21 Gender, Religion, Culture
In 1905, Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller donated $100,000 (about $2.5 million today) to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Rockefeller was the richest man in America, but also one of the most hated and mistrusted. Even admirers conceded that he achieved his wealth through often illegal and usually immoral business practices. Journalist Ida Tarbell had made waves by describing his company’s (Standard Oil) long-standing ruthlessness and predilections for political corruption. Clergymen, led by the reformer Washington Gladden, fiercely protested the donation. A decade earlier, Gladden had asked of such donations, “Is this clean money? Can any man, can any institution, knowing its origin, touch it without being defiled?” Gladden said, “In the cool brutality with which properties are wrecked, securities destroyed, and people by the hundreds robbed of their little all to build up the fortunes of the multi-millionaires, we have an appalling revelation of the kind of monster that a human being may become.”
Despite widespread criticism, the American Board accepted Rockefeller’s donation. Board President Samuel Capen did not defend Rockefeller, arguing the gift was charitable and the Board could not assess the origin of every donation, but the dispute shook Capen. Was a corporate background incompatible with a religious organization? The “tainted money debate” reflected questions about the proper relationship between religion and capitalism. With rising income inequality, would religious groups be forced to support either the elite or the disempowered? What was moral in the new industrial United States? And what obligations did wealth bring? Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote in an 1889 article, “The Gospel of Wealth,” that “the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth” was the moral obligation of the rich to give to charity. Farmer and labor organizers, meanwhile, argued that God had blessed the weak and that new Gilded Age fortunes and corporate management were inherently immoral. As time passed, American churches increasingly adapted themselves to the new industrial order. Even Gladden came to accept Rockefeller’s donation and businessmen, such as the Baptist John D. Rockefeller, increasingly touted the morality of business. At the same time that many churches wondered about the compatibility of large fortunes with Christian values, others were concerned for the fate of traditional American masculinity.
The economic and social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including increased urbanization, immigration, advancements in science and technology, patterns of consumption and the new availability of goods, and growing protestations against economic, gender, and racial inequalities—challenged traditional gender norms. At the same time urban spaces and shifting cultural and social values presented unprecedented opportunities to challenge traditional