uprising. All other engagements were laid aside; elegant women of
society walked beside quiet women of home, school, and shop, in the
strange processions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of
nearly every town and village in the State that was its birth
place,[218] but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices
trained in Paris and Berlin sang “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” in the
malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls. Meanwhile, where were the
men who patronized these places? Thousands of them signed the pledge
these women brought, and accepted their invitation to go back with them
to the churches, whose doors, for once, stood open all day long; others
slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; but even of these
it might be said, that those who came to curse remained to pray. Soon
the saloon-keepers surrendered in large numbers, the statement being
made by a well-known observer that the liquor traffic was temporarily
driven out of two hundred and fifty towns and villages in Ohio and the
adjoining States, to which the Temperance Crusade extended. There are
photographs extant representing the stirring scenes when, amid the
ringing of church bells, the contents of every barrel, cask, and bottle
in a saloon were sent gurgling into the gutter, the owner insisting that
women’s hands alone should do this work, perhaps with some dim thought
in his muddled head of the poetic justice due to the Nemesis he thus
invoked. And so it came about that soft and often jeweled hands grasped
axe and hammer, while the whole town assembled to rejoice in this new
fashion of exorcising the evil spirits. In Cincinnati, a city long
dominated by the liquor trade, a procession of women, including the
wives of leading pastors, were arrested and locked up in jail; in
Cleveland dogs were set on the Crusaders, and in a single instance a
blunderbuss was pointed at them, while in several places they were
smoked out, or had the hose turned on them. But the arrested women
marched through the streets singing, and held a temperance meeting in
the prison; the one assailed by dogs laid her hands upon their heads and
prayed; and the group menaced by a gun marched up to its mouth singing,
“Never be afraid to work for Jesus.” The annals of heroism have few
pages so bright as the annals of that strange crusade, spreading as if
by magic through all the Northern States, across the sea, and to the
Orient itself. Everywhere it went, the attendance at church increased
incalculably, and the crime record was in like manner shortened. Men say
there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew before; a sense of
God and human brotherhood.
But after fifty days or more, all this seemed to pass away. The women
could not keep up such work; it took them too much from their homes;
saloons reopened; men gathered as before behind their sheltering
screens, and swore “those silly women had done more harm than good,”
while with ribald words they drank the health of “the defunct crusade.”
Perhaps the most significant outcome of this movement was the knowledge
of their own power gained by the conservative women of the churches.
They had never seen a “woman’s rights convention,” and had been held
aloof from the “suffragists” by fears as to their orthodoxy; but now
there were women, prominent in all church cares and duties, eager to
clasp hands for a more aggressive work than such women had ever before
dreamed of undertaking.
Nothing is more suggestive in all the national gatherings of the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, that sober second thought of the crusade,
than the wide difference between these meetings and any held by men. The
beauty of decoration is specially noticeable; banners of silk, satin and
velvet, usually made by the women themselves, adorn the wall; the
handsome shields of States; the great vases bearing aloft grains, fruits
and flowers; the moss-covered well with its old bucket; or the setting
of a platform to present an interior as cozy and delightful as a parlor
could afford, are features of the pleasant scene. The rapidity of
movement with which business is conducted, the spontaneity of manner,
the originality of plan, the perpetual freshness and ingenuity of the
convention, its thousand unexpectednesses, its quips and turns, its wit
and pathos, its impromptu eloquence and its perpetual good nature—all
these elements, brought into condensed view in the National Convention,
are an object lesson of the new force and the unique method that
womanhood has contributed to the consideration of the greatest reform in
Christendom. It is really the crusade over again; the home going forth
into the world. Its manner is not that of the street, the court, the
mart, or the office; it is the manner of the home. Men take one line,
and travel onward to success; with them discursiveness is at a discount.
