Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920

Paul Boyer was Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• Part One. The Jacksonian Era 1. The Urban Threat Emerges: A Strategy Takes Shape 2. The Tract Societies: Transmitting a Traditional Morality by Untraditional Means 3. The Sunday School in the City: Patterned Order in a Disorderly Setting 4. Urban Moral Reform in the Early Republic: Some Concluding Reflections Part Two. The Mid-Century Decades: Years of Frustration and Innovation 5. Heightened Concern, Varied Responses 6. Narrowing the Problem: Slum Dwellers and Street Urchins 7. Young Men and the City: The Emergence of the YMCA Part Three. The Gilded Age: Urban Moral Control in a Turbulent Time 8. "The Ragged Edge of Anarchy": The Emotional Context of Urban Social Control in the Gilded Age 9. American Protestantism and the Moral Challenge of the Industrial City 10. Building Character among the Urban Poor: The Charity Organization Movement 11. The Urban Moral Awakening of the 1890s 12. The Two Faces of Urban Moral Reform in the 1890s Part Four. The Progressives and the City: Common Concerns, Divergent Strategies 13. Battling the Saloon and the Brothel: The Great Coercive Crusades 14. One Last, Decisive Struggle: The Symbolic Component of the Great Coercive Crusades 15. Positive Environmentalism: The Ideological Underpinnings 16. Housing, Parks, and Playgrounds: Positive Environmentalism in Action 17. The Civic Ideal and the Urban Moral Order 18. The Civic Ideal Made Real: The Moral Vision of the Progressive City Planners 19. Positive Environmentalism and the Urban Moral-Control Tradition: Contrasts and Continuities 20. Getting Right with Gesellschaft: The Decay of the Urban Moral-Control Impulse in the 1920s and After Notes Index

This unusual work in social history...clarifies the most troubling contradiction in democratic theory and practice: In a society in which each person has identical legal status without hereditary rank, and no social institution—such as a church—enjoys official recognition, no elite should have the right to prescribe a code of behavior binding on the members of the social order. Yet without such a code of traditional conduct, how can a democratic society avoid decay and chaos when it loses the original homogeneity of its population and changes the economic relations among its people?... Whatever the future may hold, the issues raised with such tact by Boyer remain crucial.