Consecrated Capital: The Business of the Frontier

Charles Carroll Bonney came into his professional prime on a geographic edge of the mythical U.S. western frontier during the consolidation of its colonial occupation. His awareness of this situation echoes in his published speeches and writings. With Frederick Jackson Turner, Bonney understood the western expansion of U.S. territory to be an essential stage in the racial reformation of the nation, the production of industrious citizens, and the growth of democracy.Footnote ¹² But, although these two celebrities of Chicago's Fair shared a common motivation, they oriented themselves differently. Whereas Turner attended the Columbian Exposition and declared with some melancholy that the western frontier was closed, Bonney spent two decades underscoring the potential of commercial exchange to advance human relations and democratic ethos within the new territories. For Bonney, the business of citizenship and the business of capitalism were partners in a task to build a humanistic community of citizens that could span first across the contiguous United States and then abroad. The first step in this project was to move American power—both political and economic, state and private—westward and overseas.

Bonney's position on the intersection of public interest and private business helps to clarify his, perhaps counterintuitive, genealogy as a lawyer. He built his reputation not in litigation on matters immediately pertaining to the legalities of religion but, instead, in his work with interstate commerce and risk-management industries. Bonney's earliest published writings—advisory manuals for railroad and life insurance companies—expressed his commitment to industrial growth. “Aside from legislative and judicial duties,” he mused in the introduction to his booklet, A Summary of the Law of Marine, Fire, and Life Insurance, “the highest office of the lawyer is to apply his legal learning, ability and experience to the development and protection of the great business interests of the country.”Footnote ¹³ Bonney had built his legal career by drafting legal proposals on government regulation of commerce and defending them before the U.S. Congress. These included a bill to empower railroad companies to travel across state lines (1861), a bill to create uniformity in paper used in interstate commerce (1882), and a bill to extend government bailouts of debtor companies who had lost their money in spite of their good intentions and ethical business practices (1886).

Bonney saw business as more than merely a means for generating funds or exercising personal freedom for business people; he believed that the capital raised and circulated in U.S. commerce could exercise a certain sanctifying moral power over its subjects. In wise hands—such as the hands of honest American businessmen—capital was more than just capital. It was “consecrated capital.” “To consecrate,” Bonney declared in an 1885 speech in which he laid out this theory, “is defined to be set apart to sacred uses: to set apart and devote to the service of God. In the light of Christian civilization, the service of God embraces the entire domain of human relations.”Footnote ¹⁴ Against imagined detractors who accused for-profit endeavors of corruption, Bonney opined that if “touched by the Master's hand, purified by his spirit, even money becomes a new creature.” Money gained altruistic agency from a divine wellspring:

Bonney renders money as something much greater than an instrument in reform projects. Consecrated, it becomes something much closer to the foundational agency of these efforts. Humans do not simply apply consecrated capital to particular ends; consecrated capital is more like the animator and director of human action. We notice the many anthropomorphic qualities imbued in money. Money has desires, longing to be unlocked for the purposes of charity. Once it is unlocked, money builds its long resume of good works. It is a Christ figure, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, but it is also laying the bricks for the trinity of total institutions so valorized in industrial reform: schools, churches, and asylums. It “share[s] the burdens” of not just individual teachers, ministers, and missionaries in these spaces, but also the travails “incident to organized society.” It is significant that the money's power for the “reform of abuses” is the last endorsement in its list of qualifications. Bonney understood this social reform, by which the world could finally achieve harmonious organization, as the principle responsibility of his epoch.

Although Bonney granted that “criminal money, wicked, malignant, accursed money, flaunts its flags and blows its trumpets on every hand,” he made this concession by way of condemning naysayers who had eyes for its “Borgian crimes”:

Hand in hand with the legal system that Bonney also loved—which, as we will see, he also imagined as endowed with a sovereign animating agency—consecrated capital marched forward to make peace in the world. A yearning for a reconciling reform was the hinge between the dreams of Bonney's capitalism and the philosophy of his civil service. “Money is the power of the world,” Bonney quipped.Footnote ¹⁷ But this power had to be unleashed. Here is where the state would come in. Bonney knew that interstate commerce, railroads, and new spaces for capital incursion depended on the growth and organization of new U.S. territory. Consecrated capital's reformation project could not unfold without this preparatory step.

Beneficent Sway: The Evolution of Christian Governance

Bonney's background in secondary education and jurisprudence merged as a conviction that U.S. legal structures themselves served a pedagogical purpose for subjects, and potential subjects, of the nation. The influence of U.S. laws—specifically over new immigrants, striking workers, and indigenous people in western territories—promised to prepare the way for a public bound together in a Christian peace. Bonney's preferred object lesson to illustrate this idea was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which extended U.S. governance to territories northwest of the Ohio River. He saw this act as the third limb of a sacred troika whose first and second elements were the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. The Ordinance earned its status in the group because it seemed to establish Protestant Christianity in the new territories’ schools.

