“Of all the monopolies that disgrace civilization a monopoly in sin is most to be dreaded and deplored.”Footnote 1 So warned Frances Willard in 1886 in opposing an increase in the licensing fee on Chicago saloons. Like so many nineteenth-century social activists, Willard held firm to the conviction, deeply entrenched in the worldview of her New England forebears, that every nation was either a benevolent “theocracy” that protected its inhabitants from sin or a malevolent “devil-ocracy” that inflamed the basest and most dangerous passions.Footnote 2 From such a standpoint, the levying on the manufacture of alcoholic beverages of any excise tax and the imposition on their sale of any licensing fee posed an existential peril that the citizenry had a moral obligation to resist.
Willard’s warning was emblematic of the strategy that she devised to build a grassroots social movement to outlaw the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, which Willard called the “liquor traffic.” Willard’s crusade, known today as prohibition, would culminate just over two decades after her death in 1898 in the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banning the manufacture, transportation, and sale of “intoxicating beverages,” an umbrella term that included spirits, beer, and wine. Prohibition would remain the law of the land from 1920 until 1933, when it would be superseded by the “three-tier” (manufacture, transportation, sale) alcoholic beverage control system that remains in place today.
In a nation awash in drink, the enactment of a comprehensive alcoholic beverage ban was in Willard’s lifetime a visionary, and in certain ways quixotic, goal. Yet for Willard and her fellow temperance advocates, it was no less implausible than the abolition of slavery had been on the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860.
The distillery, the brewery, and the saloon all trafficked in bad habits, making them prime examples of what has recently been called “limbic capitalism”—the business of addiction. The phrase limbic capitalism is new, yet the phenomenon it describes was a visceral reality for Willard and her collaborators, no less than it is today for critics of digital media platforms and the pharmaceutical sector.Footnote 3
To broaden support for prohibition, Willard mobilized the language of anti-monopoly. “Monopoly” in the Anglo-American world had long been a pejorative. The word itself literally means “single seller,” a phenomenon that eighteenth-century English political economists such as Adam Smith associated with an exclusive government grant. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith heaped scorn on the unaccountable power that the East India Company had amassed as a result of the monopoly grant it had obtained from Parliament. Anti-monopoly quickly crossed the Atlantic. In the 1830s, for example, it was popularized by journalist William Leggett in a series of strident articles that he wrote for the New York City press.Footnote 4 The kind of monopoly that Leggett deplored was a government grant that clogged the channels of trade. For Willard, in contrast, monopoly connoted more than just the unaccountable power of institutions exempted from critical scrutiny as a result of the special privileges that they had been granted—and which, in the case of the liquor trade, were a byproduct of the revenue they generated for the state. In addition, it signaled the existential peril of a powerful business that profited from addiction and spawned a litany of societal harms that ranged from child abuse to domestic violence.Footnote 5
Anti-monopoly was but one of several modes of inquiry that Willard tapped in her temperance crusade. Others included theology, women’s rights, and public health. In an age in which women’s rights remained highly controversial, public health claims hotly contested, and religious appeals foregrounding sin, evil, and the devil perennially contentious, anti-monopoly had the advantage of being relatively non-controversial. In addition, and by no means incidentally, it had a time-tested appeal among men. If Willard were to obtain even the most incremental of her political goals, such as a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages in residential neighborhoods, male support was essential. Though women in Willard’s day had begun to win the right to vote on specific issues in certain jurisdictions—an innovation that Willard and her Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) collaborators lauded, and which they doggedly fought to extend—it was not until 1920, long after Willard had passed from the scene, that women would obtain the right to vote nationwide.
Willard’s organizational base was the WCTU, a voluntary association founded in 1874 that Willard led from 1879 until her death. Under Willard’s leadership, the WCTU became one of the largest women’s organizations in the world.Footnote 6 In 1890 alone, its publishing unit employed 100 people and churned out 125 million pages of material on temperance-related topics—an impressive achievement for an operation that relied for financial support primarily on its dues-paying membership.Footnote 7 Willard herself was a powerful voice in the cause. Her personal motto—“Do Everything”—succinctly signaled the extraordinary range of her interests. Committed not only to temperance but also to women’s suffrage, which she publicly endorsed in 1876, she would come by the end of her life to support collective bargaining, Christian socialism, and the legislative program of the People’s Party. In a steady stream of books, essays, and public lectures—one biographer estimated that Willard had spoken on at least one occasion in every locality in the United States with a population of over 10,000—Willard waged a two-decade crusade to empower women to take charge not only of their homes but also of the neighborhoods in which they lived. If women could vote, the saloon was doomed.Footnote 8
The WCTU was a women’s union in a double sense. Restricted to women, it was also led by women, a notable achievement in an age in which female empowerment was limited by convention and law. The secret to the union’s success, in Willard’s view, lay in its ability to tap the latent “power of organization” with which women were supremely endowed. The formidable constraints under which women labored gifted them with a second sight that men lacked—a resource they could mobilize for the public good: “No terrestrial being thus far developed, has so much constructive force …. Alike by endowment, by heredity and by environment, she is set forth as nature’s supreme specimen of organizing power.”Footnote 9 Few women, she explained, had attained positions of power and influence that obliged them to speak favorably of capitalists, politicians, or corporations. As a result, money-making remained a “consideration altogether secondary”: decision-making at the WCTU was “in nowise, moulded or controlled by men.” In fact, it was the WCTU’s very insulation from the powers-that-be that had instilled in its membership the righteous fervor necessary to undertake the “vast and systematic work” of freeing the nation from its bondage to sin.Footnote 10
This essay shows how Willard and her inner circle of like-minded activists, journalists, and lawmakers refashioned anti-monopolism to build the case for prohibition. In so doing, they adapted a mode of inquiry honed in the commercial political economy of eighteenth-century Great Britain to the industrial political economy of the nineteenth-century United States. Among the anti-monopoly metaphors that Willard and her collaborators mobilized, three stood out: protection, traffic, and competition. Each provides insight into both the temperance activists’ tactics and their vision of the good society.
