When one thinks of turn-of-the-century women agitators for Prohibition one most likely thinks of the hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation (en.m.wikipedia.org/...). Two years before the Hachetations began, Frances E. Willard, a much deeper and broader thinker on the relationship of temperance with other moral duties, died, still not recognizing the full scope of intersectionality. This now virtually forgotten person had been taken from the movement just as she was further expanding her horizons under the influence of socialists—and finally Ida B. Wells, a fearless African American journalist who had been born into slavery.
Recently I watched the three-part Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary on the Prohibition. I don’t think Ida B. Wells was mentioned in the film. She found more important things to make her life’s work than intemperance. But it speaks volumes that she felt it was necessary to go to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union when she was desperately looking for allies who should know better. We too should be desperately looking for allies who should know better.
A single reference in the film to the longtime leader of the Union’s eventual interest in socialism did peak my curiosity. “Could this interest be rekindled in a productive way?,” I asked myself as I sat up late on the couch. And even if the answer is “Generally No,” the dialectics of the broadening and subsequent narrowing of a mass religious women’s movement seemed important to try to understand. This seemed to be a major dialectical process that developed roughly parallel to the ultimately demagogic agrarian Populist movement (m.dailykos.com/...).
This piece is written from a critical Gramscian perspective (m.dailykos.com/...). Possible lessons on cultural hegemony can be learned from a failed mass attempt at what we might in hindsight call partial intersectionality. Had Willard lived longer, it is even possible that she would have continued her moral growth and the attempt might have evolved into full intersectionality and not failed, although the focus on legal prohibition of alcohol seems to have been an insurmountable flaw.
Importantly for present purposes, as illustrated by the constructive Wells-Willard confrontation, interpersonal acts and relationships can form part of larger dialectical processes. As a theoretically “radical international democratic socialist” who is also a pro-choice Christian living in the Deep South, I see the need to as much as possible find ways to bring like-minded religious persons into holistic struggle for liberty and justice for all. Doing that most effectively requires consciousness of cultural and personal dynamics and not simply one’s own awakening political consciousness. Spreading the good news of socialism by yelling on the street corner where I live is not only dangerous but also unlikely to be effective. But sometimes sacrificial confrontation not only with enemies but also with potential allies who should know better should not be avoided.
I’m not a woman, an African American, or a historian. Members of this group know I’m no scholar on the class struggle. I only have an at best basic understanding of gender and racial struggles others experience firsthand and have devoted their lives to studying and waging. I didn’t even know the term “intersectionality” until Geminijen, a member of this group, exposed me to it a few years ago. I’m certainly not going to attempt to tell the amazing story of Ida B. Wells. Others at Daily Kos have done that wonderfully (See, e.g., m.dailykos.com/...).
Our own NY brit expat wrote:
... Ida B. Wells became a teacher, refused to give up her seat to go to the “coloured section” and sued the railroad in the 1880s. She led the national campaign against lynching, and founded Alpha Suffrage Club of Chicago with Black suffragists. But the rights of blacks and women did not always go hand in hand. In 1869, as America was about to give black men the right to vote, the woman's movement split in two. Half the activists felt that any expansion of voting rights was a step in the right direction; the other half were angry that women were being left behind. By 1900, most suffragists had lost their enthusiasm for civil rights, and actually used racism to push for the vote. Anna Howard Shaw, head of NAWSA, said it was "humiliating" that black men could vote while well-bred white women could not. Other suffragists scrambled to reassure white Southerners that white women outnumbered male blacks in the South. If women got the vote, they argued, they would help preserve "white supremacy.” But not all white suffragists shunned blacks, but Wells was never really embraced by the white suffrage movement. And though both white and black women won the vote in 1920, they did not do it by marching together.
(m.dailykos.com/...)
Pushing for full intersectionality was at the heart of Wells’ moral challenge to potential white allies. Although the class struggle implications of injustice were not fully recognized by her, perhaps this was in part because most white socialists were ambivalent at best about sticking up for African Americans’ rights, including the fundamental right to not be murdered by Southern white mobs.
Like Douglass, Wells was a staunch champion of women’s rights—even though feminist leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, formerly avowed abolitionists, turned their movement for women’s rights into a tool of racist reaction following the Civil War. Feminists organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution because it gave votes to black men and not to women.
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Wells was a militant reformer. She was religious and was part of the black middle class, albeit somewhat of a thorn in their side. She appealed for federal legislation to ban lynching. Such a ban was her ultimate goal, as she did not have a Marxist perspective. She was a courageous liberal.
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The early SP in the U.S. included everyone from outright racists like Victor Berger to liberals like Mary White Ovington to revolutionaries like Eugene V. Debs. Debs was an anti-racist who spoke out against lynching and was in favor of organizing integrated unions. But even Debs, who was among the best of the Socialists, did not clearly see the need for American revolutionaries to systematically organize the whole multiracial working class against the atrocities being committed against black people. His color blindness was expressed in his statement: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.”
(www.icl-fi.org/...)
During the same early decades Wells was working for full intersectional justice, Willard came to a position of great influence with white Evangelical women. This was a time when many of such women were open on some level to a socially-active Gospel.
In 1874 Willard helped establish the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The main objective of the WCTU was to persuade all states to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. Under the leadership of Willard (1879-1898), the organisation succeeded in bringing about temperance education in schools. The WCTU also supported the abolition of prostitution, prison reform and women's suffrage.
