ABSTRACT

A SOCIAL GOSPEL VISION OF HEALTH: WASHINGTON GLADDEN’S SERMONS ON NATURE, SCIENCE AND SOCIAL HARMONY, 1869-1910

by Benjamin A. Susman

This thesis is a case study in a Social Gospel approach to nature, human health and environmental politics. Human health and non-human nature were mutually constitutive in Washington Gladden’s vision of health. In sermons from 1869 to 1910, Gladden argued that human health was closely connected to the health of societies and cities, for the simple fact that humanity was a part of nature. The local, urban aspects of Gladden’s Social Gospel vision of health were an important connective tissue to understand his broader moral and economic arguments. Gladden’s distinct notions of social morality and social harmony are best understood at the intersection of religious histories of the Social Gospel, urban environmental histories and public health histories. Gladden emphasized social morality through scientific public health and the conservation movement. His vision of social health was an ideal of social harmony supported by professionals who understood that human beings were capable of ordering God’s creation so that humanity could live healthy lives in healthy places around the world.

A SOCIAL GOSPEL VISION OF HEALTH: WASHINGTON GLADDEN'S SERMONS ON SCIENCE, NATURE AND SOCIAL HARMONY, 1869-1910

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

by

Benjamin A. Susman

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2020

Advisor: Dr. Steven Conn

Reader: Dr. Amanda Mcvety

Reader: Dr. Marguerite Shaffer

©2020 Benjamin Anthony Susman

This Thesis titled

A SOCIAL GOSPEL VISION OF HEALTH: WASHINGTON GLADDEN’S SERMONS ON NATURE, SCIENCE AND SOCIAL HARMONY, 1869-1910

by

Benjamin A. Susman

has been approved for publication by

The College of Arts and Sciences

and

Department of History

______Dr. Steven Conn

______Dr. Amanda McVety

______Dr. Marguerite Shaffer

Table of Contents

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Introduction: The Prospect of Healing Urban-Industrial Society………………………………………..1

Chapter One: Gladden’s Early Approach to Nature, Health and Social Morality……………………...17

Chapter Two: Professional Medicine and Gladden’s Vision of Social Harmony in the 1890s…………39

Chapter Three: Cities, Health and Social Harmony through the Conservation Movement………………57

Conclusion: Applied Christianity……………………………………………………………………...78

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..83

iii

Dedication

To my parents.

iv

Acknowledgements

In theory, an acknowledgement page is a necessary part of any published work. In practice, it is a difficult thing, even for a master’s student submitting a thesis. Beyond the names listed here were many more who helped this project become a reality.

My advisor, Dr. Steven Conn, deserves to be listed first here; for coaching a scrawny, inconsistent utility infielder into a serviceable second baseman. That is to say, his guidance, patience and ability to turn many of my negative qualities into positives, are the main reasons this thorough project was completed.

Many other thanks go to Dr. Amanda McVety, a reader/advisor on this project and the instructor in historical methods that opened my eyes to the various fields of history included in the thinking behind this project. Dr. Marguerite Shaffer, also a reader/advisor on this project, was probably the first professor I spoke to about my intention to venture into the field of environmental history. Each time we spoke, she helped me to see the forest for the trees, and that turned out to be a great help for a project such as this one.

From here on out is where many names will go unmentioned for lack of space. In addition to the professors listed above, this project could never have been completed without the input and encouragement of the following advisers and instructors: Dr. Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Dr. Nishani Frazier and Dr. Andrew Offenburger. And to Dr. Erik Jensen, Dr. Stephen Norris, Dr. Daniel Prior, Dr. Elena Albarrán, and Dr. P. Renée Baernstein, thank you for helping me build my confidence in forming historical arguments and for providing stellar examples of the professional historian at work.

In my mind, my colleagues are always going to be separated into two groups: first years and second years. The latter guided the former from our first day and left us with invaluable wisdom about how to succeed in our positions. For me, Austin Hall, Evan Ash, Eric Rhodes, Alexandra Fair and Edward Strong, were especially helpful in offering the right word at the right time to keep me going. Of the first years who eventually became second years (and then graduated), I want to thank all nine of you for making this a very fun and perfectly normal two years. Zach Logsdon, Louis Grün and Zina Osipova deserve special mention for being perfectly fun and very normal.

This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Brook Susman and Valerie Stanley. My sister, Kathryn Susman, also deserves mention here for being a shining example of honesty, perseverance and curiosity.

v

Introduction: The Prospect of Healing Urban-Industrial Society

Washington Gladden took up a pastorate at Columbus’s First Congregational Church in 1882. He held this position in Ohio’s capital until passing away at the age of 82 in 1918. Reverend Gladden was known worldwide, through the books and essays he published from the 1860s until his death, as he became one of the most renowned ministers of the Social Gospel movement.1 He provided guidance to Protestant audiences navigating the social and cultural changes of urbanization and industrialization in the United States. His invitation to Columbus by the congregation of the First Church was a recognition of his national influence.2 After graduating from Williams College in 1859, Gladden worked for urban churches of various sizes through the 1860s and 1870s: in Brooklyn, in Morrisania, New York, in North Adams, and then Springfield, Massachusetts. Journeying from Springfield, Gladden’s new position in Columbus was a promotion. Now he would be the most prominent Congregationalist voice in an important capital city. Columbus grew in population through the late nineteenth century, and so did Gladden’s influence as a guiding voice to Americans in the social and political transformations of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Once he settled into the parsonage of Columbus’s First Congregational Church, Gladden continued to push the boundaries of the traditional role of a minister in American society.

1 Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 1-9; Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3-7; Ronald C. White, Jr. and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America, with an essay by John C. Bennett (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), xiii-xv; Jacob Henry Dorn, Washington Gladden: Prophet of the Social Gospel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1968), vii-viii. The growth of local and national economies, as well as social conflicts over issues of labor, economic power, and race, challenged the orthodox Protestant establishment and inspired the rise of the Social Gospel movement in many American denominations. Social Gospelers reflected on the changes taking place in their society, including status anxiety about the role of the middle class in the industrial economy and threats to the middle-class domestic ideal. The Social Gospel applied biblical teachings to political, economic, and social reform, and came to be the dominant form of Protestantism in the United States by 1910.

2 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 71-73; C. George Fry, “The Social Gospel at the Crossroads of Middle America: Washington Solomon Gladden and the First Congregational Church, Columbus, 1882-1918,” in Perspectives on the Social Gospel: Papers from the Inaugural Social Gospel Conference at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, ed. Christopher H. Evans (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1999), 51-53; David Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church: The Minister Who Made Modern American Protestantism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 97-98. In focusing more on Gladden’s early life and the first two decades of his ministerial career, Mislin provides a foundation in Gladden’s personality that is a great benefit to other biographies that emphasize Gladden’s later career, see Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, x-xi. 1

Gladden was one of many ministers that took American Protestantism in new directions after the Civil War.3 Into the 1860s, there remained a prevalent mindset of ignorance in most American denominations over the social consequences of the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization. Many congregations simply withheld assistance to the poor, in a theological standpoint that came to be known as clerical laissez-faire.4 The goal was to justify the lives of the wealthy and demonize the lives of the poor, and to erect a border between sacred space and the urban spaces of crime, corruption and immorality.5 Nowhere were threats to the American Protestant establishment more apparent than the industrializing city. Urban denizens, specifically those part of the working class, were automatically seen as irreligious.6 In this view, the poverty and ‘otherness’ of rural migrants and immigrants gathered in urban slums threatened the future of American Protestantism. To strengthen the authority of their churches in the growing industrial cities, certain Protestant ministers supported an inclusionary, extroverted Christianity.7 For these liberal Protestant leaders, the future of Christianity became a matter of faith in a wider conception of humanity, grounded in the affirmation of God’s love for human beings. As a liberal religious

3 Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971); Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949); Rebecca Edwards, “Faith,” in New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 171-95; Matthew Bowman, “Religion in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, eds. Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 165-77; David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 7; Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). In the midst of their own crisis of religious legitimacy, American Protestants were distinctly connected to the larger political machinations, protests, and reform projects of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, combined here between 1865-1920, see Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877- 1920, (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

4 Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, 136-40; May, Protestant Churches, 14-16.

5 Robert A. Orsi, Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5-10. Orsi describes a ‘cultural strangeness’ dawning on Americans in response to the transformation of urban spaces.

6 Heath Carter, Union Made, 5, 49-71.

7 White and Hopkins, The Social Gospel, xi-xvii; Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 61-66; Edwards, New Spirits, 178-83; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 141-58; Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 45-54. 2 leader, Gladden clearly expressed his version of the New Theology, a set of liberal ideas which stressed that human society outside of the church was not alienated from God. The religious person needed to understand the influence of God in the everyday world, even in the natural world. The new theology incorporated scientific investigations and objective explanations into a ‘True Christianity.’8 Compared to the narrow views of mass evangelism and evangelical city mission movements, liberal Protestants such as Gladden were dedicated to understanding and providing solutions to social instability. This viewpoint coalesced most clearly in the Social Gospel movement. Living through the extraordinary growth of cities and the infamous labor conflicts of the period changed the views of many middle- and upper-class Protestants. By the 1880s, the Social Gospel gained support from churchgoers in these groups because they began to link social involvement and service to their religious life.9 In a framework that would increasingly make use of the scientific method and the new field of sociology, reform work in the cities was to provide the guidance necessary for municipal leadership hindered by rapid population growth and industrialization. Social Gospelers shared ideas about the superiority of broad social transformation over the narrow goals of traditional Christian philanthropy and charity to individuals.10 Churches became institutes, in the sense of research centers for solving social problems by the implementation of local programs to support social and economic welfare. Social Gospel ministers prioritized the improvement of social conditions and the formation of productive urban citizens. These ministers organized their congregations for the specific purpose of attempting to better the lives of the working class. If preachers did not apply the resources of

8 James C. Ungureanu, “Science, Religion and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” Science and Christian Belief 31, no. 1 (2019): 51-53; Ungureanu, “Science and Religion in the Anglo-American Periodical Press, 1860-1900: A Failed Reconciliation,” Church History 88, no. 1 (2019); Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Volume I: Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

9 Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, 144-47; Orsi, Gods of the City, 23-27; May, Protestant Churches, 112-22; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 182-200. Even with the acuteness of the battle between labor and corporations, the Social Gospel was slow to reach a critical mass to form into a movement. The final hurdle faced by those preaching a Social Gospel was the adoption of a religious viewpoint over materialist concerns of social and economic problems. Liberal theology was the intellectual framework for the Social Gospel; also influential was an enduring trust of American democratic institutions, and an ideology formed from intellectual currents such as pragmatism, idealism, and romanticism. The theoretical underpinnings of the Social Gospel allowed aid to be conceived of on a society-wide basis, greater than any single casualty of the conflict between capital and labor.

10 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 136-42, 171-80. 3 their church to social uplift, other Social Gospelers criticized them as frauds and grifters. Social Gospelers looked to their ministers to direct their reform impulses and shape their involvement in urban-industrial society. These ministers used basic, understandable language to efficiently convey their message.11 They were critical of slums and sweatshops because they degraded those who lived or worked in these spaces and prevented the formation of citizens who could contribute economically and morally to urban society. Social Gospel ministers placed emphasis on the workingman’s share and supported bargaining rights for labor organizations. Ministers expressed the hope that a spirit of cooperation between capital and labor would maintain high wages and eventually lead to profit-sharing as a standard business practice. The Social Gospel view of harmonized social relations was based in a moral system where individual well-being would be secured by social stability and a healthy society. Social Gospelers hoped to awaken society to a Christian spirit of love and cooperation that would counter the evil forces at play in the city and the economy. Columbus’s First Congregational Church was an established venue for ideas about religious and social reform.12 From its founding in 1856, the First Church was led by ministers with a concern for social well-being. When Gladden arrived in the early-1880s, the composition of the church’s congregation made it fertile ground for Social Gospel ideas. The First Church was considered exclusive, with many members from central Ohio’s upper and middle class but few wage-earners. By 1902, eight of nineteen presidents of the Columbus Board of Trade had been church members. A large contingent of members were faculty from the Ohio State University; by 1902, 32 of 130 instructors counted themselves as members. Students from the university and Medical School also attended services. Members of the First Church established a regular Literary and Social Club and supported lectures on historical subjects and contemporary issues in a Citizens Lecture Course. The congregation reinforced Gladden’s intellectual and

11 May, Protestant Churches, 170-75.

12 Fry, “The Social Gospel at the Crossroads of Middle America,” 54-58; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 90- 92. The congregation was formed by a splinter group of congregants from the Second Presbyterian Church of Columbus. Gladden oversaw a congregation whose membership expanded almost as quickly as their home city. From a membership of 500 in the 1880s, the congregation numbered over 1,200 in 1914. Located on Broad Street facing the State Capitol, the church was supported and attended by some of the city’s wealthiest families, bankers, mine and railroad owners, doctors, lawyers, state judges, city high school principals, and directors of various state public health institutions. They stood by their pastor even as he took the side of strikers in the Hocking Valley Coal Strike (1884) and vigorously rejected plans for John D. Rockefeller to donate one hundred thousand dollars to the American Board of Foreign Missions (1895). 4 activist pursuits. According to one of Gladden’s biographers, the relationship the minister had with “so many education, business, and philanthropic leaders undoubtedly magnified his influence in local affairs.”13 The mutual influence on pastor and congregation was clear.14 This intellectual climate strengthened Gladden’s activism. The exchange of ideas between a minister and their congregation is central to this analysis. Through weekly sermons, Gladden spoke to his local congregation more often than his national audience. In so doing, he tested ideas about reform. He considered solutions to the issues of poverty, temperance and gambling in Columbus. He also sought to improve working and living conditions through cooperative endeavors in the economy (municipal ownership of public utilities) and in local culture (municipal patronage of art and music).15 The focus in the following chapters is on Gladden’s unpublished sermons on science, health and nature. These subjects reveal broader aims of the Social Gospel movement than the traditional emphasis on labor issues, corrupt politics and a monopolized economy.16 Research on Gladden and the Social Gospel has not yet delved into the role of the natural world, health and science in the liberal Protestant quest for a more viable Christianity in urban-industrial society.17 Gladden’s home city of Columbus grew to extreme proportions in the late nineteenth

13 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 91.

14 C. George Fry and Jon Paul Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution: Washington Gladden and Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 14. To bolster the atmosphere of social responsibility in Columbus, Gladden often lectured at Ohio State. During a significant series of lectures in 1886, Gladden offered his perspective on The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Gladden published these lectures as part of his 1891 book Burning Questions of the Life that Now Is, and of That Which is to Come.

15 Fry, “The Social Gospel at the Crossroads of Middle America,” 67; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 303-5; Mislin Washington Gladden’s Church, 104-6. Gladden sought to institutionalize social morality in politics, especially as a city councilmember; in his church, with the establishment of a Sunday school for low-income children; and in the urban landscape, with his efforts in the establishment of a settlement house in Columbus.

16 Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 107-17, 120-24; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 235, 305-8, 323-32.

17 Gladden wrote many more sermons than could be the focus in this investigation. The titles and locations of additional sermons not discussed are listed in the footnotes throughout. The following are six additional sermons that would be useful in expanding an investigation into Gladden’s views on religion and science: 1) Washington Gladden, “The Natural and the Spiritual, September 21, 1879,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 15, #133), 2) “The Relations of Nature and the Supernatural, May/June 1891,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 22, #444), 3) “The Relation of Christ to the Creation, June 1891,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 23, #448), 4) “The Presence of God in Nature, May 6, 1894,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 25, #562), 5) “Natural Symbols and Spiritual Realities, April 12, 1903,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 35, #963), 6) “Spiritual Law in the Natural World, n.d.,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 49, #1545). 5 century. The urban population of the city more than doubled from 51,000 in 1880 to 125,000 two decades later.18 The city added an additional 100,000 residents before 1920. In 1882, Gladden found Ohio’s capital beginning to transform into a metropolis: while already a center of state politics, it was starting its transition from commodity entrepot to center of manufacturing, banking and insurance in central Ohio.19 Concerns over public health became paramount as industrialization and urbanization necessitated new procedures to funnel waste out of crowded spaces where infection spread quickly.20 The interplay between public health and politics figures prominently in the most recent historical thinking about Columbus. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, deaths from endemic and epidemic disease spurred the gradual improvement of the city’s sanitation infrastructure.21 Culminating in the expansive sanitation project known as

18 U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 11: 1880,” “Table 13: 1900,” “Table 15: 1920,” Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places, accessed May 23, 2020, https://www.census.gov/population/www/ documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html.

19 Mansel G. Blackford, Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change, (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 11-34. Gladden arrived seventy years after the site of Columbus was chosen by the Ohio General Assembly to be a temporary state capital. Incorporated in 1834 and chosen as the permanent state capital in 1851, by the 1880s it was a quickly industrializing city crossed by fourteen railroads and the frantic pace of stagecoaches on the National Road. Columbus society transitioned in the 1880s from a city of agricultural commerce to a city of foundries, manufacturing, and wholesale distribution companies. For the larger context of industrialization, urbanization, and environmental change, this investigation relies on the framework provided by William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), xvi, 92. Cronon underscores the importance of railroads in connecting the farmer and shopkeeper in small cities and frontier peripheries to the merchant and capitalist in urban cores. The railroads were but one aspect strengthening the bonds between metropolitan cores and smaller cities and periphery settlements in a capitalist geography. The larger force on the macro scale was the capitalization of nature (the pricing and mortgaging of commodities and agricultural land) with the goal of extracting increasing profits from ecological systems.

20 Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996), xxx-xxxi; Tarr, “The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh,” Journal of Urban History 28, no. 5 (July 2002), 511-45. Tarr focuses on the city’s place within the countryside. Issues of land use and technological development during rapid urbanization revealed the increased waste being produced by the city, which overflowed into the surrounding environment. Agricultural uses of waste and the uninhibited effluence of pollutants into natural watersheds were replaced by the technological development of sanitary engineering. Sanitation infrastructure was a particular technological system that helped a community cope with the pressures of the urban ecological system. These processes transformed cities and made them much more sustainable as living spaces. Martin V. Melosi sees the urban expansion, industrialization, and growing environmental consciousness of the late nineteenth century as a pivotal moment in the history of American sanitation, see Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 2-11. Melosi does not see sanitation as an organic processes, but a more recent historian has a more organic view of sanitation engineering, see Daniel Schneider, Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

21 Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 91-92. Blackford weaves together two centuries of Columbus’s history to establish an argument around the evolution of Columbus’s urban sanitation and land use system. The decisions made 6 the Great Columbus Experiment of 1908, these improvements by the municipal government eliminated public health concerns over water-borne disease. Historians see this Great Experiment helping to jump-start the growth of Ohio’s capital over the next century into the present day. In the continued search to understand the history of this important city, this analysis is focused on the ideas of one of the most prominent cultural figures in Columbus as this transformation was taking place. By focusing on Gladden’s sermons we see how one individual grappled with new ideas. The health and well-being of individuals motivated Gladden’s reform efforts. As delivered in their original form, sermons about public health and the natural world would have fit into a sequence of sermons that could have discussed labor the week before and politics the week after. Gladden’s vision of health in these sermons expressed the relationship between humanity and God’s creation by emphasizing public health.22 As this analysis shows, Gladden emphasized the redemption of society through a scientific understanding of God’s creation. In so doing, Gladden provided intellectual depth to reformers interested in healing their society. Gladden was never trained in a seminary. His influence as a preacher was based in his civic involvement. In his sermons, ideas shared in discussions about the improvement of industrial cities mixed with ideas brought up in consideration of the future of American Protestantism. A close reading of Gladden’s sermons shows his personal vision. The investigation of Gladden’s ideas, as one of many contributors to contemporary conversations about reform, helps to further an investigation into the underlying motivations for municipal reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Gladden was very influential as a member of Columbus society, and further investigation of his ideas through letters, city council minutes, and

to implement new water use regimes were important because they set limits on technological advancement, social movement and land use, which determined the subsequent growth of the city, see Andrew Karvonen, Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). Historians who previously focused on Columbus took a broad approach. They focused on a period of decades to establish the importance of Columbus’s history to that of the wider United States in their period of study, see Patricia Burgess, Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900-1970 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994); Gregory S. Jacobs, Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998).

22 Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Carl Smith, City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013); Mark Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Evan Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 7 the minutes of the Board of Trade, would help to show exactly how influential his ideas were in the pursuit of better health for the city’s citizens. Gladden always considered reform in the language of morality.23 For instance, with regard to the labor question, the social contingents of capitalists and laborers had a moral responsibility to accommodate one another’s standpoints. Justice and social stability meant harmony, rather than tyranny of one side over the other.24 When confronting the epidemics that menaced the population of Columbus throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Gladden hoped for a broad social morality in public health institutions to save lives and contribute to social harmony.25 Gladden envisioned the health of urban-industrial society secured by “social morality” that would be the driving force in the establishment of “social harmony.”26 These themes are essential to understand Gladden’s vision of health. They are discussed in this introduction and elaborated through the remaining chapters. Social morality was a perfected human morality revealed in altruistic social relations. This broad morality on the scale of human society was not set up by churches. “There is no more blinding heresy,” Gladden said in a sermon in 1906, “that the church undertakes to set up a kind of society or of morality which is apart from and superior to human society or human morality.”27 Churches were part of the larger human community, and social morality was a religious concern with the morals of society. Gladden did not see the salvation of individuals in a church or a city separate from the involvement of these individuals with larger social forces.28

23 Jacob Dorn, “The Social Gospel and Socialism: A Comparison of the Thought of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch,” Church History 62, no. 1 (1993), 87.

24 Gladden was no collectivist, but he wanted a ‘fraternity’ of interests to understand their mutual investment in urban society. He emphasized the ‘brotherhood of man’ and did not want the humanity of social groups and institutions to take the place of the ‘fatherhood of God,’ see Dorn, “The Social Gospel and Socialism,” 82.

25 Typhoid fever was one of the more aggressive of these diseases in Columbus, leading to three percent of deaths between 1898 and 1906, see Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 49-76.

26 Discussed below, these are primarily philosophical concepts. Gladden ascribed importance to these concepts, but these terms have not been clearly defined by historians.

27 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society, September 30, 1906” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 38, #1106), 29.

