Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900-1920 [2nd printing 1966. Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674865495, 9780674863255

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PROHIBITION and tke

PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 1900-1920

PROHIBITION and tlie

PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

1900-1920 ψφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφ^

JAMES H. T I M B E R L A K E

H A R V A R D UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE

·

I 9 6 6

MASSACHUSETTS

© Copyright, 1963, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Second Printing Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-9564

Printed in the United States of America

TO T H E M E M O R Y OF M Y MOTHER AND FATHER

Acknowledgments I am deeply conscious of how much I owe to others for the writing of this book. Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger suggested that I undertake the topic and guided and directed me in the early stages of the research. Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., saw the work to completion and offered many challenging questions and comments and much helpful advice and criticism. Professor Oscar Handlin was the source of many stimulating ideas and encouraged me to seek the publication of the work. To each of these three men 1 am extremely grateful. 1 am also grateful to a number of others for their generous assistance: to J. Joseph Huthmacher and Charles Parkhurst for many valuable ideas and suggestions and to Cecil Headrick for reading and criticizing the entire manuscript. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Walter E. Knotts whose encouragement and support were a constant source of strength and whose help made the writing of this book possible. James H. Timberlake

Contents

I. 11.

Introduction

ι

The Religious Argument

4

The Scientific and Social Arguments

39

III.

The Economic Argument

67

IV.

The Political Argument

100

Pressure Politics: The Anti-Saloon League

125

Toward a Dry Utopia

149

Notes

185

Index

2 31

V. VI.

List of illustrations φφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφφψφφφφφφφφφ^ΦΦΦΦ^ The Latest Recruit—Carter in the New York Sun (The Digest, September 13, 19x3)

Literary

56

The White Man's Burden, "Preaching Prohibition by Postcards" —drawn by May for the Patriotic Postcard Co., Saginaw, Michigan ( T h e Literary Digest, April 18, 1908)

59

Consistency—Wellington in the Knoxville Sentinel (The ary Digest, July 25, 1908)

Liter-

91

Properly Shocked—Richards in the Philadelphia American Literary Digest, April 25, 1914)

(The

122

The Politician—"That sounds like a million votes. The Prohibition issue for me."—Morris in the New York Evening Mail (The Literary Digest, August 17, 1918)

143

Something About T o Happen—Henderson in the Westerville American Issue (The Literary Digest, August 5, 1916)

170

PROHIBITION and the

PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT 1900-1920

Introduction

B e t w e e n the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency in 1901 and the repudiation of Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Americans gave vigorous support to two great crusades: one to preserve democracy at home and the other to make the world safe for democracy. The Progressive Movement of these years came as a reaction to a long period of dominant conservatism during which the nation had undergone a rapid transformation from a predominantly rural to an urban-industrial society. Spreading first from city to state and finally to the national government, this movement embraced not only the long-embattled farmers and urban laborers but also middle-class businessmen, professional men, and whitecollar workers. Embodied in the dynamic energy of Roosevelt and the lofty idealism of Wilson, the Progressive Movement endeavored to come to grips with the two great problems threatening American democracy: the growing power of big business on the one hand, and, on the other, the mounting discontent of the lower classes, especially among urbanindustrial workers. It sought to solve these two problems by democratizing the machinery of government and using government to control big business and to improve the lot of the underprivileged. T o achieve these ends, the Progressive Movement embraced a wide variety of individual reforms, one of the more important and least understood of which was prohibition. Although

2

P R O H I B I T I O N A N D T H E PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

today sometimes regarded as a conservative measure, prohibition was actually written into the Constitution as a progressive reform. As an integral part of the Progressive Movement, prohibition drew on the same moral idealism and sought to deal with the same basic problems. If the Progressive Movement was nourished on a belief in the moral law, so was prohibition, which sought to remove from commerce an article that was believed to despoil man's reason and undermine the foundation of religion and representative government. If progressive America's growing devotion to efficiency also reflected an optimistic belief in the desirability of material progress, the attack on alcoholic beverages as an enemy of efficiency mirrored the same faith. Americans were coming to place more and more faith in the claims of science; they were thus willing to accept its findings that even the moderate use of alcohol was dangerous and ought to be avoided. If progressivism desired to curb the power of an industrial and financial plutocracy, prohibition aimed to remove the corrupting influence of one branch of that plutocracy—the liquor industry. Again, if progressivism represented a quickening of the humanitarian impulse, manifested in redoubled efforts of philanthropists and social workers to banish crime, poverty, and disease from the environment, prohibition was an effort to eliminate one factor that caused them. And, finally, if progressivism sought to improve the status of the lower classes by direct legislation, prohibition sought to uplift them by the same means. Prohibition did not command universal support, however, for its appeal lay largely with the old-stock, middle-class section of the American community. Other progressives, especially those identified with the urban-labor-immigrant elements, disliked the reform and fought it. Although the two groups often cooperated on other measures, they disagreed on the

INTRODUCTION

3

question of prohibition. But because the old-stock middle class constituted the backbone of the Progressive Movement and wielded disproportionate political power, it was able to overcome the opposition of the urban masses and to impose its own standard of sobriety on the nation by law.

