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Title: Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 by Paul Boyer ISBN: 0-674-93110-6 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Invasion of the "Friendly Visitor"
Comment: Boyer's URBAN MASSES AND MORAL ORDER was a book just ahead of its time. In the Foucauldian spirtit of the historical genealogy which has become the standard form of books about social power, Boyer periodizes the many manifestations of social control that rose in American cities from 1820 to 1920.
The first social control programs were the Tract Societies who distributed tracts showing new urban populations how to live morally, according to a kind of outdated bucolic Christian ideal. When tracts didn't work (none of the methods worked at all well according to Boyer), a number of other missionary societies stepped in with new ideas: the Children's Aid Society, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the Settlement Movement, and finally, the City Beautiful Movement. Many of these societies went after children as the best hope for saving innocent urban unfortunates from the ills of the city, their ethnic parents, and the filthy Catholic and Jewish denizens of the tenements. The only exception was the Children's Aid Society whose founder saw urban urchins as extremely savvy, smart and supremely adaptive. Nonetheless, the Children's Aid Society shipped young people out to rural America in the belief that they could better prosper elsewhere than in the city. Most of the time this was done with parental consent, but sometimes kids claimed to be orphans so they could have an adventure with their friends.
Boyer's largest theme is the tracing of slow retreast of the strategy of personal contacts with the urban poor rendered by the "friendly visitor" of these many organizations as the means for moral uplift and social control, and its eventual replacement by the notion that a new achitecture, a new environment of playgrounds, swimming pools, outdoor concerts would have a mass civilizing effect. The prosletyzing was done in the form of buildings and patrolled urban spaces. Sans the religion, but still full of the moralizing and improving rhetoric, the progressive age government was enlisted in these new strategies of social control. And, of course, eventually, the "friendly vistior" became the social worker. But the same goal was pursued -- turning scary immigrants into solid middle-class citizens. Positive resentimentalizaion through civil space, through education, through public art in public museums, etc., is still a major strategy in large cities. Art and high culture as a moral instrument.
Boyer's other large theme is that all of these movements were essentially the same -- the tactics barely changed from generation to generation, with the exception of the spatial solution which had a different means but the same hoped for end. As one exhausted organization after another gave up, new organizations sprung to take their place, most of them presided over by men from rural communities who had moved to the city and were disturbed by the lack of social cohesion and surveillance they had experience growing up, and so sought to impose their rural or town Christian values and moral controls upon the city dwellers. The Puritans practiced this form of coercion in their small settlements, until the flock dispersed to such an extent that social control through surveillance could not work. By the end of the 19th century, city dwellers surpassed country dwellers, and much of the impetus of these early movements faded.
There is, of course, a parallel now with the Southern fundamentalists trying to impose their beliefs on the "godless" cities of the Northeast. In fact, in reading URBAN MASSES AND MORAL ORDER with an eye toward the rise of the South in the 70s and 80s, the same kinds prosletytizing are apparent. Although the intent of this particular social control movement was at odds with the free market ideologists on the other side of the conversative movement, the moral conservatives of the South and West (which had always been backward until vast flows of Federal money were diverted there by Southern senators after WWII), needed an ideology to go along with their grab for power. So, once again, we in the wicked urban North once more got to hear about our moral corruption -- as if nearly two hundred years of it weren't enough already.
A great read, a great synthesis, a real classic.
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