28 Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel, 125-26; Dorn, “The Social Gospel and Socialism,” 83-84, 347; Bowman, “Religion in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” 171. In the development of the Social Gospel movement, reformers placed emphasis on the salvation of humanity and society over personal salvation. 8

“The welfare and the happiness of each are the concern of all,” Gladden said in 1906.29 “The prosperity of the whole body is dependent on the hearty cooperation of each of its members.” Social morality was an ideal of human conduct that encompassed the actions and relationships of ‘each’ and ‘all’ individuals in a cooperative spirit. Human ‘welfare,’ ‘happiness,’ and ‘prosperity’ resulted from approaching both worldly and spiritual concerns with ‘hearty cooperation’ that expanded beyond the walls of the congregation. For Social Gospelers, an emphasis on individual morality and individualism was no longer feasible to bring about a harmonious, Christian society. Embracing a religious spirit was not simply a matter of the individual, it was reliant on the family, the nation, and other social and economic relationships.30 Gladden explained that “this church is itself a member of a larger body – of the community in which it stands…the life of a larger organism.”31 Prominent Social Gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch later explained: “It is not a matter of saving individual atoms, but of saving the social organism. It is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.”32 Like Rauschenbusch, Gladden envisioned social harmony that resulted from a collective social spirit. The complex relationships and interactions of society, what Gladden referred to as both the social organism and the Kingdom of God, needed to be perfected. The Kingdom of God was a concern for human welfare and for the building of ‘heaven on Earth’ – a compassionate character in all of humanity that would lead to a just and righteous society. Striving to implement the Kingdom of God, Social Gospelers sought the betterment of living conditions through global reform efforts.33 The liberal Protestant emphasis on morality and harmony freed the idea of the Kingdom of God from “its traditional catastrophic setting and its background of demonism…[so that] coupled to the dogma of progress, the kingdom was now at home in the naturalistic

29 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 39.

30 Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 56-60.

31 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 40.

32 Orsi, Gods of the City, 27.

33 Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, eds., “Introduction: Restoring Women and Reclaiming Gender in Social Gospel Studies,” in Gender and the Social Gospel, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 3; Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 30-35; Fry and Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution, 15. P.S. Moxom described that the Kingdom of God was a form in which the salvation of the individual was extended throughout their social relationships to become a social salvation, see Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel, 129. 9 atmosphere of the modern world.”34 Liberal Protestants such as Gladden purposefully linked a naturalistic, organic view of society with beliefs about the immediacy of God’s intervention in the world.35 In this way, the social and moral progress sought by liberal Protestants reinforced the scientific, transportation and communication transformations of the period.36 For Gladden, social harmony was the spiritual perfection of the social organism. In a religious sense, the social organism showed “the vital unity of the [human] race.”37 In a scientific sense, the social organism was “as much a part of the order of nature as is gravitation or chemical affinity,” Gladden said.38 As a physical force, the social organism was malleable and could be improved by the establishment of social harmony. This harmony would be driven by a supernatural energy that was endemic to Christian belief. “Only let this vital principle of the Kingdom, the law of unselfish love, become the dominant force in the life of any association of men,” Gladden said in 1894, “and in a very short space of time the little [association] will become a thousand and the small one a great nation.”39 Gladden compared the productive process of natural forces to human organizations such as the laboratory, the factory and the church.40 When Gladden advocated for social morality and social harmony, he set his First Church as a monument to Christian expertise.41 From his office in the bell tower, Gladden’s

34 Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel, 127. In the orthodox view, nature was understood as a background to a theatre that human beings would be saved from or destroyed with at the end of history.

35 Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 126-30; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 189-200.

36 Fry and Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution, 16-17; Robert T. Handy, “The Church and the Kingdom,” in The Social Gospel in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 102-18. Handy uses an excerpt from The Church and the Kingdom (1894) by Gladden to underscore the view of the Social Gospel movement that the Christian church served humanity by preparing it for the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

37 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 37.

38 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 38.

39 Gladden, “The Germ of Life, October 25, 1894,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 26, #580), 11.

40 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 11-19. Gladden compared organizational life in the modern day to the organization and growth of the early church, with its grounding in a true expression of the law of Christ: Christian love.

41 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 304; Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel, 123-27; Bowman, “Religion in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” 175. The moral and spiritual system of the Social Gospel was to be applied to urban space. Social Gospelers saw urban space as the site where Christianity would be fully manifest. A new ‘lived religion’ in the city empowered Social Gospel ministers such as Gladden. Also see, Alexandra Oleson and John 10

Social Gospel vision of health would help to guide the inner, spiritual life of Ohio’s capital city. To his attentive congregation, Gladden offered a reasoned and effective voice to advocate for municipal policy, toward asserting a Social Gospel view in the city’s power relationships.42 Gladden’s view was influential partly because his ideas bridged the transition from the moral environmentalism (moral suasion) of Victorian era reform and the social environmentalism (material improvement of urban life) of many Progressive Era reformers.43 From the 1870s, social science and public health were combined in the intellectual beginnings of urban progressivism. The social environmentalist perspective held that slums and unsafe working conditions caused immoral behavior. Social environmentalism brought an investigative and sociological perspective to the front of urban reform. Gladden still thought in terms of reforming people, while many social environmentalists interested in reform considered transforming (with scientific precision) the spatial conditions and aesthetics of working-class neighborhoods. Gladden’s sermons show that he was not as trustful of the urban environment as others committed to social transformation.44 For him, the city was a prime site for human interaction, but it was not the only site. Humanity was an organic body, connected in the city not to the city. Gladden’s perspective was indebted as much to a moralistic view of healing the corruption of urban space as it was to a social environmentalist understanding of healing through science and expert judgement. Gladden rejected a self-righteous view of poverty but he held a narrow view of how humans fit into the urban landscape. To be fair, Gladden explained that the urban environment functioned as a composite of its human components. He saw a sharing of human labor and lives to an extent unparalleled in human history. Compared to the “savage in his hut,” with “his own

Voss, ed., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

42 Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 18-23, 296-312.

43 Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America, 108. Stoll’s environmental moralism parallels Platt’s definition of moral environmentalism in the sense that morality equaled a lack of action in the environment – wilderness or city – and this judgement was considered capable of changing the world.

44 In 1897, Gladden’s emphasis on moral failing was still on behavior, as in the ‘Parasite’s Creed’ sermon, discussed in Chapter Two. As he expressed in the ‘Influenzas’ sermon from 1890, discussed in Chapter One, moral failing was not just the responsibility of the criminal but also a concern of the municipal government through their regulatory responsibility. 11 rude industry,” Gladden explained that even the poorest worker in the early twentieth century relied for their “subsistence...comfort...and enjoyment” on the “labors of other men,” Gladden said.45 Gladden did wish to counter non-religious views of society, and he also wished to oppose the influence of Social Darwinism.46 He emphasized the need to balance the negative experiences of human society with the positive: optimism about the future, humanity’s “upward tendencies,” and the finer qualities of truth and beauty, all balanced the inheritance of physical and mental deficiency.47 Humanity’s finer qualities, as well as physical deficiencies and ill health, were passed down and formed through previous generations. “Heredity may bring us disabilities, but it brings us also all the mighty gains of accumulating moral energy,” Gladden said.48 Importantly, heredity was an essential aspect of social morality and social harmony for Gladden.49 Part of Gladden’s prerogative in asserting his expert view was to solidify his cultural standing as a male, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in a society becoming increasingly heterogeneous.50 Gladden sought approval as a member of the elite culture of the period. In the focus of this investigation, it is not my intention to be insensitive to gender and race. Social Gospelers who were male had an impulse to control that female Social Gospelers rejected – especially when men upheld beliefs in manhood, asserting what they believed to be the right of men to oversee actions in the public sphere in the context of Victorian gender ideologies.51 Just

45 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 15-16.

46 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 170. Dorn explains that Gladden rejected a naturalistic view of humanity.

47 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 8. This was a matter of genealogy, and it formed each human’s physical, intellectual, and moral powers, see “Organic Bond of Society,” 6-9; for an extended discussion of humanity’s complex intellectual heritage, see “Organic Bond of Society,” 20-27.

48 Gladden, “Organic Bond of Society,” 9.

49 Gladden expressed a concern with heredity in the 1890s, discussed in the Conclusion, which he linked to social health and social harmony. Along with many other cultural and political elites, Gladden invited sociology and public health into the city. Through a concern with heredity, specifically, Gladden drew a logical connection between public health, urban space and the expansion of scientific-based actions in each.

50 Croce, Science and Religion, 18-20; Mislin, Saving Faith, 10-11. Mislin emphasizes that elites, in big cities, were not un-self-serving.

51 Deichmann Edwards and De Swarte Gifford, Gender and the Social Gospel, xii, 1-9; Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 31-33. The marginalization of women in Social Gospel histories is evident in the inaccurate, non- gender-specific definitions of the movement that assume Social Gospelers as essentially elite, white, male intellectuals. Women’s involvement in the broad, diverse cultural landscape of the era leads to the conclusion that 12 as significant, while white Social Gospelers of any gender may have professed an agenda of liberation, their race consciousness was most likely not a true social consciousness.52 Important to remember is that Gladden’s perspective on nature and science was just one perspective of “many interacting layers of culture” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.53 Chapter One of this thesis establishes that for Gladden a significant component to social morality was human interaction in and with the natural world. Because humanity was connected to nature, each as part of God’s creation, the spread of illness and disease was a matter for societies to solve as they considered their relationships with the natural world. Gladden believed that ignorance of bacteria prevented any true understanding of the Kingdom of God. Those who rejected scientific public health rejected the truth of the intricate workings of God’s creation. In Gladden’s Social Gospel vision of health, professional medicine and public health tied human society more closely to the natural world and therefore to God. Gladden believed that only through the treatment of illnesses would social health be restored and social harmony realized. Wresting control of the city from those who condoned an unhealthy urban space helped to establish social morality. Chapter Two documents Gladden’s formation of what he called the medical conception of Christianity, with its emphasis on the professional duties of the minister. In their everyday work, physicians and other public health officials shared with ministers a concern with the preservation of human life.54 While medical science revealed elements of God’s creation that no

the Social Gospel can indeed be understood outside of male-dominated ideologies and institutions. For Gladden’s unsupportive attitude to women’s rights and suffrage, see Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 124-27.

52 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 5-6; Blum, Reforging the White Republic, xx-xvi, 18. For black Social Gospelers, churches were more than an element of black culture in America – they were a refuge from the realities of racial injustice. Because of race-based discrimination, black churches had always been placed in a central position of supporting social programs and wider civic efforts. Additionally, Edward Blum wants scholars of American religion to understand the social power resulting from the combination of whiteness and godliness. Black American inclusion and justice were forgotten in this religious context.

53 Croce, Science and Religion, 19.

54 John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Anne Hardy, The Epidemic Streets: Infectious Disease and the Rise of Preventive Medicine, 1856- 1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); for a contrasting view of the most significant cultural figures in American public health, see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of the Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); also see, John Blevins, “US Public Health Reform Movements and the Social Gospel,” in Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health, ed. Ellen L. Idler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 133-142; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 40-54. 13 religious mind had ever considered, ministers still played an important part as professionals in efforts to bring social harmony to the world. The basis for the minister’s assertion of authority inside and outside their congregation was a moral view of society that encompassed the interactions of all humanity. Gladden and other Social Gospelers identified modern ailments, not limited to physical sickness and death, which affected society: health was linked very closely to a productive, active life.55 Ill-health became a symptom of lost productivity. The Social Gospel vision of health was grounded in a belief that human society should undergo processes of healing. Religion could not cure disease; and religion could not free water of pollution. To accomplish these tasks, Gladden gave moral justification to broad alliances that looked after social morality from a material standpoint. Cooperation was the basis of harmonized social relationships for Social Gospelers such as Gladden.56 After his visit to the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in Columbus in 1899, Gladden explained that the work of physicians was a direct testament of God’s ability to work out divine will through humanity. Gladden was impressed that in matters of scientific medicine and public health, individual concerns of well-being became social concerns.57 This was the foundation of the physician’s cultural authority to investigate and demarcate the world in relation to human health. The professional relationship between physicians and ministers was part of a larger effort to support human welfare, to bring about social harmony. The well-

55 David G. Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869- 1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 1-4; Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 16-19; 69-70. In Schuster’s study of neurasthenia, he shows that Gilded Age and Progressive Era health and well-being were understood in terms of balance and harmony. When confronting such a disease, Schuster explains, patients felt that it was futile to hold fast to traditional conceptions of life and work. Curtis shows that notions of purposeful work were part of the larger criticism from the Social Gospel movement of free-market competition, legally-established selfishness, and the resulting hindrance on social morality. Purposeful and rewarding work, striving for personal achievement, became worthy through the approval of others in the professional class.

56 Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 20-26; Mislin, Saving Faith, points out this was the case for the larger body of liberal Protestants of which Social Gospelers were included.

57 Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982). Starr emphasizes a contentious atmosphere between doctors, reformers, and other public health officials (none of these categories is mutually exclusive). New institutions were founded by each of these groups to strengthen their cultural authority in preserving public health; a recent appeal to historians updates the significance of Starr’s social transformation, see Christopher Sellers, “To Place or Not to Place: Toward an Environmental History of Modern Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 92, no. 1 (2018), 1-45. Sellers underscores how as medicine professionalized, diagnosis began to be considered in a place-neutral capacity. Medicine became place-specialized. In an effort to structurally eradicate disease in all its forms, doctors began practicing tropical medicine, bacteriological public health, and occupational medicine. The cross-pollination of ideas was minimal among these specializations and confusion about what was pathological and what was natural resulted. 14 meaning professional was cognizant of the benefit they provided to the larger society through their daily efforts. Joining in a larger association of public-spirited investigators, the professional individual’s work ethic would distribute the burden of combatting contemporary social problems. At the very least, ministers were to exert moral influence on others in the professional class locally and nationally. At their most productive, ministers were experts in looking after social morality and social health. Chapter Three shows that Gladden’s ideas about social harmony were part of his broader thinking about harmony between humanity and nature, and the functioning of each in the urban environment. In his support of the conservation movement, Gladden was concerned as much with the urban environment and human settlements as with the natural world. His placement of humanity as a component of God’s creation made him more conscious of societal health. Gladden’s most optimistic vision of health was an ecological vision of social morality and societal harmony that reconciled expert public health administration, medical science and humanity’s place as beings within nature. Along with other liberal Protestants, Gladden wanted to better understand connections between human beings, in their social interactions, and between humanity and nature. The social and the environmental were linked in Gladden’s mind as part of the wider Progressive movement.58 Social Gospelers were interested in reform and what historian Benjamin Johnson terms ‘environmental politics.’59 The conservation movement, for instance, shared with the Social Gospel a cultural grounding in Progressive Era concerns of morality and harmony through reform.60 “Both conservation and the social gospel stressed making connections, understanding interrelationships, and posited the essential unity of things as

58 Benjamin Heber Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 6-7, 11.

59 Johnson, “Environment: Nature, Conservation, and the Progressive State,” in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, eds. McKnight Nichols and Unger, 71.

60 Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), xiv-xv; David Traxel, Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War, 1898-1920 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), ix. This investigation focuses on Progressivism through the lens of the conservation movement, see Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City; Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1999). 15 constitutive of their worldviews,” says historian D. Keith Naylor.61 This thesis seeks to add to the literature about the Social Gospel and the conservation movement by describing the intellectual development of Gladden’s beliefs about humanity and the natural world. This thesis is a case study in the Social Gospel approach to nature, human health and environmental politics. Human health and non-human nature were mutually constitutive in Gladden’s vision of health. He argued that human health was closely connected to the health of societies and cities, for the simple fact that humanity was a part of nature. Gladden’s sermons were at every point supported by wider intellectual debates of the period. His notions of morality and harmony are best understood at the intersection of religious histories of the Social Gospel, urban environmental histories and public health histories. Each of these histories emphasize the cultural, political and social changes in the new industrial cities of the late nineteenth century. Gladden emphasized the importance of social morality through scientific public health and the conservation movement. His vision of social health was an ideal of social harmony supported by professionals who understood that humanity was capable of ordering God’s creation so that human beings could live healthy lives in healthy places around the world.

61 D. Keith Naylor, “Gifford Pinchot, the Conservation Movement, and the Social Gospel,” in Perspectives on the Social Gospel: Papers from the Inaugural Social Gospel Conference at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, ed. Christopher H. Evans (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1999), 254. 16

Chapter One: Gladden’s Early Approach to Nature, Health and Social Morality

Compared to the rolling topography of Western Massachusetts, central Ohio and the city of Columbus presented a “quieter beauty,” according to Washington Gladden.62 When he arrived in 1882, he thought that Columbus’s central place in state politics was not obvious from the “flatness and monotony” of the surrounding landscape. A stark natural environment paralleled the stark urban environs of the city in the 1880s. Rev. Gladden’s move to Columbus was important in his comparison of the city with the place he had just left. The city of Springfield, Massachusetts had been “the fairest of the lesser cities of the land,” Gladden explained in his autobiography.63 The Western Massachusetts city was the natural capital of its region and “a centre of considerable influence,” said Gladden.64 In Columbus, the landscape, the built environment and the city’s culture were second rate. The city’s streets, the street lighting and the domestic architecture were primitive and crude. In the 1880s, Columbus “presented no such trim and finished appearance as the best New England cities.”65 Gladden compared Columbus to Springfield and thought of the possibility that Columbus could join the ranks of ‘the fairest of the lesser cities of the land.’ What was Columbus missing that prevented its transformation into a municipality worthy of comparison with an older, more refined city? One can imagine Gladden’s thoughts on this question as he walked around Ohio’s capital, noticing the unpaved streets, the primitive street lighting, and the crude domestic architecture. His answer to this question can be glanced in noteworthy sermons from the late-1860s and the late-1880s, before and after Gladden’s arrival in Columbus. The conclusion that the prominent minister arrived at was that a better life in the city would result from better living conditions – not only better streets, lighting and architecture, but

62 Gladden, Recollections, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 284.

63 Gladden, Recollections, 240; Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 86-87; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 59-60.

64 Gladden, Recollections, 242.

65 Gladden, Recollections, 285.

17 better health.66 Like many upper and middle-class Americans of his generation, Gladden believed that individual morality was not as significant to a Christian life as a morality that was understood socially; morality that could be measured at the level of social interactions, and that may be more responsive (than individual sentiments) to efforts of revitalization and healing. Gladden’s middle- and upper-class congregation most likely held a frame of reference very similar to the newly arrived minister. A better city would result from a better life in urban space, which was a matter of improving urban living conditions. Through the nineteenth century, the question of public health became more scientific and less related to morality and religion. In Columbus, by the time Gladden arrived in 1882, the city was debating the future of its public health.67 Across the United States, urban residents had similar discussions about the prospect of clean water supplies, municipal water treatment and the expansion of sewer systems.68 Waterborne disease coupled with infectious disease gave a grim reputation to any city without an updated sanitation system.69 The result was that many

66 Tomes, The Gospel of the Germs, 2-8; Duffy, The Sanitarians, 4-5; Hardy, The Epidemic Streets, 5-8; Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 227-33. Public health experts addressed the health of larger populations, dealing with different issues than individual doctors would confront with patients in a private practice. Gladden conceived of a public health network supported by physicians, and this placed him in a very specific historical context. Gladden’s thinking about disease maps onto the timeline set by public health historians of the transition from miasmatic thinking to thinking about the germ theory in the late nineteenth century. Gladden hoped that the physician and other adherents to medical science would arrive at a broader view of the physician’s practice by being attentive to a social framework.

67 Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 52-58. As early as the 1820s, Columbus had a reputation as an unhealthy place to live. Diphtheria, typhoid fever, dysentery and malaria, were waterborne diseases that turned up with regularity throughout the antebellum period. Columbus established hygienic ordinances in 1828, 1830, and in the city’s Articles of Incorporation of 1834. These governmental actions held residents accountable for their own polluted waste, and the waste of their living or decomposing animals. These incorporation laws also allowed for a temporary Board of Health for the city; a significant concern in its early years was controlling the disembarkation of infected canal boat passengers. Columbus was without a permanent Board of Health until 1887.

68 Duffy, The Sanitarians, 177. In 1888, many state boards of health reprinted a report by a committee of the American Public Health Association that linked efforts to improve sanitation with reduced rates of typhoid fever.

69 Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 69-74. In Columbus, a city council resolution in 1853 called for a water works system. The city clerk collected reports for a decade before setting up a committee to research building a water works in 1863 (though no comprehensive sewer system was a factor in this research until the 1890s). In 1868, the council debated steam-powered water works, leading to the building of a well and filtering gallery (to lessen turbidity) on a bank of the Olentangy River north of the city. Over the course of the 1870s, a 70-mile system of cast- iron pipes and hydrants, centered at the steam-powered West Side Pumping Station, was built to carry water through the city. A companion pumping station was built on Alum Creek in the East Side of the city in 1889. By the 1890s, the east side station pumped 6 million gallons per day through the city and the west station contributed 9 million gallons. For financial reasons, the city’s sanitation infrastructure was always in need of an upgrade. Without an updated system, Columbus faced the threat of epidemic disease into the twentieth century. Typhoid fever and malaria reached epidemic scale in 1881 and a cholera epidemic infected the population in 1892. Rates of death from 18

American cities gradually connected patchwork water and sewer pipes through projects that created comprehensive systems supplying water and treated sewage.70 These debates took place as the germ theory of disease causation replaced the miasmatic theory, not only for scientists but also for the general population.71 Under the influence of miasmatic thinking, the quality control of water was less important than cleaning spaces of filth created by decaying animal corpses, human waste and other rotting organic materials. Proponents of the germ theory argued that disease was spread by microorganisms, not by inanimate matter and gas from unclean spaces. Germ theorists explained that microorganisms moved in an invisible world, but would incapacitate even the healthiest human if the two crossed paths.72 Bacteriology was divisive because it laid low the boundaries between the individual and society.73 The expansive perspective of adherents to the germ theory of disease acknowledged the importance of studying human pathology, disease transmission, infection, and the significance of comprehensive sanitation systems. The vulnerability and uncertainty brought about by the invisible danger of bacteria was precisely related to the connections revealed among humans and between humanity and nature. Only the germ theory, not the theory of miasmas and a focus on hygiene, could be successfully fused with natural science. To better understand disease causation and to counteract the damage of disease, humanity needed to acknowledge more deeply than ever before their interrelationship with the natural world.

typhoid fever were at 33 per 100,000 from 1898 to 1903, and rose during a time of widespread epidemic to 78 per 100,000 from 1904 to 1906.

70 Karvonen, Politics of Urban Runoff, vii-xii. With urbanization, municipalities experienced water flowing more and more as horizontal phenomena instead of the vertical “falling” of rain. The task fell to civic engineers to manage these water flows. The environmental management process of sanitation was an effort at expert and bureaucratic control, but it was also an acknowledgment that what occurred in an industrial district mattered for those living downriver or those who had to breathe polluted air when the wind changed. Karvonen demonstrates the mix of the rational and the populist in the politics of the urban environment. Each segment of the city had their own interests, and these were different from the interests of the city as a whole. Those at the level of municipal government were separated from alternative viewpoints at the neighborhood level.

