THE SOCIAL-GOSPEL NOVELISTS1 CRITICISMS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY ELMER F. SUDERMAN The social-gospel novel is a religious novel based on the presupposi­ tions of social Christianity, one of the most important religious movements in America in the period between the Civil War and World War I. ! The social-gospel novels echo the theology and social philosophy of the move­ ment: God is immanent in this world, working out His purposes through men and institutions; there can, therefore, be no distinction between the sacred and the secular; because God is the father of all men, all share alike in his goodness and are organically related to and responsible for each oth­ er; institutions as well as individuals must be redeemed; and the Kingdom of God is an earthly as well as a heavenly kingdom. The genre had its beginning in the early 1880's — the earliest exam­ ple I have been able to find is Washington Gladden's "The Christian League of Connecticut, " published in The Century Magazine in 1882 and 1883 — reached its peak in the late 1890's with the publication of Charles M. Shel­ don^ best-seller In His Steps (1897), and declined in the first decade of the twentieth century. I have been able to locate sixty-two novels written by forty-three authors which can be classified as social-gospel novels.2 Propagandistic rather than literary in purpose, these novels were one of the most spectacular and effective methods of acquainting Am eric ans with social Christianity. Grier Nicholl points out that between 1865 and 1885 about one novel a year devoted to social Christianity appeared in the United States and that from 1886 to 1914 about three or four a year appeared (2). These novels, moreover, had a wide circulation. In His Steps, the best known of the type, is repeatedly reported to have sold over thirty million copies, though eight million is probably a more accurate estimate.3 Of little interest as belles-lettres, the social-gospel novels are, nev­ ertheless, important for American social and intellectual history as evi­ dence that even during the complacent Gilded Age their authors were mak­ ing many Americans aware of the serious social problems of the age and that they incisively and vigorously criticized the resulting social evils. A universal judgment of the social-gospel novelists was that the King­ dom of God could not be served merely by converting the individuals and leaving the institutions of society unregenerate, for personal salvation was often little more than "refined selfishness" (Mason, 226, and Tourgeé, 46 Midcontinent American Studies Journal Murvale Eastman, 122). This movement away from exclusive emphasis on individual salvation and individual altruism to an increasing emphasis on social salvation can be clearly traced in the American religious novel. So­ cial criticism and Christian social reform had always been a part of Ameri­ can fiction. As early as 1851 Sylvester Judd in Richard Edney and the Gov­ ernor's Family shows how Edney builds a settlement house in a slum area and brings rich and poor together in one church (Nicholl, 20). But the criti­ cism was usually leveled at individuals, not at institutions, and the reforms had usually been directed toward changing individuals. Whether the altera­ tion in the individual modified the society was of secondary importance. Christians, indeed all men of good will, had always been admonished in fiction, as in sermons, to give charity to the poor. With few exceptions novels written before the late 1880Ts which can be said to have a social em­ phasis, like T. S. Arthur's temperance fiction — Temperance Tales (1844), Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854) and Bar Rooms at Brantley (1877) — Har­ riet Beecher Stowe's Unc^ To^n^^abin (1853), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Hedged In (1870) — which deals with the problem of the unwed mother — and The Silent Partner (1871) —which deals with the exploited laborer — all treat the problem of injustice in society by showing that it is the Christian's duty to reform the saloonkeeper and convert the drunkard, to repent and see that justice is done to the slave, to show Christian charity to the unwed mother so that her soul might be saved and to convert the factory owner, not primarily that he might help his employees in times of trouble but that he might go to heaven and take his employees with him. Christian social em­ phasis, then, even as late as the 1880Ts was basically an individual matter. These novelists may feel, as Arthur and Mrs. Phelps do, that society is corrupt, but their concern is to redeem people from that corrupt society as much as to change the society. But the social-gospel novelists, following Shailer Mathews and other leaders of the movement argued for "the application of the teachings of Jesus and the total message of Christian salvation to society, the economic life, and social institutions ... as well as to individuals, "4 though only a few insisted upon a thoroughgoing change in society, and for most the change was a superficial one. In general, however, they saw the futility of the individual altruism stressed by earlier novelists. Indeed, the Rev. Mr. Strong in Washington Gladden's The Christian League of Connecticut holds that" 'lazy and indiscriminate charities' " result in " 'a rapid increase of the pauper class in all our cities and large towns.' "5 Margaret Sherwood in An Experiment in Altruism dramatized the insufficiency of personal gener­ osity by having one of her characters, sent by a city charity organization, take two aprons to a woman in a slum area. Going through dirty streets, climbing up dark and filthy stairs, she finds the woman -- diseased, shrunken, helpless, cold, hungry and dirty — with two miserable little girls crawling around her crying for food. Standing there, stupefied, the altruist Criticisms of American Society 47 realizes that her gift of two gingham aprons — no matter how pure her mo­ tives may be — will not touch the conditions which had given rise to this misery (30-32). The evils of this life, then, could not be attacked only on an individual basis. Men must be redeemed not only for eternity but also from the pov­ erty, squalor and misery of this life. Increasingly convinced as the century progressed that human misery comes more often because of an industrial and social system "built upon the law of competition, the law of beasts by which the greedier and stronger snatch the portion of the weak" than by the individual's transgression of the law of Christ, the novelists argued that the unchristian social system must be brought under Christian judgment (Ibid., 12). Archibald McCowan in Christ the Socialist speaks for the more radi­ cal social-gospel novelists when he asserts that if Christ were on earth to­ day he would not approve of the injustices of the representatives elected to political offices, the extortions practiced upon the people by monopolies and trusts and the many other acts of injustice made possible by an unchristian arrangement of the social order (74-75). The main character in Sheldon's The Crucifixion of Phillip Strong tells his congregation that it is their duty not only to save the individual but also to make Milton a cleaner town, to purify the municipal life, to help relieve physical distress and to under­ stand the problems of labor and capital (161-162). The Christian, therefore, must act directly upon the social order and work for its reconstruction. But the assumption of the social-gospel novelists that social evils must be changed by action upon the institutions rather than upon individuals was not often very thoroughgoing. Both Davies and Nicholl have correctly pointed out that most of the novels reject any drastic social changes, usu­ ally returning to the old idea that "all that is needed is not a change of sys­ tem but a change of heart within the individual to follow Christian princi­ ples" (Davies, 357). Nicholl points to three different solutions —none very radical — advanced by the novelists: (1) motivating the upper classes to take particular kinds of Christian social action to ameliorate the poverty of the poor in the slums and of the laborer in industry, (2) quickening the church to work for social betterment in deprived areas and (3) changing completely the social patterns and moving peacefully toward a Utopian so­ ciety. In all three cases, however, even when the change begins with the individual, its effect on society is as important as its effect on the individ­ ual and its effect on this life is more important than its effect in the after­ life. Whether the solutions of these novelists to very difficult problems were profound or viable is not, however, the point of this paper. They did succeed, as I shall show, in dramatizing the evils involved in the increas­ ing inequalities of wealth with great fortunes concentrated in a few hands while masses of people were experiencing great poverty; they described graphically the squalor and misery of urban slums and of conditions of labor 48 Midcontinent American Studies Journal in the factories; they delineated the sharp conflict between labor and capi­ tal; and they reacted against the churches1 complacent attitude toward so­ cial problems. Sharply criticizing the American economic system which resulted in the squalor and debasement of life in the slums, Bellamy in Looking Back­ ward describes the situation: pale babies ngasp out their lives amid sultry stenches"; hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship retain no trait of womanhood except weakness; and swarms of half-clad brutalized children fill the air with shrieks and curses as they fight and tumble among the gar­ bage that litters the courtyards (265).