The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  “Touch not, taste not, handle not,

  Drink will make the dark, dark blot.”

  The song, in a dozen verses, was ineffective and the singer turned to a monitor she had long known. For three days she enjoyed “a heavenly rapture” in which “my Savior was my constant companion.” Presently, she heard a voice ordering her to “go to Kiowa,” a neighboring town. Arming herself with stones and other missiles, wrapping them in paper and carrying them in the crook of her arm, she went into a “joint” and flung the first of these “smashers” into the mirror behind the bar. She hardly noticed the fury of the joint-keeper, or the surprise of the drinkers for, in the mirror, appeared by magic the figure of President McKinley—whom she had always identified with the liquor interests. Her second smasher struck his chair; her third, his head. Finally, the whole mirror crashed and the President with it.

  After she had smashed five saloons, she became aware of her false tactics. A stone, however effective, could only be used once; when she ran out of ammunition she had to retreat, unless she could find, as happily she once did find, a billiard ball handy. So she armed herself with a hatchet and crossed into the town of Enterprise. Quietly she went to breakfast at the home of the Mayor’s father. Soberly she attended prayer meeting at two in the afternoon. At three, she went down the street. Saloon-keepers, warned of her presence, had locked up, but she was not dismayed. With a terrific blow she smashed a plateglass window and, climbing through the jagged edges of glass, hammered a great mirror to pieces, swept bottles and glasses from shelves, emptied cases of liquor, and smashed the bottles one by one. She was unhurried and thorough, but finally the city marshal pushed his way through the cheering crowd and led her away.

  A shout of ribald joy rose in the land, and a cry of pain from the Kansas joint-keepers. Mrs. Nation was jailed for disturbing the peace, but no law could touch her for destroying property which did not legally exist. She went to Chicago, to consult with prohibitionists, and Chicago trembled but, for the moment, Mrs. Nation was concentrating on states where liquor traffic was forbidden. She toured the country, carrying little hatchets with her as souvenirs. She smashed when she could and, when she could not smash, she shouted. Or prophesied. She was denouncing a saloon in New York when a man jostled her. “Never mind,” she cried, “Never mind, you beer-swelled, whiskey-soaked, saturn-faced man. God will strike you.” And without any particular show of pride she adds, “In six weeks from that time this man fell dead in the streets of Coney Island.”

  She had a style in writing as in action. Her published work suggests a childish infatuation with words. She throws in a few extra adjectives, without specific regard for their meaning, just to give her sentence a swing. Of a Bangor hotel keeper she says, “This Chapman was a noted dive keeper, a rummy, and ran a representative, rum-soaked Republican hotel,” making her five R’s roll like the rumble of thunder. When she spoke in cheap vaudeville houses, or between the acts at burlesque shows, she was never embarrassed by the jeers and catcalls of the rum-soaked audiences. She faced them and, if she did not make them listen, she claims that she did. She was reproached for exposing herself in such desperate sinks of iniquity and responded that they needed her most. She was certainly nobody’s fool. Howls of laughter did not deter her, because she knew she was making her propaganda dramatic. If governors and Presidents refused to see her, it could only be because they were suborned by the whiskey interests. This she knew, because she was pleading the cause of American wives and mothers. “Conspiracy and Treason!” she shouted from the balcony of the Senate chamber during a debate, to make that august body listen to her, and then tried to wreck their private bar. She refused to pay fines and wrote, usually without rancor, of the jails she had visited. But in the end, she was able to dicker with lecture agencies for respectable fees, to contribute money to weeklies supporting the crusade of hatchetology, to plan a home for the wives of inebriates, and to go abroad to England so that Punch could have fun with her and the valor of her ax.

  She hated love-making; it was one of the things which most “needed a rebuke, or exhortation,” and she never failed to give it. Even if she caught a boy and girl spooning, she would threaten their future peace of mind and, when she heard of a seduction, her energy was endless. She made it a personal matter to see that justice was done, and once when suicide followed her interference, she recorded it as an entirely natural and desirable result. In her autobiography, she accuses everyone, high and low, because she was seriously incapable of believing that any honest person, anyone of good will, could be on the other side. If they were against her, they must be slaves to rum or slaves to rum’s money.

  At Harvard, she had seen professors smoking, but at Yale the boys became her special pets, for they appealed to her to come and put an end to the way the college authorities were debauching the young by forcing them to eat ham with Champagne sauce. She quotes, with perfect equanimity, the broad spoofing letters which students wrote, and her heart breaks for the boy who had “brandy so strong on the food it made his head dizzy.” She was a remorseless enemy of every other movement or individual that attracted public attention and wrote attacks on Dowie, on Weltmer’s Mindcure Treatment, on Christian Science, and on theosophy. She had some very clear ideas on the profession of advertising; particularly, she pointed out that makers of whiskey so often used an animal as a trade-mark, because they wanted to associate something dignified, healthy, and clean with their ignoble product.