I

The Religious Argument

Β y the time the Progressive Movement got under way, which was about 1900, American Protestantism was firmly committed to temperance reform. This had not always been the case, however, for during the early days of the Republic the churches had played no significant role in the reform. Only within the first quarter of the nineteenth century did the Protestant denominations take up the cause and become its most ardent supporters. The question arises, therefore, why did American Protestantism come to support the reform, and why, in particular, did it come to advocate total abstinence and prohibition rather than moderation and legal restriction? W h y did it suddenly launch a crusade against intemperance and the liquor traffic in the early nineteenth century rather than at some other time? And why did its crusade gain such a commanding position and reach its final climax only during the Progressive Era? The basis of the interest of American Protestantism in temperance reform was, of course, moral. It held that the primary purpose of the Christian church was to save souls; in intemperance it found a vice that made this work difficult, if not impossible. For by undermining man's health, impairing his reason, dulling his conscience, and obliterating his fear of God, intemperance fostered ungodliness, immorality, disease, and death, and destroyed both body and soul. As an enemy of spirituality and a defiler of the body, intemperance separated

T H E RELIGIOUS A R G U M E N T

5

man from the love of God and prevented him from attaining salvation.1 "For drunkards no more than murderers," the Reverend Lyman Beecher said, "shall inherit the kingdom of God." 2 As conduct that presumably led to spiritual death, intemperance had always been an object of concern to the church, Protestant and Catholic alike. But what prompted American Protestantism to become intensely concerned with the problem were the great evangelical revivals of the nineteenth century. These had a twofold influence: by bringing about a general religious awakening, they produced a new piety and asceticism, a new austerity in private morality that expressed itself in abstention from such worldly pleasures as drink; and by bringing about a renewed emphasis on personal conversion as the central fact of religious experience, they caused evangelical Protestantism to oppose anything that interfered with this experience. Nothing seemed more obstructive than intemperate drinking. In order to go forward with the "preaching of the pure gospel salvation from all sin by the power of a personal Saviour," the evangelical churches took up and maintained their interest in temperance reform. 3 Quite different in their attitude toward this evangelism were the Roman Catholics, and, for the most part, the Protestant Episcopal and Lutheran churches. With their greater emphasis on liturgy, confession, creed, and sacraments, rather than traumatic conversion, as the means of grace and salvation, they tended to frown upon revivalism and were far more lenient and forgiving in matters of private morality, such as drinking. But even these churches had evangelical wings. In the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, the Paulist Fathers were the leading evangelizers, and they provided most of the leadership of the Catholic temperance movement.4 In the American Lutheran Church, the older English-speaking Lutherans and

6

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

the Swedish Lutherans of the Augustana Synod were most strongly evangelical and the most devoted to temperance reform. 5 The latter, indeed, provide a particularly good example of the fundamental connection between evangelicalism and temperance. The product of an early nineteenth century religious awakening in Sweden, they had migrated to the United States in order to escape the confessionalism, spiritual complacency, and political conservatism of the established church of Sweden, and had brought with them their interest in both evangelism and temperance. The German Lutherans, on the other hand, who had also migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century, represented a conservative, confessional orthodoxy that objected to both revivals and temperance reform in equal measure.® But individual salvation was only part of the moral problem created by intemperance, for sin is social as well as personal. By destroying man's love of God, intemperance, the churches believed, also destroyed Christianity's most powerful incentive to self-discipline and social morality. The result was wretched homes, pauperism, crime, disease, and vice, and a lowering of the moral tone of society in general.7 Intemperance, wrote one Catholic reformer, "destroys the sense of decency and honor, silences conscience and deadens the best instincts of the human heart. . . Whenever it touches human life it leaves the awful shadows of disease, crime, poverty, shame, wretchedness, and sorrow." 8 The moral responsibility for the consequences of intemperance, however, by no means rested on the drinker alone. The churches held that those who profited by catering to the drink appetite also bore part of the guilt. The liquor interests, they believed, greatly aggravated the evils of intemperance. In their quest for profits they constantly sought to create new drinkers and to induce those who drank to drink more. Because of

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

7

its corrupting influence in political life and its connection with gambling and prostitution, moreover, the liquor traffic opened the way to further evils. "There is no law it will keep, no pledge it will honor, no child it will not taint, no woman it will not befoul, no man it will not degrade," declared the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church: It feeds upon dishonesties of conduct and on the shame of brothels. It stimulates all revenges and makes the murderer dance upon the body he has killed. It falsely claims to be a great public interest because it employs thousands and pays heavy taxes. Bat no . . . profits, however real or immense, can compensate for the corruption of our politics, the emptiness of the drunkard's home or the fullness of prisons and graves.9 N o man could engage in such a business, the churches maintained, without violating the Golden Rule and the divine law of love, for how could a man love his neighbor and at the same time inflict evil on him? Clearly, the liquor dealer would no more inherit eternal life than the drunkard. 10 In dealing with the liquor problem and other social evils, evangelical Protestantism was inherently progressive. Unlike those extremist and apocalyptic sects that rejected and withdrew from the world as hopelessly corrupt, and unlike the more conservative churches, such as the Roman Catholic, Protestant Episcopal, and Lutheran, that tended to assume a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward the influence of religion in culture, evangelical Protestantism sought to overcome the corruption of the world in a dynamic manner, not only by converting men to belief in Christ but also by Christianizing the social order through the power and force of law. According to this view, the Christian's duty was to use the secular power of the state to transform culture so that the community of the faithful might be kept pure and the work of saving the unregenerate might be made easier. Thus the

