The Devil in Babylon: Fear of Progress and the Birth of Modern Life

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Folk memory has associated cities with sin at least since the time of
Sodom and Gomorrah. That alone makes the subject a rich and deep vein
for historians to mine. Allan Levine has staked out the 50-odd years
between the 1880s and 1930s in the history of North America’s large
cities, a period when New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Winnipeg saw their
populations swollen by a torrential influx of migrants and immigrants
from eastern and Mediterranean Europe. Like a tsunami they swept into
inner-city neighbourhoods, taking them over and turning them into ethnic
ghettos, speaking in strange tongues and unpacking the sometimes
sinister contents of their cultural baggage. How, Levine asks, was urban
culture transformed; how did the members of the receiving society create
a pattern of explanation for its transformation; how did they seek to
contain its deleterious effects; and how successful were they? How, in
fact, was the devil to be chained in Babylon?

Periods of violent and heated cultural ferment often generate movements
for the defence of traditional values, for their destruction, or for
their reform. This period was no exception. Levine skilfully weaves a
story that reveals the complex relationship among competing ways and
prescriptions: the American Way and the prescriptions of anarchists and
socialists; the assimilationist model for American and Canadian society,
and a variety of multicultural prescriptions; the patriarchal way and
feminist prescriptions; the model of collective social responsibility
and the prescriptions offered by social Darwinists and eugenicists;
alcoholic beverages as an essential accoutrement of civilized existence
and the prohibitionists’ advocacy of abolition in the interests of
collective security and prosperity; sex within marriage for the purpose
of procreation, and sex as a recreational ground dedicated to the
extension of human freedom.

This is well-plowed ground. While Levine has added little to the
specialist’s knowledge of the subject, he is a trained historian who
has mastered the literature, surveyed the Canadian as well as the
American dimensions of the matter, and moved the narrative and
analytical elements along by associating them with characters whose
names most people will recognize. The Devil in Babylon will be enjoyed
by readers who reject pulp, but have little patience or time for
monographs and the periodical literature.