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  • Episode 15 Reform Movements

  • Hi I’m John Green. This is Crash Course U.S. history and today we finally get to talk

  • about sex. Also some other things. Today were gonna

  • discuss religious and moral reform movements in 19th century America, but I promise there

  • will be some sex. Mr. Green, Mr. Green. Is it gonna be about

  • real sex or is it gonna be able people who are obsessed with not having sex?

  • You got me there, Me from the Past. But how (and whether) we skoodilypoop ends up saying

  • a lot about America, and also people in general. Intro

  • So, one response to the massive changes brought about by the shift to an industrialized market

  • economy was to create utopian communities where people could separate themselves from

  • the worst aspects of this brave new world. The most famous at the time, and arguably

  • still, were the Shakers, who were famous for their excellent furniture, so you can’t

  • say that they really fully withdrew from the market system.

  • Still Shaker communities did separate themselves from the competition that characterized free

  • markets, especially in terms of the competition for mates.

  • They were celibate, and therefore only able to increase their numbers by recruitment,

  • which was made a little bit difficult by celibacy. But they did do a lot of dancing to sublimate

  • their libidinous urges, they embraced equality of the sexes, and at their peak they had more

  • than 6,000 members. Today, they are still one of the most successful

  • utopian communities to have emerged in the 19th century. They have three members.

  • Much more successful in the long run were the Latter Day Saints, also called Mormons,

  • although at the time their ideas were so far out of the mainstream that they were persecuted

  • and chased from New York all the way to Utah. In addition to the Bible, The LDS Church holds

  • the Book of Mormon as a holy scripture, which tells of the resurrected Jesus’s visits

  • to the Americas. And while it was subject to widespread persecution,

  • and even some massacres, the LDS Church continued to grow, and in fact continues to today.

  • So, while some of these communities were based in religion, others were more worldly attempts

  • to create new models of society, like Brook Farm.

  • Founded in 1841 by a group of transcendentalists, is a dependent clause that always ends in

  • failure, Brook Farm tried to show that manual labor and intellectual engagement could be

  • successfully mixed. This community drew on the ideas of the French

  • socialist Charles Fourier, who as you may recall from Crash Course World History believedno

  • jokethat socialism would eventually turn the seas to lemonade.

  • And much like Fourier’s planned communities, Brook Farm did not work out, largely becauseand

  • I can say this with some authoritywriters do not enjoy farming.

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, complained about having to shovel horse manure. But if

  • he’d only kept shoveling horse manure, he might not have shoveled The Blithedale Romances

  • onto an unsuspecting reading public. I’m sorry, Nathaniel Hawthorne. I do like

  • The Scarlet Letter, but I feel like the only reason youre read is because you were,

  • like, the only author in pre-Civil War America. So either we have to pretend that America

  • began with Huck Finn’s journey on the Mississippi or else were stuck with you.

  • It was just, like, you, Thomas Paine, Mary Rowlandson, a bunch of printed sermons, and

  • James Fenimore Pooper. Anyway, the most utopian of the utopian communities

  • were set up at Utopia, Ohio and Modern Times, New York by Josiah Warren.

  • Everything here was supposed to be totally unregulated and voluntary including marriage,

  • which, as you can imagine worked out brilliantly. But, without any laws to regulate behavior,

  • Warren’s communities were individualism on steroids, so they collapsed spectacularly

  • and quickly. But these utopian communities were relatively

  • rare; many more 19th century Americans participated in efforts to reform society rather than just

  • withdraw from it. And behind most of those reform movements

  • was religion, particularly a religious revival called the 2nd Great Awakening.

  • This series of revival meetings reached their height in the 1820s and 1830s with Charles

  • Grandison Finney’s giant camp meetings in New York. And in a way the 2nd Great Awakening

  • made America a religious nation. The number of Christian ministers in the United

  • States went from 2,000 in the 1770s to 40,000 by 1845.

  • And western New York was the center of this revivalism. That’s where Joseph Smith had

  • his revelations. It’s also where John Humphrey Noyes founded

  • his Oneida Community, in which postmenopausal women introduced teenage boys to sex, and

  • which eventually ceased being a religious community and evolved intowait for itone

  • of the world’s largest silverware companies. That’s right, every time you take a bite

  • of food with Oneida cutlery, youre celebrating free love and May-December relationships.

  • Well, more like February-December relationships. (Libertage: Turning Free Love into Fancy Forks)

  • So, yes, religious fervor burned so hot in upstate New York that it became known as the

  • burned-over district,” and New York remains the heartland of conservative Christianity

  • to this day. Or not.

  • The Awakening stressed individual choice in salvation and a personal relationship with

  • Jesus Christ, and it was deeply influenced by the market revolution.

  • So, like, while many preachers criticized the selfish individualism inherent in free

  • market competition, there was sort of a market for new religions and preachers, who would

  • travel the country drumming up business. Awakening ministers also preached the values

  • of sobriety, industry and self-discipline, which had become the essence of both the market

  • economy and the impulse for reform. There are three points I want to make about

  • the religious nature of all these 19th century reform movements. First, it was overwhelmingly

  • Protestant. Like, all thesenewreligions were protestant

  • denominations, which meant that they wouldn’t have a lot of appeal to immigrants from Ireland

  • and Germany who started to pour into the United States in the middle of the 19th century because

  • A. those people were mostly Catholic, and B. reasons well get to momentarily.

  • Secondly, many of these reformers believed in perfectionism, the idea that individuals

  • and society were capable of unlimited improvement. And third, many of the reform movements were

  • based ultimately on a different view of freedom than we might be used to.

