backed these threats with concerted resistance to “scab
ministers,” generating clashes that, especially when picked up by the
press, only intensified clerical anxieties. A select subset of the working
classes—namely, white, skilled men—wielded disproportionate influ-
ence in this unfolding cultural process. The clergy were especially des-
perate to secure their allegiance, as it seemed not only the antidote to the
feminization of the churches but also the guarantor of their ongoing rel-
evance. Across the nation at the turn of the century, Protestant minis-
ters turned to this population for help, conducting surveys designed to
identify the sources of their disenchantment. The churches’ hostility to
labor topped nearly every list. This empowered scattered reformers on
the inside, who insisted that the hope of a Christian society would soon
be altogether dashed if the churches did not find a way to embrace trade
6 In t roduc t ion

unionism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, as entire denomi-

nations did just that, there could be no doubt that social Christianity was
ascendant—and that it had emerged from below.
The rise of the AFL as a major force expedited this sea change. With
its focus on achieving incremental gains for comparatively privileged
workers, the organization advanced a vision of labor reform that was
increasingly palatable to church leaders. So long as Samuel Gompers
and his allies could hold the socialists within the organization at bay, the
Christian elite could imagine its rising support for trade unionism as a
crucial prong of its ongoing battle against radicalism. The middle-class
Social Gospel was, in this and every sense, a real but distinctly mod-
erate accommodation of working-class religious dissent. It was almost
inevitably so. While historians of the modern conservative movement
have been combing the archives for evidence of collaboration between
churches and corporations in the mid-twentieth century, the hunt could
easily begin a century before.30 The churches’ patrons in the industrial
elite did not wield as much clout during the Progressive Era as they had
during the Gilded Age, but they remained formidable. Their enduring
strength pushed many of the more radical middle-class Social Gospelers
to pursue their visions outside the confines of the institutional churches.
Those reformers who remained had to tread carefully, as was clear on
Labor Sunday 1910, when the very prospect of friendly gestures toward
the AFL’s labor aristocrats made some leading Christians nervous and
others irate.
If social Christianity was not often revolutionary, it was neverthe-
less among the most important American reckonings with industrial
capitalism.31 Long after the First Amendment disestablished religion,
Christianity remained the dominant ideological framework within which
the nation’s diverse peoples debated public questions.32 Thus, the lively,
late nineteenth-century exchanges recounted here were not merely of reli-
gious significance. When believers wrangled over the modern implica-
tions of Jesus’s command, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” the
contours of the national conscience were at stake.33 For many Americans
of the day, questions about what the Lord meant when he said, “the laborer
is worthy of his hire,” and whom he had in mind when he declared, “Woe
unto you that are rich!” were gripping.34 The answers to these questions
had major ramifications for public policy, not to mention the country’s
longer term political economy. Indeed, in repositioning working people as
makers of social Christianity, this study locates them at the very center of
 Introduction 7

fierce fights over how to reconcile democracy and capitalism in the indus-
trializing United States.35
American workers were also players in a wider and longer story: namely,
the history of Christianity. The vigor with which many pressed their theo-
logical case—in the papers, the pews, and the streets—underscored their
investment in the shape of this fractious, transnational, two-millennia-
old movement.36 To be sure, there was no monolithic “working-class
Christianity,” let alone a “religion of the working classes.” Some wage
earners were altogether indifferent toward religion.37 Countless others
found meaning and solace in the ideals propounded by their pastor or
priest. But class was nevertheless among the most important lines of
demarcation running through the Gilded Age church and workers were
far more likely than their social betters to believe that God sides deci-
sively with the poor. While the documentary record is most robust for
white Protestant men, fragmentary evidence suggests that myriad others,
including working-class women, Catholics, and African Americans,
shared this intuition.38 In defending their conviction that God would lift
up the lowly—which had ancient roots, but was not always embraced by
Christian institutions—wage earners joined a line of believers, stretching
back for millennia, who sought to reform the churches themselves.39
The action here is set in nineteenth and early twentieth-century
Chicago, which emerged from the swamps to become an industrial behe-
moth. In 1830 the settlement numbered some 100 persons. In 1900 it
boasted nearly two million, making Chicago the world’s fifth largest city.40
The speedy transformation of a frontier outpost into a modern metropolis
reflected tectonic shifts in the global economy, for what was happening
on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan was intricately connected
to developments in Manchester, Bombay, and the far corners of a world
ever-more woven together by the flow of capital and commodities.41 In
addition to its significance for industry, Chicago was a global epicenter of
working-class organization, of anxiety, experimentation, and often violent
confrontation over the labor question. The city was moreover a hub of
religious innovation and activity, home to a breathtaking array of ethnic
parishes, as well as to many of the greatest revivalists and reformers of
the age.
While the decision to concentrate on a single locale introduces inevita-
ble limitations, it also opens up new interpretive vistas. Here—in the geog-
raphies, habits, conversations, and conflicts of a specific place—the lines
between intellectual, social, religious, and political history are blurred,
8 In t roduc t ion

