The fissures that opened in Clinton, Iowa, and Bowers’s reaction to them were symptomatic of reform’s problems. When evangelicals pushed for temperance, women’s suffrage, social purity, and English language education, they reinforced the ethnocultural political divisions that reformers needed to bridge to create majority alliances. Yet evangelicals could not give up these measures; they were, as Josiah Strong emphasized, the core of their attempt to redeem and reform America.