8

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

function of law was not simply to restrain evil but to educate and uplift. 11 Imbued with this idea of religion and law, evangelical Protestantism naturally turned to prohibitory legislation as a means of promoting its ideal of a sober society. As one reformer put it: Prohibition would establish the social conditions of morality under which men are more likely to be moral than when living under an environment which is conducive to immorality and wrong-doing. Gladstone said it was "the duty of government to make it easy to do right and difficult to do wrong" . . . Some cynics and thoughtless people may seek to ridicule the idea of making men moral by law but the fact is that the social and ethical gains through governmental action . . . have been beyond computation.12 But the moral reason alone is not sufficient to account for evangelical Protestantism's interest in the temperance movement. For its attitude toward the liquor problem was determined not only by the moral ideals of a religious faith that sought to transcend culture but also by the demands of the particular culture in which it functioned. Like any vital religion, American Protestantism molded its culture and was in turn conditioned by it. 13 As typical products of a democratic, capitalistic, thoroughly middle-class society, American Protestants shared with their nonchurchgoing countrymen the universal devotion to the American ideal that all men have an equal right to life, liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Nourished on this ideal, American Protestants adopted a social ethic distinguished as much by its program to promote earthly blessings as by its concern for eternal bliss in the world to come. T o the typical Protestant, the virtues of honesty, industry, sobriety, thrift, and prudence were not only visible signs of God's grace but were also the indispensable foundation of economic success and

T H E RELIGIOUS A R G U M E N T

9

political liberty. Intemperance, therefore, was a vice to be combatted not out of a concern for otherworldly salvation alone, but out of a this-worldly desire for freedom, prosperity, and happiness.14 Economically and socially, intemperance was stigmatized by the evangelical churches because it struck at the well-being of the individual and prevented him from achieving success. It caused him to squander his wages, plunged him into bankruptcy, and pauperized him and his family. The drink habit, moreover, lowered his efficiency and hampered production and thus interfered with the material progress and prosperity of the nation as a whole. Furthermore, by increasing the amount of crime, poverty, disease, and death, it caused untold misery and suffering, and by adding to the cost of maintaining jails, poorhouses, and public charity, it imposed on all people an extra burden of taxation. 15 In a society where nearly everyone possessed or aspired to middle-class respectability, where material prosperity and success were regarded as evidence of virtue and marks of divine favor, and where poverty and failure were considered as probable symptoms of vice, intemperance naturally came to be viewed with stern disapproval and sobriety with high esteem.16 One Methodist minister, the Reverend E. L. Eaton, put the case quite simply: If a man who consumed only three drinks a day at a nickel apiece were to stop drinking and save his money instead, he would in twenty years accumulate at interest $2,349. Whereupon, Eaton concluded, his "character of integrity and honesty, his habits of economy and industry, together with the cash saved, will place him in a position to own property, enter business, and command respect." 1 7 American Protestantism's concern with intemperance as the enemy of material prosperity and success was matched by its concern with intemperance as a threat to political liberty.

10

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

It was a fundamental axiom of American democracy that popular government, unlike monarchy or tyranny, demanded an enlightened and virtuous electorate and that such an electorate could only be secured through the power of education and religion.18 "It is admitted," said the Reverend Lyman Beecher, "that intelligence and virtue are the pillars of republican institutions, and that the illumination of schools, and the moral power of religious institutions are indispensable to produce this intelligence and virtue." 18 By attacking man's reason and paralyzing his moral nature, intemperance, it was believed, struck at the very foundation of political democracy. And since American Protestants held that religious liberty could not exist without political liberty, it is clear why they came to regard intemperance and the liquor traffic with such intense hostility. For all of these reasons, moral, social, economic, and political, evangelical Protestantism entered into the movement for temperance reform. In attempting to combat the liquor evil, however, the evangelical Protestant churches soon concluded that neither the ideal of moderate drinking nor legal restriction was adequate. They therefore gradually advanced toward more and more extreme remedies until total abstinence and prohibition finally came to be the accepted goal of temperance reform.* By the 1890's, these two principles were solidly entrenched in the moral philosophy of the evangelical churches. Having embraced total abstinence and prohibition for reasons peculiar to American culture, some Protestant reformers, known as "Gospel total abstainers," sought to invoke the authority of the Bible to support their position by claiming that the wine served by Jesus at the Last Supper and elsewhere * As used in this study, "temperance," "temperance movement," and "temperance reform" refer broadly to all of those measures designed to deal with the liquor problem, extending from moderation to total abstinence by the individual, and from legislative restriction to prohibition by the state.

T H E RELIGIOUS A R G U M E N T

11

associated with him was not fermented wine but the fresh fruit of the vine. This involved them in a rather labored discussion of the meaning of the three Hebrew words for wine, yayin, shekar, and tirosh, and the corresponding Greek word, oinos, in order to show that oinos referred neither to yayin nor to shekar, both of which meant fermented wine and were forbidden in the Old Testament, but to tirosh, which meant unfermented wine and was used in the Old Testament with approval.20 This two-wine theory, however, was of fairly recent origin in the United States and never won the support of most reputable Biblical scholars.21 And the wets, of course, laughed it to scorn. One liquor spokesman remarked that if Scriptural wine meant unfermented grape juice the Bible ought to be revised. Ephesians 5:18, for example, should be changed to read: "And be not drunk with unfermented grape juice." "On the whole," he concluded, "it would be just as well for the Anti-Saloon League . . . to give up all reference to the Bible. It was written before the Anti-Saloon League was formed and cannot be expected to meet the requirements of that organization." 22 Men who believed that the Bible condemned the use of wine and strong drink sometimes went even further and asserted that alcohol was inherently evil and that its use as a beverage was a sin.23 In taking this position, however, they were in effect ascribing evil to matter—a heresy long ago condemned by the Christian Church in the Manichaean sects. T o avoid this error, the Christian could not dogmatically assert that the Bible enjoined total abstinence or that drinking was a sin; he could only argue that the Christian had a moral duty to abstain. He could also safely contend that the principles of love and charity obliged him to forgo even the best things if their use offended or caused a weaker brother to stumble. This was in accord with St. Paul's counsel: "It is good neither to eat

