Religion, Politics, and Journalism: Modern Influences in Nineteenth-Century America

Peterson, Stephen J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97996-0_2

Stephen J. Peterson²

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Abstract

This chapter serves as an introduction to the relevant trends in the late nineteenth century in American religion, politics, and journalism. Traditional ideas and institutions were battered steadily by progressive developments, and opinions about Gladstone in the American press were often framed within the context of these changes to intellectual life. Specifically, Peterson discusses the effects of liberalism on both politics and Christian theology. Postbellum America had witnessed the rise of a new generation of liberal democratic reformers, while, in religion, liberal theology was making decisive inroads. The chapter also explores the continuing conflict between the Protestant majority and Roman Catholics along with the changing nature of print journalism. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book’s primary-source periodicals, both secular and religious.

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Notes

1.
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 16, 17, 26.
2.
Mark A. Noll, History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1992), 393.
3.
Alasdair I. C. Heron, A Century of Protestant Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), 38–60.
4.
James Moorehead, World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of Last Things, 1880–1925 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 32, 33; See also J. W. Brown, Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 45–124.
5.
Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 261.
6.
Dorrien, Making of American Liberal Theology, 292–293.
7.
Dorrien, Making of American Liberal Theology, 365.
8.
For developments in Great Britain see Frank M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension,” Isis (69), 356–376.
9.
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 22–25.
10.
Josef L. Altholz, “The Mind of Victorian Orthodoxy: Anglican Responses to “Essays and Reviews,” 1860–1864” in Gerald Parsons, ed, Religion in Victorian Britain, 4 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), IV, 28–40.
11.
Noll, History of Christianity, p. 238; Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, xx.
12.
Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, 282, 293–304.
13.
Lindberg, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 378–383.
14.
John F. Wilson and Donald L. Drakeman, Church and State in American History, 2nd ed (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), xvii, xviii.
15.
Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism : A History of Religion and Culture in Tension. (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2002), 58.
16.
Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism , 14, 57.
17.
Patrick W. Carey, “Republicanism within American Catholicism , 1785–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 3 (1983), 416, 417.
18.
Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals Politics: Antebellum America (University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 245–255.
19.
Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 59–60.
20.
Daniel Dorchester, Romanism versus the Public School System (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1888); McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 115–116.
21.
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), pp. 19–25; and Dolan, American Catholic Experience, p. 130.
22.
Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretative History of Journalism, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 387.
23.
Butler, Critical Americans, 5–10.
24.
James Turner, Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), 201–204.
25.
Quoted in Turner, Liberal Education, 203.
26.
Quoted in Turner, Liberal Education, 204.
27.
Turner, Liberal Education, 204.
28.
See J. P. Ellens, Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conflict in England and Wales, 1832–1868 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)
29.
James Turner, Liberal Education, 183.
30.
Quoted in Butler, Critical Americans, 89.
31.
Quoted in Butler, Critical Americans, 89.
32.
Murney Gerlach, British Liberalism and the United States: Political and Social Thought in the Late Victorian Age (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xv.
33.
James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1971), 95–96.
34.
Wood, Magazines in the United States, 66.
35.
Wood, Magazines in the United States, 95–96.
36.
Ted Curtis Smythe, The Gilded Age Press, 1865–1900 (London: Praeger, 2003), 71, 98.
37.
George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
38.
Douglas, Golden Age of the Newspaper, 1–9.
39.
See John Steele Gordon, A Thread across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable (New York: Walker Publishing, 2002).
40.
Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of the News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 35–40; and see Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
41.
Smythe, Gilded Age Press, 19, 72–73.
42.
Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, 195–207.
43.
Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, 201.
44.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 281.
45.
Mott, American Magazines vol 3, 76, 282.
46.
Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, 195–207.
47.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 59.
48.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 425.
49.
Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 421–425.
50.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 425–426.
51.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 428.
52.
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, 1959), 27–28.
53.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 4, 293.
54.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 4, 293.
55.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 4, 288, 293
56.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 70.
57.
George Preston Mains, James Monroe Buckley (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1917), 100.
58.
Mains, James Monroe Buckley, 102.
59.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 1, 138.
60.
Howard A. Bridgman in Albert E. Dunning and Joseph Edwin Roy, eds, Congregationalists in America: A Popular History of the Origin, Belief, Polity, Growth and Work (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1894), 478.
61.
Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, 290–291.
62.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 76.
63.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 70, 71.
64.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 4, 291.
65.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 4, 294–95.
66.
See Gerald P. Fogerty, The Vatican and the Americanist Crisis: Denis J. O’Connell, American Agent (Rome: Gregorian University, 1974); and William L. Portier, “Isaac Hecker and the First Vatican Council ,” Catholic Historical Review, 71 (1985), 206–227.
67.
Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton, eds, The Conservative Press in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 369–371.
68.
Lora and Longton, Conservative Press, 381.
69.
Lora and Longton, Conservative Press, 358.
70.
McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 45, 89.
71.
Lora and Longton, Conservative Press, 91–101.
72.
Dorrien, American Liberal Theology, 291, 292.
73.
Douglas, Golden Age, 23–24.
74.
Smythe, Gilded Age Press, 58.
75.
Emery, Press and America, 290.
76.
Douglas, Golden Age, 119–130.
77.
Douglas, Golden Age, 120; and Smythe, Gilded Age Press, 20–21.
78.
Smythe, Gilded Age Press, 176–177.
79.
Turner, Liberal Education, 187–190.
80.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 263.
81.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 31.
82.
“Death of Allen Thorndike Rice,” CT, May 17, 1889, 4.
83.
“Death of Allen Thorndike Rice,” CT, May 17, 1889, 37–38.
84.
Quigley, Second Founding, 31.
85.
Turner, Liberal Education, 185, 197.
86.
Arthur J. Kaul, “Edwin Lawrence Godkin ,” in McKerns, Joseph P., ed, Biographical Dictionary of American Journalism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 277–279.
87.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 40, 329–346; and Turner, Liberal Education, 197.
88.
Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 23–24.
89.
Wood, Magazines in the United States, 73.
90.
Wood, Magazines in the United States, 86–92
91.
Wood, Magazines in the United States, 80; and Mott, American Magazines, vol 4, 211.
92.
Emery, Press and America, 241.
93.
Turner, Liberal Education, 209.
94.
Douglas, Golden Age, 50.
95.
Douglas, Golden Age, 64.
96.
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010), 331–332.
97.
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 141.
98.
Roderick, Bradford, D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 97–102.
99.
Bill Cooke, “Boston Investigator,” Tom Flynn, ed, New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 150.
100.
Mott, American Magazines, vol 3, 548–551.

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Tulsa Community College, Tulsa, OK, USA
Stephen J. Peterson

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Peterson, S.J. (2018). Religion, Politics, and Journalism: Modern Influences in Nineteenth-Century America. In: Gladstone's Influence in America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97996-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97996-0_2
Published: 03 October 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97995-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97996-0
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