"A True Revival of Religion": Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions, 1906-1909

Abstract

Almost a year after the great earthquake fire of April 1906, San Francisco clergyman William Rader declared, We are having a true revival of religion. Writing in the San Francisco-based Congregationalist weekly Pacific, Rader was not referring to the visit of a mass evangelist; rather, he meant the graft prosecutions officially launched in October 1906 against the Union Labor party administration of the city. He compared Rudolph Spreckels, a reform-minded member of the city's financial elite who was helping to fund the prosecution, Francis J. Heney, the lead prosecuting attorney, to the late-nineteenth-century revival team of Dwight L. Moody Ira D. Sankey. is moving the city, Rader asserted, and when a number of our supervisors other officials are sent to prison we will be more free. ... Thank God the Christ spirit is not dead; it lives.' That a Protestant clergyperson of the early twentieth century would view an urban reform crusade in religious terms is not surprising. The close ties between Progressive-era reform American religion have been firmly established by a number of historians.2 Rader reflected a crusading moral reformism that pervaded Anglo-American Protestantism between 1890 1920.3 Anglo-Protestantism (shorthand for Anglo-American Protestantism) was a religious tradition that, by the turn of the century, appeared to be justifiably confident of its place in the nation. It was differentiated by denominations-the northern Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, together with the Congregationalists Episcopalians, were the largest groups-but it was bound together by Caucasian race, English language, interand nondenominational organizations, a canopy of common sensibilities forged in British North American contexts.4 Important elements of the AngloProtestant worldview included the theological moral authority of the Bible, the personal Christocentric focus of salvation piety, the activist character of the Christian life, the millennial goal of