  She was appallingly reckless in her accusations. Daniel Webster, she said, was so drunk that he had to hold on to the railing when he argued cases before the Supreme Court. Theodore Roosevelt, because the train on which he crossed dry Kansas had liquor on board, was a dive keeper. His successor was “Taft, of the noted Taft cigar.” McKinley would have recovered “but his blood was bad from nicotine.” She quarreled with Roosevelt’s secretary because she wanted to make a public protest against Alice Roosevelt’s cigarettes. She was a comic figure, with a certain drastic common sense, and, in spirit, she was much closer to the prohibition of Wayne B. Wheeler than Frances Willard was. Miss Willard, one fancies, wanted the world to be sober so that it might be happy. Carry Nation wanted it to be sober so that it might not be happy. Miss Willard had, therefore, a little of the older tradition of reformer which includes pious idealists, warm lovers of humanity, and visionaries. Carry Nation is the new order, a fanatic and a crank, hating whatever joy it is given to others to experience. Like most other women reformers, Carry Nation was ultimately successful. But it seems rather a pity that her crazy figure should not have lived on to become the apostle of direct action in prohibition enforcement. Somehow, the milieu of bootleggers, corrupt revenue officers, hijackers and night-club speak-easies, seems to call for her presence.

  † Carriages drove along the Bloomingdale Road in clouds of dust, and “they were filled with parties driving for pleasure.” † It was held against Newark, New Jersey, that whips for floggings slaves were manufactured there and the mayor of that city presided at a meeting which resolved that the subject of slavery and the question of its duration or abolition belonged exclusively to the slave states. † Horses on tread-mills turned the paddles of steamers at times and nobody seemed to be willing to pay 12½ cents for the use of a book from the steamer’s library. † The leading literary lights of the country—Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Bancroft, Willis, and Prescott—were all Democrats. † There was an excitement about rearing silkworms and James P. Espy was granted a sum of money and offered a bonus to experiment in rain-making by means of a great artificial fire. The New York Evening Star objected because the “proposition savors of blasphemy.” † The schooner Amistad bearing slaves who had rebelled on the high seas and killed the captain came into territorial water. The abolitionists defended them and in Boston they were considered as pirates. Eventually the courts decided that the Negroes should be set free but exported to Africa.

  † A hundred votes were cast for Mrs. Maria Ann Chapman for governor of Massach
usetts. † About fifty Americans settled annually in Cuba and the slave states wished that island to become a state of the Union. † There was a revolt against the patroons of northern New York; in New York City it was noted with dismay that the number of stock brokers had risen to eighty-six. † Female education was accused of an anti-domestic tendency “and to this we may trace the restless craving for excitement and public pleasures, which so strikingly characterize the aggregate of female society at the present day”; Lucy Stone and her friends did their own cooking and laundry at Oberlin College and helped to pay tuition fees by washing for the male students. † Abolitionists considered Boston the center of pro-slavery feeling. † The Negro quarter in New York was dreary and squalid beyond description. † When the famous violinist, Ole Bull, visited Washington, a Congressman asked him to play Hail, Columbia, and when an appropriation of $25,000 was suggested for Morse’s telegraph, another Congressman proposed that half of that sum should be spent on mesmerism and still another suggested Millerism for the other half. † On the Erie Canal boats, corns were cured between stops at fifty cents for the first corn and less in quantity. † “Mr. Daniel Webster, the greatest political character of Massachusetts, is not rich.”

  XVII. Some Women Reformers.

  THE success of women reformers in America is extraordinary. While men were founding colonies and going bankrupt, or founding religions and going crazy, women threw themselves into great political and social movements and inscribed their purposes in the laws of the land. Like most other reformers, they were reviled and ridiculed but, in their case at least, martyrdom may be considered as proof of the ultimate righteousness of the cause. When the Constitution was being framed, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband ironically assuming that the new nation would recognize the equal rights of women. But long into the next century, the woman who married was legally dead, without rights or privileges, and popular prejudice sustained the legal status. Socially, the majority of women were privileged to be as coyly attractive to men as they desired; but this was the ideal of the town and the city. In the backwoods, there was but one right: the right to bear children abundantly. The woman who wrote, or painted, or thought, was a freak; the woman who demanded the right to hold her own property was an anarchist.

  The actual history of the woman’s movement, which changed all this, does not come within the scope of this book: some of its connections and a few of its leaders do.

  The hidden spring of Suffrage as an actual political movement is, oddly enough, in Prohibition. From 1800 to 1860, a very few women wanted to vote, but a much larger number wanted to vote against slavery. For half a century longer, although the desire for the ballot per se increased, the majority of women still wanted to vote only against the saloon. The Temperance Convention which met in Rochester, in 1852, was led by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Mrs. Bloomer—the leaders of Woman’s Suffrage. All of them were temperance workers and all were hampered by the lack of the ballot in their efforts to destroy the demon Rum. Thirty years later, Frances Willard and the women of the W.C.T.U. went through the same experience and, for the same reason, became workers for Woman’s Suffrage. It was many years later that suffrage became an end in itself, and that the emancipation of women came to include not the right to stop men from drinking, but the right of women themselves to drink. In the early days, nearly every item in the program of woman’s rights was approached on that side which bore a relation to drink. Women wanted to hold property so that the drunken father might not ruin their children. They wanted divorce made easier so that the virtuous wife might elude the drunken husband. They wanted to speak in public, to be lawyers and doctors and bankers, so that the drunkard in delirium tremens, or in his grave, might not leave the wife and mother penniless. They were interested in phrenology, and diet, and dress reform, and participated in most of the other movements of the time, but above everything was the dominating desire to destroy the demon Rum. Had there been a prohibition amendment in America in 1800, the suffragists might have remained for another century a scattered group of intellectual cranks. Temperance gave to Suffrage an emotional overtone and a moral fervor which the movement never lost even when free lovers and intellectuals began to be influential in the Party. Mrs. Stanton wrote, “Let women’s motto be ‘no union with drunkards.’”

