XVII.

WORK OF THE W. C. T. U.

BY

FRANCES E. WILLARD.

Let me try to set forth the sequel of that modern Pentecost called the “Woman’s Crusade.” That women should thus dare was the wonder after they had so long endured, while the manner of their doing left us who looked on bewildered between laughter and tears. Woman-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr work, or their embroidery, and simply swarmed into the drink-shops, seated themselves, and watched the proceedings. Usually they came in a long procession from their rendezvous at some church where they had held morning prayer-meeting, entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader with the Gospel in her looks, took her stand beside the bar, and gently asked if she might read God’s word and offer prayer.

Women gave of their best during the two months of that wonderful 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.

In 1883, on the suggestion of the National President of the W. C. T. U., a World’s Union was projected, and Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt, of Boston, started out to organize all civilized countries. She has now (1890) been seven years absent, and is reaching a greater variety of nationalities than any woman who ever lived. She has thus far traveled over fifty thousand miles; held over a thousand meetings; more than eleven thousand pages have been written; she has spoken, through interpreters, to people in twenty-three languages. Other missionaries are constantly being sent to follow Mrs. Leavitt, and the white ribbon is acclimated in every country in the world. Its methods are the universal circulation of a pledge against the legalizing of the sale of brain poisons, including of course, and chiefly, alcoholics and opium. This is to be presented to all governments by a deputation of women to which the petition will be entrusted when the number of signatures reaches two millions, and they will carry it round the world. The methods of the National W. C. T. U. have been universally adopted, of which the principal ones are total abstinence for the individual, and the effort to secure total prohibition for the State. The noon hour of prayer is everywhere observed, asking God’s blessing on the work and workers. The white ribbon—emblem of purity, prohibition, patriotism, and philanthropy—is the badge worn, and the motto, “For God and Home and Every Land.”

The first president of the World’s W. C. T. U. was Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas, sister of John Bright, and president of the Woman’s Temperance Association of Great Britain. The second and present president is Frances E. Willard.

Australia is organized, also Japan, China, Ceylon, Madagascar, the civilized portions of Africa, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. In continental Europe the progress is slow, as drinking habits are well nigh universal; but much progress has been made in Switzerland, also in Berlin. In the former country through the efforts of Miss Charlotte Gray, in the latter city through Mrs. Mary Bannister Willard, of the Home School for Girls.

A World’s W. C. T. U. convention is to be held in connection with the World’s Fair in Chicago, in 1893.

Wherever white ribboners are found, will be found friends of woman’s complete enfranchisement and admission to all professions and trades, on the ground that no artificial barrier should be thrown in her way, but that she should be freely permitted and welcomed to enter every place where she has capacity to succeed. Perhaps no motto of the W. C. T. U. is more frequently quoted than the following: “Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place.”