71 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 26-38.

72 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 41-43. Natural scientists, physicians, and engineers gave agency to microbes through the germ theory, not only in the ability for germs to transmit diseases but in supporting processes of industrial ecology such as brewing. Not only did microbes have agency, but they moved and existed in an entire microscopic world; for a discussion of Darwin in debates about the germ theory, see Tomes, 43-45; the germ theory was transformational in the history of Columbus, see Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 64.

73 Duffy, The Sanitarians, 193-203. 19

Understanding Gladden’s formation into a prominent Social Gospel thinker is not complete without considering how he connected humanity and the natural world through his sermons. Beginning in the late-1860s, Gladden’s reflection on nature led to a reflection on the place of humanity in God’s creation. Nature and science were a reflection of divinity in Gladden’s mind.74 In his autobiography, as Gladden recalled his move from Springfield to Columbus in 1882, the natural world was a major theme of this transition. Gladden admitted that Columbus’s environment was depressing. There were fertile plains and rivers, but, unlike in Springfield, the “hills to which I had been wont to lift up my eyes, and from which had often come my help, were nowhere in sight,” he said.75 The environmental change from the Connecticut River Valley to Ohio signaled a cultural and political change for Gladden, evident in the urban space of Columbus. By the late-1880s, Gladden’s sermons make clear that nature also played an important part in bettering the lives of Columbus’s citizens – through bacteriological public health initiatives. This chapter will show that Gladden’s preaching took on a socially conscious viewpoint beginning in the late-1860s through sermons on nature, science and public health. The first section of this chapter shows that when Gladden contemplated nature he found that humanity could not so easily be separated from the natural world. In the ‘Rainbow Round the Throne’ sermon from 1869, similar in its naturalistic themes to other sermons of Gladden’s in the late nineteenth century, he linked human nature with the natural world, reflecting on the principles of liberal Protestantism through a naturalistic metaphor.76 In 1870, Gladden’s ‘Action and Reaction

74 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 12-18; for a history of American landscape art’s connection to Calvinism, see Stoll, 28-34; for the connection between Reformed Protestantism and natural science, see Stoll, 43- 52. By the late nineteenth century, nature became a more prominent point of reflection for liberal Protestants. Thinkers, writers, and many others, experienced nature in dramatically different ways than in previous centuries. Western scientific and artistic traditions began to experience nature as an intellectual and material resource that humanity could understand as a reflection of divinity. For the medieval and early modern precedents to religious and environmental thinking in the nineteenth century, see Berry, Devoted to Nature, 40-49 and Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America, 17-21, 27-28.

75 Gladden, Recollections, 283-84.

76 Based on their listed titles, the following of Gladden’s other sermons would be useful in expanding an investigation into Gladden’s views on nature: 1) “Four Lessons of Autumn, October 28, 1860,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 12, #12), 2) “The Spirit of Autumn, October 1870,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 13, #46), 3) “Lessons of the Earthquake, September 1886,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 19, #287), 4) “The Earthly Schoolroom, May 19, 1889,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 21, #392), 5) “The Summer Months,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 29, #718), 6) “The Gospel of the Springtime,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 31, #813), 7) “God’s Vineyard, January 15, 1905,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 37, #1044), 20 are Equal and in Opposite Directions’ sermon emphasized the unique role that Gladden humanity played in perfecting the natural world. The second section of this chapter argues that when Gladden approached the topic of health he wanted to emphasize that the work of scientists, doctors specifically, was not unnatural. In 1886, Gladden’s ‘Christ as Healer’ sermon underscored that a spiritual concern for healthier souls had to be interwoven with a concern for physical health. Improving bodily health led to healthier souls; saving bodies would save souls. Scientists revealed God’s “personal interposition in the affairs of the world,” Gladden said.77 By the 1880s, he explained to his audience that science, religion and health were more related to one another than some ministers led their congregations to believe.78 In the 1880s, Gladden’s belief in public health was grounded in a specific connection between nature, science and religion.79 He began to contemplate the scientific and religious aspects to American culture, framing human health as a question of humanity’s place in nature. Public health experts supported humanity as mortal beings, but also as beings who were a part of God’s creation. Gladden’s thinking about God’s power in nature and in society sprung from a revolutionized view of the natural world and humanity. Even for a minister, new ideas from the natural sciences about evolution and natural selection in the late nineteenth century destabilized an already unstable social context in the United States. The result was what historian Cynthia Eagle Russett calls “a revolution in the way we think about physical nature.”80 To understand

8) “Outdoor Religion,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 49, #SF4), 9) “God in the Garden,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 49, #SF7).

77 Gladden, “Christ as Healer, April 1886,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 19, #276), 17-18.

78 Gladden wrote other sermons that clearly expressed similar themes to ‘Christ as Healer,’ based on their listed titles: 1) “The Healing of Aeneas, Lent, 1887,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 19, #299), 2) “The Healing of the Paralytic, March 27, 1888,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 20, #342), 3) “The Healing of the Nobleman’s Son, March 29, 1888,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 20, #343), 4) “Luke the Beloved Physician, n.d.,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 48, #1504).

79 Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, 25-38; Ungureanu, “Science, Religion and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 42-43; Fry and Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution, vii; Berry, Devoted to Nature, 88; Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1976). Liberal Protestants such as Gladden accommodated theories of evolution and reconciled a belief in God with a theology compatible with the guiding force notion in the earliest iterations of Darwinism.

80 Russett, Darwin in America, 203. 21 disease, for example, people had to broaden their sense of human nature. Disease necessitated thinking about social interactions not just individual action. Gladden associated social morality with cooperative efforts by sanitarians and scientists to lower instances of deaths from disease. In his ‘Influenzas’ sermon from 1890, the focus of the third section in this chapter, Gladden explicitly connected the curing of broad social problems and the curing of epidemics. A belief in social morality empowered scientific medicine and public health in urban space. Science revealed the natural world to be more and more complex, and this necessitated a broader view of morality and health. Gladden and others moralized natural phenomenon, including disease. Social morality was reflected in a rainbow, a city and the work of physicians battling disease. These phenomena were windows into the processes and procedures of God’s creation. In this way, natural science could help expand the basis for Christian belief: Humanity needed to be made aware of the trust that God placed in their ability to understand, to manage, and to improve nature. The connection between the natural and human worlds, clarified in the germ theory of disease, helped Gladden to show the seriousness of public health.

Nature’s Place in the New Theology

In 1869, when Gladden thought of heaven he thought of a rainbow. When he delivered his ‘Rainbow Round the Throne’ sermon, Gladden did not limit himself to elaborating on a subject of natural science. Nor was he simply interested in the beauty and symbolism of nature. He used the natural world to reflect on the divine connection between God, nature and humanity. He viewed natural science and religion as parts of a divine power working in the world. In the 1870 sermon ‘Action and Reaction are Equal in Opposite Directions,’ Gladden’s deliberation on the scientific maxim of ‘action and reaction’ underscored how humanity harnessed the power of God to improve their societies. Gladden showed the natural phenomenon of the rainbow from a scientific perspective, created by the diffusion of pure light.81 “Pass a ray of light through a prism and you have the seven primative [sic] colors which constitute the rainbow,” Gladden said. “Recombine these

81 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne, July 1869,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 13, #37), 24-30. 22 colors in the same proportion and you have the white light.”82 This scientific perspective revealed the complexity of the natural world and it revealed truths of divine power. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, Gladden and other liberal Protestants were in the middle of an intellectual battle with orthodox ministers over the influence of science in Protestant thought. For Gladden, orthodox belief was defined by its conformity, and the threat of exclusion and banishment. For liberal Protestants, Christianity did not boil down to orthodox theology, an organized set of unchanging facts leading to salvation.83 Rather, Christianity could transform when faced with the intellectual and social pressures of the late nineteenth century.84 Christianity was to be devotional, preserving the essential elements of the religion, while also evolutionary, immediately relevant and intellectually creative. Gladden acknowledged that common Christian beliefs about the natural world were narrow. In contrast to human spaces, nature offered humanity a new sacred space to contemplate their religious lives. The rainbow was a symbol hinting at heaven, “the celestial country,” and the “Spiritual Fatherland.”85 Humanity needed no more reason than the naturally-occurring rainbow to place trust, hope and confidence in God.86 Like the rainbow, as Gladden explained: “Heaven is not one glare of white light – all the prismatic colors are there.”87 Heaven was a perfect space where all varieties of characters, people with various beliefs, from every class, would fill their

82 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne,” 24-25.

83 Fry, “The Social Gospel at the Crossroads of Middle America,” 61-62.

84 Jon H. Roberts, “Science and Religion,” in Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science, ed. Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank, (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 257; Ungureanu, “Science and Religion in the Anglo-American Periodical Press,” 122-30, 137, 145-49; Gladden’s views on science and religion coalesce with the views of John William Draper in History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). Draper showed human intellect to be opposed to traditional faith, with its religious/ecclesiastical authoritarianism and orthodox despotism. Gladden felt a tyrannical presence over theology and in theology’s influence over popular conceptions of science. He viewed scientific belief as complementary to religious belief, in the same way Andrew Dickson White believed science would rejuvenate religion from the stunted phase of orthodoxy and inspire ‘true Christianity’ that was more purified and more evolved. For the historical context of these debates over science and religion, see Blum, Reforging the White Republic; Mislin, Saving Faith; Croce, Science and Religion; White and Hopkins, The Social Gospel.

85 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne,” 39-40. Gladden emphasized that an unenlightened spirit of individualism and denominational rivalry was impractical, because, in the end, humanity would be unified in the afterlife.

86 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne,” 15.

87 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne,” 25. 23 time with discussion and even disagreement.88 The rainbow inspired self-transformation and contributed to moral progress, as nature was a reflection of God’s creative power. The contemplation of a rainbow fit into broader intellectual currents in American Protestantism focused on delineating a New Theology.89 Contrasted with orthodox theology, the new belief rejected hard formulations of doctrine and prescriptions for overcoming worldly evil. Instead, the foundation of liberal Protestant belief was that the processes of the human and natural worlds were under God’s guidance.90 These beliefs became a progressive, systematic theology, which gave credence to the energy and movement of the natural world and all living things.91 The new religious spirit was founded in the interconnection between humanity, God’s creation and biblical teaching.92 Gladden agreed with other liberal Protestants in the late- nineteenth century in their reflection on the natural world and on the connection between nature and the human world. As Gladden showed in the ‘Rainbow Round the Throne’ sermon, the idea of ‘nature’ was a morally positive influence on liberal Protestants.93 In contrast to manmade environments (such as towns and cities), and the sinful, corrupt influences of human interactions, nature was to be read like a holy book with the power of redemption and salvation. Theological liberals believed they were continuing in the tradition of the Protestant Reformation by empowering humans to

88 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne,” 31-37.

89 White and Hopkins, The Social Gospel, 31-35.

90 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 34-37; Berry, Devoted to Nature, 51-59. The simplest act that most nineteenth-century Americans undertook to contemplate the human relationship to nature was recreation, specifically a walk through nature. Many American Protestants in the nineteenth century looked to their journeys on foot as restorative of more ‘natural’ ways of thinking, reminiscent of an imagined existence in Eden, where humanity was closer to nature. A peripatetic tradition grew from influences as broad as British Romanticism and the growing accessibility of recreation in the age of industry, which increased the popularity of walking and reflecting on nature.

91 Mislin, Saving Faith, 31-33, 38; Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 24, 49.

92 Berry, Devoted to Nature, 25-28, 49-51; Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 20-26. Attending college and later returning as a minister to the ‘Calvinist Crescent’ of the northeastern United States, Gladden’s interest in the natural world as a subject of his sermons reflected cultural trends in Calvinism dating back centuries. According to this tradition, God was neither quiet nor inactive. The activity of nature and its seeming order were manifestations of the most divine aspects of God. Reflecting on nature would lead to a better understanding of human society and the social components to morality.

93 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 17, 38-42; Berry, Devoted to Nature, 27-28, and see 29-39 for a discussion of how the liberal Protestant position on the natural world was less of a rejection of a millennium of Christian theology and more of a gradual transmutation of Christian beliefs about nature. 24 understand their own salvation with respect to God’s creation. The natural world was another avenue for theological liberals to counteract the influence of conservatives. There needed to be an intellectual space for the development of human understandings of their true place in God’s creation; God was not the only factor in redemption and salvation. Neither the influence of nature in human religious life nor the importance of nature as a part of God’s creation was emphasized in the theologically conservative Protestant tradition. Scientific investigation appealed to many liberal Protestants because it distanced natural history from the accounts of history found in scripture. This was an important aspect separating the liberal viewpoint from the orthodox view of biblical inerrancy. Blind obedience to a conservative, orthodox view of nature was counterproductive to true faith. Looking at the rainbow as solely a natural phenomenon expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. Gladden explained that the rainbow was a scientific phenomenon whose origin and history was distinct from the history of Christianity. There was “no reason to suppose…that the properties of light were at all different after the deluge from what they were in the morning of the creation...the rainbow must under certain conditions have appeared to men before the flood,” Gladden said in 1869.94 Gladden supposed that the rainbow was an allegory for heaven, but he did not make any statements of certainty. In pointing out the relationship between humanity, nature and God, a liberal Protestant such as Gladden emphasized ambiguity over certainty. The intellectual movement away from rational certainty was replaced by an emphasis on guarding against doubt.95 Gladden invoked doubt about a dogmatic view of heaven, and at the same time offered support for the further contemplation and investigation of the natural world to strengthen a liberal Protestant understanding of Christianity. Engaged citizens sought out religious leaders and scientific authorities for methods of inquiry to sort through multiple viewpoints rather than an assurance of a final view of things. Investigating uncertainty, hypothesizing that heaven was like a rainbow, became a more valid way of approaching both

94 Gladden, “The Rainbow Round the Throne,” 4-5. Another theme present in Gladden’s sermons about the natural world, health and disease was the separation of biblical history and natural history. This was a necessary step to understand that humans existed at a point between the natural and spiritual world. At some point in history, humanity came to see itself warded off from the natural world, according to Gladden. Up until the late nineteenth century, popular religion compensated for this alienation from God by stigmatizing the natural world.

95 Croce, Science and Religion, 2-5, 16; Mislin, Saving Faith, 28. The embrace of doubt and science was a significant factor in separating liberal Christianity from orthodox Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Importantly, Gladden was an evangelical liberal not a modernist liberal Christian, which may help to explain his unique contemplation of the supernatural through the prism of the natural, see Dorn, Washington Gladden, 177-80. 25 religious and scientific knowledge. Gladden was one of many in the late nineteenth century who reacted to the rising reputation of natural science.96 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had a monumental influence on the way Americans interacted with scientific ideas. Scientific knowledge was debated much, but it was not seen on the surface as contradicting religion. Beliefs in the advancement of society through scientific knowledge began to be looked upon optimistically. The popularity of Darwin’s work and the prominence of his theories in the period were the culmination of decades of changes in scientific methods. Natural science was seen as increasingly useful to society after the 1850s, with technological advancement that improved industries, agriculture and public health. Science became less a popular pursuit and more the devotion of a trusted cadre of professionals. Science and religion were not easily reconciled but religious belief and professional science could be harmonized.97 The basis of this harmony would be new approaches to both science and religion. As was the case with many liberal Protestants, Gladden accepted the standard view of Darwinian evolution in the natural world as a core conviction of Christianity.98 Darwin confirmed a divine order in the universe that for many indicated the existence and the activity of God. Divine providence was the designer and maintainer of the solar system and of all animal species. Evolution did not provide definite certainty to understanding the world. Darwin’s thinking about natural science was prototypical of how many contemplated the prospect of a changing, developing and more realistic world. For liberal Protestants concerned about the

96 Russett, Darwin in America, vii-ix; Mislin, Saving Faith, 4-6; Croce, Science and Religion, 85-95. Scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer worked from the popularity of Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species as they promoted the value of science to society. Huxley was a professor of biology and Spencer a professor of cosmic evolution. Their academic positions alone indicated the rapid intellectual development taking place in the middle period of the nineteenth century. These developments required many who involved themselves in these debates to reconcile old and new ideas. From a gradual, implicit reconciliation of science and religion before Darwin, afterward there was much cultural division in the ranks of scientists and religious groups regarding the intricacies and consequences of evolution.

97 Croce, Science and Religion, 98-107.

98 Fry and Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution, vii, 9-12; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 172-76. And Darwinian thinkers accommodated liberal Protestant thinking, as well. Darwin himself was a signatory on a ‘Scientists’ Testimonial’ in a show of support for liberal Protestant clergy, see Ungureanu, “Science, Religion and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 58. Also see relevant titles from among Gladden’s sermons to expand an investigation of his views of Darwinian evolution: 1) “Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog), July 14, 1895,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 26, #612), 2) “Next Step in Evolution, March 1, 1903,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 35, #956), 3) “Newer Phases of the Doctrine of Evolution, June 2, 1907,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 39, #1131). 26 survival of Christianity, Darwinian evolution raised important questions about changes taking place in human society. What role did religion play in human society? Was that role changing in the modern world? How important was religion to humanity? Liberal Protestants struggled to understand the draw of secular-based knowledge, which they believed threatened institutions of religion through the questioning of religious authority and raising doubts about religious belief. To assuage these doubts, religious commitment needed to be grounded in knowledge besides biblical truth. Liberal beliefs allowed for human beings to be the intercessors of morality and purpose in God’s creation. According to Gladden, if the natural world seemed separate and inimical to humankind, it was only because humanity too often rejected moral restraint and adopted animal-like behavior. As he explained in his ‘Action and Reaction are Equal in Opposite Directions’ sermon from 1870: “So long as man is in what may be properly called the state of nature, he is also under this law of action and reaction; and there is no tendency toward anything better.”99 Gladden was not referring directly to Newton’s Third Law. The comparison with a well-known proof of natural science helped Gladden make a larger point about human society. “Action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions,” Gladden said.100 “This is the law of the mechanical forces: is it equally the law of organic life?” he wondered. Yes, ‘the state of nature’ had its own unique inertia working to counteract ‘anything better.’ Darwin’s theory of natural selection was understood as evolution, to be sure, but Gladden was frustrated that a notion of natural improvement and advancement were not considered in this theory; natural selection led to the survival of the fittest, but this process did not lead to the survival of the best. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was not relevant to the question of human progress.101 Gladden stressed that there was no innate force leading to the advancement of any species in any of the animal kingdoms. Importantly, the theory of natural selection provided a picture of eventual decline for some species through their competition with others. In the ‘Action and Reaction’ sermon, Gladden questioned whether the great kingdoms of life, including humanity, propelled themselves in an evolutionary advancement using an innate force. His

99 Gladden, “Action and Reaction are Equal and in Opposite Directions, November 27, 1870,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 13, #47), 25. Emphasis added.

100 Gladden, “Action and Reaction,” 11.

101 Gladden, “Action and Reaction,” 11-18. 27 conclusion was that they did not. As part of the natural world, humanity clung to its animal-like behaviors, throughout history and into Gladden’s time. Only the implementation of a force such as Christianity provided a way out of nature. Gladden said this was foretold in Paul’s letter to the Romans 8: 18-30, which described God’s creation waiting for humanity’s interposition. Against the idea of natural selection and the struggle of every species for survival, many scientists clung to the idea that there was something more than natural selection; that divine action could be found in the world.102 Similarly, for Gladden, Darwin’s theory did not take into account human interaction with the natural world. This interaction was defined by inventiveness, resourcefulness and imagination in how humanity made use of nature. “Where man is degraded to a position little above that of the brutes, the earth, though rich in its resources remains a wilderness,” Gladden said.103 He framed human action as a component of the scientific law of action and reaction. However, this regression was halted “where man is enlightened and cultivated in his spiritual faculties.” The goal was not natural harmony but a harmony of human creation and cultivation through the moderating, supernatural force of Christianity. In such an ideal place, “the earth, though it may be sterile and unproductive blossoms with beauty and laughs with plenty.” Humanity’s return to the good graces of God through Protestantism would improve landscapes throughout the world. Gladden understood science and the natural world through its connection to human beings and to religion.104 The beliefs of liberal Protestants such as Gladden were focused on nature’s processes, and the relation of these processes to the manifestation of God’s power. When seen as part of nature, and understood in the context of Darwinian evolution, humanity was fast approaching the status of a perfected organism. Humanity broke from the natural world and improved both human and non-human nature. Gladden explained in his ‘Action and Reaction’ sermon, that human beings had clearly led to the improvement of species, as well as nature, through forested parks and orchards, garden plants, and flowers in conservatories. Each showed that only human intervention could lead to such definite advancement in nature. Christianity, and humanity in general, was not beholden to atheistic, animalistic nature. Humans were free to improve themselves and their surroundings

102 Croce, Science and Religion, 131-33.

103 Gladden, “Action and Reaction,” 22.

104 Russett, Darwin in America, 11-14, 208-12. 28 apart from organic life. “When man in the exercise of his intelligence and free choice brings about improvements in the various orders of living things, that does not show that there is a tendency in nature to improve, but that there is a supernatural force working in nature to improve it,” Gladden said.105 He related this supernatural force to the similarly strong natural force of Darwinian evolution. Gladden showed off no lesser example of human advancement than in the Great American Desert, only then beginning to be dissected by railroads.106 This desert was an obstacle to human improvement of Western territories of the United States. The overcoming of this obstacle exemplified human will power and intelligence, according to Gladden. The idea of natural selection did not explain why humanity would be motivated to improve such an area as the Great American Desert. “Unless some power above nature interposes the desert will remain a desert for countless centuries,” Gladden said.107 He explained that human intelligence and technological advancement changed the climate of the desert. Humidity increased, harsh winds decreased, and the land became more fertile. Gladden and many others believed this climatological theory was quotable scientific fact.108 Similar vast improvements on the surface of the earth, throughout history, were through the initiative of humanity.109 Human ingenuity improved God’s creation. Liberal Protestants were amenable to Darwinism because the facts of evolution showed a

105 Gladden, “Action and Reaction,” 15.

106 The ‘Action and Reaction’ sermon was delivered approximately eighteen months after the ‘Wedding of the Rails’ ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. This date celebrated the unification of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 37-38. With this example, Gladden focused on the triumph of American settlement over the harsh climate of the West. Gladden saw railroads as a positive influence in human society. Gladden was an antimonopolist, but he separated the corrupt practices of the railroad companies from the technological function of railroads in the improvement of the material conditions of human life. Also see Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America, 115-23, for a discussion of American religion and railroads.

