For the controversy about African American membership in the Sons of Temperance and Good Templar fraternal temperance societies, one can find details in my book Temperance & Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and the Good Templars (University Press of Kentucky, 1996).  The black writer William Wells  Brown figured in both the Sons of Temperance and the Good Templar fights.  For another sad chapter in the larger story, one can look at my Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Catherine Impey, a Quaker who fought drink and racism and published the little sheet, Anti-Caste.  White reformers denounced her when she made the mistake of falling in love with a man of color.

David Fahey

On Jun 15, 2006, at 5:07 PM, Crowley, John wrote:

Colleagues,

When I jumped into the discussion yesterday, I did not have in hand THE SERPENT IN THE CUP, co-edited by David Reynolds; and so I misquoted the title as well as the title of my own piece!, which is "Slaves to the Bottle: Gough's AUTOBIOGRAPHY and Douglass's NARRATIVE."  Also I referred to Mr. Freeland as Mr. Freeman, etc.  Forgive the rusting of a formerly steel-trap memory.  My point today is that I have now reread the essay after ten years, and I see that it has even more to say than I remembered about the confluence of the genre of the slave narrative with that of the "temperance narrative," as I called it in my edition of Washingtonian books, DRUNKARD'S PROGRESS (Johns Hopkins UP).  It is certain that Douglass was aware of Gough, for instance, and I believe that the narrative features of both genres are very similar and probably influenced each other in the 1840s.

I also went into greater detail than I remembered about Gough's rare references to race and about Douglass's frustration over the racism of the temperance movement, in particular the mob action by Irish immigrants against an Negro temperance march in Philadelphia, which Douglass denounced to the world in London during 1846.

The speech cited by Dave Trippel is the "smoking gun" in my argument.

That Genvieve McBride has already worked the territory I thought vacant repairs my ignorance and gives me work to do.  I don't doubt that others too have begun to work this very promising territory.  Just in regard to Douglass, for instance, it is clear that his fervent support of temperance gradually waned as he encountered more and more resistance to himself and to any linkage of temperance to abolition.  The subtle and not so subtle expulsion of African Americans from the temperance movement -- the Washingtonians had welcomed them with open arms -- is likely a nasty little/big story in and of itself.  It also has relevance to the delicate politics of race in Alcoholics Anonymous, the direct heir of the Washingtonian movement --a fact that Bill W. both acknowledged and tried to play down.  It is known that AA's official position on segregated AA meetings in the South was purposefully hands-off: on the grounds that race was an "outside issue."  Déjà vu all over again.