Addressing the Chicago College of Law in 1876, Bonney explained that the Ordinance charged public schools with “inculcating religion, morality, and knowledge, as necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” According to Bonney, these words forged an “irrevocable compact” between new U.S. territories and a “broad and tolerant” faith. Tolerance was in the eye of Bonney's own beholding, however. “The religion here meant, was, according to the fixed rules of legal construction, the Protestant form of Christianity,” he explained. He interpreted it further as a decree that students read “the King James version of the sacred Scriptures, being that broad and tolerant form of Christianity, without distinction of creed, which the courts and jurists hold to be a part of the common law.”Footnote ¹⁸ He repeated a well-documented tendency of nineteenth-century Protestants to frame their religious practices as secular, but he did so from the western edge of its settler-colonial project, underlining the extent that a vision of Protestant governance and educated subjects remained inextricable from U.S. colonial advance.Footnote ¹⁹

The College of Law speech used the Northwest Ordinance as an entrée into the main subject on Bonney's mind: why the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible should retain a prominent place in Chicago's own public education system. As was common in this period, KJV reading had come under attack by Catholics who objected to this practice in public institutions.Footnote ²⁰ Bonney saw this position as absurd; a divine order, actualized through the American government, required the KJV.Footnote ²¹ The “compact between the thirteen original states and the people of the territory” did not merely grant entry rights to the KJV but rather “demands its presence there.” This practice would be the foundation of both expansionist right and democratic freedom. A Chicago Times reporter summarized, “The perfect freedom which all other forms of faith had enjoyed under the provisions of the ordinance was abundant proof of the beneficent sway of legal Christianity, free from sectarian control.”Footnote ²² The question of scripture in schools held in its balance the future of the nation and the unity it promised to forge. For Bonney, routines of recitation and reading exerted an almost alchemical power on their practitioners. They were rituals of citizenship, which cultivated subjects for economic and social reform, even as they pointed back to a steady basis in Protestant law and Protestant education.

At the foundation of Bonney's account of legal pedagogy was his concept of “judicial evolution.” This was his idea that juridical frameworks contained a metaphysical capacity to “expand with the growth and development of the country.”Footnote ²³ Bonney introduced this concept in a keynote speech to the American Bar Association, in which he attacked another member's argument that judges should imagine their role as creating policy from the court bench. Bonney urged judges to suspend any political interest in order to surrender to the “sovereign” character of the U.S. system. “Few rules that regulate human contact were crafted by legislative hands” but instead “evolved from the experience of mankind, in the progress and development of civilization.” For Bonney, the U.S. system was a pinnacle of this arc, having “risen under the hands of its master-builders, with a harmony, strength, and beauty as fascinating to the lawyer and the judge as is the matchless Cathedral of Milan to the eye of an architect or a poet.”Footnote ²⁴ As he urged his audiences to imagine the American system as a building without architects, he prescribed moral action as cooperation with a plan far too grand for individuals to fathom alone.

Bonney sounded this theme across Chicago's lecture halls. To the Congregational Club, he contended that the Constitution could “not be regarded as the product of a human mind[;] its growth had been a process extending through a long period of years … [and] successive stages of development.”Footnote ²⁵ He traced this arc through the Protestant Reformation, which he understood as the theological foundation for and political precursor to the American Revolution. “The effect of the religious movement of the sixteenth century … was the truth that every individual man is responsible to God,” he opined. “The development of this idea brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock … and gave birth to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”Footnote ²⁶ Reformation history provided a warm-up to the U.S. Constitutional system. “[T]he American Constitution came down from heaven,” he exhorted students at Chicago's Manual Training School. It is “the gift of the Sovereign Ruler of the universe, that free government might be established, far transcending any that ever existed.”Footnote ²⁷ It followed that the United States and its agents had a special role to play in ushering other nations toward a more advanced stage.Footnote ²⁸

