William Booth

English religious leader and social reformer

• Born: April 10, 1829
• Birthplace: Sneinten, Nottingham, England
• Died: August 21, 1912
• Place of death: London, England

Compelled by his deep Christian faith to seek ways of serving his fellow man, Booth founded the international religious service organization called the Salvation Army, which became established in the United States fifteen years after the Civil War.

Early Life

The son of a humble builder, William Booth was left fatherless at the age of thirteen. Determined to help support his family after his father’s death, he served as an apprentice to a pawnbroker. At the age of fifteen, he underwent a dramatic Christian conversion, at which time he began his career as a preacher, eventually pursuing formal theological education through private tutors.

In 1849, Booth moved to London, where he worked on the side at a pawnbroker’s shop, disliking the work but needing the income. It was during this time that he met the person who would become perhaps the single most important influence on his life and on his view of Christian service: Catherine Mumford, whom he would marry six years later and who would encourage him in his dream of becoming a full-time Christian minister.

By 1852, Booth had become entrenched in a respectable and established Methodist Church, dutifully pastoring the congregation but vaguely yearning for a ministry that would bring him into contact with those who needed the assurance of God’s care the most, the “street people” of Victorian London: the alcoholics, the orphans and widows, those abandoned by society. Increasingly uncomfortable with the isolation inherent in the life of a located minister, Booth left this pastorate after nine years. The Booths launched careers as independent revivalists; unattached to any particular denomination, they were free to speak their consciences.

The key event in their lives occurred in July, 1865, when they established a mission outpost at Whitechapel in London, an outreach of the “East London Revival Society,” which came to be known as the Christian Mission. In typical revivalist rhetoric, Booth preached salvation from eternal punishment through belief in Christ, but he also offered a different, more immediate salvation from drunkenness, hunger, lack of clothing, and lack of shelter. By 1878, this mission was called the Salvation Army and had become a controversial yet effective means of taking Christianity out of the churches and into the streets; the Booths and their coworkers embraced the words of Jesus to the effect that “the healthy have no need of a physician; therefore, we must go to those who are sick.”

Life’s Work

Booth’s genius was to employ a central military metaphor in organizing and conceptualizing his missionary work. Many historians of religion would argue that Booth was the first to recognize the need for and value of“packaging” religion in symbols and contexts that would arrest the attention of the public and associate his faith in the minds of adherents with something memorable and concrete. In founding the Salvation Army, Booth took the role of general and created ranks, uniforms, flags, rules of order, and even a military band.

The years between 1878 and 1890 saw the Salvation Army grow astoundingly successful in attracting other Christian workers and in assisting delinquents and lifelong ne’er-do-wells in reforming their lives and becoming respectable citizens within Victorian society. Booth’s increasingly rigid, authoritarian manner, however, alienated many within Salvation Army ranks during this period, and his growing public power alarmed many outside the Salvation Army. These fears and objections came to a climax in 1890, when Booth published what was to be the most celebrated and defamed manifesto of his stormy career. Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out proclaimed an elaborate plan for reforming Victorian society so that the poor would no longer be exploited and victimized by the cruelty of industrialized England.

At this time, the Victorian intelligentsia were buoyantly trumpeting the “survival-of-the-fittest” mentality arising from Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and equally busily exploring and reporting upon the exotic lifestyles in “Darkest Africa.” Their morbid fascination with the sordid tales of slavery and primitive worldviews angered Booth, whose book mocked their affluence and offered a ten-point plan for ridding society of poverty, including the creation of employment bureaus, farm colonies, state-provided legal assistance, and a missing-persons’ agency. Progressive as it may seem to a twentieth century readership, the book outraged Victorian society and was denounced by churchgoers and social critics as a form of reckless socialism; biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, champion of Darwinism and opponent of religion, felt compelled to launch an unprecedented public attack on Booth and his social agenda.

Essentially, Booth’s public image was never rehabilitated after the book’s publication, and he lived out the remainder of his years in fervent but quiet service to the Salvation Army, assisting its formation and growth around the world until his final days in August, 1912. Only after his death did the prescience of his work and vision begin to receive the acclaim and respect it warranted.

