Martha McClellan Brown

Martha McClellan Brown (April 16, 1838 – August 31, 1916) was an American lecturer, educator, reformer, newspaper editor, and major leader in the temperance movement in Ohio.

In 1861, Brown joined the fraternal organization Independent Order of Good Templars, beginning her temperance career. The organization promoted total abstinence and state prohibition. In 1868, she was editor of a local newspaper in Alliance, Ohio, The Alliance Monitor, where she and her husband turned it into a temperance publication during their tenure until 1878. She served as Grand Templar of Ohio from 1872 to 1873. Brown helped form the Women's Temperance Association of Ohio in 1874 by drafting a plan and called for the First Woman's National Temperance Convention in November 1874 after realizing new supporters of the temperance movement were unwilling to join the Good Templars. At the convention, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded. She wanted to be president of the new organization, but the post went to Annie Turner Wittenmyer because of Brown's ties to the Good Templars.

She afterwards was chiefly instrumental in gathering the women in the first national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, where she largely assisted in developing her plan, which was made the basis of the permanent organization of the National WCTU.

Just after the founding of the WCTU in August, 1874, Brown was elected Right Grand Vice-Templar of the International Order of Good Templars, in Boston, Massachusetts. That gave her a place in a board of five, which held supervision over upwards of 800,000 pledged temperance workers. When nominated for the president of their union by the women in Cleveland. Ohio, the ladies were sarcastically reminded that Brown was an active official of the Prohibition Party, Chief Templar of Ohio, and a member of the International Executive of Good Templary, and ought not to be made president of the Woman's Union. She immediately arose and withdrew her name, and Wittenmyer was elected to the place.

In 1876, Brown objected to the attitude of the majority of the Right Grand Lodge of Good Templars in rejecting lodges of African Americans, and so withdrew and united with the English delegates in constituting a more liberal body. After ten years of separation, the two bodies adjusted their issue by providing for regular lodges of African Americans, and Brown marched at the head of the English delegation on entering the hall for the re-union of the bodies of Good Templars, in 1886, in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In 1877, after repeated personal efforts with leading Republican officials, State and National, had failed to secure any actual, or even fairly promised political, antagonisms of the liquor interests, Brown went to New York City and assumed the management of the newly organized National Prohibition Alliance. She had also a secondary aim, which was to make that organization a barrier and corrective against the growing defection of temperance workers from radical measures of reform. Hence, she gave herself for five years to the projection of prohibition reform by means of the National Prohibition Alliance, which she caused to be operated chiefly in the churches and independent of party policy. Through those years, she maintained an office in New York City without salary, while her husband continued in the ministry and, with their family of five children, remained at his work in Pittsburgh.

1880s and beyond In the winter of 1881–82, from a caucus of Republicans, directed by Simon Cameron, she received the tender of the highly remunerative position of Superintendent of Public Instruction in the State of Pennsylvania. To have accepted that offer, she would have been compelled to abandon her work with the Prohibition Alliance, without any one to take her place; hence she did not accept.

In October, 1881, Brown gathered through personal letters, special circulars, and press notices a large National Conference of leading Prohibitionists and reformers in the Central Methodist Episcopal Church, New York City. Before that Conference, she made one of her most impassioned appeals for unity among temperance workers, whereby the National Prohibition Alliance was led to unite formally with the Prohibition Reform Party. The success of the New York conference led to a similar conference in Chicago the following year, August, 1882, which was arranged for by Brown, and which was more successful than the one held in New York. Many of the old leaders of the Prohibition Reform Party were induced to attend the Chicago conference. At that conference, Frances E. Willard and her immediate following of Home Protectionists and the WCTU were brought into the Prohibition Party, besides many local organizations of temperance workers. Brown thereupon dropped the non-partisan National Prohibition Alliance, believing that it had served its purpose.

In the summer of 1882, Dr. and Mrs. Brown were elected to the presidency and vice-presidency of the Cincinnati Wesleyan College. The entire management of the institution thereafter devolved upon them, with Brown holding a professorship as well as the vice-presidency of the college, having previously received the degrees of Ph.D. and LL.D. During that time, she twice visited Europe and was warmly received among reformers and scholars abroad. In Cincinnati, she became prominent in civic affairs, including organizing school mothers’ clubs; launching a summer program from the city's poor children; establishing the Fresh Air Movement; and serving as president of the Woman's Rotary Club in 1914.

Personal life In 1858, she married Reverend W. Kennedy Brown. Together, they had six children: Orvon Graff (1863), Westanna O’Neil, Charme, Richard McClellan, Marie, and Kleon Thaw (1886).

After four days of illness, Brown died on August 31, 1916, in Dayton, Ohio of ptomaine poisoning,