Such rhetoric had immediate implications for the treatment of indigenous people in the United States. Bonney considered how American Indians fit into his moral-legal program when, in 1884, he participated in a round table–style discussion about whether the state should interfere with indigenous nations on the western frontier.Footnote ²⁹ Bonney agreed with his colleague, Henry Spackman Pancoast, that the U.S. government should cease recognizing American Indian sovereign nations, should privatize reservation land, and should respond to “insubordination” by cutting off reservations’ food supply. He elaborated on this position in response to three previously provided prompts: First, will American Indians “be willing or easily induced to submit their disputes to the decision of a judicial officer?” Second, if American Indians are “unwilling to submit to judicial trial, could [they] be COMPELLED by civil process to keep the peace during a litigation?”Footnote ³⁰ Third, should the Bureau of Indian Affairs assign individual magistrates to govern reservations? Bonney would not compromise: “One judge [assigned to] each reservation, and submission to the law should be strictly enforced, as among white men, without regard to ‘willingness.’”Footnote ³¹ Where American Indians are “semi-civilized” and it is “practicable,” however, they might access “equal rights with whites in United States or local courts.”Footnote ³² Against many of his colleagues, who argued in the same round table that indigenous peoples should be barred from all privileges of U.S. citizenship on the basis of immutable genetic inferiority, Bonney carved out a liberal position anchored in progressive racial rehabilitation.Footnote ³³ He insisted that American Indians should have access to judicial redress, raised not just against members of their communities, but also against Bureau of Indian Affairs agents and other white men. This position, influenced by philosophies of social evolution that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century, assumed the imminence of social progress under the right conditions. As an adviser for the “Friends of the Indian” association in Chicago, Bonney recommended that white citizens assume a tutelary role with respect to indigenous people.Footnote ³⁴ On a comparatively progressive vanguard of racial theorization, he exchanged biological theories of race for a view of a singular human race whose members’ differences were explained by their places on an evolutionary continuum. With the proper legal and economic interventions, no subject was beyond the possibility of development.

Bonney's optimism and tolerance stood in contrast to the positions advocated by some of his judicial colleagues. He advocated for constitutional freedom and universal citizenship with an eye to how such reforms would benefit settler colonial subjects—would even make friends of them—and there was an unmistakable warning in his position. If his line was comparatively tolerant, it was simultaneously an assimilationist platform that threatened carceral consequences for anyone who rejected a program of reform and served as an argument for the state's expansionist project. Bonney's theories were a late-nineteenth-century formation of what Chandan Reddy names a “freedom with violence,” wherein national conquest is justified by promises of inclusive citizenship in the modern nation-state, presented as “the best possible totality for worldwide social relations.”Footnote ³⁵ The education that Bonney promoted was a missionary project. It sought not to create new exclusions or erect new borders but, rather, to enfold more subjects into a turn-of-the-century state building project. Bonney's eye, as ever, was on the frontier.

This vision would eventually span beyond U.S. western territory. Bonney envisioned the advance of U.S. law as a force that would establish peace across oceans. In 1889, just as plans for the World's Parliament of Religions got underway, Bonney proposed the creation of an International Court of Justice that would be a similar meeting point for the world. It would use the U.S. legal system as a model for the arbitration of justice issues around the globe.Footnote ³⁶ The endeavor would have been the logical culmination of his previous causes, whose common ground lay in a zeal for expanding the boundaries of U.S. legal power and preparing subjects to conform to it. Proper citizenship involved submission to a self-consciously, normatively, and timeless Protestant legal system that provided a canopy for global relations and a context for capital expansion. Within this scheme, American law could not be extricated from a manifest Protestant framework that saw all others as potential converts to its norms. Nor could morality be extricated from its basis in submission to U.S. law. This relationship between tutelage toward citizenship and missionary Protestantism materialized in the “beneficent sway” of empire. This position would have consequences not only for the indigenous people Bonney sought to bring under U.S. governance, but also for legions of industrial immigrant workers fighting for their own economic survival.

There is No Peace: Securing Law and Order

Bonney's position that providence works itself out in the evolution of legal structures and the circulation of capital was not an abstract claim. It often had an implied target in the growing labor movement gripping Chicago and the nation. Bonney criticized organized labor for its mistrust in U.S. governance. He lamented the “millions of treasure [that] had been wasted and destroyed” by “strikes, riots, and violence,” putting the city's prosperity to ruin. He read it most of all as an opportunity lost. “Had one-fifth of that sum been expended in educating the people in their duties as citizens, in showing them there is no honorable pursuit in which they are not protected by the government, no wrong for which they may not demand justice and restitution, it would have been a wise expenditure of money.”Footnote ³⁷ If Chicago residents needed to be convinced that reform projects were a pressing issue, they should look no further than the swelling legions of workers who were striking and rioting for better working conditions.Footnote ³⁸