Anti-monopoly for Willard and her collaborators denoted much more than moral outrage at special privilege. In addition, and no less importantly, it signaled opposition to the complicity of governmental institutions at the federal, state, and municipal levels in the perpetuation of unaccountable power, as well as the continuance of an economic institution—the liquor trade—that posed an existential peril not only for men but also for the nation and the world. By combining home protection with cooperation, temperance advocates popularized an anti-monopoly appeal that was simultaneously anti-privilege, pro-bigness, and anti-competition. This appeal differed significantly not only from William Leggett’s anti-special-privilege anti-monopolism, but also from the anti-restraint-of-trade anti-monopolism of the lawmakers who enacted the 1890 anti-monopoly law known today as the Sherman Act. In certain ways, Willard’s strategy harkened back to the anti-corruption anti-monopolism of Adam Smith; in others, it looked ahead to the anti-cartel, anti-fascist, anti-addiction anti-monopolism of the twentieth century and beyond.
Home Protection
“Ours is a famous country for protection,” observed Willard in 1877, in the introduction to Annie Wittenmyer’s History of the Woman’s Temperance Crusade. Wittenmyer’s book chronicled the 1873–1874 women’s crusade against the “Liquor Traffic” that culminated in the founding of the WCTU. To make this protest movement understandable to the largest possible audience, Willard reminded her readers of the many realms in which “our brothers” had successfully lobbied for protection. Businessmen, inventors, and even animals had long obtained from lawmakers special privileges of one kind or another: “There is the tariff to protect industry, while the patent laws are a safeguard to invention. There are the land grants for railroads, subsidies for steamship companies, charters for corporations. In many of the States we have societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and in nearly all, laws for the protection of game.”Footnote 11 Trade unions protected workers from the “aggressions of capital”; monopolies protected owners from the “encroachments of competition.”Footnote 12
One realm of vital importance to women, however, had yet to obtain the necessary safeguards to keep its denizens secure: “Busy with all these gentle, wise, and patriotic measures, there is one place our brothers have forgotten adequately to protect, and that is—Home.”Footnote 13 To close this loophole, Willard backed the enactment of municipal ordinances banning shopkeepers from selling alcoholic beverages in residential neighborhoods. To increase the chances that these restrictive ordinances would prevail at the ballot box, Willard urged lawmakers to permit women to vote in local elections, on the grounds that, as homemakers, they had an obligation to protect their children from harm. “No other era,” reflected cultural historian Neil Harris, in reference to the United States in the fin de siècle, “witnessed the formation of so many clubs, societies, lodges, and fraternal organizations.” The “Gilded Age was more properly a ‘Guilded Age’,” Harris added—that is, “Gilded” with a “u”—in the sense that it should be remembered as an “era of association for protection.”Footnote 14 No voluntary association fit this criterion better than the WCTU.
To build support for “local option,” as these residential bans would become known, Willard popularized a meme—“home protection”—that would be closely identified with the WCTU for the next forty years.Footnote 15 “The times have changed,” Willard declared in 1876, the year in which she launched her home protection crusade. The overriding political issue was no longer the tariff, fiscal policy, or the revanchist dreams of our “southern brethren”: “No. Home Questions have come elbowing their way to the front. The child in the midst is also in the market-place, and they are bidding for him there, the politicians of the saloon.”Footnote 16 Fifteen years later, the message remained the same: for mothers, wives, and daughters, home protection should be the “keyword of woman’s work.”Footnote 17
The fin de siècle was a Victorian age in which British commerce, shipping, finance, and manufacturing dominated the channels of trade. To cheapen the cost of food, parliament eliminated the tariff on grain. To stimulate manufacturing, it opened its market to foreign goods of all kinds. Since Britain had a well-earned reputation as the “workshop of the world,” few lawmakers feared that open markets would imperil its factories, plants, and mills.
In the United States the situation was quite different. The Republican Party had from the moment of its creation supported a protectionist campaign against the “informal empire” that Britain’s turn to free trade had inspired.Footnote 18 Most WCTU families, including Willard’s, hailed from Republican households in which it was taken for granted that high tariffs protected US manufacturers from ruin and US workers from starvation. Willard’s home protection crusade extended this protectionist logic from the nation’s ports to its residential neighborhoods.
“Free Trade England Wants the Earth,” warned Republican cartoonist Victor Gillam in an 1888 chromolithograph touting his party’s protectionist creed (Figure 1). Gillam’s cartoon appeared in the final week of a tight presidential race in which the Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison bested the incumbent Grover Cleveland by prevailing in Cleveland’s home state of New York. High tariffs, Gillam reminded his fellow New Yorkers, stood between the United States and John Bull, a personification of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Outfitted as a British merchant prince with a “free trade” feather in his cap and multiple octopus-like outstretched arms, John Bull had already gained control over the empire’s English-speaking commercial periphery: Canada, the West Indies, South America, Ireland, Gibraltar, Egypt, Africa, the Cape Colony, India, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand. Only the United States eluded John Bull’s outstretched arms, bathed in the warm glow of the Republican Party’s beacon of protection.Footnote 19
Confronting the British free trade octopus.
Timed to coincide with the 1888 presidential election, Victor Gillam’s Judge cartoon reminded readers of the Republican Party’s longstanding commitment to the protective tariff. By casting John Bull as a multi-armed octopus whose global reach was thwarted only by the warm glow of the party’s beacon of “protection,” Gillam reenvisioned an anti-monopoly archetype to illustrate the peril of British free trade. (Source: Victor Gillam, “Free Trade England Wants the Earth,” Judge 15 [27 Oct. 1888]: 1.)
Figure 1. Long description
The illustration shows a personified figure representing England, wearing a top hat and labeled ‘Free Trade,’ stretching its arms to different continents. The figure is labeled ‘Protection’ on one arm and ‘Free Trade’ on the other. The continents are labeled with names such as ‘United States,’ ‘Canada,’ ‘South America,’ ‘Africa,’ ‘Australia,’ and ‘New Zealand.’ The figure appears to be grasping or attempting to control these regions. The illustration is signed ‘Victor’ in the lower right corner.
Protection for Willard referred only occasionally to British imports, an issue she rarely addressed—in comparison to, say, women’s suffrage. Even so, protection remained a key phrase in her anti-monopoly lexicon. Why should male lawmakers not permit women to vote in local elections for a “home protection” ballot measure that would ban saloons in their own backyard? Should “local option” find its way onto the ballot in a jurisdiction in which women had been authorized to vote, Willard presumed that the sought-after ban would be enacted. By permitting women to vote on issues of pressing local concern, home protection would empower them to keep their families safe.
