The New England Watch and Ward Society

In The New England Watch and Ward Society, P. C. Kemeny offers an expansive study of 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant attempts to reign over American public virtue through the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1878, later called the New England Watch and Ward Society. Throughout, the author mines the depths and intersections of moral reform, shifting American print culture, and the high tide of hegemonic liberal Protestantism in light of antivice campaigns such as the Watch and Ward Society. Aimed toward saving not just individual American souls but American society at large, the efforts of antivice organizations are revealed by Kemeny to be both symptoms of and catalysts for postbellum American attitudes toward increased cultural pluralism and the rise of secular rationality. This is particularly examined through the lenses of enduring late Victorian views about literature, censorship, and moral duty.

The author presents a consistent and well-founded narrative that argues that the New England Protestant establishment was engaged in a culture war against the increased commercialization of perceived vices, such as books that supported the free-love activism touted by Ezra Heywood and others. This was especially the case in well-known Protestant theological circles on the East Coast, whose long-established presence and influence had shaped American cultural values for more than a century. Kemeny carefully illustrates how the Watch and Ward Society acted as a conduit for those principles, emphasizing traditional marriage and family values and working to restore order from chaos in an effort to move closer to the realization of God’s kingdom on earth. In order for America to act as a new Jerusalem, the salacious literature that pervaded the marketplace, thanks to advances in print technology and transportation of goods, had to be stopped. This ultimately resulted in antiobscenity legislation carried out by US Postal inspector Anthony Comstock and fellow antivice sympathizers.

Beyond the Watch and Ward Society’s attack on modern secular literature, Kemeny demonstrates the ways in which the organization expanded its reforms to include crusades against gambling and prostitution. In the context of the literature explored in the text, such as Walt Whitman’s 1883 Leaves of Grass, mainline Protestants feared that such activities would lead Americans to eschew their moral duties to family and society. While gambling “defied … the Protestant work ethic” of the early 20th century, the “white slavery” of prostitution was targeted for its victimization of women and for undermining health and marriage in a life of “professional immorality” (112, 197).

Despite falling short of their aims, liberal Protestants enjoyed continued influence in what Kemeny calls their halcyon days during the progressive era. Though not intentionally linked, the antedated reforms of groups such as the Watch and Ward Society undoubtedly aligned with social gospel and progressive efforts for continued religiously motivated social reform. As Kemeny contends, however, the Watch and Ward Society’s efforts to purify America by eliminating the vices of obscene literature, gambling, and prostitution were failed campaigns. Like the heavenly kingdom that they wished to establish on earth, the success of the antivice crusades was destined to fall short of ideals, particularly when the moral philosophy of the era began to supplant the traditional theological impetus to act morally. In what the author defines as the Watch and Ward Society’s “sudden and dramatic fall from grace,” shifts in politics and society changed American attitudes by the 1930s and reduced Protestant cultural authority (231).

Kemeny’s book is an impeccably researched contribution to studies of late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant moral politics, making connections to broader American trends and reforms to create a comprehensive picture of virtue and vice in a tumultuous period of religious history.

Emily J. Bailey is assistant professor of Christian traditions and religions of the Americas at Towson University.

Emily Bailey

Date Of Review:

March 19, 2021