Photo from the Oct. 10, 1888 Warren Mail Four columns of front-page above the fold coverage was given to the W.C.T.U. - Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The annual meeting that year was held in Russell.

I guess it’s part of the human experience that all of our societal problems feel like the most significant problems the country has faced.

But I was reminded recently that what we may think is important today could be little more than a historical footnote in 100 years.

The proof? The temperance movement (I’m open to the argument that societally this maybe still should be an issue but the reality is that it isn’t).

I found a whole series of interesting articles in the 1870s into the 1890s that – often with quite a bit of hyperbole – make the pitch for alcohol abstinence.

Now, we know the effort culminated with the 18th Amendment in 1917 and fizzled 16 years later when the prohibition amendment was repealed.

Photo from the Nov. 12, 1914 Warren Mail By 1914 - decades into the movements - temperance efforts had grown to get their own header in the local newspaper.

But no one attending the Woman’s National Temperance Convention in Cleveland in Nov. 1874 knew that.

Several of the resolutions of that gathering were published in the Warren Mail.

“Disenfranchisement is recognized by all the States as a punishment for every crime from larceny to burglary, and as the man who transgresses the law by selling intoxicating liquors is, in the opinion of the convention, doing more to injure society than either of the classes above referred to….”

Selling liquor as a crime? Not in 1874.

The group asked doctors to “exercise case” in administering liquors as medicine and proposed that children by taught “total abstinence.” Their lobbying efforts extended into the church, where they called for church officials to only offer “unfermented wine at the communion table.”

There were also other… interesting… proposals: “If we would have men forsake saloons, we must invite them to a better place, where they can find shelter and food and company. We would open small, near coffee rooms, with reading rooms attached which the ladies might supply with books and papers from their own homes and by solicited funds.”

There were also calls for “homes for inebriate women.

“Our work came forth to us from God,” they resolved. “The miracle of the crusade was wrought by prayer. Let us, women of America, and of all lands, dedicate the evening twilight hour to prayerful thoughts about this greatest reform.”

The following year there was a Temperance Convention held in Warren County (the county was possibly where the first temperance Union in the state was formed, first meeting in 1875) but the Mail took a dim view of the gathering: “Mr. John White, of Tidioute, said he was opposed to adjourning, but if we do adjourn, thought they had better order up a barrel of whiskey, all have a good time and call the thing ‘Busted.’ That is rather (bizarre) talk for temperance reformers….

The Mail editorialized the convention this way: “Called by any name, it will ‘drive away voters’ and an old worker in the cause out to have nothing to do with it.”

But the annual conventions continued. The Mail, in a much more serious way, covered the 1888 gathering of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

“The service was such as would prepare all hearts for the work in hand,” the Mail reported. “Getting into the Spirit of Christ and into a oneness with him was made prominent, they being the necessary steps towards the accomplishment of the Temperance work.”

The president of the group was Mrs. L.D. Wetmore, presumably the wife of the county’s first president judge.

The convention received reports on “uniting of families through the banishment of liquor from the home” and from various other committees as part of the multi-day event.

“For several years the most important work of this organization has been the circulation of remonstrances against the granting of license to sell alcoholic drinks,” Mrs. Wetmore, per the Mail, said. “One year ago the desired end was gained. Not a license was granted…. The members of this organization have not engaged in temperance work for pleasure or because they have not as many home duties as other women, but from a desire to save, not their own sons only, but all the boys.”

There were 500 members of this group that met in chapters all around the county.

“There are many before me now who at a great cost to themselves of comfort and pleasure have done good service and who would have greatly preferred the perusal of books or the doing of fancy work to this,” Wetmore said. “They are courageous women who are willing to wait till public opinion shall be so educated as to see the advantages of temperance and desire it.”

She said that some of the town hotels closed “and we have been told we are responsible for this dire calamity…. That the traveling public demand a bar is a sad reflection upon the travelers.”

A similar report for the gathering in 1890 appears to show a focus on work in the county jail as well as literature distribution.

The Union wrote directly to the county’s clergy via an open letter in Aug. 17, 1894 and published in the Warren Ledger.

“In behalf of the children of Warren County, thousands of whom are worse than orphaned and fast growing into criminals because of the influences which surround them, we come to you, who stand for what is purest and best, earnestly begging, that you will set aside one evening of every month for a ‘Gospel Temperance Prayer Meeting,'” they asked.

An entire article in 1895 highlighted how temperance messaging had been spread via Sunday School throughout the county and membership in the county Union had grown to 900 in 1899.

“I believe that for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of the next quarter century there are greater things than we have dreamed,” Mrs. D.I. Ball said that year.

On that score, she was certainly right.

But only for 16 years.