The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  “One of these women, quiet and gray-haired, sat silently listening all through the speech and when it was over and the people were going away, she suddenly burst into bitter crying. With the spirit of friendliness that pervaded the conventions, Hannah Whitall Smith went up to her to console her and asked her to tell the trouble and be comforted. But the poor convert could not be comforted. ‘Frances Willard has just convinced me that I ought to want to vote, and I don’t want to.’ Nothing could help her. She was convinced, and could not escape it, and she didn’t want it, and could not escape that, and so there was no comfort to be given her.”

  The utmost demand in women’s rights was embodied in a petition to Congress asking that, in territories, the sale of liquor should be legalized only when a majority of men by their votes, and women by their signatures, should so request.

  Frances Willard joined Moody’s Boston revival. She then went on a lecture tour, working as a free lance for Temperance, and helped to collect 2,000,000 names in Illinois to a petition for local option in which “women of lawful age shall be privileged to take part . . . when voting on the question of license.” In 1879, she was elected president of the national W.C.T.U. and, with her election, it became certain that the organization would indorse Woman’s Suffrage. In her first annual address, she predicted the coming of Suffrage “and then America, beloved Mother of thrice grateful daughters, thou shalt find rallying to thy defense and routing the grimy hosts that reel about thee now, an army of voters which absenteeism will not decimate and money cannot buy.” At the same time, she foreshadowed her more significant work by a friendly allusion to the Prohibition Party.

  To those familiar with later events, the connection between the W.C.T.U. and the Prohibitionists seems an entirely natural one. But as late as 1882, Frances Willard herself doubted it. The stumbling block was the Republican Party.

  The W.C.T.U. existed at that time almost exclusively in the North. It was composed of women whose fathers had been called “barn-burners” and “free-soilers,” who had suffered to bring the Republican Party into being. Their brothers had fought and died in the War which the Republican Party had waged to preserve the Union. The Great Martyr, who had delivered an address to the Washingtonians and was claimed as a Temperance man, had been a Republican. The Republican Party had saved the Union and freed the slaves, and was now reconstructing the South and restoring sound currency. It was “the party of moral ideas.” Regrettably, it feared the beer-drinking German vote and was sold to the liquor interests. Miss Willard, for many years, felt that her only possible course was to work upon the Republican Party from within. Patiently and heroically, she braved the fumes of nicotine in committee rooms at the great conventions and made brief logical addresses to the delegates preparing platforms. Usually there was no effect but, once in a while, the Republican Party declared itself in favor of “the virtue and sobriety of the people and the purity of the home,” and expressed sympathy with “wise and well-directed efforts for the promotion of Temperance and Morality.” And these sops encouraged those members of the W.C.T.U. who were eager to support the Republicans.

  The organization had in fact been unanimous in endorsing Garfield, whom the leaders had known as a brotherly Disciple preacher of the Campbellite persuasion but, after the election, Garfield met them coldly and they came to see that the liquor interests “held the balance of power.”

  In the meantime the Prohibition Home Protection Party was beginning to appear “as women’s answered prayer.” It was, almost from the start, enthusiastically in favor of woman’s suffrage. “To-day,” said Miss Willard in 1883, “that party is Endymion, the unknown youth, who by the friendship of Diana, the clear-eyed queen of heaven, shall make for itself friends everywhere, until it becomes regnant, and the two reign side by side.” In 1884, Democratic and Republican Parties both refused to adopt a prohibition plank and, although the Prohibition Party gave up the name of Home Protection which Miss Willard had found so winsome, the W.C.T.U. gave that party its endorsement. On the 20th of November, 1884, Miss Willard could look back upon the election and ask her followers not to gloat over their defeated adversaries. For the party of moral ideas had, for the first time since 1861, been defeated and by such margins that the mugwumps were without dispute guilty; not only political mugwumps, but those natural-born Republicans whom women had diverted from the true path to vote for Prohibition. The Republican papers were furious and called the W.C.T.U. a political party. The Prohibition candidate for President, ex-governor John St. John of Kansas, was burned in effigy. When the W.C.T.U. was about to meet at the Central Methodist Church in St. Louis, the leaders were asked whether they would promise to avoid politics. They refused and Miss Willard said, “We can give up the high-toned churches, but not our high-toned ideas.” After the Republican defeat, the churches turned bitterly against the W.C.T.U., but Miss Willard held firm and was able to defeat a resolution to make the Union non-partisan. From that time on, the Republican Party was considered the great enemy of Prohibition.

