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Evangelist of Fragments: Doing Mite-Box Capitalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2017

Hillary Kaell
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Abstract

A century ago, the mite box (penny collection box) was ubiquitous in North America as a religious fundraising tool, especially for women and children. Using the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society as a case study, I ask what these boxes reveal about the intersection of gender, consumerism, and capitalism from circa 1870–1930. By cutting across traditional Weberian and Marxist analyses, the discussion engages a more complex understanding of religion and capital that includes emotional attachments and material sensations. In particular, I argue that mite boxes clarify how systematic giving was institutionalized through practices that created an imaginative bridge between the immediacy of a sensory experience and the projections of social policies and prayers. They also demonstrate how objects became physical points of connection that materialized relationships that were meant to be present, but were not tangible. Last, they demonstrate the continued salience of older Christian ideas about blessings and sacrifice, even in an era normally associated with the secularization of market capitalism and philanthropy.

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Articles
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Church History , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 86 - 119
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2017 

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References

1 KCNTS operated from 1899 to 1964. According to a list of the fifteen graduates in 1926, the students in this period were white women in their early 20s, mainly from the Midwest. These demographics likely characterized the 1925 graduates as well. Courtesy of Jennifer W. Legath, letter to the author, June 16 2015.

2 “The ‘Might’ Box,” The Shield (KCNTS, Kansas City, Mo.), 1925, 67, unprocessed document, General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Archives Center, Madison, N.J. (hereafter cited as GCAH).

3 Among many examples is Hutchison, William R., Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 123 Google Scholar.

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11 Lloyd, Sarah, Charity and Poverty in England, c.1680–1820: Wild and Visionary Schemes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 2, 15 Google Scholar. See also, Stevens, Laura M., The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 14–15, 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My approach is also informed by Morgan, David, introduction to Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London: Routledge, 2010), 8 Google Scholar. For a definition of “sensation,” see pp. 13–14.

12 Mauss, The Gift, 72.

13 Matson, Cathy, “Markets and Morality: Special Issue Introduction,” Early American Studies 8 no. 3 (2010): 475 Google Scholar: “Economy” often connotes “an expansive rubric that encompasses a wide range of . . . activities to get and spend, satisfy needs and wants, organize households and work relations in myriad ways, negotiate race and status through the exchange of goods, found empires, exploit environments, and much more.”

14 The phrase “business turn” comes from Corrigan, John, Grem, Darren, and Porterfield, Amanda, eds., The Business Turn in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 Google Scholar [forthcoming]). Although I focus on ca. 1870–1930, I am thinking also of recent studies that cover the mid-twentieth century, a number of which are cited in note 10. For an example of the way studies of Protestant businessmen/pastors can seem to encompass the study of U.S. Christianity and capitalism as a whole, see Heath Carter, “Christianity and the Specter of Capitalism,” Religion in American History (blog), April 17, 2013, http://usreligion.blogspot.ca/2013/04/christianity-and-specter-of-capitalism.html.

15 Both Mauss and Campbell fundamentally ignored gender. A good overview of the literature on economy and lived religion is Engel, Katherine Carté, “Religion and the Economy: New Methods for an Old Problem,” Early American Studies 8, no. 3 (2010): 489–497 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Miller, Daniel, A Theory of Shopping (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 108–110 Google Scholar.

17 Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, 8–9, 204.

18 Valeri, “Weber and Eighteenth-Century Religious Developments,” 67.

19 Edward John Hickey, “The Society for the Propagation of the Faith: Its Foundation, Organization and Success, 1822–1922,” (Ph.D. diss., University of America, 1922), 14.

20 Andrew, Donna T., Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 47–49, 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lloyd, Charity and Poverty, 27, 38; Roberts, Michael J. D., “Head versus Heart? Voluntary Associations and Charity Organization in England, c.1700–1850” in Charity, Philanthropy and Reform: From 1690s to 1850 ed. Cunningham, Hugh and Innes, Joanna (New York: St Martin's, 1998), 66–86 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Anglo-Protestants often disparaged ‘stagnant’ forms of European Catholic charity. Yet the trends that gave rise to mite box giving were present in Catholicism too. Charities, such as the Holy Childhood Association (founded in France in 1836), instituted equivalent methods of systematic subscription.

