USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 64
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The most obvious if not the most significant fact of New York's re- ligious history was the rapid growth of the various church groups within the state. In 1855 the Protestant churches of New York had 457,971 members. The single largest denomination was the Methodist, followed by the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Episcopal. Some seventy years later (1926) Protestant church membership totaled 1,712,898. This represented a 274-per-cent increase over the earlier figure and stands in contrast to a 222-per-cent increase in the state's population for the same period. By the 1920's the four largest denominations were the Episcopal, Meth- odist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran. With the exception of the Lutherans, most New York Protestants were native-born Americans, and their churches exerted a more powerful influence in the state's rural areas than in its cities.
Roman Catholic and Jewish religious organizations were the prin- cipal beneficiaries of the increase in immigration and urbanization. During the postwar years a large percentage of immigrants were either Catholics from southern and eastern Europe or Jews from Russia and from the European states that bordered it. New York City was the principal port of debarkation for most immigrants, and large numbers of them made the city their home. As a consequence, New York City became a major center of Catholic and Jewish population. The number of Catholics in New York State increased from 242,225 in 1855 to 3,115,424 in 1926, a majority of whom lived in New York City. By the time of the Civil War there was still only a negligible number of Jews in New York. But from 1880 to 1914 more than a million Jews migrated to the United States, and a large proportion of them settled in New York. In 1880 there were 60,000 Jews in the state; in 1914 more than 1,500,000; and in 1927 almost 2,000,000. The state's Jews were heavily concentrated in New York City, where they comprised approximately 30 per cent of the total population.
Religion was one of the few possessions that immigrants were able
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to bring with them to America, and they clung to their old faiths in their new homes. The neighborhood synagogue or Catholic church was a cohesive force that helped to create social as well as spiritual com- munities among poverty-stricken foreigners living in the slums of a strange land. The Protestant churches, on the other hand, held rela- tively little appeal for most immigrants. Moreover, as various Protestant churches increased in wealth, many poor people in the cities came to view them as exclusive institutions to which only the well-to-do could belong. Some indication of the impact of new conditions on American Protestantism is revealed by the fact that from 1868 to 1888 seventeen Protestant churches moved from an area in lower Manhattan into which some 200,000 new residents had moved in the same period.
In several cities Protestant clergymen sought to meet the problems growing out of industrialization and immigration by making their churches agents of humanitarian reform and social centers for their parishioners. William A. Muhlenberg, an Episcopal minister in New York City, is generally credited with being the originator of what has come to be known as the institutional church. While serving as pastor of the Church of the Holy Communion from 1846 to 1858, he allied his church with such charitable enterprises as the Sisterhood of the Holy Communion and St. Luke's Hospital. A somewhat similar program was adopted in 1868 by Grace Episcopal Church in New York City. In 1872 Thomas K. Beecher, rector of the First Congregational Church of Elmira, opened a new church building that included lecture rooms, a library, and a gym- nasium. The role of the institutional church in urban religious life is indicated in part by the experience of St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City. In its first fifteen years as an institutional church its membership increased from seventy-five to more than four thousand.
New York's religious leaders, like those in other states, were com- pelled to deal with new ideas as well as with new social and economic problems. Darwinian thought, the conflict between modernism and funda- mentalism, and the controversy arising over the higher criticism (or the analysis of the historical validity of the Bible) in varying degrees oc- cupied and often divided most of the Protestant groups within the state. With significant exceptions, churches in the rural regions gen- erally adhered to the established views, while those in the cities proved relatively receptive to new ideas. Modernism, for example, won many more adherents in the city than in the country, and Darwinian evolu- tionary theory was treated with far more tolerance in urban than in rural pulpits. It was, moreover, the preachers in the state's larger cities who took the lead in the movement to reconcile evolution and traditional Christianity. Among such preachers were Henry Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott, successive pastors of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, both
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of whom maintained that the evolutionary process was created by God and revealed His omniscience and all-pervading wisdom. Finally, the higher criticism never aroused the opposition in the cities that it did in the country, and it is perhaps significant that in the mid 1880's a revised version of the New Testament sold 200,000 copies in New York City within a week of its publication.
If religious developments in New York conformed to a national pat- tern, the literature and art of New York City often set the pattern for the rest of the nation. The concentration of what might be termed the business of the intellect in Manhattan enabled the city-and indirectly the state-to impose many of its values on the rest of the nation. Men in downtown offices in New York City decided what books should and should not be published. Newspaper owners in the metropolis estab- lished standards that were accepted by many country editors in every section of the United States. The city's theatrical producers selected the plays that would be sent on the road to other cities and towns. Mil- lionaires in Fifth Avenue mansions became arbiters on matters of taste in painting, sculpture, and architecture. New York City was the nation's wealthiest metropolis, and money talked in the world of books and art almost as much as it did in the countinghouse.
