Howard Hyde Russell

• Howard Hyde Russell
• Born: October 21, 1855
• Died: June 30, 1946

Founder of the Anti-Saloon League, which led the fight for a prohibition amendment to the Constitution, was born in Stillwater, Minnesota, the son of Joseph A. Russell, an Episcopal clergyman of English descent, and Sarah Emogene (Parker) Russell.

Educated by his father at the Glens Falls (New York) Academy, and in the public schools of Galva, Illinois, he finished his preparatory work at Griswold College in Davenport, Iowa, in 1872. For the next few years he held a succession of brief jobs. In 1875 he became manager of The Adams County Gazette, in Corning, Iowa, where his parents had settled. He studied law at home and then at Indianola (Iowa) College. After receiving his LL.B. in 1878, he became a partner of Francis Marion Davis, one of the ablest lawyers in the state. In 1880 he married Lillian Davis, daughter of his partner; they had two children, Julia and Ernest Clement. His wife died in 1939.

Russell seemed destined for a law career when, in 1883, he suddenly decided to enter the ministry. His decision was the result of a conversion that he underwent at a revival, along with the quiet influence of his pious wife. Leaving his law office, he studied for five years at Oberlin (Ohio) Theological Seminary (1883-88). While a student, in 1885, he was ordained in the Congregational ministry at Amherst, Ohio, where he was pastor. Later he served at Berea, Ohio.

When he received his B.D. degree in 1888, Russell accepted an offer from the Congregational City Missionary Society to plant a new church in Kansas City, Missouri. In only two years he erected a church building and made the congregation self-supporting. In 1891 he was put in charge of the Armour Mission, in Chicago, a large enterprise serving 20,000 people.

It was in Chicago that Russell decided to devote his life to the cause of prohibition. Earlier, as a pastor in Amherst, he had conducted successful temperance meetings; and at Berea he had helped obtain passage of a village ordinance closing all saloons. A teetotaler, he had taken the pledge of abstinence and had urged it on his congregations. Nevertheless, he saw the great limitations of the antialcohol groups then in existence, which relied largely on moral suasion.

During his student years at Oberlin, Russell had discussed with his colleagues and teachers the possibility of creating a more politically active prohibition movement. His first chance had come in 1888, when he was elected to direct the work of the Oberlin Temperance Alliance, which campaigned successfully for the Beatty Township Local-Option Law. This law sought to improve enforcement of the state’s prohibition legislation by giving local communities the authority to close saloons. Russell organized the Local-Option League and, as Norman H. Clark notes, “began to show his followers that well-disciplined waves of petitions, letters, and telegrams could have a profound impact on legislation.”

For the next five years the prohibition movement in Ohio languished, while Russell was serving his congregations in Kansas City and Chicago. But in 1893 he returned to Oberlin, invited by antiliquor workers to work full-time in the creation of an effective prohibition organization. On May 24, 1893, Russell inaugurated the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, whose goal was to destroy the liquor traffic by obtaining local-option prohibition in all the counties of Ohio.

In his work with the Anti-Saloon League, Russell demonstrated a keen grasp of organization and an unerring sense of how to use the churches as building blocks of people and money. Within a few years most of the Protestant churches in the state had been enrolled in the effort, with each congregation, led by its pastor, aligned to the official policy as promulgated at the headquarters in Oberlin (later in Westerville, Ohio). Whenever a bill that touched on liquor was discussed, locally or in the state legislature, the Anti-Saloon League mobilized its forces to obtain the most favorable outcome. Gradually, the League became what has commonly been regarded as the first American pressure group. Russell had succeeded in making the moral issue of liquor into a political one and thus paved the way for the eventual political decision of national prohibition. (Attacks on the saloon, characteristic also of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, have come under some recent criticism by historians on the ground that the saloon was often the nineteenth-century workingman’s social club, post office, and center for relaxation—a form of protest against the hardships of industrial capitalism. Foes of the saloon, in this view, are looked upon as middle-class elitists.)

Success in Ohio bred imitation elsewhere and led to the formation of antisaloon leagues in most other states. In 1895 the Washington (D.C.) Anti-Saloon League called a convention, at which the National Anti-Saloon League was formed. Russell was elected superintendent and Hiram Price of the Washington league became president. The national headquarters was established in Westerville.

Between 1895 and 1903 Russell helped organize leagues in thirty-six states, including one in New York (1899), of which he became head in 1901. In 1909 he became associate superintendent of the national league and moved his home to Westerville, where he helped establish the league’s publishing house. He also resumed work with the Lincoln-Lee Legion, a pledge-signing organization devoted to spreading the ideal of total abstinence, which he had founded at Oberlin in 1903.

From 1909 to 1919, Russell and the Anti-Saloon League concentrated their efforts on the drive to pass a national prohibition amendment. A tireless campaigner, Russell traveled more than 50,000 miles a year, mostly by train, on speaking tours. He also helped organize and then lead the American chapter of the World League Against Alcoholism (1919).

With the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and its enabling Volstead Law (1919), Russell slowed the pace of his work. In the next ten years he averaged only 35,000 miles annually, including two trips to Europe, in 1921, to assist prohibition organizations there; a trip to Lausanne, Switzerland, as American delegate to a conference against alcoholism; and trips around the United States as a speaker on alcoholism.

The greatest achievement of Russell’s life was surely the passage of the prohibition amendment although he was almost equally pleased by a 1925 declaration of the Anti-Saloon League that named him “Founder of the Anti-Saloon League.” His national eminence began to decline, however, during the late 1920s and the 1930s, when dissatisfaction with prohibition led to the campaign for repeal. By then, Russell was old and unable to kindle any enthusiasm for another great campaign. He died, at ninety, in relative obscurity in Westerville, where he was buried.

Not an original thinker or writer, Russell was above all a gifted organizer whose great contribution was his ability to systematize reform activity and make it politically potent.

Russell wrote numerous pamphlets and magazine articles promoting abstinence and prohibition. During the summer of 1889 he preached a series of sermons directed to lawyers and published as A Lawyer’s Examination of the Bible (1893) that went through seven editions. Surprisingly little has been written about Russell the man, apart from his work with the Anti-Saloon League. The best sketch is in the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, vol. 5 (1929), which should be supplemented with the short entry in Who Was Who in America, vol. 2 (1950). The standard work on the Anti-Saloon League is P. H. Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (1928). The league’s place in the prohibition movement is described in N. H. Clark, Deliver Vs From Evil (1976). Russell’s application of business principles to the organization of the league is discussed in K. A. Kerr, “Organizing for Reform: The Anti-Saloon League and Innovation in Politics,” American Quarterly, Spring 1980.