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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

ADAM CHAMBERLAIN  and
ALIXANDRA B. YANUS
ADAM CHAMBERLAIN
Affiliation:
Coastal Carolina University, USA
ALIXANDRA B. YANUS
Affiliation:
High Point University, USA
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Woman’s Christian Temperance Unionvoluntary associationsinterest groupspressure politicspolicy diffusion
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 345 - 372
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

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References

Notes

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21. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002), 253. On women petitioning, see also Daniel Carpenter and Colin D. Moore, “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women,” American Political Science Review 108 (August 2014): 479–98.

22. Data derived from Michael J. Dubin, Party Affiliations in the State Legislatures: A Year-by-Year Summary, 17962006 (Jefferson, NC, 2007).

23. Mezvinsky, Norton, “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 1 (March 1961): 48–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at 49.

24. Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘The Queen of the Lobby’: Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education in America, 1879–1906,” History of Education Quarterly 32 (Spring 1992): 1–30, specifically pp. 9 and 2.

25. The WCTU also influenced education policy in Canada. See Nancy M. Sheehan, “Temperance, Education and the WCTU in Alberta, 1905–1930,” Journal of Educational Thought 14 (August 1980): 108–24; Nancy M. Sheehan, “The WCTU and Educational Strategies on the Canadian Prairie,” History of Education Quarterly 24 (Spring 1984): 101–19; Nancy M. Sheehan, “National Pressure Groups and Provincial Curriculum Policy: Temperance in Nova Scotia Schools, 1880–1930,” Canadian Journal of Education 9 (January 1984): 73–88.

26. Mary H. Hunt, An Epoch of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: P.F. Foster & Co., 1897), 9.

27. Ibid., 9.

28. Philip J. Pauly, “The Struggle for Ignorance about Alcohol: American Physiologists, Wilbur Olin Atwater, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (October 1990), 366–92; Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘When the Doctors Disagree’: Scientific Temperance and Scientific Authority, 1891–1906,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (April 1993): 171–97.

29. Mezvinsky, “Scientific Temperance Instruction”; Zimmerman, “‘The Queen of the Lobby.’”

30. One quantitative study has examined the relationship between the WCTU and scientific temperance, though not on the subject of passing such laws. Hiatt, Sine, and Tolbert used WCTU membership and the presence of scientific temperance instruction to study brewery failures and the rise of soft-drink manufacturers. In their models, both positively affected the number of brewery failures while scientific temperance instruction positively influenced the number of soft-drink manufacturers. The authors clearly understood the connection between the two variables (642), but the effects on these two unique dependent variables were independent despite a .658 correlation (653) between the WCTU and scientific temperance instruction. See Shon R. Hiatt, Wesley D. Sine, and Pamela S. Tolbert, “From Pabst to Pepsi: The Deinstitutionalization of Social Practices and the Creation of Entrepreneurial Opportunities,” Administrative Science Quarterly 54 (December 2009): 635–67. On lobbying as a legislative subsidy, see Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100 (February 2006): 69–84.

31. Delaware was at seven years of age, and Oregon was at fourteen.

32. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 13.

33. Ibid., 15.

34. Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Minutes of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union at the Thirteenth Annual Meeting (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1886), 77.

35. Ibid., 77.

36. Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 15 and 37.

37. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, 2003), 248.

38. See Ruth Birgitta Anderson Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981); Jane E. Larson, “‘Even a Worm Will Turn at Last’: Rape Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 9 (1997), 1–71.

39. Alston, Lee J., Dupré, Ruth, and Nonnenmacher, Tomas, “Social Reformers and Regulation: The Prohibition of Cigarettes in the United States and Canada,” Explorations in Economic History 39 (October 2002): 425–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at 435.

40. Cassandra Tate, Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of “The Little White Slaver” (New York, 1999), 27; Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Minutes of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union at the Tenth Annual Meeting (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1883).

41. Marc Linder, “Inherently Bad, and Bad Only”: A History of State-Level Regulation of Cigarettes and Smoking in the United States Since the 1880s, vol. 1: An In-Depth National Study Embedding Ultra-Thick Description of a Representative State (Iowa). (Iowa City: Self-published online by scholar at the University of Iowa. Available at https://ir.uiowa.edu/books/2/ ).

42. Apollonio, Dorie E. and Glantz, Stanton A., “Minimum Ages of Legal Access for Tobacco in the United States from 1863 to 2015,” American Journal of Public Health 106 (July 2016): 1200–1207 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, specifically 1200.

43. Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Minutes of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union at the Seventeenth Annual Meeting (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1890), 187. Eventually, the WCTU’s effort to restrict tobacco and cigarette use became closely connected with Lucy Page Gaston, whose desire to end cigarettes led to the creation of a new organization in 1899, the National Anti-Cigarette League (which became the Anti-Cigarette League of America).

44. Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 160.

45. A. Lawrence Lowell, “The Influence of Party upon Legislation in England and America,” Annual Report of the American Historical Society for the Year 1901 (1902), 319–542.

46. Foster, Moral Reconstruction, esp. 35, 39, 80, and throughout the book.

47. Mary Hunt, A History of the First Decade of the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction in Schools and Colleges, of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, in Three Parts, 3rd ed. (Boston: Washington Press, Geo. E. Crosby & Co., Printers, 1892); Mary Hunt, An Epoch of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: 23 Trill Street, 1897).

48. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (Rochester: Published by Susan B. Anthony, 1902), 465–1011.

49. Odem, Delinquent Daughters.

50. David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900 (Westport, CT, 1973), 141–42.

51. Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Report of Twenty-Second Annual Convention of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1895), 298–99; William D. P. Bliss, The Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1897), 9–11.

