either welcome back to module five this is part four of the market revolution in our previous segments we saw that American society especially in the north I had changed really dramatically in the first half of the 1800s its geographic expansion happening we're seeing large waves of immigration by the 1830s particularly from Germany from Ireland we see the growth of cities as well as a lot of the problems that we often associate with cities things like poverty or crime or prostitution and keep in mind that all of this is happening in a very short span of time you know 10 15 maybe 20 years for a lot of people it seems like they're very society is being transformed overnight and for 19th century people these changes are going to generate a lot of anxiety we see people trying to cope with these changes in a variety of different ways we see a wave of religious revivals in a surge and reform movements as people try to make sense of these changes or they try to turn society in a different direction some Americans are going to cope with this changing society by turning to religion there was a major wave of religious revivals called the Second Great Awakening that swept through the country really between about 1800 and 1850 it had some of the most significant impact in the north particularly in areas that have been heavily impacted by these economic transportations so areas of upstate New York are going to see wave after wave of revivals this is also the area that has been heavily impacted by the Erie Canal early on a lot of these revivals will basically tent meetings and you can kind of see that down here in the picture on the right if you look in the very background you see a lot of tents set up people have come from perhaps hundreds of miles around so that they can camp out for a few days or maybe a week and here all of these different preachers speak this is also an opportunity for social interaction you can also see here in the slide that women were very enthusiastic participants in all of this event we'll see that women are becoming the majority of church members in this period so women are taking very active roles in this religious experience and this is a very emotional style of a religion it's a style that really appeals to the heart rather to them to the head and you can kind of see that here in the other image I'm showing a very charismatic preacher and just really having in the congregation and hanging on his every word it's a style of religion that really rejects this older notion of predestination that we talked about in an earlier model this idea that your status is fixed and you really can't change anything about it that's not what these people believe now they've come to believe that people can change themselves for the better and that society if you had enough people working together that they can potentially change society that you can actually build a perfect world by improving individuals one at a time these are the kinds of ideas that are going to carry over into a lot of the reform movements that take shape in this period there's this perception that this changing society is going down the wrong path or perhaps that America isn't living up to its ideals of equality or morality that's gonna lend momentum to a lot of these perform addition airs so what we're going to do in this module is just focus on a few specific reforms to get a sense of what these folks want and how they're trying to achieve those goals one major category of reform was utopian reform these folks really believe that mainstream society is going down the wrong path that all these changes that the market revolution has triggered have corrupted Society they believe that in order to restore the proper social vision you have to break away from that corrupt society you need to go off on your own and establish your own separate little perfect world your own separate utopia so they want to go off and create their own little communities that are distinct from mainstream society a lot of these groups are going to emphasize various ideas of perfection you know creating the perfect community and too many of them that includes ideas of equality as well as ideas of communalism working together for the good of the whole rather than the good of the individual some groups that would fit into this category would be folks like the shakers we could perhaps put the Mormons in this category as well and I think in particular a group that we're going to look at a little bit more the Oneida the Oneida community was one of the more successful and more radical of these utopian groups they were led by the guy down here at the bottom with this awesome hipster beard his name was John Moya's he's going to establish a community in upstate New York near the town of Oneida in the 1830s with a group of his followers and so that's where it gets his name on Ida and this is a pretty radical group they are rejecting most mainstream notions about class and gender and property relationships so for example the the image of his building that you see here this was actually a dormitory the members of this community are going to live in dorms communal houses so there's a men's dorm a women's dorm and a children's dorm children are not going to live with their individual biological parents they're going to be raised by the community as a whole because there's this sense that children should not be the exclusive property of their parents particularly their fathers because fathers husbands had a great deal of authority and control over wives and children the Oneida are rejecting that kind of exclusive ownership to give you some other examples they practice communal dining so when you guys go to the cafeteria to get your meals you're probably going to sit down with your own particular group of friends the Oneida don't do that they sit down based on the order that they went through the line because the idea here is that they don't want members forming exclusive or individual attachments with each other because that undermines the integrity of the group so they're really going to work to try to minimize those kinds of exclusive relationships I think the practice that the United were best known for and again very radical idea with something called complex marriage for the Oneida they believe that everybody in this community was considered married to everyone of the opposite sex within that community so all the men are married to all the women in this community and they can all have sex with each other now keep in mind this is not some kind of wacky orgy going on in the backwoods of New York they did have rules about how this was supposed to go down you know Bob and Nancy want to get together they don't just go find a room and do their thing they would have to go to the council of elders and say hey is okay if we get together and that council would have to say yes or no they would keep a record of it too so they know who's getting together with whom and let's say that Bob and Nancy are spending a lot of time together the council of elders sees that they might come to them and say hey we need you guys to start seeing other people they might step in and break them up because they're forming this exclusive relationship with each other that is potentially detrimental to the group now I think the whole premise behind this it's about ensuring equality between men and women again in mainstream society wives were not much more than the property of their husbands they had virtually no legal rights as we'll see here in a few moments so this is rejecting that whole notion this is trying to ensure that women do have some power and that they're seen as equals it's also rejecting this whole idea of individual attachments that husbands and wives have it in each other they're also rejecting the notion that women should be compelled to bear children they do practice a kind of primitive form of birth control again it's the idea that women should be able to make these kinds of decisions about their own bodies and I think the context for this matters too because you have to keep in mind that in the 19th century when women had children they were risking their lives it was very common for women to die in childbirth and in fact Noah is before he found in this community his wife had suffered several