and the push-and-pull between working people and church leaders comes
into full view. This more focused lens allows me to track not only what
a minister had to say about a strike but also who was sitting in the pews
when he said it, what transpired in the immediate aftermath, and what
were the longer term reverberations. Only when these various layers of the
story are accounted for do the working-class origins of social Christianity
become clear. Developments in Chicago were not entirely representative.
However, the fundamental dynamics driving historical change here can
be found across the industrializing north, suggesting that this story’s
implications extend well beyond its geographical scope.42
Leading economists have taken to calling ours “a new Gilded Age,”
and not without reason, as the widening chasm between rich and poor
in the contemporary United States approaches historic proportions.43 Yet
readers may find that the analogy only goes so far. In the world evoked in
these pages, unlike today, concerns about the experiences of workers and
the fate of the working classes saturated public conversation; devastating
recessions elicited fundamental questions about the shape of the nation’s
economic life; and believers, both ordinary and elite, could hardly help but
be drawn into freewheeling debates regarding the morality of capitalism.
It is a world familiar and yet strange.
 1

“Is the Laborer Worthy of His Hire?”

Christianity and Class
in Antebellum Chicago

“Is the L aborer worthy of his hire?” read a July 1858 headline in
the Chicago Press and Tribune. “As an abstract question, every person
would answer ‘Yes,’ ” the article began, “but in practice there are thou-
sands who answer ‘No.’ ” For readers attuned to the news of the day, the
workers at Chicago’s McCormick Harvesting Machine plant might have
come immediately to mind. The company had slashed wages that very
month, accelerating a dismal trend: in 1849 the average pay rate had been
12.5 cents per hour; by 1859 it was down to 6.2.1 But the writer had some-
thing else in mind: “We do not here particularly refer to the exactions of
grasping employers and hard taskmasters, who wring from humble toil
their own ill-gotten gains.” Rather, “we would speak for a moment of the
great fault of Christian communities everywhere, the inadequate payment
of Christian ministers.”2
This particular problem had roots in the nation’s constitutional order,
which forbade tax support for churches and thereby rendered ministers
dependent upon the largesse of their congregations.3 The transition to the
voluntary system proved financially rocky for many clergy families and
more than a generation after disestablishment Christian leaders found
themselves still in the position of having to plead for better support. Luke
10:7—“for the laborer is worthy of his hire”—was a favorite scriptural
touchstone of these pleas. The religious press worked this verse into count-
less columns bemoaning congregations’ failures to adequately pay their
10 U nion M a de