But women in the home must be mistresses as well as maids of all work;
they have learned well the lesson of unity in diversity; hence, by
inheritance and by environment, women are varied in their methods; they
are born to be “branchers-out.” Men have been in the organized
temperance work not less than eighty years—women not quite fifteen. Men
pursued it at first along the line of temperance, then total abstinence;
license, then prohibition; while women have already over forty distinct
departments of work, classified under the heads of preventive,
educational, evangelistic, social, and legal. Women think in the
concrete. The crusade showed them the drinking man, and they began upon
him directly to get him to sign the pledge and “seek the Lord behind the
pledge.” The crusade showed them the selling man, and they prayed over
him, and persuaded him to give up his bad business, often buying him
out, and setting him up in the better occupation of baker, grocer, or
keeper of the reading-room, into which they converted his saloon after
converting him from the error of his ways.
But oftentimes the drinking man went back to his cups, and the selling
man fell from his grace; the first one declaring, “I can’t break the
habit I formed when a boy;” and the last averring, “Somebody’s bound to
sell, and I might as well make the profit.” Upon this the women, still
with their concrete ways of thinking, said, “To be sure, we must train
our boys; and not only ours but everybody’s; what institution reaches
all?—the public schools.” Under the leadership of Mrs. Mary H. Hunt they
have secured laws requiring scientific temperance instruction in the
public school system of thirty States.
To the inane excuse of the seller that he might as well do it since
somebody would, the quick and practical reply was, “To be sure; but
suppose the people could be persuaded not to let anybody sell? why, then
that would be God’s answer to our crusade prayers.” So they began with
petitions to municipalities, to legislatures, and to Congress,
laboriously gathering up, doubtless, not fewer than ten million names in
the great aggregate, and through fourteen years. Thus the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union stands as the strongest bulwark of
Prohibition, State and national, by constitutional amendment and by
statute. Meanwhile, it was inevitable that their motherly hearts should
devise other methods for the protection of their homes. Knowing the
terrors and the blessings of inheritance, they set about the systematic
study of heredity, founding a journal for that purpose. Learning the
relation of diet to the drink habit, they arranged to study hygiene
also; desiring children to know that the Bible is on the side of total
abstinence, they induced the International Sunday School Convention to
prepare a plan for lessons on this subject; perceiving the limitless
power of the Press, they did their best to subsidize it by sending out
their bulletins of temperance facts and news items, thick as the leaves
of Vallambrosa, and incorporated a publishing company of women.
It is curious to watch the development of the women who entered the
saloons in 1874 as a gentle, well-dressed, and altogether peaceable mob.
They have become an army, drilled and disciplined. They have a method of
organization, the simplest yet the most substantial known to temperance
annals. It is the same for the smallest local union as for the national
society with its ten thousand auxiliaries. Committees have been
abolished, except the executive, made up of the general officers, and
“superintendencies” substituted, making each woman responsible for a
single line of work in the local, State, and national society. This puts
a premium upon personality, develops a negative into a positive with the
least loss of time, and increases beyond all computation the aggregate
of work accomplished. Women with specialties have thus been multiplied
by tens of thousands, and the temperance reform introduced into
strongholds of power hitherto neglected or unthought of. Is an
exposition to be held, or a State or county fair? there is a woman in
the locality who knows that it is her business to see that the W. C. T.
U. has an attractive booth with temperance literature and temperance
drinks; and that, besides all this, it is her duty to secure laws and
by-laws requiring the teetotal absence of intoxicants from grounds and
buildings. Is there an institution for the dependent or delinquent
classes? there is a woman in the locality who knows that it is her duty
to see that temperance literature is circulated, temperance talking and
singing done, and that flowers with appropriate sentiments attached are
sent to the inmates by young ladies banded for that purpose. Is there a
convocation of ministers, doctors, teachers, editors, voters, or any
other class of opinion-manufacturers announced to meet in any town or
city? there is a woman thereabouts who knows it is her business to
secure, through some one of the delegates to these influential
gatherings, a resolution favoring the temperance movement and pledging
it support along the line of work then and there represented. Is there a
legislature anywhere about to meet, or is Congress in session? there is
a woman near at hand who knows it is her business to make the air heavy
with the white, hovering wings of prohibition for the better protection
of women and girls, for the preventing of the sale of tobacco to minors,
for the enforcement of the Sabbath or for the enfranchisement of women.
