A cold rain poured on the crowds making their way to the old railroad freight depot at Thirteenth and Market Streets on the edge of Philadelphia. It was Sunday, November 21, 1875, and revivalists Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey were finally in Philadelphia for the first in a series of 250 revival meetings after years of petitions to visit the city by religious and civic leaders.
Tickets were issued, and extra policemen circulated to help control the throng. Despite the rain, thousands squeezed into the improvised freight depot tabernacle to hear the words and music of Moody and Sankey. The Philadelphia Times noted that “it looked as though the whole city had turned out before breakfast on the muddy, dreary morning” to attend the revival.1 Many were turned away. The Times reported without a hint of irony that as the bells of the nearby Catholic churches rang to announce Mass, the Moody revival began. The congregation stirred when Moody and Sankey mounted the stage and “two snow-white pigeons roosting in the rafters above the pulpit” took flight, circling over the gathered multitude. Soon the combined voices of the choir and congregation drowned out the rival church bells.2
Ample press coverage breathlessly detailed the religious spectacle as thousands congregated nightly in what was dubbed the “Tabernacle Depot” by the media.3 Moody’s advertising machine, assisted by local Protestant business leaders and newspaper owners, whipped up demand for tickets.4 Special reserved streetcars and trolleys brought scores of Philadelphians to the site, filling the twelve thousand seats day after day. People continued to stream to the far side of town for twelve consecutive weeks, making the once remote location a well-known landmark.5
The improvised tabernacle was meticulously organized. Inside, attendees found a well-lit space with thousands of chairs in neat lines. Nearly three hundred “blue-badged” ushers, many of them employees of a local department store, rushed to seat the demanding crowd. Once all the seats were occupied, the latecomers had to stand at the back and along the sides of the room.
Revival organizers cast the gatherings as disciplined and orderly affairs and asked audience members to sit “perfectly still.” The instruction served a twofold purpose: to help make it possible to hear the speaker throughout the cavernous space, and to demonstrate the respectability and decency of the revival proceedings.
On the second night, Moody stressed that his revival meetings kept to a tight schedule by dramatically declaring that “the doors will be closed and locked, if the house is only half full, and the other half outside.” Emphasizing the seriousness of his declaration, he announced, “If the President of the United States himself should come, . . . he wouldn’t get in.”6 In fact, President Grant would attend the revival a month later, along with his entire cabinet and the U.S. Supreme Court after touring the yet unfinished Centennial Exhibition grounds and buildings.
On the fourth night of the revival, the hordes continued to prove greater than the space could accommodate. One disappointed man exclaimed, “It’s as hard to get into heaven as it is to get into this depot,” and another worried about the structure’s safety if a fire broke out.7 Every night following Moody’s preaching and Sankey’s heart-stirring singing, Moody’s friend John Wanamaker, the owner of Philadelphia’s leading men’s wear store and provider of the revival’s ushers, led postrevival meetings at a nearby Methodist church. Wanamaker also owned the freight depot sanctuary. A little more than a year after the last night of the revival, Wanamaker transformed the temporary tabernacle into one of the first American department stores.
Eight months after the revival, Moody wrote to his old friend, urging him to sell his successful stores. “I cannot get you out of my mind for the last few days and nights. I must set down & write you & make one more effort to get you out of your business.”8 It was not a new tension in their relationship. Moody had shared his concerns with Wanamaker before. In this letter, he worried for his friend’s salvation, telling him, “It seems to me as if the devil wanted to cheat you out of your Crown and I was a fraid you will lose it the way you are goin–on.” Moody coaxed further, “You can recover all you lost & gain your heart and the hearts of the people.”9
Moody and Wanamaker’s friendship had developed out of a shared past. They both came from working-class backgrounds and discovered evangelical Christianity as store clerks. They both served as paid secretaries for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and worked with the U.S. Christian Commission during the Civil War. Both men started Sunday schools in major American cities that became the megachurches of their day. And they both feared the influence of the developing urban environment on young Christian men and women. However, their perspectives on the moral nature of business were at odds.