  One reason for the success of women reformers is their extraordinary guile. In small things and in great they were easily the equals of the experienced political males. “On the fifth day of November, 1872, Miss Susan B. Anthony was a woman” as the indictment said and, being a woman, exercised certain rights she claimed as a citizen: she voted for a candidate for Congress. Knowing that she would be tried for this crime, Miss Anthony took the precaution to vote the Republican ticket and so mollified the Republican prosecutor, judge, and jury. Miss Willard’s veiled threats to the major parties of the influence of women in critical states, where a few thousand persuaded husbands could swing a national election, were made with great dignity, but with the political astuteness of a ward boss. In a whole century of radical endeavor, women for the most part kept their heads. Rarely, a Fanny Wright attempted to combine half a dozen unpopular causes. As a rule, women went forward to a specific object and only took up side issues if they were compelled to. When their first convention met in 1848, —in upstate New York—they skillfully avoided a direct demand for the ballot for fear that this might prejudice outsiders against “more rational” demands. Even the eccentric among women were not unbalanced. Of these, two may be taken as fair examples.

  The syllables of Mrs. Bloomer’s father’s name, Ananias Jenks, and of Gloriana, the pen-name she used, carry us back to a day remote from our own. The omission of the word “obey” from her marriage vow brings us on to the year 1927, in which the Established Church first countenanced this change in ritual. Another event of the day of her marriage strikes the balance. Her modest husband, Dexter C. Bloomer, relates it with a becoming appreciation of his wife’s superiority:

  “Mr. Bloomer had many friends in the town, and on the evening of his arrival with his bride they filled Mr. Fuller’s room to welcome the newly wedded couple to their new home and new life. With them came many members of a fire company of which Mr. Bloomer was a member, accompanied by a band of music, and all went merry as a marriage bell. Refreshments were, of course, served, and among them a plentiful supply of wine, for in those days this was the almost certain accompaniment for all social gatherings. All, or nearly all, partook of it; and just then occurred an incident which told most instructively of the moral character and firmness of the young and happy bride. Glasses were filled with the sparkling beverage and one of them was presented to her by the bridegroom himself, but she firmly yet pleasantly declined to accept it. ‘What!’ he said with the greatest earnestness. ‘Will you not drink a glass with me on this joyful occasion? Surely it can do you no harm.’ ‘I cannot! I must not!’ A crowd of guests standing around could but admire her great self-denial and devotion to principles; and ever after, to the end of her days, she was a firm and consistent advocate of Temperance and the unceasing enemy of strong drink in all its varied forms.”

  One follows the sensible and energetic Amelia through her full and interesting life with a sense of recapturing the whole of American history. She fell under the influence of the Washingtonians. She became a contributor to her husband’s newspaper and assistant postmaster at Seneca Falls. Then she began to edit her own magazine, The Lily, thus being virtually a pioneer in her field, as most other women editors had not owned their magazines. Quite casually she adopted a “sensible costume” created by a neighbor, a Mrs. Miller. It never occurred to her that her name was to be for ever associated with this particular costume. With some excitement, she first took the New York and Erie Railroad steam cars to visit New York and, among her visits in the metropolis, was one to the home of the great phrenologist, L. N. Fowler (it will be noted that the other great dress reformer, Dr. Mary Walker, shared this enthusiasm
for phrenology), and another to the home of Horace Greeley. The gentleness, the perfume, the waywardness, and the energy of the time, all come out in her account of a soirée at Greeley’s:

  “At the latter place we met about a dozen of New York’s literati. Of these I only remember Charles A. Dana, then on the Tribune staff; Mrs. E. F. Ellet, a prominent story-writer at that time; and Alice and Phœbe Cary, the poet sisters. I remember the latter as dressed with very low necks and arms bared to the shoulders, while their skirts trailed upon the floor. Around their necks were hung huge boas, four feet long, the style of that day, as a protection, I suppose, from the cold. These, being heaviest in the middle, were continually sagging out of place and kept the wearers quite busy adjusting them. I confess to a feeling short of admiration for this dress display at a little social gathering in midwinter, and my estimation of the good sense of the Cary sisters sank accordingly. And I never read of them to this day but that those bare shoulders and necks and trailing skirts appear before me. They, no doubt, were as much disgusted with my short dress and trousers which left no part of the person exposed. Tastes differ, that is all; and I was not used to seeing women in company half dressed.”