Scholars of the Gilded Age have identified middle- and elite-class anxiety as the roots of progressive reform. Commenting on this dynamic, the historian, Nell Painter, writes, “Fear of revolution appeared repeatedly in [progressive arguments about] why this or that evil needed to be eliminated. Fear of working-class violence explains much of what has been called progressive reform.”Footnote ³⁹ To underline the self-preservationist impulses of reformers is not to suggest that progressives lacked a concern about ameliorating the privation of working-class life or improving the health of their cities—certainly they wanted such things—but, rather, to highlight the ways their reforms also preserved their own class position. Bonney fit this bill; his efforts to propagate respect for the law were never far removed from a creeping sense of threat from organized labor dominated by a German-Irish working class. Drawing on his own experience in law, he believed that mass education in the duties and privileges of citizenship, focused particularly on jurisprudence and directed at labor, would halt conflict between labor and capital before it spiraled out of control.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, in which tens of thousands of workers froze the country's transit system until police and national guardsmen shut down their demonstrations, spurred Bonney to action. The strike motivated him to join with colleagues to found the National Citizens’ Law and Order League. This association stated its primary purpose as generating wider respect for and submission to the law, with a secondary purpose of saving young people from destructive habits. Underneath this rhetoric was the specter of revolutions fomented in a very particular place: saloons that sold liquor to minors.Footnote ⁴⁰ Original members of the league had observed during the Great Railroad Strike that “a large proportion of the rioters were half-drunken boys” and that “such boys, estimated to number thirty thousand, were habitual patrons of the liquor saloons of Chicago, and were undergoing a rapid transformation into drunkards, vagrants, paupers, lunatics, and criminals.”Footnote ⁴¹ “Without rum,” Bonney declared before a crowd of supporters, “there will be no riot.”Footnote ⁴² League members not only spoke publicly about the dangers of liquor, but also were deputized by local city police to organize raids on saloons, to employ private detectives to pursue violations of alcohol law, and to perform citizen's arrests.Footnote ⁴³ Its early, revival-style meetings drew thousands of supporters. Just three years after its genesis, the League claimed chapters in cities as wide ranging as New York, Cincinnati, Newark, Boston, Nashville, and Chicago; by 1890, it had a chapter in Canada. The ranks of national officers in its first decade included such progressive stars as department store mogul John C. Wanamaker, storied social gospeler Washington Gladden, Catholic Archbishop John C. Ireland, Freedman's Bureau commissioner General O. O. Howard, and Christian Union editor and Congregationalist pastor Lyman Abbott.Footnote ⁴⁴ If our historiography of the social gospel has tended to put such actors in different social and political groups, here we find them in active alliance to bring the urban immigrant poor into order.

Bonney and his contemporaries did not publicly consider that exploitative business practices or roaming vigilante groups of elites would foment the conflicts they sought to resolve; the culprit still lay in the corrupting influence of alcohol, or “that great evil of making boys and girls criminals.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The rhetoric of the organization usually focused on the protection of youth, but the warnings also coded the fear that these same young people would turn against the state.Footnote ⁴⁶ The League's attempts to enforce selective liquor laws were an opening act to the raced and classed policing of twentieth-century Prohibition laws. By inciting fears of organized labor through rhetoric about liquor's corrupting power, members of the League promoted the surveillance not just of poor, ethnic, immigrant populations but of the body politic at large.Footnote ⁴⁷

When it came to control of the liquor industry, Bonney saw the U.S. public, and its defenders in the League, as engaged in a struggle of cosmic proportions. In his first address as the organization's president, he called for vigilante citizens to “raise an army” for a “moral revolution” against the “stupendous evil of the liquor traffic.” He warned his fellow militiamen of the battle ahead:

Recall Painter's point that reformers saw themselves amid a revolutionary struggle for the future of the nation. Besides comparing League members to Revolutionary War–era minutemen and using a biblical allusion to affirm both groups as divinely favored, Bonney presented the law as embroiled in a time of trial dire enough to require intervention from citizen watch groups. League materials seemed to anticipate accusations that they acted extralegally. They emphasized that the organization did not seek to create or break laws, but rather to “enforce existing laws relating to the welfare of the commonwealth, the maintenance of good order, and the suppression of intemperance and crime.”Footnote ⁴⁹ By “asking only obedience to the Laws” the League framed itself as “sinking all sectarian differences; agreeing to disagree about all questions as to what laws would be best.”Footnote ⁵⁰ If the laws provided common ground for all people, it followed that those who broke the laws composed a sectarian enemy afflicting the body politic with its “gigantic evil.”Footnote ⁵¹ Bonney urged League members to come to the aid of “that imperial power by which the people preserve and enforce their real sovereignty”: the police. “Police power,” he announced, “declares by the judicial voice of the people that … all personal rights and privileges must yield to the demands of the public good.” It went unsaid that this public good would be defined not by workers’ unions nor recent immigrants, but the business class of the city.Footnote ⁵² At stake in the “sacred warfare” against liquor and its disorders was not just the order and peace of society, but also an embodied community's relationship to God. As Lyman Abbot emphasized during the same meeting, “Laws are the successive steps up God's throne.”Footnote ⁵³

