*******************************************
Jack Blocker
History, Huron College, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6G 1H3 Canada
(519) 438-7224, ext. 249 /Fax (519) 438-3938
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 15:40:44 -0600
From: Kriste Lindenmeyer <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-Net Gilded Age and Progressive Era List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Review: Kerr on Fahey, _Temperance and Racism_
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (February, 1998)
David M. Fahey. _Temperance and Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and the
Good Templars_. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. xii +
209 pp. Illustrations, appendix, index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-8131-1984-7.
Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by K. Austin Kerr <[log in to unmask]>, Ohio State
University
For almost two hundred years now there has been widespread concern about
the misuse of beverage alcohol among Americans. Today it is hard to
conceive of anyone in the United States living without some first-hand
adverse experience with someone misusing liquor. Historians have long
recognized the importance of the temperance and prohibition movement in
19th century America, as traditional attitudes accepting high levels of
alcohol consumption changed. American reformers developed organizations
to encourage temperate behavior and to encourage and support complete
abstention from liquor consumption. Although considerable scholarly
attention has been paid to these phenomena, and especially to the
political expression of the values that they represented, surprisingly
little was known about the International Order of Good Templars. It was
the largest of the 19th century organizations that sought abstemious
behavior and supported efforts to change public policy to strike at "the
liquor traffic" by taking away the license to do business from the
saloons, distributors, and manufacturers of beverage alcohol.
David Fahey, a specialist in Victorian Britain, has corrected that
deficiency with this book. Fahey observes that many of the sources for
studying the Good Templars are in British temperance newspapers. He has
used those sources, plus material in American libraries and archives to
inform us about this organization. (Regrettably, personal letters of the
participants have not survived.) He focuses on the ways in which race,
and conflicting attitudes about race, divided the Good Templars, divisions
which add to our understanding of the complexities of racism in the 19th
century. Thus the book is about race in America. But it is also a book
that informs us about a sizeable temperance organization that was bitterly
divided over issues of race. And because the Good Templars were an
international organization, the book is also about different views toward
race between Britons and Americans in the 19th century.
The Good Templars formed in 1851 and 1852 among young persons in New
York's "burned over district." Rooted in evangelical Protestantism, it
quickly evolved as a fraternal organization appealing mostly to working
class people under the age of 30. Very early the organization rejected
selling insurance as a condition of membership lest the costs keep away
poor people. The Templars also accepted women as members and officers.
In fact, the organization grew and spread out from New York State on a
principle Fahey calls universalism, that anyone could join so long as
they pledged to abstain from alcohol consumption. The Templar lodges were
solidly in the tradition of American temperance groups that sought to
persuade people to abstain from consuming liquor, and offered support for
recovering alcoholics. Eventually the group also demanded that members
support prohibition laws. At its peak in North America in 1868 there
were 207,387 members. Then the movement leaped across the oceans. By
1873 there were 200,000 members in England, and Good Templar lodges
existed on every inhabited continent. By 1876 nearly 3,000,000 persons
had been initiated. (In 1992 the International Order of Good Templars
claimed a membership of more than three and a half million members in
over 50 nations.)
The Good Templars divided bitterly, however, in the 1870s over issues of
race. The ideology of universalism, that anyone was eligible for
membership so long as they promised to be teetotalers and to support
prohibition, conflicted with the desires of members in former slave states
to forbid membership by black Americans. And membership in the south,
especially in Kentucky, was growing. It was also growing in Great Britain
at the same time, and Templars in the two regions were soon at odds.
Southern Templars wanted to violate the principle of universalism and
segregate the organization, while British Templars, supported by some
Americans, both black and white, wanted to maintain the principle of
universalism. "Contemporaries personalized the dispute as a duel between
a Kentuckian and an Englishman," John J. Hickman and Joseph Malins,
respectively (p. 32). Their dispute, and the competing values that the
contestants represented, caused a "great schism," which lasted from 1876
to 1887.
In the schism, the Hickmanites wanted to set up separate lodges for
African Americans. The British wanted to maintain the principle of
universalism. Fahey believes that the British view reflected a
long-standing aversion to the slave trade and a belief that black people
deserved better treatment than they received in America. In the dispute,
northern Americans played little role, probably for the most part
accommodating themselves to segregation in the south. What Fahey finds
especially interesting is how the principle of universalism interacted
with racism among the Templars in America. Typically, fraternal societies
refused to have anything to do with blacks. But the Templars, in
contrast, attempted to create separate lodges for black members. These
lodges, however, were not especially successful. Eventually, Malin's
supporters formed a separate organization abiding by the principle of
universalism, but it had little success in the United States in general,
and in recruiting black members in particular.
Eventually the schism ended, in effect, with the Hickman view prevailing.
The effort to develop a rival Good Templar organization true to the
principle of universalism had succeeded in Britain, but the original group
remained largest on a worldwide basis. Malin's supporters had attempted
to organize integrated lodges in the south, to no avail. The two groups
reunited in 1887, and Malin remained an important figure in British life
until his death in 1926.
Fahey's book is well crafted and clearly written. The details of the
story can, however, be taxing to the reader. In his principal objective,
to make the Good Templars visible, the author has succeeded well. He
recognizes the limitations that his focus on Britain and the United States
place on the history of an organization that was so widespread around the
world. We learn from him that southern white racism was not always
simple. Racist southern Templar leaders were often willing to accept the
reality of black members elsewhere, and willing to attend national and
international meetings in which black delegates participated. Those same
racist leaders tried to help blacks form segregated local lodges in the
south. In the end, racism prevailed, but it was tempered somewhat by the
idea of universalism.
Finally, Fahey's findings may change somewhat prevailing views about the
nineteenth-century American temperance movement. Although previously
ignored in favor of attention to other groups, especially the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union, the Templar lodges were, collectively, the
largest organization of voters committed to prohibition laws, and the
lodges thus merit attention. They also merit attention because they were
working-class organizations. Moreover, although specialists in the
history of temperance and prohibition have generally found that the appeal
of the reform cut across lines of social class, sometimes this finding is
not accepted. Fahey's work should remind us all of the importance of
temperance and prohibition measures in the thoughts and actions of
sizeable numbers of working class Americans, who also had fraternal links
to counterparts abroad.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [log in to unmask]
Philip VanderMeer
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe AZ 85287
[log in to unmask]
|
