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

Protests of Formality and Restraint

In the early weeks of the Crusade, until sometime in mid-to-late March, the women enjoyed widespread public support and gained major victories. Their success stemmed from the effective symbolism of their public protests. At the most basic level, such public demonstrations can serve two purposes. On one hand, they may work to unite a group and reaffirm its values. Thus Durkheim observed that all societies periodically reaffirm their "collective sentiments and ideas" by means of "reunions, assemblies, and meetings" in which individuals join in celebrating shared values.(47) Likewise Victor Turner noted that the festivities surrounding a Brazilian soccer match produced % transcendence of mundane reality and a sense of civic and national history made present."(48) A second large class of rituals enact directly oppositional meanings and pose a symbolic protest or rebellion against the status quo - as in Denise Lawrence's depiction of Pasadena's Doo Dah Parade or Jack Kugelmass's account of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, events that challenge dominant social or sexual mores.(49)

Such rituals of protest serve to unite and strengthen the participants, as was clearly true of the Freedom Songs sung by early Civil Rights demonstrators. Yet they also pose the risk of alienating outsiders, as seen, for example, in the hostile white response to the image of two black American athletes, Tommle Smith and John Carlos, giving clenched-fist salutes at the 1968 Olympics. To some extent, the Crusaders' ritualized protests reveal the working of all these elements. Crusade demonstrations posed a critique of local life and clearly voiced the women's sense of a pervasive community crisis. Their protest also served to empower the Crusaders themselves. Although the Crusaders would eventually alienate many of their fellow citizens, at the outset they achieved considerable success in their effort to draw the community together through evangelical conversion and strict temperance, thus appearing to revitalize Richmond's fundamental Christian faith. To this extent, the Women's Crusade also reflects what Anthony E C. Wallace termed a "revitalization movement."(50)

This temperance movement was deeply grounded in women's customary role at the moral center of family life, but the Crusaders' activities greatly enlarged women's realm of action. The women - taking an unaccustomed, even unprecedented, public role - portrayed their actions as a legitimate extension of their accepted moral and religious duties. As Jack Kugelmass noted, ritualized public activities give "collective expression to the physical spaces they occupy."(51) In Richmond, the Crusaders were clearly engaged in such an effort to redefine and reshape public space. Crusade activities were highly structured and sought to maximize the women's moral and religious authority. Crusade activists presented themselves in massed and orderly processions. Their initial strategy was to gather in morning and afternoon at one of the evangelical churches, often Fifth Street Friends Meeting, for Bible reading, prayer, and singing.(52) Volunteers then filed out, two abreast, in a silent procession to a particular liquor dealer; the other women remained behind to pray for the marchers. "No conversation is indulged in," an observer noted of these processions, "and hardly a smile is perceptible, save when meeting a familiar friend."(53)