New York City, however, had attractions other than money, for it provided writers and artists with an environment that many of them found irresistible. Novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, and sculptors often were-or at least they liked to think that they were-uncon- ventional people, and the city's relative indifference to convention per- mitted them to pursue their careers without the restrictions imposed by the mores of the village or small town. New York City, moreover, was one of the few places in the United States where they could associate with others who spoke their language and shared their interests. Finally, it was the most cosmopolitan city in the nation, and its close ties with Europe gave its inhabitants a chance to know-if not to participate in- the Old World's intellectual and artistic life. New York may not have been Paris, but it was the next best thing.
After 1900 Greenwich Village in downtown Manhattan became a major center of intellectual life in America. In the Village rents were low, inhibitions were considered poor taste, and the neighbors did not pry. Almost every resident took pride in being a nonconformist. Avant garde writers, artists in revolt against the academy, anarchists, playboys, revolutionists, pacifists, editors of The Masses, and composers of the new poetry conducted a never-ending, multifronted, joyous offensive against middle-class America and its values. To outsiders the Village was where people stayed up all night, drank too much, and practiced free love. But it was also where a number of dedicated individuals did a great deal
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of work that was to shape the future of intellectual America. Eugene O'Neill's early plays were produced in the Village before they appeared on Broadway; modern art was brought from Europe to the United States by Villagers; and many of the prominent authors of the 1920's and 1930's served their apprenticeships in the Village during the years that preceded World War I.
Although, after the Civil War, New York State may not have pro- duced any writers comparable to Cooper, Melville, and Whitman, New York City attracted most of the prominent literary figures of the age. If they did not live in New York City, they visited it frequently. Writers came to Manhattan to talk with other writers; to arrange for the pub- lication of their books by such firms as Harper and Brothers, Henry Holt, Scribner, Macmillan, and Putnam; to sell stories or articles to the editors of the city's magazines; to take jobs on its newspapers; to escape an environment that they found stultifying; to embark for Europe; to have a good time. Boston was no longer the hub of the literary universe, and William Dean Howells' move from there to New York City in 1889 was belated recognition by America's dean of letters of Massachusetts' decline and New York's ascendency.
Although writers were attracted to New York City, they did not com- prise a New York school of literature. During the postwar years there was a marked decline in intellectual parochialism. Authors often used regional material, but they were seldom provincial, and they wrote for a national audience. Under the circumstances, New Yorkers were not in a position to assume a possessive attitude toward those poets, novelists, dramatists, and journalists who happened to have been born or to have lived in New York. Such diverse writers as Paul Leicester Ford, Frank Stockton, Richard Harding Davis, Jacob Riis, John Burroughs, Theodore Roosevelt, and H. C. Bunner were all New Yorkers; but they had little else in common, and the reading public correctly viewed them as Amer- icans rather than as American regionalists. In a similar vein, Henry James, although born and brought up in New York City, was rightfully considered an international literary figure rather than a product of the locality in which he had spent his early life.
The diversity and complexity of life in New York City provided many novelists and short-story writers with material and themes. Although James became an expatriate whose subject matter was derived in large part from Europe, his native city was not entirely excluded from his work. In Washington Square he used a setting that he had known in- timately as a boy. The locale of Washington Square, however, has little to do with the novel's plot, and of far greater interest to the local his- torian is The American Scene's beautiful and highly impressionistic sketch of a Jewish community on the lower East Side. But if James's interest in
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New York was at best incidental, Edith Wharton found it an ideal setting for her fictional studies of the upper reaches of society. A member of the local aristocracy by birth and background, she knew her material at first hand, and she approached it with the subtlety of an artist and the objectivity of a sociologist. Above all, she was a craftsman, and in such novels as The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) she wrote with perception and precision of the emotional con- flicts and conventions in the tight little world of New York's upper classes.
In contrast to Edith Wharton, most writers preferred to emphasize the more colorful and distinctive features of the city and its people. Thus, Ernest Poole in The Harbor (1915) used his personal experiences as the basis for what is undoubtedly the outstanding novel about the city's water front; Paul Leicester Ford's The Honorable Peter Sterling (1894) was, in effect, a case study of ward politics in New York; and Theodore Dreiser incorporated in Sister Carrie (1900) a description of a strike which had occurred in the neighboring city of Brooklyn.
The city's poor also proved an invaluable source of material for many authors. In addition to Jacob Riis's factual reports on the slums in How the Other Half Lives (1890) and A Ten Years' War (1900) were H. C. Bunner's stories in Short Sixes (1890) on life in the tenements; and William Sidney Porter (O. Henry) wrote ironic tales with unexpected endings about shopgirls, policemen, clerks, and other members of the city's lower middle class. Although Bunner and Porter did not ignore the sordid features of urban existence, they infused enough sentimentality into their stories to leave the impression that most city dwellers-even the poorest ones-lived in the midst of excitement and adventure.