12

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak." 2 4 The Christian could likewise argue that he was bound to give up liquor if it became a proximate occasion of mortal sin; indeed, since no one could know whether he would become a victim of drink, the Christian had an obligation not even to begin. The Christian, moreover, could claim that abstinence was necessary in order to avoid supporting the liquor traffic. Still other reasons could be invoked by devout men to justify total abstinence; for example, as an exercise of will power or penance.25 Once the evangelical Protestant churches had officially embraced total abstinence as an ideal of Christian conduct, they quite logically began to urge that the use of fermented wine at the Lord's Supper be abandoned and that pure unfermented grape juice be used instead. As in the case of personal abstinence, this was justified not on the ground that alcohol was evil per se, but that the church ought to avoid even the appearance of evil and should remove the slightest step toward stumbling and offense.26 T o change from wine to grape juice was a simple matter for the evangelical churches, since they looked upon the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as a memorial and regarded the elements of bread and wine as purely symbolic. By the turn of the century, the use of grape juice in these churches had become quite general. The sacramental churches—Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Protestant Episcopal—however, continued to use fermented wine in the celebration of Mass or Holy Communion.27 Although the evangelical Protestant churches often implied that drinking per se was wrong, they refrained from actually stating it. They did not hesitate, however, to condemn participation in the liquor traffic as a sin. For, unlike the individual drinker, the liquor seller incited others to drink, sometimes immoderately, and was directly responsible for the evils aris-

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

13

ing from the traffic. In the eyes of the evangelical churches, the liquor business was morally reprehensible and ought to be abolished.28 Said one reformer: When we come to consider a public institution like the traffic in intoxicating liquors, which fattens, not upon the ambitions and virtues of mankind, but upon its vices; which pumps into the body politic—without surcease night or day—disease, insanity, degeneracy, pauperism, lust, crime, corruption, pain, and woe,—an institution . . . which does this, and can produce no record of good—there is but one attitude that a State can consistently assume toward it, and that is its suppression . . . What a man eats and drinks is his own concern primarily; and any change which one may seek to effect in these habits of an individual must be left to reason and moral appeal. But what a man sets up business in, and keeps open house for, on our main thoroughfares, becomes public business, and may be suppressed in the interests of decency and good order.29 Such, then, were the reasons why the evangelical Protestant churches took up temperance reform and why they came to advocate total abstinence and prohibition. But there still remains the question: why did the temperance movement reach crusading proportions at certain times and languish at others? Although the moral, economic, social, and political aspects of the liquor question were sufficiently compelling to provide the reform with a faithful following at all times, it was only when special conditions existed to give the liquor problem unusual urgency that the temperance movement became an object of concern to the public at large. Such conditions arose with particular force during the early years of the nineteenth century and again during the early years of the twentieth century. And in each case the temperance revival coincided with a nation-wide reform movement. In the earlier period the rapid extension of the franchise to the laboring classes in the cities and to frontiersmen in the

14

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

West gave rise to the temperance movement. Since selfgovernment presupposed a virtuous and intelligent electorate, many middle-class citizens feared that the extension of the franchise to a turbulent and propertyless lower class would endanger sound government. They were especially fearful that if the lower classes continued to fall victim to drink in alarming numbers, as they seemed to be doing, they would soon become impoverished and corrupted and would eventually use their vote to attack property and destroy liberty. "These are the troops of the future Caesars," warned the Reverend Lyman Beecher, "by whose perverted suffrages our future elections may be swayed, and ultimately our liberties destroyed. They are the corps of irreligious and desperate men, who have something to hope, and nothing to fear, from revolution and blood." 30 Although the Republic, Beecher said, was the "freest, and is destined to become the greatest, and may become the happiest upon earth," the alarming increase of intemperance threatened to "dig the graves of our liberties—and entomb the last hope of enslaved nations . . ." 31 It was this threat to American institutions, as well as a sincere desire to save men's souls, that moved Beecher and his fellow churchmen to give so much of their energy to the great religious revivals that swept over the country at the time. The result was that evangelical Protestantism helped awaken the nation spiritually, tame the frontier, and create a new respect for life that promoted a number of humanitarian reforms, not the least significant of which was an organized and vigorous temperance movement. And by converting thousands to faith in Christianity, the revivals inculcated moral restraint and implanted those bourgeois virtues of industry, honesty, sobriety, and thrift that soon brought individual success and middle-class respectability. By means of revivals and reform, evangelical Protestantism served both its culture and its God. 32

