TWENTY YEARS AFTER Mother Thompson’s Crusade had subsided, her most important follower was generous with credit. Thompson, said Frances Willard, “caught the universal ear and set the key of that mighty orchestra, organized with so much toil and hardship, in which the tender and exalted strain of the Crusade violin still soared aloft, but upborne now by the clanging cornets of science, the deep trombones of legislation, and the thunderous drums of politics and parties.”
That was one way of putting it. Another would have been “Mother Thompson’s Crusade launched the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.” But Frances Willard was no more likely to utter so declarative a sentence than she was to walk into a saloon and chug a double rye. At thirty-five Willard was among the small group of women who in 1874 founded the WCTU; at forty she took control of the organization, and for the rest of her eventful life she was field general, propagandist, chief theoretician, and nearly a deity to a 250,000-member army—undoubtedly, the nation’s most effective political action group in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Willard’s rhapsodic prose style apparently inspired others as well. To one of her most ardent admirers, Hannah Whitall Smith, Willard (who was always known to her family and friends as “Frank”) was “the embodiment of all that is lovely, and good, and womanly, and strong, and noble, and tender in human nature.” To another, the historian and U.S. senator Albert J. Beveridge, Willard managed to be both “the Bismarck of the forces of righteousness in modern society” and “the greatest organizer of sweetness and light that ever blessed mankind.”
The woman who educed such adoration was raised on a farm in Janesville, Wisconsin. At sixteen, she asked her parents to sign a pledge she had pasted in the family Bible. Fashioned as a series of rhyming couplets, the oath began, “A pledge we make, no wine to take / Nor brandy red that turns the head.” Several couplets later it concluded with “So here we pledge perpetual hate / To all that can intoxicate.” When Willard moved to Evanston, Illinois, with her parents a few years later, she found herself in what she would call a “Methodist heaven.” The new college that dominated the town (the predecessor of Northwestern University) had been established, its founders said, in “the interests of sanctified learning.” This mission was abetted by a legal proscription against the sale of alcoholic beverages within four miles of its campus and buttressed by the creation of a similarly liquor-loathing women’s school that soon opened nearby. Willard graduated from North Western Female College as valedictorian, became president a decade later, and assumed the position of dean of women at the university when the two schools merged in 1873.
But 1874 was the year of the Crusade, and on a trip east Willard found herself on her knees in Sheffner’s Saloon, on Market Street in Pittsburgh, singing “Rock of Ages.” Taking measure of the “crowd of unwashed, unkempt, hard-looking drinking men” arrayed behind her, “filling every corner and extending out into the street,” Willard wrote, “I was conscious that perhaps never in my life, save beside my sister Mary’s dying bed, had I prayed as truly as I did then.” A week later she was back in Chicago, about to walk away from her academic career so she could give her life to the temperance cause.
Forging a new alloy out of the moral commitment of Eliza Thompson and the feminist fire of Susan B. Anthony, Willard very explicitly made temperance a woman’s issue—and women’s issues, she argued, could not be resolved if authority was left solely in the hands of men. She had further come to believe that encouraging temperance was no longer enough. Only some form of legal prohibition could crush the liquor demon, and no such prohibition would ever be enacted without the votes of women. In 1876 she stunned a WCTU audience into silence when she made the case that women should have the right to vote on matters relating to liquor. Only three years later, her commitment to suffrage enabled her to unseat the WCTU’s founding president, the antisuffragist Annie Wittenmyer. Susan B. Anthony would soon begin to appear at WCTU conventions, and Willard installed Lucy Anthony, Susan’s niece, as head of the WCTU lecture bureau. The merging of Anthony’s campaign and Willard’s brought a critical realignment among the era’s feminist activists: the WCTU had acquired a very specific goal, and the suffrage movement had acquired an army.
