America Aflame Read Online Free Page B

spectacle. Many of his middle- and upper-class congregants came to see a show and to be part of an event. It was comfort religion, part of the culture of affluence and prosperity, a turn taken to its ultimate by Russell Conwell, whose sermon “Acres of Diamonds” unabashedly preached the Gospel of Money. The sermon stayed in print for over a century. When evangelicals ventured to influence public policy, such as the periodic attempts to impose a Christian amendment on the Constitution or to legislate against Catholic influence in the public schools, their efforts fell flat. Their great crusade became alcohol. Personal behavior rather than national sin became their focus.
    Evangelical Protestantism became culture-bound in the South as well, though in a quite different form. “Redemption” retained its born-again connotation, but in the South after the Civil War, it was indelibly connected to the restoration of white supremacy. Religion became a prop of the Lost Cause for whites. For blacks, evangelical Christianity became their community. The focus was less on the hereafter than on the here-and-now.
    Science suited the new era well. It was rational. America’s Romantic Age had produced a civil war. The Age of Reason would offer up the telephone, the incandescent bulb, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Public policy would be rational, too. Cities were inefficient because experts and professionals were not in charge. States in the South were ill governed because unqualified electorates ruled. Just as the second generation of Americans thought they could discern the will of God, so their postbellum offspring believed they could divine the secrets of science and apply them to their society. Both were wrong.
    The North settled into prosperity. The Gospel of Money was apolitical, and it soothed the conscience by validating financial success as a calling unto itself. Entrepreneurs were the heroes. Industries blossomed that did not exist before the war, such as steel and oil, feeding the railroads, stoking home and commercial construction, and generating new white-collar jobs in accounting, insurance, finance, and managerial positions. Affluence and new technologies enabled families to move from congested inner cities to tranquil suburbs. Thomas Edison’s successful experiments with electric lighting and the phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone were merely a few of the innovations that eased the lives of middle-class families, especially of women. Many of those women now had an array of employment opportunities open to them as well, including office work, education, and retail.
    The transcontinental railroad completed in 1869 was a symbol of the innovative spirit and of the new role of government as a facilitator to the national economy. Stephen Douglas’s railroad finally got built. It was a marvel, spanning the continent, conquering difficult terrain, enlisting over twenty thousand immigrant construction workers, and doing it all ahead of schedule. The railroad also accelerated confrontations with the Plains Indians. Here was some unfinished business, though now, instead of justifying Indian removal in terms of manifest destiny, the government rationalized it as a way to save the Indians and allow a superior civilization to develop the land to its fullest potential—a more scientific approach. By 1877, the last of the Plains tribes were entering reservations.
    The African American fared little better. Like the Indian, he belonged to a subordinate race incapable of full equality with whites, so the prevailing scientific racial theories suggested. The Indians would fare best converted to sedentary farm life under the paternalistic protection of the federal government. The freedman would reach his full capacity as a worker for wages, on a farm preferably, under the supervision of whites. The aspirations of the freedman were not taken into account any more than the aspirations of the Plains tribes.