The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story

Reviewed By Jon Butler

In 1930 the remarkably prolific twenty-two-year-old Brooklyn essayist and poet, Alice Rayfiel Siegmeister, offered up a witty portrait of “Brooklyn’s New Citizens” for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Rejecting the nativism that disfigured Brooklyn and America for a century, she toured Brooklyn’s ethnic neighborhoods, from Russian, Gallician, and Rumanian Jewish enclaves to blocks stuffed with Italians and smaller clusters of Czechs, Norwegians, Syrians, and Finns. Even its old Dutch residents won her attention. “Remember the Cortelyous, the Stuyvesants and the Remsens?” But the Yankee Protestants who had dominated Brooklyn culture up to and past the Civil War? Not mentioned.[1]

Blumin and Altschuler’s Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn offers exactly what its title claims. It deftly traces Brooklyn’s transformation from a post-Puritan enclave separated conveniently from sinful Manhattan by the East River to a modern swirl of urban ethnicities, races, religions, and classes, perhaps not Queens with parks and trees but not far away. Smoothly written, smartly analyzed, and deeply researched, The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn becomes An American Story, as its subtitle promises — a wonderfully satisfying book whose final sentences convey just how powerfully our past can illuminate our troubled present if we let it.

Blumin and Altschuler divide Brooklyn’s development into familiar periods — colonial era to the Civil War, Civil War to the 1890s, and the turn of the century to about 1930. If the periods are familiar, their inquisitiveness and research imbue each with rich surprises.

In the earliest period they make clear how thoroughly migrating Yankees dominated infant Brooklyn. Yankee Protestants overwhelmed the early Dutch settlers who had already pushed the native Lenape out of Brooklyn’s woodlands. The earlier twentieth-century Brooklyn historian, Ralph Foster Weld, could rightly note that by the 1830s the “disheveled unkempt village of 1816 had undergone a metamorphosis.” Brooklyn “had become the city of homes and churches, a lecture-going, church-going community, a pleasant suburban place, quieter and more sedate than New York.”[2]

“Quieter and more sedate” took work, however, and Brooklyn’s Protestant churches provided it. Members from Brooklyn's new and largely White Episcopal, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist congregations, plus the old Dutch Reformed church, activated a new Association for the Suppression of Vice, and Brooklyn's (Protestant and White) Female Religious Tract Society, its (Protestant and White) Sunday School Union, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music offered uplift. Protestants reduced the number of saloons, squelched theater proposals, promoted classical literature and music, and began Brooklyn’s quickly famous yearly parade of (Protestant and White) Sunday School children that lasted well into the twentieth century.

Yet stirrings of a more complicated Brooklyn poked through Brooklyn's early Protestant sheen. Enslaved and free Blacks labored in Brooklyn throughout the colonial era, and their descendants organized the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church in 1817 after the (White) Sands Street Methodist congregation increased fees to sit in the balcony. An African Woolman Society and school for Black children followed. Irish Catholic immigrants arrived by the 1820s and soon organized a church, a Hibernian Provident Society, and Erin Fraternal Association. A bookseller began stocking Catholic titles and an Episcopal rector called for tolerating immigrants, but anti-Catholic nativism also appeared, although without the violence across the river.

A quietly revelatory chapter on Brooklyn's antebellum waterfront previews the urban modernities that will turn Brooklyn's early Protestant sheen into an antebellum relic. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman lovingly evoked the magnetism of the waterfront experience. But Blumin and Altschuler stress the "drudgery of loading and unloading ships…. the people who performed this work... the shanties and tenements in which they and their families lived." They expose the "imbalance of attention" that contemporaries and historians alike have described "between the suburban City of Churches and the less lovely — and decidedly less Protestant — workplaces and neighborhoods that lined the river from Red Hood to Williamsburgh and beyond," and especially the new people who would remake Protestant Brooklyn.[3]