“I have cared very little about food, indeed, very little about anything,” Willard once said, “except the matter in hand.” This dedication to her cause was magnified by her astonishing productivity. She began each day with a devotional reading, and then immediately after breakfast, whether at home in Evanston or on one of her cross-country speaking tours, she would charge into eight hours of dictation to her stenographer. She traveled constantly, in one year addressing audiences in every state and territorial capital except Boise and Phoenix. In 1881, accompanied by her secretary and lifelong companion, Anna Gordon, she went south to organize WCTU chapters in states where women’s political activity was even less welcome than it was in much of the north. She also traveled abroad (having founded the World WCTU in 1883), particularly to England, and numbered among her friends and supporters such fellow enemies of alcohol as Leo Tolstoy and the British philanthropist Lady Henry Somerset. Books poured out of her: polemics, memoirs, political manuals. She did step away from the temperance campaign long enough to publish A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (“As nearly as I can make out, reducing the problem to actual figures, it took me about three months, with an average of fifteen minutes’ practice daily, to learn, first, to pedal; second, to turn; third, to dismount; and fourth, to mount independently this most mysterious animal”). But even in her homeliest concerns, Willard rarely wandered far from the cause. She called her pet dog Hibbie, a diminutive for the name she had originally bestowed on him: Prohibition.
Willard’s army marched behind two concepts. The first, “Home Protection,” seemed perfectly anodyne. But beneath its surface blandness lay a subtle variation on the themes of the Crusade, repackaged for a more urgent purpose: by insisting that the elimination of alcoholic beverages was necessary for the health, welfare, and safety of the American family, the women of the WCTU were now praying not for the sinner, but for those sinned against. The images Home Protection evoked (and that its propagandists used shamelessly) were the weeping mother, the children in threadbare clothes, the banker at the door with repossession papers. The moral crusade was now a practical one as well.
Willard’s second principle, which blossomed as her fame and influence grew, was “Do Everything.” Perceiving that the energies of the WCTU could be harnessed for broader purposes, Willard urged her followers to agitate for a set of goals that stretched far beyond the liquor issue but harmonized with the effort to improve the lives of others. Her “Protestant nuns” (as Willard sometimes called her followers) campaigned for suffrage, of course, but also for prison reform, free kindergartens, and vocational schools. After reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in 1889, Willard declared herself a “Christian socialist” and broadened the WCTU’s agenda once again, agitating for the eight-hour day, workers’ rights, and government ownership of utilities, railroads, factories, and (she was nothing if not eclectic) theaters. Along the way she also took up the causes of vegetarianism, cremation, less restrictive women’s clothing, and something she called “the White Life for Two”—a program “cloaked in euphemism,” wrote Catherine Gilbert Murdock in Domesticating Drink, that “endorsed alcohol-free, tobacco-free, lust-free marriages.”
As exceptional as Willard was, her determination to connect Prohibition to other reforms was neither original with her nor uncommon. In its first national campaign, in 1872, the Prohibition Party endorsed universal suffrage, public education, and the elimination of the electoral college, and would soon take up a range of issues reaching from federal control of interstate commerce to forest conservation. Dio Lewis was a harvesting machine of causes and campaigns. At the moment he took the abstinence pledge in 1845, Frederick Douglass had said, “if we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery,” partly because “all great r
eforms go together.” The great abolitionist Wendell Phillips—who said he was also “a temperance man of nearly 40 years’ standing”—may have been speaking for Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Neal Dow, and all the others who had labored for both temperance and abolition when he argued that the defeat of slavery proved that government action was an appropriate weapon in the battle against moral wrongs.
In fact, Phillips may have been speaking for anyone who had managed to cross the gulf between persuasion and compulsion, between the traditional meaning of temperance and the new meaning of prohibition. Or, decked out in its permanent capital P, Prohibition—not just a word but a declaration, an apotheosis.