Some writers, however, preferred to treat urban life realistically, and of these Howells and Stephen Crane were easily pre-eminent. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), which is the most rewarding of Howells' New York novels from both a literary and historical viewpoint, deals with the city's principal classes and emphasizes the conflicts among them. Representatives of the new and old rich, the very poor, and the middle classes are presented with accuracy and understanding in a framework of social unrest and struggle. Howells' sympathy with the underprivileged seldom interfered with his objectivity, and A Hazard of New Fortunes is realistic without being propagandistic. Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1892) lacks the scope of A Hazard of New Fortunes, but surpasses it in both intensity and depth of feeling. The author de- picted life in the slums as brutal and ugly, and his characters never emerge from the degradation and misery that have engulfed them. Harsh, merciless, and authentic, Maggie was a landmark in American fiction that set standards to which many subsequent realists have aspired.
The rural regions of the state produced no literature comparable to
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that written in and about the city. Perhaps the outstanding novel with an upstate locale written during the period under consideration is Seth's Brother's Wife by Harold Frederic, published in 1877. It is distinguished by its realistic treatment of rural society. Although Hamlin Garland is often credited with being the first American author in the postwar years to depict life in the country in all its drabness and harshness, Seth's Brother's Wife appeared four years before Garland's Main-Travelled Roads and deserves to rank with it. Many other novels about the New York countryside, however, were folksy, anecdotal accounts of shrewd local characters. The most famous example in both the state and the nation of the so-called "B'Gosh School" of literature was David Harum (1898) by Edward Westcott of Syracuse. The central character was an upstate banker and horse trader, who entranced readers with his hard- headed philosophy and homespun wit. The book's enormous popularity can be attributed at least in part to the nostalgia of an increasingly ur- banized America for a vanishing way of life. As such, it tells us more about the reading public than it does about upstate New York at the turn of the century.
American journalism, unlike the book-publishing business, was not concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of firms, but in this field, as in so many others, the city's supremacy was undeniable. There were, of course, outstanding papers in other states and in other cities and towns in New York State. The Albany Argus and Evening Journal, the Brooklyn Eagle and Union, the Schenectady Union, the Ithaca Journal, the Rochester Express, the Utica Observer, and the Buf- falo Express were all papers of unusual distinction at various times in their careers, and each had some feature or policy that set it off from other journals. They were, however, papers whose influence was con- fined to a comparatively limited area, while those in New York City were often national as well as local institutions. For many years before the Civil War, the Herald, Times, Tribune, and Post had been known, if not read, throughout the country, and their editors were as famous as many of the nation's business and political leaders. Country editors either quoted or paraphrased the editorials and news stories of the metro- politan papers, and the tone of the press throughout the land more often than not was set by those who controlled the principal journals of New York City.
For approximately a decade and a half after the Civil War, the Sun and the Post were the city's foremost newspapers. Believing that other papers were stuffy and overwritten, Charles A. Dana made the Sun witty, entertaining, and incisive. Filled with human-interest stories, the Sun was invariably amusing, but it was seldom profound, and it often seemed more concerned with trivia than with the news. The Post, under
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the editorship of E. L. Godkin, was all that the Sun was not. Its editorials were scholarly analyses of current problems, and no attempt was made to write down to the paper's readers. Godkin was a nineteenth-century liberal, and both he and his paper stood for low tariffs, civil service reform, the abolition of war, and an economy unhampered by govern- ment interference or regulation. Although the Post's circulation seldom exceeded twenty thousand, it was read by many other newspapermen, public officials, and members of the professions throughout the United States.
Joseph Pulitzer's acquisition of the New York World in 1883 marked the advent of yellow journalism in the United States and the beginning of a new era in the American newspaper business. Written for the poorly educated and underprivileged urban masses, the World appealed to its readers with spectacular stories of crime and sex, blaring headlines, cartoons or pictures on almost every page, and comic strips. But Pulitzer was not content with mere sensationalism. For many years the World's international news was unsurpassed; at one time or another most of the country's ablest reporters were on its payroll; and it sponsored more reforms than did any other major paper in the United States. At any given time its editorial page provided what in effect was a check list of current reforms, and its news columns were filled with exposés that substantiated its editorial crusades. The mixture of reform and sen- sationalism proved to be good business, for within a short time after Pulitzer purchased it the World had the largest circulation in the United States.
