Martha McClellan Brown

• Martha Brown
• Born: April 16, 1838
• Died: August 31, 1916

Temperance reformer and suffragist, one of the founders of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), was born in Baltimore, the younger daughter of David McClellan and Jane Many-penny (Haight) McClellan. Her father, a mill architect, was descended from Scottish Covenanters, her mother from English families long established in Maryland. In 1840 the family moved to Cambridge, Ohio. There both parents died when their two daughters were still young. Mattie, as she was known, and her sister were raised by a neighboring family; nothing is known of her early education.

At age twenty, Martha McClellan married a Methodist minister, William Kennedy Brown, a man who believed strongly that women should be well educated and participate fully in public life. He encouraged his wife to enter the Pittsburgh Female College when they were living in that Pennsylvania city, and she was graduated in 1862. Throughout her life he provided important advice and support, especially on matters of temperance. She, for her part, followed him loyally as he filled a succession of church posts in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Their happy marriage produced six children, born between 1863 and 1886: Orvon Graff, Westanna O’Neill, Charme, Richard McClellan, Marie, and Kleon Thaw.

Martha McClellan Brown began her public career in 1864 in Philadelphia, where she spoke in favor of continuing the Civil War, then in its third year. After the war she turned her developing oratorical gifts to the service of temperance, joining the Independent Order of Good Templars, an organization of men and women dedicated to total abstinence and state prohibition of intoxicating liquors. Founded in New York State in 1851 (the order was the first secular association to admit women as equal members), the Good Templars were entering their most rapid period of growth, and by 1869 would number almost 400,000 members.

Martha Brown quickly began to rise in Good Templar ranks. In 1867 she was elected to the executive committee of the Ohio Good Templars. She was then living in Alliance, Ohio, where her husband had held a pastorate for a year and had then purchased a local newspaper, the Alliance Monitor. She edited this paper from 1869 through 1876; she also edited the Temple Visitor, a Good Templar magazine published in Alliance. She also wrote temperance pamphlets and organized a lecture series that brought to Ohio such temperance luminaries as John Russell and Neal Dow. In 1872 she was chosen Grand Chief Templar of Ohio, a post she held for two years, and in 1874-75 she was Right Grand Vice-Templar of the international order. As a delegate to the gathering of the International Lodge in London in 1873, she lectured to large audiences in England, Ireland, and Scotland.

Her temperance work reached its greatest moment in 1874, when she helped found the WCTU. In the winter of 1873-74, Ohio was shaken by a reform upheaval, as bands of praying women began picketing illegal saloons and working for their closure. This “Women’s Crusade,” begun in Hillsboro in December 1873, spread quickly through Ohio and surrounding states. Its members were solid, educated, middle-class women who commanded the respect of their communities. By skillfully using church networks, they were able to coordinate local activities across wide areas of the state.

Martha Brown played an important role in the Ohio movement. She participated in a statewide campaign that defeated an attempt to replace the current prohibition law with a licensing system that would have legalized the liquor traffic. She was also a major speaker at a state rally convened in February 1874 by Diocletian Lewis, a Boston temperance speaker whose lectures had helped set off the crusade. And a little later she helped form, in Ohio, one of the country’s first women’s state temperance associations (the first was founded by Susan B. Anthony in 1852).

As she participated in these ever-widening circles, Brown came to appreciate that the crusade was enrolling women who would never consider joining the Templars in their political work for state prohibition. In an age when women did not have the right to vote, and when respectable women were not supposed to appear in the public eye too prominently, many middle-class women, however eager for reform, were reluctant to join a secular, politically oriented organization like the Templars. On the other hand, the fledgling local temperance unions were much more appealing, not only because they avoided politics in favor of moral suasion but because they were usually closely associated with an institution in which women had long held a recognized and important place—the local church. It only remained to pull the scattered nodes of reform activity into a single, national organization —an insight that seems to have dawned on Brown before anyone else.

The idea is said to have come to her while she knelt in prayer at a Sunday School assembly at Lake Chautauqua, New York, on August 14, 1874. Her recommendation received an enthusiastic reception from the other participants in the assembly, who formed a committee of ten women, including Brown, to put it into effect.

