Home Protection: Frances Willard’s Anti-Monopoly Crusade

The neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly movement that emerged in the United States following the 2008 financial crisis provides a new perspective on anti-monopoly thought, politics, and practice in the less recent past. The “home protection” crusade led by renowned temperance activist Frances Willard is a case in point. To combat addiction, domestic violence, and child abuse, Willard joined like-minded temperance activists in the 1870s to form the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a grassroots women-led social movement to ban the “liquor traffic.” To free the nation from its “ monopoly in sin ,” Willard opposed federal alcohol taxes and municipal liquor-retailing licensing fees. Inspired by the utopian journalist Edward Bellamy and the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Willard reinvented herself in the 1890s as a Christian socialist committed to improving the living conditions of the poor—an anti-monopoly ideal more expansive than anything championed by the lawmakers who drafted the 1890 law known today as the Sherman Act.