Here were factories producing rope, iron, white lead, porcelain, major shipyards, a lifeboat factory, and, by the Civil War, a huge sugar refinery. Local newspapers, city directories, and census records expose complex immigrant patterns. Brooklyn's Irish, condemned as unskilled louts, worked in a variety of laboring occupations as well as "blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons," and as "nonartisanal businessmen." Germans "clustered more to the center than the bottom of the economic order," but still provided substantial workers in menial positions. Least advantaged, Brooklyn's increasing Black population remained poor and poorly employed despite the end of slavery in New York.[4]

Ironies sometimes abounded. Growth in Brooklyn's native-born population and substantial migration from Manhattan reduced its foreign-born population to 39 per cent, Irish-born to 21 per cent, and Black population to 1.6 per cent by 1860 even though immigrant and minority populations grew. That increase brought shacks, shanties, and tenements to Williamsburg and settlements along the East River (smaller than lower Manhattan's tenements, but tenements still) that contrasted sharply with the elegant neighborhoods that gave Brooklyn its glowing suburban reputation. Brooklyn's Blacks, Irish, and Germans faced racism and anti-Catholicism, while the White Protestant temperance reform movement found an additional convenient threat to Irish and German social life.

Brooklyn's Blacks, Irish, and Germans struck back through the very institutions its White Protestants employed to set Brooklyn's suburban culture, specifically, churches and the organizations they spawned. By 1860 nine additional Black churches joined the single Black congregation of 1817. Catholics could worship at fifteen churches, three offering German services, and German Protestants could choose among eight churches. Unsurprisingly, the new Irish, German, and Black congregations spawned women's groups, more schools, and benevolent societies that fostered immigrant and minority resilience among Brooklynites carving out new lives despite the suspicions they face from Brooklyn's older Protestants.

Between the Civil War and 1900, "old" Brooklyn both prospered and declined. Real estate developers and the new Brooklyn Bridge swelled Brooklyn's tony neighborhoods with middling and upper-class commuters to Manhattan. Planners of the new Prospect Park (1873) could promote proper leisure, and Brooklyn's still multiplying Protestant congregations could count high profile clergy, from Richard Salter Storrs and the evangelist Thomas DeWitt Talmage to the truly famous Henry Ward Beecher, no matter his infamous affair with Elizabeth Tilton. The new congregations in turn produced even more clubs and organizations, especially among women, from missionary societies to literary groups all earnestly promoting progress and propriety. The New York Times may have been condescending when it labelled Brooklyn "that moral suburb" before the Brooklyn Bridge dedication, as Blumin and Altschuler put it. But it hadn't missed the Protestants' aim.[5]

Increasingly, however, life overwhelmed that aim. Protestants continued forming churches but clergy began reporting more absences in the pews and the Brooklyn Eagle worried about "doubts and questions about the Old Testament, the miracles" and other once sacrosanct beliefs. Opulent men's clubs more clearly expressed class and social aspirations than commitment to a Protestant moral code. Irish and German immigration increased and Brooklyn's Jewish population zoomed from perhaps a thousand at the Civil War to twelve thousand in 1886 and fifty thousand in 1900. Then came "MONGOLS," the Eagle's term for Chinese immigrants — perhaps a thousand by 1900 — and more Blacks, who counted fourteen congregations by the 1890s plus lodges, men's and women's benevolent societies and a politically aware Afro American League. Brooklyn's Protestant elite still held enormous power near the turn of the century. But as Blumin and Altschuler poignantly observe, increasingly they only "ruled but did not reign."[6]

Brooklyn's 1898 incorporation within New York City, fought by its Protestant elite, did not cause its subsequent transformation but symbolized much that came, and quickly. Immigrant Jews and their descendants poured into Brooklyn after the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903. Joined by the Manhattan Bridge in 1909, the bridges sealed the end of Brooklyn's splendid isolation. Italians migrated as well, many from Manhattan, some directly from Italy. Protestants complained about "hyphenated Americans" and promoted "One Hundred Percent Americanism," with a few joined the revived Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Yet for those who supported Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's "Red Scare" and its attacks on immigrant "Communists," the only Brooklyn raid, on the otherwise innocuous Finnish Socialist Society, surely must have been deflating.[7]

Meanwhile, Brooklyn's newest immigrants simply out-Americanized their detractors. They became citizens, voted, formed still more churches and synagogues, and organized dizzying numbers of benevolent aid societies, sodalities, literary groups, and purely social clubs that galvanized religious and ethnic identities, just as their predecessors and critics had done for a century.

