The temperance movement and Dayton's 'whiskey candidate'

An 1878 Puck cartoon pokes fun at prohibition politics in Ohio. Source: Library of Congress

© Copyright 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney

Annie Wittenmeyer had high hopes for Dayton in the first week of April, 1874. After a month of activism, temperance crusaders here had a chance of seeing a pro-temperance candidate become the Gem City’s next mayor.

What she didn't want to see was the ascent of a type of person she loathed—a former beer brewer and a saloonist—and one of German heritage, no less. The “whiskey candidate,” she called him.

I touch on Dayton's mayoral election of 1874 in my upcoming book Dayton Beer. But here are a few details and graphics I just couldn't squeeze into my history of brewing in the Miami Valley.

Annie Wittenmeyer. Source: History of the Woman’s Temperance Crusade.

Wittenmeyer was a native Ohioan who became a national leader of the temperance movement. Born Sarah Ann (“Annie”) Turner (1827-1900) on the Ohio River in Sandy Springs, Adams County, Wittenmeyer lived most of her life in Iowa and died in Pennsylvania. But it was back in Ohio that organizers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Cleveland made her its first president in November 1874. (The WCTU still exists, by the way, in Evanston, IL.)

Wittenmeyer was a bright, educated woman who had seen and done a lot. She had opened Iowa’s first tuition-free school. During the Civil War she had visited troop encampments, organized aid programs and advocated for better treatment of wounded and sick soldiers, even overseeing all hospital kitchens for the Union army. Her organizing efforts continued after the war and eventually led her to the cause of temperance.

The WCTU grew out of the Woman’s Crusade that erupted in Ohio in the winter of 1873-74 and spread across the country. Wittenmeyer chronicled it—from her own point of view—in her 1878 book History of the Woman’s Temperance Crusade. The temperance movement was on the rise.

“Bar of Destruction,” a Thomas Nast cartoon in the March 21, 1874 Harper’s Weekly. Source: Library of Congress.

Dayton’s was one of several local crusades she described in vivid, even lurid detail. Then a city of about 40,000, Dayton “is a beautiful, well-built town,” she wrote, with “handsome residences, fine churches” and “substantial public buildings.” But, she went on, “many of its palaces are red with the blood of murdered innocence, and many of its massive edifices have been built with the price of souls.”

What ignited Wittenmeyer’s rhetoric was “not only the usual array of saloons, and gambling-dens, and brothels, where liquors were sold and drank but there were massive breweries, and great wholesale houses… and the business was largely in the hands of a rough class of foreigners, mainly Germans.”

Beer brewing was one of Dayton's earliest industries. Pioneer George Newcom, an Irish immigrant, added a brewery to his famed Newcom’s Tavern in 1809 or 1810. True, by Wittenmeyer’s time nearly all of Dayton’s brewers were owned by German immigrants or their first-generation descendants. The Miami Valley was a land of immigrants who had displaced its native people less than a century earlier. Beginning in the 1830s, an increasing percentage of new arrivals were German.

While allowing that “some of the best people in our land are foreigners,” Wittenmeyer, who noted her own blood line went back to the Revolutionary War, blamed immigrants—German and Irish in particular—for the drunkenness, lawlessness and poverty she saw afflicting America. “We are slowly learning the fact that we are building jails and almshouses that ought to have been built in Germany and Ireland, and that America is rapidly becoming a sewer for the moral filth of Europe,” she wrote.

So it shouldn't surprise you that she had nothing nice to say about Lawrence Butz Jr. (1839-1913,) a Dayton grocer who was seeking the mayor’s seat this week in 1874. While Butz was a native Ohioan, his father had come from Baden-Württemberg. Also, in the 1860s Lawrence Jr. had been a partner with another German immigrant, Henry Ferneding, in the City Brewery then at Warren and Brown streets.

City directories and census records show Butz later joined his father’s grocery business at 260 Warren. How much it involved sales of beer or liquor isn’t clear, but some city directories in those years also listed it under saloons.

Wittenmeyer labeled Butz “the whiskey candidate.”

"Woman’s holy war,” Currier & Ives lithograph, c1874. Source: Library of Congress. 

The temperance women formed a Dayton organization in February, and on March 6 some 200 crusaders marched through rain to the saloons, which simply turned them away, according to Wittenmeyer's account. As the weather improved, more crusaders gathered in front of saloons to pray and sing.

The saloons responded. “It soon came to be known that the visit of the ladies to a saloon meant free beer and whiskey at that place, and there ‘the boys’ rallied in force like vultures over a dead carcass. The result was, more drunken men on the streets than had been since since the 4th of July,” Wittenmeyer wrote. Jeering mobs taunted them and threw “bits of bologna and crackers” at women kneeling in prayer.

No doubt the crusaders hoped a pro-temperance mayor would put an end to this sorry business. The election came Saturday, April 6—and Butz won. “This was taken by the saloon-keepers as a verdict for free whiskey,” Wittenmeyer lamented. 

The police department issued a proclamation vowing to charge saloonists who permitted unruliness during temperance vigils, but the crusaders gave up the mass approach, instead visiting saloons in small groups and attempting to talk to the proprietors. 

“The saloon-keepers were generally averse to these visits, and insisted that the election had settled the question,” she wrote.

Butz was mayor through 1875 and won a second term in 1878.

Wittenmeyer died in 1900 without seeing her wish fulfilled. Had it happened, Dayton today might be without its breweries and bars. And, perhaps, without many here now who are descendants of those who were immigrants in her time.