Wanamaker and Moody took different directions in their ministries. Moody became a revivalist and educator while Wanamaker became a successful retailer and church layman. Although Wanamaker’s success funded and supported Moody’s evangelism—for instance, Wanamaker purchased the property for Moody’s seminary in Northfields, Massachusetts—Moody remained unenthusiastic about the rapid expansion of Wanamaker’s dry goods store. In Moody’s mind, business was not equal to ministry and business could corrupt—a paradoxical stance, given Moody’s reliance on business techniques, advertising, and businessmen for the success of his revivals. He believed that a high commitment to Christian service demonstrated faithfulness.10 Moody wanted Wanamaker at his side “to look after the business [of ministry]” and to be fully committed to Christian work. By closing his growing store and devoting himself to full-time ministry, Moody claimed, Wanamaker would “be a free man again.”11
Wanamaker disagreed. He neither abandoned his store nor left ministry behind. Instead, he built one of the largest retailing businesses in the world and helped to develop the American retail shopping experience, creating one of the early American department stores. The freedom to browse without purchase, one price for each product clearly labeled for all customers, generous return policies, and annual white sales—these retailing conventions that he helped to implement continue to define American retail to this day. A stint as the U.S. postmaster general stimulated an interest in political office, only to be thwarted by a series of defeats. His introduction of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) expanded mail service to rural customers and supported his growing catalog business and that of other mail-order stores. Seeing the opportunity for ready-to-wear clothing, Wanamaker embraced changes in production, later developing his own line of products under the Wanamaker store label. He fashioned his stores as regional enterprises and special destinations, drawing customers from across the eastern United States with promises of more than shopping; his stores offered a full cultural education, including art galleries and concert music, under one roof. His store advertisements offered shopping advice and homespun wisdom in addition to marketing goods and educating consumers. Wanamaker’s massive stores in Philadelphia and later New York City and his active mail-order business, along with his enormous buying and production power, put him in a league with the other American merchant princes: A. T. Stewart, Marshall Field, Edward Filene, Aaron Montgomery Ward, and Julius Rosenwald. Wanamaker helped to create American retail. But business was not his sole occupation.
Wanamaker was also a prominent Christian lay leader. From his youth in the 1850s until his death in 1922 Wanamaker participated in the major Protestant moral reform movements that gained momentum during the second half of the nineteenth century to address concerns over the effects of immigration and the rapid growth of cities. Like many urban young men, he ignored sectarian differences and threw himself into more than one reform movement.12 He began as a local leader in the Philadelphia outbreak of the Businessmen’s Revival of 1857–1858. That same year, he started a Sunday school mission that later became Bethany Church, one of the largest institutional churches on the East Coast. Wanamaker served as the first paid secretary of a North American YMCA and then as president of the Philadelphia branch, where he oversaw the construction of its first building. He believed that architecture creates a powerful moral ambience capable of changing people, leading him to embrace the City Beautiful and Gothic Revival movements.13 He subscribed to the principles of the temperance movement and Sabbatarianism, and he invested heavily in the development of religious education. He supported the Moody revival and later Billy Sunday’s evangelistic efforts. He bankrolled large sums for the Salvation Army, made record donations to the organization, gave the Philadelphia branch a building, and kept a portrait of its founder, William Booth, in his home.14 In other words, he believed in moral influence and its potential for shaping people and places.
Dwight L. Moody was not the only critic of Wanamaker’s decision to remain in his business. Moody’s concerns for his friend echoed the popular negative view of business in the second half of the nineteenth century, a view that continued into the twentieth century. Merchants, in particular, suffered from an image problem and invited criticism for a host of unseemly business practices. They were also regularly lampooned in the press as modern greedy tricksters known for their “duplicity” and “hardened hearts.”15 The press claimed that businessmen “too much loved the world” and thus devoted themselves to business to such a degree that family and religion fell into eclipse.16 These perceptions conflicted with an emerging model of the working man whose tenacity and hard work moved him from poverty to success.
Popular opinion also laid the blame for the four major economic collapses of the nineteenth century squarely at the feet of businessmen, depicting the financial catastrophes as a result of an “emotional excess” of lust and greed.17 A series of books detailed the charges, most famously one by William T. Stead, a journalist and moral advocate who later would get himself into trouble over his righteous zealousness. Stead published his provocatively titled book, If Christ Came to Chicago!, in 1894 after his visit to the city during the World’s Fair. In it, Stead took readers on an imagined visit to Chicago through the eyes of Jesus. He directed the blame for the ills of society at Chicago’s business leaders, particularly its merchants, including department store tycoon Marshall Field. He accused Field of mercenary business practices, claiming that Field had built his store on a “pyramid largely composed of human bones” and accusing the department store founder of destroying small businesses by undercutting prices.18 The luxury rail car maker George Pullman and mass meat producer Philip Armour shared the scathing spotlight with Field for what Stead called their “quest of the almighty dollar.”19 As evidence of their immorality, he chronicled their lavish lifestyles in comparison to those of their workers. The book became a runaway bestseller.
