John Weaver-Hudson is at least 20 years younger than almost everyone else at the Christmas party, but that doesn`t seem to phase him. Nor does the alcohol-free liquid refreshments.
Weaver-Hudson, clearly happy to be here, lifts his wine glass of cranberry-apple juice in a holiday toast. Like other guests, the 32-year-old minister is a proud member of the National Woman`s Christian Temperance Union. That`s right. The WCTU, that formerly powerful, Evanston-based army of determined gray-haired ladies known for their advocacy of total abstinence from liquor and for spearheading the Prohibition movement, is still around, and working hard to regain the momentum it once enjoyed.
And there are signs that, as it pushes a new agenda, it is beginning to succeed. At the top of its list of interests is keeping children away from drugs and alcohol, and in the process of pursuing that goal, it is
replenishing its aging ranks with a promising number of energetic new members like Weaver-Hudson. It is computerizing its records and even has retained a public-relations adviser.
At the same time, the organization has embarked on an ambitious, $500,000 restoration of the Frances Willard House-a national historic landmark built in 1865 when Evanston was just a village of 300 people-and three adjacent buildings it owns. It has raised more than half of the needed money, a big chunk of it coming from the sale of a house the WCTU owned in Washington, and $50,000 more from members.
Eventually, the Willard House will be a museum devoted to the life and work of Frances Willard, the longtime leader of the WCTU and the first dean of women at Northwestern University. Widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished American women of the 19th Century, she is recognized with a statue in the rotunda of the U.S Capitol, the only woman so honored.
”I get letters all the time from people saying they thought we all died a long time ago,” says national WCTU President Rachel Kelly, a retired elementary school principal who moved from her home in Maine two years ago to assume her post at WCTU headquarters, just behind the Willard House. Proudly, she points out that the WCTU was nominated this year for a Nobel Peace Prize by three members of the Norwegian Parliament.
”We want to get the message out that we`re still here,” she says. ”We want to shake the image of being little old ladies.
”People think we don`t want them to have any fun. That`s not the case. We`re concerned about alcohol and other drugs and what they`re doing to our nation, about fetal alcohol syndrome and babies born addicted to cocaine.”
Indeed, drugs, not alcohol, first drew Kelly to the WCTU. She grew concerned about the abuse she was seeing in her own community in Maine in the mid-1960s, and the WCTU provided the best educational materials she could find to use in her own school, she explains from her office in the Evanston headquarters.
”To be concerned about alcohol and drug abuse is not old hat,” adds Weaver-Hudson, who had no trouble signing the group`s more than 100-year-old pledge to abstain from alcohol. He`s also not the least bit concerned, he says, that as a male member of the women`s organization he is not allowed to vote or hold office. ”It`s not an ego threat,” he says smiling.
”This (group) isn`t a museum piece,” he says. ”It`s an active, relevant group. . . . It`s a help that an organization exists that says you have the right to think for yourself (about whether to drink or not). I certainly hope WCTU can make a difference.”
50 new chapters
So does Dorothy Russell, WCTU`s 40-year-old Oregon state president.
”Society is becoming more and more aware of the effects of alcohol and drugs,” she says in a phone interview. ”Mothers don`t want their children to ever get started.” Russell adds that she knows of six communities near her home interested in starting WCTU groups.
North Dakota state President Karen Bragg, also in her 40s, observes that some of the organization`s new young members are former drug and alcohol abusers. Others come from the families of alcoholics. ”They have been there,” she says. ”They see what alcohol and drugs can do, and they want to get involved.”
”People respect you for what you stand up for,” adds Shirley Wieman, the 43-year-old South Dakota president and wife of a recovering alcoholic who also was reached on the phone. ”This organization is fulfilling a need.”
In the past year alone, some 50 new WCTU chapters have started, Kelly says, adding more than 500 men and women to the group`s rosters.
”I`m really encouraged,” says Bragg. ”It feels like a new era.”
The WCTU claims more than 40,000 members in America, and 500,000 in 72 countries. It has a successful publishing arm offering the most up-to-date pamphlets and books on everything from sexually transmitted diseases to drugs to alcohol to smoking to AIDS. Many are written for children, with appealing graphics and in language they can understand.
”Orders are up. They come in every day,” says Kara Tschanz, manager of the WCTU`s Signal Press. ”We`re even hearing from young people who write in saying they need help with a problem.”
Cuddling cocaine babies
To meet those needs, the WCTU has a program to prepare members to become crisis counselors, and another that sponsors workshops for teachers on drug education. There is a division devoted to programs for youngsters. Chapters even sends volunteers to hospitals to cuddle infants born addicted to cocaine. Members are busy on the legislative front, too, lobbying, among other things, for higher taxes on the sale of alcohol, attention to violence on TV, and enforcement of drunken-driving laws.