On an ideological continuum from middle-class progressive reformers to the welfare capitalism of business moguls, and within the growing ranks of voluntary associations during this historical period, Bonney and his voluntary club at first seem to stake out a kind of middle ground.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet, his position between progressive state reform and capital advance helps us see the fallacy of insisting on clear divisions between business interests and social progressives. The historiography of Christians in the Progressive Era has tended to underscore the well-intentioned critique of social-gospel Christians over and against the profit motives of baron capitalists.Footnote ⁵⁵ When historians critique the social gospel, we are likely to emphasize how, despite good intentions, its middle-class and elite reformers did not connect well enough with the protests and grievances of workers, themselves. Striving to recover working-class voices, historians’ constructive response to this problem has been to recuperate the Christianity of the picket line and union hall.Footnote ⁵⁶ Alternating our attention between the social intentions of the wealthy and the activist innovations of the poor, our pattern of interpretation has unfolded alongside rich literature on the multifaceted progressive movement of which the social gospel, also internally contested and diverse, is a part. Many historians, who otherwise downplay the role of Christianity in progressive movements, have argued convincingly that turn-of-the-century industrialization and Progressive-Era reform was a period of expanded institution building and consolidation of state power in the service of industrial power.Footnote ⁵⁷ Bonney's life, as well as the roster of allies with whom he worked, reveal a need to integrate these historiographical strands.

Using a language of both state policing and privatized humanitarianism, Bonney promoted reform in a way that served the interests of businesses, promoted an emergent carceral state, and endorsed progressive and reformist Christianity.Footnote ⁵⁸ Bonney's published writings urged both workers and bosses to conduct themselves by the Golden Rule, and, in doing so, he never failed to mention that U.S. laws were the proper instruments for actualizing this higher good.Footnote ⁵⁹ Striking workers constituted the greatest threat to this mutual self-regard of workers and bosses and the judicial systems that facilitated its postures. Not only did strikes squander profits and alienate employers, they also flouted existing avenues for judicial redress. Bonney, however, believed that civic education would prove the exigency of appealing to the state as a mediator of class conflict and, in the process, demonstrate the fallacy of worker strikes. This conviction flowed into his position on immigration. Given the level of labor unrest in the city, the government must deny naturalization to any immigrant who failed to show “evidence of being sincerely attached to our constitution and laws.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Proof of this attachment hinged on markers of class status. Bonney further held that “he who cannot support himself cannot support the Constitution” and that “he who cannot read and write cannot intelligently take the oath of citizenship.”Footnote ⁶¹ Such statements implicitly restricted legal access to rights—and the capacity for encouraging citizenship in others—to a population that excluded working-class people in his own jurisdiction. Bonney, however, saw this problem as one that the right kind of intervention could correct.

If the ethnic working class flouted national norms, the aftermath of the Haymarket riots found Bonney blaming Chicago's genteel class for neglecting the moral education of immigrants. “Instead of taking them into our friendly charge on their arrival, and teaching them what our laws require, and the glorious purpose of our free institutions to elevate and enlighten all who come under their influence,” he scolded, Chicago's elites had watched as conniving, working-class politicians and anarchists manipulated newcomers.Footnote ⁶² In the wake of labor conflict, the city's elite class faced a moment of truth. “Do we owe to those people no duty of Christian civilization? Is it right to maintain no system of teaching them what they can not otherwise know?” Bonney asked. He framed the duty of evangelism as a matter of inculcating the power of law before extremists, “follow[ing] the red flag of murder and arson,” could attract converts in their campaign to destroy “the religion, the civilization, the laws and the institutions which are the life and glory of the great republic, and the four-fold crown of the new age of light and progress.”Footnote ⁶³ Now the streets echoed with the “war-cries” of “No God! No Master! No Law! No Property! NIHIL! Nothing!”Footnote ⁶⁴ Bonney bemoaned that “Law and Order meekly submitted to the indignities offered them, and tacitly conceded the equal right of their deadliest foes to possess and enjoy the land.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The moral battle had reached a breaking point.

Bonney's position in the Citizens’ Law and Order League, combined with his public face in Chicago, positioned him to make an intervention. Bonney urged “the law-abiding people of the United States” to establish satellite “Law and Order Missions” that would instruct “the masses of toiling people” in ten key “truths,” including “the purposes and principles of free government,” “the relations of civil and religious liberty to each other,” and “the criminal nature of attempts to secure higher wages or the like, by conspiracy, intimidation or force, and the certainty of failure and serious loss.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The missions would press disgruntled workers to air their grievances not on picket lines or in union halls, but to labor departments and other “great facilities provided by our incorporation laws.” Such an education campaign would transform relations between capital and labor into a “wedding, not a war,” but it would also extend the gift of spiritual freedom to the masses: “Under such teachings our toiling masses would know the truth,” explained Bonney, “and, as the master saith, THE TRUTH WOULD MAKE THEM FREE (John 8:32).”Footnote ⁶⁷ Although the missions never gained broad traction, by the end of that year, Bonney had drafted and testified on behalf of national legislation that would have created state-run arbitration boards to mediate conflicts between workers and bosses.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both explicitly and in his use of biblical quotations to naysay labor movements, Bonney cleaved to a law that wielded redemptive power in both present time and in an arc of salvation history. A perceptive Chicago attorney reflected after his colleague's death, “Mr. Bonney was more than a lawyer. The profession he had selected was the noblest of all, because it deals most closely with that without which civilization is impossible. He believed thoroughly in the regnant influences of human law.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Law and Order teaching initiatives were only one kind of mission; the broader mission was extant in the law, in capital, and in the life of the man so perfectly placed on their intersection. As Bonney climbed Chicago's social ladders, he would find more ways to build the law's “regnant influence” in the hearts and minds of all people—namely, by encouraging the spread of “consecrated capitalism” and intervening against the rising tide of labor resistance. In doing so, he would join a larger band of capitalists who tied together wealth acquisition with philanthropic intervention. If he never raked in cash in the manner of a Rockefeller or a Carnegie, Bonney's positions on the court bench and in the League linked him to such figures as the legal champion of their social and economic visions.

