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For most Americans, the Salvation Army is a trusted, if peripheral, organization: We are happy to toss loose change into the Army's shopping-mall kettles at Christmastime, and are relieved to know that their cheerful employees will take unfashionable clothes and tattered children's toys off our hands once or twice a year, leaving us with more closet space and a welcome tax deduction. Many of those who pull into the Salvation Army's parking lot to unload boxes of polyester knit suits and fraying sweaters from their station wagons do not seem aware that the roots of this established charity are religious. The last time I made a run by the Salvation Army— I was finally parting with shorts and skirts I hadn't been able to get into since ninth grade—I overheard a trim Jewish woman commenting to her friend that she was thrilled to have access to a Salvation Army: she'd just moved from a small town in northern Florida where the only philanthropic shop had been run by a Baptist organization, and she "just didn't feel comfortable donating to a Christian charity, regardless of how much good work they do."
The origins of the Salvation Army, of course, are every bit as religious as those of any Baptist orphanage. Founded in midnineteenth-century England by William Booth, the Army began as a rag-tag mission devoted to evangelizing London's poor. Booth, whose theology was influenced by classic holiness teachings as well as by Wesleyan revivalism, Quakerism, and Methodism, was a flamboyant leader who believed that any publicity was good publicity. As Diane Winston writes in her new study of the Army, Booth understood that "to capture the unchurched, no less than practicing Christians, the Army first had to attract their attention." (Case in point: The Salvation Army arrived in America in 1872, but it floundered until the 1880 arrival of George Scott Railton and seven "hallelujah lassies," who disembarked their ship at a Manhattan port waving the brightly colored Salvationist banner and convening an impromptu press conference on the spot.)
Although two important studies of the Salvation Army have appeared within the last five years—the second edition of Edward McKinley's standard history, Marching to Glory: The History of the Salvation Army in the United States, 1880-1992 (Eerdmans, 1995), and Norman Murdoch's Origins of the Salvation Army (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1994)—Diane Winston's long-awaited Red-Hot and Righteous is far from redundant. More than any previous writer, Winston has done justice to the complex, contradictory movement of the Salvation Army.
Winston's narrative, spanning the period from 1880 to 1950, centers on questions of consumer culture. Material culture and consumerism are buzz words among historians these days, and often it seems that scholars invoke material culture even when it adds nothing to the story. Winston, however, is not guilty of that charge; her book provides an example of the study of material culture done right.
Gilded Age New York, the setting of Winston's tale, was a flashy, glittering world of consumer goods that were widely available for the first time. Coupled with the new power of the purse (particularly for women, who were working outside of the home and thus in control of salaries of their own, in ever-increasing numbers) and the rise of advertising, this explosion of commerce created a consumer-oriented world that posed both new challenges and new opportunities to evangelical Christians. Fashion and entertainment were particularly important sites of consumption, with young singles spending money on the latest sartorial styles and forking over significant chunks of their paychecks to the ever-changing world of theaters and cabarets.
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