The World's supremacy was soon challenged by William Randolph Hearst's Journal. After acquiring the Journal in 1895, Hearst hired some of the World's leading reporters, copied all of Pulitzer's sensational tech- niques, and devised some new ones of his own. The two papers were soon engaged in a furious fight for circulation, and during the Spanish American War their own battle for readers often overshadowed the conflict in Cuba. But although Hearst learned about sensationalism from Pulitzer, he did not adopt the World's other features. The Journal's edi- torial policy was both superficial and erratic; the paper was frequently used to advance its owner's political ambitions; and at times its news reports were slanted to make them conform to Hearst's prejudices. The Journal attracted readers, but it did not always enlighten them.
A year after Hearst took over the Journal, Adolph Ochs purchased the Times. Since Henry J. Raymond's death in 1869, the Times had declined in prestige and influence, and by 1896 its circulation was down to nine thousand. Shunning sensationalism and all other forms of journalistic pyrotechnics, Ochs transformed the Times into a vehicle for well-written, comprehensive, and detailed accounts of "all the news that's fit to print."
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His concept of the news, moreover, was broad enough to include litera- ture, music, the arts, and drama, and he hired authorities to report on each. The Times's coverage rivaled that of the giant press associations, while no other paper approached the objectivity of its news columns. In addition, its format and typography served as models for many other papers throughout the United States. No other paper printed more news and no other paper printed the news with less bias.
Despite the influence and prestige of the Times, it was yellow jour- nalism rather than the conservative press that prepared the way for New York's modern mass-circulation magazines. For several years Har- per's, the Atlantic Monthly, the Century, Scribner's, Putnam's, and the Galaxy were the nation's leading periodicals. With the exception of the Atlantic Monthly, they were all published in New York, and they all had certain features in common. They ran serials by leading English and American novelists, contained few advertisements, sponsored good-govern- ment reforms rather than changes in the economic system, were rela- tively expensive, and appealed to the most educated-and, therefore, a very small part-of the population. It was only a matter of time, how- ever, before the forces of industrialization and urbanization that had produced the mass-circulation newspaper would effect similar changes on New York's periodicals. McClure's Magazine, founded in New York City in 1893, was among the first magazines to reach a mass audience. Priced at fifteen cents (later reduced to ten), profusely illustrated, filled with articles and stories of general interest, and crammed with adver- tisements, McClure's established a pattern that was copied by the Cos- mopolitan Magazine, Munsey's Magazine, and many others. By 1900, when Harper's and Scribner's each had a circulation of only 150,000, Munsey's was selling 650,000, and both McClure's and Cosmopolitan exceeded 350,000.
In painting and sculpture, as in literature and journalism, New York achieved a pre-eminence that was in considerable measure due to the presence of the nation's largest and richest city within its borders. Repre- sentatives of all the leading art movements were attracted to the city, and it was there that the academicians and insurgents waged their never- ending war. With considerably more insight and technical proficiency than had been displayed by their predecessors in the Hudson River School, Alexander H. Wynant, George Innes, and Homer Martin painted landscapes of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and Mohawk Valley. Albert P. Ryder, by far the most imaginative of the post-bellum painters, went beyond reality into the realm of his own mind to produce a series of haunting, symbolic pictures in which individuals became ghostlike figures and shadowy masses supplanted details. August Saint-Gaudens, the son of an Irish mother and French father and a product of the streets of New
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York City, became the nation's foremost sculptor. His statues of Admiral David Farragut at Madison Square and General William T. Sherman on the plaza at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street are masterpieces that remain as evidence of his pre-eminence in his field. All these men were in some degree innovators. Their acknowledged leader was John La Farge. An eclectic, he painted landscapes and figures, did drawings and water colors, and earned his most lasting fame for his murals and pioneer work in the design of stained-glass windows. A champion of the new styles and new artists that emerged in the postwar decades, he led the revolt against the standards imposed by the highly respected and equally conservative National Academy of Design. With his assistance a group of rebels in 1877 organized the Society of American Artists and set up the Art Students' League as the Society's school. The Society flourished from the outset, and within a short time its membership in- cluded most of the country's outstanding artists.
During the first decade of the twentieth century a group of young painters in Greenwich Village attracted considerable attention with their realistic studies of commonplace scenes in New York City. The leading exponents of the new school of urban realism were eight rebels (among whom were Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks) who were collectively known as "the Eight" and whose work was derisively labeled "the Ash Can School" by the critics. Painting scenes of tenements, elevated railroads, bars, and city streets, the Eight peopled their pictures with salesgirls, pugs, drunks, push-cart peddlers, prostitutes, bums, and almost every other type of New Yorker who neither lived on Fifth Avenue nor worked in Wall Street. Their war cry was: "Don't imitate; be yourself!" They shocked the traditionalists, and they reveled in their own iconoclasm. In subject matter-and to some extent in technique-they represented a break with the past and provided un- deniable evidence that America was capable of an indigenous art.
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