Crowning Glory: Producing the Parliament

A cacophony of cries for a living wage, for law and order, for an eight-hour workday, for peace between labor and capital, and for a return to Christian unity, were loud background noise when, in September 1889, the U.S. Congress announced that Chicago would host a world exposition in honor of Columbus's 1492 conquest of American shores. Economic barons from around the country raced to put their signature on the event as its underwriters, as Chicago's political leadership class turned to the bare logistics of the coming celebration of industrial might and technological progress.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bonney, meanwhile, was wrapped up in different concern. The proposed event seemed excessively materialistic. Bonney went to work correcting the problem. He began to imagine an auxiliary event that would honor the “enlightened and progressive spirit of the present age” by making the Exposition's “crowning glory” something “higher and nobler” than “the material triumphs, industrial achievements, and mechanical victories of man.”Footnote ⁷¹ In contradistinction to the spectacular, sensory quality of the broader fair, the World's Congress Auxiliary embraced the motto “men, not things.” Bonney appointed subcommittees on topics ranging from homeopathy to railroads, women's labor to dentistry. He asked each committee to oversee a subconference on philosophical innovations in those fields. The centerpiece of the Auxiliary would be the Parliament of Religions. As the ultimate consecration of the Exposition's capital, it garnered disproportionate attention during and long after the event.

Bonney's vision of a divine agency that animated both capital accumulation and the evolution of law—and that inspired the good deeds of both in the world—were extant in his plans for the Auxiliary in general, and the Parliament of Religions in particular.Footnote ⁷² That is, for all of its appeals to immaterial virtue, the Auxiliary did not disavow accumulation and wealth. Rather, it offered a platform from which nations could showcase their intellectual and spiritual achievements alongside their technology and industry. Scholars have since identified questions to ask immediately when faced with such performances of diversity: Into what normative whole is diversity being embraced? What are the terms of the welcome? Is this performance of pluralism and multiculturalism a supplement to some greater violence?Footnote ⁷³

The imperial smoking gun in the Parliament is not difficult to find. The motif of a conquering Columbus pervaded the Auxiliary's dedicatory events. John Henry Barrows, appointed by Bonney to direct the operations of the Parliament, opened the ceremonies with a long prayer of gratitude for “the discoverer of this Western continent, whose brave heart was eager to add new realms to the Empire of the Cross”:

As Barrows returned to his seat, League officer Archbishop John Ireland took the stage to deliver a keynote speech, in which he declared that men are “the highest products of progress” and that the United States stood as the central example of human evolution. Ireland had built a reputation among Protestant liberals for his brand of “Americanized” Catholicism, evidenced in his opposition to Catholic parochial schools, his hostility toward ethnic Catholic parishes, and his rebukes of both tyrannical bosses and labor unions.Footnote ⁷⁵ Ireland's leadership at the Parliament should not detract from its organizers’ desire to forge a Protestant universality. His presence attests to the pressures to form one's religious self in the mold of a patriotic nationalism that sprang from a well of incorporative Protestant piety. The organizers of the Parliament were not interested in building borders, but in forging unity.

There was no better candidate for such a role. Ireland declared that an omnipotent God had “held in reserve this region of his predilection, awaiting the propitious moment in humanity's evolution to bestow it on men, when men were worthy to possess it.” Now, on the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's invasion, the dream of this progress had reached a stage of active realization:

Bonney and his colleagues maintained that the Parliament had a central role to play in advancing this mission into a promised future. Ireland celebrated the new “Columbuses of our time,” who would conquer the hearts and minds of all of those gathered at the Exposition.Footnote ⁷⁷ Through the invocation of Columbus, the voices of the Auxiliary sutured Christian faith to a march into and beyond a western frontier.

From its opening sentences, the Auxiliary and the Parliament sought to create a global public bound by U.S. empire. It is not new to observe the unyielding grip of empire on late-nineteenth-century religious and economic cultures. Students of the Parliament and its reverberating pluralism have been well aware of these dynamics. But we are less conscious of the concerted efforts to resist these articulations in the very Gilded Age contexts of their genesis. Not all parties endorsed the vision of Bonney, Ireland, and Barrows, individuals whose words not only glossed the bloody trail of U.S. imperial history but, also, ignored the political economy of the Auxiliary itself. Others sought to speak, and to be heard. That our histories have forgotten their voices is something this article seeks to rectify.