21 Thomas Bray, “A general plan of the constitution of a Protestant congregation Or society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge,” (1697), quoted in Kemp, William Webb, The Support of Schools in Colonial New York by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1913), 13 Google Scholar.

22 Kemp, The Support of Schools, 18.

23 Lloyd, Sarah, “Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality, Benevolence, and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 1 (2002): 34 Google Scholar; Roberts, “Head versus Heart?,” 67. This point deserves emphasis since previous studies accented the essentially unchanged elite nature of charitable giving, for example Heyrman, Christine Leigh, “The Fashion Among More Superior People: Charity and Social Change in Provincial New England, 1700–1740,” American Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1982): 107–124 Google Scholar. On the early adoption of this model in the U.S. see Eckley, Joseph, A Discourse before the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge among the Indians and Others in North America, delivered Nov 7, 1805 (Boston: E. Lincoln, 1806), 26 Google Scholar. Also, Kemp, The Support of Schools, 30.

24 Valeri “Weber and Eighteenth-Century Religious Developments,” 71, Lloyd, Charity and Poverty, 228.

25 Robert, Dana L., American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (1997; repr., Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 5. Such societies were already popular in England, as noted in Beaver, R. Pierce, American Protestant Women in World Mission: History of the First Feminist Movement in North America, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1980), 13, 19Google Scholar.

27 Andrew, John A., Rebuilding the Christian Commonwealth (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 95 Google Scholar. For example, a charity box in JG's store in Boston netted $2.62, reported the Herald: “Donations to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Nov 21 to Dec 30,” Missionary Herald, January 1821, 28.

28 Miller, “The White Child's Burden,”142; Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages,” 351–352.

29 For an example of this (misnamed) form of economic activity, see “Susie's Speculation,” Heathen Woman's Friend (hereafter cited as HWF), March 1879, 212–213. The phrase “magical promise of wealth” is based on Taussig, Michael T., The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1980), 109–139 Google Scholar.

30 Mauss, The Gift, 65–78.

31 For example, historian Michael J. D. Roberts notes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that charity ceased to be an opportunity for Christians “to sacrifice superfluous desire” and “most educated citizens no longer saw charitable giving as a result of holding resources on trust for communal benefit: it was an act of mercy performed as a result of morally refined sensitivity in the giver to the sight or knowledge of human suffering.” Roberts, “Head versus Heart?,” 70. U.S. Christians a century later did view benevolence as finding a basis in “the sight or knowledge of human suffering,” as Heather Curtis has shown (“Depicting Distant Suffering”), but I contend that it did not exclude older ideas about sacrifice or holding wealth in trust.

32 Heyrman, “The Fashion Among More Superior People,”117.

33 Among studies cited above, see Miller, “White Child's Burden,” Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages,” and Twells, The Civilising Mission, 89–90.

34 First Annual Report of the Minneapolis Branch of the Female Missionary Society, Held at St. Paul, Minn. October 5, 1884 (Minneapolis, Minn.: Tribune Job, 1884), 24Google Scholar. Records of the Women's Division of the General Board of Global Ministries (hereafter cited as WDG), GCAH.

35 Muffley, Mary B., “Mite Chests,” Seventh Annual Report of the Western Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Year 1876–77 (Minneapolis, Minn.: Johnson, Smith and Harrison, n.d.), 53 Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH.

36 So taught “Mrs. Pickett's Missionary Box,” which, according to sources from the period, was in broad circulation in the mid-1880s to 1890s. For example: Annual Report of the New York Branch of the Female Missionary Society of New-York, From Oct. 1, 1883 to Oct. 1, 1884 (Dansville, N.Y.: Bunnell & Oberdorf, 1885), 10, WDG, GCAH. The text I use is “Mrs. Pickett's Missionary Box: Benefits at a Cent Apiece,” (Toronto: Woman's Foreign Missionary Society: Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1899), https://archive.org/details/cihm_38102.

