Salvation Army Meeting, 1902

City officials and the press initially objected to the Salvation Army's disruptive public activities. Relations improved as Salvation Army officers and volunteers provided valuable assistance to Chicago's needy during the panic of 1893 and the Great Depression, and most famously, to American soldiers serving in World War I. The early decades of the twentieth century saw the Salvation Army move away from the fervent evangelism of its earlier days to focus on providing social services. At the close of the twentieth century, Chicago's Salvation Army maintained nearly two hundred facilities, providing community members with food and shelter as well as job training and counseling.

Jonathan H. Ebel