Prohibition, members acknowledge, is not a realistic goal in these times, though they certainly would welcome it. WCTU President Kelly points to the success of the national anti-smoking crusade and its focus on health concerns. ”We (hope in the same way) people will decide by themselves to stop drinking,” she says.
”Our goal is to show that we`re not any different from the average family. We just abstain, and we still have a good time,” adds Michigan WTCU officer Jackie Rosher.
Kelly points out that the WCTU has long been involved in other social issues: helping to start kindergartens and day-care centers, fighting for women`s rights, caring for battered women, helping to start legal aid societies for the poor, and fighting for eight-hour days and equal pay for women.
”We`re an organization interested in protecting the home and family,”
she says. ”That`s always been our issue.”
But fighting against alcohol was what got the organization started and earned it attention and fame.
Growing influence
The organization was born in 1874 when three women, two from Illinois, met at a Sunday school conference in upstate New York and lamented the problem shared by all their families: alcohol abuse.
They quickly found other supporters and soon took their campaign for temperance to the streets-and saloons. They would pray outside, and even inside, drinking establishments, imploring saloonkeepers not to serve the demon alcohol.
The women of the WCTU are quick to tell you, incidentally, that they never condoned the methods of temperence crusader Carrie Nation: She won notoriety in the 1880s for walking into saloons, ax in hand, to smash the place. Nation, WCTU members say, was only briefly affiliated with their organization.
But even using peaceful means wasn`t easy. Through the years, members were cursed, had tobacco juice thrown at them, and even were doused with the contents of chamber pots. ”Today it would be a bullet in the head,” notes Kelly dryly.
They wouldn`t quit, though, and by the 1880s, under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU had emerged as the most influential woman`s organization in the country, and possibly the world. In its heyday, it had about 2 million members worldwide.
A tour through the Willard House reflects that era. One group of WCTU artifacts was deemed so valuable that it is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution, part of a year-long exhibit celebrating women`s accomplishments. But plenty of artifacts are still here, including some that reflect the feelings of those who opposed the temperance movemment. There is a china doll of Willard, for example, that shows her holding a bottle. A tiny cork in the back of the doll`s head reveals its true function: a flask.
The book shelves in the Willard parlor are filled with more than 1,000 volumes, many signed by such luminaries of the day as Susan B. Anthony. There is the pen used to sign the Prohibition Act into law, and rolled muslin-backed sheets containing millions of signatures from women around the world imploring leaders to get rid of alcohol.
Then there is the memorabilia from Willard`s life. She traveled the world fighting against the consumption of alchohol and for women`s rights, even taking up the cause of child brides in India who had been abandoned.
Visitors who walk into her bedroom find her purse on the dresser, hairpins nearby. Her clothes hang in the closet. On the desk in her study sit a pair of spectacles, an old-fashioned Dictaphone next to them, as if Willard has just taken a break from her work.
The dining room cupboard still holds the Willard family china. Frances Willard never married but lived with her mother and her mother`s possessions for many years among her own. In the parlor is the organ she bought with her first teaching money-to demonstrate her independence from her father-and the family Bible, complete with the pledge she insisted everyone sign promising to abstain from alchohol.
”She was such a great person, and she did so much for women`s rights, we thought people should be able to come here and see how she lived,” explains Kelly as she moves through some of the rooms.
Clearly, the house reflects how a prosperous Midwestern family lived during the second half of the 19th Century. All the rooms are not open to the public, however: three WCTU national staff members live in the 17-room house, and the building is also used to house visiting guests.
Even though it has remained in use, the house obviously has been in desperate need of repair.
Sprucing up an image
The same could have been said of the organization during much of this century. Once Prohibition was enacted in 1919 via passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, some WCTU members might have felt their job was done.
”Then when it was repealed in 1932, I think we got discouraged,” says Kelly. ”And (by that time) women had more rights. They were involved in other issues.”
Members grew older. Few new ones replaced them. The organization suffered from a growing image problem. ”That we were little old ladies in tennis shoes,” acknowledges Kelly.
Now, just as it has gone to work repairing the Willard House, the WCTU hopes it can spruce up its image. Still, its leaders concede, the organization has a long way to go. Cook County, for example, has only two small local groups. And many members here and around the country, after all, are elderly ladies who do fit the WCTU`s stereotyped tennis-shoes image.
”But just remember,” says one veteran at the Christmas dinner, ”tennis shoes are stylish now.”