Willard’s political strategy hinged on coalition building, or what her critics sometimes disparagingly called “fusion.” While Willard’s core constituency leaned Republican, she prided herself on remaining aloof from each of the nation’s major political parties—then, as now, the Republicans and the Democrats. Under Willard’s leadership, the WCTU built a close relationship in the 1880s with a third party—the “Prohibition Party” —that shared its political agenda.Footnote 20 Willard joined the Prohibition Party’s organizing committee in 1882; for a time, in fact, she successfully rechristened it, in homage to her temperance credo, the “Home Protection Prohibition Party.”
To unite temperance-minded voters in the North and South, Willard touted the Prohibition Party’s big-tent inclusivity. In contrast to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, the Prohibition Party was destined to be the “greatest party” since it stood for the future over the past; nationalism over sectionalism, including, in particular, reconciliation with temperance-minded southern whites; the “home vote” certified by an educational test over the saloon vote with “beer-breath as its credentials”; and, most important of all, the “everlasting and absolute prohibition of sin as against any alliance between sin and the government.”Footnote 21 Excluded from Willard’s coalition were Southern blacks, a voting bloc that was rapidly being disenfranchised as the Democratic Party regained control over the political machinery of the former Confederacy.Footnote 22 Though the Prohibition Party never lived up to Willard’s expectations, her justification for its rationale clarified her evolving understanding of the “trusts”—a legal tool deployed by corporate lawyers to facilitate economic consolidation. Economic consolidation was not inherently problematic for Willard. The problem lay, rather, in the hubris with which monopolists profaned that “holy word, ‘trust’” to thwart the “noblest aims and aspirations” of the wage-worker.Footnote 23
The Liquor Traffic
While protection in the fin de siècle conjured up for Willard positive images of bustling factories and wholesome homes, a second anti-monopoly metaphor—traffic—had a quite different connotation. No single word in the temperance advocates’ anti-monopoly vocabulary carried a more pejorative charge. To be sure, not every meaning of the word “traffic” was invidious. No one opposed the railroad traffic that sped the movement of goods, the telegraph traffic that facilitated the circulation of information, or the coal traffic that heated city dwellers’ offices, factories, and lodgings. More problematic was “liquor traffic” and “liquor trafficking.”Footnote 24 Like “vice traffic” and “vice trafficking,” each was a term of opprobrium. “Liquor is just the stuff in the bottle,” explained temperance historian Mark Lawrence Schrad, “but trafficking is about profits and predation; like human trafficking, diamond trafficking or the traffic in narcotics and opioids.”Footnote 25
Willard preached personal abstinence, as did the WCTU. Yet neither Willard nor her fellow temperance advocates endorsed a ban on the personal consumption of alcoholic beverages. No such ban, for that matter, would find its way into the Eighteenth Amendment. Even after this amendment went into effect, the personal consumption of alcoholic beverages in one’s home remained legal under federal law, even if the purchase of alcoholic beverages was not.Footnote 26 To put it differently, the legal ban for which Willard crusaded, and which is known today as prohibition, targeted not the consumption of alcoholic beverages but the business that sustained it. “Every effort will be made to obscure the issue, to fix attention upon the drinker rather than the dealer,” warned Willard’s Prohibitionist Party colleague A. J. Jutkins in 1885, “and so produce the very thing objected to, viz: an attempt to regulate personal habits. Intelligent Prohibitionists will fall into no such trap. They are dealing with what all legislation deals: crime and commerce.”Footnote 27 When the Prohibition Party used the word prohibition, Jutkins explained, it meant nothing more and nothing less than that the extension of the government’s police power to “suppress the traffic in poisoned drinks,” just as it had long “suppressed the traffic in poisoned and unwholesome meats.”Footnote 28
By downplaying Willard’s fixation on the traffic metaphor, historians have marginalized the political-economic dimension of her home protection crusade. In so doing, they have rendered it well-nigh incomprehensible. For the temperance advocate, as Schrad observed, it was “entirely consistent” to “oppose the predatory liquor traffic as a cause of poverty, disenfranchisement, and depredation, while having empathy for the drunkard who consumed it. It’s the traffic that makes all the difference.”Footnote 29
It was one thing to deplore liquor trafficking; it was quite another to declare war on the liquor trade. Not only was the liquor trade large and profitable, but by the 1880s it had come to occupy, at both the federal and municipal levels, an integral place in the fiscal apparatus of the state. In this period, the federal excise tax on distilleries, breweries, and wineries, in conjunction with the municipal licensing fee on saloons, poured millions of dollars into the government’s coffers. At the federal level, the excise tax generated 40 percent of the Treasury Department’s total annual revenue.Footnote 30 At the municipal level, the saloon licensing fee accounted for 40 percent of Chicago’s annual budget.Footnote 31
The federal excise tax created a structural impediment to any ban on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that would not be lifted until the ratification of the federal income tax amendment in 1913. In the absence of a constitutional mandate to tax the citizenry directly, it is hard to imagine lawmakers foregoing the millions of dollars in excise taxes that they collected. A counterfactual comes to mind: no income tax amendment, no prohibition?Footnote 32
The federal excise tax and the municipal licensing fee prompted from temperance advocates two very different responses. Moderates favored raising both. In so doing, they confidently assumed, the cost of alcoholic beverages would skyrocket and their consumption would fall. Radicals like Willard disagreed. With prohibition as their touchstone, they derided any liquor-related revenue legislation as a pact with the devil that, if not countermanded, would confront the nation—to shift to a more secular register—with an existential peril.Footnote 33 The imposition of a hefty levy on specific economic sector is not ordinarily regarded as a privilege. Yet for the anti-monopoly-minded radical prohibitionist, it legitimated the liquor trade by investing it with the imprimatur of the state.Footnote 34