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

15

Before the end of the nineteenth century the religious enthusiasm aroused by the earlier evangelical revivals had subsided; American Protestants, caught up in the general scramble for material success that marked the post-Civil War era, had become worldly, complacent, and conservative. Even those churches that had started out as sects of the poor, chiefly the Methodist and Baptist, had become solidly middle class and conservative. In the absence of any sweeping and continuing religious revival, evangelical Protestantism lost its earlier spiritual vitality and its inner compulsion to social reform, hardened morally into a narrow legalism, and preached a social ethic that sanctioned the most extreme dogmas of laissez-faire capitalism.33 Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of American business after the Civil War, the steady influx of millions of immigrants, the growth of cities, and recurring economic crises gave rise to circumstances that once again endangered the ideals of the middle class. On the one hand, there emerged an industrial plutocracy of great wealth and power that threatened the economic opportunity, political liberty, and social well-being of the rest of the community; on the other hand, there arose a new class of uprooted poor who threatened to modify, if not destroy, the existing economic system. Unlike the Jacksonian period, whose masses had been predominantly native-born, Protestant, and rural, this new lower class, though partly rural, was primarily industrial and urban and was composed mostly of non-Protestant Europeans by birth or parentage. The middle-class response to this double challenge from above and below was the Progressive Movement. As typical members of the middle-class community, Protestants once again joined in the general movement for local, state, and national reform, and again turned to the temperance movement as a means of helping solve social problems. During the Progressive Era, even more than in the earlier period,

16

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

Protestants came to regard the liquor question as one of major importance. This attitude was due primarily to the rise of the liquor industry after the Civil War. With its vast financial resources and its alliance with commercialized vice, government-favored business, and machine politicians, the liquor industry stood out as one of the most corrupt and predatory of all economic interests, a major obstacle to political reform, and a prime factor in the breakdown of honest government in the cities. Apart from any considerations of the moral, social, and economic consequences of the liquor traffic, churchmen could have felt compelled to attack the industry on political grounds alone. In addition to its conservatism, power, and corruption, the liquor business also provoked the hostility of Protestants for its part in creating and aggravating unrest among the lower classes. This was especially true in the cities where the saloon flourished and where the laboring classes were concentrated. "In our large cities," observed the Presbyterian Church's Committee on Temperance, "the controlling vote is that of the dangerous classes, who are readily dominated by the saloon. City government is 'boss government,' and the boss rules by the grace of the grog shop." 34 It was this dangerous element, this "drink-sodden, muddled and fuddled proletariat," 35 that raised the awesome specter of class conflict, industrial strife, and social unrest. "Our cities throb with an intense social fever that is ready to burst forth into raging mania, disorder and anarchy," asserted the Committee on Temperance of the Congregational Church. The "saloon continues to poison the blood in the veins of the towns, villages, and cities of this land . . . [and] to destroy men many times faster than the church can rescue them." 36 T o counter this threat, middle-class Protestants once again sought to evangelize the masses, to promote social reform, and to foster temperance.

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

17

In good evangelical tradition, many Protestants believed that the church, while fulfilling its mission to save men's souls, could best solve the social problem by generating another great religious revival. The new birth of private morality and brotherly love that would result, they felt, would lift the nation out of the morass of crime, corruption, and vice into which it was sinking; purify the cities; reclaim the masses whom the churches had alienated by their conservatism and bourgeois respectability; and reawaken Protestants to their responsibilities for social reform. But a religious revival, they believed, could only succeed if accompanied by a temperance revival, for drinking and the liquor traffic were making it increasingly difficult to win men to Christ. Indeed, some Protestants were persuaded that America would never experience another general religious awakening until the liquor traffic was wholly eradicated.37 It was this faith in temperance reform as the prerequisite to a successful revival and in revivalism as the solution to the social problem that accounts for so much of the Protestant zeal behind the temperance movement. Around 1900 some of the leading denominations began to appoint special committees to oversee evangelistic work. In 1906 the Reverend R. A. Torrey commenced a protracted revival campaign and was soon followed by the Reverend J. Wilbur Chapman, W. J. Dawson, Rodney (Gipsy) Smith, William (Billy) A. Sunday, and others.38 Of these, Billy Sunday was the most famous and the most effective in the crusade against liquor. Although a revivalist, Sunday was by no means indifferent to social reform and, in fact, he denounced all the evils of his day. He believed simply that permanent reform could only come through individual conversion, and that legislative remedies, unaccompanied by individual regeneration, would at best be only temporary.39 The "sworn, eternal, and uncompromising enemy of the liquor traffic," Billy Sun-

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PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

day was especially noted for his "booze sermon," which he preached on numerous occasions and used to persuade thousands of men to abstain and vote dry. In 1915, on one Sabbath day alone, two successive audiences of 15,000 men heard the sermon and at its close promised, with the help of God, to vote for prohibition.40 The experience of the early nineteenth century, however, was not to be repeated; despite all the efforts of the churches and the evangelists, no sweeping religious revival ensued. The largest attendance at revival meetings came from those who were already professing Christians; unlike the earlier awakening that had successfully tamed the West, the newer revivalism failed to reach and convert the "disinherited of the new frontier"—the city. 41 T o a large extent, this was because the new urban poor were recent arrivals from abroad and were non-Protestant in background; they were isolated by language, custom, and religion from any revivalistic appeal. Those that were unchurched, moreover, proved to be too hopelessly alienated from Christianity to respond to another religious revival; men who in the past might have responded to revivalism now tended to find their emotional outlet in Socialism and trade unionism.42 But though the evangelical Protestant churches failed to bring about a general religious revival, they enjoyed unprecedented success at promoting temperance reform itself. Before 1900 their official embracing of total abstinence and prohibition, their creation of temperance committees, and their attacks on the liquor traffic had made little headway against the pervading apathy of the Protestant rank and file; but the new century brought a more favorable climate.43 With the rise of social reform, Protestant church members began to pay more and more attention to the liquor question. This was clearly seen, for example, in the activities of the