107 Gladden, “Action and Reaction,” 19-20.

108 Gladden made use of the ‘Rain Follows the Plow’ theory, later proven false as a scientific phenomenon, see Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 34-36. The theory that explained westward settlement as the cause of a long cycle of humid weather and above-average rainfall in the 1860s and 1870s was another sign of optimism in the capacity for the human improvement of the natural world. Gladden used this climatological theory to underscore that religious faith in God’s power over nature was the means by which humanity progressed, bringing the natural world under control.

109 Gladden, “Action and Reaction,” 21-25. 29 long-term order that contradicted the orthodox belief in imminent, apocalyptic destruction.110 Gladden’s reaction to Darwin was the creative response of a Social Gospeler who saw this new knowledge as especially useful to social reform. Gladden was not afraid to reconcile science, religion, and society. As Gladden understood, humanity did not exist in a stark, antagonistic natural world. As much as Darwinism clarified the long-term order of God’s creation, Gladden believed that Christianity revealed the place of humanity in the natural world. Gladden would have agreed with many liberal Protestants who held that the influence of Christianity on humanity was as the “consummation of Nature and the goal of History,” C. George Fry explains.111 Christianity provided the long-term order for humanity that natural scientists such as Darwin uncovered in God’s creation. Without Christianity and without Darwinian evolution, humanity would never understand its place in the natural world and in God’s creation. In the 1860s, Gladden was concerned with clarifying scripture in relation to the natural world and human society. Beginning with a natural phenomenon, Gladden sought not only to understand it scientifically. He attempted to relate the lessons from the natural world to human society and religion.112 The human soul and human morality were central to this reconciliation of science and religion. Morality could be brought to bear on organic life and create the conditions for a vast improvement in the human condition. Gladden understood a law of the physical universe and a simple rainbow to be applicable to human nature. Because human nature was an aspect of God’s creation, humanity had an integral role to play in the world. Humanity’s Christian purpose was to improve God’s creation. Scientific efforts to restore human health had to be seen as an aspect of improving worldly life as well as spiritual life.

110 Mislin, Saving Faith, 10. Liberal Protestants reacted to orthodox believers and to fundamentalist Protestants. Fundamentalism pledged to adhere to biblical teaching and reject modern cultural streams in updating traditional, orthodox belief. If Social Gospelers hoped to replace doubt in the scientific, modernist future with a new faith in human progress, radical evangelicals asserted that traditional faith should be replaced with a deep-seated pessimism about the future. Thus, liberal Protestant views provided fundamentalists with an inverse set of conservative beliefs, exclusivism, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitism, that modified orthodox Protestantism for modern culture, see Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

111 Fry and Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution, 10. Gladden was clearly at odds with the atheism of Social Darwinists, who applied evolution theory and natural selection to human society.

112 Russett, Darwin in America, 2-3. Gladden reacted to the diffusion of Darwinism in the non-scientific community and formed his own reconciliation between science and religion. He expressed a perspective based in the ‘Genteel Tradition’ that did not readily incorporate Darwinism, but sought to reconcile religion and natural science; discussed in more depth in Chapter Two. 30

‘Christ as Healer’: Washington Gladden’s Early Approach to Public Health

Gladden was not preoccupied with issues of public health through the 1870s, but such issues would not have been foreign to him. He was editor at a monthly magazine in which the first issue addressed the devastation of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878.113 This epidemic raised the visibility of public health for many Americans.114 In the contentious political climate of Reconstruction, such a peril from the natural world became a worthy metaphorical foe to vanquish. The epidemic revealed an ‘American brotherhood,’ a ‘common humanity,’ in the face of such ‘universal distress.’ Healing the nation physically would require the repairing of moral and social tension. The epidemic showed many Americans in the fractured postbellum country that there were threats beyond sectional antagonism that faced the future of the nation. The national sin of sectional strife was denounced, and in its place a reconciled nation would share resources for the upkeep of public health. In the annual message to Congress in 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes voiced support for a national sanitary administration to coordinate quarantine and commerce during future epidemics.115 Others called for more widespread national health laws including a national bureau of public health. With scientific experimentation and advancement, the margin of error that produced miraculous explanations was rapidly closing. Throughout the ‘Christ as Healer’ sermon of 1886, Gladden highlighted how the work of physicians was compatible with late-nineteenth century liberal Protestantism. Medical science was another avenue where humanity improved nature. By

113 Gladden, “Editor’s Table: Expounding Providences,” Sunday Afternoon: A Monthly Magazine for the Household, July-December 1878, 379; Gladden, “Editor’s Table: Materialism in the Popular Faith,” 476. Gladden was the editor of Sunday Afternoon from 1878 to 1879, and continued to write editorials until 1880. Published out of Springfield, Mass., the magazine included fiction, poetry and essays of political analysis; contemporary social issues were highlighted; all with the aim of promoting liberal Protestantism, see Dorn, Washington Gladden, 67-68; Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 85-86.

114 Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 146-73. Blum considers the epidemic from the perspective of religious history. The epidemic lasted from the summer to the fall of 1878 and was seen from Louisiana to Ohio and Mississippi to Missouri, with devastation concentrated in the Mississippi River Basin. Not only were over 9,500 people killed, but cities were abandoned as the sickness raged and many poor and African American citizens were left to fend for themselves.

115 For the context of the yellow fever epidemic, which ties together the themes of science, politics and delves into the background of national public health, see Duffy, The Sanitarians, 162-72. Duffy concludes that recollections of the epidemic, mentioned by Gladden elven years after the fact in 1890, were critical in establishing the National Board of Health from 1879 to 1883. 31 taming germs, specifically counteracting malevolent germs with benevolent ones, humanity was taming nature. The miracles of Jesus were proof that God was a master of nature, Gladden said.116 Rather than evidence of an atheistic world, it became clearer and clearer to Gladden the divine influence on nature that had existed all along. “Undoubtedly nature – not only external nature, but the human nature was meant to be the organ for the divine manifestation,” he said.117 There was no need to divide the natural and the supernatural so cleanly from each other. A new age of Christianity was dawning where supernatural intricacies took on natural forms. The supernatural, what in different times and places was called the ‘miraculous,’ was an element of science. God worked through nature, as did the scientist in his work with the material of God’s creation. The healing of the blind, healing the lame, cleansing lepers, restoring hearing to the deaf, and restoring life to the dead, remained “no better demonstration” of divine nature and “the clear insight of the last and greatest prophet,” Gladden said.118 He gave the example that in working with nature, the physician was tasked with harnessing the revelation of divine nature. Epidemics were physical maladies from the natural world. These physical ailments were separate from the moral world of humanity, except that humans existed in the same physical nature as the germs of disease. God’s will and divine plan was seen up until Gladden’s day to operate “always and exclusively on a plane above nature.”119 Instead, Gladden questioned, “was it not intended that the divine will should operate in nature.” So that “with these natural forces and processes the spiritual energies of God should coalesce and combine.” Infections and afflictions had a history all their own, separate from theology. The history of disease, from the biblical age, to ancient history, to the late nineteenth century, was not antiquarian; it was indispensable to a modern audience. Gladden shared that disease needed to be studied and understood outside a religious context and separated from the constraints of religious dogma. The doctor’s healing was not a rejection of God’s power over nature, but rather it grew from the biblical precedent of Jesus’s healing of diseases.120 Traditional views of Jesus’s

116 Gladden, “Christ as Healer,” 7-10.

117 Gladden, “Christ as Healer,” 7.

118 Gladden, “Christ as Healer,” 15.

119 Gladden, “Christ as Healer,” 10.

120 Gladden, “Christ as Healer,” 2-7, 21. The traditional, orthodox Christian worldview gave the physician a limited role. The physician was popularly understood as a healer of the body. The physician’s work to remedy 32 ministry did not emphasize this physical healing enough, according to Gladden. The traditional view did not see Jesus’s miraculous healing of physical bodies as “closely intertwined in the very centers of life with moral evils,” as Gladden said.121 Though he spoke only broadly about these moral problems, Gladden emphasized that spiritual healing and physical healing were closely linked. The rejection of the miasmatic theory by Gladden and others dampened the connection between morality, cleanliness and health.122 The prevention of disease was not an individual task, but required social sacrifice and social support that undercut a view of cleanliness focused on the moral individual (tasked with keeping a clean living space). The germ theory engendered a moral randomness to the work of domestic sanitation and public health. Vectors of disease did not take into account morality. Germs did not pass judgement on the moral quality of individuals. Gladden clarified his conception of public health in the late-1880s. In these years, he established that a moral society was also a society free of the threat of disease. Public health was best seen in the context of salvation. Morality could not be upheld without scientific medicine and public health. Public health served a larger purpose for humanity, and the trends in scientific medicine pointed toward the protection of greater and greater populations from the threat of disease.

Social Morality and Public Health

With a population of around 30,000 in the late nineteenth century, Springfield, Massachusetts was smaller than Columbus, Ohio. Its history and sense of community more than made up for the amount of people living in its environs.123 Despite the region’s Puritan roots, by

disease was at one time seen as a purely physical action. It seemed to have no relation to the spiritual world and the supernatural realm. Deriving his understanding of this traditional role from the Greek root of the word ‘physician,’ Gladden explained the physician was a student of nature. First, the physician investigated the physical aspects of human beings to understand how the human body fit with scientific laws. Second, the physician searched through knowledge of the natural world to find remedies for disease. Gladden framed orthodox theology as refusing to acknowledge the connection between the healing of the body and the spiritual healing of the mind.

121 Gladden, “Christ as Healer,” 2-3. This is, although not explicitly worded as such, a therapeutic view of the relationship between individual disease and individual morality. The most significant result of freeing the body of pollution, which was Jesus’s main function as a healer according to Gladden, was that this would give more power to the individual and their mind to conquer moral evils. Noticeably, this is a view that does not yet account for the broadest social impact an improved public health would entail.

122 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 45-47.

123 Gladden, Recollections, 241-44. 33 the 1870s, when he lived there, Gladden pointed out that the social factor most clearly tying the community of Western Massachusetts together was journalism. The Springfield Republican was the bedrock of a positive moral climate in the city. Gladden believed that conspiracies, corruption, graft, and other political irregularities, were minimized by the work of the newspaper’s journalists. The Republican was foundational to the social and civic health of Western Massachusetts, in Gladden’s view. In Columbus, there was no eminent newspaper keeping the peace and upholding the morality of the city.124 Corruption was firmly entrenched in Ohio’s capital, as it was throughout the state, according to Gladden. Corruption was closely associated with partisanship, in Gladden’s mind, and this division in Columbus was not quelled by any moderating, journalistic voice. “If newspapers of the type of the Springfield ‘Republican’ could be planted all over this country at intervals of not more than one hundred miles, the foundation would be laid for a great improvement in social and political morality,” he said in his autobiography.125 Gladden thought of social morality in terms of behavior, but also in terms of jurisdiction and space – exemplified by the influence of a newspaper on the community it served. For liberal Protestants, public health was an exemplary arena for social reform because it relied on the organization and application of ideas about social relationships and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Through his ‘Influenzas’ sermon in the winter of 1889-90, a well-intentioned popular history of epidemics, Gladden underscored the connection of every man, woman, and child to every other one throughout the world.126 “The solidarity of the human race,” Gladden explained, was revealed by this “common inheritance of suffering, by the kinship of pain, by a community of disease and disaster.”127 The poor in accounts of biblical history were connected to the poor of modern times through disease; the rich and the learned were also connected. Even in Gladden’s own time, the royal princess was just as much at risk as the street sweeper's child to a fatal epidemic.128 The least favored classes and the most favored shared a

124 Gladden, Recollections, 283-86.

125 Gladden, Recollections, 244.

126 Gladden, “The Influenza[s], February 1890,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 22, #415), 1-7.

127 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 28-29.

128 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 29. 34 common peril as long as the scientific component of disease was not taken seriously. Disease was one element in humanity’s complex history. Modern history offered a correction to the traditional view of epidemic affliction laying low the poor in morals. The moral evils that caused disease were to be found in the interactions of society as a whole, not just in in the actions of individuals. Those with power to make a difference in society held responsibility. To successfully eradicate disease, humanity needed to address the “selfishness and greed of the strong” in nations where the poor were kept in “subjection and squalor,” Gladden said.129 When the living conditions of the poor were neglected, epidemics became the “evil fruits of human misery and depredation.”130 This was a judgement to be made for every nation across the globe. Modern progress demanded experts were guided by an ethic of industry and efficiency in their positions and the aspects of the world under their purview. The natural law of science combined with religious morality to reveal a modern social morality. This social morality connected “human misery and degradation” and starvation and “epidemic visitations,” Gladden said.131 All of humanity was susceptible to disease because the “seeds” of disease “wafted on the wind around the world.”132 Gladden understood diseases through the everyday experience of human interactions with the natural world, as others helped their audiences by drawing analogies from baking, brewing and preserving food. The scientific question of germs helped Gladden to tie religious concerns to larger social issues. Gladden’s role as a minister was to help the devout Christian layperson, with a house to run and life to keep, understand how the scientist, in the laboratory and the pages of medical journals, helped to upkeep public health. The outbreak of yellow fever in 1878 showed the widespread impact an epidemic could

129 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 41.

130 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 30.

131 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 39.

132 Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 52-62. Gladden understood disease spread by wafting seeds. This was most likely a secondhand analogy based on a popular scientist’s simplification of the complex arguments for the germ theory. In the ‘seed and soil’ metaphor, germs were like the seeds of plants – they needed only the correct balance of environmental factors in order to germinate and begin to spread havoc. Germs were also understood as small animals, invisible without a microscope, which found their way into the human bloodstream. These seeds germinated in the water supply and soil of cities; for meteorological concerns and the spread of disease, see Duffy, The Sanitarians, 151-52. 35 have on the nation.133 A “brotherhood of man” was necessitated by epidemics, Gladden said.134 “Humanity is organically one…[and] what affects one class must be [a] matter of concern to every other class…no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself,” Gladden said. Medical professionals needed allies in the colossal task of raising the health of every nation on earth. American Protestants needed to be aware of conditions in other parts of the world, of conditions that existed in history up to the present day. The doctor and the minister each contributed to a modern system that ensured the standard of living and livelihoods of national citizens the world over. “We must go into all the world and preach the gospel to every nation, if we want our country to be a safe and pleasant habitation,” Gladden said.135 He asserted that liberal theology would support human welfare, and that the expert moral influence of ministers would raise the standard of living of other nations. In turn, in an increasingly connected world, this would ensure the health of Americans and their safety from deadly diseases. Christian efforts of reform were not separate from the efforts of medical experts. Each sought to understand humanity’s place in the natural world. The work of scientists (physicians and others) did not detract from the Christian understanding of God’s power. A concern with health and cooperation would lead to a better world. This was a goal of the medical doctor, who was an expert at analyzing and sharing information arriving from around the world. What the scientists accomplished on behalf of humanity in their laboratories, ministers should sanction from their pulpits. Public health was a way of smoothing over class tensions and bridging the class divide. If the minister was truly inspired by medical science, they would diagnose symptoms of illness, of sin, as they revealed themselves throughout society; and be included in the prescription of laws and regulations to heal modern society. Humanity was the minister’s patient. Concerns about the health of a wider community shifted from a moral view of public health to a concern with the actions and interactions of individuals in a confined environment,

133 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 26-28, 36-39.

134 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 29-30.

135 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 41-42. Gladden decreed that political communication needed to remain open. The United States was even bound by social morality to take on the commodities of foreign producers, even if protective tariffs were kept in place for some goods. A protective tariff did not guarantee safety from an epidemic, Gladden said. The modern world, with its growing economies and increasing interconnection, and the modern environment that resulted from human progress, meant political and economic intelligence begged the uplift not just of lower classes in the West, but around the world. 36 such as a city. This was accomplished by the professionalization of public health.136 The functions of these professionals precluded a view of disease prevention based on the morality of individuals. Clean living in itself was a moral positive, not directly connected to a person’s character. More than the moral reform of individuals, the improvement of the environments that residents lived and worked in would lead to more successful efforts to improve the health of a community. The germ theory of disease introduced an urgency that was met first in domestic spaces and was only later supported through public health institutions and the updating of sanitation infrastructure.137 By the mid-1880s and early-1890s, Gladden linked his ideas about the improvement of human society to a concern with public health. The scientific, medical investigations that revealed the germ theory were to be framed in a religious context, along with other existential questions. The medical profession, in Gladden’s view, was illustrative of human progress generally: if the ‘good old times’ truly had been more golden, then humanity would not now be healthier and safer. For instance, since the Biblical period, Christian scripture had always emphasized long life as the reward of righteousness.138 Gladden saw the prolonging of human lives and bettering the quality of these lives as the main preoccupation of the physician and of public health. Medical doctors and public health institutions fought back “the black wings of the

136 Duffy, The Sanitarians, 126-37. A municipal health department and the state board of health could not serve all the functions necessitated by the increasing number of discoveries of pathogenic organisms and vectors of disease, and then implement antitoxin and vaccine programs. Health departments became concentrations of expertise with extensive powers of delegation to other city and state departments. Emphasis shifted from concerns over hygiene to concerns about sanitation. Boards of Health employed inspectors to analyze milk, meat and bread at the microscopic level. Inspectors eventually became full-time bacteriologists requiring laboratory space to combat food contamination and contagious disease. In the case of sanitation infrastructure, this professionalization saw health departments spin off professional oversight to engineers concerned with municipal water and sewer systems.

137 Hardy, Epidemic Streets, 268-83; Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 52. The key to the development of a uniform preventive policy was a change in socio-cultural attitudes toward disease. Tasked with saving lives, public health expert-officials began to see that their efforts demanded more than mandating a standard of health and prosecuting compliance. The task of preventing disease required an understanding of those most vulnerable to illness. Nonetheless, scientific visions of public health were countered by culture and social inclinations that did not prioritize the expert advice of public health officials. Hardy describes that public health expert-officials succeeded in teaching the value of their expertise to the population at large. In this process, they had to break down previous social stigmas towards the poor as well as cultural attitudes about privacy and the morality of illness. The problems faced by public health experts were not simply biological. For officials to find success in lowering mortality rates, they had to encourage a public health consciousness in the general population. By the 1870s, the poorest populations in British society began to rely on the advice and intervention of experts. Through the end of the century, these expert-officials gained valuable resources of local information that they used to study the spread of disease.

138 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 46-49. 37 pestilence” and made the harrowing raids of certain diseases a seldom occurrence in the Western world, Gladden said.139 By relating medical science to a theological standpoint, Gladden helped to translate developments in the world of doctors to the commoners in his congregation.

139 Gladden, “The Influenzas,” 48. 38

Chapter Two: Professional Medicine and the Revelation of Social Harmony in the 1890s

The days before the second Sunday of June 1899 were particularly busy for Washington Gladden. In addition to preparing for his standard two-sermon program for the week, Rev. Gladden attended the fiftieth annual meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA) taking place in his home city. Convening on June 6th at ten o’clock in Columbus’s Grand Opera House, blocks away from the First Congregational Church, the meeting hosted 2,500 physicians from across the nation.140 As the most prominent religious voice in Columbus, and given his view on scientific medicine, it was no surprise that Gladden was asked to deliver the invocation for the gathering. Once this official business was over, Gladden was free to attend lectures as a layman in the realm of medical expertise. The following Sunday, he shared a sermon reporting on two lectures given at the meeting.141 The ‘Doctors’ Meeting’ sermon was deeply personal, reinforcing Gladden’s long-held ideas that linked the mission of physicians and medical science to the mission of Christian ministers. The AMA epitomized the transformation of professional medicine in the late nineteenth century.142 For the benefit of his congregation, Gladden directly related the advancements made by professional physicians to the crisis of authority faced by liberal Protestants. Approaching medicine from a religious perspective, Gladden overcame the intellectual conflict that separated science and religion.143 In the context of the threat of declining religious commitment in American culture and with the rising cultural influence of popular scientific

140 “American Medical Association: Physicians Advocate Establishment of Headquarters in Washington,” Washington Post, June 7, 1899.

141 J. C. Wilson, M.D., “A Century of Medicine in America. The Oration in Medicine at the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, held at Columbus, Ohio, June, 6-9, 1899,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 32, no. 23 (1899): 1277-82.

142 Starr, Social Transformation; Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation, 8; John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1; The American Medical Association (AMA) exemplified, in the United States, the growing cultural authority of scientific medicine.

143 Mislin, Saving Faith, 7-12; Hopkins, The Social Gospel, 123-26. Established in Chapter One, when Gladden spoke of Christianity, he represented liberal Protestantism as the ideal. This is always in opposition to traditional or orthodox belief, which, as Gladden explained in an earlier sermon, rejected the scientific worldview of the nineteenth century. 39 thinking, liberal Protestant leaders admitted that their fellow ministers and congregants did not have a monopoly on belief. Science and religion were two realms of human experience capable of harmonization. This was no easy task, in the midst of the nineteenth-century schism between the Christian worldview and the scientific worldview. Recognizing the depth of the schism in which orthodox and liberal Protestant theologians and clergymen, non-Protestants, and atheists, attempted to tread intellectually and assert their cultural authority, helps to place the Social Gospel in a more accurate cultural context. Gladden’s sermons in the 1890s show how a prominent liberal Protestant gradually embraced intellectual diversity and made both popular and professional science useful to American Protestantism. Once seen as a straightforward conflict between believers in science and believers in religion, historians now view the rift as more complex.144 In popular print and other cultural exchanges, conservative Christians condemned the liberal Protestant embrace of science as endangering faith in God altogether. In his sermons, Gladden emphasized the reconciliation of science and religion as a way to accommodate modernity by incorporating modern intellectual efforts into a social consciousness unique to Protestantism. Gladden was not enthralled by science, but he was intrigued enough by the scientist’s compulsion to find the truth. Even if ultimate truth could never be certified, the search for truth would be a valuable endeavor in finding practical solutions to society’s religious, political, and economic instability. Unbelief and ignorance of the world needed to be countered by an intellectual grounding in facts and details. Continuing in his thought process from the late-1880s, Gladden understood the natural realm of science as a common intellectual context with attempts to understand the supernatural realm. The role of science in society was to categorize and explain natural processes through rules of operation. Ministers reckoned with divine justification for why such rules existed in God’s grand design. Each investigated the world for the benefit of humanity. Gladden saw the usefulness of science to religion in terms of a new type of religious authority in the wider

144 Croce, Science and Religion, 4-16; Ungureanu, “Science and Religion in the Anglo-American Periodical Press,” 131-45; Roberts, “Science and Religion,” 255-60. The mysteries of the universe needed to be a task for all professionals concerned with the building of or caretaking of human knowledge. Each professional had their own role in the contemplation of the mystery with reasoned thought. The mystery would be understood through the integration of rational truth; mystical truth; moral truth; and cultural truth; each professional would contribute their perspective on truth from Nature, Personality, and Spirit. The minister was devoted to the mental, moral, and emotional needs of their congregation, see Fry and Fry, Pioneering a Theology of Evolution, 13-14; also see, Oleson and Voss, “Introduction,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, vii-ix. 40

American culture.145 The necessity of purging orthodox beliefs was framed as a ‘New Reformation’ that required making alliances in the wider society. It was not popular science that ministers should ally with but trends in the professionalization of science – no more clear a trend was there than scientific medicine.146 In the late-1860s, Gladden’s frame of reference for the harmony of science and religion was still popular science and a rational certainty in how the world worked. By the 1890s, Gladden viewed public health concerns and professional medicine as the basis of the harmony between religion and science. The three sections in this chapter chart the development of Gladden’s ideas about health, science and Protestantism in sermons from the early-1890s to the AMA meeting of 1899. In the first section of this chapter, Gladden’s ‘Everyday Physician’ sermon from 1892 posited that the everyday efforts of physicians should be grounded in a re-conception of Christianity – medical Christianity. For a healthy-functioning society, the scientific healing efforts of physicians were to be closely allied with and framed by ministers as a divine process. Gladden revealed his view that at the intersection of Christianity and science was public health and social harmony. The second section of this chapter focuses on the ‘Germ of Life’ sermon from 1894 and the ‘Parasite’s Creed’ sermon from 1897. In these sermons, Gladden took the themes he had wrestled with up to that point and began to define social harmony. Through scientific analogies, he expressed the hopes of a Christian society and the dangers that existed to this social world.

