BLUE LAW

Blue Law

Blue Law

Introduction

The Blue Laws is also known as Sunday closing laws. The blue or Sunday closing laws, once deeply embedded in American government practice and public behavior, have largely vanished or become inconsequential in the United States. Initially they were inspired by a strong religious heritage that sought to order society by God's commands. But over time, people who supported those laws, Sabbatarians, as they are now known, regarded them as symbolic expressions of the dominant culture asserting order and stability in an increasingly diverse and changing society. Because Blue laws declined only after often bitter conflicts, much of the serious attention given to their history has properly focused on clashing cultural preferences and civil liberties issues involving church-state relations.

To understand what happened to Blue laws, however, attention must also be directed at competing economic interests and attitudes. Apart from religious devotion or cultural symbolism, practical considerations led some Americans to support Blue laws and others to oppose them. In ways insufficiently appreciated, those laws were eventually undermined by the gradual public acceptance of the commercialization of Sunday, part of the spreading culture of consumption that included buying, selling, and leisure activities. Cultural critic Witold Rybczynski poses an interesting rhetorical question: "Is the weekend merely the cunning marketing ploy of the materialist culture, a device to increase consumption?" (Norman, 1950, 53)

The history of Blue closing laws suggests an answer in the affirmative. Those laws declined, in large part, because Americans wanted to go shopping on Sundays.

History: Origins and Developments Before 1900

From the outset, Blue laws in America combined religious and other purposes. As historian Winton Solberg observed, "The Sabbatarian ideal emphasized a way, of life in which duty to God out-weighed the claims of mammon but, even during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries those laws served secular purposes, providing workers with a common day of rest and protecting small shopkeepers from larger competitors able to operate on Sundays with hired workers. After the American Revolution, preambles to state Blue laws proclaimed that the common day for rest and moral reflection would bestow upon secular and religious communities alike the benefits of church attendance.

Massachusetts, for example, declared in 1797 that men needed relaxation from the burdens of labor and the cares of business, and government coercion was necessary because thoughtless and irreligious persons otherwise damaged their communities by pursuing worldly business and recreation on Sunday (Robert, 1991, 71-74). Sabbatarians thus bolstered religious observance of Sunday by enlisting concepts of the common welfare against those who did not share their values and beliefs.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Sabbatarianism, much like the temperance movement, emerged as a moral crusade that aimed to wield the force of law to control behavior. The spark that ignited the Sabbatarian movement was the Post Office Act of 1810, which required mail service to continue from the rest of the week into Sundays. Sabbatarians responded by mobilizing to change the policies of the national government. In many states Sabbatarian organizations, led by Protestant ministers and laymen, sprang up and actively pressured government officials to enforce laws ...