T H E RELIGIOUS A R G U M E N T

19

Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. From an annual income of about $1,500 in 1900 and a yearly output of around one million pages of temperance literature, this church's temperance board increased its money intake to $52,000 by 1916 and its output of temperance literature to the equivalent of approximately 25 million pages.44 By the latter date the church's temperance board maintained a staff of ten, sponsored oratorical contests in Presbyterian colleges and seminaries, and supplied temperance literature not only to its own ministers, Sunday schools, young people's societies, and church members, but also to college and public libraries. It also published a temperance paper, The Amethyst, for pastors, Sunday school teachers, and other church workers.45 Moreover, the church's General Assembly, which had authority to decide all matters of doctrine and discipline and to bind its members through its annual resolutions, admonished Presbyterians to refrain from the use of liquor and to avoid any complicity in the liquor traffic.46 In 1914 it further tightened discipline by empowering local churches to expel not only those who were connected with the liquor traffic but also those who refused to resign from social clubs that sold liquor.47 In addition, the General Assembly passed official resolutions, sent delegates to testify before Congressional hearings, and petitioned Congress and the President in the interests of temperance legislation. In 1913 it came out officially in favor of a federal prohibition amendment.48 Because of the American tradition of separation of church and state, the Presbyterian Church could not, as an ecclesiastical body, enter politics directly; it was forced to rely, as in the past, on voluntary societies through which its members, as citizens, could unite to effect reform legislation. In the case of temperance, the church had depended largely on the American Temperance Society before the Civil War and on

20

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the Prohibition party and the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union after the Civil War. By 1900, however, the church was coming to rely increasingly on the AntiSaloon League for this purpose and thereafter repeatedly encouraged Presbyterians to back the league's efforts.49 In 1907 the church's General Assembly officially endorsed the league as a "sane, safe, and effective organization in the advancement of the great cause of temperance . . ." 50 Nearly all of the other evangelical Protestant denominations underwent the same experience. Some of them went further, however, and not only endorsed the Anti-Saloon League but entered into an organic relationship with it. Thus, many of the Methodist Episcopal Church's leading temperance officials were also high in the league's councils. Among these were such league stalwarts as Bishop Luther B. Wilson, the Reverend Purley A. Baker, the Reverend James K. Shields, William H. Anderson, Ernest H. Cherrington, Judge C. A. Pollack of North Dakota, and Governor J. Frank Hanley of Indiana.51 Because of this close relationship and the large number of league officials and state superintendents who were also Methodist ministers or laymen, the public naturally came to regard the league as a Methodist agency, while Methodists themselves came to view the league as "in a peculiar sense" representative of the cause of temperance reform. 52 The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was represented in the league's inner circles by the Reverend James Cannon, Jr., the Southern Baptist Convention by the Reverend A. J. Barton, the United Lutheran Church by the Reverend E. C. Dinwiddie, and the Congregational Church by the Reverend Howard H. Russell and Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler.53 This does not mean, however, that every one of the Protestant churches responded so enthusiastically to the prohibition drive. The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United

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21

States remained committed to moderation and strict license rather than total abstinence and prohibition; only in 1916 did it go further and urge its members to abstain from drinking at public functions and social gatherings and to support legislation to "repress" the liquor traffic.54 T w o other Protestant churches, the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America and the Evangelical Synodical Conference of North America, representing for the most part later waves of beer-drinking and conservative Germans, actually opposed the reform.66 But they were exceptions; most of the Protestant churches aligned themselves solidly behind the prohibition movement. One of the major concerns of the Protestant churches was to promote temperance work among their youth. This they did through Sunday-school lessons and through their own young people's societies or the interdenominational United Society of Christian Endeavor.66 After 1912 temperance work also received the support of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. Through its Commission on Temperance, organized that year, the Federal Council, representing 30 constituent denominations and 17 million communicants, devoted itself to the task of arousing public opinion and enlisting churchgoers in behalf of total abstinence and prohibition.57 Its most important effort in this direction was to coordinate and stimulate the work of existing denominational temperance committees and to encourage the formation of additional committees among its constituent church bodies. But the council's commission also conducted its own campaign of agitation and propaganda. From 1914 to 1916 it published and circulated a considerable quantity of temperance literature and used its staff and other special speakers to present the message throughout the country. 68

22

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

One of the commission's more notable achievements was its inauguration in early 1915 of a nation-wide campaign for total abstinence. Through the National Temperance Union, which it organized for this purpose, it sponsored a number of mass meetings in Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, and other cities, at which thousands of men took the pledge of total abstinence. At one meeting in Philadelphia alone, 16,000 men heard William Jennings Bryan speak, and of this number an estimated 12,000 took the pledge. Aided by an advisory committee of about 100 statesmen and leading citizens, the National Temperance Union also compiled instructive temperance information that emphasized the scientific and economic arguments for total abstinence. This information was made available in the form of literature, slides, and exhibits for the instruction of children, and it was disseminated among the foreign-speaking population of the cities and distributed to the social welfare and safety departments of municipalities, railroads, and industrial plants.59 At its quadrennial meeting in December 1916, the Federal Council of Churches declared, "total abstinence for the individual and prohibition for the state and nation is the path of wisdom and safety," and urged the adoption of a federal amendment.60 Early the following year the Federal Council greatly augmented its propaganda potential by agreeing to federate its Commission on Temperance with the National Temperance Society and Publication House, the oldest and foremost temperance publication agency in the country.®1 When, a few months later, the United States entered th£ European War, the Council's Commission on Temperance immediately stepped up its agitation and propaganda activities. It launched an intensive advertising campaign in newspapers and magazines to counter the arguments of the liquor forces, printed and circulated vast quantities of temperance literature

