In undertaking extensive Internet “background checks” on the men and organizations involved in the publications making up this small digitization project, I found myself doggedly adopting a purist “digital” investigation. I am not sure why, except that as I pursued online resource after resource, web page after page, Google digitized book after digitized book, I came to realize how much could actually be done this way. And what could not be done this way was, well, unlikely to get done at all, if you know what I mean.
A popular definition of obsessive behavior is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet given the speed of online search – a couple dozen Google searches and skimming six or seven result screens in the same time it might take just to find one likely source in the stacks — circling back and back again takes on a less crazy sense. Obsessive research might sometimes be validated in Google because, as has often been noted, search results there change from day to day, even hour to hour. Google’s ‘bots are ceaselessly depositing their booty in the server farms in Mountainview. I think though that more often than not our “sensibility” changes — we ourselves are never the same from day to day. We see new and different and better things all the time, based on who knows what?
How about a concrete instance? Here is a link to a tract from the St. Anne’s Temperance Society (India)
I would swear on a stack of our temperance pamphlets that I had checked its author, a P. W. O’Gorman, as thoroughly as possible in Google and circled back and back again doggedly. I certainly found data about the man but no dates. Catalogers really, really love being able to pin down birth and death for their prey, and I had neither.
Then under some odd combination of searching or skimming or the meanderings of the Google ‘bots, a breakthrough…. Eureka! A copy of the British Catholics Who’s Who & Yearbook for 1908 has been digitized by Google. Our Dr. O’Gorman was in born 1860.
When and if I find out when he died — I know he was still writing articles as late as 1940 but perhaps not long after that — I will let you know.

Rev Dwight Spencer (1827-1910) wrote the poem that is one of the most interesting of temperance tracts, The House That Rum Built. This booklet is visually unusual and … poetical. Quite rare, the pamphlet clearly stands apart from ordinary temperance “propaganda.” While perhaps not exactly artistic, the poem is certainly energetic, brimming with crusader zeal. Here is a link to this fascinating pamphlet.
This is the man, all tattered and torn,
Who goes to the gin-mill every morn
And owes his fall to taking a horn
And lives in the house that rum built.

On the page opposite each stanza is an evocative illustration — the overall effect frequently striking. Here, within considerable negative space, an isolated figure turns away from the verses.

The illustrations are by a Canadian-born Methodist minister, Edward Carswell (born 1832) himself a temperance crusader and author (also poet!) and illustrator of similar tracts, including The Temperance Alphabet (1871), John Swig (1871), The Indians and Whisky (1870’s) and a number of broadsides. In the 1870’s the National Temperance Society and Publication House seems to have been a hotbed for this kind of popular pamphleteering. A sample of other Carswell graphics can be viewed at the excellent Brown University Library Center for Digital Initiatives “Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition” collection. Search his name at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance
The Rev. Spencer is an intriguing man. Although I have not found a published biography, Spencer was from New England and New York, but in 1880 became superintendent of missions for the Rocky Mountain District of the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Much of his missionary life seems to have been “out west.” He was very active in Utah, establishing the Ogden Baptist Church and First Baptist Church of Salt Lake City, among others, in the heart of Mormon country. He later returned to the East and was a district secretary of the Baptist Home Missionary Society.
More than in temperance work, Spencer’s prominence in the research I have been able to conduct appears to derive from the “dark side” of a reformer’s zeal: intolerance, prejudice, and xenophobia. In Immigrants, Baptists, and the Protestant Mind in America by Lawrence B. Davis (1973), he is held up as succumbing to the anti-immigrant and indeed anti-Catholic fervor of the time, one that displaced the rosier ambition of many Baptist and other Protestant leaders that foreigners coming to America would be fertile ground for evangelization.