For over a century, dark visions of moral collapse and social disintegration in American cities spurred an anxious middle class to search for ways to restore order. In this important book, Paul Boyer explores the links between the urban reforms of the Progressive era and the long efforts of prior generations to tame the cities. He integrates the ideologies of urban crusades with an examination of the careers and the mentalities of a group of vigorous activists, including Lyman Beecher; the pioneers of the tract societies and Sunday schools; Charles Loring Brace of the Children's Aid Society; Josephine Shaw Lowell of the Charity Organization movement; the father of American playgrounds, Joseph Lee; and the eloquent city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham.

Boyer describes the early attempts of Jacksonian evangelicals to recreate in the city the social equivalent of the morally homogeneous village; he also discusses later strategies that tried to exert a moral influence on urban immigrant families by voluntarist effort, including, for instance, the Charity Organizations' "friendly visitors." By the 1890s there had developed two sharply divergent trends in thinking about urban planning and social control: the bleak assessment that led to coercive strategies and the hopeful evaluation that emphasized the importance of environmental betterment as a means of urban moral control.

• Contents 
• PART ONE 
• The Jacksonian Era
• 1. 
• The Urban Threat Emerges: A Strategy Takes Shape
• 2. 
• The Tract Societies: Transmitting a Traditional Morality by Untraditional Means
• 3. 
• The Sunday School in the City: Patterned Order in a Disorderly Setting
• 4. 
• Urban Moral Reform in the Early Republic: Some Concluding Reflections
• PART TWO 
• The Mid-Century Decades: Years of Frustration and Innovation
• 5. 
• Heightened Concern, Varied Responses
• 6. 
• Narrowing the Problem: Slum Dwellers and Street Urchins
• 7. 
• Young Men and the City: The Emergence of the YMCA
• PART THREE 
• The Gilded Age: Urban Moral Control in a Turbulent Time
• 8. 
• “The Ragged Edge of Anarchy”: The Emotional Context of Urban Social Control in the Gilded Age
• 9. 
• American Protestantism and the Moral Challenge of the Industrial City
• 10. 
• Building Character among the Urban Poor: The Charity Organization Movement
• 11. 
• The Urban Moral Awakening of the 1890s
• 12. 
• The Two Faces of Urban Moral Reform in the 1890s
• PART FOUR 
• The Progressives and the City: Common Concerns, Divergent Strategies
• 13. 
• Battling the Saloon and the Brothel: The Great Coercive Crusades
• 14. 
• One Last, Decisive Struggle: The Symbolic Component of the Great Coercive Crusades
• 15. 
• Positive Environmentalism: The Ideological Underpinnings
• 16. 
• Housing, Parks, and Playgrounds: Positive Environmentalism in Action
• 17. 
• The Civic Ideal and the Urban Moral Order
• 18. 
• The Civic Ideal Made Real: The Moral Vision of the Progressive City Planners
• 19. 
• Positive Environmentalism and the Urban Moral-Control Tradition: Contrasts and Continuities
• 20. 
• Getting Right with Gesellschaft: The Decay of the Urban Moral-Control Impulse in the 1920s and After
• Notes
• Index