“High license,” as the proposed licensing fee increase was known, would hasten economic consolidation in the liquor trade just as the protective tariff had in manufacturing. So warned the president of the Indiana WCTU in the Union Signal in 1883. By shuttering small saloons, it would embolden their larger and more powerful rivals, which could afford to pay the fee, to continue the “work of slaughter.” Small barkeeps opposed the tax hike, well-aware that it would drive them out of business. The large and powerful saloons, in contrast, could easily absorb the additional cost, enabling them to enjoy the “monopoly of the trade” that the “‘high protective tariff’” on liquor retailing would not “fail to yield,” with the scare quotes around “high protective tariff” highlighting the analogy between the licensing fee and the tariff.Footnote 35
Let us propose a thought experiment, suggested one Union Signal contributor in 1889. What if Chicago city officials increased the annual saloon licensing fee to ＄10,000, a sum far in excess of the current maximum of ＄1,600? Were such a law enacted, would this not be a boon to those saloons that were sufficiently large and powerful to afford the fee? “Very high license,” the contributor explained, would for this reason “simply make a monopoly of the trade and put it in a line with all modern industries.” To make matters worse, a consolidated “national monopoly” would sell just as much liquor as the swarm of small retailers did today: it was “nonsense” to “talk about taxing the traffic to its death.” The higher the levy, the higher the profits for the saloons that survived—while, in the meantime, the “fearful devastation” wrought by the liquor trade would continue day and night. Just as Standard Oil had increased its market share for kerosene by lowering the price, so, too, if it had the opportunity, would a “national liquor syndicate” of distilleries, breweries, and saloons reduce the retail cost of alcoholic beverages to a price that was sufficiently low so that no one would lack the means to imbibe.Footnote 36
The temperance advocates’ troubling thought experiment came true. Just as they feared, the ＄500 minimum “high license” saloon fee that Illinois lawmakers enacted in 1883 hastened the consolidation of the saloon trade in Chicago. In the year following its enactment, 780 of the city’s 3,500 saloons closed their doors. Yet even after the field had been winnowed, more bars remained in Chicago than in all fifteen southern states combined.Footnote 37 Only a nationwide ban, warned Prohibition Party stalwart A. J. Jutkins, could save the nation from its “guilty complicity” in an existential peril.Footnote 38 The Thirteenth Amendment, by abolishing slavery, had ended the traffic in human bodies; the next step was the abolition of the liquor trade. Yet the much-heralded second abolition would remain a practical impossibility until lawmakers cleared the way for a federal ban on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages by breaking the fiscal chokehold of the liquor trade on the administrative state.
Most saloons were pretty humble affairs. Yet the largest and most lucrative—precisely those that would most benefit from “high license”—could be quite imposing, with their long mahogany counters, cheap food, musical entertainment, and risque paintings of scantily clad women. High license, Willard mordantly warned, “entails” the saloon monopoly, while emboldening saloonkeepers, who sometimes doubled as aldermen, to “gild the hook of iniquity with dazzling, tempting bait.” In fact, the flashy interior of a well-appointed saloon and the “‘high-toned’ social standing” of its barkeep were the devil’s “most coveted allurements.” Most Americans, Willard ruefully conceded, conflated wealth, respectability, and morality: “With concentration always comes power and the political influence of the liquor traffic, now boastfully predominant in this republic where the side always wins that gets the most votes, will reach the height of an autocracy under high license.”Footnote 39
Willard’s fears, while overwrought, rested on a solid empirical foundation. For the brewery and the saloon, competition was intense. To steady demand, breweries invested heavily in retail outlets, hastening their proliferation. Before long, as the historian of the Chicago liquor trade has observed, the city’s saloons began to resemble chain stores more than independent proprietorships.Footnote 40 To keep their doors open, barkeeps relied on breweries not only for the beverages they dispensed and the furnishings they rented, but also to pay their licensing fees. Distilleries, in contrast, had far less trouble matching supply and demand, not only because they were highly localized in Illinois and Kentucky, facilitating collusion over pricing and the terms of trade, but also because they were more capital intensive, discouraging insurgent suppliers from entering the field.
Tariff policy only made matters worse. Our “great national sin,” lamented one Union Signal contributor in 1895, was not drunkenness but the legalization through tariff policy of “drunkard-making”: “Restrictions so-called, build up gigantic trusts and monopolies, and by their very nature conduce to increased consumption of liquor. Regulation does not regulate.” Tariff policy shielded the liquor trade from foreign competition and blinded the public to the deplorable fact that the so-called “‘revenue’” generated by the manufacturing and marketing of alcoholic beverages—with “revenue” in scare quotes to highlight the immorality of the transaction—called forth a curse that would be felt in “every tissue and fiber” of the “nation’s social and political organism.” Only prohibition could save the nation from the unholy alliance of sin and state.Footnote 41
What if a legal ban on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages could not be enforced? For the Union Signal the question answered itself. Was this not compelling proof that the people’s will had been thwarted by the Machiavellian machinations of a monopolist even more powerful than the wiliest of the nation’s financiers? The most powerful plutocrat in the land was neither Jay Gould nor William H. Vanderbilt, but, instead, the “liquor capitalist” who muzzled the press and invaded the home. So terrifying was this personage that the editors refrained even from identifying him by name: “Shall we then rivet the chains, by the apathetic citizens’ confession so strong already that they cannot cast off; shall we rivet these chains still more tightly by a high license decree, which brings more money than before into the coffers of our masters? ‘Woe unto them who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.’”Footnote 42
