The Intellectual Origins
The Progressive Era’s social and urban reform was informed by John Dewey’s pragmatic pedagogy cultivated by the period’s settlement houses and Walter Rauschenbusch’s Baptist critique of American economics and society.
The Origins of Sociology
After the turn of the century, the University of Chicago was at the forefront of academic and pedagogical advancements, particularly in its sociology department. Sociology emerged as an academic discipline in a highly contentious period where it could have become part of economics or political science. Descended from thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkeim, the Chicago School of sociology featured a very different perspective than the dominant American pedagogy: it focused on the first-hand collection of data, looking at individual case studies, and emphasizing induction rather than deduction. The school’s dominance in the field would come to be displayed in 1925, when one third of all graduate students of sociology in America were enrolled at the University of Chicago. This type of experiential teaching would later come to be standardized by academics like John Dewey.1
1900
John Dewey, Pragmatism, and Experiential Learning
Image: TIME Magazine
Interested in the relationship between the individual and society, John Dewey graduated from Johns Hopkins as a philosopher. He was committed to exploring how schools could become laboratories of experience and learning. The era’s prevailing philosophies of pragmatism and instrumentalism together with Dewey’s reformist mindset formed the underpinnings of social sciences.
Dewey founded the University of Chicago’s laboratory school, where he created a curriculum that focused as much on the pupils as it did on the subjects taught. The process of learning was emphasized so that the student’s curiosities and interests could be cultivated. At the same time, Dewey started to get involved with local communities in Chicago and started visiting Jane Addams‘ Hull House where he was exposed to the immigrant experience, the needs of underprivileged youth, and the effects of the lack of a formal education.
Dewey left Chicago for New York’s Columbia University when he became disenchanted with the university’s political infighting over his laboratory school. Although he was never involved with creating another school, his pedagogy based on experiential learning reverberated throughout future generations of educators. Moreover, he remained committed to his liberal ideals, believing that equality and democracy were both necessary for a successful society.2
“Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth.”
John Dewey
Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us (Columbus: American Education Press, 1939).
1902
Theodore Roosevelt breaks up the railroad monpoly
1906
Hull House and the Settlement House Movement
Settlement houses played an important role in the Progressive Era as they provided a space for educated middle-class women to work on social issues and engage with communities they normally would not cross paths with. Hull House became a model for other settlement houses in the United States, and by 1910, there were more than 400 such houses across the country.
Image: The University of Illinois – Chicago Library
Image: HipPostcard.com
The activities of settlement houses varied depending on the needs of the community they served, but they generally focused on providing education, healthcare, and social services to poor and working-class immigrants. Settlement houses often worked in partnership with other community organizations and government agencies to address social problems, and they played an important role in advocating for social reform.3
In 1906, activist and muckraker Upton Sinclair stayed at Hull House when he was in Chicago to write his seminal text, The Jungle. Over the course of seven weeks, he gathered information and wrote secretly about the conditions and practices of meatpacking plants in Chicago’s stockyards. He placed a magnifying lens over the poverty of the working class, harsh working conditions in the plants, and the anguish and listlessness of the workers. Sinclair continued his fight to end poverty until his dying day, and his campaign platform for the Governorship of California later inspired the New Deal.
Image: Bain News Service via Library of Congress
Image: New York Public Library
New York was home to America’s first settlement house – University Settlement – and had many more that are still around today. During the Progressive Era, recent university graduates staffed some of these houses before they went on to more prominent organizations like William English of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Howard Brubaker of the New Yorker, or Walter Weyl of the New Republic. This arrangement exposed the social plight of the underclass to those in a position to change and reform it.4
“I remember, before we were married, I was working at University Settlement in New York and Franklin called for me there late one afternoon. I wasn’t ready because there was a sick child and I had to see that she was taken home. Franklin said he would go with me. We took the child to an area not far away and Franklin went with me up the three flights to the tenement rooms in which the family lived. It was not a pleasant place and Franklin looked around in surprise and horror. It was the first time, I think, that he had ever really seen a slum and when he got back to the street, he drew a deep breath of fresh air. “My God,” he whispered, “I didn’t know people lived like that!”
Eleanor Roosevelt, a recollection of a date with Franklin Delano Roosevelt before marriage
University Settlement Society of New York, Legacy of Light – University Settlement: 1886-2011 (New York: 2012).
1907
Walter Rauschenbusch
“I came early to Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis, which left an indelible imprint on my thinking by giving me a theological basis for the social concern which had already grown up in me as a result of my early experiences… It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).