By 1881 Willard had become president of the WCTU. She was an outstanding lecturer, organizer, writer and for a time was editor of the Chicago Daily Post. Willard published her autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years, in 1889.
Williard became a socialist and in 1897 she shocked fellow delegates at the national conference of the Women's Christian Temperance Union when she argued that "socialism is the higher way; it enacts into everyday living the ethics of Christ's gospel. Nothing else will do."
(spartacus-educational.com/...)
Willard’s path to socialism wound through an earlier “Do Everything” policy that got her into hot water. She also wanted to enlist white Southern women into the movement and was willing to sacrifice solidarity with African Americans to do so.
As president, Willard encouraged creativity and experimentation in the WCTU, an optimistic, progressive position she called the “Do Everything” policy. Willard embraced women’s suffrage, both as a political tool to advance temperance reform and as a matter of justice, and she called women to establish a world founded on equality. She led the WCTU to pursue a set of reforms that included labor and workplace safety reforms like the eight-hour day, elimination of the sexual double standard, prison reform, free kindergartens, night schools for working women and men, reading rooms, and women’s shelters or homes for reformed prostitutes. To implement these reforms the National WCTU created departments of work.
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A handful of National WCTU executive officers, armed with financial details of a struggling Woman’s Temple building and the arrival of a disastrous national economic depression by early 1893, challenged Willard by arguing that her “Do Everything” policy diluted the Union’s temperance mission. Although they failed to detach the Woman’s Temple enterprise from the Union or to deny Willard reelection, their dissent revealed a limit to Willard’s broad reform vision within the organization.In the wake of unprecedented violence against African Americans, including lynchings, the National WCTU passed an anti-lynching statement at its 1893 meeting. Willard, however, undermined the resolution in her annual address by stating that lynching resulted from black men raping white women. The claim, popular among apologists of Jim Crow segregation, not only drew criticism from famed reformer Ida B. Wells but also damaged Willard’s and the WCTU’s credibility among African Americans more generally. Embattled and ill, Willard was unable to attend the Columbian Exposition. She nevertheless addressed the National WCTU convention by having a colleague read her remarks, making wavesby offering a cogent argument for Christian Socialism. She placed the struggle for temperance and women’s suffrage within a broader context over the fight against inequality. To Willard, capitalism was an idea whose time had passed. Christian Socialism, she maintained, would replace economic competition with cooperation, and would inaugurate an age of “Golden Rule justice,” and universal brotherhood and sisterhood.
(faith.galecia.com/...)
Please read this magnificent discussion of Wells’ brave and brilliant confrontation of Willard while they were both in Great Britain: www.theroot.com/... Read about the incredibly ugly dishonesty and hostility directed back at Wells by Willard and her connections. At great personal cost, good seeds were nonetheless planted by Wells.
Other U.S. publications — including the Memphis Commercial — weighed in with statements against Wells' character. The Commercial examined her career, painting "the saddle-colored Sapphira" from Holly Springs, Miss., as a harlot. The newspaper also stated that Wells was pushing her "foul and slanderous" outbursts on the British.
Even so, the media campaign didn't stop Wells. She lectured to audiences in London; was invited to dinner in Parliament; and before she headed home, helped Londoners establish the London Anti-Lynching Committee. Forming this group was a clear victory for Wells in the anti-lynching crusade. It comprised some of the most influential editors, ministers, college professors and members of Parliament. To Wells' surprise, Lady Somerset joined the committee, and Willard was among the Americans who also signed on.
With the victory in hand, Wells set sail for home after a four-month campaign. She later wrote in her autobiography that the moment "was not only a boomerang to Miss Willard. It seemed to appeal to the British sense of fair play. Here were two prominent white women, joining hands in the effort to crush an insignificant colored woman who had neither money nor influence — nothing but the power of truth with which to fight her battles."
The truth prevailed.
The “harlot” continued speaking truth to “Christian” power until her death in 1931. Along the way she co-founded the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People.
Maybe if Willard had lived longer she would have seen the need to repent of her sins and extend full intersectional solidarity to African Americans. As it stands, her legacy is much more shameful than good. The first Prohibition she helped to inspire diverted attention from the “Everything” she honestly cared about. The cultural hegemony she helped to put in place and which eventually resulted in the Eighteenth Amendment was based on lies she and countless others told based on prejudice against immigrants and African Americans. Such “Christians” as the members of the KKK were happy to tell the same lies.
The lies Willard told continue to be told. The less “fortunate” are made so in part by a second Prohibition much worse than the first. It is based on a devastating Drug War of death, mass incarceration, and the everyday trauma of targeted traffic stops, K-9 sniffs, and suspended drivers licenses. These days most white Christians seem not to care about this or the “Everything” else as long as they can have theirs.
The Gramscian questions we must ask ourselves on the left are (a) whether it is worthwhile to continue to speak to them at all, and sometimes to confront them in ways they will find uncomfortable, and, if so, (b) whether our language should sometimes include the Golden Rule or other moral elements of cultural hegemony. If we are ever to have liberty and justice for all I think the answer to both questions is “Yes.” We are in an intersectional dialectical struggle and need every peaceful tool at our disposal, including moral suasion. Truth is on our side and may yet prevail.