  • And this is really important to understand, for 19th century reformers, freedom was the

  • opposite of being able to do whatever you wanted, which they associated with the word

  • license. They believed that true freedom was like an

  • internal phenomenon that came from self-discipline and the practice of self control.

  • Essentially, instead of being free to drink booze, you would be free from the temptation

  • to drink booze. According to Philip Schaff, a minister who

  • came to Pennsylvania in the 1840s, “true national freedom, in the American view [is]

  • anything but an absence of restraint … [It] rests upon a moral groundwork, upon the virtue

  • of self possession and self control in individual citizens.”

  • Members of the fastest growing Protestant denominations like Methodists and Baptists

  • were taught that it wasn’t enough to avoid sin themselves; they also needed to perfect

  • their communities. And that leads us to America’s great national nightmare, temperance.

  • Now youre not going to see me advocate for prohibition of alcohol, but to be fair,

  • Americans in the first half of the 19th century were uncommonly drunk. In fact, in 1830, per

  • capita liquor consumption was 7 gallons per year, more than double what it is now.

  • And that doesn’t even count wine, beer, hard cider, zima, pruno.

  • By the way, some people like to have home breweries or whatever, but at our office,

  • Stan’s been making pruno under the couch. The growing feeling among reformers that we

  • should limit or even ban alcohol appealed to those protestant ideas of restraint and

  • perfecting the social order. And that’s also precisely why it was so

  • controversial, especially among Catholic immigrants, who A. came largely from Germany and Ireland,

  • two nations not known for their opposition to strong drink,

  • and B. were Catholic and the Catholic church’s morality didn’t view alcohol or dancing

  • as inherently sinful the way that so many Protestant denominations did.

  • And then we have the widespread construction of asylums and other homes for outcasts.

  • Anyone who’s ever done a bit of urban exploring knows that these places were built by the

  • hundreds in the 19th centuryjails, poorhouses, asylums for the mentally illand while they

  • might not seem like places of freedom, to reformers they were.

  • Remember, freedom was all about not having the choice to sin so you could be free of

  • sin. Bear in mind, of course, that the crusading

  • reformers who built these places usually chose not to live in them.

  • And speaking of places youre forced to go regardless of whether you want to, the

  • mid 19th century saw the growth of compulsory state-funded education in the United States.

  • These new schools were called common schools, and education reformers like Horace Mann hoped

  • that they would give poor students the moral character and body of knowledge to compete

  • with upper-class kids. And that worked out great. Just look at where

  • we are on the equality of opportunity index. Now, this may seem like an obvious win for

  • all involved, but many parents opposed common schools because they didn’t want their kids

  • getting moral instruction from the government. That said, by 1860, all northern states had

  • established public schools. But they were far less common in the South, where the planter

  • class was afraid of education falling into the wrong hands, like for instance, those

  • of poor whites and especially slaves. Which brings us to abolition. Let’s go to

  • the Thought Bubble. Abolitionism was the biggest reform movement

  • in the first half of the 19th century, probably becausesorry alcohol and fast dancingslavery

  • was the worst. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the only challengers to slavery were slaves

  • themselves, free blacks, and Quakers. But in the early 19th century, colonizationists

  • began to gain ground. Their idea was to ship all former slaves back to Africa, and the

  • American Colonization Society became popular and wealthy enough to establish Liberia as

  • an independent homeland for former slaves. While the idea was impractical, and racist,

  • it appealed to politicians like Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. And some black people, who

  • figured that America’s racism would never allow them to be treated as equals, did choose

  • to emigrate to Liberia. But most free blacks opposed the idea; in fact in 1817, 3,000 of

  • them assembled in Philadelphia and declared that black people were entitled to the same

  • freedom as whites. By 1830, advocates for the end of slavery

  • became more and more radical, like William Lloyd Garrison, whose magazine The Liberator

  • was first published in 1831. Known for beingas harsh as truth and as uncompromising

  • as justice,” Garrison once burned the Constitution, declaring it was a pact with the devil. Radical

  • abolitionism became a movement largely because it used the same mix of pamplheteering and

  • charismatic speechifying that people saw in the preachers of the Second Great Awakening,

  • which in turn brought religion and abolition together in the North, preaching a simple

  • message: Slavery was a sin. By 1843, 100,000 Northerners were aligned with the American

  • Anti-Slavery Society.

  • What made the radical abolitionists so radical was their inclusive vision of freedom. It

  • wasn’t just about ending slavery but about equalitythe extension of full citizens

  • rights to all people, regardless of race.

  • By the way, it was abolitionists who re-christened the Old State House Bell in Philadelphia the

  • Liberty Bell.” Why does all this awesome stuff happen in Philadelphia?

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, needless to say, not all Americans were quite so thrilled about

  • abolitionism, which is why slavery remained unabolished.

  • Often, resistance to abolitionism was violentlike, in 1838, a mob in Philadelphia burned down

  • Pennsylvania Hall because people were using it to hold abolitionist meetings. And you

  • were doing so well, Philadelphia! A year later, a mob in Alton, Illinois murdered

  • antislavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy when he was defending his printing press. This

  • was the fifth time, by the way, that a mob had destroyed one of his newspapers.

  • Even Congress got in on thelet’s suppress free speech and the pressact by adopting

  • the gag rule in 1836. The gag rule prohibited members of congress

  • from even reading aloud or discussing calls for the emancipation of slaves. Seriously.

  • And you thought the filibuster was dysfunctional. The best known abolitionist was Frederick

  • Douglass, a former slave whose life story