In the earliest stages of logistical planning, trouble had erupted between the society men who oversaw the events and the labor organizers in their periphery. The Trades and Labor Assembly requested and then demanded that the committees give work priority to unionized workers, that they adhere to the eight-hour workday, and that they pay a minimum wage of $1.50 per day.Footnote ⁷⁸ First National Bank of Chicago president and exposition chair Lyman Gage refused these requests, countering that “in a national undertaking it would be unjust not to recognize the great body of unorganized laboring men.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Because “this country is a free one,” he explained, the Exposition board cannot “dictate to American labor that it must join this or that association before it may enjoy equal rights with others before the Exposition. It is a matter of conscience and principle with us.”Footnote ⁸⁰ But even as executive leadership mobilized classic charges against collective bargaining, they offered the Auxiliary as an alternative collective forum in which to address “the conflicts of labor and capital.” In the wake of this fight between advocates of union labor and the general leadership, Bonney created a committee of business and labor leaders in the city to address “the various problems of employment, compensation, profit-sharing, and the like.”Footnote ⁸¹ Bonney appointed moderate socialist Walter Thomas Mills to chair the Labor Committee and, together, they garnered endorsement and participation from labor leaders around the city.Footnote ⁸²

The members of the Labor Committee began to suspect that the Auxiliary's rhetoric of conflict-free inclusion exercised a disciplinary power. Namely, they foreclosed critiques of capitalism. In November, Darrow submitted his resignation and sent his acerbic letter to Lloyd. Laced with sarcasm and name-calling, Darrow described how “Mr. Mills—Rev. Mills—has tried to quiet the committee” with false assurances that he and “Mr. Wordy Bonney” will “consent to any programme they make.”Footnote ⁸³ But Darrow maintained that anyone paying attention could see through this lie, because “the bosses” had already set the terms and limits of the debate. Darrow framed the relations between the Auxiliary leadership and the actual committee as one of calculated deception on the part of the “bosses” and false consciousness on the part of the petit bourgeois charged to carry out their bidding. But Darrow saw through it: The promise of autonomy could not overcome Auxiliary leaders who had already set the terms of debate and who believed that “lying is proper if it results in the Glory of God, which of course means his agents.”Footnote ⁸⁴ “The [Labor] committee,” Darrow concluded, “is being deceived and played with for the purpose of confounding and misleading the cause of labor, and especially to prevent any radical utterances by any independent men or bodies.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A century before scholars of religion would turn their interpretive arsenal against the Parliament's discourse, critics at the center of the event were making a similar point against its pluralism. Darrow named how this particular pluralism chose not to exclude its dissidents, but rather to neutralize their critiques by including them in a managed form.

Darrow had company in his concern. Less than a month after he resigned, the parallel Committee on Women's Labor—chaired by Ada C. Sweet and featuring prominent reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr—resigned en masse. The Labor Committee's aims, they stated, were “entirely irreconcilable with those of the President of the World's Congress Auxiliary.” Bonney and his executive Auxiliary Committee, moreover, had overridden an original program that prioritized “ideas upon which working people are at present founding their hopes of advancement” and replaced it with a “general and vague” agenda. The new plan, to which no Labor Committee member had consented, not only would render it “impossible to secure the cooperation of the leaders representing the various labor organizations” but also would “justly arouse the suspicion of the laboring people.”Footnote ⁸⁶ They claimed that the Auxiliary leadership had pressured the Labor Committee to align with “ecclesiastical bodies” rather than maintaining a “broad and unsectarian character,” which they saw as nonnegotiable. Following many attempts to resolve these problems, the Women's Committee concluded not only that Bonney had cast them as disempowered figureheads, but also that the Auxiliary's “controlling power” intended “no adequate presentation of the labor question.”Footnote ⁸⁷ They refused to tolerate this insult. “We are not willing to have any appearance of connection with what will be offered as a substitute for a real labor congress,” the statement concluded, before it demanded that the women's names be removed from all event literature. In more direct language, Sweet noted to a journalist that the members of her committee would be “very much embarrassed” at any affiliation with the “so-called Labor Congresses.”Footnote ⁸⁸ If the bid for labor's inclusion was going to have such neutralizing effects, the only answer was to quit.