Brown is given credit for drafting the call for the convention that was held in Cleveland in November 1874. Attending were two future presidents of the National WCTU, Annie T. Wittenmyer and Frances E. Willard. Willard and Brown were the secretaries and guiding spirits of the Committee on the Plan of Work, which produced the WCTU’s first platform of action. The liquor traffic was labeled by WCTU leader Eliza D. Stewart “the greatest curse of our race,” on which was spent more each year than on “all humane and intellectual enterprises of the land,” producing poverty and suffering among the lower classes, and meriting “the best energies of the people for its abolition.”

After the other committees had produced their reports, the convention turned to the election of a president. Nine women were nominated, several of whom asked to be excused. Martha Brown wanted the presidency, but the election went to Annie Wittenmyer, a founder of the Methodist Home Missionary Society, who was well known for her work on the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Brown, a distant third in the balloting, withdrew from the new organization in disappointment and never worked for it or with it again, although she and Willard were both closely associated with the Prohibition party in the 1870s and 1880s.

Brown’s disappointment with the WCTU was followed by problems with the Good Templars. They had divided in 1876 over admitting blacks. She joined with the minority group that favored admission of blacks, and along with some English Templars formed a new organization. The two factions were finally reunited in 1887, by which time the Templars were a declining organization. Brown made two speaking visits to England for them in 1881 and 1889. In 1909 she became national chancellor of the College of Good Templars, and two years later was appointed International Chancellor of the educational program of the order. Nevertheless, after the split of 1876, most of her energy was directed to a new force in the temperance movement, the national Prohibition party.

The party was created in 1869 in Oswego, New York, at a meeting of the Grand Lodge of the Good Templars at which Brown helped obtain a woman’s suffrage plank in the platform. Named a vice president of the party in 1876, she also became a member of the executive committee (for a four-year term) and joined the platform committee.

In 1877 she became secretary of the National Prohibition Alliance, a lecture bureau created by the party (but supposedly independent of party policy) to fan popular support for using political means to achieve prohibition. Although the post was unsalaried and required that she live in New York, away from her husband and children in Pittsburgh, it provided an arena for her speaking and administrative talents. Only two years later, however, when the Prohibition party joined forces with WCTU president Frances Willard, the resulting combination of political and temperance union power made the Alliance redundant. In 1882 the Alliance, and Brown’s post, were discontinued.

Her role was thus considerably diminished in the party, although she served on the executive committee until 1896. In that year, at the presidential nominating convention, a platform was adopted that concentrated on one issue—prohibition—to the virtual exclusion of other issues, including woman suffrage. To an ardent suffragist such as Brown, who in 1882 had spoken at the annual convention of the National Suffrage Association, there was no choice but to resign from the party.

Having lost her last major national forum (although she remained affiliated with the Good Templars), she began to seek other activities. She had been interested in higher education since 1882, when she became vice president and professor of arts, literature, and philosophy at Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman’s College. The president was her husband, who had raised money to keep the small and struggling institution alive; but after ten years of deficits, the college closed in 1892.

During her last thirty years, Brown lived in Cincinnati and became active in civic life. She helped create mothers’ clubs in the public schools and in 1886 organized a Cincinnati fund to provide summer vacations in the country for poor urban children. Her husband held various church appointments until his retirement in 1909. When he died, in 1915, she moved to Dayton, Ohio, and lived with her youngest son. The next year, at the age of seventy-eight, she died of ptomaine poisoning. She was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati.

During her long career Martha Brown was associated with three of the most prominent temperance reform organizations of her era: the Good Templars, the WCTU, and the Prohibition party. In two of these she held high offices, yet she never attained the eminence of Frances Willard, her contemporary. Indeed, her greatest single contribution to reform was the idea of creating a national women’s temperance organization. When she could not direct the new union, she abandoned it for the apparently more promising Templars and later for the Prohibition party. Ironically, in the public eye it was the WCTU, more than any other group, that was associated with the eventual national prohibition of the liquor traffic.

Brown’s writings, consisting of occasional articles for the Alliance Monitor and the Temple Visitor and some temperance pamphlets, have never been collected or republished. In the absence of a full-length biography, Brown’s life must be written from numerous scattered accounts. The most complete are in F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967), and the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, vol. 1 (1925). Additional information may be gleaned from D. L. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States (1926); E. D. Stewart, Memories of the Great Crusade (1888); and E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 3 (1886) and 4 (1902). The founding of the WCTU and its relationship to temperance reform in general, including organizations such as the Good Templars and the Prohibition party, is discussed in R. Bordin, Woman and Temperance (1981). See also Notable American Women (1971). Obituaries appeared in the September 1,1916, issues of The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Cincinnati Times Star, and The Dayton Journal.