145 Ungureanu, “Science, Religion and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 41-58. Many liberal Protestants aimed to reform rather than abandon Christianity. Biblical criticism, comparative religious studies and scientific knowledge were key in this transformation. A new cultural authority for liberal Protestants was found in ideas such as ‘primitive faith,’ ‘natural religion,’ and ‘Divine Science.’ The revelations of old were no more prominent than other forms of knowledge, and in fact the miraculous and the superstitious were at odds with the uniformity of universal scientific laws. See Dorn, Washington Gladden, 158-67, for a discussion of Gladden and biblical criticism, and 168-76, for a discussion of Gladden at the intersection of religion and science. Dorn explains that Congregationalists were most receptive to the theological reconstruction necessitated by biblical criticism and evolutionary science.

146 In addition to the sermons discussed in this chapter, Gladden wrote eight others between 1895 and 1915 that would be useful in expanding an investigation into Gladden’s view of health. They are included here only as titles because their subject matter was too broad for this investigation: 1) “(Famous Men of Columbus:) Dr. Samuel M. Smith, January 13, 1895,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 26, #589), 2) “Michael Faraday: The Hero as Scientist,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 33, #869), 3) “Christian Science,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 33, #882), 4) “Faith Cures and Medical Science I (of III), (beginning) November 18, 1907,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 39, #1140), 5) “Ministry of Healing, December 6, 1908,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 40, #1185), 6) “Cure that Kills, April 18, 1909,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 40, #1203), 7) “Religion and Medicine, May 18, 1909,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 41, #1208), 8) “Louis Pasteur: The Hero as Life Giver, n.d. (1915),” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 34, #905). 41

Gladden’s expression of a social harmonious ideal fit perfectly with his thinking about science, nature and humanity over the course of the 1890s. The focus of the third section in this chapter is Gladden’s ‘Doctors’ Meeting’ sermon given in 1899. Here Gladden defined social harmony in terms of a wider ethic of cooperation in scientific work, for the physician, ministers, and others, that would improve the life of all humanity. Gladden endorsed an alliance between Protestantism and professional medicine toward a broadened conception of human well-being. Throughout the 1890s, Gladden’s sermons show the development of a new direction for social morality.147 Gladden placed utmost importance on constraining the demise of social ethics. Christ was a role model of spiritual selflessness. Humanity was only perfected without selfishness – as a part of society. The idea that human existence was so focused on the individual, whether it was individual ethics in theology, philosophy, or science, and thus had no truly spiritual component, seemed to inhibit knowledge about the soul and the soul’s capacity to inspire free will against sin. Gladden continued to develop a full expression of social morality after 1890s. But in his emphasis on scientific medicine, Gladden took the opportunity to underscore that the liberal Protestant concern with social morality was connected to a scientific framework that understood the world through investigation and the healing of society.

The Medical Conception of Christianity

To hear Gladden speak on an everyday topic (not necessarily a religious topic) was a treat, and an increasingly common one at that.148 As Easter approached in 1892, Gladden delivered a sermon titled ‘Everyday Physician.’ He did not seek to draw out religious themes from natural science. Rather, he showed a logical defense of medical science and professional medicine in the context of liberal Protestantism. Building from his past sermons on religious

147 Social morality was the focus of the previous chapter. It can be understood as an expansion of the concept of morality beyond the individual level. Society can lack morality on a wide scale, and these societal dimensions to morality destabilized social relations and brought out conflict.

148 Fry, “The Social Gospel at the Crossroads of Middle America,” 58-59. As he further entrenched himself in Columbus society, Gladden expanded his offerings as an orator to include lectures as well as sermons. Gladden’s Sunday morning sermons were augmented by talks termed by one historian ‘sermon-lectures.’ Delivered primarily on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, Gladden wrote about half as many of these evening lectures throughout his career. As most of the sermons in the present investigation demonstrate, through these lectures Gladden related religious topics to a range of other topics, including contemporary social and political controversies. 42 belief and healing, in the early-1890s Gladden reconciled differences between a scientific and religious outlook. He explained that the doctor made use of God’s restorative power in healing the systems of the human body.149 Key to this logic was the medical conception of Christianity. Gladden’s medical vision of Christianity saw the church and its doctrines not as a divine courtroom but as a social laboratory. The medical conception of Christianity was based on the idea that religion, like science, was a forum for debate. Inspired by the organization and investigation of physical facts and statistics gathered from the world, an emphasis on medical science focused the minister’s work on investigation, healing, and regeneration. Gladden referred to Christianity as the ‘science of manhood,’ and explained that Protestantism paired well with other scientific methods.150 “Progress in medical science, and in ethical and theological science,” he said, “must bring these two great departments of human knowledge into closer and more sympathetic relations.”151 The doctor and the minister were both scientists, and they were colleagues, and co-religionists.152 Working under the supervision of Christ, the Great Physician, the efforts of the doctor and the minister shared the aims of a larger social and scientific worldview. In his medical conception of Christianity, Gladden followed other intellectual currents that reconciled scientific investigation with religion.153 Religion needed to help investigate divine methods and divine energy, the ‘Supreme Efficiency’ behind both natural and spiritual law. Religion was a laboratory open to collaboration between the minister, the doctor, and any other professionals willing to join such an alliance. Investigating morality by understanding the soul, and protecting its existence in a

149 Gladden, “Everyday Physician, March 20, 1892,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 23, #472), 15. Delivered again on April 2, 1905, the opening quote of the sermon is from Luke 5:31: “And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick.” Gladden invoked the Western philosophical tradition, beginning with the concept of vis medicatrix naturae. While maybe an overly simplistic phrasing, it served for Gladden as a classical motif of God’s power in relation to life and death. Espoused by the ‘old physicians’ inspired by ancient Greek ideals of healing, this phrase was attributed to Hippocrates. Gladden took from the Latin phrase a confirmation of the restorative forces that come natural to the world. Health was natural, while disease was unnatural. This classical reference was in line with Gladden’s own considerations of health and disease.

150 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 11-13. Gladden asserted that the old arrangement was minacious, with implications that denied God’s influence except when man was engaged in religious activity. Gladden denounced older conceptions, separating secular and religious, as heretical to modern Christianity.

151 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 13. Together these established the ‘true science of man.’

152 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 4-5.

153 Roberts, “Science and Religion,” 260-61. 43 modern, social context, provided a rationale for the minister’s contribution to the new professional alliances being delineated at the end of the nineteenth century. Gladden quoted from literary theorist Matthew Arnold, and theologians David Strauss and Llewlyn David Bevan to underscore that science and theology complimented each other. Arnold showed that the minister was equally a man of science and a man of God. Arnold’s belief, expressed in St. Paul and Protestantism (1887), that science could be understood in the context of acknowledging God’s Power was “wonderful and beautiful and awe-inspiring,” according to Gladden.154 Gladden drew the conclusion from Arnold that the true scientist recognized “there is a stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfill the law of their being.”155 God was understood, in a scientific framework, as this stream of tendency. Gladden showed faith in Arnold’s optimistic, synthetic view of science as a component to Christian faith. The physician’s specific aim was to understand the laws of science. The goal of the minister was to reveal God’s supernatural reason and eternal goodness.156 “Reason and goodness, as well as order and law are the soul of the Kosmos,” Gladden said.157 The physician needed to understand the difference that spiritual communion through prayer would make in their work:

“Doctors, like other men, I suppose, are spiritual beings. They are not merely animal organisms - not merely reasoning machines - they possess sympathy, intuition, imagination, reverence: their hearts are stirred with longing; for something better not yet attained; they are under the spell of ideals, whose origin they cannot trace; they have a feeling of obligation which they can neither explain nor ignore; they have a sense of dependence which argues irresistibly that there is a Power above them on which they

154 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 16; Basil Willey, “Matthew Arnold,” Encyclopedia Britannica online, last modified April 11, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Matthew-Arnold; also see, Roberts, “Science and Religion,” 263, for a discussion of Arnold.

155 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 16. Emphasis added. Part of this quote seems to have originated in Arnold’s Literature and Dogma (1873).

156 “David Friedrich Strauss,” Encyclopedia Britannica online, accessed May 23, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Friedrich-Strauss. For Gladden, Strauss’s writing served to build up the distinction between science and religion in a contemporary, liberal framework; also see, Roberts, “Science and Religion,” 261-62; Ungureanu, “Science, Religion, and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 59. Both mention Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher who was a predecessor of Strauss in the German tradition of biblical criticism, influential to many liberal Protestants.

157 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 22. All four elements (reason, goodness, law and order) emanated from God, according to Gladden. The minister’s crafting of reason and goodness into doctrine strengthened the doctor’s weaving of natural law and order into healing. The physician should not neglect reason and goodness as personal characteristics, even though these were traditional attributes of God’s faithful. 44

must depend.”158

Gladden recommended a foundation of study and interest in the spiritual realm to run parallel to the study of medical science.159 These offerings would inspire the necessary balanced judgement when the physician was tasked with the darker aspects of their profession. Ministers were there to give scientists hope and solace when they encountered the unfamiliarity of the supernatural. As physicians supported society, ministers would support physicians. From Scottish theologian Llewlyn David Bevan’s Sermons to Students and Thoughtful Persons (1881), Gladden underscored how investigating the pathology of the soul was different than investigations in other sciences.160 Gladden warned physicians not to simply approach their job as any other profession. The realities of their everyday work demanded “entering fully into the Spirit of Him who took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses, and learning from Him how to find solace and inspiration in the Eternal Goodness,” he said.161 Physicians should count on the support of God and the church. In the ‘Everyday Physician’ sermon, Gladden defended liberal Protestantism and arrived at an important conclusion about the relationship between science and religion. Where the physician sought to understand and control nature physiologically, religion justified a deep spiritual investigation of human nature.162 The minister protected and guided inner spirituality

158 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 23-24; also see, 31-34. Gladden felt a deep obligation to physicians. He hoped his advice would lead other ministers to take on the responsibility of easing the physician’s burden, made heavy by the powerful emotions and natural human feelings physicians encountered in their occupation.

159 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 25-27. The two realms were ‘strangely interblended,’ Gladden emphasized again. He referred to the doctor’s task as ministering to both spirits and the bodies of spirits. Like the permanence of dye on a dyer’s hand, Gladden explained, the physician needed to be cautious with the materiality he encountered. This is an indirect reference to blood, gore, and death. Gladden proscribed a daily reading of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, having to do with works of charity underscoring human knowledge, and a yearly reading of theologian and biologist Henry Drummond’s The Greatest Thing in the World. Drummond’s influence on Gladden is mentioned in Dorn, Washington Gladden, 191-92.

160 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” subpage 30a-30f; Neil Gunson, “Bevan, Llewelyn David (1842-1918),” Australian Dictionary of Biography online, accessed May 23, 2020, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bevan- llewelyn-david-5228.

161 Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 33.

162 Ungureanu, “Science and Religion in the Anglo-American Periodical Press,” 125-36; Roberts, “Science and Religion,” 262-65; Gladden, “Everyday Physician,” 3-6. Six years prior, Gladden covered this subject in his ‘Christ as Healer’ sermon. By 1892, he placed emphasis on humanistic concerns. When a ship sank, Gladden said, and news arrived of the loss of three hundred souls, we “mean that...three hundred human beings perished,” 4. Souls were human beings, after all, not disembodied, spiritual entities. The curing of souls was not simply mental or 45 based on the law of a personal God, imbuing humans with life, feeling, and hope. The alliance between liberal Protestant ministers and professional scientists, such as physicians, was motivated by a rejection of orthodoxy. Liberal Protestantism emphasized an inner spirituality that was attractive to the rising class of professional scientists – experts tasked with the investigation of a strictly natural world separated from the supernatural. The individual inquiry and private judgement of both liberal Protestantism and professional science stymied ecclesiastical tyranny. With a view toward True Christianity, the ‘Church of the Future’ (as one critic of orthodox religion described this religious transformation) fought the dogmatism of Scripture, rites, and ecclesiastical doctrine. Emotions and conscience (i.e., notions of truth, justice, and value) were part of faith, as was moral character. Faith and morality were essential to counteract religious authority and a theology that was unchanging, illiberal, and that prevented a simpler religion more compatible with reason and science. The medical conception of Christianity offered a way for the minister to take part in human healing society. Likewise, the medical doctor’s striving toward rationality should logically lead them to God, whose power unified scientific law and that unquantifiable supernatural component of the world.

Divine Nature and Social Harmony

Gladden looked out over the faces of those gathered to listen to his sermon one day in the fall of 1894. If he knew failings specific to certain faces that looked back at him, he did not dwell on any individual. On the whole, humanity was perfectible. At one end of this spectrum were unruly, animalistic instincts. On the other end, virtue and self-mastery occupied the mind.163 Like other liberal Protestants, Gladden understood this spectrum of perfectibility by drawing metaphors from the world of science regarding natural processes and animal life. In two important sermons in the mid-1890s, the ‘Germ of Life’ sermon and ‘The Parasite’s Creed,’ Gladden made clear that divine nature involved ongoing, complex processes of regeneration

psychological. It was holistic, in the sense that it cured the whole of the human body. Of utmost importance was the way physicians and ministers shared a devotion to the curing of souls. When souls were cured, they were saved. This was a physical and mental process, concerning the life of the body and the life of the mind.

163 Carter, The Spiritual Crisis, 50-60. 46 toward balance and harmony.164 Gladden emphasized that both science and religion connected humanity with the non-human aspects of the natural world. He grounded the medical conception of Christianity in ideals of purposeful work and productive social relationships. On October 20, 1894, Gladden delivered the ‘Germ of Life’ sermon for the first time. He would present the subject again half a decade later in the weeks before the ‘Doctors’ Meeting’ sermon.165 This eventual connection with the AMA meeting was important. As a deep analysis of the parable of the mustard seed, the sermon emphasized the connection between human nature and divine nature.166 “The great kingdoms of life are all closely related,” Gladden said in 1894 and 1899, “and among the lower orders we find hints and foretokenings of the higher relations.”167 Traditionally, the mustard seed was an analogy that explained humanity’s grasping of God’s power. For Gladden, the parable also provided a reflection on spiritual doctrine that showed divine power over nature included the life of humans, animals and plants. This organic process of renewal was similar in the life of plants and in the human experience of the Kingdom of God.168 The transformative power of God linked the laws of natural processes to spiritual and moral law. Gladden based this idea in a quote from Edward Caird’s The Evolution of Religion (1893), which said that the renunciation of the life of the self was necessary to bring about a spiritual transformation. This change was the whole purpose of Jesus’s theory of religious life, and Gladden did not want the sacrifice of life to go underappreciated; the loss of self was the key to this transformation. According to Gladden, the mustard seed served its function in its transformation from one phase of life to another:

“The beautiful little sphere, with its shining husk, has lost its symmetry and shapliness; its integument has burst, its tissues have fallen into decay. One tiny germ, liberated by this dissolution, remains alive below the Earth, and at once begins, with a mighty faith, to push upward toward the light.”169

164 Ungureanu, “Science, Religion, and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 51-52. Liberal Protestants understood religion in the context of a naturalistic, regenerative component to human existence.

165 Gladden presented his “Germ of Life” sermon again on May 14, 1899.

166 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 2-3.

167 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 3.

168 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 6-9.

169 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 8. 47

Likewise, humans became something beyond themselves under the influence of God’s power. In sacrificing their worldly lives, they communed with the infinite, expanding their energies to an otherworldly level.170 The seed reached legendary strength only as the culmination of its process of growth, the productive commonwealth of which the solitary seed was only one, pliable element. The forces of nature, rain, sun, and earth, could not be discounted in this process. “The branch cannot live except it abides in the vine,” Gladden said, “leaf and flower and fruit have no life in themselves; their life is a natural ministry of receiving and giving.”171 Vital bonds connected the life of the organism to the natural world, as social bonds connected humans. If God’s power and law were pervasive in a social organization, the organization too would grow. The power of God over plants, animals and humans, defined the minister’s interest in social morality. Morality itself was based in nature; a harmonized society was the result of a moral society and natural processes. In 1894, Gladden was inspired by his earlier exegesis on medical science to underscore that society was a natural organism.172 Historian John Higham understands the matrix of professional specialization as a logical extension of Herbert Spencer’s prominent beliefs about organic systems: these systems evolved by differentiation and were strengthened in this specialization. Gladden’s focus in ‘The Germ of Life’ in the 1890s was on the integration and interdependence that was also a component of Spencer’s organic evolution. Gladden was not devoted to Spencerian thinking, however, and instead mentioned differentiation in the context of integration, specialization and social harmony. Social harmony was a natural process, conceived in the context of interdependence resulting from the matrix of professional specialization.173 The social order was at stake in the work of the specialized expert. To Gladden, the human concept of faith revealed how human lives were organized in light of the forces of

170 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 10-12.

171 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 17.

172 John Higham, “The Matrix of Specialization,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, ed. Oleson and Voss, 7-9; also see, Ungureanu, “Science, Religion, and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 44; Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation, 21-22.

173 Higham, “The Matrix of Specialization,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 9-10; Oleson and Voss, “Introduction,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, xiii-xiv. Ministers would be included in the development of a great democracy of specialists. 48 divine nature. Social harmony was attainable. Gladden understood the harmony of the Kingdom of God to be at its core a biological organism.174 Churches would guide the social organism to a better understanding of morality that would feed better ethical action. Churches needed to save humanity from conditions that depleted social morality; the goal was social harmony. When humanity reached a state of perfection, all social effort would work toward harmony: “these powers are harmonized; there is no schism in the social body; all the elements and the forces are working together, for the good of all,” Gladden said.175 The social impulse to help, to foster goodwill, created a moral standard that induced social harmony. Just over two years after the ‘Germ of Life’ sermon, on January 17, 1897, Gladden elaborated on natural threats to humanity’s moral character. In ‘Beliefs of Irreligion: The Parasite’s Creed,’ part of a two-sermon series on the topic of irreligion, Gladden explained that humanity was menaced by parasites.176 The parasites he referred to were a special type of the human species that acted more like a non-sentient plant or an uncivilized animal.177 These persons latched on to the healthy functions of society and produced imbalance, hoping to receive the fruits of labor without contributing labor of their own. These parasites included paupers, con men, thieves, and selfish members of the capitalist class. They were leeches of harmony and order, keeping society from running like a well-oiled machine, like a “swiftly moving industrial mechanism,” Gladden said.178 The parasite’s rejection of morality, in disrupting society, threw off the balance of a stable and peaceful civilization. The body of humanity was not without dysfunction. Over the course of the 1890s and into the 1900s, Gladden expressed a specific concern with criminality and pauperism. For him,

174 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 197-200.

175 Gladden, “The Germ of Life,” 35; also see, 35-41.

176 The other sermon in the series also dealt with nature: “Beliefs of Irreligion: The Butterfly’s Creed,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 27, #648).

177 Gladden, “Beliefs of Irreligion: The Parasite’s Creed, January 17, 1897,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 27, #645), 1-3.

178 Gladden, “The Parasite’s Creed,” 9, 33. The components of this machine, supporting each part as well as a unified whole, included plowing, planting, reaping, threshing, husking, mining, spinning, weaving, sewing, grinding, baking, storing, transporting and exchanging. 49 there was the important connection between each individual human and the larger society.179 Criminals and other parasites disconnected the bonds of society. Not all of those who were impoverished were to be blamed for the danger of slums and other neighborhoods nestled into industrial sectors of the city. Gladden specifically rejected the belief that poverty was a form of divine retribution for sin. Moral behavior was key, but Gladden focused on the extremes of human behavior and attempted to speak about these behaviors scientifically.180 The protection of upright citizens from criminals and public charges, but also corporate monopolies, was necessary for social health. Indeed, stemming the influence of these social forces contributed to social morality. This was an integral aspect of Gladden’s view of social stability. The sin of parasitism was an analogy from the natural world to underscore the work to be done to save humanity. Parasites were a direct threat to the highest ideals of society.181 In contemplating nature, Gladden related the scientific components of the natural world to religion. Liberal Protestants such as Gladden believed spiritual laws complemented the laws of natural science and vice versa. Liberal Protestantism resolved the tension between Christian belief and scientific questioning by 1) remaining true to liberal, evangelical Christianity and 2) accommodating a materialism in theology that linked human society and the natural world. The spiritual and the worldly were linked by nature. Gladden asserted that humanity’s interaction with the natural world through scientific investigation would bring about spiritual salvation and improve human life. Rebuilding the character of society was partly the minister’s task. “We are to save them, not in their sin of parasitism but from their sin,” Gladden said.182 He rejected efforts to reach social perfection through divine judgement. Gladden understood health in a broader sense beyond religion, as a balanced social

179 Gladden, “Germ of Life,” 21-33; Gladden, “The Parasite’s Creed,” 6-10, 16-36. Gladden spoke of cooperation in the work that it took to support all of a stable society. The parasitic actions of unequal taxation, patronage in government, monopolies in the corporate world, and private inheritances of wealth, sustained the larger groups of social parasites at the bottom of the social hierarchy, according to Gladden.

