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Part One Hundred Thirty-Three: Twin Causes of Progressivism
All Created Equal:
The issue of women's suffrage had been a major issue in the United States since before the National War. While there had been few national organizations prior to the 1860s, John C. Fremont's presidency greatly boosted suffrage's prominence in the national discourse. While Fremont never made any statement of support for granting women the vote, his wife Jessie Benton Fremont was politically active during and after Fremont's presidency and advocated suffrage frequently. Jessie Fremont organized a meeting of prominent women in Washington, D.C. in 1870. In the Georgetown Conference, over two hundred women gathered to call for action on granting women the right to vote at federal and state levels. However, there was little support nearby in the Capitol for the movement at the time. Several members of Congress, mostly Democrats, made statements calling for President Fremont to keep his wife under control. President Fremont replied in support of Jessie pursuing her own independent politics, but he stopped short of giving any support to her cause. The Georgetown Conference ultimately made little headway in national women's suffrage, but its organizational efforts helped pave the way for statewide suffrage efforts.
One of the attendees of the Georgetown Conference was Frances Willard. Willard was elected president of the Women's Christian Union in 1877 following her attendance of the York Convention in 1876 and her support of the White Rose Movement[1]. She used her influence to support progressive causes such as primary education, universal suffrage, and prohibition. The Women's Christian Union became one of the primary organizations pushing the suffrage movement in its early stages. Champoeg became the first state to grant women the right to vote in 1879. Colorado and New Mexico followed in 1880 and 1882. Oregon and Kootenay had enacted women's suffrage for local elections while they were territories, and universal suffrage was enshrined in their state constitutions when they were admitted in 1891. The WCU and Willard were most influential in spreading support for universal suffrage back east. As the Women's Christian Union worked to assist immigrants upon arriving in the United States, the suffrage movement also gained support from poorer immigrant communities. With fellow WCU activist and future New England Women's Suffrage Association president Bessie Lathe Scovell[2], the WCU helped bring universal suffrage to Demoine and Marquette by the 1896 election. By 1900, Vermont, Rhode Island, Itasca, and Illinois had also adopted universal suffrage.
While women's suffrage at the state level had made significant gains in the late 19th century with the support of the White Rose Movement and the WCU, there had been little headway fro women's suffrage at a federal level. After the new century, however, that would change as the Populist and Progressive movements became entrenched in the new party system. Willard, Scovell, and others started to gain international support for the women's movement in the 1890s. After a trip to France to an international assembly of women to honor the centennial of the Convention on the Rights of Women and renew the call for women's suffrage in France, the American delegation returned with renewed vigor toward achieving the same goal in the United States. The Populist Party had included enfranchising women early in its national platform, and this continued with the Progressive Party. The Great War threatened to split the suffragist movement as pacifist activists such as Jane Addams opposed Roosevelt's overtures of support to the Alliance Carolingien. Additionally, while a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote had been introduced to Congress in 1906, the start of the Great War had sidelined the effort for the time being. As the United States entered the Great War, suffragists gained further support for the issue with speeches praising French universal suffrage while criticizing the United States for limiting the franchise similar to Great Britain. The amendment finally passed Congress in 1909, and was submitted to the states. Activists such as Addams and Scovell worked over the next year to pass the amendment in the states. The frontier states were the first to approve the amendment, and over the next three years other northern states approved the amendment. The Seventeenth Amendment was at last ratified in January of 1912 in a special session of the Missouri state legislature. President Roosevelt on his return from Vienna hailed the Seventeenth Amendment as a "significant step in American democracy", and called upon the states to have measures in place for women to vote in the 1912 elections. While the movement had ultimately succeeded, the war had created a large split in the suffrage movement. Jane Addams ran in 1912 on a National Women's Party ticket, but garnered few votes due to the lack of support from women leaders who had supported American entry in the war.
The Devil's Drink:
Along with women's suffrage, the other major progressive cause advocated by Frances Willard and the Women's Christian Union was alcohol prohibition. The origins of alcohol prohibition in the United States began in New England early in the nation's history. Neal S. Dow spearheaded the first major success for the prohibition movement in Maine, when what is now known as the Maine Liquor Law was passed in 1851. The Maine Law completely outlawed the sale of alcohol except for medicinal purposes. Within the decade, Vermont and Rhode Island had also passed similar laws[3]. After the National War, the temperance movement and prohibition expanded outside of New England.