COMMEMORATING THE CENTENNIAL of American independence in 1876, the Manhattan lithography shop of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives reissued a popular item Currier had first published in 1848, Washington’s Farewell to the Officers of His Army. The great general stands in the exact center of the print, his associates arrayed around him, his tricorne hat on a stout table by his side. Washington is in full dress uniform; his right hand, fingers curled into a fist, rests on his breastbone. He looks to be making an emphatic gesture, but the officers in the picture seem lost in thought. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It did, however, when Currier first published a version of the image twenty-eight years earlier. In that version there’s no hat on the table; a decanter and some wineglasses occupy that spot. Nor is Washington making that peculiar fist. His fingers are extended, the better to grip the glass of wine he’s holding. He’s apparently delivering a heartfelt toast to the officers, whose considered expressions convey both their sadness and their humility.
The original image makes historical sense. Washington’s fondness for Madeira found expression in the postprandial bottle (and accompanying bowl of hickory nuts) he shared with his guests almost nightly. At the event depicted—his valedictory at Fraunces’ Tavern, in 1783—he had opened the emotional proceedings by pouring himself a glass of wine and inviting his officers to join him. Currier and Ives were businessmen, however, and business required them to oblige the temperance agitators who objected so vociferously to the original image. It was easy enough to obliterate the decanter and glasses by drawing in the hat; chopping off Washington’s own goblet, as well as the top two joints of his fingers, may have required a little more skill, but presumably it was worth the effort. That this self-censorship occurred as early as 1876, when the WCTU and its allies were only beginning to develop their strength and their strategy, suggests the degree to which aggressive actions would soon replace the prayerful entreaties of Mother Thompson—not least because they worked.
This became clear in the dazzling career of a former chemistry teacher from Massachusetts named Mary Hanchett Hunt, who became one of the most influential women in the country through her religiously inspired temperance work, even if her tactics proved to be not so holy. In her late forties, stirred by what she described as “a great hunger to do more for the Master,” she left behind her position as the leader of the Hyde Park Ladies Sewing Society to become as influential an agitator as the Prohibition movement would ever know. According to William Jennings Bryan, the campaign she led “did more than any other one thing” to bring the Eighteenth Amendment into being. In Hunt, the coercion Wendell Phillips had celebrated found its agent.
Hunt believed it her mission to reach the nation’s children, to saturate them in facts—as she perceived them—that would make young people despise alcohol as much as she did. Invited by Frances Willard to speak at the WCTU convention in 1879, she enlisted the union’s battalions in an assault on the nation’s school boards, which she intended to put in a “state of siege.” Through them, she said, a program of “Scientific Temperance Instruction” could be introduced into every American classroom. But Hunt was not prepared to entrust school boards alone with this grave responsibility. “It is our duty not to take the word of some school official,” she declared, “but to visit the school and carefully and wisely ascertain for ourselves if the study is faithfully pursued by all pupils.” With Willard’s support, at least in the early stages, Hunt sought to have two or more monitors from every single WCTU chapter lay siege to their own local boards. Lest anyone underestimate the audacity of what she was trying to accomplish, she borrowed from the educational taxonomy and called these local enforcers “superintendents.”
In 1881 she began to aim higher. Having persuaded the WCTU to commit itself to legally mandated temperance instruction, Hunt targeted the state legislatures. She took control of as many of these campaigns as possible, in some instances moving to the capital of a particular state to direct petition drives and demonstrations, while simultaneously handling legislators with such skill—and such effect—that she acquired the epithet “Queen of the Lobby.” Vermont, in 1882, was the first state to pass a compulsory temperance education law; the crucial New York legislature capitulated in 1884; the next year Pennsylvania went a step further, tying state funding to local compliance with the statute’s provisions, among them mandatory temperance examinations for all new teachers. Hunt had a falling-out with Willard around this time, but her juggernaut no longer required Willard’s personal sanction. In 1886 Hunt took her caravan to Congress, which promptly passed a law requiring Scientific Temperance Instruction in the public schools of all federal territories and in the military academies as well. By 1901, when the population of the entire nation was still less than eighty million, compulsory temperance education was on the books of every state in the nation, and thereby in the thrice-weekly lessons of twenty-two million American children and teenagers.