180 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting, June 4, 1899,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 30, #765), 32-38; a more accurate date for the sermon is June 11, the Sunday following the AMA annual meeting. The second-half of Gladden’s sermon on the meeting focused exclusively on the science of crime, addressed by a Dr. Browner of Chicago.

181 Gladden, “The Parasite’s Creed,” 30.

182 Gladden, “The Parasite’s Creed,” 37. 50 harmony supported by professionals working to reverse the effects of depleted energy.183 Since humanity was a creation of God, existing in a divine, natural world, it was subject to biological principles that could be investigated.184 Ethical, purposeful work meant cooperation in a broad effort to uphold the life of humanity against the moral decay of society. The material bounty of modern life was supported by an idealized cadre of professionals with the best interests of humanity in mind. The upholding of social morality by a reasoned, rational professional class would establish social harmony. Social harmony required the work of many occupations, not just physical and intellectual work, but spiritual work also. On May 14th, 1899, less than a month before the AMA doctors’ meeting in June, Gladden again delivered the ‘Germ of Life’ sermon. When he thought of the future of an ideal professional alliance between physicians and ministers, he thought in terms of social harmony – a religiously-founded social cooperation.

The Parable of the Doctors’ Meeting

Without attending the doctors’ meeting in the summer of 1899, Gladden may not have committed himself so fully to a medical conception of Christianity. This medical Christianity embraced an alliance between scientists to improve human welfare. Ministers should openly embrace the lessons provided by advances in medical science and effective, efficient healing. Neither individual nor social well-being was beyond the restorative reach of professional experts. In the work of the professionalized minister, the spiritual health of individuals would be connected to social health and bring about a harmonized society. The doctors’ meeting was a parable for modern, professionalized Protestant ministers. In this modern parable, Gladden affirmed the cultural authority of doctors.185 He linked the cultural authority of physicians to the cultural standing of liberal ministers by acknowledging the social implications of modern medicine. The purpose of the doctors’ meeting was “to enlarge the bounds of medical knowledge,” Gladden said, in order to broaden the skill set of all medical

183 Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation, 15-34; Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 30-31.

184 Gladden, “The Parasite’s Creed,” 10.

185 Starr, Social Transformation, 9-13, 134-38; Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 1-5, 260. Through the development of professional associations and the founding of authoritative institutions in the late nineteenth century, American medicine bound itself to objective science and achieved a significant share of cultural authority in the realm of health. Physicians developed a new professional identity, the goal of which was the validation of health through a community of shared standards, scientific experimentation, and universalized diagnosis and therapy. 51 practitioners.186 Modern physicians did not simply “talk as though they were sure they knew it all,” he said.187 Their relief of suffering in the scientific curing of disease made them coworkers with all true Christians in expanding the Kingdom of God.188 Though they were secular professionals, the work of physicians performed the deeply religious function of promoting human welfare. The power of the physician was manifested in their associational strength. Gladden expressed a specific unease that the ecclesiastical world would be left out of the advancements fostered by professional associations.189 He worried traditional sectarian and doctrinal constraints on Protestantism would limit the ability of churches to influence society expertly and efficiently to the extent that other associational groups did. “I wish that I might, some time, attend a meeting of ministers, as numerous as this,” Gladden said of the doctors’ meeting, “which devoted its time as largely to the specific business of finding out how to help and benefit human beings.”190 Knowledge-seeking was life affirming. Gladden allied himself to the doctors’ association, in addition to associations of teachers and charity workers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.191 Each of these associations was an example of God using man’s capacity for social harmony to strengthen the divine within the earthly domain. The noble work of physicians helped to sustain social harmony. Though some physicians prioritized pay and prestige in treating patients, most were selflessly focused on enhancing

186 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 3.

187 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 13. The criticism of doctors as charlatans was an outdated standpoint made mostly by the orthodox and the self-righteous, Gladden contended. The ignorance and self-righteousness of many traditional church leaders led to the demonization of physicians. Critiques of medical science would be applied better to the critics themselves, Gladden said.

188 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 6-10. Gladden specifically emphasized this social and professional focus would also be beneficial to teachers, professionalized charity workers and other scientists. The benefits brought to the larger society because of these fields, not to mention the personal fulfillment of those professionals employed in these fields, was a manifestation of the divine.

189 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 3-7.

190 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 3-4.

191 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 6-8. Scientific enquiry was beneficial to human spirituality such as a ‘tributary’ supported its main branch. Gladden warned against orthodox views of disease and public health, explaining such traditional doctrines treating death as an acceptable manifestation of God’s will were anti-scientific and anti-humane. 52 human welfare.192 What made these physicians professionals was their attempt to standardize and normalize American medical practices on a broad scale. Such a large professional organization did not escape disagreement totally, but the physicians of the AMA kept calm in the face of differing opinions. For Gladden, the emphasis on an outward display of consensus was an important component to professional medicine. The AMA intentionally propagated a vision of itself as an organization free of dissension.193 Gladden believed in a particular vision of professional medicine showcased at the doctors’ meeting, of a national association supported by the elite cultural milieu of the Northeast. A significant element of new therapeutic practice was a shift in professional morality, a phrase indicating the moral vantage point of the physician’s work. Historian John Warner understands experimental science as a new therapeutic principle revealing a wider moral perspective. Contrasted with specific, place- and person-based remedies for ill-health, modern science and new therapeutics treated universal, abnormal conditions.194 Gladden was enamored with the universal application of experimental therapeutics.195 As was the case with scientific medicine, Gladden hoped religion would be streamlined, beyond conflict and criticism, by the authority of a few reformers over a plurality of voices. These were the reform-minded physicians who led Gladden to feel, in his recollection of attending the conference, “something very stirring, almost sublime, in the spectacle of thousands of men coming together and working patiently and

192 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 11-14; Starr, Social Transformation, 85-88. Gladden emphasized that only physicians with this ideal character, those who set their sights on dignified humanistic aims and imbued their work as scientists with lofty purpose, were worthy to engage on equal ground with a minister.

193 Starr, Social Transformation, 93-102. The AMA’s attempt to present itself as a united organization of modern physicians obscured many elements of dissention in the transition taking place in medical therapeutics (the occupational work of physicians to provide remedies to their patients).

194 Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 58-68, 85-91; also see, Duffy, The Sanitarians, 136-37, 196; Edmund Ramsden, “Science and Medicine in the United States of America,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 229. The tension between population medicine and clinical medicine is one example of the difference between universal remedies and specific remedies.

195 Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 7, 260-83. The methods Gladden hailed as egalitarian – physiology and bacteriology – others considered ineffectual means of healing. Interestingly, there was a paradox in Gladden’s understanding of professional medicine. The professional minister would be theologically liberal, while the professional physician was unmistakably orthodox with regard to medical theory. In the context of a medical conception of Christianity, Gladden sought above all else to reject orthodoxy as anti-science and embrace science at the expense of what he saw as uninformed, decentralized judgement. It was much easier for an orthodox physician to integrate new ideas of healing, simply by incorporating scientific knowledge as a source of therapeutic practice, than it was for an orthodox minister to accept liberal ideas about Christian belief. 53 enthusiastically for so many days to make themselves good physicians,” he said.196 Another important theme in the modern doctors’ parable was to show that the physician’s scientific rigor would serve liberal ministers well in their new conception of Christianity. Like scientific-minded physicians in the medical marketplace, liberal ministers needed to tread carefully in a competitive religious marketplace.197 As early as the 1880s, Gladden noted the paralyzing effect of denominational rivalry on his duty to attract churchgoers and assert moral authority.198 Differing liturgical practices, creeds, ecclesiastical rivalries, and bitter competition over denominational allegiance were criticized by liberal ministers; these elements of Protestantism pushed away otherwise interested churchgoers, even those from sheltered communities of new immigrants. This disunity diminished the standing of Protestant churches and ministers in the wider cultural landscape. Gladden sought the establishment of an objective religious authority from outside denominational institutions. As the AMA showed, scientific authority was one way to do this. Physicians were imbued with a modern “Spirit of Truth and Life,” Gladden said, that orthodoxy and tradition could never harness.199 In embracing experimentation and efficiency, humanity pursued a true vision of health.200 For Gladden, the way the AMA conducted its associational business, its social spirit, personified its cultural authority.

196 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 9.

197 Mislin, Saving Faith, 95-101.

198 Mislin, Saving Faith, 100-1; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 351-52. In “The Christian League Club of Connecticut,” a series of short stories published in Century magazine from 1882-83, Gladden worried about ‘churchless classes’ more loyal to ‘heathenism.’ He countered these trends by writing of a non-denominational league of ministers and lay leadership that emphasized mutual work in social service among their congregations; see Handy, “The Christian League of Connecticut,” in The Social Gospel in America, 72-83. The success of the Connecticut stories inspired Gladden to write a novel with similar themes, the Cosmopolis City Club (1893), focused on cooperation to solve urban problems through municipal reform.

199 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 23. Orthodox ministers created an impossible cosmological standard to which they held physicians, as well as the rest of their flocks; Starr, Social Transformation, 109-11. The doctor’s spirit was evident to Gladden in their corporate consciousness and fraternal interactions.

200 Naylor, “Gifford Pinchot, the Conservation Movement, and the Social Gospel,” 249-54. In linking the Social Gospel and the conservation movement, Naylor shows how each reform group used scientific data to change long-held views of the social landscape. Using data-driven action, efforts at cooperative church planning and denominational merging to better serve society culminated in the establishment of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. This body’s adoption of the ‘Social Creed of the Churches’ in 1908 was a tremendous endorsement of the Social Gospel by American Protestants, see Dorn, Washington Gladden, 349-71; Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 133-37. But questions about whether the Federal Council was a vindication of Gladden’s efforts toward a more professionalized ministry are beyond the scope of this investigation. 54

The prime example Gladden used to showcase the physician’s ideal, social spirit was to quote from the plenary lecture by Dr. J.C. Wilson of Philadelphia.201 The subject was “A Century of Medicine in America.” Dr. Wilson’s goal was to trace the most recent developments of American medical science to show the groundbreaking advances brought about by the dissemination of scientific knowledge among groups of physicians. This was the ascendance of experimental medicine. “Marvelous changes!” Dr. Wilson exclaimed.202 “The fairy tales of science,” Dr. Wilson said, and Gladden quoted, “had become the everyday handbook of the doctor.” A more centralized, science-based, laboratory approach replaced the traditional village doctor’s pharmacopoeia.203 Preventative medicine, such as vaccination and inoculation, as well as modern remedies, replaced traditional medical practice. Gladden emphasized these elements as the best example of the physician’s value, to uphold the health of society by their scientific authority as investigators and healers. Experimentation in bacteriology and scientific therapeutics further engrossed physicians in the revelations of divine nature. The professional minister should strive for a similar scientific legitimacy and authority. The ‘Doctors’ Meeting’ sermon was the keystone relating the physician’s scientific spirit to liberal Protestantism. Gladden tactfully applied what he learned from the doctors’ meeting to the question of the Protestant minister’s authority. Physicians succeeded in Gladden’s mind in changing public perception of scientific medicine. Ministers also needed to change the outdated perception of their profession. A professionalized corps of modern workers was essential. Morality, the traditional purview of religion, would be supported by ministers using preventative measures that built strong character, a moral body capable of defending itself from contagions that corrupted truth and fact and the pursuit of free will. The morality of society would be the focus of liberal ministers’ cooperative efforts, using science in the purification of ecclesiastical tyranny.204 Gladden did not want to ignore doctrinal difference, he wanted to settle doctrinal

201 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 15-18.

202 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 16. The development of the germ theory of disease underscored the replacement of the old surgery by new methods. Advances in anesthetics, histology and cellular pathology laid the foundation for experimental physiology, biological chemistry, and experimental therapeutics.

203 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 17-19.

204 Mislin, Saving Faith, 101-3; Ungureanu, “Science, Religion, and the ‘New Reformation’ of the Nineteenth Century,” 58. The question remained: not only how such essentials would be agreed upon but codified and made into new doctrine in an intellectual climate where liberal Protestants rejected creeds as orthodoxy. 55 debates scientifically.205 The traditional religious authority of the minister no longer fit into an expert-scientific intellectual landscape. The professionalization of medicine exhibited at the AMA’s annual conference in 1899 was Gladden’s guide as he thought about a professionalized ministry. The goal was to raise the cultural authority of liberal Protestant ministers. The individual minister would draw their authority from their church as well as a wider national movement of cooperation among churches to bridge differences on issues of doctrine and practice. Professionalized healing of body and soul, through the combined efforts of medical and church organizations, was the only path to a truly healthy society. By the first decade of the twentieth century, social harmony was the foundation of Gladden’s thinking about public health and humanity’s place in nature. Gladden framed the conservation movement as a broad contribution to social morality and stability that would make a tangible difference in the material conditions of human life. As much as the transformations and ruptured traditions of urbanization affected American society, this society could undergo processes of healing. Public health became an essential aspect of the conservation movement for Gladden because of his belief in the ideal of social harmony, a connection between individuals and the wider society. Gladden envisioned public health contributing to social health. The work of a minister in the conservation movement was to guard social morality and guide society’s healing efforts.

205 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 18. There was no telling the final form an experimental, systematic Christianity would take. Ideally, it would be a system similar to experimental medicine, with a limited number of commands implemented efficiently. 56

Chapter Three: Cities, Health and Social Harmony through the Conservation Movement

As in the movement for scientific medicine, Washington Gladden found social harmony in the conservation movement. Beyond professional alliances, social harmony would be achieved in Columbus through the expert control of the urban environment. Historians have recently examined how religious themes blended with the perspective of conservationists.206 As Rev. Gladden put it, the risk to religion and the natural world in the late nineteenth century was that “our days will not be long in the land which the Lord our God has given us.”207 Aligning the Social Gospel to the conservation movement, Gladden saw the clear benefits to cooperation between the two efforts of social transformation. For him, the conservation movement stressed that humanity needed to be wary of outgrowing their presence in God’s creation by squandering the resource base provided by nature for human welfare and survival. Gladden was no medical expert. As an advocate of scientific medicine and as a supporter of the conservation movement, his influence on public health was as a ‘minister-in-politics.’208 His position as an influential member of religious and political society in Columbus led him to seek out alliances to assist with the Social Gospel aim of establishing a harmonious society.209

206 Naylor, “Gifford Pinchot, the Conservation Movement, and the Social Gospel,” 244-45, 251. George Perkins Marsh, an intellectual influence on many in the conservation movement, framed the relationship between man and nature as a concern for the spiritual survival of humanity. When Gifford Pinchot, among the most prominent American conservationists, described his vision of conservation it was as if he recounted an experience of spiritual conversion. In the 1890s, Pinchot served as an honorary vice-president of the New York State Federation of Churches – a Social Gospel organization. In the 1910s, he served as head of the Commission on the Church and Country Life, an effort by the Federal Council of Churches to expand the purview of the Social Gospel movement to rural America.

207 Gladden, “Conservation, September, 18, 1910,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 41, #1254), 12.

208 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 333.

209 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 314-15. For the implementation of social harmony in the city, it is very likely that Gladden believed professional alliances that worked toward reform were best expressed in civic federations or municipal leagues. All across the United States in the 1890s, reformers concerned with finding long- lasting, scientific solutions to urban governance joined such organizations. Dorn notes that even in the early-1890s, in various outlets, Gladden spoke highly of the five municipal leagues formed across the country in 1892, the nine formed in 1893, and the 26 formed in 1894. In Cosmopolis City Club (mentioned in Chapter Two), Gladden presented the story of prominent urban citizens who organized in a downtown social club for the purpose of reform. In 1894, Gladden directly influenced the formation of the Civic Federation of Chicago; also in 1894, Gladden participated in the National Conference for Good Government which later became the National Municipal League. 57

Gladden became an active and influential member of the Columbus Board of Trade after its establishment in 1884. He joined the Board’s committee on municipal affairs and eventually became the committee’s chairman. Throughout the 1890s, Gladden and the Board of Trade were directly involved in local reform efforts.210 When Gladden was elected to the city council in 1900, his plan for reform was four-fold: a renewed streetcar franchise, a franchise for interurban railroads crossing the city, fair prices in new contracts for the gas company, and the construction of a new municipal dam to provision the city’s water works.211 As a minister-in-politics, Gladden raised his profile as a reformer with a specific vision of social health and harmony. This chapter will show how Gladden approached the themes of health, humanity and nature, in his emphasis on the importance of the conservation movement to the future of American Protestantism and the nation. By 1908, the Great Columbus Experiment fulfilled the Columbus Board of Trade’s vision for their capital city.212 The city could finally advertise a state-of-the-art urban water, sewage,

In 1897, Gladden helped to form the League of American Municipalities. He became a member of the City Club of New York in 1904.

210 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 312-19. Through the Board of Trade, Gladden advocated for the reorganization of municipal government in Columbus, in the form of a state charter for a federal plan of a single municipal executive (the mayor’s office) which shared governance with the city council. This plan would increase the ability of the city to govern under municipal home rule, free of state interference and with increased powers of administrative efficiency and law enforcement. In 1885, Gladden presented details of Brooklyn, New York’s system of government (implemented by reformer and mayor Seth Low) to the Board of Trade. A year later, the Board endorsed a federal plan for city government, and such a plan was adopted in 1893 after the Board initiated ward primaries to select delegates to a charter convention (after more campaigning by Gladden, including another address to the Board). In 1894, the Board attempted to halve the number of city council members from 38 to 19. Also in this year, Gladden became a vice president of another local mobilization effort, the Taxpayers’ League of Franklin County. This league was directly involved in petitions over public transit franchises and the composition of the city’s board of education.

211 Dorn, Washington Gladden, 321-31; Mislin, Washington Gladden’s Church, 120-24. The only successes during Gladden’s single term as a councilmember was the agreement of beneficial streetcar and gas franchises for the city. The story of the municipal dam was only beginning to unfold in the early 1900s.

212 Daniel Amsterdam, Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1-6; Jon Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), xi. Businessmen rose to be the most empowered group in the Industrial Age city. Teaford describes a century-long process of the rising influence of white-collar industries and professional-types in American cities, from merchants to later corporate figures, particularly in the Midwest. Amsterdam investigates businessmen’s support for large increases in government spending in the early twentieth century. These businessmen envisioned molding healthy citizens for gainful employment and political participation by expanding local, government-supported infrastructure improvement projects and some social spending programs. Areas of reform that benefitted were sanitation infrastructure, public health institutions, public schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, museums, and the building of decentralized, single- family homes. In Columbus, historians trace the efforts of Columbus’s prominent residents and the city’s 58 and garbage-disposal system. This Great Experiment resulted from the belief of residents and their government that a vital natural resource could be expertly controlled. The reform of the urban landscape of Columbus was part of the broader reform of the national landscape through conservation. The Great Columbus Experiment would not generally be included in a list of achievements of the conservation movement. However, prominent figures in Columbus in the early twentieth century, including Gladden, were acutely aware of the problems that the conservation movement tried to solve. Historians define the conservation movement as a combination of efforts to rationally and efficiently develop all natural resources through applied science.213 This broad agenda promoted responsibility in human interactions with the natural world. Gladden joined with many others, nationally and internationally, when he called for urgent reforms to humanity’s relationship with nature. Churches (like Gladden’s First Church), schools, women’s clubs, debating groups, and Chautauqua assemblies, helped solidify the reform vision of the movement. The wider audience of ordinary citizens gave way to a broader concern with many resources: water, forests, minerals, soil, crops, and human health. The movement for conservation balanced the need for natural resources with a specific vision of a well-ordered society.214 At stake was the unraveling of society through the reckless use of nature, shortages of natural resources, and the resulting social disorder this would cause. Only recently have historians shown that conservationists considered health a resource. Conservationists sought to regulate human action in the city, including public health, as part of an environmental agenda that also included hunting and logging regulations and the management

government to establish a sanitation system back to the 1870s, see Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 91-93; also see, Conrade C. Hinds, The Great Columbus Experiment of 1908: Waterworks that Changed the World (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012).

213 Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, 1, 5-6; Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 4-12, 21-27; Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City; Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency.

214 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 70-76. Stoll investigates the roots of conservation as an environmental reform movement back to the sixteenth century and the Reformed tradition of Calvinism. Conservation was not only moral, it was scientific, technological, economic and social. Stoll shows how devoutly Huguenots were dedicated to agricultural improvement, agronomy, forestry and communal park land in France. The American conservation movement fit into a tradition of Protestant conservation. Stoll points to the establishment of the U.S. Bureau of Agriculture in 1835 and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1862 as an indicator of the Congregationalist influences on environmental conservation before the Gilded Age, see Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 84; also see Soll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America, 24-35, for a historical discussion of the subjugation and improvement of nature as the basis for the natural world’s significance to humanity in Protestantism. 59 of large tracts of land by resource experts. With a focus on health, the conservation movement would assist in the establishment of social harmony – a healthy and politically, culturally and economically productive municipality.215 Informed by science and considerations of human interactions with the natural world, conservationists sought to re-design and re-organize the city through broad measures that provided potential solutions to social conflict. Gladden believed the ideal city was not just a moral space, and a Christian space, it was a healthy space through which clean rivers flowed, providing a pure water supply. The attention paid to sanitation infrastructure in Columbus in the early twentieth century should be seen through the lens of conservation. The purpose of Gladden’s sermons was to guide many to situate urban public health as part of the conservation movement. Gladden’s experience of the natural world and of humanity’s place in nature gave a tremendous weight to his advocating for public health and the health of the natural world in his sermons on the subject of conservation. In sermons from 1903 to 1910, Gladden acknowledged the complicated webs of alliances made by the conservation movement in efforts to improve urban life. The first section of this chapter focuses on Gladden’s sermon “Nature Study – The Rivers,” from 1903.216 As a conservationist, Gladden explained how rivers supported human health. Waterways highlighted the intrinsic bonds between humanity and God’s creation.217 Gladden added the expert management of Columbus’s sanitation and public health to his vision of a healthy, harmonious

215 Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 28-43, 137-42.

216 Gladden wrote a series of nine ‘Nature Study’ sermons from 1902-1903. These sermons would be useful in expanding an investigation into Gladden’s understanding of nature: 1) “Nature Study – The Social Life of the Bee,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 34, #927), 2) “Nature Study – The Flowers,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 34, #930), 3) “Nature Study – The Mountains,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 34, #931), 4) “Nature Study – The Clouds,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 34, #932), 5) “Nature Study – The Stars,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 34, #933), 6) “Nature Study – The Sea, June 14, 1903,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 35, #972), 7) “Nature Study – The Trees, June 21, 1903,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 35, #973), 8) “Nature Study – The Beasts of the Field, June 28, 1903,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 35, #975).

