Abstract
Reviewed by Todd Nicholas Fuist , Arkansas State University, USA
The initial divide and eventual tentative alliance between “steeples and stacks,” or clergy and workers, animates William A. Mirola’s new book Redeeming Time: Protestantism and Chicago’s Eight Hour Movement, 1866-1912. The book presents a historical and sociological analysis of how networks, organizations, authority, and beliefs shape social movement action by investigating the role that Protestant rhetoric and Protestant clergy played in the long history of Chicago’s labor struggles. As someone whose family is comprised of Catholic Italians from Chicago, I was initially surprised to see “Protestantism” in the book’s title when I picked it up. But this framing is part of why Mirola’s book is important: it addresses lacunae in our stereotypical thinking about religion and labor by addressing a tradition less associated with the working classes in U.S. history. In doing this, Redeeming Time both provides a compelling narrative about how and when stacks and steeples did and did not ally in labor struggles, as well as contributes notable theoretical insights into religion and collective action.
Redeeming Time connects the history of labor and the history of religion in a way that is revealing about both. It shows how clergy were long constrained in their ability to support the eight-hour movement in any meaningful capacity both because they ideologically were invested in maintaining “order” and because their pews were often filled with congregants whose interests and sympathies rested with capital. As such, full-throated endorsements of labor were a risky proposition for maintaining their authority as well as for keeping their congregants happy. However, as the labor movement gained strength over the course of the nineteenth century, Protestant clergy increasingly worried about Catholicism’s growing influence on the working class. What is more, as the eight-hour movement gained mainstream acceptance for reasons that were largely secular, including union strength and economic evidence in favor of eight-hour workdays, Protestant clergy eventually had the freedom to, at least in rhetoric, support the movement. This contributed to a new consciousness among the clergy that both ideologically connected labor to other movements such as abolitionism, sabbatarianism, and temperance, as well as paved the way for the eventual rise of the social gospel in the twentieth century. Mirola’s telling of this history highlights the various cultural, organizational, and personal constraints on clergy’s ability to be political actors within the labor movement, providing nuanced detail of the variables at play in their choices.
In addition to this useful historical analysis, Mirola makes a number of compelling theoretical points in Redeeming Time. First, the book amply demonstrates that stacks, steeples, and capital do not act independently of each other. Rather, strategies and rhetorics developed by labor, clergy, and employers emerged in relation to the other two groups, as well as other actors and audiences with stakes in the unfolding conflicts. For example, the labor movement was divided into a number of different movement organizations that utilized religious rhetoric in often divergent ways: sometimes minimizing faith talk to appeal to diverse audiences or because it did not fit with their radical agenda and sometimes maximizing it to claim moral authority or make strategic demands. Second, despite the clear use of religious rhetoric as a conscious strategy by labor, Mirola challenges the purely instrumentalist take on religion that sees it exclusively as a means to an end in movement action. Rather, as Redeeming Time shows, workers in the eight-hour movement adopted a “both/and” approach. They certainly did use religious rhetoric strategically, in an effort to promote their agenda. Yet workers also drew on religious rhetoric because they were religious and their faith was an important part of their lived reality. Mirola presents evidence that many radicals, for example, drew extensively on Protestant rhetoric because it was personally meaningful for them, even as it separated them from other more anticlerical radicals.
To support these theoretical points, Mirola’s book moves chronologically through the history of the eight-hour movement after an introductory chapter that sets up his key arguments. In chapter 1, “A City of Industrial and Religious Extremes,” Mirola sets the table by demonstrating that Chicago’s identity as a labor hub in the 1800s meant there were both many workers as well as many wealthy industrialists, creating the space for Chicago to be a focal point of labor struggles in the country. Between these two groups were the clergy: both workers and capitalists were people of faith and therefore took clergy’s role as moral arbiters seriously. Despite this, the power of wealthy congregants meant clergy were unable to “question the fundamental assumptions underlying the capitalist industrial order” (38). The second chapter, “Opening Eight Hour Protests and the 1867 Eight Hour Law,” follows up on these tensions. In the agitation first for ten-hour days, then later eight-hour days, religious rhetoric was employed, with both workers and clergy promoting the idea that shorter hours would mean more time to attend church and participate in moral education. Yet Mirola shows that clergy were also reluctant to fully support the burgeoning eight-hour movement both because they tended to defend the status quo as well as because their commitment to the protestant work ethic tended to push them towards the position that labor was inherently virtuous. In chapter 3, “Eight Hours and the Financial Crisis of 1873,” Mirola highlights how this rhetoric was challenged by the 1873 panic, which pushed unskilled and semi-skilled laborers to the front of the movement and strengthened socialist labor organizations. Out of this grew a Christian Labor Union that promoted the idea that it was every Christian’s duty to support the eight-hour movement, while rejecting the radicalism of some wings of the movement which would soon take center stage.
Chapter 4, “Marching to Haymarket and the 1886 Eight Hour Campaign,” explores the lead up to and effects of the contentious Haymarket protests in 1886. Mirola shows that the workers themselves were divided between different factions, making it difficult for clergy and the religious press to have a unified view on the movement. Many religious moral authorities felt comfortable supporting the more moderate elements of the movement but balked at supporting the more radical elements. After Haymarket, however, radicals in the movement became increasingly marginalized, and clergy began to see support for the eight-hour movement as “a vehicle for social harmony in the city” as well as a way to win alienated workers back to the pews (116). This story culminates in chapters 5 and 6, where Mirola shows that the growing secular support for the eight-hour movement among mainstream political candidates and the populace, along with the development of increasingly sophisticated religious arguments in favor of labor, allowed them to develop “a new morality of leisure” which eventually contributed to the rise of the social gospel. The whole of this complicated history shows the theoretical nuance required to tease out the various alliances, strategies, and identities at play in how Protestant clergy did and did not participate in labor struggles.
In fact, because the theoretical points of the book were both strong and nuanced, I found myself wanting Redeeming Time to push a little further in presenting them. For example, I think that the first point above could have benefitted from an engagement with recent work on social movement fields (e.g., see Fligstein and McAdam’s A Theory of Fields, Raka Ray’s Fields of Protest, or Maren Klawiter’s The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer). On one hand, it is clearly a contribution to this literature, demonstrating how the relationship between different movements as well as the cultural and organizational environment around the key actors shaped their ability to make claims and partner with each other. Drawing on work on social movement fields would have provided a useful theoretical handle to talk about the findings being presented. It should also be noted that one reason I was left wanting more in this regard is that there is not a thorough discussion of methods in the book and, as such, I found myself curious what the data were able to say and what remained unexamined. Nonetheless, despite these minor critiques, this book represents an important contribution to work on religion, labor, and social movements. It is both a compelling history and an important theoretical statement about the connections between faith and political action. I would suggest that this book would be useful to any and all scholars interested in the intersections of religion, politics, and labor.