Walter Rauschenbusch was an influential Baptist clergyman of the ‘social gospel.’ He was the pastor of a working-class German American congregation in Hell’s Kitchen and witnessed common social issues like poverty. After retiring from preaching due to health reasons, he returned to Rochester Theological Seminary where his father had taught. One of his most influential texts, Christianity and the Social Crisis, which was published in 1907, was considered a ‘dangerous’ book as it espoused a form of socialism. It encouraged Christians to form labor unions, embrace cooperative economics, and improve their communities by learning to evade the societal pitfalls of the industrial revolution. Henry George influenced Rauschenbusch when he volunteered for George’ mayoral campaign in 1886, as evidenced by the following economic commentary:
Image: American Baptist Historical Society Archives
“The most glaring evils of our land system are found in our cities. City land represents an opportunity to live and to make a living. Its value is created by the community that throngs over and around it. The more wealthy and moral the neighborhood, the more valuable the land. The value of an empty city lot is wholly a social product; the value of an improved lot is partly a social and partly a personal product. Moreover, additional value is created by the pressure of want. The more numerous the people, the greater the need of a place on which to live and breathe. Space is as much a necessity of life as air and water. People may perish for the lack of it. Hence they will pay heavily for the use of it. Thus the community, both by its labors and by its needs, creates an increasing value for city land. But our laws give this social product away to individuals. This encourages speculation in land. Men buy up land with the hope that its value will increase without their labor. If their forecast proves false, they suffer impoverishment or bankruptcy. If it proves correct, they have an unearned gain, like a shrewd card-player”
Walter Rauschenbusch
Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1907).
Rauschenbusch provided a philosophical and theological basis for a variety of social justice thinkers, ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Cornell West. He suggested this rhetorical inquiry that remains emblematic of a core struggle faced in community development: “But now that our free lands are almost exhausted, we have come to the point where the element of injustice in the system will begin to menace us. The first comers are well placed; but how about those who press up hungry through our ports and through the gates of birth?”5 While he offered a theological response to these issues, his contemporaries opted for solutions based on direct action and organizing.6
Walter Rauschenbusch
Rochester Theological Seminary
Christianity and the Social Crisis
Martin Luther King, Jr.
1908
Ford begins selling the Model T, the first affordable, mass-produced vehicle.
1908
The Social Creeds
Founded in 1908, the Federal Council of Churches of America was an ecumenical association that sought to create greater cooperation on ‘social policy’ between different Christian denominations in the United States. The association revered the model of democracy and a commitment to American rule of law. They described their theological framework as “a ministry to all men—a commitment to education in the moral and spiritual life; a dedication to social, industrial, and racial justice; a belief in democracy; and an adherence to an international, in the sense of ecumenical, outlook.” This allegiance produced social interventions ranging from neighborhood soup kitchens to organizing some of the first departments of child welfare.7
Image: Horace Mann Bond Papers via UMass Amherst Library
1909
Harvard offers the first city planning course in the United States
“We believe that the great Christian bodies in our country should stand together and lead in the discussion of, and give an impulse to, all great movements that “make for righteousness.” We believe that questions like that of the saloon, marriage and divorce, Sabbath desecration, the social evil, child labor, the relation of labor to capital, the bettering of the conditions of the laboring classes, the moral and religious training of the young, the problem created by foreign immigration, and international arbitration—indeed, all great questions in which the voice of the churches should be heard—concern Christians of every name, and demand their united and concerted action if the Church is to lead effectively in the conquest of the world for Christ.”
The Letter Missive, November 15 – 21, 1905
John F. Piper, “The Formation of Social Policy of the Federal Council of Churches,” Journal of Church and State 11, no. 1 (1969).
Footnotes
- Johnathan Turner, The Mixed Legacy of the School of Sociology (1988) ↩︎
- Thomas Fallace, John Dewey’s Influence on the Origins of the Social Studies: An Analysis of the Historiography and New Interpretation (2009) ↩︎
- Jane Addams, et al., Philanthropy and Social Progress: Seven Essays (1921) ↩︎
- Jeffrey Scheuer, New York’s Vanishing Visionary: The Quiet Mysteries of Charles B. Stover (2011) ↩︎
- Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity & the Social Crisis (1907) ↩︎
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Strive Towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) ↩︎
- John F. Piper, Jr., The Formation of the Social Policy of the Federal Council of Churches (1969) ↩︎