The fearsome power of the liquor capitalist—a stand-in for the distiller-brewer-exciseman-saloonkeeper-city alderman-complex—featured prominently in an 1897 Union Signal interview that Willard conducted with Susan B. Anthony, the celebrated suffragist. Like virtually every prominent women’s rights activist—a distinguished gallery that included Ida B. Wells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone—Anthony was a teetotaler who abstained on principle from the consumption of alcoholic beverages. To burnish her temperance bona fides, Anthony informed Willard that in 1852 she had been one of a handful of women who had organized in Rochester, New York, what she claimed to have been the first women’s temperance society in the United States. Anthony candidly confessed that in her own crusade for women’s suffrage she had downplayed the prohibition issue in the conviction that it would be divisive among certain groups of her would-be supporters. Yet Anthony did not want to leave Willard’s readers with the impression that she somehow failed to appreciate how truly insidious the liquor trade really was. “There is one Business in this country that dominates all others,” Anthony opined, in a veiled reference to the liquor trade: “one set of men that no other men dare to offend; one monopoly that monopolizes all the others”:
I need not call its name; every man, woman, and child in the republic knows by what power we are ruled. If the business man votes against it, he loses customers; if the professional man attacks it, his patronage falls off; if the minister preaches against it, he offends the pews; if the editor writes against it, he loses his advertising; for this Business not only uses its influence directly in taking away patronage, but boycotts other forms of business if they do not follow its example.Footnote 43
That the power and influence of the liquor trade was truly “diabolical” was a recurrent theme in WCTU publicity. “Down with the Liquor Traffic!” trumpeted a handbill issued by a Canadian affiliate of the WCTU around 1897. To amplify its message, the handbill quoted from a morbid “bit of advice” that a liquor retailer had reputedly proffered to his colleagues at a recent meeting of the Ohio Liquor League. The most reliable way to increase sales, or so the retailer was alleged to have recommended, was to habituate young boys to an “appetite for drink” that they would retain for the rest of their lives:
It will appear from these facts, gentlemen, that the success of our business is dependent largely upon the creation of appetite for drink. Men who drink liquor, like others, will die, and if there is no new appetite created, our counters will be empty as will be our coffers. Our children will go hungry or we must change our business to that of some other more remunerative. The open field for the creation of this appetite is among the boys. After men have grown and their habits are formed, they rarely ever change in this regard. It will be needful therefore that this missionary work be done among the boys, and I make the suggestion, gentlemen, that nickles [sic] expended in treats to the boys now, will return in dollars to your tills after the appetite has been formed. Above all things create appetite.Footnote 44
The liquor dealer’s edgy and provocative remarks would be widely circulated in prohibitionist publications in the years to come: the Union Signal, for example, ran it without comment in January 1897.Footnote 45 Yet questions lingered about its authenticity. The statement was so outrageously brazen, so callously amoral, that pressure mounted to determine whether or not it had been fabricated as part of a surreptitious prohibitionist disinformation campaign.Footnote 46 Fake or real—and the preponderance of evidence pointed toward it being a prohibitionist plant—the message hit home. No one who read it could not pause to wonder if liquor dealers were deliberately grooming drug addicts to fatten their bottom line.
That no class of Americans was more susceptible to the saloonkeepers’ blandishments than the workingman was for Willard an unshakable article of faith. Instead of electing “men of the people” for public office, workingmen were fooled into backing the saloonkeepers’ candidate, who, more often than not, had been put up for office by grasping monopolists in collusion with mercenary politicos to “legislate against the people.”Footnote 47 The ramifications of the peril posed by this subterfuge were vast, since it gave the “liquor lobby” more influence over the electoral process than all of the nation’s reformers and philanthropists. That big money had come to play such an outsized role in politics was bad enough. Even worse, much of it flowed to barkeeps adept at the black art of debauchery: “The existence of a plutocracy in a democratic form of government depends upon an ignorant, purchasable vote…. Drink makes the popular sovereign poor, ignorant, vicious, venal.” In an age in which vote buying and ballot stuffing were endemic, how could the “trust men and monopolists” to whom the saloonkeepers were beholden be stopped? To ask the question was to answer it:
By furnishing the money to secure this vote, wealthy men put their creatures in power, keep them there and control their action. It is not conjecture, or extravagance, to say that trust-men and monopolists own the government in the sense that its leading officials and legislators are made such by their wealth, and that they can and do control legislation in the interest of their several monopolies.Footnote 48
The culpability of the liquor lobby in the debasement of the electoral process is an open question. Yet it is a matter of record that the administration of late-nineteenth-century elections was marred by all manner of irregularities. For ordinary Americans—whether city dwellers or country folk—it made little difference whether or not a particular saloonkeeper had bribed a voter or stuffed a ballot box. So long as the saloon-workingman-polling place nexus persisted, the peril to the electoral process remained.Footnote 49
Anti-privilege anti-monopolism lived on in the Union Signal even after Willard’s death. In “How Long Does It Take to Produce a Millionaire?,” novelist Harriet E. Orcutt pondered in 1900 why the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor. Government-granted special privilege, an anti-monopoly perennial, held the key. “For every person who is worth ten or twenty or fifty or a hundred million dollars,” Orcutt warned, “ten thousand or twenty thousand or fifty thousand or a hundred thousand other people must live in poverty”: “A millionaire is a rare and costly product, never indulged in until a class arises in the state to whom, in some form or other, special privileges in the wealth-making line are granted. A century ago we had no millionaires. Thirty years ago a millionaire was a rarity. He is a recent development born of land grants, monopolies, trusts, syndicates and combines, and existing at the expense of society at large.”Footnote 50 The special privileges that lawmakers heaped on the liquor trade by legitimating its existence through fiscal policy were but one example among many of a kleptocratic political economy that imperiled not only the republic’s youth, but also its very survival.
Home protection was long characterized as an agrarian protest against the industrial city in which old-stock Protestants battled newly arrived immigrants for the hearts and minds of the rising generation.Footnote 51 If we shift our frame of reference from region to political economy, and from the liquor drinker to the liquor trade, the story looks different. Women’s rights, revenue collection, and public health each had an anti-monopoly dimension. So, too, did prohibition.