What many of these millions received in the name of “Scientific Temperance Instruction” was somewhat different from what the three words implied. The second one was arguably accurate, but what Hunt called “scientific” was purely propaganda, and what she considered “instruction” was in fact intimidation. Students were force-fed a stew of mythology (“the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy”), remonstration (“persons should not take a stimulant before bathing”), and terror (“when alcohol passes down the throat it burns off the skin, leaving it bare and burning”). These specific “insights,” as embarrassing as they were even to the WCTU leadership, were not spontaneously generated; they entered the curricula of an estimated 50 percent of all American public schools in textbooks bearing the one imprimatur most valuable to any publisher: the approval of Mary Hunt.
The textbook endorsement program was an arm of the prodigious operation Hunt had assembled in her home on Trull Street in Boston. In one room Hunt created the Scientific Temperance Museum (among its prized artifacts: pens governors had used to sign temperance education bills into law). In the Correspondence Room as many as five secretaries handled her mail and managed her punishing schedule. But only Hunt could attach her signed endorsement to a textbook’s copyright page, and publishers and authors who sought it had to survive her grueling interrogations. Professor Charles H. Stowell of the University of Michigan Medical School, the author of a series of health and anatomy books, spent more than a year negotiating word-by-word changes with Hunt before she agreed to sign off on A Healthy Body, a volume Stowell and his publisher, Silver, burdett & Company, intended for students in the intermediate grades. Unlike those authors of “unscientific and unpedagogical” books who did not seek her seal of approval, Stowell generally had no issue with Hunt’s authority; he was a stalwart antiliquor man himself, and in his textbook for high school students he described alcohol as “a narcotic poison [with] the power to deaden or paralyze the brain.” He drew the line only when Hunt insisted on inserting in one of his books the claim that a single drink of liquor seriously affected one’s vision.
Stowell thereby showed more steel than the scholar who told a committee investigating Hunt’s work that “I have studied physiology and I do not wish you to suppose that I have fallen so low as to believe all those things I have put into those books.” But it was Hunt’s way of doing business, not her edit
orial standards, that led Stowell’s publishers to fall out with her. In 1891 she informed the firm, which was ready to publish one of Stowell’s books, of the “utter impossibility” of meeting their schedule. She couldn’t possibly provide an endorsement for at least six weeks, she said—unless, that is, the publisher picked up the tab for Emma L. Benedict, “my Literary Assistant,” whom Hunt was taking to Atlantic City “for a couple of days rest between engagements.”
The record doesn’t reveal the reaction inside the offices of Silver, Burdett to this mild ransom demand. But a few days by the seaside weren’t so costly, and soon the firm ponied up the money. The company’s compliant posture stiffened, though, when Hunt presented its officers with what could only be called a shakedown. When Stowell’s next volume was completed late that same year, Hunt once again stalled, and this time she wasn’t coy about her intentions: she wanted to be paid for her endorsement. “Did you think I was doing this work for nothing?” she asked. O. S. Cook, Stowell’s editor, told Hunt that his firm had come to “plainly understand that you demand a definite arrangement as to compensation, before you will indorse the books.” When she requested a meeting to discuss the matter, the firm made its final response: “Our position is clearly known to you. Any further discussion would undoubtedly prove fruitless.”
It was true that Hunt never accepted a salary from the WCTU in the twenty-seven years that she patrolled America’s classrooms, and it was also true that she and her supporters repeatedly denied that she received or expected payment from publishers. The chairman of her advisory board, the Reverend A. H. Plumb, condemned these “unjust charges” before a New York state senate committee in 1895 and two years later insisted that the rumor that Hunt demanded a 3 percent royalty on textbooks she endorsed was a calumny spread by Silver, Burdett.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 3