The Women's Christian Union's support of the temperance movement was a natural synthesis of the two major demographics supporting alcohol prohibition. The first group was women. The WCU aided a perception in the late 19th century that alcohol was a moral danger to a husband's work ethic as well as the source of husbands being abusive to their spouses. This spurred a moral outcry especially among middle class women against the dangerous drink, and intertwined prohibition with advocacy for women's suffrage. It also had the effect of encouraging women to participate in politics. Aside from women, growth in evangelical Protestant organizations such as Methodists and Baptists heavily influenced the spread of prohibition around the country. Methodists, Baptists, and others saw an increase in membership during the late 19th century, mostly in rural communities. These religious groups were most popular in the rural South and preached against what they saw as a growing immorality among the urban populations, weaving in a nativist and anti-Catholic message. As Irish immigration and urbanization around cities like Cincinnati, Cairo, and Saint Louis grew, this sentiment only intensified, especially in the upper South and near West.
Outside of New England, alcohol prohibition did not gain much traction until the 1880s. The first state to join Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island in outlawing liquor was Kearney in 1882. Neighboring Calhoun followed a year later, with support from the largely Dutch Calvinist population in the state. By 1900, Champoeg, Colorado, Itasca, Arkansaw, Chickasaw, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, and New Hampshire had also outlawed the production and consumption of alcohol. Further pushes had occurred in many other Midwestern and Southern states but had been blocked by local opposition. In Missouri, Irish and German immigration and the state's growing wine industry led to the legislature rejecting a prohibition bill in 1895 and a referendum rejecting a similar proposal in 1898. Similar legislation was defeated in Kentucky and Tennessee in the first decade of the 1900s.
At the same time as prohibition was being defeated in Missouri, Frances Willard and other temperance activists were seeking to outlaw alcohol nationally. Vice President and later President William Jennings Bryan became a fervent advocate of a prohibition amendment in the constitution, and personally gave his endorsement when one was introduced in Congress in 1900. The proposed Swallow-Volstead Amendment[4] passed the House and Senate with support not only from Republicans but from the Populists and some Southern Democrats, and the amendment was sent to the states. However, with Bryan's defeat in the 1900 election, a growing urban population turning against prohibition, and trade issues arising from the Great War, the amendment languished in the states. By 1912, only sixteen states had ratified the amendment. After the end of the Great War, there was a renewed push for passage of the Swallow-Volstead Amendment but there was also renewed opposition. In particular, Cuba Senator Emilio Bacardi of the Bacardi distillery family spoke vigorously against passage of the amendment as a looming economic disaster. Emilio Bacardi became instrumental in guiding the ultimate defeat of the amendment by authoring a deadline on state ratification. Arguing that it had already been a decade since the amendment had been proposed, the Bacardi Deadline set out two more years for the amendment to be ratified before it would be dropped and have to be passed through Congress again. Wet and Dry activists fought for that time, but the Swallow-Volstead Amendment failed sufficient ratification by 1914, and was not passed. Over the following decades, several states that had enacted prohibition repealed their laws. Notably, however, Calhoun, Vermont, and Maine have retained alcohol prohibition statewide to this day. In Missouri, the Anheuser family was one of the most vocal opponents of prohibition and helped to mobilize the German immigrant community against the measures. The brewery begun by Eberhard Anheuser and the vineyards begun by his nephew Rudolf still operate as staples of Saint Louis and east Missouri culture[5].
[1] From the last women's suffrage update
here.
[2] Bessie Lathe Scovell was in OTL head of the Minnesota chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
[3] Both Maine and Vermont passed prohibition laws in the 1850s. In OTL they were repealed shortly after, but ITTL they stay.
[4] Proposed by
Pennsylvania Congressman Silas Swallow and
Demoine Senator Andrew Volstead.
[5]
Eberhard Anheuser is of course the founder of what would become Anheuser-Busch in OTL. However, his nephew Rudolf remained in Germany in OTL and started vineyards in the
Nahe wine region. In TTL, Rudolf goes with Eberhard to America, and starts vineyards in the
Missouri Rhineland, and without national prohibition, the Missouri wine industry never collapses.