Competition versus Cooperation
The 2008 financial crisis has encouraged a cohort of journalists, jurists, and lawmakers to revive anti-monopoly as a mode of inquiry.Footnote 52 While this interpretation of US economic history has many variants, it presumes that anti-monopoly has always been anti-bigness and pro-competition. Home protection, in contrast, reveals how a programmatically progressive anti-monopoly movement could be emphatically pro-bigness and anti-competition.Footnote 53
Willard had no quarrel with large-scale enterprise, if—unlike the liquor trade—it was not inherently harmful. Cooperation and not competition was her lodestar, a position that she regarded as not only morally praiseworthy but also economically sound. “I believe that competition is doomed,” she declared in 1897, in reiterating a conviction she had articulated on many occasions, and we are “better without than with it.” The “single object” of the trusts had been to vanquish competition, and they had won.Footnote 54
Willard’s aversion to competition was boosted by her Christian socialism, a theological commitment that she had long espoused in private, and that she would publicly affirm with increasing certitude in the last years of her life, beginning with an 1893 public address in Chicago, Illinois, to the second biennial convention of the World’s WCTU.Footnote 55 The day would come, Willard proclaimed in 1897 in her final WCTU presidential address, in which the habits of “everyday living” would finally align with the “ethics of Christ’s Gospel” and the “corporation of humanity should control all products”: “nothing else will do it, nothing else can bring the glad day of universal brotherhood.”Footnote 56 In a letter to a friend that she penned at around the same time, she wrote even more expansively about her hopes for the future: “I believe in the things that Christian Socialism stands for, and were I not ‘tee-totally’ occupied, would go into the movement heart and soul, as, indeed, I have done in public utterances for many years. Oh, that I were young again, and it should have my life! It is God’s way out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. It is the very marrow and fatness of Christ’s Gospel. It is Christianity applied.”Footnote 57
Willard’s embrace of Christian socialism received a vital impetus in the mid-1880s from her friendship with Episcopalian minister W. D. P. Bliss, a Boston-based labor activist who founded in 1889 one of the first avowedly Christian socialist organizations in the country. Yet it would not become a recurrent theme in her public pronouncements until after she had encountered the writings of Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts journalist who in 1888 published Looking Backward, a futuristic romance-cum-manifesto.Footnote 58 For Bellamy, the greatest problem confronting the nation was the bitter, seemingly intractable conflict between labor and capital. To solve this problem, Bellamy imagined an industrial utopia, set in the year 2000, in which the labor problem had been solved, politics had been subsumed by public administration, paper money had been replaced by the “credit card” (a Bellamy coinage), and every able-bodied person between the age of 21 and 45 had been drafted into an “industrial army” to produce whatever goods and services the government deemed necessary to guarantee prosperity for all.
Bellamy’s utopia galvanized a political movement that was socialist in everything but name. To avoid the opprobrium that the word “socialist” could arouse in contemporaries (a reflex not entirely unknown today), Bellamy called his movement “Nationalism” instead. Yet for anyone who was paying attention, the Nationalist platform, like Looking Backward itself, laid out a blueprint for a socialist utopia. Bellamy’s ideas would live on not only in the progressivism of Tennessee Valley Authority chair Arthur E. Morgan—who, by no means coincidentally, was a leading Bellamy scholar—but also in the collectivism of the American Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, a four-time Socialist Party presidential candidate in the period between 1904 and 1920.Footnote 59
For Willard, Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a revelation. Might its author be not a man named Edward but a “great hearted, big-brained woman” named Edwardina, Willard wryly mused, in an admiring letter that she wrote to a friend shortly after Bellamy’s book had come to her attention? For how could a man have envisioned a future society that so closely resembled the land of promise for which women such as herself so earnestly yearned?Footnote 60 To be sure, Bellamy had not prioritized prohibition: his utopians enjoyed the occasional glass of wine. Yet his overall message was prophetic. The “age of brotherhood” that Bellamy foretold, Willard confidently predicted, would kill the “age of gold.”Footnote 61 By eliminating the scourge of labor conflict while guaranteeing abundance for the many as well as the few, it would usher in a veritable heaven on earth, provided only that men and women of good hope could join together to supplant the monopolists who had for so long commanded the levers of power.
Willard and Bellamy had different priorities. For Bellamy, the greatest challenge facing the nation in 1888 was labor strife; for Willard, it was the liquor trade. Not until after an 1892 meeting in London with Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb would Willard come around to the view that poverty trumped the liquor trade as the nation’s most pressing existential peril.Footnote 62 Willard’s gestalt shift expanded her moral imagination and redoubled her faith in Bellamy’s prophetic vision of the future. For decades, Willard had labored tirelessly to improve the lot of men as well as women, capitalists as well as workingmen, adults as well as children, the drunk as well as the sober. With the rapid consolidation beginning around 1890 of hundreds of free-standing proprietorships into vast industrial combines, an event that historians today call the “great merger movement,” the promised land was in sight.Footnote 63 “Brotherhood,” rather than cut-throat competition, as Willard exulted in an 1889 tribute to Bellamy, was the “fulfillment of man’s highest earthly dream.”Footnote 64
While Willard’s utopia was cooperative, it left ample room for self-improvement. As a principled defender of equality of opportunity, she had no doubt that the best way to elevate a man to the level of the “world’s best accomplishment” was by cultivating his intellect through a formal program of study.Footnote 65 Higher education could be a means to this goal, so long as it retained a commitment to the self-improvement of the many, rather than the upward mobility of the few.
Willard’s encounter with Bellamyite collectivism strengthened her suspicion of market competition. The liquor trade was problematic not because it was big, but because it was bad—or, as Willard would put it with reference to the liquor trade, evil. That wage workers sometimes viewed economic consolidation with alarm, Willard had no doubt. The “octopus grip of the ‘Trusts,’” Willard conceded in 1889, “render our wage workers uneasy”: “A new machine may any day make the work of scores of men superfluous.” Yet she discounted their anxiety as of merely transitory concern. To reinforce her position, she lifted up Bellamy as the apostle of the “new labor reformers,” and incorporated into her speech several paragraphs from a Bellamyite manifesto. “Combination must take the place of competition,” the manifesto declared, in a passage that Willard quoted: “we must have a system in which business shall be carried on, not for private profits, but for the public good.” And as economic consolidation intensified, the nation’s economic institutions would somehow shapeshift—the Bellamyites did not specify precisely how—into the “one huge monopoly” that was “Humanity itself.”Footnote 66
Willard’s disapproval of competition was on full display in an interview that she conducted with Bellamy shortly after Looking Backward appeared. “I had long since believed that competition was not the higher law,” Willard averred, confident that Bellamy agreed. Though this mistaken postulate had long been prized as a “holy and immutable principle” by “old-school Presbyterians among political economists,” its time had passed. “It was inevitable,” Willard added, that—just as Bellamy had described—top-down monopolies would inspire a bottom-up social movement to nationalize the means of production: “Classes can only be offset by masses. A Jay Gould demands an Edward Bellamy.”Footnote 67
For the nation’s long-suffering workingmen, as well as its mothers, wives, and children, this social transformation could not occur quickly enough. For women, Bellamy’s consumerist utopia would effectuate their “industrial disenthrallment.” Once the nation’s leading industries had been consolidated into “one great business corporation,” women would finally gain their “industrial independence.” No longer could a “masculine intermediary” hold them back. For once the “great, kind foresighted human family” had become folded into the “corporate firm of We, Us & Company,” everyone would finally have a fair chance to benefit from the “survival of the fittest” in its “true character and highest conquest.”Footnote 68
Willard’s invocation of a Darwinian catch phrase was not incidental. Like most progressives, she presumed evolutionary theory eminently sound, so long as it was guided by men and women of sound moral conviction.Footnote 69
Willard’s Union Signal collaborators shared her progressive understanding of Christian evolutionism. Conspicuously absent from their columns were paeans to the self-made man, a figure often mistakenly conflated in this period with Protestant piety. Year after year and article after article, contributors called out this delusion not only as a moral monstrosity but also as an insidious assault upon the home, the family, and the workaday world.