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

23

of a sort not duplicated by other temperance agencies, published four periodicals, including The National Advocate, and sent copies of the Reverend Charles Stelzle's book, Why Prohibition!, to labor leaders, members of Congress, and key government officials. It urged college and university classes and alumni associations to refrain from serving liquor at reunions and banquets, entreated society women to abstain from using or serving liquor at social functions, and sent out speakers to conduct numerous mass meetings and open forums. During the war years, the Commission on Temperance also carried on a "Strengthen America" campaign through the nation's press and cooperated with the United Committee on War Temperance Activities in the Army and N a v y to give men in uniform practical and scientific information about alcohol.62 In addition to revivalism and direct temperance measures, American Protestants also supported a practical program of social reform. Alongside the doctrine of individual salvation they placed the doctrine of social redemption through the application of Jesus' teaching to everyday problems, especially to the problems of industrialism, labor, and city life. This approach to social questions became known as the Social Gospel. Prior to 1900 the Social Gospel was preached by only a handful of clergymen, most of them theological as well as political liberals, but with the rise of the Progressive Movement the Social Gospel gradually found its way into the mainstream of orthodox American Protestantism. Most of the evangelical churches eventually created denominational commissions on social service and nearly all of them adopted the comprehensive Social Creed drawn up by the Federal Council of Churches' Commission on the Church and Social Service in 1912. This creed called for equal rights and justice for

24

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

all men, the protection of the family, the abolition of child labor, the regulation of the labor of women, the right of labor to organize, the elimination of poverty, and an equitable division of the product of industry. The creed stated that the liquor problem was inextricably bound up with the general problem of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, and called for the "protection of the individual and society from the social, economic, and moral waste of the liquor traffic." 63 That the Social Gospel was intensely concerned with the liquor problem can be seen in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, social Christianity's most influential spokesman. In Christianizing the Social Order, which appeared in 1912, Rauschenbusch declared that the conflict between capital and labor could only be resolved peacefully by regenerating American business and by bringing it into harmony with the ethical teachings of Jesus.64 American capitalism, he believed, was generally unchristian because of its selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility, and some businesses were particularly vicious, because they not only put profits above humanity but sold products that were actually harmful. The prime example of this, he felt, was the liquor industry. Interested only in expanding its market and increasing its sales, the liquor business never hesitated to break down any barrier of law or morals that sought to restrict its profits.85 "Alcohol is a spirit born of hell," Rauschenbusch asserted, but it is "merely a satellite and tool of a far greater devil, and that is Mammon." 66 It was difficult enough to wean a nation from the drink habit, he noted, but the task of reform was made unusually hard by the malignant and fighting power of the liquor industry.67 "The private interest that has invested its money in the wholesale and retail liquor business," he declared, "is seeking to fasten on an angry people a relic of barbarism which the awakened conscience and the scientific intellect of the world are combining to condemn." 68

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

25

Rauschenbusch also called attention to the evil effects of alcohol on labor. The worker who drank was a dangerous menace amidst the complicated machinery of modern industrial society. The liquor habit, he noted, also impaired the selfrestraint and good judgment of the worker in times of industrial conflict when sound judgment was most imperative. Nothing would increase the fighting capacity of labor and win the confidence of the churches more, Rauschenbusch believed, than for the workingman to give up the use of alcohol. In the interests of sobriety, he felt, trade unions should refuse to meet in any hall associated with a saloon. The churches should do their part by helping unions secure a labor temple in every city or by letting them meet in church buildings.69 The Reverend Josiah Strong was another leading social gospeler who advocated temperance reform. From 1898 to his death in 1916, Strong served as head of the American Institute of Social Service, the outstanding religious agency devoted to collecting sociological data for reform purposes, and, with the assistance of the Reverend W . D. P. Bliss, edited its monthly magazine, The Gospel of the Kingdom, first published in 1908. Designed as a "course of study on living social problems in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ," The Gospel of the Kingdom presented a series of Sunday-school lessons that attained the widest circulation of any material published in the interest of social Christianity.70 In two separate lessons, Strong's magazine stated the case for total abstinence and prohibition in social gospel terms.71 In its first lesson, the magazine noted how industrialism tended to aggravate the liquor problem. For one thing, the exhausting nature of industrial work created an artificial desire for stimulants and caused the laborer to turn to alcohol. At the same time industrialism made it easier to get a drink: in a rural society one had to go out of his way to find a saloon, but in a manufacturing community "one must usually go out of his