37 Anderson, Rufus, “Economy and Curtailments in Missions,” The Missionary Herald, 57 (November 1861), 326–329 Google Scholar. Emphasis added. Similar ideas could be more eschatological, as in Elsbree, Oliver Wendell, The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America 1790–1815 (1928; repr., Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980), 125 Google Scholar.

38 Mary Lyon, quoted in Fisk, Fidelia, Recollections of Mary Lyon, with Selections from Her Instructions to the Pupils of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (Boston: American Tract Society, 1866), 26Google Scholar, quoted in Robert, American Women in Mission, 100. See also Porterfield, Amanda, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar and Lyon's, Mary own A Missionary offering, or, Christian Sympathy, Personal Responsibility, and the Present Crisis in Foreign Missions (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1843)Google Scholar.

39 For example, Nind, Mary, “Annual Address,” reprinted in Fifth Annual Report of the Work of the Western Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society for the Year Ending April 21, 1875 (Des Moines, Iowa: State Journal Book and Job), 13 Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH. Also Beaver, American Protestant Women, 13, 33–34; Hill, Patricia, The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 69Google Scholar.

40 For example, Ranck, Annie, “Mite Boxes,” in Sixteenth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, October 1886 (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodruff, 1887), 49 Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH. Also, “The Bareilly Missionary Society,” HWF, September 1874, 711.

41 “Philadelphia Branch Report,” HWF, May 1878, 256; examples of giving in kind are in “Cincinnati Branch Report,” HWF, July 1879, 21, WDG, GCAH; the story of the Wilmington woman and the quotation about “future poverty” are from Mrs. U. B. Wilson, “State of Missouri,” in Fourth Annual Report of the St Louis Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, for the year ending April 21, 1874 (Barns and Beynon), 18–19, WDG, GCAH.

42 Sixteenth Annual Report, Philadelphia WFMS, 1886, 23, WDG, GCAH.

43 Mary Douglas, “No Free Gifts,” forward to The Gift, by Mauss, vii.

44 Robert, Dana L., “Holiness and the Missionary Vision of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1869–1894,” Methodist History 39, no. 1 (2000): 15–27 Google Scholar.

45 This is a conservative estimate based on statistics in the branch reports. On the mite box campaign see “Northwestern Branch Report: A Word to our Treasurers,” HWF, January 1882, 165.

46 Annual Report of the New York Branch, From Oct. 1, 1883 to Oct. 1, 1884 (Summit, N.J.: Record, 1886), 12–13, 27Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH. Their 26,273 members were grouped into 710 auxiliaries and 55 young ladies' societies. There were also 267 unorganized churches and many individual members. There may be discrepancies in the counts since just two years earlier the Branch reported distributing one box per 9.2 members (18,408 members/2,000 boxes). In the same year, the two other largest branches had boxes for every 8.4 members (Northwestern) and every 7.7 members (New England). Some regions far exceeded this average. For example, women in Rome, Ohio had boxes for every 1.5 members (38 members raised $97 in 24 mite boxes), according to the Cincinnati Branch Report, HWF, October 1882, 87.

47 Mary Nind, “Our Mite-Boxes,” HWF, February 1873, 412–413.

48 Lina Kummer, quoted in “New York Branch Report,” HWF, July 1884, 15. On Catholics and others, see “Northwestern Branch Report,” HWF, May 1883, 261. On the spread of boxes to towns with no auxiliary, see “Wisconsin Conference,” HWF, August 1881, 48; “New York Branch Report,” HWF, July 1883, 16. On charging a fee or not, see Third Annual Meeting, 15 May 1872 – New York, handwritten meeting notes, 22, WDG, fol. “First Annual and following Meetings of the General Executive Committee, 1820–1891,” GCAH; Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Topeka Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, 1896–97 (Kansas City, Kan.: Lane), 10, WDG, GCAH.

