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The Shopkeeper’s Millennium is my second trip up the Genesee River Valley with Paul E. Johnson, my first being Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, an assigned reading from last year. Much like Sam Patch, Johnson uses Rochester as a grand specimen for larger American phenomena during the Industrial Revolution, with Patch focusing on the strains of labor and Millennium on social and religious evolution. While Sam Patch provides the chronicle of a wage labor driven into alcoholism, depression, a fall-diving career, and a tragic death (in Rochester, no less), The Shopkeeper’s Millennium presents an exposé of a sinful, depraved mill town transforming into an (on-the-surface) orderly, God-fearing church town thanks to the Second Great Awakening. Johnson argues that the religious and moral revival in 1830-31 amongst the town’s entrepreneurial class led to heightened labor discipline, increased calls for temperance, and, eventually, a need for a new party system to address their concerns and desires for reform. However, he occasionally makes sweeping generalizations that oversimplify his subject and weaken his argument.
Rochester was a logical choice for Johnson to base his research. It was a blend of all worlds: east and west, agricultural and industrial, urban and rural. Also, its location square in the middle of New York’s “Burned-Over” district made it a hotbed for religious, political, and social turmoil. It had all sorts of characters and classes: migrants hoping to start anew, settlers hoping to make it to the frontier, and entrepreneurs and businessmen hoping to make it big. Make no mistake- Rochester was still a town thoroughly divided by class, beginning with the powerful families who settled the area around 1815 (including Nathaniel Rochester himself). As a result, the consequences of industrialization follow the patterns seen elsewhere. Business owners became less and less a part of the productive process until they were merely salesmen. The workers were pushed back from the eye of the consumer and the owner. They lived in separate neighborhoods and social spheres. Before the religious revival of 1830, the relationship was impersonal and strictly businesslike.
Johnson then makes a noteworthy argument that more factors than just wealth and profit played into American social interaction. While Alex’s post on the “Hydra” argues that “it’s all about class” when it comes to labor relations, Johnson stresses that the reinvigoration of religion, especially amongst the business classes, had a redefining role in labor, politics, and social life. While the businessman of the 1820s would “dominate his wife and children, work irregular hours, consume enormous amounts of alcohol, and seldom vote or go to church”, the businessman of the 1830s was sober, religious, and intent on instilling moral values in his community (8). They would prevent drunkenness amongst their workers on the job and crusade for temperance off the job, while campaigning for “moral” political candidates and movements. By 1830, temperance would become “a middle-class obsession”, signifying the self-given responsibility of the bourgeoisie class to govern the morality of the lower classes. The fiasco created by the Anti-Masonic Party in 1826 displayed the great power of the middle-class in obtaining political power from the “elite families”, and it assisted in undermining the already unstable party system of the mid-1820s.
Overall, Johnson uses the Rochester model well as a microcosm of America, and he backs up his points with comments from residents, newspaper columns, advertisements, economic data, and even city geography. His maps provide great insight into how the inhabitants divided the city into business and residential spheres as well as how the classes separated themselves. However, some of his more sweeping claims concerning the divisions between the business and working classes are questionable and unsubstantiated. For example, he declares “the fifth-ward neighborhood known as Dublin spent Sundays drunk and Mondays visiting their friends” (42). It seems unlikely that no members of this working-class group would have a church affiliation, or could even stand being sober on a Sunday. While these businessmen and working class groups are largely homogenous and consistent amongst themselves, I believe they are still more nuanced and sophisticated than Johnson portrays them to be.