The growth of companies into huge, abstract corporations invited the charge that large businesses and their proprietors were unethical, “amoral,” and “soulless.”20 The problem was more than just the increasing size of businesses: Americans had trouble identifying where large corporations fit in the familiar relational frameworks of home, church, and local business. Exposés that uncovered disturbing business practices and the growing power of corporations led to perceptions of businesses as uncaring, distant, and morally questionable in their drive to make more money.21
Cultural historians and journalists in the late twentieth century took up the critique of businessmen, equating the birth of modern consumerism with a decline in Protestant Christianity.22 Their studies of the intersections of religion and business suggested that the business leaders of the late nineteenth century helped to create “a commercial environment steeped in pecuniary values.”23 For these scholars, Wanamaker and others like him represented a cultural turn in which uncritical “accommodations of religion” to consumerism” led to a marginalization of religion.24 Merchants, in this view, used religion merely as a convenient gimmick to sell more goods. The behavior of those prominently involved in religious activities was seen as a naive attempt to bring together religious sentiments and the developing world of consumerism or as a malicious intent to use religion for business profit.25 Religious commitments were assumed to have little to no effect on their business practices, which frequently appeared to operate in opposition to professed religious belief.26
Yet, while some historians suggested that business leaders used religion either to insincerely increase profits or to assuage guilt—a thesis that equates the rise of business with the decline of religion—a new generation of scholars has demonstrated the intermingling of Protestantism and business stretching back as far as the Puritans.27 As historian Mark Noll has noted, religion and business have always been intertwined in “extraordinarily complex ways.”28 Their histories have shown how revivalists and Protestant Christian organizations employed business techniques to further religious aims long before the nineteenth century.29 And they have demonstrated how American evangelical business leaders geared their businesses to promote and support their religious agendas.
Were Wanamaker’s religious activities and his store’s holiday promotions merely a ploy to increase sales? Was his incorporation of Christian themes into the material world of his store self-serving and a corruption of his spiritual message? Or were his efforts part of a larger endeavor to breathe new life into an evangelical Protestant message to meet the challenges of the time?
This book examines how and why a well-known and leading American businessman, John Wanamaker, blended commerce and religion in his massive Philadelphia department store. It offers a historical exploration of how the relationships among evangelicalism, commerce, and urban life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries merged in unexpected and public ways, and how these relationships contributed to the creation of an American Protestant Christian ethos that was expressed, shaped, and supported by commerce. Wanamaker aimed not only to shape the budding American retail experience, but also to evangelize his consumers and employees, creating model middle-class Protestants. Wanamaker saw his retail empire not as separate from religion but as an instrument of it, as a means for achieving moral reform in business, in the city, and in individuals’ lives. Wanamaker, like many others during this period, developed a new way to deliver “old-time religion.” He harnessed the material world and aesthetics for his ministry, seeking to influence and define the moral order of the urban milieu through architecture, material goods, and public religious and civic events.
For many years, Wanamaker and his retail business made appearances in histories of American retail, department stores, holidays, and the rise of the middle class. The store and its art displays have also been a staple source for art historians and scholars of material and visual culture exploring the public display of religion. Yet, a fuller treatment of Wanamaker’s store and his religious commitments has not been undertaken, until now. This book traces earlier developments in the blending of religion and business and their roots in the emerging moral reform movements of the nineteenth century. Attending to Wanamaker and his approach to business and religion reveals much about the role Protestantism played in the formation of a middle-class aesthetics, the way that Protestantism was tied to the emergence of consumerism, and how Protestantism changed through its moral-religious response to shifts in population and religion in the urban landscape.
The nineteenth century was a period of moral anxiety for Protestants, centering on cities.30 American cities changed dramatically in layout, density, architecture, size, and social strata in a relatively short period of time. While new technology offered more affordable goods and greater personal comfort, it also upended traditional business methods and work life.31 “Progress” was touted as a positive moral value, but it came at a high cost. The familiar structures of communal life and business became nearly unrecognizable.32
Developments in transportation and jobs lured people to cities from small towns at the same moment that Protestant churches faced diminishing authority. A flood of newcomers with little experience of urban living arrived looking for jobs, housing, and a sense of identity in an unfamiliar environment.33 Business shifted away from small establishments operated by “self-employed proprietors to large corporations run by salaried managers” and their army of workers. Historian Alan Trachtenberg has noted the sharp contrasts that erupted during this period between the wretched effects of industrialization and the hopeful, upward mobility of some members of the population.34 New technologies introduced improvements to life while at the same time creating new detriments.
