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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Singing Sisters

Dr. Lewis—Visitation bands—WCTU—Lucy Hayes

The female sex is not easily kept out of anything it wants to get involved in, as was proved when the “women’s crusade” shook the country in the last half of the nineteenth century.

It all started, as so many such things do, with a man, in this case a large, booming, white-whiskered physician named Dio-clesian Lewis. Dio, as his friends called him, was a versatile performer, at once a Harvard graduate, homeopath, writer, editor, physical culture enthusiast, and worker for the temperance cause. He is credited with the invention of the beanbag. He assisted in the development of the common dumbbell. He is supposed to have coined that slogan with the false but heartening message, “A clean tooth never decays.” He recommended that women wear one short skirt instead of the three, four, or five long ones that were the fashion. If the skirt was heavy, it could be held up by braces over the shoulders, and that would take the strain off the waist. Dio’s design did not catch on, perhaps because the public had already spent its spleen on the bloomer dress, after which anything else would have appeared anticlimactic.

A strikingly handsome man with a classical profile, Dio was much in demand as a temperance lecturer. It was during a lecture in Hillsboro, Ohio, in the early 1870’s that he broached the idea of a “women’s crusade,” a descent upon the local liquor spots to annoy them until the owners consented to close down. He proposed that the groups be called “visitation bands.”

The ladies of Hillsboro liked the idea, and they appealed to Mrs. Eliza J. Thompson, daughter of a former governor and herself a vigorous grandmother, to lead them. Some sixty women sallied forth to visit the town’s saloons, while their husbands and other men waited for them in a church and prayed for their safety. It was the middle of winter, but this did not faze the ladies. The first saloon held out for only a few hours, after which the proprietor, perhaps driven half mad by the way the women wailed, promised that he would close up, and did. The women went to the next place, and the next.

They sang “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” Sometimes they knelt in prayer and sometimes they sat in the snow, but all the while they sang.

They did not interfere with anybody who entered or left the saloon, and they did not set foot in that unhallowed place, God forbid. They simply sang. They sang “Ring the Bells of Heaven,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “I’ll Walk with the King, Hallelujah,” “Thrown Out the Lifeline.”

Soon they had every saloon in town closed, after which it can be assumed that each of them went home to a hot bath.

Women from the rest of the state and parts of Illinois and Indiana took up the idea. The Singing Sisters—as the public semiaffectionately called them—devised a pledge for saloonkeepers to sign:

Knowing, as you do, the fearful effects of intoxicating drinks, we, the women of _________, after earnest prayer and deliberation, have decided to appeal to you to desist from this ruinous traffic that our husbands and brothers, and especially our sons, be no longer exposed to this terrible temptation, and that we may no longer see them led into those paths which go down to sin and bring both soul and body to destruction. We appeal to the better instincts of your heart, in the name of desolate homes, blasted hopes, ruined lives, widowed hearts, for the honor of our community, for our happiness, for the good name of God who will judge you and us, for the sake of your own soul, which is to be saved or lost. We beg, we implore you to cleanse yourself from this heinous sin, and place yourself in the ranks of those who are striving to elevate and ennoble themselves and their fellow men. And to this we ask you to pledge yourself.

The saloonkeeper probably never got to the end of this tirade. He would throw up his hands in despair and sign, though he no doubt broke his word later.

The “women’s crusade” that Dr. Lewis began never moved east or south. It died almost as abruptly as it had appeared, and bar after bar opened again. All the same, the Singing Sisters had struck a mighty blow in the cause of temperance. It had been rather silly, but still a man could not help but admire those ladies with their poke bonnets, their bustles, their determination. The nation laughed but was impressed. Furthermore, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was organized only a short while later, also in Ohio, as what Frances Willard called a “sober second thought” of the “women’s crusade,” and nobody laughed at it.

The WCTU, as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union has always been called, was and is a formidable institution. It began as a series of conferences at Lake Chautauqua, New York, in 1874, though its formal birth was in November of that year at the Second Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Mrs. Annie Wittenmyer of Philadelphia, a Methodist, was elected president, and vice-presidents were chosen from each of the seventeen states represented.

There was no mealymouthed reference to “gradualism” in the stand taken by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. These women agreed with the Prohibition party that “traffic in intoxicating beverages is a dishonor to Christian civilization,” and they proposed to erase it, not merely to limit and control it. “We hold prohibition to be essential to the full triumph of this reform,” they said flatly.

Women had one more triumph in the 1870’s—the election of 1876, when Rutherford Birchard Hayes became president by exactly one electoral vote. The drys, especially the women, were delighted, for not only was Hayes an abstainer, but his wife Lucy was emphatically a prohibitionist.

“Lemonade Lucy” lived up to her nickname. The first thing she did when the Hayeses moved into the White House was to order the sideboard taken down to the cellar. The famous mansion, for the first time in its existence, was drinkless. It was a bit hard on members of the State Department, not to mention foreign ambassadors, who from time to time had to dine there. “Oh, it was very gay,” one of them reported after a state meal. “The water flowed like champagne.” Lucy paid no attention to such remarks. She was also the first First Lady who happened to be college-educated.