10A | THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020 | COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL
Offbeat Oregon: With a friend like A.C. Edmunds, early suffragists didn’t need enemies (Part 2)
By Finn J.D. John
for The Sentinel
A.C.
Edmunds’ ex-
perience
in
Portland before the Civil
War had been so short, and
by his personal standards
so uneventful, that the turf
there was for all practical
purposes unburned.
Considering what had
happened to every other
organization he’d worked
for, that was to prove a great
misfortune for his fellow
travelers in Stumptown.
Edmunds was the “own-
goal” champion of Oregon
history; in California and
Oregon he had already de-
livered serious setbacks to
at least two Universalist
Church groups for which
he had worked, through his
uncanny ability to alienate
the public, and had come
very close to ruining things
for a third.
He’d also launched half a
dozen publishing ventures,
all of which started out
strong but fizzled when im-
portant backers withdrew
their support. He was, es-
sentially, the worst kind of
political activist: Absolute-
ly convinced of the righ-
teousness of his cause, and
intransigently opposed on
moral grounds to any com-
promise whatsoever with
the “forces of evil” that op-
posed it.
He was a compulsive ac-
tivist looking for a cause.
And when he arrived, late
in 1873, his timing could
not have been better. The
city was alive with the fer-
vent spirit of reform — just
the sort of environment
in which Edmunds most
thrived. Plus, the topic of
reform was one of his reg-
ular hobby-horses: Temper-
ance.
T
he society ladies of
Portland, inspired by
reports of the great temper-
ance movements back east,
had organized themselves
through the main down-
town Protestant churches
into the Women’s Temper-
ance Prayer League.
The plan: Members of the
League would fare forth into
the city each day and visit a
saloon. There, they would
hold a prayer service, plead
the cause of temperance to
its owner and patrons, cir-
culate a pledge to abstain
from alcohol consumption
in future, and move on.
It took a little while for
the ladies to get their pro-
gram dialed in just right,
but by the spring of 1874
it was hitting nicely on all
twelve cylinders and send-
ing ripples of fear through
Portland saloon owners.
Their intervention led at
least two saloon owners to
quit the business. But, more
importantly, it enraged one
particular saloon owner —
Walter Moffett, owner of
the Webfoot Saloon. Mof-
fett’s scandalously ungen-
tlemanly behavior on the
frequent occasions when
the ladies came to see him
not only inspired the ladies’
determination to wear him
down, but also galvanized
public opinion in Portland
against the saloons, and in
favor of the ladies — and
temperance.
The ladies were still rid-
ing that wave of popular
support and esteem as the
election day for Portland
City Council positions drew
near.
There were at least two
slates of candidates for the
Council seats: a reform-ori-
ented Republican one, and
a “People’s Ticket” that was
generally stocked with li-
quor-business-friendly can-
didates. (The Democratic
party did not put forth a
ticket.)
Several sources also claim
there was a Temperance
ticket as well. That’s proba-
bly not correct; the temper-
Come experience our new laser
had done it deliberately to
punish his allies for having
been willing to work with
the ideologically impure
Republican reformers.
So, back on the lecture
circuit he went; by this time,
he had turned against reli-
gion, and now he brought
the same savagery and
self-righteous fury to the
cause of atheism that he had
once rallied to the standard
of “Black Republicanism”
and Universalism.
In 1877 he took up the
cause of trade-unionism, as-
sumed the pen-name “Port-
land Mechanic,” and set
about leading the founda-
tion of what would become
The Workingmen’s Club of
Portland. The organization,
though, once formed, eject-
ed him from membership
within six months.
Finally, in 1879, during
a lecture tour in California
where he was speaking on
labor issues, A.C. Edmunds
suffered a paralytic stroke
and died. He was just 51
years old.
He left behind a re-
markable record of nega-
tive achievement. Like the
Stormy Petrel of marine
mythology, he brought
trouble with him every-
where he went, and his re-
cord of own-goals has yet to
be topped.
His heart may have been
in the right place, but plen-
ty of his fellow activists and
co-religionists in Oregon,
California, and back East
must have wondered, “With
friends like him, who needs
dmunds was, of course, enemies?”
persona non grata in
temperance and suffragist
(Sources: “He Was a Start-
circles after this. Not only
had his tactic backfired, but er but Got No Further: Ca-
some fairly credible rumors reers of A.C. Edmunds,” an
started to circulate that he article published in the June
1983 issue of Oregon Histor-
ical Quarterly; The Women’s
War with Whiskey; or, Cru-
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ance crusaders, according to
historian Belknap, made the
practical decision to work
with the reform-minded
Republicans rather than
trying to field their own
slate of vote-splitting Tem-
perance candidates.
None of them were happy
with this decision, of course;
they would much rather
have a slate of pure-hearted
teetotalers to vote for; but
they knew if they found and
put one forward, the liquor
ticket would ride to easy
victory over a divided op-
position.
But this was exactly the
sort of practical compro-
mise that always seemed to
bring out the worst in A.C.
Edmunds. And it seems to
have, in this situation, done
just that.
Shortly before the elec-
tion, Edmunds stepped for-
ward with a small essay that
he proposed to have printed
and circulated on Election
Day, which he assured the
ladies would tip the balance
and assure them the win.
The circular was titled
“The Voter’s Book of Re-
memberance.”
“Voters of Portland, the
Book of Remembrance is
this day opened, and you
are called upon to choose
‘whom ye will serve,’” it
starts out. “On one hand are
found prostitutes, gamblers,
rumsellers, whiskey topers,
beer guzzlers, wine bibbers,
rum suckers, hoodlums,
loafers and ungodly men.
On the other hand are
found Christian wives,
mothers, sisters and daugh-
ters of the good people of
Portland. You cannot serve
two masters. You must be
numbered with one or the
other.
Whom will ye choose?”
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It actually gets worse as it
goes on, blatantly accusing
Portland’s police of being
“devoted to the protection
of prostitution, drunken-
ness and debauchery, and
the persecution and pun-
ishment of virtue” and
claiming that “whiskey ad-
vocates employ prostitutes
to insult Christian women
while praying and reading
the Holy Bible.”
By modern standards
of campaign polemics, it’s
not that far out of line. But
when it was released, it put
the entire city — the male
half, at least, the half that
was legally allowed to vote
— into a cold fury.
The result was an elec-
toral pounding for the
ages. The least temper-
ance-friendly slate of can-
didates was swept into of-
fice by a landslide. And the
hostility was so bad that
the Women’s Temperance
Prayer League dissolved.
Unfortunately,
while
it had existed, the Prayer
League had done a yeoman’s
job of hitching its wagon to
the women’s-suffrage star.
The events of 1874 left
most male voters with the
clear belief that if women
ever did get the right to vote,
they’d use it to cram Pro-
hibition down everyone’s
throats. That’s why several
historians, including Belk-
nap, have suggested that the
“Temperance Riots” set the
cause of women’s suffrage
back a whole generation, or
maybe even two.
E
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