Adding to the ferment, urban populations swelled with an influx of millions of immigrants who came in successive waves starting in the 1820s and lasting until the 1920s. Between 1840 and 1890, 7.5 million Irish and German people poured into American cities, forever changing the cultural and religious demographics.35 Most of these immigrants were Catholic or Jewish, upsetting the Protestant majority at a moment when Protestants already felt vulnerable because of changes stemming from the industrialization of cities.36 The surfeit of newcomers broadened the increasing culture gaps between city residents and country dwellers, rich and poor, educated and uneducated.37
Cities were not prepared for the swift expansion that took place in the nineteenth century. Insufficient water supplies and waste systems, poor street conditions, and a lack of suitable housing plagued cities and yet did little to stymie growth.38 New transportation lines extended the boundaries of cities to meet outlying communities, eventually absorbing them. Wealthy residents moved out of cities to escape declining conditions, forcing their religious institutions to decamp from their urban homes. The old pattern of cities composed of small neighborhood enclaves that created tight-knit communities broke down with a surge in unregulated development.39 As cohesive neighborhoods disappeared, traditional institutions of support destabilized and became overwhelmed by the needs of a larger area and a more diffuse complex of problems. Customary lines of authority and power weakened as established families found themselves competing with new wealth in a jostle for power and prestige.
Women’s roles also began to change as a large number entered the workforce outside the home. At first, women’s occupations opened largely in the arena of domestic service. By the 1890s, women found jobs in factories, business offices, and early department stores.40 Upper-class women discovered new opportunities outside the home through women’s groups, volunteer activities, and businesses, like department stores, that catered to them. The social needs of the urban context also drew women into reform work and offered new opportunities for leadership.
An increase of violence and unrest also marked the period, with inadequate police forces and many city governments hampered by corruption.41 Bloody gang wars, street brawls, anti-Catholic riots, and protests broke out regularly.42 Unemployment and pockets of deep poverty contributed to the disquiet, while workers toiled long hours doing backbreaking work for low wages. The second half of the century saw several eruptions of labor unrest, including the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, Chicago’s Haymarket Affair in 1886, and the Pullman Strike of 1894, in addition to smaller, localized outbreaks.43
Starting at the same time that the first wave of young men from rural areas and immigrants settled into American cities, a surge of popular literature warned of the moral dangers of urban spaces. A new popular genre, what historian R. Laurence Moore has called “moral sensationalism,” soared in popularity, feeding the masses a never-ending stream of salacious tales of crime and vice in the city.44 Cities were cast in the popular imagination as sinister places that eroded more than the physical health of their occupants; they were a danger to their moral health too. Slums and tenements in particular were painted as places of sexual licentiousness, lawlessness, and drunkenness. This genre contrasted cities with a romanticized depiction of domestic life in agrarian small towns.45
Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, starting in 1885, authored several works identifying the need to focus Christian mission work in American cities and the West. Alarmed by the changes in population, the perceived moral danger of the city, and what felt like diminishing Protestant religious authority and cultural dominance in the face of a soaring Catholic presence, Protestants responded with a proliferation of reform strategies in what historian Paul Boyer has called a “moral awakening.”46 These programs—which included new forms of church and an array of agencies, movements, and morality campaigns—aimed to take back the city, domesticating it, and transforming it morally. What had been seen as a dire situation turned into an opportunity. Unable to combat the problems alone, Protestants set aside major doctrinal differences and banded together, pooling resources and ideas to address the problems of the city in creative ways that led to what was ostensibly a rebirth of American Protestantism.47 At the heart of these moral reform movements stood both a real community and what scholar Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community.”48 The imagined community links people together who may never meet and yet share a similar set of values and ideals that make them recognizable to one another.
The real community consisted of a network of Protestant churches and leaders who, throughout the nineteenth century, worked together toward common goals across denominational lines. In many ways, these leading Protestants were the economic beneficiaries of the changes in American commerce. In this period, Protestantism began to embrace the concept of moral influence or persuasion and moved away from a sudden conversion model to one of religious formation over time.49 Popularizing these ideas, Horace Bushnell, in his book Christian Nurture, advanced an organic approach to religion in which home developed into a religious and spiritual center.50 A child became Christian through the influence of properly maintained family, home, and church. Good taste and refinement came from God.51 These ideas transformed the way people looked at housekeeping, the arrangement of furniture, and home design—elevating them to new importance in religious life. Home, as historian Colleen McDannell has observed, became an intentional “vehicle for the promotion of values.”52 Reformers embracing this viewpoint and expanded the vision beyond the home with the belief that beautiful and orderly cities and green spaces had the power to transform their inhabitants morally.53 Bushnell and other reformers had combined piety with taste.