It was thus entirely predictable that a contributor to the Union Signal would enthusiastically laud in 1897 the “Agriculturalists National Protective Association” that a progressive farm group had recently established. The farmer’s cooperative, the contributor admiringly explained, was “the latest thing in trusts.” Not only had farmers built warehouses to enable them to keep their crops off the market until market conditions improved, but they had also pooled knowledge, curtailed overproduction, and redistributed profits “somewhat after the socialistic plan.” Nothing about this venture struck the contributor as problematic. The “gospel” of the “unity of forces” was increasingly commending itself to “all classes of people.” Though trusts sometimes overreached, their emergence foretold the advent of a “transition period” in which the “iron age of competition” would give way to the “golden age of cooperation.” This transition was “wise and good” and entirely compatible with evolutionary theory—which, like Willard, the contributor praised as a progressive force—and it was also in accord with the sacred wisdom of the Bible. For in the “truly Christian commonwealth” that was aborning, the manufacturer, the wage earner, the farmer, and the railroads would all combine to form the “biggest and most righteous ‘trust’” the world had ever known—for “every citizen will be ‘in it.’”Footnote 70
No temperance advocate more effectively debunked the myth of the self-made man than Frank Beard, a gifted illustrator acclaimed in the 1890s as a chromolithographer for Ram’s Horn, a Chicago-based Christian magazine closely aligned with the WCTU. Known to posterity as the “cartoonist who drew America dry,” Beard disparaged the egoism of the other-directed, reputation-driven upwardly mobile status-seeker as a snare and a delusion. Beard’s iconic cartoon, “The Self Made Man,” made this point in an arresting way. To warn against the sin of pride, Beard conjured up a sanctimonious egoist who falsely attributed his worldly success to his own endeavors. With “self righteousness” for a cloak, and nothing more substantial than a shabby “gentility” and a pitiful veneer of “respectability” to cover the torn patches on his threadbare pants, the foolish man was, quite literally, skating on thin ice, shielded from disaster only by the shimmering illusion of his “reputation.” Having spurned the counsel of his elders and forgotten the lessons of his Christian upbringing, he was utterly alone in the world, with no family, friends, or mentors in sight, with the exception of a cossetted golden pig—“mammon”—who, perched complacently on a sled, was along for the ride (Figure 2). Though the self-deluded self-seeker had not in any obvious way been corrupted by a saloon—a favorite theme of Beard’s—he had plainly set himself up for a fall. For anyone with eyes to see, a warning sign was, quite literally, staring him in the face: “Danger! For every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled.” Should any reader remain perplexed about what lay in store, the caption supplied a suitable Biblical prooftext: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.”Footnote 71
Ridiculing the cult of the self-made man.
That pride cometh before the fall was the message of this Frank Beard cartoon. For the readership of the Chicago-based Ram’s Horn, an interdenominational Christian social gospel magazine closely allied with Willard’s WCTU, it furnished a haunting reminder that the republic was imperiled not only by the liquor trade (a frequent Beard theme) but also by the delusional egoism of headstrong men hell-bent on risking body and soul in the heedless pursuit of the main chance.
(Source: Frank Beard, Fifty Great Cartoons [Chicago, 1899]).
While the Union Signal never enlisted a cartoonist as talented as Beard, contributor Ira Gale Tompkins wondered in 1893 how the WCTU might, like Beard, take advantage of the affordances of multicolor lithography—then a new media—to get its message across. For decades, the Union Signal had flooded the country with column after column of densely worded articles in small-font type. Might it not be time to try to invent a “new gospel of temperance,” pondered Tompkins? Thanks to a successful WCTU-backed lobbying campaign, schoolchildren received WCTU-vetted scientific information about the harmfulness of alcohol abuse.Footnote 72 Yet this information could not be expected to make a lasting impression on the legions of impressionable young men flooding into the nation’s cities. To reach this audience, Tompkins proposed that the WCTU adopt the “devil’s own weapons” and plaster the city’s billboards with sensationalistic circus-style multicolor posters that could hold their own with the plethora of flamboyant “flaming” theatre, dance, and concert-hall announcements that had been designed to catch the viewers’ attention.Footnote 73
To illustrate what she had in mind, Tompkins appended to her article a black-and-white mock-up for a multicolor poster modeled on the elaborate chromolithographic tableau that regularly appeared in Judge, Puck, and Ram’s Horn. To grab the viewer’s attention, the poster featured a histrionic large-type full-caps warning about the public health dangers of alcohol addiction: “THERE ARE IN THIS COUNTRY 214,000 LICENSED SALOONS Which Send 100,000 DRUNKARDS Annually TO DRUNKARDS’ GRAVES.” Immediately below was an eleven-line primer on saloon economics designed to remind the would-be imbiber that the barkeep did not have his customer’s best interests in mind. Filling out the design was a freely drawn rendering of the “SALOON OCTOPUS,” an “eight-armed devil” whose outstretched arms enumerated some of the perils to which the saloon goer was vulnerable: “sensuality,” “theft,” “murder,” “suicide,” “insanity,” “corrupt politics,” “poverty,” and “idleness” (Figure 3). Mass-produced in bright colors and plastered on billboards, would not such a poster have the potential to inspire in at least some of the nation’s young adults an “arrest of thought”—“as Miss Willard would say?” Footnote 74
Deploying new media to get the attention of the rising generation.
