The cereal magnate Charles W. Post ‘was beside himself at organised labour's attempt to evangelise the churches’, thanks to the support of some clergy for a Labour Sunday in 1910. The headline in numerous newspapers which carried Post's paid editorial signalled what he found to be ‘as dangerous to the peace and liberty of the citizens as a coiled rattlesnake in the grass’. Readers learn all that and much more thanks to the very first footnote in Heath W. Carter's book. While the people on both sides of the working people versus the magnates divide, and their publics, spoke and wrote in consistently explosive terms, Carter stays cool and compassionate as he successfully sets out to inform a new generation of conflicts which are now one and a half centuries old – and still unsettled.

Heath Carter, a professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana, an hour or two from Chicago, chose the site of his story well and shows that he knows the scene thoroughly. Chicago was the focus of reporters, agitators, historians and experts in the emerging fields of social sociology and social work, and Carter takes seriously the causes and concerns of leaders on both sides of the issues. While those who are at home with labour history and the story of the liberal Protestant American ‘Social Gospel’ will find much that is familiar here, they will gain new understandings because of Carter's close-ups on one metropolis and pastors, priests and lay spokespersons of the time. While the traditional accounts of ‘social Christianity’ tend to focus on the ideas of theological professors and heads of national organisations, this book patiently listens to well-known leaders, those who are not well known, and, shall we say, sufferers on the scene.

Those of us who know Chicago today and the stories from the era described in Carter's Union made will feel right at home, because of the attention to the geography and architecture here described. They can still spot the ‘tall steeple’ churches which dominated the old skyline, but which now fight for attention among skyscrapers. These were beginning to dominate the skyline, thanks to the efforts of architectural pioneers, people of wealth, corporations and congregations which used sacred buildings, both as refuges from the industrial turmoil around them and then, gradually and increasingly, as centres for dealing with the turmoil.

While Carter pays due attention to the Catholic Church, which was burgeoning, thanks to immigration of ‘working people’ from Europe, many of the headlines and stories which attract historians dealt with the kind of Protestants who are ancestors of those often called ‘mainline’ today. Carter does notice the African-American presence, which was growing rapidly in the decades after the 1880s, but the privileged voices still tended to be those of established Protestants. In fact, we read mainly of ‘Firsts’, as in First Baptist and then First Christian Reformed, First Congregational, First Methodist, First Presbyterian and First Unitarian churches, fair game for those whom Mr Post called ‘hoodwinking clergymen’, who were the ‘rattlesnakes’ of the magnates’ fantasies.

What the pastors, social workers and care-givers who appear on Carter's pages possessed, that many of the Social Gospel professors or ‘Gilded Age’ journalists behind their lecterns or beyond their headlines lacked, was direct access to the people whose livelihood depended on the daily lives of ‘working people’ in the packing houses, the sweatshops and the factories. Carter has read widely and deeply in the records that they left and in the first-hand reports about them. That feature will help assure a secure future for this book as a source for both social and religious historians in America.

The humdrum nature and banality of many of the ‘workers’ stories was interrupted by at least two well-remembered disruptions, the ‘Pullman Strike’ and the ‘Haymarket Riot’. The Pullman Palace [Railroad] Car Company in the South Side had been conceived by George Pullman as a kind of utopian venture in which ‘the Company’ built and provided homes for workers. All went well while all went well. But in harder times, when Pullman significantly lowered the wages of his workers, he did not cut the rents due to his company. What choices did workers have? Some organised and rebelled, others moved away, and still others fell into depression of a sort that also inspired anger or despair.

The best-remembered riot of a riotous era had begun at Haymarket Square, just west of down town, one night in 1886. Some 30,000 workers, who had the sympathy of 170,000 – Carter's count – many of them foreign-born and unskilled, protested against the policies of employers and the treatment that workers received. Everything erupted late in the evening, when Chicago police arrived as an anarchist was speaking, to quiet and then break up the crowd. A bomb went off and gunfire erupted. Seven policemen were killed, and a backlash followed. (Four years later four anarchists were hanged.) The Churches, both Protestant and Catholic, assessing the dangers and reacting against violence, worked to quiet the city, but had not been able to address the grievances of the non-anarchist working people.

Carter patiently traces the efforts of civic-minded people who sought a better way for the forces to coexist and to work for the common good. Advocates of social Christianity did have some successes, thanks to men – and women, be it noted – who inspired the formation of organisations which tried to address industrial evils so that such as the Pullman Strikes and Haymarket Riots should not recur. Carter cannot be accused of ‘presentism’, the biasing or distorting of his story by editorialising. Still, in the last paragraph, a devastating reference to social inequality in the present day leads to his last sentence: ‘It remains to be seen whether present-day believers will quietly abide [the social inequality situation] or whether it will at some point call forth a generation of prophets comparable to those that visited Gilded Age Chicago.’ The author's respect for those ‘prophets’ is patent through the book, and he demonstrates why they deserve such respect.