The Social Functions of Voluntary Associations in a Nineteenth-Century American Town

Abstract

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

Group Presence, Population, and Interest Group Theory: A Case Study of the American Anti‐Slavery Society

“…Instead of looking broadly across associations and time (Gamm and Putnam, 1999; Skocpol, Ganz, and Munson, 2000; Chamberlain, Yanus, and Pyeatt, 2017), this approach provides the opportunity to hone in on the specific period of time and the factors that were potentially relevant predictors of mobilization among local‐level groups that make up the state‐ and national‐level associations. This approach also improves upon past studies that looked at a single state (Brown, 1974) or community (Doyle, 1977), since relying on a single association and its presence in communities across many states overcomes the geographic limitations of those studies.…”

“…This so‐called urban culture, aided by a well‐developed postal system (John, 1995), was a product of populated communities that were connected to the wider world. Doyle's (1977) work on voluntary associations in Jacksonville, Illinois, from 1820 to 1870 focuses on their roles in a city with a rapidly increasing population, but with heavy turnover. The associations did integrate people into the new environment, but they also helped to solidify the social hierarchy; business and political leaders often found themselves atop the associations.…”