Significance

In his time, William Booth was feared by some, loathed by others, but respected by all for his fierce determination to help the less fortunate, to prove that religion had application in this world as well as in the world to come. He succeeded admirably where others had failed in focusing the attention of the upper and middle classes on the plight of the indigent and destitute in an industrialized, capitalist culture.

Directly in England and indirectly in the United States, Booth appealed to the conscience of a wide range of church members, moving them to recognize their duty to reach the souls of men and women by first feeding and clothing them. While not the first to articulate the social dimensions of the Christian gospel, Booth as much as anyone during the early twentieth century was responsible for linking belief with action, faith with social responsibility.

The Salvation Army he started in the British Isles probably has its strongest presence in North America and is one of the most respected and responsible religious service organizations in operation. Indeed, in the minds of many, Booth’s Salvation Army is more associated with relief efforts and noble self-sacrifice than it is with any specifically religious orientation or dogma. The Salvation Army’s survival and health—more than a century removed from its origins and in a time more than skeptical about service institutions—is a greater tribute to General Booth’s tenacity, faith, and love of humankind than any physical monument could be.

Bibliography

Begbie, Harold. The Life of General William Booth. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1920. The standard, nearly exhaustive biography of Booth, written unabashedly as a tribute to a man whom the author regards as a hero. While this quaintness wears thin very early, the two volumes contain the basic facts about the Booth family and their formation of the Salvation Army. Contains especially valuable excerpts from journals and letters that Booth wrote to his wife, Catherine, and others that illuminate the motivations of this driven man.

Bishop, Edward. Blood and Fire! The Story of General William Booth and the Salvation Army. London: Longmans, Green, 1964. A succinct narrative of the life and times of the Booth family and the Salvation Army. Helpful as it is as a brief overview of the main outlines of Booth’s life and his program for reforming Victorian England, overall it is quite derivative of the earlier biographies of Booth and the Salvation Army.

Chesham, Sallie. Born to Battle: The Salvation Army in America. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965. Though written primarily as a history of the Salvation Army in the United States, the early chapters of this volume provide a useful summary of Booth’s life and the impact of the Salvation Army in the United States in the twenty years before the turn of the century.

Collier, Richard. General Next to God: The Story of William Booth and the Salvation Army. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965. A biography that updates and presents more concisely the information available in Begbie’s sprawling two-volume work. Much less hagiographical than Begbie’s biography, but still disarming in its undisguised admiration for Booth and his work. The reader will not find a critical assessment of Booth’s life or social agenda here.

Hattersley, Roy. Blood & Fire: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Hattersley, a member of the British Labour Party, describes the political and social context in which the Salvation Army operated in Victorian England. He portrays the personalities and peccadillos of the Booths with more honesty than some previous biographers.

Huxley, Thomas H. Evolution and Ethics. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Huxley, the Victorian social critic and popularizer of evolution, wrote a series of scathing attacks on Booth that are collected in this volume under the chapter “Social Diseases and Worse Remedies.” Huxley’s remarks provide an interesting secularist counterpoint within Victorian England to Booth’s ambitious social reform programs.

McKinley, E. H. Somebody’s Brother: A History of the Salvation Army Men’s Social Services Department, 1891-1985. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986. This volume examines in great detail the social activism of Booth that motivated him to link evangelism uniquely with feeding, clothing, and housing the poor and destitute.

Spence, Clark. The Salvation Army Farm Colonies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. An interesting examination of the controversy surrounding Booth’s initial call for state donation of farmland to be used for raising food for the poor. Spence chronicles Victorian opposition to what appeared to many as “mere autocratic socialism.”

Walker, Pamela J. Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Walker focuses on the religious origins of the Salvation Army, describing how it was primarily an evangelical religious group, not a charity. She also describes how the Salvation Army adapted secular working-class culture to accomplish its mission and enter into nineteenth century city life.

Winston, Diane. Red-hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. A history of the Salvation Army in America, from its origins in New York City in 1880 through its work during World War II. Winston examines the mission, methods, and growth of the Salvation Army and its influence on American life.