ministers. “Go throughout the sparsely settled districts of the country, and
though store-house, granary and cellar be full and overflowing with the rich
bounties of Providence, yet the minister of Christ is often found in suffer-
ing want,” wrote one correspondent.4 The going was especially tough for
Baptist farmer-preachers, who were paid with irregular free-will offerings,
and Methodist itinerants, whose salaries were capped at subsistence lev-
els through the mid-1840s.5 As late as the mid-1850s, the average minister
earned roughly $400 a year, the same as the average laborer and nowhere
near enough to afford the trappings of a comfortable middle-class life.6 In
at least one case, frustrated divines—inspired by the growing militancy
of their fellow workingmen—organized a Preachers’ Protective Union.
“NO PAY—NO PREACH,” avowed an 1853 circular published in Boston’s
Independent.7
As much as ministers may have resented their plight, it had, if any-
thing, a salutary effect upon their work. In the wake of independence,
many Americans became enamored with the idea that the truth was as
accessible to the common man as to any learned divine. Ruffled collars
and Harvard degrees became, in many cases, liabilities. Indeed, in the
early decades of the nineteenth century crowds flocked to hear plain-folk
revivalists, who developed innovative techniques to popularize an evan-
gelical tradition that was rapidly—and improbably—converging with the
dominant political and moral philosophies of the day.8 Remarkably, this
unrefined, ill-educated class of preachers accomplished what their aristo-
cratic, colonial-era predecessors had not: the mass Christianization of the
people.9 In cities, boomtowns, and far-flung rural regions ordinary per-
sons converted in record numbers and to spectacular result; in the years
between 1776 and 1850, rates of Christian adherence more than doubled.10
American Christianity had become the people’s religion by becoming,
first, a religion of-and-by the people.
By 1858, however, when the Chicago Press and Tribune ran its column
on ministers’ salaries, the religious landscape had begun to shift dramati-
cally once more. The article’s author was well aware of the changes. They
were, he asserted, what prompted him to write: “We have been led to think
upon this subject by the numerous accounts which have gone the rounds
of the papers lately of particular instances of liberality of certain congrega-
tions to their pastors.”11 The qualifying adjectives—“particular instances”;
“certain congregations”—served his rhetorical purpose, which was to
impart a sense of ongoing urgency to Christian givers elsewhere. But
the delicate prose hid a striking development on the ground: that leading
 “Is the Laborer Worthy of His Hire?” 11

churches in many a northern city were evolving into exclusive clubs domi-
nated by an emergent industrial elite.12
Chicago was no exception, as underscored by dramatic shifts in two
key indices: the amount of ministers’ salaries and the cost of church build-
ings. In the city’s earliest years even the most prominent congregations
met in simple frame buildings and paid their ministers only marginally
more than local artisans and tradesmen earned. But as Chicago grew
from outpost to metropolis, elite merchants and industrialists financed
the construction of ornate cathedrals and underwrote lucrative salaries
to secure the most renowned ministers. In so doing, Chicago’s wealthi-
est Christians sowed the seeds of working-class resentment, though nota-
bly, these did not sprout into militancy during the antebellum period.
Throughout these years many of the city’s ordinary believers remained
hopeful that they, too, would soon enjoy the fruits of modern industrial
society. The pervasive evangelical revivalism of the earlier nineteenth cen-
tury had unpredictable consequences for class relations, fueling antipathy
at particular moments and diminishing it at others. But so long as an
expanding frontier economy churned out a better standard of living for
its citizens—as it did, more or less, up through the Civil War—it held
class conflict in check, both within the churches and without.13 Only in
the postbellum era, as a northern consensus on the dignity of free labor
devolved into industrial warfare, would the churches, having sown the
proverbial wind, reap the whirlwind.
In 1830, Chicago looked much the same as when Louis Jolliet and Jacques
Marquette first laid eyes on the area in 1673: to the west lay an expansive
swamp, separated from Lake Michigan by a ribbon of dry prairie several
miles wide. The north and south branches of the Chicago River ran slug-
gishly toward one another through the terrain, uniting a mile or so west
of the Lake before emptying their combined waters into it. The most con-
spicuous change was that, since 1803, the local Indian trails had converged
at Fort Dearborn, a military post positioned alongside the River and just a
short walk east of where its branches joined. As late as 1830 fewer than a
hundred people lived in the shadows of the Fort. But when federal invest-
ment in the improvement of the harbor signaled renewed commitment
to a long-proposed Illinois and Michigan Canal, a wave of new settlers
descended. By 1837, nearly 4,000 persons resided in the newly incorpo-
rated city, including a handful of merchants, doctors, and lawyers, a smat-
tering of “gentlemen speculators,” and a large cohort of ordinary laborers,
many hard at work upon the canal.14
12 U nion M a de

