Booth, William

BOOTH, WILLIAM. - Social reformer and founder of the Protestant sect the "Salvation Army," b. at Nottingham on 10 April 1829, d. blind in London on 20 Aug. 1912. The son of a poor family, from the age of 13 he had to work to live. At 15 he experienced a first impulse toward conversion and felt drawn to the revivalist movement. In 1849 he moved to London, where he worked in the large workshops, from which he carried away a deep impression. During this period he met Catherine Mumford, his future wife and collaborator. In 1852 he gave an itinerant course of preaching as a follower of the Methodist New Connection. Meanwhile his religious convictions were moving away from the Methodist creed and taking a new and personalistic direction, especially with regard to a certain movement of social redemption that he was elaborating in favor of the humblest and most unfortunate classes of the London suburbs. At his wife's urging he founded at Whitechapel, a district of the destitute, a Christian mission that would constitute the first cell of the future worldwide organization called the Salvation Army (v. ESERCITO DELLA SALVEZZA), devised by him for the purpose of attracting to Christianity, by new means and methods, not excluding certain choreographic forms of propaganda, the workers, the wretched and the outcasts of society, restoring to them the sense of life and hope in moral and social rehabilitation. After endowing the new association with rules and statutes, in 1878 he modeled it on the pattern of a military hierarchy composed of privates and officers, of which he himself proclaimed himself "general."

At the outset his demonstrations, considered extravagant and disturbing to the peace, were not taken seriously; public opinion was hostile to him, and some of his followers were fined and imprisoned. Nevertheless he succeeded in giving ever greater impetus to his work. The results achieved among the proletarian classes, besides winning him the admiration of the dispossessed, forced themselves on the attention even of the most skeptical and earned him the esteem of various personalities in the political world, who wished to meet him and support his action.

In 1890 he lost his wife, who had always assisted and followed him as "generaless" in order to insinuate herself into the female strata, and he felt her absence very deeply. In the same year he published, in collaboration with the journalist W. T. Stead, the volume In Darkest England, and the Way Out, in which, after bringing to light the tragic conditions of the English working classes, exploited by the capitalists and estranged from every form of economic and religious assistance, he proposed to remedy the immense plagues of pauperism by means of a plan of reforms: the great success of the book (ca. 10 million lire for 200,000 copies in a few weeks), the favor of King Edward VII himself who, in 1902, personally invited him to the coronation ceremony, the sympathies that he had gradually been winning within wealthy London society, procured for him a conspicuous fortune that enabled him to carry out, in a short time, a great part of his program and to extend the new military order to every continent, proving himself an indefatigable organizer and an effective orator.

His firstborn son William Bramwell, b. at Halifax (Yorkshire) in 1856, succeeded his father in the generalship of the association. Already an officer of the "Army" in 1874, he was placed in 1880 in charge of the work of organization and distinguished himself in the struggle against the "white slave trade," revealing to public opinion the underhanded arts by which the victims were recruited, and through his agitation he succeeded in having an amendment to the penal code approved in 1885. He had as a valiant collaborator his wife Florence, an officer of the army. However, in 1929, judged inexperienced and unsuited for the office he held, he was dismissed by the council of the order and replaced by Edward J. Higgins. When the latter retired in 1934, the rank of general was assumed by Evangeline Booth, the founder's fourth daughter, who remained in office until 1 Nov. 1939, the Australian George Carpenter having succeeded her from that time.

Mario Bevilacqua