Blumin and Altschuler characterize older residents' reaction as ones of acceptance, resistance, and flight, and make it the title of their penultimate chapter. Yet if some accepted Brooklyn's new character, their nostalgia for a lost past could lead down difficult paths. Neighborhood associations that sometimes included token Irish, German, and Jewish members sought to improve their quarters by demanding better city services and blocking new apartment buildings that could house less affluent immigrants. Traditionalists successfully ended horse racing in Brooklyn but lost the battle against Sunday baseball. They temporarily won their long-sought temperance through national Prohibition, but it became a fiasco in Brooklyn as fast as elsewhere. Housing developers, in Brooklyn Eagle advertisements, touted exclusionary "SOCIAL AND BUSINESS REFERENCES" required for their new Queens and Nassau neighborhoods. But Blumin and Altschuler correctly note the impossibility of determining if they really drew any Brooklyn buyers.[8]

Blumin and Altschuler's epilogue, "Brooklyn's America," contrasts the attack on "interbreeding" and racial hierarchicalism of Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) with Horace Kallen's contemporaneous essays on the democratic beauty of multiculturalism (although not without criticism of Kallen's blindness to the depth of American race prejudice). Grant and his allies won the day in the anti-immigration acts of 1921 and 1924. But the acts could not erase the immigrant past any more in Brooklyn than America.

The door had been closed too late. Immigrants had already formed their families, built their communities, and set to work toward a better life. Many of them and many of their children thrived in America, and while that thriving generally involved a significant degree of assimilation it almost never resulted in the abandonment of prior ethnic identities.[9]

The Brooklyn Blumin and Altschuler explore is not an isolated, peculiar borough all too "New York" to be important in a larger American history. Their Brooklyn emerges as an American demographic, economic, and religious exemplar and one still singing to the dignity of what Walt Whitman might have termed a multihued, multinational society.

The lady who lifts her lamp beside the golden door knows the value of the wretched refuse of any teeming shore. And Brooklynites know that their uniquely vibrant borough, as much as or more than any other place in America, is where huddled masses learned to breathe free.[10]

The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn offers a sophisticated, nuanced history of Brooklyn's transformation into a vibrant, modern, urban community. It also speaks powerfully to the shameful anti-immigrant sentiment currently surging across the nation.

Is anyone listening?

Jon Butler, who lives in Minneapolis, is the Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University, and the author most recently of God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan.

[1] Blumin and Altschuler discuss Alice Rayfiel Siegmeister’s “Brooklyn’s New Citizens,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 9, 1930, in the conclusion of Chapter Six, “Transformation,” The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), 194-95. The New Yorker published Siegmeister's poem “Carrousel Horse,” in its July 18th issue. Three months later she succumbed to Addison's disease at age 23. “Alice Siegmeister, Writer and Poet, Dies in Hospital,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 9, 1931.

[2] Weld quoted in Blumin and Altschuler, The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, 25.

[3] Ibid., 65.

[4] Ibid., 79.

[5] New York Times quoted in ibid., 96.

[6] Eagle on religion and Chinese immigrants quoted in ibid., 127, 150. Blumin and Altschuler on Brooklyn Protestant "rule," 164.

[7] "Americanism" quotations in ibid., 191-92

[8] Exclusionary housing advertisements quoted in ibid., 226.

[9] Ibid., 233-34.

[10] Ibid., 234.

Antebellum & Civil War, Brooklyn, Early Republic, Gilded Age, Immigration, Metropolitan Region, Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsAndrew LangMarch 8, 2023Comment