Fin de siècle temperance advocates struggled to engage audiences unmoved by religious appeals. In this mock-up for a chromolithographic poster, banner headlines quantifying the public health harms of the liquor trade were paired with a monstrous octopus whose outstretched arms spelled out the multiple perils of the saloon: “poverty,” “idleness,” “sensuality,” “theft,” “murder,” “suicide,” “corrupt politics,” and “insanity.”
(Source: Ira Gale Tompkins, “A New Gospel of Temperance,” Union Signal 19 [21 Sep. 1893]: 4.)
There is no evidence that Tompkins’s posters were were ever produced; in fact, her thought experiment may well have been intended as a joke. Even so, by melding venerable anti-monopoly content with an innovative attention-getting form, it illustrated the familiarity of WCTU insiders with the imperatives of the attention economy of the late-nineteenth-century city.
While the Union Signal only occasionally featured illustrations, it made an exception in 1912 for “In the Race for Success,” a black-and-white cartoon reprinted from a Portland, Maine, newspaper. To illustrate the salutary power of cooperation, the cartoon depicted nine young men as a rowing crew in a shell labeled “community” sculling toward the finish line of “prosperity” (Figure 4). To make it to the winner’s circle, the crew had to lead exemplary lives of “self-control,” “manhood,” “self-restraint” (as their oars proclaimed), while steering clear of the grasping arms of the looming, and by-now familiar, “Saloon Octopus.” The race itself was not a typical competition, for there were no other boats in sight. Instead, it was a test of character. Should any individual succumb to temptation, he would become a “dead weight” and a “handicap” to the entire community.Footnote 75 The moral was plain. In the race for success, everyone had to not only pull together, but also to be alert to existential perils that loomed in plain sight. Frances Willard could not have put it any better.
How to succeed in business without really competing (and what to keep an eye out for).
For temperance advocates like Willard, wealth creation was a collaborative project in which cooperation had supplanted competition in the “race for success.” In this tableau, which originated in a temperance newspaper, a team of oarsmen representing the “community” had to steer clear of the “saloon octopus,” a metaphor for the liquor trade, to reach the promised land of “prosperity.”
(Source: “In the Race for Success,” Union Signal 38 [19 Sep. 1912]: 12.)
Figure 4. Long description
The illustration shows nine men rowing a boat labeled ‘Community’ in a race towards a finish line labeled ‘The Competition’. The men are all synchronized, paddling together in harmony. In the water below them, an octopus labeled ‘Saloon Octopus’ is depicted, with one of its tentacles reaching up towards the rowers, attempting to pull one of them underwater. The scene is set against a backdrop of a stormy sea with waves crashing around the boat. The illustration is a metaphor for the challenges faced in the pursuit of success and the importance of cooperation and unity.
Conclusion
Limbic capitalism is a new addition to the vocabulary of political economy that was coined to characterize the business models of present-day digital media platforms and the pharmaceutical sector. Yet it can be stretched to provide a fresh perspective on the harms posed by economic practices that are centuries old.Footnote 76 How, for example, might historians better understand the past, if, as one temperance historian has provocatively proposed, they silently substituted “big pharma” for “liquor traffic” every time the latter appeared in the historical record?Footnote 77
Frances Willard’s home protection crusade was controversial in her lifetime and it remains so to this day.Footnote 78 Yet there is no reason to question the moral authority that Willard wielded for the multitude of women and men around the world who shared her beliefs. The WCTU’s message was compelling, and the harms it exposed—addiction, child abuse, domestic violence—viscerally real. Without minimizing the well-known problems that the implementation of Prohibition posed—problems so substantial that even John D. Rockefeller, Jr., long the single largest funder of the Anti-Saloon League, would ruefully come to regard them as insurmountable—it would seem to be a propitious time to take seriously the moral imagination that inspired Willard’s crusade.Footnote 79
But what does this have to do with anti-monopoly? A great deal. Of the several modes of inquiry upon which Willard and her collaborators relied to build support for their home protection crusade, anti-monopoly was prominently in the mix. Three temperance metaphors—protection, traffic, and competition—had an anti-monopoly pedigree. So, too, did such related concepts as cooperation, local option, and trust. Women’s suffrage and prohibition rested on anti-monopoly premises, as did, paradoxically, the administrative state.
But was Willard really an anti-monopolist? Here, too, the answer is yes. Lawmakers like John Sherman are routinely hailed as anti-monopoly heroes, yet there was nothing in the vacuous platitudinizing that filled the halls of Congress during the long debate preceding the enactment of the federal anti-monopoly law known today as the Sherman Act to match Willard’s eloquent defense of the democratic promise of a world liberated from the ravages of substance abuse. If anti-monopoly is understood as a mode of inquiry that takes seriously the menace of special privilege, unaccountable power, and existential peril, and Willard’s home protection crusade is located in its historical context—the only sound basis for a historical assessment—then Willard is no less deserving of an honored place in the anti-monopoly pantheon than Adam Smith, William Leggett, or Louis Brandeis.
The past, it is often rightly said, was a foreign country. Yet if Willard’s home protection crusade is viewed through an anti-monopoly lens, might not it spark an “arrest of thought,” as Willard herself might say? At the very least, its history expands the annals of anti-monopoly to embrace a crusade launched by a generation of activist women to combat the existential peril of an economic sector whose marketing strategy they presumed to have been structured around the business of addiction. At the very least, it challenges the enormous condescension of posterity that has stymied critical inquiry into the democratic promise of a bottom-up woman-led social movement that mobilized countless Americans over many decades in a crusade for social justice to bring the nation’s economic institutions into better alignment with its civic ideals.
Acknowledgments
For assistance in the preparation of this essay, I am grateful to Chloe Bosman, Michael Bruk, Iris Chen, Christopher H. Evans, Gaines M. Foster, Lisa Jacobson, Robert Kaminski, Pamela W. Laird, Karun Parek, Charles Postel, David Shorten, Hannah Sommers, Sam Stark, Gabriel Thin, and several anonymous Business History Review referees. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2023 meeting of the Business History Conference in Detroit, Michigan. I am grateful to Laura Phillips-Sawyer for her comments on that draft.
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