  It is not precisely true that the Prohibition Party gave the 18th Amendment to this country. It never had a great leader and it saddled itself with too many social and economic theories ever to be successful. The Prohibition Amendment was ratified in the Middle West by people who believed in Prohibition, not by members of the Party; and these were the people to whom the W.C.T.U. appealed. Until it exerted a political influence by breaking down the series of Republican victories, the W.C.T.U. was considered harmless and insignificant but, from that time, it never ceased to gain in power, at least so long as Frances Willard remained at its head. Behind her action in pushing her organization into politics, there lay a statesmanlike concept. While the wives of Republicans and Democratic leaders went in for Temperance they still pretended to find some difference in essential things between the two parties. Miss Willard brushed these differences aside. She made it clear that social and moral reforms of any scope could only be accomplished by cutting across party lines. Like most Americans, she believed heartily in political action. The personal appeal had failed with the Washingtonians and the Crusaders, and Miss Willard went in for organization and the law—that is, for political action. For that reason, she demanded the Suffrage and, for that reason, too, she supported the Prohibition Party. To her, they were essentially the same; both were only political means to her moral ends. Both of them cut diagonally across the existing political organization. Miss Willard was actually helping to form a party, really national, and expressed her statesmanship in a pun on the initials of her own society, “We Come To Unite.” Particularly, she wished to unite the North and the South, letting a great moral wave flow over and obliterate the rancor of the war.

  She was responsible for the morality of Prohibition, for the emotions which the movement expressed. She withdrew the energies of women from the trivial and fruitless reform of individuals and directed them to a reform of society. She was too good an American to inquire whether society really could be reformed by law.

  Miss Willard’s work was carried on by the Anti-Saloon League which was founded, in 1895, exactly where one would expect it to be founded—in the town where Frances Willard spent her early childhood, the middle western center of reform, Oberlin, Ohio. The Anti-Saloon League went much further than the W.C.T.U. The women’s organization still trusted to a degree in moral suasion and still was happy at the thought of a signed pledge and a great petition. The League had but one object, divided into two parts: the abolition of the saloon wherever it could be abolished, and the ultimate amendment of the constitution to destroy the liquor trade entirely. The Women Crusaders of 1873 had attempted to abolish a single saloon by prayer. They discovered that the drunkards went elsewhere and converted barkeepers had a tendency to backslide, but they had pointed the way. And although Miss Willard never dropped moral suasion—and thereby kept alive the emotions to which the Anti-Saloon League ultimately appealed—she foreshadowed the whole politico-legal movement which was eventually succe
ssful.

  She was to be followed by one of the rare comic figures of the American reforming movements—Carry A. Nation. But before Miss Willard passes from the scene, it is worthwhile to record some of her other thoughts and activities. For example, one is pleased to note that she drank wine, under doctor’s orders, and twice, once in America and once in England, she went to the theater. She allowed Nelson Sizer the phrenologist to examine her head, and liked Walt Whitman whom she thought a genius. In conversation with Harriet Beecher Stowe, they agreed that “pens and voices are constrained from on high.” She went to a water cure and to a spiritualist. She once asked Henry Ward Beecher to explain the scriptural significance of “it is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine.”

  She at one time published the Chicago Post and always liked newspapers and newspaper men, wishing only that they would not drink and smoke so much. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly could not tell from a sample of her writing whether her work would be acceptable. It surprised her when a “great beak-nosed unmistakable Jew” helped her out of a slight difficulty in a New York bus. Her dog was named Prohibition. She deplored the prevalence of French dolls and denied that dolls are needed to “develop or cultivate” a mother heart suggesting that boys might better play with dolls and develop the fatherly instinct. She called her secretary Little Heart’s Ease. She disliked the pleasures of the table almost as much as the pleasures of the glass.

  She was of course deeply interested in marriage and her horror at the arranged marriages of Europe, with love left unfulfilled or unsanctified, was very great. On other questions concerning sex she spoke with a certain freedom up to a point and then involved herself in vagueness. When she was nineteen “a young woman who was not chaste came to the college . . . not knowing her degraded status I was speaking to her, when a schoolmate whispered a few words of explanation that crimsoned my face suddenly; and grasping my dress lest its hem should touch the garments of one so morally polluted, I fled from the room.” She attributes this to a healthful instinct, but thanks God that, with the years, she became mellowed. Yet it was not till long after other groups in the W.C.T.U. had added a crusade against vice to their activities, that she lifted the White Cross, a crusade to pledge men to purity, and the White Shield, a work for penitent prostitutes. In the Advocate for Moral Reform, she had read a story which haunted her more than any other except Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “It was brief but it was tragic, and the lovely young girl was left at the close in a madhouse, while of the man, I remember this sentence, ‘I see him often, passing to and fro in his elegant carriage. Beside him sits his wedded wife, around him are his happy children, and he is a candidate for the state legislature.’”

  At the age of thirty she kept in her house a servant girl who had been seduced, but all improprieties of the animal nature made her uneasy. In an essay entitled, Is Marriage a Failure? she discusses property rights and co-education and monogamy and the right of a woman to her own name and then proceeds to this astonishing climax:

  “Last of all and chiefest, the magnum opus of Christianity, and Science, which is its handmaid, the wife will have undoubted custody of herself, and, as in all the lower ranges of the animal creation, she will determine the frequency of the investiture of life with form and of love with immortality. My library groans under accumulations of books written by men to teach women the immeasurable iniquity of arresting development in the genesis of a new life, but not one of these volumes contains the remotest suggestion that this responsibility should be at least equally divided between himself and herself. The untold horrors of this injustice dwarf all others out of sight, and the most hopeless feature of it is the utter unconsciousness with which it is committed. But better days are dawning; the study by women of heredity and prenatal influences is flooding with light the Via Dolorosa of the past; and the White Cross army with its equal standard of purity for men and women is moving to its rightful place of leadership among the hosts of men. I believe in uniform national marriage laws, in divorce for one cause only, in legal separation on account of drunkenness, but I would elevate and guard the marriage tie by every guarantee that could make it at the top of society, the most coveted estate of the largest-natured and most endowed, rather than at the bottom, the necessary refuge of the smallest-natured and most dependent woman. Besides all this, in the interest of marriage . . . men who, by bad habits and niggardly estate, whether physical, mental, or moral, were least adapted to help build a race of human angels, should find the facility with which they now enter its hallowed precincts reduced to the lowest minimum.”

  Almost equally vague is Miss Willard’s record of her love affairs, as a prelude to which she records all her childhood and schoolgirl infatuations, with girls in school and women teachers. About men she says very little. At Evanston she had an inamorata—it is her word—and told her mother that she had written to Maggie, “I love you more than life, better than God, more than I dread damnation,” to which her mother ambiguously replied, “Oh, Frank! Pray Heaven you may never love a man.” It seems likely that the prayer was answered. “I was almost nineteen,” she says, “before the slightest token of interest came to me from beyond the mystic line that a virtuous woman’s glances may not cross.” This token was a polite invitation to go to a students’ entertainment. She makes a peculiar point about even slight intimacies insisting that “the most delicate approach in deeds” must be accompanied by those self-committing words that women always expect to hear in the connection, and says, “ ‘hands off’ is the golden maxim for every genuine girl and each true gentleman. All this I say out of a heart that suffered once and to help those yet untried.” For nine months she was engaged to be married and, of this episode, she would say no more during her lifetime. She was by the nature of her work always closer to women and seemed to be happy in that intimacy, yet still wondered why she missed “life’s crowning joy . . . love’s delirium of delight.” Her explanation of friendship between women betrays her own bewilderment, for she “pondered much” why “the loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day.” She cites the example of the two maids of Llangollen who withdrew from their lives of wealth and position to live secluded together, and speaks of women, unfortunately married, joining in business and taking each other “for better or for worse.” She tries to believe that drink and tobacco separate men from women and, just as she wandered from the subject of birth control in the excerpt above, she wanders now from this troubling subject to say that the men advocating women’s advancement do not use tobacco or drink. The trouble, however, is still in her mind and she returns to it: “The friendships of women are beautiful and blessed; the loves of women ought not to be, and will not be, when the sacred purposes of the temperance, the labor, and the woman movements are wrought out into the customs of society and the laws of the land.”