Thus have the manifold relationships of the mighty temperance movement
been studied out by women in the training-school afforded by the real
work and daily object-lessons of the W. C. T. U. Its aim is everywhere
to bring women and temperance in contact with the problem of humanity’s
heart-break and sin, to protect the home by prohibiting the saloon; and
to police the State with men and women voters committed to the
enforcement of righteous law. The women saw, as years passed on, that
not one, but three curses were pronounced upon their sons by the
nineteenth century civilization; the curse of the narcotic poisons,
alcohol and nicotine; the curse of gambling; the curse of social sin,
deadlier than all; and that these three are part and parcel of each
other. And so, “distinct like the billows, but one like the sea,” is
their unwearied warfare against each and all. They have learned, by the
logic of defeat, that the mother-heart must be enthroned in all places
of power before its edicts will be heeded. For this reason they have
been educated up to the level of the equal suffrage movement. For the
first time in history the women of the South have clasped hands with
their Northern sisters in faith and fealty wearing the white ribbon
emblem of patriotism, purity and peace, and inscribing on their banners
the motto of the organized crusade, “For God and Home and Native Land.”
“No sectarianism in religion,” “no sectionalism in politics,” “no sex in
citizenship,”—these are the battle cries of this relentless but peaceful
warfare. We believe that woman will bless and brighten every place she
enters, and that she will enter every place on the round earth. We
believe in prohibition by law, prohibition by politics, and prohibition
by woman’s ballot. After ten years’ experience, the women of the crusade
became convinced that until the people of this country divide at the
ballot box, on the foregoing issue, America can never be nationally
delivered from the dram-shop. They therefore publicly announced their
devotion to the Prohibition party, and promised to lend it their
influence, which, with the exception of a very small minority, they have
since most sedulously done. Since then they have not ceased beseeching
voters to cast their ballots first of all to help elect an issue rather
than a man. For this they have been vilified as if it were a crime; but
they have gone on their way kindly as sunshine, steadfast as
gravitation, and persistent as a hero’s faith. While their enemy has
brewed beer, they have brewed public opinion; while he distilled whisky,
they distilled sentiment; while he rectified spirits, they rectified the
spirit that is in man. They have had good words of cheer alike for North
and South, for Catholic and Protestant, for home and foreign born, for
white and black, but gave words of criticism for the liquor traffic and
the parties that it dominates as its servants and allies.
While the specific aims of the white ribbon women everywhere are
directed against the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages,
it is sufficiently apparent that the indirect line of their progress is,
perhaps, equally rapid, and involves social, governmental and
ecclesiastical equality between women and men. By this is meant such
financial independence on the part of women as will enable them to hold
men to the same high standards of personal purity in the habitudes of
life as they have required of women such a participation in the affairs
of government as shall renovate politics and make home questions the
paramount issue of the State, and such equality in all church relations
as shall fulfill the gospel declaration, “There is neither male nor
female, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The cultivation of specialties, and the development of _esprit de corps_
among women, all predict the day, when, through this might-conserving
force of motherhood introduced into every department of human activity,
the common weal shall be the individual care; war shall rank among the
lost arts; nationality shall mean what Edward Bellamy’s wonderful book,
entitled “Looking Backward,” sets before us as the fulfillment of man’s
highest earthly dream; and Brotherhood shall become the talismanic word
and realized estate of all humanity.
In concluding this portion of my article I cannot better express my view
of what we are, and what we may be, than by the following quotation from
my address before the Woman’s Congress at its meeting in Des Moines,
Ia., 1885:
Humanly speaking, such success as we have attained has resulted from the
following policy and methods:
1. The simplicity and unity of the organization. The local union is a
miniature of the national, having similar officiary and plan of work. It
is a military company carefully mustered, officered, and drilled. The
county union is but an aggregation of the locals and the district of the
counties, while each State is a regiment, and the national itself is
womanhood’s “Grand Army of the Republic.”
2. Individual responsibility is everywhere urged. “Committees are
obsolete to us, and each distinct line of work has one person, called a
superintendent, who is responsible for its success in the local, and
another in the State, and a third in the National union. She may secure
such lieutenants as she likes, but the union looks to her for results,
and holds her accountable for failures.