49 Twede, Diana and Selke, Susan E. M., Cartons, Crates and Corrugated Board: Handbook of Paper and Wood Packaging Technology (Houston: Design House, 2005), 41–42, 55–56Google Scholar.

50 E. E. Adams, Collection-box, US Patent 931549 A, issued August 17, 1909, accessed July 12, 2015, https://www.google.com/patents/US931549.

51 Ranck, “Mite Boxes.”

52 On seriality see Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1993; repr., Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 2001), 91–95 Google Scholar. For cultural theorists, the power of mechanical seriality is a rejoinder to Benjamin's influential notion of aura (noted briefly below).

53 Twentieth Annual Report of the Topeka Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1903 (Topeka: Adams Bros, 1903), 42 Google Scholar.

54 “Des Moines Branch,” HWF, May 1884, 285. On rural mission churches, see “New York Branch Report,” HWF, October 1884, 87.

55 Cradle mite boxes are described in “Committee Notes,” in Bulletin of the Fatherless Children of France (October 1918), p. 4, Mrs Leland E Cofer Papers, box 1, fol. 3, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Loaf of bread mite boxes are described in Bob Owen, “Love Loaf: Hunger Fighter,” World Vision Magazine, March 1976, 12–14, World Vision Archives, Monrovia, CA. A Globe mite box is pictured at “6.25-inch Globe Collection Box Bank: United Christian Missionary Society,” George Glazer Gallery: Antiquarian Globes, Maps & Prints, accessed February 3, 2017, http://www.georgeglazer.com/globes/archive-novelty/missionbank.html. The globe mite box photographed here is from the United Christian Missionary Society, St. Louis, MO in the early 1900s. Ceramic mite boxes were also common in Catholic Europe before World War II. For example, in francophone countries boxes (tirelire) were shaped like African children who nodded their thanks upon receiving a penny (the head was affixed to the body by a hook or spring). These and other mite boxes reiterated often-racist depictions of colonial subjects, a subject I do not directly engage since I found few relevant examples in the WFMS records. A tirelire is pictured at “Missions Donation Box,” Material Objects Archive, Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, Yale University, accessed February 9, 2017, http://mavcor.yale.edu/material-objects/missions-donation-box.

56 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Halton, Eugene, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. And, from a very different theoretical standpoint, Latour, Bruno, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Bijker, Wiebe E. and Law, John (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University Press, 1992), 250–251 Google Scholar.

57 Latour, citing Akrich, “Where Are the Missing Masses?,” 232.

58 Mrs. M. C. Lindquist, The Sorrows of a Mite Box (s.l: s.n., 1890s), unprocessed materials, WDG, GCAH.

59 Annual Report of the New York Branch 1884–1885, 13, WDG, GCAH.

60 Corrigan, Business of the Heart, 3, 83, 119, 295.

61 “Baltimore Branch report,” HWF, November 1881, 117; “Northwestern Branch Report,” HWF, October 1883, 89.

62 It is a very literal and thus intriguing example of what David Morgan calls “material acts of seeing that enfold humans into large and extended networks.” Morgan, , “The Ecology of Images: Seeing and the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 5 (2014): 83–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Although, as noted, the advertisement slightly postdates the period under study, Woods's poem was in fact published by an earlier incarnation of the Golden Rule Fellowship in the mid-1920s, as evident in Vickrey, Charles Vernon, International Golden Rule Sunday: A Handbook (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 72Google Scholar. Biographical information from “Historical Note,” Bertha (Gerneaux) Davis and Albert Fred Woods papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1315.

64 Many studies have shown this to be untrue, at least in any simplistic sense. A good example is McDannell, Colleen, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

65 Rapp, Lillian, To My Mite Box (Harrisburg, Pa.: The Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society of the United Evangelical Church, ca. 1890s)Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH. Although the exact date of this tract is unknown, as The Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society of the United Evangelical Church published out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania from 1891–1922, that is almost certainly when this pamphlet was produced.