Art critics such as John Ruskin, Charles Eliot Norton, and others broadened this thinking to include civic and religious architecture, landscape design, and artwork as sources of moral refinement. Ministers picked up these themes in their preaching and led their congregations to construct new buildings that paid attention to the aesthetic expression of Protestantism.54 They wanted to reestablish moral authority and the prominence of Protestantism; in that process they redefined American Christian churches, institutions, architecture, and white identity. The YMCA, Sunday school mission movement, development of religious education, Moody-Sankey revivals, settlement house movement, social gospel movement, City Beautiful movement, Gothic Revival, and Arts and Crafts movement, among many others, shared this perspective.
Tying these moral reform movements together was an “imagined” pan-Protestant community rooted in a nostalgic, idealized vision of rural small-town life remembered as moral, virtuous, orderly, and supported by neighbors’ supervision.55 Reform movements contrasted this vision with the seemingly chaotic urban landscape where everyone appeared to be a stranger. The romanticized agrarian past informed a shared vision of what it meant to be Protestant, white, and middle- or upper-class. Print media, such as religious publications, books, religious education materials, magazines, advertisements, and sermons, helped white urban Protestants to “imagine themselves and their identities in relationship to others,” identified what they aspired for themselves to be, and articulated a longing for a mythical, utopian past.56 The Protestant imagined community allowed the exchange of ideas and approaches to move between Europe and the United States, making it a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. Attempts to bring unity among Protestants found their way into the design of church architecture, liturgy, and Sunday school classes.57 They redefined and reinforced what it meant to be Protestant. It was a Protestantism suited for the urban world and new wealth.
Protestant reformers translated desired values into practices of decorum and material expressions. Historian Richard Bushman has noted, “The refinement of America began around 1690” and by the “end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth . . . the middle class . . . [began] to believe they should live a genteel life.” In part, material markers of a genteel life became accessible to a wider range of people when they became more affordable with the changes in mass production and transportation. By the Civil War, “vernacular gentility,” a gathering of elements of refinement and taste, had become the possession of the American “middling classes.”58 Values perceived to be derived from rural life included purity, cleanliness, discipline, honesty, order, neatness in dress, and refinement in manners, and these values were also articulated into house furnishings and domestic architecture. Those who wished for “simple respectability had to embody the marks of the genteel style in their persons and their houses.”59 Social theorist Pierre Bourdieu calls the adoption of genteel style “cultural capital,” the idea that values could be translated into “culturally authorized tastes, consumption patterns, attributes, skills and awards.”60 Increasingly, for many Protestants “good taste became virtually a principle of Christian morality.”61 The combining of good taste with morality gave permission to purchase material goods and imbued material goods with moral power.
Good taste, then, had the power to change people. Material acquisitions and deportment determined “good taste.” With morality thus connected to taste, good taste signaled to bystanders an individual’s moral disposition.62 It became a shorthand way for urban Protestants to recognize moral individuals and those with whom they wished to associate. Protestants intentionally mobilized architecture, fashion, art, and music to promote morality and conversion in what I term an “aesthetic evangelism.”63 In the urban context, these small-town values that were meant to shape the immigrant population became associated with, attracted, and simultaneously helped to create the developing middle class.64
This book examines how John Wanamaker not only participated in these urban moral reform movements but creatively adapted these approaches for his department store, making it an instrument for moral reform. He also attempted to convert retail business into a moral-ethical, Christian endeavor by changing and promoting new business practices. From the Philadelphia store’s architecture to the ritual use of space, from the art and educational exhibits to employee education programs and their physical presentation, Wanamaker understood his department store and his employees as an extension of his religious work. Contrasting himself with his Chicago competitor Marshall Field, who had said, “Give the Ladies what they want,” Wanamaker told the public, “To give people the things they want is not enough.” Instead, he sought to be “an educator in taste.”65 For him, taste was not simply fashion, although it was that too. “Good taste” was an outward expression of an interior state—a reflection of one’s moral character. He believed, as did other Protestants, that disciplined dress, bearing, behavior, and lifestyle had the power to shape one’s morality—to improve one’s interior. Wanamaker hoped that through his store’s aesthetic education his customers and employees would experience moral uplift. His approach to business was an exercise of his Christian piety and practice. While pursuing traditional avenues of Protestant Christianity through his continued work in revivals, his Sunday school, and the YMCA, Wanamaker helped to transform Protestant Christianity by infusing the developing commercial culture with new meaning. Wanamaker’s blending of religion and business altered our understanding of Protestant Christianity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By following the trajectories of the braiding together of business and religion, we gain insight into the intertwining strands of aesthetics, material goods, and architecture with the developing middle class.