Social movements and the symbolism of public demonstrations: the 1874 Women's Crusade and German resistance in Richmond, Indiana

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1999 by James Clyde Sellman

In Richmond, Indiana, on February 18, 1874, Quaker temperance activist Martha Valentine led a small group of women to "La Belle," a saloon owned by German immigrant Chris Schultz. Chastising Schultz for the damage that he was causing to his customers as well as to their helpless wives and children, the women implored him to close his business.(1) When he refused the protesters soon left, but they promised that they would return. Thus began the Women's Crusade in this small city located near the Ohio border. Events in Richmond were part of a massive temperance revival that swept the nation in 1874.(2) The Richmond Crusaders, predominantly Quakers and Methodists, acted out of a deep evangelical Christian faith. But the women's fervent piety could have unsettling effects on others.(3) When a visiting reporter from the Chicago Times asked Rachel Mendenhall, a Methodist Crusade leader, about the Crusaders' plans and goals, she replied that the movement was "' ... wholly in the hands of the Lord and under His direction. He is leading us'."(4) The reporter's follow-up questions got him nowhere. Then, suddenly, the hunter became the hunted. "'Do you', said the lady with a saint-like smile, 'live very NEAR the Lord?'" No - the newsman conceded - he came from Chicago.(5)

These two incidents reveal much about the Women's Crusade, suggesting its complex intertwining of gender, ethnicity, piety, and deflating humor. Almost daily for eleven weeks the city's mostly German saloonkeepers found themselves under siege. At first, the women met with astonishing success, virtually shutting down the city's liquor traffic. Ultimately, however, local opinion turned against them, and the Crusaders were repudiated at the polls in Richmond's spring municipal election. The best account of this extended social drama is found in Fred Maag and D. E. Caldwell's Daily Independent, the city's first successful daily newspaper.(6) The Daily Independent's extensive coverage was the work of local editor Calvin R. Johnson, later recognized as the city's first true reporter.(7) Rather than sitting behind his desk and waxing eloquent or vituperative, as did most nineteenth-century editors, Johnson went into the streets to look for stories. He reported local events with remarkable care and compiled a record of the movement that is vivid and surprisingly even-handed.

During the 1980s, historians rediscovered the nearly forgotten Women's Crusade, interpreting it as a struggle over gender boundaries no less than over the consumption of alcoholic beverages. But these efforts have tended to miss an equally significant aspect of the Crusade - its significance as a conflict over the nature of community life. In Richmond, evangelical women ultimately lost a complex struggle over the symbolic language of their protest and its meaning for the larger community. In stressing its symbolic nature, I do not mean to suggest that the Crusade was either epiphenomenal or somehow less than real: insofar as they challenge regnant values and understandings, all social movements partake of this symbolic quality. Nor do I intend, in using the language of symbolism, to invoke Joseph Gusfield's notion of temperance as a symbolic crusade."(8)

Although in part the Richmond Crusade represented a middle-class effort at social control, it was much more than that. The Crusade was a struggle over political and cultural meaning that took place at the very center of community life. Crusaders and their opponents confronted one another in protests rich in symbolism and intended for a wider community audience. In Richmond, all parties to this movement - Crusaders, their predominantly German opponents, and the community at large - knew that the stakes were high indeed. To the people of Richmond, these events were neither an intellectual game nor some hermeneutic exercise; it seems only reasonable to take their actions seriously.(9)

I do not mean to suggest that past scholarship has altogether ignored the Crusade's symbolic aspects. In Drink and Disorder, a study of temperance in nineteenth-century Cincinnati, Jed Dannenbaum characterized the Crusade as "a public theater of propaganda."(10) In Woman and Temperance, Ruth Bordin noted that women's temperance activism "can be explained in terms of symbolism."(11) By and large, however, this scholarship reflects less a concern with nuanced symbolic communication than with the platting of social boundaries. Over the past generation, a vast amount of scholarship has applied the concept of social boundaries, generally drawing - whether implicitly or explicitly - on Fredrik Barth's influential discussion in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.(12) Scholars following Barth's conceptual approach generally understand social boundaries as loci of inter-group conflict, revealing and defining an "us" and "them." Those who studied immigrant and working-class communities - often the targets of temperance reformers - portrayed temperance activists as invasive and repressive, guilty of violating ethnic or class boundaries.(13) For example, Roy Rosenzweig likened the late nineteenth-century temperance campaigns to "a 'class war' over the recreational world of the industrial working class."(14)