Chapter 29
Before there were Red and Blue states, there were Wet and Dry—thanks in part to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, whose principal, Frances Willard, believed a “most effective” way to wean Americans off demon drink was through exhibits such as this one, held soon after the Titanic sank in 1912 (evidenced by the nautical poster on the wall). America was sinking, too, the WCTU warned in pearl-clutching prose, in a vast sea of alcohol, spending 500 percent more on hooch than it did on public education.
Like a good vintage port, the WCTU and the temperance movement in general took decades to age into a potent force. In colonial times, Americans quaffed intoxicants in prodigious quantities: One estimate pegged consumption of ardent spirits at the time of the Revolution at 3.5 gallons per capita; by the late 1820s, that figure had bubbled up to four gallons per person. Yet another assessment pegged usage at seven gallons per capita in 1830.
The backlash against excessive imbibing began in earnest in 1826 when individual clergymen uncorked their efforts by founding the American Temperance Society. By 1831, it rebranded itself the American Temperance Union, reporting over 2,200 known branches. By 1832, there were temperance societies in every state but three.
For all their reach and ambition, though, the advocates of teetotalism may as well have been wrestling a tornado. After all, when the Puritans set sail for the new world, they lugged 42 tons of beer and 10,000 gallons of wine compared to 14 tons of water. Less stridently absolutist than we might think, early temperance scolds exempted beer and usually wine in lieu of harder stuff. It was a balanced position abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century in the face of inebriation’s immoveable object against temperance’s highly resistible force. (In 1850s Chicago, an armed mob brawled with Windy City police over the city’s enforcement of Sunday tavern-closing laws.) Perhaps because the old standbys, humiliation and harangues, had failed, temperance scolds doubled down, declaring that all brews, beer, ale, or wine, were, in whatever quantity, equal in their sordidness. And they chose the ballot box to express this extreme position.
Courtesy of the Frances E. Willard Memorial Library and Archives
One of the first Prohibition laws went into effect in 1843 in the Oregon territory but was repealed five years later. In 1847, Maine enacted a Prohibition law (called “a square and grand blow right between the horns of the Devil,” by preacher Lyman Beecher, the American Temperance Society co-founder), followed by a tidal wave during the next few years of similar Prohibition statutes in Rhode Island, Minnesota, Delaware, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York. Often, however, governors vetoed them, legislatures repealed them, and state supreme courts invalidated them.
In 1869, the National Prohibition Party was born and placed its first presidential candidate, John Black, on the ballot for the presidential campaign of 1872; he received 5,607 votes. Success at the polls ultimately peaked in 1892 when John Dedwell, the Prohibition presidential candidate, received a total of 270,710 votes out of roughly 12 million cast.
Where the first waves of temperance advocates focused on alcohol of and by itself, the WCTU saw spirits with a surprisingly modern sensibility, as part of a complex lattice of cause and effect, and a consequence of social problems that went full ouroboros on themselves.
Officially founded in Ohio in 1874, WCTU had founders who saw alcohol as the catapult on which the women’s movement could be launched past the castle walls of male domination. Headed for much of its early decades by suffragette Frances Willard, the WCTU believed it would bridge the existential gap that drink and tobacco created between men and women. “Once they used these things together, but woman’s evolution has carried her beyond them; man will climb to the same level . . . ,” Willard stated, “but meanwhile . . . the fact that he permits himself fleshly indulgence that he would deprecate in her, makes their planes different, giving her an instinct of revulsion.”
Preposterously prim, the WCTU’s position on smoke and drink had the naivety of 1950s highway safety films; yet the organization was gratifyingly advanced, with a “Do Everything” strategy that resulted in roughly forty sections advocating for other interests such as women’s suffrage, trade unionism, dress reform, prostitution reform, child care, and animal rights. The WCTU also advocated a living wage, an 8-hour day, “wiser civil service reform,” and a “better Indian policy.”
Moreover, it understood promotion in a way that would have brought salty tears to Don Draper’s jaded eyes.
For its exhibit at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition held in New Orleans in 1884, the organization hired Henry Worrall. A self-taught illustrator of remarkable imagination, Worrall had the down-home appeal of Norman Rockwell and the uptown quirk of Christo: To promote Kansas, Worrall created “cereal architecture” for world’s, state, and local fairs, such as an 8-foot-high Liberty Bell made of broomcorn, millet, and wheat. For the WCTU, however, he created a promotional watercolor poster of Kansas’s pastoral scenery, with an infinite beauty that seemed reserved only for those who ascend to heaven after they’re gone.
The group recruited children to serenade “the true and the brave” who signed the abstinence pledge. It also enlisted McGuffey’s Readers in their battle, which pummeled the practice of licensing of liquor stores and saloons:
Licensed—to do thy neighbor harm,
Licensed—to kindle hate and strife,
Licensed—to nerve the robber’s arm,
Licensed—to whet the murderer’s knife,
Licensed—like spider for a fly,
To spread thy nets for man, thy prey,
To mock his struggles, crush his soul,
Then cast his worthless form away.
The WCTU numbered 158,477 members by 1901 with chapters throughout the United States and Canada, but for years the WCTU did not accept Catholic, Jewish, or African-American women. It saw the devil not only in beverages of leisure and self-forgetting but in immigrants—especially Germans, renowned for their breweries, much as one saw the vector of the bubonic plague in rats. Indeed, much of the organization’s efforts in the first decade of the twentieth century were focused on its center on Ellis Island in order to prompt the Americanization of the naturally drunk Germans and Irish. Subsequently, the WCTU found common cause with the Ku Klux Klan and the eugenics movement. (The KKK supported Prohibition with the same zeal it loathed the Pope and immigrants.) By 1902, the temperance campaign had permeated the public school systems, with every state but Arizona introducing compulsory temperance education.
With the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, the WCTU had apparently won the war, if not all the battles. While its membership peaked at 372,355 in 1931, the WCTU’s decline quickly began with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 repealing Prohibition.
Its most enduring heritage may be the hundreds of water fountains it built across the country. The idea had its genesis at the WCTU’s 1874 convention, where it was proposed that fountains would offer parched men relief without having to enter a saloon where stronger refreshment might tempt them. (The Sons of Temperance may have copycatted the idea when it sponsored a fountain serving icy water inside a $2,300 thirteen-sided gazebo at the 1876 Centennial International Exposition.) Over the next few decades, the WCTU built hundreds of fountains (which often included drinking troughs for horses and dogs) around the nation, whose branding included an inscription with the WCTU’s name and a white ribbon.
The WCTU is now considered the oldest voluntary, non-sectarian women’s organization in continuous existence in the world. Sometimes dismissed as Victorian as corsets for advocating Prohibition, the WCTU was also a progressive force, working for voting rights for women and equal pay for equal work. Its legacy, though, might be summed up as a caterpillar that became a butterfly that became a caterpillar again in its journey from obscurity to fame, and back again to anonymity.