52. By this definition, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi did not pass age-of-consent laws prior to 1901. As a territory, the age of consent in Washington was sixteen, but this was found to be unconstitutional; the age was then officially twelve until it was increased to eighteen in 1897.

53. Clark Bell, Medico-Legal Studies, vol. 6 (New York: The Medico-Legal Journal, 1902), 51–65.

54. See Berry and Berry, “State Lottery Adoptions.”

55. Representative citations of these approaches are, respectively: Garry Young and Andrea Sarzynski, “The Adoption of Solar Energy Financial Incentives Across the States, 1974–2007,” George Washington Institute of Public Policy (2019). Available at https://gwipp.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2181/f/downloads/Working_Paper_039_SolarEnergy.pdf ; Michael Mintrom and Sandra Vergari, “Policy Networks and Innovation Diffusion: The Case of State Education Reforms,” Journal of Politics 60 (February 1998): 126–48; Frederick J. Boehmke and Paul Skinner, “State Policy Innovativeness Revisited,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 12 (September 2012): 303–29.

56. The one oddity is Kentucky, which began its legislative session on December 31. Since laws could pass on that day, we counted this as a 1.

57. The state association owed the national organization .05 in 1883 and 1884 and .10 per member from 1885 onward. We use the totals as presented in WCTU proceedings here, though scientific temperance and anti-tobacco models were tested after adjusting the 1883 and 1884 dues to align with the .10 per member standard. These models are almost exactly the same as those presented here, with no changes in statistical or substantive results.

58. These calculations were based on population or population averages, using the 1880 state population for 1882; the average of the 1880 and 1890 state populations for 1883–87; the 1890 state population for 1888–92; the average of the 1890 and 1900 state populations for 1893–97; and the 1900 population for 1898–1901.

59. Dubin, Party Affiliations in the State Legislatures. Since he reports the post-election legislative composition, we adjusted his numbers to correspond to the year in which a legislature meets. For example, Vermont held elections in the early fall and the legislature met that same year, so the results of the 1886 election correspond with the 1886 legislative meeting; a few other states followed that example. Most commonly, however, states held their legislative elections during the prior year, so members elected in 1886 would convene in 1887.

60. Melanie S. Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Champaign, 2001); Ivy, James D., “‘The Lone Star States Surrenders to a Lone Woman’: Frances Willard’s Forgotten 1882 Texas Temperance Tour,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 102 (July 1998): 44–61 Google Scholar; Chamberlain, Adam, Yanus, Alixandra B., and Pyeatt, Nicholas, “The Connection Between the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party,” SAGE Open 6 (December 2006): 1–8 Google Scholar.

61. Some might question why we do not use regional measures, as in Daniel J. Mallinson’s work. Given the limited communication between state legislatures of the era, and the ease with which an association’s membership could more easily work with those in neighboring states, our expectation is that neighboring states (those that share a border) should affect one another more than a state in the same region as another state that does not border it. The assumption, then, is that, Alabama and Mississippi were more likely to be influenced by one another than Alabama and North Carolina.

62. For example, see Mooney, Christopher Z., “Modeling Regional Effects on State Policy Diffusion,” Political Research Quarterly 54 (March 2001): 103–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 107.

63. In Appendix Table B, we drop territories that became states from the calculations. The only significant change is for age-of-consent, where per capita WCTU dues are significant at the p<.05 level when unified Republican legislatures are included.

64. The speed with which women’s organizations developed in the region is a point raised by Marjorie Spruill Wheelers’ work, which argues that suffrage organizing was delayed in the South, and Adam Chamberlain, Alixandra Yanus, and Nicholas Pyeatt, whose research reveals that the WCTU and other women’s national associations found support in the South but did not expand rapidly in them. Furthermore, the region’s weak state legislative capacity and a climate unfavorable to women’s political activism likely compounded the effects of partisanship and organizational strength. This is particularly interesting in relation to scientific temperance, as the region’s women were important in the push for local option for determining prohibition, or the idea that citizens could determine, by vote in local jurisdictions, whether alcohol sales would be allowed or banned. The WCTU, a strong supporter of national and statewide prohibition, had a mixed view on local option; while it would participate in local efforts, its leaders still believed that national prohibition was the ultimate goal. Teaching children that alcohol was dangerous could pave the way to national prohibition by changing the hearts and minds of a generation; local option could only provide piecemeal reform that could, in the future, be reversed. Perhaps these points play a role in the South’s slow adoption of STI legislation, too. In the South, where WCTU organizations were weaker and where sympathetic Republican legislatures were extremely scarce, and where states were general less interested in education policy and more supportive of local control, the various factors noted here reduced the likelihood of early policy success for STI, so Hunt’s efforts found more supportive audiences elsewhere and southern WCTU efforts instead focused on other types of policy work. See Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, 1993), 3–37; Adam Chamberlain, Alixandra B. Yanus, and Nicholas Pyeatt, “The Southern Question: American Voluntary Association Development, 1876–1920,” Political Science Quarterly 135 (Spring 2020), 103–29, esp. 110–18. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham, 2003), 110–21.

65. Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, “CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results,” Journal of Statistical Software (2003). Copy at http://j.mp/2oSx5Pc .

66. We also tested models (not shown, but available upon request) that interacted Republican unified control with the WCTU measures. None of the interactions were significant on their own, and marginal effects plots reveal that the only substantively significant interactive effect was for unadjusted WCTU dues and Republican control for age-of-consent increases at certain points. At low levels of WCTU dues, increasing from $0 to $400, significantly increased the probability that a Republican unified legislature passed an age-of-consent bill from around .17 to .40; thereafter, the probability decreases until the interactive effect is no longer significantly different than 0 at $600 in dues.

67. Pauly, “The Struggle for Ignorance”; Zimmerman, “‘When the Doctors Disagree.’”

68. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967).