Anna Adams Gordon

• Anna Gordon
• Born: July 21, 1853
• Died: June 15, 1931

Temperance leader, was born in Boston, the fourth daughter of Mary Elizabeth (Clarkson) Gordon and James Monroe Gordon, a bank cashier and treasurer of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In all, the family had seven children. Of the daughters, two others also became well known in reform movements: Elizabeth Gordon was active in temperance work and Alice Gordon Gulick founded a college for women in San Sebastián, Spain.

Although a Congregationalist by birth, Anna Gordon became a Methodist in later life. She was educated in Newton (Massachusetts) public schools and then Mount Holyoke Seminary (1871-72) and Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, Massachusetts. In 1875 she spent a year abroad, preparing for a musical career.

She continued her musical studies upon her return to the United States, until 1877, when she met Frances E. Willard, then corresponding secretary of the recently founded national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The two became close friends, and Gordon was drawn into the world of reform. She moved to Evanston, Illinois, where she lived with Willard in the Rest Cottage (now a WCTU shrine). On their frequent tours of the nation, organizing and encouraging temperance work for the WCTU, the women complemented each other’s abilities: Gordon at the organ and Willard on the podium. Although Gordon was a competent speaker and organizer herself, she worked most effectively as a second in command. She was also extremely successful with children, and composed “Children’s Marching Songs,” the first series of which sold 300,000 copies.

When Willard was elected president of the national WCTU in 1879, Anna Gordon became prominent in the affairs of the organization. She was Willard’s indispensable assistant, writing letters, organizing tours, managing personnel, overseeing finances, and proffering important and heeded advice. One historian of the temperance movement, Ruth Bordin, has concluded that she was able to “exercise more control over the Union’s destinies than anyone except Willard herself.”

When Willard died in 1898, Gordon began to shape an idealized memory of her illustrious friend. She was determined that the world would see Willard as she did—a saint—and to a remarkable degree she succeeded. She persuaded state and local temperance unions to use their influence to have new public works and buildings named after Willard. She also induced the “powers that be” to erect a representation of Willard in the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol (1905). She wrote the first full-length biography about Willard, The Beautiful Life of Francis E. Willard (1898), and she carefully destroyed any Willard correspondence in her possession that did not contribute to the idealization.

Ironically all this activity only diminished Willard’s stature in the long run, because it tried to reduce a complicated and controversial public figure to a graven image of straitlaced reform. Gordon passed lightly over Willard’s passionate interests in women’s rights and social justice, to concentrate almost solely on the battle against alcohol. This image of Willard as a prim, teetotaling guardian against the immoralities of strong drink came to predominate not only in the WCTU but in the public (and even scholarly) mind as well.

The image was much more attuned to the direction that the WCTU began to take shortly after Willard’s death. The next president, Lillian M. N. Stevens, made the union much more strictly a prohibitionist organization. The prohibition theme became even stronger when Anna Gordon, a vice president of the union since 1898, became president in 1914. Indeed she brought the union into close cooperation with the prohibitionist organization par excellence, the Anti-Saloon League, in the successful battle for the Eighteenth Amendment and its enabling Volstead Act (1919).

With the achievement of prohibition, at least on paper, Gordon turned to the question of enforcement and to spreading prohibition around the world. In addition to many speaking trips to England, she toured South America and Mexico as president of the world’s WCTU. In 1925 she resigned as head of the national WCTU to devote full attention to the world crusade.

Gordon died at age seventy-seven of myocarditis, in a sanatorium at Castle, New York. Her ashes were buried in the family plot in Mount Hope Cemetery, Mattapan, Massachusetts.

An account of her earlier career and a partial bibliography of her temperance writings appears in F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds.,. A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967). Other sources include J. F. Deane, Anna Adams Gordon: A Story of Her Life (n.d.); an unsigned article in the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, vol. 3 (1936); M. Earhart, Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (1944); and H. E. Tyler, Where Prayer and Purpose Meet: The WCTU Story (1949). See also Notable American Women (1971). A good analysis of Gordon’s role in the WCTU is provided by Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance (1981). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and the Evanston (Illinois) News-Index, June 16, 1931.