Capitalist’s Christianity: The Haymarket Affair and Moody Bible Institute
In 1884 Cyrus McCormick died. He and his workers had grown a business making grain harvesters which had taken off, his son went to Princeton to study economics and improved efficiency. In the year his father died they had a 71% profit, the workers were becoming more efficient and were asking for an 8 hour workday because they could accomplish just as much in 8 hours rather than the 10 hours a day (six days a week) they had been working. Instead, McCormick Jr decided to eliminate half of the jobs at his father’s plant and rehire the remaining workers at 10% less. He justified putting them and their families into poverty because he no longer needed as many of them, he used the usual justifications: they are lucky they have any job at all. He wasn’t the only one in Chicago or the world doing this at the time, just the most relevant to our story.
The workers, without options, protested. McCormick Jr. and other gilded age factory owners told the media and government they had some complaining, disruptive workers, and gave money to police and private security to keep them in line. For the following year and a half, there was much tension involving strikes and beatings from the police and protesting workers.
Some of the old workers said the fired workers deserved a job, and a company shouldn’t fire people just because they became more efficient, they said keep everyone and asked for an 8 hour workday, so they could spend more time with their friends and families. Eventually many said they wouldn’t work unless their friends were rehired. McCormick Jr. ever the efficient businessman didn’t budge. Some, facing eviction and difficulty due to no job or less pay snapped and became violent, some of the police officers following orders also became violent, there was death on both sides. McCormick decided to hire all new workers and gave them an 8 hour workday.
It all culminated in the 1886 “Haymarket Affair” when police disrupted a peaceful protest in Haymarket square, and a bomb was thrown, one police officer died and several other people in the vicinity were injured.
Eight of the leaders of the protesters were sentenced to death, seven of whom were not present. There was no evidence these workers threw the bomb, only that possibly one had made it. Three were quickly hung while one scheduled to be hung committed suicide in prison. Seven years later the governor of Illinois criticized the trial and freed those still in prison.
To be clear, Cyrus McCormick Jr.’s actions to preserve his own interest, were incredibly unjust, and he needed something to rehabilitate his image, but also not compromise the wealth making enterprise he had control of.
This is where religion comes in. Three months after the Haymarket Affair, Cyrus McCormick Jr. gave money for the charismatic though uneducated shoe-salesman turned preacher Dwight Moody (whose goal was to be a millionaire) to start his Moody Bible Institute to train “Christian workers”.
Moody’s preaching centered on a “plain reading of scripture” that saw the Bible as a message from God to individuals (not society) about working hard, not rebelling and going to heaven after you die. Notably absent was criticism of wealthy business owners. In fact, everywhere Moody preached he had the business owners of the city, or, those who in his view had been blessed by God with finances, sit behind him to indicate their endorsement. If the Christian worker was really a Christian — working hard, not rebelling, he could also be blessed by God like Cyrus McCormick Jr. was.
The workers who had been fired by McCormick Jr. were described as rebellious, and probably analogous to the biblical scholarship which had been coming out of Germany that led to Karl Marx’ rebellious criticism of the wealthy in Europe. Marx was the youngest of many young students of Hegel, the other well known students were David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the Danish man who travelled to Berlin, Søren Kierkegaard. For all of them, determining why Christianity was oppressing so many people was of central concern. Applying historical study of the Bible was central for them, and would be the thing that Moody’s successors most wanted to remove from Christianity — when people studied biblical history they kept advocating for the least powerful, that was a problem for the powerful, a problem that Moody and his successors would fix.
The businessman John Rockefeller would follow the precedent of business leaders like McCormick Jr. and find his own Moody in an ex-baseball player named Billy Sunday. Upton Sinclair reported Rockefeller admitted to paying $200,000 to fund 187 meetings in 100 factories to have Billy Sunday speak to 50,000 workers. ($200,000 adjusted for inflation to 2020, is just over $6 Million.)
Lyman Stewart, a wealthy oil baron took the president from Moody Bible Institute, RA Torrey, to start the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, (now known as Biola University) and between the years of 1910–1915 they mailed a series of essays called The Fundamentals to every Christian worker in the United States and not a few in China and Korea, the number has been reported as 700,000, an investment of $300k in 1909, equivalent to $8.5–$9 million in 2020 dollars. The goal of The Fundamentals was to erase historical study of the Bible (the Germans) and set required doctrinal points for their Christianity. Those who followed the rough outline of The Fundamentals is where we get the term “Fundamentalism” from.
Walter Rauschenbusch in 1907 published a book detailing what he called the “social gospel” contending that the gospel does apply to society and the wealthy businessmen who controlled it, but fundamentalism was already in the works. McCormick Jr, Rockefeller and Lyman Stewart had already found their preferred interpretation and rewarded it handsomely. Other interpretations were false prophets if they referenced the Bible, godless socialists if they didn’t.
Fundamentalism fell out of fashion after it was seen to be anti-science in one of the most covered news events of the early 20th century, the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial.” Consequently it was much less prominent until people like William Randolph Hearst and Cecil B. Demille promoted Billy Graham to the point he could take his plain reading of the Bible, about personal salvation for life after death and non-rebelliousness on earth, all the way to President Dwight Eisenhower’s White House — which eventually added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 and put “In God We Trust” on all US currency in 1957. Graham’s seemingly less aggressive rebrand came to be known in the US as evangelicalism, a term which had a longer history, but, more activist and less intellectual roots.
This rebrand was successful enough that many born into this US American evangelicalism would never know there was any other version of Christianity on offer. Kierkegaard would say in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
“When Christianity entered into the world, people were not Christians, and the difficulty was to become a Christian. Nowadays the difficulty in becoming a Christian is that one must cease to become a Christian.”
………….
For further reading I recommend
Tim Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: Business, Moody Bible Institute and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Apr. 2015)… Gloege received his PhD in history from Notre Dame. This book is where I first discovered the connection between Haymarket and MBI.
James Green, Death in the Haymarket… Green is a historian at UMass Boston, it’s an excellent, readable overview of the history of the Haymarket affair.
Matt Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Nov. 2014)… Sutton is a historian at Washington State University. This is where I first read about Lyman Stewart and Fundamentalism. Sutton’s work has central the ideas of dispensationalism/end times interpretation which I left out of this article to keep it brief, but, are another huge component in the development of fundamentalism/evangelicalism.
Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion …Upton Sinclair is an influential journalist who uncovered a lot of the ugly side of things in the early 1900s. As a ‘muckraking journalist’ his The Jungle significantly cut into the profits of the meatpacking industry. In this book are articles he wrote on various religious movements of the time.
Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Apr. 2015)…Kruse is a historian at Princeton University, this book is about the allegiance between Corporate America and (fundamentalist/evangelical) Christian America, which became especially in effective during Eisenhower’s presidency in the 1950s, but he argues it began as an anti-New Deal coalition in the 1930s.
Edit: Three more histories which I have read since I initially wrote this are:
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (May 2020) by Kristin Kobes du Mez, she went to Dordt College in Iowa where Trump first campaigned and is now a scholar at Calvin University in Michigan, this book spends a lot of time looking at the masculine influence on the history of white evangelicalism.
The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Jan 2019) by Jemar Tisby, another evangelical himself, though black, Tisby goes through the history of race and the white church in the US — not just evangelicals, but dipping in much further. The portion on George Whitfield renting out slaves to fund his Christian orphanage was particularly mindblowing.
Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education by Adam Laats (Apr. 2018). This one goes through the development of fundamentalist/evangelical universities and seminaries. The original cancel culture.
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll (Oct. 1994). Mark Noll is an evangelical and a historian at the Harvard of US Evangelicalism Wheaton College (now University). He writes this as a “wounded lover” of evangelicalism. The first line is “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” and he laments that his tradition is built on the doctrine of “the intellectual disaster of fundamentalism”. He says everything he says in this book was initiated by a talk given by former UN Prime minister and Lebanese Christian Charles Malik at Wheaton called The Two Tasks. The two tasks he speaks of are evangelism and education, Malik says you do one great, the other you have neglected.
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