217 Smith, City Water, City Life, 3-8, 130, 155-57. Smith emphasizes that reconstructing the non-human world to be able to support intense urbanization led to philosophical and rhetorical responses by American elites, such as Gladden. In Boston, earlier in the nineteenth century, the Puritan cultural tradition that Gladden was a descendent of mixed with contemporary Unitarian ideas of rationality and Transcendentalist hopefulness to frame urban sanitation infrastructure as God’s plan for non-human nature. Much as Gladden thought decades later, the political elite in mid-century Boston believed humanity’s sacred calling was to improve upon non-human nature. This improvement was not a conquering regime but a civilizing process of commodification and incorporation. What was once considered natural was redefined to balance the new urban world on top of traditional human settlements in the natural world. 60 society. The urban landscape helped Gladden to develop an understanding of the role of human spaces in the conservation movement. The second section of this chapter shows the culmination of a longer intellectual journey that many urban residents at the time, such as Gladden, took to support conservationist policies and the politicians who made specific decisions about the urban environment. The emphasis on public health in Gladden’s ‘Conservation’ sermon of 1910 must be understood in the context of its Social Gospel themes. To make these connections clearer, this chapter will conclude with an emphasis on a sermon by Gladden from 1906 titled ‘Organic Bonds of Society.’ Gladden thought in terms of the ‘organic unity’ of humanity. Gladden’s view of the conservation of nature was complicated by his acknowledgement of humanity as an integral part of God’s creation. The history of American Protestantism provided an example for how city life could be redemptive.218 The ideal New England village “with its tasteful steepled church on the town green [was] representative of traditional communal, devout, prosperous, and harmonious society” that was romanticized by nineteenth-century Congregationalists such as Gladden.219 These Congregational communities were revered for their promotion of a society where moral order was established by industriousness and a consideration of human interaction with and improvement of the natural world. The Puritan town in the New England countryside provided the greatest example of a godly community. Nostalgia for a bygone era’s moral and practical urban space was evident in Gladden’s vision of health in the conservation movement. Moving from Springfield to Columbus, Gladden traveled from an old world of religion and societal harmony to a new world of individualism and social strife. The intellectual and moral framework that called back to the model communities of Congregationalist New England were deeply inspirational for both the Social Gospel and the urban conservation movement. Especially in increasingly dense human settlements, the bonds between humans and between humans and the natural world were bonds integral to national health. Concurrent with the timeline of sanitation reform in Columbus, Gladden proposed a specific vision of

218 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 60-70.

219 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 68. By the nineteenth century, communities no longer organized into Congregationalist churches at the rates they had in previous centuries. A result of this was that there was less regulation of forest and timber use, less equal access to resources, and less regulation of tenancy and land sales to outsiders in American communities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these conservationist actions had been distinct aspects of Congregationalist morality, industry, and beliefs about human relationships with the natural world, according to Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 76, 109. 61 conservation for the urban environment. He approached public health from a scientific perspective, and he linked public health to the health of the nation. Gladden’s outlook on health became a conservationist’s outlook on the nation’s future.

The Gospel of Cities and Rivers

Columbus was established on the eastern bank of the Scioto River, a half-mile south of its juncture with the Olentangy River. In the nineteenth century, steamboats flowed south on the Scioto to the Ohio, running parallel to traffic on a spur of the Ohio and Erie Canal. The Scioto provided water for Columbus’s drinking, firefighting and industrial needs.220 In the early nineteenth century, it was illegal to prevent navigation on the river by diverting its current. Any obstructions, such as mill dams, created pools of stagnant water that were seen as health hazards. As urbanization increased, Columbus became an industrial ecosystem.221 Private waste, commercial refuse from kitchens and markets, chemical refuse from manufacturing, all increased water pollution and sedimentation of the Olentangy and Scioto. As pollution became more noticeable, calls increased for a sanitary flow of water and a system of drainage that would purify any polluted water and reduce the frequency of public health disasters such as epidemics. From 1871 to 1873, the Columbus municipal government spent $1.7 million on improvements to the city’s sanitation infrastructure, including water wells, pumps and a system of citywide pipes. Though disease could be prevented with continued improvements to sanitation infrastructure, expense was the main issue with expansion.222

220 Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 60-62; Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11-15, 267. Steinberg describes the incorporation of water in New England (through the example of the Waltham-Lowell system of industrial mills) as the beginning of a process of industrial capitalism dominating nature. The commodification of nature and the establishment of factory economies and urban-industrial ecologies formed the ‘ecological relations’ of industrial capitalism that soon blended the use of human and natural resources in the economy. The consequences of this interconnection first fell to the public health expert-officials discussed in Chapter One. However, scientific preciseness was not just an element of public health. Steinberg highlights the cultural change that brought about a new industrial calculus of human expansion into nature and nature’s incorporation and management.

221 Schneider, Hybrid Nature, xvii-xx. Schneider links the development of sanitation technology with other developments of the modern world, such as electrical power, telephones and mass transit. Sewage treatment was seen both as a natural process and an artificially invented and maintained process. Scientists, engineers, sanitation employees and capitalists conceived of sewer treatment systems spatially and organically.

222 Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 66-70. In 1889, yearly revenue from the water system stood at $179,000 while $99,500 was spent on the system in Columbus. Many cities decided to take on debt (municipal bonds) and 62

In his ‘Nature Study – The Rivers’ sermon on June 7, 1903, Gladden noted: “It would hardly be possible for Columbus to be the city that it expects to be, were it not for the Scioto River.”223 The citizens of Columbus needed to understand the importance of such a river to the city’s future.224 Gladden linked the spiritual value of rivers to the need for an abundant water supply to support future urban growth. In his ‘Rivers’ sermon, Gladden modified liberal Protestant ideas to fit a conservationist outlook. He thought about the relationship between rivers and humanity. Gladden’s understanding of rivers built on his beliefs about humanity’s placement in divine nature. He explained that the natural processes of rivers were made sacred by humanity.225 Hebrews, Hindus and Romans revered the power of rivers as a reflection of divine intercession. In the Christian tradition, from Genesis to Revelation to Dante, rivers were components to the perfect landscape. In the New Jerusalem, a river would give life to trees that would provide fruit and leaves “for the healing of nations,” Gladden asserted.226 Gladden explicitly linked the natural processes of rivers to human societies. Humans not only lived beside rivers, but their interactions with this natural resource were essential to human survival.227 Powered by a complicated process of drainage from the land and from underground,

enact higher taxes to reach a purified source of water through engineering, with some cities taking on an additional expense to purify their water. Costs were often outstripped by growth and the need for the expansion of the system.

223 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers, June 7, 1903,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 35, #971), 24.

224 This viewpoint echoed much of what the business community of Columbus thought at the time, see Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 28, 51. In the new industrial economy of the late nineteenth century, cities competed for reputation. As early as 1885, a Board of Trade publication hailed fresh water as one of the most important elements in Columbus’s economy: they boasted that from the 1870s into the 1880s, the extension of service pipes was a critical factor pushing city businesses to expand the limits of the city. This was an exaggeration, unfortunately, as there was little attention paid to water quality: in the 1880s, the city’s water was limited as a source of drinking water by diseases and was not soft enough to be harnessed in steam-powered boilers. The Board of Trade placed emphasis on river water because, as Blackford explains, urban pride was lacking without a state-of-the-art water works and sewage system. The Board did not want Ohio’s capital to be left behind in comparison to the advancements made in other cities.

225 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 3-9.

226 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 5.

227 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 14-21; Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 9-10. The United States Division of Forestry had its first chief appointed in 1881. The health and vitality of watersheds were linked to resource use in forests as early as 1891-92. Forest reserves were established and, at the federal level, came under the territorial jurisdiction of the Organic Act of 1897. From an early concern with the preservation of forests, 63 the business of rivers was to carry “the waste of the soil from the highlands to the lowlands, from the mountains to the sea,” said Gladden.228 Rivers served a divine, cleansing function in human society. Rivers contributed to the health of the city, and they needed to be managed by municipalities in the name of public health. Just as Gladden shared his ‘Rivers’ sermon, prominent citizens were discussing the improvement of Columbus’s sanitation infrastructure. Between 1900 and 1905, the city council and Ohio’s Department of Health approved components to an updated sanitation project. This project would result in the construction of a dam, reservoir, sewage treatment plant, garbage- disposal plant, and a water purification and softening facility.229 Voters gave their consent to funding this sanitation infrastructure project between 1903 and 1904. The improvement of Columbus’s water system would cost over $3 million before its completion in 1908. The quantity of water that the Griggs Dam and Reservoir system enclosed (over 1.5 billion gallons) was itself enough to dilute disease germs and make them less of a threat to the water supply for the city service district. Water was treated and softened at a rate of 20-40 million gallons per day. Twenty to thirty million gallons of sewage per day were purified using a 10-acre artificial filtration process. Before Columbus’s project, no city had built and connected the three components of a sanitation system at the same time. Seen as an isolated construction project, the impressive Great Columbus Experiment was pioneering. The project has not yet been tied to larger conservationist ideas. In the June 1903 sermon, Gladden voiced support for increased spending to secure and purify the Scioto as a reliable source of water. He spoke as a conservationist. “It is neither economical nor rational to refuse or delay the expenditure which is necessary for the preservation of health and life,” Gladden said in his ‘Rivers’ sermon.230 He was hopeful about improved

conservationist management efforts expanded to a concern with many components of Americans’ wasteful relationship with natural resources, including water resources.

228 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 19.

229 Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 76-89. Continued support from the Board of Trade into the early-1900s was essential to the awareness of the city council of the need to improve the city’s sanitation infrastructure. By this time, the East and West Side pumping stations built in the early-1870s were thirty years old, and engineers pointed out the need for their replacement. Additionally, these consulting engineers explained that a damming project would only make sense along with a new filtration plant and water-softening facility.

230 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 24-25. 64 public health through sanitation infrastructure. The control of nature in such a way would provide tangible benefits to human health in the urban environment. The Scioto also needed to be engineered, Gladden explained. Deepening and widening the river, and straightening the river channel, would lessen the impact of flooding.231 “If we neglect this duty and disaster [by flooding] comes, we need not rail at an unkind or cruel Providence,” he said. What man would tempt a river who would never tempt a God, he seemed to be asking. He reminded his listeners to thank God for the gift of the Scioto. Though cities were primarily sites of human interaction, Gladden said that these interactions did not occur so far from the natural world as one might think.232 The water supply and sewer systems of most cities were supported by a strong river current. London, on the Thames, Liverpool on the Mersey, and Glasgow on the Clyde, as well as the Elbe, the Schildt, the Maas, the ‘Yangtse Kiang,’ the Hudson, and the Delaware, were all examples where humanity met the natural world at a vital point of exchange. The river’s natural function blended with human prerogatives at the site of the city. Humanity used water as a means to a better livelihood, as arteries for commerce and by jump-starting irrigation.233 Flowing water was essential for human survival. Gladden was a conservationist because he believed in the use of science and technology to establish a prosperous future.234 As he had done in the 1890s, Gladden again emphasized in

231 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 30-32. The message of the ‘Nature Study’ sermon was more urgent than usual because of recent flooding that had made the news. Also, the memory of the Johnstown, PA flood of 1889 was still in the minds of Columbus residents at this time, see Blackford, Columbus, Ohio, 79.

232 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 21.

233 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 22-23.

234 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 1-4, 122-27. In the older view of the conservation movement, the powerful political and economic interests of American society in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era attempted to assert their control over ‘the people’ across the American landscape. Expanding on this sanctified view of conservation, later historians emphasized that the framing of conservation as a moral struggle was rhetorical. Hays emphasizes the role of elite rhetoric in the conservation movement. According to Hays, conservationists were more concerned with professional ideals of efficiency, rational planning, and collaboration than democratic values. The urban landscape would be made safe for humanity through conservationist ideals of efficiency, planning and collaboration; also see, Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 2-5. Stradling argues that conservation was an element of civilizational discourse that led nineteenth and early-twentieth century reformers to emphasize local or social regulation and control (and secure private property and profit). Conservationists eventually adopted an industrial calculus that expanded the conception of their movement. From a reform-minded agenda that sought to legislate the control of smoke pollution for aesthetic and health reasons, smoke abatement efforts became focused on industrial efficiency and conserving natural resources. 65

1903 that by studying divine nature, science taught “men to work together with God.”235 This relationship was exemplified by the famous Nile River, which provided for the Ancient Egyptians as it provided for the scientists and engineers building the Old Aswan Dam at the turn of the twentieth century. This human improvement of the landscape “greatly augmented” the economy of the Nile region and Egypt, Gladden described. Because of the dam, “the estimate is that the poor farmer’s crops will be increased by this device, fully thirty percent,” he said.236 He considered the importance of rivers to humanity in the context of engineering efficiency and the conservation of natural resources. “A river may sometimes be a wild beast,” he said, “but man can tame it; and that is part of his business in this world.”237 Despite their reputation for destruction, river systems were positive elements in human society that led directly to human prosperity and happiness. Conservationists sought to remake industrial cities through an increase in pressure from ordinary citizens for state control over the landscape, to bring about harmony between humanity and nature.238 The conservation movement placed much importance on the implementation of a wide slate of legislation that set parameters on the legitimate use of natural resources and human interaction with the natural world. Gladden’s conservationist outlook encompassed rivers, cities, as well as ideas about social harmony that he developed over decades. He found God in urban social relations. When construction finished on a new water supply for Columbus – a new water treatment system, a new way of handling sewage and a new garbage facility – residents would benefit from improved living conditions. When clean water was secured for cooking, washing, and consumption by private and corporate use; when pollution from industrial and human waste was effectively eliminated from the everyday concerns of urban residents – these were matters of the human relationship with God’s creation. Gladden did not dwell solely on the negative consequences of the waste of natural resources. He wanted to reverse the wasteful habits of

235 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 23.

236 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 23.

237 Gladden, “Nature Study – The Rivers,” 32.

238 Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 55-65. The movement was not limited to uninhabited landscapes, but could provide for humanity in the confines of their municipality. The conservation movement inspired street paving; public health measures such as sewage treatment and drinking water protection; the integration of immigrant populations; the municipal ownership of utilities; and urban beautification efforts. These were all seen as matters of human relations with the natural world. 66 humanity to harken a brighter future.

Social Harmony through the Conservation Movement

The growth of the conservation movement in the first decade of the twentieth century was motivated by an alarmism over the misuse and waste of resources and a mix of questions brought up by modern economies and technologies. The conservation movement was responsible for a broad ideology of ideas and hope for an improved world in the future. From 1905 to 1910, conservation became a burning topic of debate, as Gladden explained in his ‘Conservation’ sermon from 1910.239 For Gladden, the overuse and waste of natural resources was the clearest sign of the disconnection between humanity and the natural world.240 Conservationists such as Gladden sought spiritual renewal in the shepherding of the material world through cultural change as well as the empowerment of government apparatus to follow through with these changes. As a conservationist, Gladden framed the mismanagement of natural resources in terms of health.241 In explaining the conservation movement this way, Gladden noted a direct, almost physiological, connection between the ‘denuding’ of land cover, the damaging effects these actions had on climate, and the injuries brought to arable land. “The deadly injury which the nation has suffered in the ruthless destruction of its forests and the denuding of its hillsides can hardly be overstated,” he said.242 “The waste of the mines has been ever more criminal, perhaps, than the waste of the farms.”243 Coal, ore, forest and field, national resources were being spent without a fair return on investment to sustain the nation’s population. Much like with the issue of resource conservation, ignorance and carelessness about human health led to an indifferent attitude toward national survival. Ensuring the nation’s abundance of natural and human resources was a patriotic duty.

239 Gladden, “Conservation,” 4.

240 Gladden, “Conservation,” 5; see Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 1-2, 8-12.

241 Gladden, “Conservation,” 5-10.

242 Gladden, “Conservation,” 5. Beyond the degradation of the soil, the lack of trees and increase in barren hillsides induced great damage from floods and drought that carried away good soil, reduced the value of land for grazing, and decreased the aesthetic appearance of the countryside, Gladden explained.

243 Gladden, “Conservation,” 9. 67

Waste led to shortage and shortage induced civilizational decline. “The happiness of those who are to live in future centuries is in our keeping,” Gladden explained.244 The motives of conservation were not individual, but social and generational.245 Conservationists saw political battles over tariffs, strikes and monopolies, in terms of social unrest, class conflict, as well as the waste of natural resources and commodities.246 A concern with intergenerational equity tied these issues of resource depletion together. This theme of equity was a hallmark of the new rhetoric of the conservation movement after 1900. “This large regard for future welfare is not a selfish interest,” Gladden said in 1910. “It has been borne in upon the people that the generations to come have demands upon us; that we must not by our own indifference or our greed make life harder for them.”247 Gladden framed his vision of this future welfare through concerns about public health. In the 1890s, Gladden began to see the importance of health to a harmonious society. By 1910, national health (an even broader term for a healthy society than public health) was the vital link between Gladden’s views on the natural world and his endorsement of conservation.248 In the ‘Conservation’ sermon, Gladden focused on the work of Irving Fisher, who a year earlier had released a report, titled National Vitality, showing the commonalities between the conservation movement and scientific public health.249 Fisher argued that ill-health and unhealthy lives were a waste of resources. Efficiency in human productivity resulted from the control of pollution and the minimizing of industrial accidents and ill health. Fisher and other conservationists saw

244 Gladden, “Conservation,” 17. Gladden voiced support for the view of Posteritism, espoused by Louis Ehrich in 1901, see Louis R. Ehrich, Posteritism: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Exercises of the Century Chest (New York: Goerck Art Press, 1901), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100553277.

245 Gladden, “Conservation,” 16-19.

246 Tyrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 79-94; Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 49. Disregard for the future was exemplified in the profligacy and exploitation of private resource development. Opposed to this disorder, the goal of conservation was national ‘self-sufficiency,’ brought about by a combination of energy security and international coordination in resource use; continued economic development; and social stability.

247 Gladden, “Conservation,” 13.

248 Gladden, “Conservation,” 27-29.

249 Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 173-78. In 1909, Fisher, professor of political economy at Yale University, published his report based on a chapter of the National Conservation Congress’s proceedings of the same year. Fisher had a broad view of health, not just the prevention of mortality but the counteracting of fatigue and morbidity. Public health was a necessary protection for economic prosperity in the long-term. In financial terms, public health infrastructure had a tremendous return on investment, according to Fisher. 68 protection from epidemics as an important key to national vitality. The connection of state and local boards of health to the products of federal research and the collection of vital statistics; and the regulation of the health industry and the dissemination of health information, were projections of American power. National vitality was the result of local vitality across the nation. Fisher confirmed Gladden’s vision of health. Gladden explained, with a direct attribution to Fisher, that eight years could be added to the lives of individual Americans if they had access to pure air, water and milk. “How vast are the losses sustained by this nation every year from causes which are easily removable,” Gladden said. Another fifteen years could be added to the lives of Americans with the adoption of hygienic reforms. Human health was a resource that could be administered and developed scientifically, ensuring economic development and national strength.250 Humanity was subject to the natural world of biology, physiology and medicine. Control of public health was part of the improvement of nature by humanity. Gladden’s reference to Fisher’s health reforms emphasized that social harmony depended on both the conservation of natural resources and a conservationist view of public health. The conservation movement’s focus on public health was a clear endorsement of efforts like the Great Columbus Experiment. The improvement of sanitation infrastructure was a civilizing force connected to social morality and social harmony. From the perspective of many conservationists, the movement for resource conservation was tied to moral order to bring about a righteous republic.251 Throughout the country’s history, Congregationalists understood the history of Protestant Christianity as a relationship with nature and land.252 This religious ethic of land conservation for the future use of resources was manifest in the promotion of agricultural improvement, the preserving of forests, the building of parks, and incursions into the natural world and nature vacations. These aspects of the Christian relationship to the land should also

250 Gladden, “Conservation,” 28; Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 89-93. Beyond the scope of this investigation, Gladden extended his ideas about improving nature through public health and began to speak about improving and controlling human nature (see Conclusion); for many, human health and human development were linked in a very nefarious manner through ideas that would give rise to the eugenics movement; also see, Tyrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 181-87. Like Gladden, Irving Fisher connected race, population, and health. This is what Ian Tyrell refers to as the unfortunate, “mixed legacy” of the conservation movement, especially in its intersection with public health.

251 Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America, 39-52. For Protestants such as Gladden, the rationality of the social order was based in morality and piety, and this extended to conservation.

252 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 82-104. 69 include the improvement and stewardship of urban spaces. The connection between the natural elements of the conservation movement and the human elements were understood by Gladden in terms of harmony in the urban setting. At the local level, Gladden’s conservationist outlook acknowledged the individual human connections that made up society.253 Gladden’s ‘Conservation’ sermon was best understood in the context of a sermon he gave four years earlier, in 1906, titled ‘The Organic Bonds of Society.’ This sermon emphasized the connections between the individual and the society and city in which they lived. This was the key to social harmony and the conservation movement. Gladden stated succinctly:

“The individual is vitally related to the society of which he is a member, can, indeed have no existence apart from it, and derives from his relation to it a large part of all that is essential to his well-being.”254

The ‘organic bond of society’ was defined by the social organism. “The social organism is so truely [sic] like the physical organism that we can explain many of the functions of the former by studying the latter,” Gladden said. However, “the social organism includes elements and springs of action and ends of which the physical organism knows nothing.”255 When Gladden explained that the “order of nature” constrained human life biologically and economically as a social organism, he emphasized that the defining factor in overcoming these constraints was a harmonized society.256 Gladden explained that the individual did not exist in society as a solitary brick in a pile of bricks, or a pebble in a heap of pebbles. Harmonized

253 Gladden, “Conservation,” 29-31. Gladden not only linked the conservation of the nation’s physical resources to its national health, he linked both to American family life. Social harmony was not only about expert cooperation, it grew from the proper constitution of American families. Gladden hoped to apply conservationist thinking to the American family. Husbands who deserted their wives and children, as well as the number of men and women living outside of wedlock, was a harbinger of a bad future for the nation. Gladden emphasized not only the economic causes weakening families, but he also noted the moral underpinnings of a solution to the problem. As with the conservation of physical resources and national health, the conservation of the family was a matter of filial piety and parental love. Gladden established the motives of the conservation movement, being national health, social morality and social harmony, in the interactions between parents and children and between husbands and wives, see Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, 62-66. Gladden’s emphasis on filial piety underscored this was a masculine, suburban view of parental respect and family life.

254 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 4.

255 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 5-6. According to Gladden, even the Bible, Romans 12: 4-5, related the fact that human society was to be understood as an organism.