3. The quick and cordial recognition of talent is another secret of W.
C. T. U. success. Women, young or old, who can speak, write, conduct
meetings, organize, keep accounts, interest children, talk with the
drinking man, get up entertainments, or carry flowers to the sick or
imprisoned, are all pressed into the service. There has been also in our
work an immense amount of digging in the earth to find one’s own buried
talent, to rub off the rust and to put it out at interest. Perhaps that
is, after all, its most significant feature, considered as a movement.
4. Subordination of the financial phase has helped, not hindered us.
Lack of funds has not barred out even the poorest from our sisterhood. A
penny per week is our basis of membership; of which a fraction goes to
the State, and ten cents to the National W. C. T. U. Money has been, and
I hope may be, a consideration altogether secondary. Of wealth we have
had incomputable stores; indeed, I question if America has a richer
corporation to-day than ours; wealth of faith, of enthusiasm, of
experience, of brain, of speech, of common sense—this is a capital stock
that can never depreciate, needs no insurance, requires no combination
lock or bonded custodian, and puts us under no temptation to tack our
course or trim our sails.
5. Nothing has helped us more than the entire freedom of our society
from the influence or dictation of capitalists, politicians, or
corporations of any sort whatever. This cannot be too strongly
emphasized as one of the best elements of power. Indeed, it may be truly
said that this vast and systematic work has been in no wise guided,
molded, or controlled by men. “It has not even occurred to them to offer
advice until within a year, and to accept advise has never occurred to
us, and I hope never will. While a great many noble men are ‘honorary
members,’ and in one or two sporadic instances men have acted
temporarily as presidents of local unions at the South, I am confident
our grand constituency of temperance brothers rejoice almost as much as
we do in the fact that we women have from the beginning gone our own
gait and acted according to our own sweet will. They would bear witness,
I am sure, to the fact that we have never done this flippantly, or in a
spirit of bravado, but with great seriousness, asking the help of God. I
can say personally what I believe our leaders would also state as their
experience, that so strongly do good men seem to be impressed that the
call to Christian women in the Crusade was of God, and not of man, that
in the eleven years of my almost uninterrupted connection with the
National W. C. T. U. I have hardly received a letter of advice or a
verbal exhortation from minister or layman, and I would mildly but
firmly say that I have not sought their counsel.” The hierarchies of the
land will be ransacked in vain for the letterheads of the W. C. T. U. We
have sought, it is true, the help of almost every influential society in
the nation, both religious and secular; we have realized how greatly
this help was needed by us, and grandly has it been accorded; but what
we asked for was an indorsement of plans already made and work already
done. Thus may we always be a society “of the women, by the women,” but
for humanity.
6. The freedom from red-tape and the keeping out of ruts is another
element of power. We practice a certain amount of parliamentary usage,
and strongly urge the study of it as a part of the routine of local
unions. We have good, strong “constitutions,” and by-laws to match;
blanks for reports; rolls for membership; pledges in various styles of
art; badges, ribbons, and banners, and hand-books of our work, are all
to be had at “national headquarters,” but we will not come under a yoke
of bondage to the paraphernalia of the movement. We are always moving
on. “Time cannot dull nor custom stale our infinite variety.” We are
exceedingly apt to break out in a new phase. Here we lop off an old
department, and there we add two new ones. Our “new departures” are
frequent and oftentimes most unexpected. Indeed, we exhibit the
characteristics of an army on the march rather than an army in camp or
hospital.
The marked _esprit de corps_ is to be included among the secrets of
success. The W. C. T. U. has invented a phrase to express this, and it
is “comradeship among women.” So generous and so cherished has this
comradeship become that ours is often called a “mutual admiration
society.” We believe in each other, stand by each other, and have plenty
of emulation without envy. Sometimes a State or an individual says to
another, “The laurels of Miltiades will not suffer me to sleep;” but
there is no staying awake to belittle success; we do not detract from
any worker’s rightful meed of praise. So much for the “hidings of power”
in the W. C. T. U.
There are two indirect results of this organized work among women,
concerning which I wish to speak.
