Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), Connecticut Division Financial Records

The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), Connecticut Division Financial Records hold correspondence, donation records and acknowledgements, invoices, receipts, account books, bank records, financial reports, and other documents related to the organization's activities in the state of Connecticut.

In her capacity as treasurer of the Connecticut Division of WONPR, Annie Burr Lewis was responsible for forwarding to the national office in New York all income collected statewide. In addition, she paid the bills for setting up and running the administrative office at 1109 Chapel Street, New Haven, and for events taking place around the state. The series holds invoices and receipts covering expenses for printing posters, handbills, and window cards, renting chairs and banners for meetings, and cash for paying the “sandwich men” hired to carry pro-repeal signs at rallies and election polls. Another income stream resulted from the sale of WONPR-branded merchandise—such as cigarette boxes and matchbox cases, scarves and ties, stickers, pins, playing cards, and thimbles—which the Connecticut division produced itself or purchased from the national office, and sold to members or at rallies; examples of WONPR smoking accessories are in the Lewises’ household objects collection.

Although the collection does not contain corporate minutes or program-related internal memoranda and correspondence, the division’s financial records do provide granular documentation of the workings of a state chapter of WONPR under the direction of president Margaret Bush Clement (1899-1993) of New Haven. The records range from receipts from the maintenance of typewriters in the New Haven office, to tabulations of individual members’ contributions, to files of attendance forms generated by the series of “chain lunches” the women held in their homes throughout the state to raise interest in, and money for, WONPR. Other financial records include ledgers, reports, and bank statements, as well as a binder holding bookkeeping course lessons, which Annie Lewis likely used to train herself to keep the books. Also present are four folders of correspondence, documents, and ephemera related to the work of the Connecticut division of The Crusaders, Inc., a men's anti-prohibition organization. Hartford resident Philip Hewes (1902-1998), treasurer of the Connecticut Crusaders, gave the material to Wilmarth Lewis in April 1976. With his gift Hewes included a printed silk "Repeal" necktie he had purchased from WONPR in the early 1930s, an example of the merchandise documented in Series II above.