Interventionist social reform reframed civilizing as improving social milieux rather than individuals.

Evidence

Some reformers became convinced that state intervention was required for a healthy, efficient, and productive social order; they also maintained that the best way to create this order was to alter the social milieu in which individuals functioned-rather than to act upon the individuals themselves. One consequence of such thinking was that by the century’s end, there was little question that amelioration of all social milieux-whether metropolitan or colonial-” constituted the purest civilizing activity” possible. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 44

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Respectability rhetoric demanded structural state reform, not just private behavior. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1007