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I found Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium to be an extremely revealing work of social history about the religious revival in Rochester in the early 1830s. Johnson does an effective job of demonstrating the “Shopkeeper’s Millennium” as a period in which middle class merchants held enormous economic and social power in Rochester as a result of millenarian religious revival. Johnson’s argument that Charles Finney’s religious revival was the basis for a redefinition of politics, labor, and social life is convincing because of his ability to demonstrate that the conversions of the 1830s produced societal reforms that were unlike those of the 1820s that pitted working men against their employers. Rather, this movement underscored a “war on sin” that removed any explicit attacks between the bourgeoisie and the working class and instead focused on the “evils” that plague all men (115). I believe Johnson only augments this claim when he adds that the communal nature of revivals “shattered old divisions” of class and established new communities (101). This creates a clear distinction in Johnson’s writing between what appears to be a struggle identified by Marxist theories in the 1820s and one of religious sentiments in the succeeding decade.
In Johnson’s final chapter, however, I felt his argument began to unravel. While he previously focused on the tenets and religious effects of Finney’s revival, Johnson proceeds to discuss revival and conversion in Rochester as an economic agent to provoke change in the city. For example, he writes “the most powerful source of the working man’s revival was the simple, coercive fact that wage earners worked for men who insisted on seeing them in church” (121). Statements like these imply that conversion by laborers could have been a mere means to acquire a job or steady income, as opposed to a change in fundamental values and beliefs. This is in direct contrast with Johnson’s previous claims about the revival’s legitimacy because it calls into question the true effect religion had in reshaping nineteenth century Rochester. Rather, it emphasizes manipulations of religion to receive desirable economic results. In his afterword, Johnson tries to cover up this implication when he states “the revival was not a capitalist plot” (141). However, when writing this, Johnson is referring to only those men who dictated social change in Rochester, the middle class businessmen, and continues to ignore exploration of any significant depth behind motivations of those experiencing the change, the working class wage laborers. While those participating in revivals could have thoroughly believed what they publicly professed, the working class laborers very easily could have accepted those same beliefs as merely a small price to pay to insure stable living.
With respect to my colleagues, I agree with most of what has been argued. Specifically, I agree with Ben that many of the inferences made by Johnson were plausible and his ample evidence behind these claims – particularly in examples like those of the extended families that helped to precipitate early business in Rochester – only helped to push his thesis. With that being said I also understand Price’s remarks about Johnson’s sweeping generalizations. One example that struck me occurred at the end of the book where Johnson writes “workmen no longer listened when proprietors spoke” (140). However, we were already told that the dissonance between employer and employee emerged from the increased privatization of their lives, not from a lack of listening (57). While these statements are likely dramatized and used more to provoke an image than used as fact, they did make me wary to trust all the claims advanced by Johnson in A Shopkeeper’s Millennium.