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Meanwhile, spring was arriving, and Exposition planners and women prepared pleasant celebrations, especially Temperance Day. In the Woman‟s Department, the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) workers completed their space and anticipated the arrival of their national president. For these dedicated women, there was no division or “rent” in their solidarity of purpose and cooperation. Their displays could be seen “a long distance away” because of star- like “shining banners of satin” that blazed the watchword and “musical refrain of the

Temperance Woman‟s working song: „For God and Home and Native Land.‟” Their central hexagonal pavilion was “one of the most charming and delightful places of resort in the building,” the Picayune declared. “Everything about the gateways and entrances seems to say come in.” A large fountain sent “a jet of filtered water into the air, which dashe[d] over a group of bronze statuary and [fell] back into a deep bronze bowl.” The donated “great ice water coolers,” with cup attached to each, were “on tap all day long.” Ladies in charge provided a “cheery presence,” temperance newspapers and pamphlets offered inspiration, and “lounging chairs” welcomed tired visitors. The reception workers now prepared was to welcome their leader, the “eloquent temperance apostle,” Frances E. Willard (1839-1898).11

11

For the WCTU readying for its leader, see the Picayune, March 13, 1885; reference to Willard, see the Picayune, March 16, 1885. Willard and Matilda Carse, Chicago businesswoman and reformer, stayed at the “elegant residence of Mr. B. D. Wood on General Taylor Street,”

Picayune, March 14, 1885. For more on Frances Willard and the WCTU, see Ruth Bordin,

Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women,

Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).

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Frances E. Willard, n. d., retrieved from http: //www.bobmccaughey.com/post1865/wpcontent/ uploads/2010/02/FrancesWillard.jpg

Ten days after the opening of the Woman‟s

Department, on Friday, March 13, 1885, the WCTU held its Temperance Day meeting in the cavernous Music Hall in the Main Building. The dynamic Frances E. Willard was the featured speaker. After a musical rendition by Professor Bochert‟s band, a

prayer, a religious song, and a psalm reading by Caroline Merrick, Willard stepped forward to the

edge of the platform. The Picayune described her as “a bright little woman dressed in black, with a kind and expressive face, yet full of strength and resolution” and a “prompt and well-poised manner.” The States said she had in her manner “womanly grace and dignity” and that “so much

of earnest conviction was portrayed in her tone and expression, that she would have held spell- bound an audience of whisky dealers.” The paper moaned, however, that her eloquence was

wasted in the Music Hall, because the acoustic properties were “so execrable” that “the most stentorian orator can scarce be heard a dozen yards from the platform.”12

Willard, however, in a “clear voice” handled “with the care that can be acquired only by experience” and in “flattering terms,” introduced ex-Governor John P. St. John of Kansas who

first covered the Exposition‟s theme of unification, then temperance. Employing the customary rousing hyperbole so prevalent at the Exposition, he called the event “perhaps the grandest ever

12

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made in the world,” the Picayune reported. “Not only will it tend to stimulate all legitimate industries,” he said, “but it will aid greatly in bringing North and South more closely together,

and to a more full and complete realization that we are one people, with one country, one flag and one future,” a central theme of the entire Exposition and one that Howe had also

emphasized. St. John was more strident when he spoke about temperance, naming the federal government a full partner in the “traffic in intoxicating drinks” because of taxes it collected on

alcohol. He chided a Christian nation that spent more on drink “than the annual outlay for all the bread, meat, boots and shoes, cotton goods, sugar and molasses consumed,” fifteen times that spent on public school education and 250 times as much as was contributed to home and foreign missions. “If this is Christianity, I say, God pity the heathen.” St. John named Louisiana “the

worst saloon-cursed State in the South,” claiming it had 5380 retail liquor dealers. He said that the unification of all sections of the country emboldened temperance advocates that “victory, final and complete, [was] sure to come.”13

Although he did not talk about votes for women, members of the WCTU knew it was an idea whose time was coming.

Cold statistics and strong rhetorichadradicalized the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union from an organization that attempted moral suasion into a political one that demanded legal prohibition. Frances Willard reminded the audience in the Music Hall that temperance work began in the same year as cotton export, thus both were celebrating a centennial in 1884. Women‟s earliest temperance work began by “visiting houses of ill fame and the haunts of

13

Picayune, March 14, 1885. Bouchert‟s band was popular at venues at Spanish Fort, near Lake Pontchartrain. St. John said that laws were corrupting when they protected 200,000 saloons and robbed the federal coffers of $1,500,000,000 annually. St. John claimed that Mississippi, with 200,000 more people than Louisiana, had but 331 liquor establishments. He also said: “One political party has gone down in the futile attempt to carry a saloon on one shoulder and a church on the other, and so will it be with every party that tries the same thing.”

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poverty,” but it was “a work insufficient.” So, Willard asserted, the WCTU had evolved, having learned that even “a good law was a delusion unless its enforcement was backed by good men.”14

Because women had no ballots, they used the power of their influence to put men in office that would insist laws be enforced, Willard declared. She claimed that since the

presidential election on November 5, 1884, more temperance legislation had been enacted than ever before. As another speaker stated (before more He-No tea was served), the Prohibition Party “would not be satisfied till it was the power of this country.” This grass-roots movement could

not foresee, of course, the unintended consequences that nationwide Prohibition could bring. They saw only that something must be done and that women must take a leading role. As the organization‟s persuasive speaker and indefatigable leader, Willard had urged her followers to “do everything!,” and thousands of women took up the banner of temperance, feminism,

organization, and public speaking.

The WCTU became a training ground for suffragists as well, because women of the organization realized they would need the ballot to accomplish their mission.15 Mississippian Belle Kearney cites her path in from fledgling speaker to organizer to full-blown suffrage worker as typical of workers in the WCTU. The young woman‟s journey accelerated at the Cotton Centennial when she heard Howe speak publicly on “Women‟s Work” before a mixed audience.

14

Picayune, March 14, 1885.

15

Ibid. Grover Cleveland was elected in November of 1884 as the first Democratic president since James Buchanan in 1856. For personal journeys with the WCTU as trainer, see Belle Kearney, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (1900. Reprinted, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969) 149-51, 123-127, 108; Caroline Merrick, Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron’s Memoir (New York: Grafton, 1901), 141-52.

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She exclaimed in her memoir that she had long had an “earnest desire to behold a genuinely strong-minded woman,—one of the truly advanced type. Beautiful to realize, she stood before me! And in a position the very acme of independence—upon a platform delivering a speech!” Powerful women who brought new ideas to the Woman‟s Department aroused another

generation, like Grace King and Belle Kearney, and propelled their lives forward.