John Granville Woolley

• John Granville Woolley
• Born: February 15, 1850
• Died: August 13, 1922

One of the few temperance or prohibition reformers to have been an alcoholic during some period of his life, was born at Collinsville, Ohio, the son of Edwin C. Woolley and Elizabeth (Hunter) Woolley. After attending local schools, De Pauw University (1867-68), and Ohio Wesleyan University (1869 71), he received a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1873. In the same year he married Mary Veronica Gerhardt, of Delaware, Ohio; they had three sons.

Woolley began his public career as the city attorney of Paris, Illinois, but found the town too narrow for his talents and ambition. He moved to Minneapolis, where he became one of the highest-paid lawyers in Minnesota. In 1881 he was elected state’s attorney for Minneapolis, and in 1885 he was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court.

In the meantime, however, he had become a heavy drinker, apparently as a result of taking large doses of alcohol as part of a medically prescribed treatment for a lung ailment. In a vain attempt to break the habit, he moved to New York City, where he sank from lawyer to vagabond drunkard. He became profoundly depressed, even contemplating suicide. In his sober moments he went to temperance meetings, where he sometimes spoke, often to great effect. He attracted the attention of Dwight L. Moody, the evangelist, who helped him in his struggle against alcoholism. On January 31, 1888, he had a sudden spiritual awakening, in the company of some ardently religious friends, which brought him simultaneously to Christ and to sobriety.

Henceforth Woolley shunned liquor and devoted himself to spreading the gospel of prohibition. He traveled the country on speaking tours, “the outstanding Prohibition orator of a period of great orators,” as prohibition historian D. Leigh Colvin has described him. His speeches brought him to the attention of temperance and prohibition reformers all over the world. In 1892-93, upon the invitation of the English prohibitionist Lady Henry Somerset, he toured the British Isles, speaking almost every day for seven months to large audiences. Other foreign tours followed in 1901 and 1905. He stimulated the efforts of prohibitionists in New Zealand through his lectures; in Hawaii he helped establish a branch of the Anti-Saloon League, and in 1907 he became its superintendent.

His career reached its zenith in 1900 when he was nominated for the presidency on the Prohibition party ticket. The Prohibition party—the only party whose principal aim was a ban on the sale of liquor—was founded at a Chicago convention in 1869. Beginning with the nomination of James Black in 1872, the party had nominated candidates for every presidential election. A novel feature of John Woolley’s campaign was his special train, which carried him around the country on a grand speaking tour: 23,000 miles and nearly 500 addresses, at the time a record. He received over 200,000 votes in one of the party’s better efforts.

Although he continued his work for the party (he was a senatorial candidate in 1902), Woolley began to question its ability to bring national prohibition into effect. After 1906 he shifted his allegiance to the Anti-Saloon League, which was using pressure-group tactics to obtain bipartisan support for a constitutional prohibition amendment. In 1913 he gave one of the major addresses at the league’s annual convention. He also advised it on strategy, recommending, for example, that in publicizing the amendment issue across the country the league hire the best speakers available, regardless of cost. “This is a big fight,” he observed, “for a big stake and ... big money.” The speakers, he asserted, should be paid “relatively as the steel trust pays.”

Woolley retired in 1921 because of declining health, but after the death of his wife he accepted an offer by the World League against Alcohol to conduct a survey of alcoholism in Europe. He died, at seventy-two, in Spain, while engaged in this mission. He was buried in Paris, Illinois.

Although he was a political candidate in several elections, including the 1900 presidential race, his real contribution to reform was through his pen and his voice. All who heard him commented on the power of his speaking ability. Woolley was a prolific author, but his works are seldom read today.

Of his books on prohibition, the best known is Temperance Progress of the Century (1903), on which he collaborated with W. E. Johnson, a prohibitionist and close friend. In 1905 the two men mapped out an encyclopedia of temperance and prohibition, which was later undertaken and published, under the auspices of the Anti-Saloon League, as the Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, 6 vols. (1925-30). Most of Woolley’s other books are compilations of his speeches and his editorials for the New Voice (the Prohibition party’s official publication, of which he was editor and publisher from 1899 to 1906). They include Seed, (1893); The Christian Citizen (1900); A Lion Hunter (1900); South Sea Letters (1906), written with his wife; and Civic Sermons, 8 vols. (1911). Despite his prominence in the prohibition movement, Woolley has not attracted a biographer. For biographical material see the entries in The Dictionary of American Biography (1936), Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem (1930), and the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 20 (1929). Additional facts may be gleaned from D. L. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States (1926); P. H. Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (1928); and A Condensed History of the Prohibition Party (1944). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, August 14, 1922.