Del programa de Articulación a la Educación Media Fortalecida en Bogotá

The WCTU’s significance in America’s temperance story is nearly impossible to understate, and it manifests in myriad ways. For the present purposes, the group’s most notable significance was that it signaled a rhetorical shift in the larger temperance discourse. No longer would women, so often the most dedicated champions of

temperance, define their advocacy of the cause in relation to their “female vulnerability,” but they would now argue for pro-temperance reform from a position of “women’s

courage, intelligence, accomplishments, and their capacities as role models and

heroines” (Mattingly 40), with one of their primary targets for educating the nation about this new brand of temperance being public schools (Burns 111). Part educational

resource, part civic organization, part political action network, part social club, part religious organization, and all confidence, the WCTU, steered by early leaders like Annie Wittenmyer and Francis Willard worked tirelessly to sow the seeds of a new American culture, one that simultaneously shunned alcohol and respected women, and they did this by celebrating women among their own ranks, positively associating Biblical precepts with the struggle for temperance (as a proxy for women’s rights), encouraging women to maximize their opportunities for civic involvement, and, at every turn, constantly galvanizing the organization’s membership into a cohesive unit that would not easily be undone by intra-organizational discord (Mattingly 40-45). They would even work with and around dominant power structures (such as pastors who controlled facilities they needed for their meetings) and the recalcitrant notions of church members who feared that new, unwanted social orders (such as those brought on by the Civil War) were somehow directly linked to temperance reform (Coker 233). As Mattingly writes, “[The WTCU] recognized the power of established religion,

acknowledging and deferring to it when necessary and when it served their purposes” (47). As the societal force most responsible for supercharging the Temperance Movement, the WCTU subtly but persistently planted the seeds of a virtual societal revolution without ever appearing to be wholly revolutionary.

On the whole, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union exuded a degree of rhetorical innovation unprecedented on such a large scale at that point in American history, and the if the tension between rhetoric and dialectic had shifted firmly in favor of rhetoric, the parallel contest between science and religion was beginning to turn into less of a contest, as both empirical and spiritual appeals were, by the close of the 19th

century, frequently employed in temperance rhetoric. These appeals were fruitful, and despite some temporary setbacks in the 1880s where prohibition amendments to

several state constitutions failed (Kerr 39), by the 1890s, enough of the cultural battle in favor of temperance had been won that a grand-scale effort to wage a political battle on alcohol could finally begin in earnest. The primary vehicle for this would be the Anti- Saloon League (ASL), which was begun by Congregational Minister Howard Hyde Russell in Ohio in 1893 and which spawned a national equivalent in 1895 (Burns 148). In the minds of the temperance advocates, saloons held a particularly insidious place in the milieu of alcohol distribution in American society, embodying “the poor man’s club, a place that was especially important in crowded cities” and one that offered

“entertainment, socializing opportunities, and a way for the working class to build community, as many patrons were immigrants” (Peck 10). The primary victory of the Anti-Saloon League was, in the words of K. Austin Kerr in the article “Organizing for Reform: The Anti-Saloon League and Innovation in Politics,” that it “adapt[ed] the structure of the departmentalized business firm and its bureaucratic values to temperance work” as a result of “businessmen learning techniques of managing economic activities previously governed by market forces” (38). “In both its prowess and its duplicity,” Eric Burns writes in The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol, “the Anti-Saloon League was like one of our modern political action committees” (151). The author expounds:

It would not credit a man for the virtue or good sense of his positions on other issues if he opposed the group in its single area of concern. It would, in fact, do everything it could to end the fellow’s career; it would write letters, issue

brochures, devise slogans, plan strategies, canvass neighborhoods, poll voters, staff headquarters, stuff envelopes, and provide speakers, the league plodding through these chores with the tenacity of bulldogs and “the patience of driver ants.” (Burns 151)

The national urge for temperance was so great, the moral call backing it so crystal clear, that scorched-earth measures like this mitigated any hesitation that those working on behalf of the temperance cause might have otherwise had to consider other ethical and practical ramifications of their actions. In addition to the Anti-Saloon

League’s political ferocity, in many communities, the group augmented its legislative action with direct judicial involvement, as temperance scholar James Timberlake conveys that, by 1908, the ASL had participated in 31,000 anti-alcohol court cases (Hamm 376).

These extreme (for the standards of the day) techniques were especially efficacious. According to Burns, by 1903, a third of U.S. citizens were voluntarily abstaining from alcohol, and by 1913, 46 million people—almost half the nation’s population at that time—had sworn off imbibing altogether. The group’s first major national political victory, the Webb-Kenyon Act, which made illegal the transfer of alcohol from states where alcohol was legal to states where it no longer was, was also passed in 1913 (Burns 152). Despite pressure from anti-temperance corners (and the brewing industry), the ASL’s work ultimately led to pro-temperance victories in the 1916 Congressional election that would institute the two-thirds majority needed to initiate the 18th _{Amendment to the U.S. Constitution two years later (Kerr 52). The path to a}

fundamental change in America’s public morality was now clear, and the motivation to proceed was unrelenting.