Abstract
In the nineteenth century, the socialist movement developed in reaction to the exploitation and political oppression of the working class. Many different types of socialism emerged, from Christian socialism to revolutionary anarchism. In this visual essay, the emphasis does not lie on the isolated voices that advocated a reconciliation of socialism and religion, but on atheist socialists. They formed the mainstream of the socialist labour movement and remained for a long time hostile to all churches and their doctrines. In the opinion of these socialists, the church and religiously motivated politicians used Christianity to blind the workers, keeping them from freeing themselves from the bourgeoisie. The battle in which socialists and Christian politicians were engaged for the workers’ sympathy in election times strengthened this antagonism between socialism and religion even more.
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Notes
James Morone’s Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in America (New Haven and London, 2003) is one the books corroborating this perspective. As the dust jacket of the study indicates, ‘The American Constitution firmly separates church and state. Yet religion lies at the heart of American politics. How did America become a nation with the soul of a church?’
Daniel Walker Howe, What Has God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford and New York, 2007)
George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven and London, 2007).
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, 1978). Bercovitch refers to Stowe’s antislavery novel in ch. 5, which delineates how the jeremiad became ‘a ritual of consensus’ (as the chapter is titled); Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, nn. 174–5.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (New York, 1994 [1852]), 388.
In terms of the specifics that Stowe provides in her depictions of, among others, Miss Ophelia, only those who can run a kitchen should be actively involved in the public domain. Alexis de Tocqueville’s defence of the republican ideology can be found in, among other works, his classic two-volume study on the American political tradition, Democracy in America (1835, 1840); for a more general depiction of the republican ideology, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992).
The most famous example in this respect is Abraham Lincoln. See Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010).
Marianne Noble, ‘The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, The Yale Journal of Criticism (1997), 10.2, 295.
John Dewey and Richard Rorty are among the prominent philosophers who follow in Stowe’s footsteps and adopt many of her ideas. See Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH, 1980 [1927])
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989). For a critique of this position in the public sphere debates
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New Brunswick and London, 1991 [1922])
Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere (Oxford and New York, 2006), 71–2.
When, in the opening chapters of Twenty Years at Hull House, Progressive Era reformer Jane Addams depicts how Christianity and the tradition of domesticity at once stimulated her to adopt a public role and prevented her from engaging in one, she reiterates Stowe’s point; Addams fell ill because of this incongruity and only managed to overcome her depression by becoming a social reformer and activist. See Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York, 1981 [1910]), particularly ch. 3, ‘Boarding-School Ideals’.
Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley and Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill, 1988), is one of the books that discuss the sisters’ convictions on women’s suffrage; see the Introduction and, for Stowe especially, ch. 9, ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe: “The Woman Controversy”’, 259–65.
It is tempting to equate Harriet and her sister Catherine in this respect. In her article about the struggle against Indian removal in the 1830s, Mary Hershberger shows how Catherine’s involvement in the women’s petition campaign against removal induced her to shy away from this type of political action; Mary Hershberger, ‘Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s’, The Journal of American History 86 (1999), 15–40.
Gregg Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge and New York, 2002).
Pierre Rosanvallon, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Princeton, 2011), 190; Rosanvallon’s italics.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford, 1984), 216, 234–5.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Boston, Cleveland and London, 1853). The University of Virginia website that has an edition of the work states that ‘Although it [the book] claims to be about the sources Stowe consulted while writing the novel […] she read many of the works cited here only after the novel was published’. Available at http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/key/kyhp.html
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (New York, 2009 [1856]).
Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise concerning Religious Affections (Philadelphia, 1821 [1746]).
Lauren Berlant (ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York and London, 2004).
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© 2013 Jolijn Groothuizen Dennis Bos
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Groothuizen, J., Bos, D. (2013). Religious Aspects of Socialist Imagery, c.1890–2000: A Visual Essay. In: Augusteijn, J., Dassen, P., Janse, M. (eds) Political Religion beyond Totalitarianism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291721_6
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