256 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 11-12. 70 human relationships provided the vital bonds in both secular and religious communities.257 Social morality motivated municipal cooperation in Gladden’s vision of social harmony. Harmony expanded to the health of the city. “The running water which flows at [any citizen’s] bidding is provided for him by the cooperation of a whole city: Every rich man on Broad street has contributed something toward supplying him with this necessity,” Gladden explained.258 In return, all working people contributed their own daily labor to the common good. This was what defined the great body of humanity and the organic bonds of society. Gladden emphasized that these bonds transcended the defects of monopolistic and individualistic thinking.259 Selfishness, cruelty and oppression, could not continue to exist alongside new sublime motives of the “organic unity” of the body of humanity.260 People found “the satisfaction and completion of their life in human association, and can find it in no other way,” Gladden had said in 1897, in his paradigmatic sermon ‘City that Ought to Be.’261 The ideal city “supplants the city that is, and justice and freedom and health and peace are established on enduring foundations,” said Gladden.262 The municipal government that upheld human health and the welfare of its population showed the organic bond of society. In the ideal city, municipal reform would introduce social morality into government. Reforms would provide the cultural and legal foundations for true community and social harmony.263 Unquestionably, Gladden explained, “this body corporate, this municipality, to which we all belong,” included churches and their congregations.264 Because of the social bonds supported in that space, the city was essential for the

257 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 1-3, 27-29.

258 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 17.

259 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 17-20, 38.

260 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 27.

261 Gladden, “City that Ought to Be, April 4, 1897,” (The Washington Gladden collection [microfilm], Roll 28, #656), 12. For a discussion of the sermon by one of Gladden’s biographers, see Dorn, Washington Gladden, 304-5.

262 Gladden, “City that Ought to Be,” 34. The ideal city was a holy space, at odds with partisan political worldviews. Politics held back the establishment of health, peace, justice and freedom in the ideal city.

263 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 41-43.

264 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 42. 71 development of Christianity and human nature. Association was the instinctive and spiritual basis of human society.265 The individual was linked to church, community, commonwealth and state:

“Whether you are church members or not, you must keep the mercury above 32 degrees Fahrenheit if you do not want water to freeze in your houses in the winter; and you must give your bodies food and drink if you do not want them to famish; and if you want healthy and sound and happy social life you must live and act as if you were many members of one body.”266

Churches and their reform work needed to be connected to the larger city and society. The function of the church was not as an exclusive club. The role of the minister was not isolated to protecting their congregation; the minister worked for social reform to protect the wider community. The church was to “minister to the health, the vigor, the forcefulness, the morality, the peace of the city,” in Gladden’s words.267 Increasingly seen as a global revitalization project, at the heart of the conservation movement were attempts to promote cooperation among professional societies, civic associations and governments.268 Civic leaders took part in or guided fraternal organizations, sportsmen’s clubs, amateur science associations, wilderness recreation clubs, and environmental preservation organizations, toward the promotion of conservation in its varied forms. Though existing outside the halls of government, these voluntary organizations involved governmental representatives in their debates about the waste of natural resources. The efficient, expert control of the natural world required national campaigns to transfer decision-making power to technocrats.269 Professional societies especially, of engineers, geologists, zoologists, archaeologists, and other groups of scientists, worked to expand the power of state administration of the natural world. The growth of the environmental state was supported by the mass constituencies built by

265 Gladden, “City that Ought to Be,” 15-18.

266 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 31.

267 Gladden, “The Organic Bond of Society,” 41.

268 Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 128-46; Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 138- 41; Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 27-33. Ideas about global interdependence were shared in meetings and at dinners through informal, personal networking. Additionally, conservationist ideas spread into the larger public through mass-circulation print news and news photography.

269 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 127-33. 72 local intellectual rationales for conservation, shared in academic and popular literature, and by ministers in their sermons. Spiritual rhetoric and religious language coalesced these different groups and their viewpoints.270 Gladden was impressed with the focused ‘spirit’ of conservationists, which echoed his reaction to the doctors’ meeting eleven years earlier. “The apostles of conservation are trying to work out these problems, and the best statesmanship of the land will be needed in dealing with them,” Gladden said.271 He underscored the enthusiasm of those at the National Conservation Congress in Minneapolis in 1910. Cooperation among professional groups and organizations was the epitome of social harmony. Gladden felt this was evidence of the Kingdom of God in such a manner that was not being readily recognized in the larger religious community.272 Together these reformers became a force to be reckoned with in national politics. The connection between the Social Gospel movement and conservation was not simply a matter of the use of religious language by conservationists; or the use of the term conservation by religious leaders. Each movement was grounded in a viewpoint specific to the late nineteenth century, being that industrial civilization threatened God’s creation and human society. Conservationists were motivated by a particular worldview that overshadowed narrow concerns with efficient, scientific management of the natural world. This new outlook on the world was defined by a moral and religious commitment linked to scientific rationality.273 In the interaction between human societies with the natural world, salvation would be realized. As in the Social Gospel movement, conservationists emphasized the welfare of future generations, which linked their ideas to the establishment of the Kingdom of God.274 Natural resources around the world were humanity’s life-support system, connecting the local site of resource conservation to other sites around the world. The establishment of the Kingdom of God was not only a spiritual matter but also concerned the material elements of human life. Social Gospelers and conservationists responded to religious and political phenomenon that shared a

270 Berry, Devoted to Nature, 82-85.

271 Gladden, “Conservation,” 19.

272 Gladden, “Conservation,” 13-15.

273 Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 102-4.

274 Naylor, “Gifford Pinchot, the Conservation Movement, and the Social Gospel,” 245-51. 73 common root: “social forces, social problems, social structures, social beings, [and] the social arena.”275 Conservationists criticized the dead-end social ethics of individualism and unrestrained economic competition that resulted in the wasteful or unproductive use of resources.276 The exploitation of the land and the mistreatment of workers struck both conservationists and Social Gospelers as wrong relations between humanity and God’s creation. Conservation was an important thread in the fabric of Progressivism and in liberal Protestantism. “In their modern discovery of the social gospel,” D. Keith Naylor says, conservationists “found a whole new set of phenomena to which they felt their religion must respond.”277 From locally-minded conservation, the movement turned to federal laws and agencies with a national scope to achieve their objectives.278 While Gladden’s emphasis on public health was for the transformation of local communities, the Progressive conservation movement expanded the possibilities for government stewardship of the nation’s human and natural resources. This development from the local to the national is understood by one historian of religion as a shift from the influence of New England Congregationalism on the conservation movement to the growing influence of Scottish Presbyterianism on the movement.279 Gladden held a New England Congregationalist view of conservation where the motivation of the movement was to

275 Naylor, “Gifford Pinchot, the Conservation Movement, and the Social Gospel,” 246.

276 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 261-66. Hays emphasizes that the conservation movement should not be seen in terms of anti-monopolism, or a negative reaction against large corporate control of industries. The movement’s political concern with breaking monopoly control of resources and organizing ownership of resources under local, state and national governments was to counteract waste and inefficiency. Corporations could be helpful, as the ultimate goal was a more centralized management of land and water that would assist in consolidating resources and applying technical and scientific skill to the continent’s continued development.

277 Naylor, “Gifford Pinchot, the Conservation Movement, and the Social Gospel,” 246.

278 Gladden, “Conservation,” 20-25; Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 96-98; Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 266-71. Conservationists shared a framework with Progressives for virtue and good character in laws and executive action. An active Progressive state undertook scientific investigation and expert solutions to minimize social conflict and promote freedom in industrial society. The inefficient use of natural resources contributed to the denial of economic freedom to many through the unequal profits from development.

279 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 139-44; Dorn, Washington Gladden, 109-110, 123-40. Grafting Stoll’s religious and environmental history onto the history of the Social Gospel and liberal Protestantism, helps to show that conservation and the Progressive movement shadowed the rise in influence of Congregationalism in the United States in the 1890s and 1900s. This is considered to be a golden age for American Congregationalism, and it is no wonder that this denomination’s star minister grew in popularity at this time, strengthening Congregational churches while preaching about the Social Gospel, conservation, and Progressivism. 74 establish a moral, godly society. For Presbyterians, morality was a more libertarian and practical relationship between the individual and society, and between humanity and the natural world. The expression of moral urgency and the need for moral regulation became the basis of conservation as the Puritan-town ideal faded from the motivations of conservationists. In the classic description of the expansion of conservation, efforts at rationality and efficiency were overpowered by simple claims about morality.280 Popular support could offer general enthusiasm but lacked an ability to focus interest in specific policies. Popularity was increased by emotional fervor and an emphasis on conservation as a ‘moral tonic’ for the nation.281 Economic rationales for conservation were minimized in favor of an increasing focus on the morality of preserving resources from efficient development. Gladden held strong to the common-good ideal of the Puritan town. In his ‘Conservation’ sermon, Gladden quoted from prominent Progressive text The Promise of American Life (1909) by Herbert Croly to emphasize that conservation was part of a broader agenda in American politics to subvert the will of the individual to the will of the nation and the common good. “The land, through a long future, will give abundant life to a great people,” Gladden said, quoting from The Promise of American Life. “Only on condition that we do not waste [the land’s] energies in selfishness and sloth – only on condition that we husband [the land’s resources] and develop them.”282 Gladden certainly worked from an intellectual nostalgia for the ideal of the Puritan countryside.283 For him, the conservation movement promoted a moral vision of harmony where resources were ordered through both market interventions by government and cooperation between industry and government.284 As part of his Social Gospel standpoint on the conservation

280 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 145-6.

281 Considering the growing moral urgency of the conservation movement through American religious history underscores just how existential were Progressive and conservationist issues. There were significant differences in visions of a modern society based in administrative efficiency, science and technology and visions of an agrarian, classless modern society. An analysis of the two strains of conservation, especially how they interacted in the decade between 1905 and 1915, is beyond the scope of the present analysis. An acknowledgement of this conflict is sufficient enough to underscore the existential framework at the intersection of Progressive conservation and the Social Gospel.

282 Gladden, “Conservation,” 3-4.

283 Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain, 150-71.

284 Gladden, “Conservation,” 10, 19-20. Gladden asserted that rivers and mineral deposits should be taken out of the hands of the “great combinations of capital,” businessmen whose only thoughts about the nation’s physical resources was as a way to get rich quickly. However, this was not a significant component of his 75 movement, Gladden supported public health initiatives that would form the foundation of social harmony and Progressive political renewal. Gladden’s connection between human nature and the natural world necessitated paying attention to urban policies. Even as much of the conservation movement moved on to broader moral concerns about waste, Gladden grounded the movement in public health. Public health was an effort at preserving humanity as a social unit, so humans could fulfill their divine role in improving God’s creation. The most vital natural resources of all, then, were industrial cities. Gladden’s personal journey in consideration of humanity and the natural world led him to the issue of health. Although this issue has not been the first to come to mind in histories of the conservation movement, it was on the minds of the movement’s national leaders.285 According to President Roosevelt, the conservationist focus on public health was a moral imperative. In 1912, the Progressive Party platform tied public health to social and industrial justice and specifically called for a national department of public health to protect against disease. The Public Health Act of 1912 gave federal authority to the U.S. Public Health Service, which could collect and disseminate health statistics and investigate the causes of disease including pollution. The Public Health Act was inspired directly by Irving Fisher’s National Vitality, which had been so important to Gladden’s thinking in 1910. Gladden understood public health as a component of the conservation movement that best grounded social morality with rational, comprehensive governmental planning to achieve social harmony. This chapter adds to the study of conservation history from the intellectual perspective of a liberal Protestant minister. Gladden emphasized social morality from a local vantage point. The

conservationist thinking. Instead, Gladden focused his argument on other means of conservation. State governments and the federal government should foster improved methods of agriculture, Gladden added, so that the individual farmer would be spared of ignorance to the treasonous crime and sin of bad farming practices. Allowing such actions was a rejection of the duty of the morality and stewardship asked of American Congregationalists and American governments, see Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City, 79-83. The Country Life movement was a successor of the conservation movement, focused specifically on the disconnection between human welfare and direct human sustenance from nature. The emphasis on rural life was a commitment to and reverence of the processes of God’s creation; was an effort to improve the rural landscape; and reflected concerns over the soulless materialism of human relations in the urban landscape. Each of these themes show a clear development from conservationist thought; also see, Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 141-145.

285 Tyrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, 187-88. In politics, the conservation movement was headed by Theodore Roosevelt and advised by Gifford Pinchot who gathered a diverse group of supporters for a wide range of policies. Tyrell quotes from Roosevelt’s ‘New Nationalism’ speech, given at Osawatomie, NY in August 1910, and the Progressive Party platform from 1912. For the background of Roosevelt and Pinchot’s efforts to assert the political autonomy of conservation from congressional control, see Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 133-38. 76 increasingly national focus of conservationists separated environmental reform from morality. The moral focus of the national movement seemed to show increasing signs of an aggressive crusade that would direct the morality and harmony of the nation’s future. This had the benefit of expanding its appeal as a transformative movement, with a broad set of concerns, but meant that it would be increasingly distanced from Gladden’s Social Gospel ideas. Gladden made the case that, because of their potential for social harmony, urban sites and human interactions in the city needed to be the focus of the conservationist’s moral imperative to preserve the natural world. Gladden was not as concerned with wilderness as he was with the urban environment. His sermons on conservation related the natural world to human society; humanity to the workings of the natural world; and politics to nature and religion. Gladden showed that the connection between the human and natural worlds prominent in the conservation movement paralleled a Social Gospel vision of health.

77

Conclusion: Applied Christianity

Sometime before the turn of the century, the family of Mary Eliza McDowell discussed Washington Gladden’s Applied Christianity (1886) in an Evanston, Illinois church gathering. The discussion was part of a talk about the everyday duties of Christians to the larger society, so- called practical Christianity.286 Public health figured prominently in Rev. Gladden’s book, particularly in Chapter 7: ‘Christianity and Social Science.’ “Social Science, as well as Christianity, recognizes the fact that men are in a condition of disorder and distress,” Gladden said.287 Relief from “existing evils” required the “study of sanitary laws with a view to the prevention of disease,” as well as efforts to study effective methods of public education and jurisprudence, and the causes of vice, crime and pauperism. “The examination of the whole structure of society” was necessary, Gladden said, to discover “what hindrances, political, economical, or customary, are in the way of [society’s] welfare.” American Protestants eagerly read Applied Christianity for Gladden’s approach to the social dynamics of urban-industrial society. Liberal Protestant ministers in the United States developed a social consciousness as they attempted to transform Christianity to better handle issues of economic, social and political inequality in the late nineteenth century. Gladden’s perspective was that of a Social Gospel reformer and a conservationist concerned with the reform of the urban environment. Gladden understood the Social Gospel to be founded on broader theoretical and theological foundations, of social harmony, than a specific concern with concentrated wealth and the labor question. This thesis emphasizes the Social Gospel movement’s vision of health through Gladden’s ideas about medical science and the conservation movement. Gladden, as a leader of the Social Gospel movement and part of the larger Progressive movement in politics, used a foundation of social morality to investigate and craft a plan of reform that would increase social harmony and raise the quality of life in human societies. Gladden’s broad social morality and his conservationist outlook were founded in a deliberation of the interconnection between human society and nature.

286 Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 160.

287 Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), 213. 78

When we think of Gladden’s mediation between the ideologies of capital and labor, we should also understand his concern over the harmony between human and non-human nature. A transformed Christianity required the establishment of a belief system that could account for contemporary social and economic changes, new science and new politics.288 Traditional Christian institutions failed humanity. The New Theology and ‘progressive orthodoxy’ espoused by liberal Protestants showed a more unified and complex view of society than the traditional beliefs they replaced.289 Gladden acknowledged that society was composed of both environmental and political elements that he hoped could be reconciled in social harmony. Gladden’s concern with humanity was a concern based in a sense of impending environmental crisis – first, of the alienation of humanity from the natural world; second, in the difficulty of persuading Americans that human actions were linked to God’s creation; and finally, in increasing human interactions around the globe that compounded the disconnection between humanity and the natural world. Harold Platt’s wish that early-twentieth century environmentalists had acknowledged the urban environment as part of a broad, almost naturalistic, social organism, does not account for the negative aspects such an organic view would have entailed.290 Gladden held such a view of the social organism in relation to urban space. His Social Gospel idea of conservation in the urban environment was underscored by a vision of “a symbiotic group of people helping each other cope with daily life.”291 While Gladden’s vision was mostly positive, he stigmatized as criminal and corrupt efforts toward governance and social organization that countered his own. For example, in his ‘City that Ought to Be’ sermon (1897), Gladden argued that unsocial elements in municipalities needed to be reformed to realize the benefits of obedience and honor. Echoing the ideas from his ‘Germ of Life’ sermon (1894), Gladden explained in 1897 how morality supported life and criminal behavior needed to be reformed by getting the criminal to strive for a reformed life in a perfected society. In his ‘Doctors’ Meeting’ sermon (1899), Gladden lamented that poverty led to crime, a criminal-pauper complex of lawbreaking. “We let

288 Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 24-27.

289 Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 55.

290 Platt, Shock Cities, 311.

291 Platt, Shock Cities, 311. 79 these classes run loose in society multiplying their kind,” Gladden explained, “filling our prisons and our almshouses with inmates and our country roads with tramps,” he underscored.292 The morally and socially abnormal, specifically ‘insane persons,’ were a hindrance to a scientifically- perfected society; some would ascend to the heights of social perfection, others “should be kept in confinement as long as they live,” Gladden asserted.293 For Gladden, abnormality reigned among criminals and often spread from generation to generation. “Moral and social infection” could be prevented in “the community” and treated, if environmental efforts at eradication failed to erase instances of this infection.294 Gladden gave support to the regulation of marriages. Habitual criminals and paupers, “the feeble minded, the degenerate should be segregated from the rest of the community,” he said.295 The goal was a minimum level of fitness of mind to partake in the bountiful freedom of society. “That this will prove, in the end a great economy and a great moral benefit to the state cannot I think be doubted,” he explained.296 Gladden made clear that it was the state’s duty to mandate a ‘favorable environment’ so that normal individuals could thrive. Public health, contained within the phrase ‘Salus populi est suprema lex – The health of the people is the supreme law,’ was a political maxim. Though Gladden defied certain prejudices, he did not embrace diversity; he was not multicultural. His view was a monocultural perspective that did not acknowledge the class, racial, ethnic, and gendered dimensions of power. Gladden did not see that, in the city “working- class culture was rooted in identity of place and in tight webs of kin and social relationships.”297 Instead, Gladden stigmatized unsocial behavior, criminality and insanity.298 His view of the

292 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 32.

293 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 34.

294 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 38.

295 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 33.

296 Gladden, “Doctors’ Meeting,” 40.

297 Platt, Shock Cities, 311.

298 Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, 2-3, 193-98. Jacoby’s analysis of elite views of the countryside and wilderness in the conservation movement explains how conservationist efforts were met with social unrest characteristic of much of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In his study of local resistance to forest and wildlife protection, intrusions on park reserves, squatting, theft of timber, and illegal hunting, Jacoby marks out the reaction against the implementation of conservationist policies. 80 urban environment echoes the focus of conservationists in Karl Jacoby’s history of the conservation movement. Jacoby emphasizes that conservationists neglected local rules and informal sets of customs at odds with the formality and centralized authority of state and federal governments. Complicating what he sees as the elite ecology of conservation, Jacoby focuses on the moral ecology of rural folk. Their legacy was not one of rugged individualism, recklessness, with a penchant for wasting resources; they sought to control their environmental surroundings in ways distinct to their locality. Much like the larger conservation movement, Gladden’s moral environmentalism was at odds with “the patterns of beliefs, practices, and traditions” in the ways ordinary citizens lived and made use of the environment.299 For Gladden, criminal and other broadly defined undesirable elements were to be converted to morally good actions in the name of upholding social morality and a healthy society. It is unlikely that further investigation into Gladden’s views on criminality and public health would change the course of analysis that understands his motives as hegemonic. In bringing health and harmony to the industrial city’s human landscape, Gladden did not readily distinguish between the willfully dangerous and the most vulnerable in society. Through Gladden’s sermons we can understand not only the history of public health and environmentalism but the way these subjects were thought about over a century ago. Gladden grappled with questions about public health and the environment because these issues expanded from the realm of intellectuals to the wider public. Gladden formed religious, political and economic questions into medical and environmental questions of science. Religion was integral in environmental history and the history of medicine. The prominence of public health in the Social Gospel and conservation movements linked each of these movements to the social and political transformations of the period.300 The health of individuals, of the environment, and of society, demanded attention. For Social Gospelers, a concern with the Kingdom of God became a concern for a new political culture, which linked Progressivism, Social Gospel ideas and the conservation movement. Inspired by Gladden’s framework for reform, Mary Eliza McDowell took on the position

299 Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, 3.

300 Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 176-78.

81 of director for a University of Chicago settlement house in the city’s stockyards neighborhood.301 In her capacity as a civic reformer, McDowell brought public health issues to the fore. She was also a Social Gospeler. McDowell, like Gladden, stressed human health was a component of civic participation and social morality. Under McDowell’s directorship of the stockyards settlement, morality was upheld through programs that supported a visiting nurse and resident physician, nutrition and cooking classes, as well as close collaboration with the municipal health and sanitation departments. The Social Gospel movement allied on the side of social reform, scientific expertise, and efficiency in municipal public health. The Social Gospel vision of health was linked to governmental agencies, education, and merged with the prerogatives of liberal Christian institutions.302 The organized powers of a municipality, rather than the private reserves of church and home, were the most efficient means of ensuring public health and welfare. Harmony was to be realized in broad professional alliances, of which alliances for the upkeep of public health were some of the most important. The local space of the city was the place where politics, human welfare and spirituality would bring about a more Christian society. As one of the most prominent figures of the Social Gospel movement, and as the premier culture figure in Columbus, Gladden’s time in Ohio’s capital grounds this study in a specific example where a powerful religious leader had an important influence on urbanization. It was also a moment where Ohio’s capital city was besieged by virulent strains of epidemic and endemic diseases. The local view of the Social Gospel in Columbus was described in part through Gladden’s sermons on public health and the environment. The local, urban aspects of Gladden’s Social Gospel vision of health were an important connective tissue to understand his broader moral and economic arguments. In other American cities, and in cities around the world, local perspectives on the health of individuals inspired different moral and economic arguments about the health of societies.

301 Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 160-65.

302 Curtis, A Consuming Faith, 165-66. In the 1910s, when McDowell’s efforts were most successful, Chicago still grappled with the question of rule by public health experts. At a time when machine politicians continued to control municipal government, McDowell worked within this system to prevent garbage dumping in her neighborhood. She convinced the city to appoint her to a commission to investigate a new means of citywide garbage disposal. 82

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