------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking versus Christian Values in
Pre-Civil War America

Published by EH.NET (May 2011)

Lorman A. Ratner, Paula T. Kaufman and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., /Paradoxes of
Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking versus Christian Values in Pre-Civil War America/.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xiii +148 pp. $40 (cloth),
ISBN: 978-0-252-03453-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Donald E. Frey, Department of Economics, Wake Forest
University.

This short book looks at popular publications in the 1850s to document
middle-class reaction to the tension between economic growth and American
republican, Christian values; it adds to the growing scholarly interest in
issues other than slavery during the antebellum period. The chapters cover
newspapers, literary and general magazines, as well as business publications,
novels, and travelogues. They also juxtapose northern and southern writers,
and male and female authors. In recent years, Stewart Davenport’s /Friends
of the Unrighteous Mammon/ (see review on EH.Net) has dealt with the
clergy’s response to the same conflict. See also the EH.Net review of Mark
Noll, editor, /God and Mammon/, which sees more moral continuity as
Protestants participated in the new economy.

/Paradoxes of Prosperity/ reveals American popular writers fretting that
economic life was undermining conventional American values. Yet, the writers
offered no common response to the problem. One outlier was James Gordon
Bennett (editor the /New York Herald/) who simply dismissed such concerns. On
the other side, some were willing to condemn the emergent capitalism, but
mainly because southern writers often defended slavery by contrasting it with
an unfavorable view of the northern market economy. The large center of
popular writers, on which this volume focuses, seemed to write for
evangelical Protestants rising into the middle-class, who were economically
insecure enough to behave in ways they suspected lay outside the moral
boundaries they had been taught. These readers were offered little clear
moral advice.

A typical strategy for calming the troubled conscience can be seen in the
suggestions of Timothy Shay Arthur, a popular novelist, who accepted “this
relentless pursuit of gain so long as the money was used for the good of
society” (pp. 99-100).  Of course this formulation excused behaviors that
in earlier times would have been condemned as sinful. Conversely, Arthur
rejected the simplistic “argument that poverty is the result of sin and
wealth is the product of virtue” (p.100), a primitive twisting of religious
doctrine to validate personal gain and negate any responsibility for the
neighbor in need (a view akin to Max Weber’s “Protestant ethic”).

The examples of moral decay in these writings were many, ranging from
speculation, to luxurious living (a staple complaint of colonial moralists),
consumption of liquor, moral hypocrisy, slaveholding, and so on. Suggestions
for reform were also numerous, but -- with the exception of abolition of
slavery -- generally amounted to exhortations for more individual willpower
to resist temptation. The popular literature showed little alarm at the
encompassing system of which temptation was an inherent feature, and which
also created the insecurity that goaded men to the relentless pursuit of
wealth as a form of worldly security.

/Paradoxes of Prosperity/ also looks at publications aimed explicitly at
middle-class women readers. As was typical of popular publications, Sarah
Hale, editor of /Godey’s Lady’s Book/, “engaged in a balancing act
between defending the status quo and seeking to instigate changes in
women’s role in American life” (p. 66).  While she advocated for
advanced ideas, such as higher education or expanded property rights for
women, she rejected stronger feminist ideas. Hale also recognized the threat
of economics to traditional values, but blandly resolved the problem by
holding that “the pursuit of wealth was important and would bring happiness
so long as it was tempered by moral principles” (p. 66).  In short, many
women writers were no more likely than male counterparts to raise fundamental
moral objections to the rapidly advancing economy.

The many writers surveyed in this book rarely looked carefully at the nature
of the values of emergent capitalism or of republican and Christian values.
Sometimes values were implied in anecdotes or historical references.
(Historical novels, glorifying the virtue of heroes such as Washington, were
common.) Lacking a clear definition of which they wrote, authors reached
conclusions running the gamut from exhortations about individual
responsibility, to dark foreboding, to scapegoating of vulnerable groups
(such as immigrants), to singling out particular evils, such as alcoholic
drinks. Given the lack of clear definitions, few of the writers suggested
that systemic change of either American capitalism or, conversely, of
Christian/republican values would have to occur to resolve the tensions.

The book, itself, refrains from critiquing the understanding of American
values (such as it was) advanced by the publications studied. Yet, /Paradoxes
of Prosperity/ might have sharpened its thesis by documenting how far the
meanings of “republican and Christian” values had already drifted by 1850
from their late eighteenth century meanings. My own view is that the
“values” cited by 1850s publications were already anemic versions of the
ethics of earlier American Protestantism. For instance, American Puritans had
been social reformers and not merely individualistic moralists. That reform
impulse remained in the Abolitionist cause; yet, Abolition was a topic most
of the popular authors steadfastly avoided (because it might be bad for
sales). The earlier Protestant sense of human moral frailty and sinfulness
surely should have registered alarm at an economic faith (amounting to a
secular religion) that left the public good to the working out of
self-interest alone. A central motif of Puritan thought had been that God
defined boundaries around human activity. By the 1850s, economic behavior was
well on the way to recognizing no boundaries. Even the very style of moral
thinking differed between the utilitarian outlook prevalent in the economic
world (and explicit in political economy) and the obligation ethics of
earlier Protestantism.  (For a contrary view, see Mark Noll’s volume
mentioned previously.)  /Paradoxes of Prosperity/ accepts the watered-down
version of values of their 1850s subjects (see p.4) as an operational
definition. This is fair enough, but a significant dimension of the topic is
thereby lost.

This book adds to a growing literature examining the tensions that early
nineteenth-century Americans perceived between the emerging economy and their
inherited values. A study of mass-readership publications nicely complements
more specific studies, such as Davenport’s study of the ways Protestant
clergy dealt with the same tension. The book is very readable, even
enjoyable, and fills in our knowledge of the ways the growing American middle
class was rationalizing economic life with what remained of their religious
and patriotic values.

Donald Frey is author of /America’s Economic Moralists: A History of Rival
Ethics and Economics/ (SUNY Press, 2009).

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Geographic Location: North America
Subject: Markets and Institutions, Social and Cultural History, including
Race, Ethnicity and Gender
Time: 19th Century