66 Arndt, Ava, “Touching London: Contact, Sensibility and the City,” in The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500, ed. Cowan, Alexander and Steward, Jill (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 99–103 Google Scholar.

67 Lindquist, The Sorrows of a Mite Box.

68 Annual Report of the Northwestern Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the M. E. Church for the year 1872–73 (Chicago: R. R. McCabe and Co.), 11 Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH; Annual Report of the New York Branch, From October 1, 1884 to October 1, 1885 (Summit, N.J.: Record, 1886), 13 Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH; Annual Report of the New York Branch 1884–1885, 40, WDG, GCAH. See also, Morgan, David, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and in Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3–4 Google Scholar.

69 First Annual Report, Minneapolis Branch of the Female Missionary Society, 1884, 23, WDG, GCAH.

70 Western Branch Report 1875, 13, WDG, GCAH.

71 Rapp, To My Mite Box.

72 First Annual Report of the Pacific Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (University: Book and Job, 1889), 14Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH; Ranck, “Mite Boxes.” Sometimes women referred to the box travelling and other times to the coins it contained.

73 Morgan, David, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14, 45Google Scholar.

74 “Copy of Mrs. J. P. Magee's letter,” Nov 23, 1890, fol. 2604-3-7:06 Correspondence, 1869–1926, WDG, GCAH. The folder begins with a handwritten table of contents by the archival compiler that labels it, “The Story of Ann Wilkins’ Missionary Box – Mrs. J. P. Magee,” which is then repeated in a penciled notation on the document itself. The dates are somewhat confused since she says that her family used the box for 28 years (until 1886). However, she also writes that it was upon her election to the WFMS in 1879 that she again took the box out of her home. Later, she remarks that it was ca.1880 that she began using it for WFMS receipts.

75 Beaver, American Protestant Women, 19.

76 “Busy Bee Hivings,” HWF, July 1882, 285.

77 Mrs J. T. Gracey, “Uniform Study for September,” HWF, August 1888, 41–42; Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Topeka Branch of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society 1918 (Topeka, Kans.: Adams Bros., 1919), 41Google Scholar, WDG, GCAH.

78 Miller “The White Child's Burden,” 153, Muffley, “Mite Chests,” 53–54. Western Branch Report, 1876–77, 53–54, WDG, GCAH.

79 Griffith, R. Marie, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 6 Google Scholar.

80 Mrs J. T. Gracey, “Uniform Study for September,” HWF, August 1888, 41–42; I. H. “September Mite-Box and Thank-Offering Service,” HWF, September 1888, 66–67; the story of the women of Connersville is in “Illinois Conference,” HWF, April 1888, 277.

81 Mauss's overarching point in his classic, The Gift, was that no gifts (charitable or otherwise) are in fact “free.”

82 Bready, J. Wesley, Doctor Barnardo: Physician, Pioneer, Prophet (London: George Allan & Unwin, 1930), 105–106 Google Scholar. On a similar idea earlier, Heyrman, “The Fashion Among More Superior People,” 118, 122.

83 Corrigan, Business of the Heart, 229, 234, 297.

84 Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, 21, 72.

85 Emily Bugbee, “Humility,” HWF, March 1874, 613.

86 Mrs. M. E. Bing, “Cincinnati Branch Report,” HWF, September 1879, 66.

87 Stevens, The Poor Indians, 14–15.

88 Kathryn Lofton, “Considering the Neoliberal in American Religion,” in Religion and the Marketplace, ed. Stieverman et al., 285. Other scholars have made the same critique in their respective fields, for example, Miller, Daniel, “Turning Callon in the Right Way Up,” Economy and Society 31 no.2 (2002): 218–233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 An excellent example is Pietsch, “Lyman Stewart and Early Fundamentalism.”

90 Lloyd, Charity and Poverty in England, 2, 15; Stewart, Kathleen, A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 189Google Scholar.

91 Cf. Lofton, “Considering the Neoliberal,” 277.