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THE COLOR OF TEMPERANCE
Stephen Crane's Blue Badge of Courage by George Monteiro (Louisiana State University Press, 2000. 224 pages. Illustrated. $65, $24.95 pb)
All of them knew the color of temperance: blue badges, blue buttons, blue ribbons, even blue inns. A year before Stephen's birth, his father denounced the Demon Rum in Arts of Intoxication (1870), and throughout the boy's New Jersey childhood—the father died in his son's ninth year—the Reverend J. T. Crane “lectured and preached on the subject from Haverstraw to Cape May.” Crane's mother likewise embraced the cause; she died, when Stephen was twenty, “after a short illness contracted at the National convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.”
Young Crane was steeped in a sea of temperance, his impressionable consciousness engulfed by wave upon wave of blue rhetoric: from his parents, from his Methodist Sunday school, from the public schools (where drug education was begun under pressure from the WCTU), and from the popular culture of temperance songs, prints, and readers. It's no wonder he rebelled. Having quaffed his first beer behind his mother's back at a WCTU rally, Crane went on to drink heavily enough to earn a reputation as a sot—but he may never have become a full-fledged inebriate.
Although Crane scorned the likes of the Blue Button Army amassed by the temperance reformer Colonel Henry H. Hadley, and although he did not live to see The Blue Badge of Courage (1902), the story of Hadley's crusade that hijacked the title of Crane's popular novel, the imagination of this prodigal son of true-blue...