miscarriages so he was very familiar with this so this idea of women choosing to bear children it's not just about whether they want to have kids it's about whether they want to risk their lives to do so so the whole idea here is about creating a sense of equality between the people the men and women in this community well it's never a very large group a few hundred people but it lasts for nearly 40 years and I think it does represent a fundamentally different set of ideas about how society should operate other types of reform in this period are focusing on health reform this idea of perfecting the body and again the context for this is important on the 1800s there were epidemics in major cities like Philadelphia New Orleans Baltimore what-have-you things like cholera and yellow fever killed tens of thousands of people and people doctors even didn't yet have an understanding of German theory so they didn't know how these diseases were being contracted and spread all they knew was that their friends and their neighbors and the relatives were dying left and right I mean it was the kind of thing where someone might seem fine in the morning and they dead by nightfall and people couldn't explain it for some folks they interpreted this as some sort of divine judgment as some sort of punishment for societies and morality well for some of these health reformers they're arguing that this kind of social and moral decay can be halted by taking proper care of the body and by living a pure life so we see reformers like this man this was a guy named Sylvester Graham he was one of the leading health reformers he was arguing that you could purify your body by purifying what you put into your body so really calling for a very plain diet lots of vegetables lots of whole grains but no meat no spices no alcohol really no stimulants of any kind well just a very pure bland diet plant-based I guess you could say he's probably best known today for developing the graham cracker although Graham's cracker probably doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what we think of because ours are all jacked up on sugar and preservatives his would have been just a kind of pure bland whole-wheat cracker I guess they'd probably tasted like hard work so not too appealing but the idea here is you know controlling your impulses controlling your urges really exercising restraint over the things you eat now graham is also going to argue that people should limit how much sex they have if you get the idea that these nineteenth-century folks are a little bit hung up on sex they kind of are the common medical theory at the time was that when you have sex you're expending the vital energy that keeps you alive so having too much sex could be bad for you it's bad for your house it could it could make you crazy you could die so Graham is arguing that people should limit you know not just their diet but also they should really exercise restraint over how much sex they have um in all of these reforms that he's proposing are emphasizing self-denial and self-control and I think these values are particularly tied to those new middle-class folks that we talked about in our last section those new entrepreneurs and bosses are those white-collar workers that are starting to emerge these are qualities and being able to control and channel your urges those are qualities that can be linked to economic success and upward mobility so these are things they're going to have particular resonance for these people well these utopian reformers these health reformers they're relatively few in number the single largest reform movement of the the 19th century was the temperance movement or the effort to get people to stop drinking alcohol now these temperance reformers are also going to emphasize self-denial and self-control but there's an added element of outreach it's not enough that I stop drinking I need to go out and convince other people to do the same thing and the main way that reformers try to persuade people is really playing up the social consequences of alcohol so they point to things like the potential for violence whether that's public violence or domestic violence they point to things like alcohol could lead to poor productivity on the job it could increase the potential for injury on the job they point to the health risks of alcohol and they certainly didn't understand addiction and cirrhosis the way that we do but they would have recognized that you know heavy drinkers had health problems they particularly play up the damaging effects of alcohol on the family you know men are supposed to be the breadwinners but if they're spending their wages on booze their wives and their children will have no means of support they may be forced out onto the streets where they have to turn to a life of prostitution and crime to get by I mean they they really you know play up the potential consequences of all of this but particularly emphasizing the the damaging consequences that alcohol can have on the family they also point to consequences that we might not think of they're arguing the alcohol is potentially a threat to our very political system the slide that you see here is called the county election and it's showing a typical Election Day in the 1850s so all the voters in the county arts you'd be expected to come to the courthouse in person to cast your vote and it's gonna be a voice vote so they're not doing secret ballots yet so you have to get up and sing out loud when you're voting for well the candidates were expected to provide alcohol to the voters so when these guys show up to vote they're not just expecting to do their civic duty they're expecting this to be a party well that's what these temperance reformers are worried about you know if you look at the guy down here in the far right corner it looks like he's had a few too many these temperance reformers are saying do you really want that guy voting you know how can we trust that these voters will make good choices if they're drunk maybe they'll elect good leaders but maybe they'll just vote for the guy who gave them the most booze if they're not making good choices there's a potential there to elect bad leaders who could abuse their power and intentionally destroy our very system of Liberty itself so these reformers are arguing that the stakes here are really really high alcohol is potentially damaging to the family to productivity even to our very political institutions we see that women are going to take a particularly active role in the temperance movement you're trying to persuade husbands and brothers and sons to take abstinence pledges to get them to stop drinking alcohol sometimes this is kind of subtle so here in the slide you see a 19th century Valentine you know essentially urging men not to drink because it's saying you know guys if you want to get a girlfriend or find a wife and you do because that's the path to middle-class respectability if you want that you're gonna have to put the bottle down because otherwise women are gonna have nothing to do with you but sometimes women might be a little bit more overt in their attempts to reform behavior here you've got a group of female temperance reformers singing hymns and temperance songs outside a bar to try to shame these men into changing their ways think about this for a second why is it acceptable for women to be doing this we just talked about those ideas of separate spheres which said that women's proper place was to be in the home and yet here you've got a bunch of women out singing songs in the streets I think the key here is that this is seen as an extension of women's moral responsibility women are making the case that you know we're responsible for tech protecting our families morals well alcohol consumption is something that directly impacts our families it's a direct threat to the home so don't we have a moral responsibility to move out into society to try to deal with this problem you know aren't we by extension in society's moral Guardians as long as women are focused on improving moral behavior through these kinds of actions this kind of activity is still seen as acceptable even though it's a public action it's still seen as an acceptable expansion of female activity as long as they don't push too far into overly political arena