Bonney managed the insubordination by way of familiar appeal to educational reform. He suggested that the defectors were insufficiently aware of the event's core values. To the press, he rearticulated the purposes of the Auxiliary, expressed surprise at the women's indignation, claimed that he had never received a resignation letter, and suggested that the “very estimable women” had misapprehended the intentions of the committee. “I think I may safely predict,” he mused, “that when the plans for the Labor Congress are more fully understood the resignation will be withdrawn.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Meanwhile, General Auxiliary Committee member and U.S. congressperson Charles E. Dixon mused that “the religious feature was probably the real bone of contention” for the women.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although the journalist did not elaborate on Dixon's statement, this passing reference—combined with the Labor Committee's stated suspicion of religion and Bonney's conviction that the Parliament would be the Auxiliary's “splendid crown”—speaks to the entanglement of its universalist religious morality, hostility toward organized labor, and legal fanfare in the context of the Auxiliary.Footnote ⁹¹ Bonney emphasized that the purpose of the Parliament of Religions was to unite “all religion against irreligion” and to “make the Golden Rule the basis of this union.”Footnote ⁹² Bonney's account of the Golden Rule must be read in relation to his life and labor. For him, this Rule had always been inseparable from his account of the rule of U.S. law that—as his other pursuits made clear—needed to be exercised toward the discipline of indigenous subjects of the state and the immigrant working class. The projects of religious unity, empire, and capitalist accumulation converged at the Auxiliary. Talk of plural peace was not a gloss on labor suppression and territorial expansion. Rather, these practices were mounted as triplet ends, inseparable from one another. From the Parliament's nostalgia for Columbus's conquest to the attempts to undermine organized labor, the Parliament's rhetoric of manifest progress wrapped a velvet glove around the fist of Law and Order working in service of capital.

How Was It Wrought?

Two years before his death, Charles Bonney published a sixteen-page, twenty-movement epic poem titled “America.” Part historical account and part romantic ode, the poem opened with a description of the fertile chaos of the New World before chronicling the progress of “Invading hosts who made the land their own / And turned it to the uses of mankind.”Footnote ⁹³ After ten pages of narrative, he comes to the present moment:

Bonney conjures the miracle of multicultural harmony and national unity. He then asks a rhetorical question: How was it wrought? For him, the answer is simple: God made it possible. Penned toward the end of his long life, Bonney believed that American governance made possible a flourishing unity in diversity. This effect composed the best argument for a U.S. expansion into further territories and empowerment of capital within them. This campaign proceeded for the good of potential citizen-subjects who, when enfolded in the national embrace, could take their place in America's “living temple” at the end of history. His poem continued,

Notice how Bonney articulates the manifest destiny of U.S. governance through a disavowal of its conquering intent. America is not a violent supremacy, he insists, but a pastoral supremacy of fraternity, law, and justiceFootnote ⁹⁶:

The potent and growing critique of religion and U.S. empire has already taught scholars how to eviscerate the presuppositions of the poem.Footnote ⁹⁸ We have learned to notice how, as Bonney conflated U.S. empire with world unity, patriotism with freedom, and the republic with human service, he also filled the discourse of religious unity with its own conditions and limits. Just as “nonsectarianism” can code for “legislated Protestant morality,” so can “common ground” and “unity” code for “American empire with divine sanction.”

Less apparent in our critiques has been attention to the physical labors of putting pluralism into place. A portrait of Charles Bonney's life—with its entanglements of religion, law, and economics—can prompt better questions about formations of multiculturalism and its relationship to state and economic power. What is the social history of pluralist dreams? What do these dreams look like when organized into material forms? How are these forms contested and remade? In the life of Charles Carroll Bonney, the pluralist hope was as much about administering U.S. law on Indian reservations, establishing a parapolice association to control labor, and crafting advice manuals for railroad barons, as it was about leading the Parliament of Religions. My intention in making this point is not to assess the Parliament's claims to inclusion. Critics have already done this, from Clarence Darrow's tirade in 1892 to scholarly exposés on pluralism since. We need not take fully onboard Darrow's somewhat reductive charge that the Parliament willfully confused the causes of labor and backed the interests of capital in a rhetoric of unity. To imagine the Parliament's pluralism as a mere front for an underlying mission to undermine unions or colonize new territory is to create an anachronistic hierarchy of these three causes. A more satisfying account would have Bonney's three primary causes—the enforcement of state law, the promotion of consecrated capital, and the progress of religious unity—working together.

The Citizen's Law and Order League and A Summary of the Law of Fire, Marine, and Life Insurance belong as much to the canon of American religious history as does the World's Parliament of Religions. Certainly any rendering of the Parliament's pluralist peace is incomplete if it is not situated as an artifact of U.S. political and labor history. This is the harder implication of Darrow's tirade toward Bonney. Darrow spoke in the voice of activist rage toward a well-intentioned educator and legal administrator who spent his life beckoning dissenting voices toward his specific vision of the good.

The activist-upstart says that your hope elides its violent underside. The educator-judge is sure you have misunderstood their welcoming intent. The activist-upstart goes to build a different world somewhere else. Will they have a wild, liquor-fueled fête? Will they share statements of faith? Will the police raid the party? Will there be a riot? Will they be dragged to court? Will they be remembered? This is the history of American religion. The struggle continues.