First. It is a strong nationalizing influence. Its method and spirit
differ very little, whether you study them on the border of Puget Sound
or the Gulf of Mexico. In San Francisco and Baltimore white ribbon women
speak the same vernacular, tell of their gospel meetings and petitions,
discuss the _Union Signal_ editorials, and wonder “what will be the
action of our next annual convention.”
Almost all other groups of women workers that dot the continent are
circumscribed by denominational lines, and act largely under the advice
of ecclesiastical leaders. The W. C. T. U. feels no such limitation.
North and South are strictly separate in the women’s missionary work of
the churches, but Mississippi and Maine, Texas and Oregon, Massachusetts
and Georgia, sit side by side around the yearly camp-fires of the W. C.
T. U. The Southern women have learned to love us of the North, and our
hearts are true to them; while to us all who fight in peaceful ranks
unbroken, “For God and Home and Native Land,” the Nation is a sacred
name.
Second. Our W. C. T. U. is a school, not founded in that thought or for
that purpose, but sure to fit us for the sacred duties of patriots in
the realm that lies just beyond the horizon of the coming century.
Here we try our wings that yonder our flight may be strong and steady.
Here we prove our capacity for great deeds; there we shall perform them.
Here we make our experience and pass our novitiate that yonder we may
calmly take our places and prove to the world that what is needed most
was “two heads in counsel” as well as “two beside the hearth.” When that
day comes the nation shall no longer miss, as now, the influence of half
its wisdom more than half its purity, and nearly all its gentleness, in
courts of justice and halls of legislation. Then shall one code of
morals—and that the highest—govern both men and women; then shall the
Sabbath be respected, the rights of the poor be recognized, the liquor
traffic banished, and the home protected from all its foes.
Born of such a visitation of God’s spirit as the world has not known
since tongues of fire sat upon the wondering group at Pentecost, cradled
in a faith high as the hope of a saint, and deep as the depths of a
drunkard’s despair, and baptized in the beauty of holiness, the Crusade
determined the ultimate goal of its teachable child, the W. C. T. U.,
which has one steadfast aim, and that none other than the regnancy of
Christ, not in form but in fact; not in substance but in essence; not
ecclesiastically, but truly in the hearts of men. To this end its
methods are varied, changing, manifold; but its unwavering faith these
words express: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the
Lord of Hosts.”
The Woman’s National Christian Temperance Union has a publishing house
in Chicago that in 1889 sent out 130,000,000 pages of temperance
literature; employs 146 men and women, mostly women; pays a dividend of
seven per cent. on money invested; is the proprietor of its own presses
and of its machinery, including an electrotyping department. It
publishes the _Union Signal_, organ of the World’s and National W. C. T.
U., with a weekly circulation of 85,000 copies; also four other papers
for the young people, children, and Germans; and has connected with it a
large job office for general printing. The directors of this great
establishment are all women, and the editors women. No one can hold
stock except a white ribbon woman that is a member of the W. C. T. U.
This enterprise constantly enlarges because it has a sure foundation in
the ten thousand local unions of the W. C. T. U.
The National W. C. T. U. has also founded a woman’s temperance hospital
in Chicago, conducted throughout by women, its object being to prove
experimentally that alcoholics have no necessary place in medicine.
A woman’s temperance temple, to cost over a million of dollars, was
projected by Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, president of the W. C. T. U., of
Chicago, and is now in course of erection. While the national society is
in no wise responsible for this movement, it has done much to help it
forward, and hopes in the course of time to have headquarters here for
its publishing department, etc., a large hall for public meetings, a
kindergarten, restaurant, and all the paraphernalia of a great
temperance headquarters. Besides this it expects to realize from the
rentals, as the building is located in the heart of the city, a large
annual endowment for its various lines of work.
A Woman’s Lecture Bureau has been established in Chicago, which is
constantly sending out speakers to all parts of the United States and
Canada. These speakers may be men or women, but the management is in the
hands of white ribboners.
Some local unions do as much work as a whole State society: for
instance, the Chicago Union, which last year sheltered 60,000 friendless
men in its great lodging house; which maintains a temperance restaurant,
an anchorage for degraded men and women, where 5,000 were cared for last
year, a kindergarten, daily gospel meetings, and many other forms of
Christian philanthropy.