  She was always sentimental, but she was not sanctimonious, and it is astonishing how much charm there is in her autobiography into which in six weeks she threw nearly half a million words consisting of diaries, reminiscences, petitions, addresses, and letters until even her devoted organization had to protest and shorten the book by nearly a half. She had working habits which would have made her an intolerable person to live with. She woke early, wrote on trains, could travel 20,000 miles a year, visiting every state in the Union in twelve months, and giving at least three hundred lectures a year. Yet she seems to have been driven by conviction and not by fanaticism. One regrets what she accomplished. By her methods she aided the most unhappy turn in the character of the American reformer, but her spirit remains faintly attractive. The pendant to her portrait is Carry Nation, the perfect fanatic, who shares with her the position of prominence in the history of American prohibition.

  [1] Gough is, in fact, a classic example of non-religious conversion. In his case, a waiter in a temperance hotel stood in the place of the revivalist and Gough was brought to conviction of sin, to repentance, and to conversion with sobriety and not sanctity as the object.


  [2] Among his fellow-lecturers in the campaign was P. T. Barnum.

  XVI. A Moral Hijacker.

  IT is fairly obvious that Carry A. Nation was a freak, slightly deranged. She claimed that the drunkenness of her first husband was responsible for her imbecile child, but her own mind was definitely unbalanced at the end of her life and nothing in her career suggests health or equilibrium. She was a moralistic hijacker born a little before her time.

  “I never saw anything that needed a rebuke, or exhortation, or warning,” she writes, “but that I felt it was my place to meddle with it.” She meddled! Her extraordinary autobiography, which she modestly called The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, is a bizarre record of meddling as practiced by “Your Loving Home Defender.” She would not allow her name to be spelled “Carrie,” for she considered that, as it stood, it was an imperative from on high to “carry a nation”—the United States—into prohibition and out of what she considered another danger as great as drunkenness—the influence of Masonic and other lodges, which gave men a pretext to absent themselves from their wives in the evening.

  She was so violent, so conspicuous, that she probably has given to our time its most definite mental picture of the fanatic and reformer. She was always right. When she was teaching school she preferred a pronunciation not countenanced by the local trustees, and she resigned rather than change. She was still quite young when her first husband died and, one gathers from her own account, she prayed that a true mate be pointed out to her. Upon which, and immediately, she met the man whose name, taken with her own, makes such a happy English sentence. She went to live in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and worked as the Jail Evangelist of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, exhorting the prisoners and wringing confessions from them that they would have remained upright, prosperous citizens if it had not been for liquor. Kansas was dry. Neither liquor nor the paraphernalia for dispensing it had any legal right to exist; it could hardly be called property. In place of a license to operate a saloon, Kansans paid a monthly fine. The saloons, openly flourishing, were called “joints” and, in addition, “sneaking, degenerate druggists” sold beer and whiskey. Mrs. Nation began her crusade in the traditional manner. Dressed in shining black alpaca, her heavy face lit with enthusiasm, her stocky figure planted as a rock, she stood at the door of a “joint” and sang: