Global Temperance and the Balkans

American Missionaries, Swiss Scientists and Bulgarian Socialists, 1870–1940

Nikolay Kamenov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030416430
• eBook ISBN: 9783030416447
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

This book examines the local manifestation of the global temperance movement in the Balkans. It argues that regional histories of social movements in the modern period could not be sufficiently understood in isolation. Moreover, the book argues that broad transformations of social movements – for example, the power centers associated with moral/religious temperance and the later, scientifically based anti-alcohol campaigns – are more easily identifiable through a detailed regional study. For this purpose, the book begins by sketching the historical development as well as the main historiographical themes surrounding the worldwide temperance movement. The book then zooms in on the movement in the Balkans and Bulgaria in particular. American missionaries founded the temperance movement in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The interwar period, however, witnessed the proliferation of new, professional organizations. The book discusses the various branches as well as their international and political affiliations, showing that the anti-alcohol reform movement was one of the most important social movements in the region.

© The Author(s) 2020

N. KamenovGlobal Temperance and the Balkanshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41644-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Temperance and the Palimpsest of Global History

Nikolay Kamenov¹

(1)

The Graduate Institute Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

Nikolay Kamenov

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Palimpsest of Global History

Zoe Ann Marie Locke, née Noyes, was born in 1833 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. Following a practice not uncommon for American protestant missionaries at the time, she married William Locke in New York in March 1868 shortly before leaving for their missionary post in the Balkans. In the summer of the same year, both entered service at the Philippopolis (today’s Plovdiv) station of the European Turkey Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM ). Locke’s first child was born in the same Thracian Plain town in March 1869. All three children of the missionaries were born in the span of five years in the Balkans. Before embarking on her missionary journey and building a family, both highly successful endeavors, Zoe Locke graduated from the Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where archival materials pertaining to her life are preserved today. In the archives sites a leather-bound book, initially published in 1867, that illustrates the many global processes and connections of the late nineteenth century. The book is a dual language book, that is, its original text flows bilingually on parallel pages (see Fig. 1.1). Each page written in Ottoman Turkish is followed by a page of translation in the at the time newly standardized Bulgarian language. The title page in the latter reads Царскый Наказателный Законникъ: Образ на Хати-Хумаюна—the Ottoman criminal code translated after the original Hatt-i Humayun (خط همايون). Printed by the imperial government, the book could be seen as part of the Tanzimat reform period’s engagement with, and attempt at integration of, the diverse ethnic groups forming the Ottoman Empire.

Fig. 1.1

Locke Family Papers, 1856–1951. Series A. Zoe A.M. (Noyes) Locke Papers Scrapbook, ca.1868–1892. Box 2

In its original form, the book is already a historical source silently revealing the global processes of territorialization.¹ The triumphal procession of the nation state as a form of legal and legitimate administration of sovereign territorial space between 1870 and 1950 here is countered by an imperial reform project.² Once in the possession of Zoe Locke, however, the book was vested with new information and meaning. It became a carrier of yet new global and historically relevant connections. By that point the contents of the book were dated—a new legal code was in effect in the newly formed Bulgarian nation state. The American missionary, however, found the sturdy binding of the book useful for a soft imperial project of her own and executed it through the 1880s. On what the English language reader would recognize as the title page a pencil handwritten title reads Biographical Sketches of Women engaged in the W.C.T.U. (cf. Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). What follows are press clippings from US periodicals that have published articles on women activists in the Women Christian Temperance Union (WCTU ) glued over the hatt-i humayun (see Fig. 1.3). The book was now practically trilingual with patches in Ottoman Turkish, English and Bulgarian. It was transformed into a palimpsest of global history.

Fig. 1.2

Locke Family Papers, 1856–1951. Series A. Zoe A.M. (Noyes) Locke Papers Scrapbook, ca.1868–1892. Box 2

Fig. 1.3

Locke Family Papers, 1856–1951. Series A. Zoe A.M. (Noyes) Locke Papers Scrapbook, ca.1868–1892. Box 2

Locke used various periodicals to compose her Biographical Sketches. The most regular source to overlay the criminal code of the sultanate, however, was the Union Signal —the official organ of the WCTU. Apart from keeping readers up to date with temperance activities in the United States, the journal had the important function of delivering reports from missionaries spread throughout the world. It informed its readership of anti-alcohol activities in far-removed corners of the world and legitimized the existence of the World’s WCTU before its funders. In the process, the Union Signal participated in the creation of a moral empire spanning the globe.³ We would return to this point in the following chapters, but let us turn to palimpsest to see how global entanglements thicken.

Pandita Ramabai, born in the Canaa District of the Madras Presidency, today’s Kanara in Karnataka, India, in 1858, was a South Asian social reformer and international champion of women rights. A legendary figure in the World WCTU, she had allegedly first turned to Brahmo Samaj—a Hindu reform movement—teachings. In her early twenties, Ramabai ‘broke her caste’ with an intercaste marriage to a lawyer in Calcutta. Later, during her stay in England in the early 1880s, where she studied educational methods and taught Sanskrit at the Cheltenham College, she converted to Christianity.⁴ In the United States, she met with Frances Willard, the second and perhaps best-known national President of the WCTU, to form a lasting personal friendship. Ramabai’s travels in America achieved a status of high prominence not least because of a book she published in Marathi under the title The Peoples of the United States.⁵ She became a leading figure of the WCTU in India. Ramabai captured the imagination of Zoe Locke. In terms of the volume of materials in Locke’s Biographical Sketches, Ramabai came second only to Willard. Among other poems devoted to Ramabai in the palimpsest book, there is one penned by Lucy Larcom published in The Woman’s Magazine. Two quatrains deserve special attention here:

That word had winged her father’s feet from fettering caste away,

To give his fledgelings liberty for flight in ampler day

Than man’ close, cage-like code allowed; and so the maiden grew

To reach of thought and insight clear no dim zenana knew.

Child of the lone Ghaut Mountains! flower of India’s wilderness!

She knows that God unsealed her lips her sisters dumb to bless,

Gave her the clew to bring them forth from where they blindly grope,

Bade her unlock their dungeon doors, and light the lamps of hope.⁶

The poem is engaging at many levels. It predates Rudyard Kipling’s meanwhile infamous White Man’s Burden by at least a decade.⁷ It too heralds the American entrance to the imperial club through reference to British imperial and Orientalist tropes—caste, dim zenana, dumb to bless, blindly groping in the dungeon. Such references notwithstanding, the poem seems to endorse a softer imperial project, one that might be willing to engage compradors as the central figures in the civilizing project and later even asks ‘how dare we look at thee […] and say we are free?’ But even more important for our study is the appearance of the poem in the form of a press clipping in Locke’s global book of heroines. How did images and tales of the South Indian–born Ramabai make their way to the Balkans in the late nineteenth century? How did she manage to obscure the pages of the obsolete Sultan’s criminal code?

The material evidence of the recycled hatt-i humayun does not merely symbolize the displacement of one territoriality by another as illustrated by gluing over of new pages; it could be also seen as a story of overlapping territorialities that bridges two epochs. Conventionally seen as decidedly separate periods, with the dividing line of the Bulgarian independence of 1878, the Ottoman Balkans and the Bulgarian nation share more than what immediately meets the eye. The taxonomic uncertainty of the US-American protestant mission active from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s and originally named European Turkey Mission, subsequently renamed to Balkan Mission and finally to Bulgarian Mission, would in this regard be the closest example of institutional continuity managing territorial transformations. However, the national projects in the Balkan themselves had their roots, raison d’être as well as language of reference, in the Ottoman times/Empire. This is another story revealed in Locke’s palimpsest. One related to the role of temperance in the Bulgarian national project and the desire for and formation of new knowledge supposed to cater better to the needs of a new state undergoing radical social transformations. The temperance movement born from the efforts of missionaries like Locke took root gradually in the Balkans. Temperance became intricately intertwined with contemporary social and political processes, its discourse reflecting at first the formation of the nation state and later, during the interwar period, oscillating between a vision of international system securing peace and a vision of a pure, healthy and strong nation. But as the example illustrates, and as I will demonstrate in detail, the story of temperance in the Balkans contrasts to a conventional story of importation, adaptation or translation of ready-made knowledge into the enclosed space of a nation state common to international historiography and to approaches placing the metropolitan perspective at center stage. The temperance movement in the Balkans (and later Bulgaria) from 1870 to 1940 was a part of a broad, worldwide network of social activism and knowledge production.⁸ In this sense, an exhaustive study of the temperance movement in this part of the world should necessarily strive to rescue its story from the nation state, which for too long has been a central analytical category but fails to accommodate a nuanced social history.⁹

Paralleling developments elsewhere, the story of temperance in Bulgaria entails a complex and entangled social history. It is a story in which different actors over different periods transformed, communicated and tried to impose their own vision of morals.¹⁰ It is a story in which a ‘vice’ was transformed into a disease and a new set of actors lobbied for bio-political measures in countering the ‘evils’ of alcoholism on a social and state level.¹¹ The story of temperance in Bulgaria, however, is also a story of liberation and empowerment. It is the story of the gradual formation of a civil society, in the context of which pupils and students engaged in political representation, managing organizations, editing periodicals and running finances. In the last instance it was a podium for conveying political messages, but also the scene of tensions between political factions that often clashed over their visions of a future world.

Temperance in the Balkans: Context, Materials and Framework of the Study

The first organized temperance activities in the Balkans started cautiously within the Ottoman Empire and grew—if unevenly—until the Second World War. At the pinnacle of the movement in the interwar period, tens of thousands of members were active in voluntary temperance organizations in Bulgaria. The growth of the movement was reflected in legal initiatives and laws aiming to curtail public drunkenness and alcoholism.¹² The vibrancy of the temperance movement, however, is most apparent in its cultural manifestations. Dedicated temperance periodicals reached a broad social base. Theatrical plays on the theme became popular. Declamations of temperance poems were held. The movement demons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Temperance and the Palimpsest of Global History
• 2. A Global Imaginaire: Fighting Alcohol Around the World
• 3. Missionaries: The Rise and Fall of Protestant Temperance in the Balkans
• 4. Scientists: Degeneration, Eugenics and the Scientific Approach to Alcoholism in Interwar Bulgaria
• 5. The Youth Temperance Movement
• 6. Socialists: The Politics of Temperance
• 7. Visual Histories: Intermediality in Temperance Campaigns
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter