Membership, Mobilization, and Policy Adoption in the Gilded Age: The Case of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

Relatively little is known about how late nineteenth-century associations worked to get their policy goals adopted by state governments. We study this question here, considering the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and three policies it supported: scientific temperance instruction, increasing the age of consent, and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors. Overall, WCTU-supported legislation was more likely to succeed in states with unified Republican state legislatures, aided by neighboring state adoptions (scientific temperance) and greater WCTU membership (increasing age of consent and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors). These findings are supported by historical evidence, which reveals how WCTU leadership targeted particular states when lobbying for scientific temperance instruction laws and utilized its broad membership base to pressure state legislatures on the other two issues. In total, these results show how one late nineteenth-century membership group was able to facilitate the successful spread of its policies throughout the nation.

Prohibition against American Imperialism

As temperance has largely been synonymous with anti-imperialism the world over, Chapter 15 examines it during America’s imperial era: specifically the Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines. It begins by charting the relationship between Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy and William Jennings Bryan, who became America’s most outspoken foe of both American imperialism and the exploitative liquor traffic. The anti-canteen movement arose in response to the increasing drunkenness and exploitation of American soldiers—as well as native Cuban and Filipino populations—by the liquor traffic backed by the US military. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the emerging Anti-Saloon League helped secure an anti-canteen law in 1901, effectively getting the US government to restrain its own predatory excesses. The chapter concludes with Bryan’s evangelical, social gospel progressivism, highlighting the shared community protection logic of prohibitionism and anti-imperialism.

A Tale of Two Franceses—Temperance and Suffragism in the United States

Chapter 13 examines the Reconstruction Era struggle for women’s rights and African American rights through the American Equal Rights Association, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), especially the WCTU activism of acclaimed black writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Born of the so-called Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873–1974, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU would become the most successful woman’s organization of all time. Willard’s Do Everything campaign expanded women’s activism, both nationally and globally. Despite racial tensions within the WCTU, temperance activism provided the main avenue of political organization for women across the Reconstruction-Era South, both black and white. By the 1890s Willard had made common cause between not just temperance, equal rights, antilynching leagues, and suffragist movements, but—as a Christian socialist—with both the domestic and international labor movement as well.

2. The dry crusade

‘The dry crusade’ describes the increasing number of anti-liquor reformers who wanted state and national prohibition. Key groups were the Women’s Crusade and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Ohio and the Anti-Saloon League. Middle-class women dried up dozens of small towns, but when anti-liquor reformers in larger towns led similar movements, they met defiance and resistance. The rise of local option in the 1880s and 1890s meant smaller communities could support a ban even if votes were lacking to prohibit alcohol statewide. Without World War I, it is doubtful that prohibition would ever have passed Congress or been ratified, but enforcement turned out to be far more challenging than the dry forces ever imagined.