These early white settlers confronted the attendant challenges of life

on the frontier. To be sure, some accumulated vast fortunes during these
years: in one 1836 auction, 186 undeveloped lots sold for $1,041,344.15
But the nouveau riche had to traverse the same roads—“about as bad as
could be imagined”—and endure the same smells—“putrid meat”; “green
putrid water and decaying vegetable matter”; “nauseous fumes . . . from
the sink-holes and sloughs of the town”—as everyone else.16 Recurrent
waves of cholera and consumption afflicted the local population. Housing
was so scarce, one settler recalled, “[that] in many instances families were
living in their covered wagons while arrangements were made for putting
up shelter for them.”17 Meanwhile, food prices fluctuated wildly in accor-
dance with unpredictable supply and demand. In December 1833, flour
cost roughly $5.50 a barrel; in one three-week span in 1836, it spiked from
$12.00 to $20.00 a barrel.18
Throughout the 1830s religious life, too, bore the unmistakable mark
of the frontier. One of the first Christian preachers to settle in the area was
William See, a regularly ordained Methodist who in 1831–1832 preached
sermons in a log hut on Wolf’s Point.19 One early history remembers See
as a “gunsmith to the Indians occasionally, [who] held forth to the ‘igno-
ramusses,’ (as he termed the unbelievers),” while another recalls, “he was
by trade a blacksmith and poor in purse, but of good moral character and
highly esteemed.”20 See’s preaching did not impress the refined likes of
Juliette Kinzie, who disparaged it as “less to the edification of his hearers
than to the unmerciful slaughter of the ‘King’s English.’ ”21
But outside of such rarefied circles, rough-hewn revivalists more
than sufficed. Consider the success of the Reverend Peter R. Borein.
Two years after his conversion at an 1828 camp meeting in Tennessee,
the 20-year-old Borein moved to Illinois, worked in a brickyard, and
made an abortive attempt to get an education before becoming a cir-
cuit rider. In 1837 he was called to Chicago’s First Methodist Episcopal
Church, where no one seemed to mind his common pedigree. During
his two-year tenure, by one count, “about three hundred united with
the Church; the young city containing at the time a population of about
three thousand.”22
Some of Chicago’s earliest divines boasted more impressive creden-
tials, but their lives were none the easier for it. The city’s first Catholic
priest, a Frenchman by the name of John Mary Irenaeus St. Cyr, com-
pleted a classical course of study at the Grand Seminary of Lyons before
migrating across the Atlantic. Dispatched to Chicago in May 1833, St. Cyr
marveled at the warm welcome he received from Catholics and Protestants
 “Is the Laborer Worthy of His Hire?” 13

alike. But in a letter to his superior in St. Louis the following month, he
underscored the hardships he faced:

I should have reason to complain, Monseigneur, were you not

to send me some assistance at the start to relieve my needs; for
I should not have money enough even to pay postage on a letter
were I to receive one, nor do I know how I am going to pay the trans-
portation charges on my trunk, when it comes, unless I have some
help from you beforehand. I cannot say Mass every day, as I should
like to, for I cannot always obtain the wine and candles.23

St. Cyr’s fledgling congregation gathered initially in a parishioner’s log

cabin and then in a small room on State Street before finally, in 1836,
building a proper sanctuary. Completed at the corner of Lake and State
Streets for $400, St. Mary’s Catholic Church did not exactly inspire heav-
enly thoughts. The unpainted, 25′ x 35′ wood exterior became recognizable
as a church only after a bell tower was added several years later (figure 1.1).
Inside one found row after row of crude benches, already insufficient to
seat the area’s fast-growing, multiethnic Catholic population.24
Function trumped form even in those churches that were home to early
Chicago’s most prominent citizens. The founding generation of the First
Presbyterian Church, established in 1833, included the families of William
Brown, a banker and financier, George Dole, the city’s first meat packer,
Philo Carpenter, a leading pharmacist, and Philip F. W. Peck, a real estate
tycoon. Nevertheless, throughout its first year the congregation shared a
single, two-story, frame building on Franklin and South Water Streets with
the Baptist and Methodist societies.25 When First Presbyterian dedicated
its own place of worship in the early days of 1834, it was also conspicuously
plain. Constructed for just $600, the 30′ x 40′ wooden structure remained
in use all the way up through 1849.26 In the 1830s, in fact, the sole excep-
tion to the Spartan rule was St. James Episcopal, whose exclusive congre-
gation financed the city’s first brick sanctuary in 1837. Outfitted with a
bell tower and an organ, the building showcased as well a mahogany altar
screen that alone cost between $2,000 and $2,500. In total, for materials,
labor, and furnishings, the members expended $15,000, an extraordinary
amount considering that a common laborer in Chicago was lucky to make
$18 a month.27 But even the well-heeled parishioners at St. James could
not entirely escape the reigning ethic of simplicity: in 1843, a new rector
ordered that the altar screen be dismantled and its beautiful mahogany
refashioned into a less ostentatious pulpit.28
Figure 1.1 St. Mary’s Catholic Church
Credit: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-37096.
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