| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920. By Gaines M. Foster. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvi, 318 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2697-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5366-6.)

Gaines M. Foster's Moral Reconstruction bridges the gap between studies of late-nineteenth-century reform and inquiries into the development of the American state after the Civil War. Previous historians of the temperance movement, the agitation for Sunday closing laws, movie censorship, and so on, have seen their topics in isolation and focused primarily on movement culture and its relationship to social and economic changes. Looking instead at "the personal and organizational connections among postbellum moral reformers, ... their shared beliefs and concerns, ... their combined lobbying efforts in Congress" (p. 3), Foster sees a larger pattern. Christian lobbyists were emboldened by the national government's assumption of power during the Civil War, he asserts, and worked to expand the postwar government to regulate moral behavior.

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