26

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

way to avoid it." 72 Furthermore, the relatively high wages of American workers made it possible for more of them to buy drink and to acquire the liquor habit before they had developed the more refined tastes of a higher civilization. Industrialism, moreover, was making it increasingly dangerous for Americans to drink, for, as a result of the accelerating tempo of American life and the intensification of competition, they were becoming the most nervous people in the world and increasingly responsive to every stimulant. T o a man of sensitive nervous organization, a "glass of spirits is like the cut of a whip to a blooded horse. The nerves tingle and leap. The reaction is proportionately great, and the resulting depression clamors for further stimulus." 73 And, finally, the magazine argued, modern industrialism aggravated the social consequences of drink; a drunken farmer injured only himself and his family, but a drunken worker might wreck a mill or a passenger train.74 In analyzing the causes of intemperance, The Gospel of the Kingdom reflected the Social Gospel's belief that environmental factors shape human conduct. Among the causes of intemperance, it noted, were poor food, bad working conditions, and the saloon, the "poor man's club." Urban congestion was also a cause: "So long as children are born in crowded tenements, almost cradled in the gutter, with no playground but the sidewalk, and with the street for their main school, they are very likely to take a post-graduate course in the saloon." 76 Yet another cause of intemperance was poverty. Although intemperance was often the cause of poverty, the reverse, the magazine asserted, was more often the case. The solution for intemperance, therefore, was to remove the environmental factors that caused it and to create conditions favorable to sobriety. This was to be done, the magazine believed, by providing substitutes for the saloon, such as

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

27

reading rooms and workingmen's clubs, and by supporting social reforms that would improve the living and working conditions of the laboring classes in general.79 But sobriety, the magazine declared, was also to be advanced by the more direct methods of moral suasion and legislation.77 Indeed, in its second temperance lesson, published in 1914, the magazine devoted itself almost exclusively to the legislative remedy. Noting that public opinion was becoming thoroughly aroused against the liquor traffic and was rapidly turning to prohibition, it attributed this to the awakening sense of democracy and to the new and broader understanding of the scope of government: "Personal L i b e r t y " is at last an uncrowned, dethroned king, with no one to do him reverence. T h e social consciousness is so far developed, and is becoming so autocratic, that institutions and governments must give heed to its mandate and shape their life accordingly. W e are no longer frightened b y that ancient bogy— "paternalism in government." W e affirm boldly, it is the business of government to be just that—paternal . . . Nothing human can be foreign to a true government.78

The Reverend Charles Stelzle was another social gospeler who supported prohibition. Brought up in poverty in N e w York City's lower East Side, Stelzle worked for several years as a machinist before he entered the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to prepare for the ministry. After a brief period at the Moody Institute, Stelzle became a lay preacher and devoted himself to the task of bringing Christianity to the city poor, not only by preaching the "pure Gospel" of salvation but also by engaging in social service and by working for social reform. Stelzle became convinced that most workingmen were not antagonistic to religion but merely indifferent and could be reclaimed if the church would only become interested in their welfare and deal with them on a basis of

28

PROHIBITION A N D THE PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

equality and justice. After several years as a lay preacher, Stelzle was ordained a minister of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.Α., and in 1903 was made the secretary of that denomination's newly established Department of Church and Labor— the first church agency to pursue an aggressive social gospel campaign under the leadership of a paid secretary.79 As a result of Stelzle's efforts, the Department of Church and Labor rapidly developed a far-reaching program of social service, mainly among industrial workers but also among rural laborers and immigrants. Stelzle remained with the Department of Church and Labor until 1913, when growing opposition from conservatives within the Church caused him to resign.80 In addition to this work, Stelzle was also active with the Commission on the Church and Social Service of the Federal Council of Churches and during 1911 led the Social Service Department of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, a laymen's movement that did much to influence the churches in favor of the Social Gospel. 81 On the basis of sociological investigations undertaken during his service with the Presbyterian Church, Stelzle concluded that the liquor problem was intimately related to other social and economic questions and that it was primarily a city and workingman's problem, since it was in the great urbanindustrial centers that most saloons were to be found and that most liquor was consumed. Both liquor-drinking and the liquor traffic, he believed, were diametrically opposed to every ideal of organized labor—higher wages, better jobs, greater efficiency, education, the elevation of womanhood, and the preservation of the home. Using data from his surveys, Stelzle, through speeches, articles, and especially through his book, Why Prohibition!, undertook to convince the American workingman of the soundness of the arguments for total abstinence and prohibition. In the final analysis, Stelzle be-

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

29

lieved, the workingman held the key to the liquor question.82 T h e Social Gospel's concern with the liquor problem makes clear that the prohibition movement was not simply a phenomenon of rural Protestantism but was also a product of urban Christianity and was adopted as one remedy for the problems created by industrialism, labor, and the growth of the cities. That the reform had an urban as well as a rural basis is borne out by an examination of the rural-urban distribution of church membership. According to the Census of Religious Bodies of 1906, the most highly urbanized of all the religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Jews, were the Christian Scientists, with 82.6 per cent of their members residing in cities of 25,000 or more; yet they were among the firmest advocates of total abstinence and prohibition. 83 T h e Unitarians, with 46.6 per cent of their members living in cities of over 25,000, also showed a degree of urbanization well above the national average, and they, too, provided strong support for the reform. 84 T h e Protestant denominations whose membership distribution most closely approximated that of the population in general were the Congregational and Presbyterian churches, with 31.1 per cent and 27.5 per cent, respectively, living in cities of 25,000 or more, and both of them had always been in the vanguard of the reform. 85 N o r should it be overlooked that the more rural denominations, chiefly the Methodist and Baptist, also had sizable contingents in the principal cities. T h e prohibition movement, in short, had an urban as well as a rural foundation, a fact which partly accounts for its great strength and its success in eventually drying up some of the larger cites prior to the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment. T h e essential fact about the prohibition movement is not that it was either rural or urban, but that it was a middle-class reform that won the support of middle-class Protestants in

30

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

both country and city. There was little in the nature of country life to make rural Protestants any more abstemious than their urban counterparts. Indeed, the American farmer had been notoriously fond of hard liquor in the days before the evangelical revivals and the beginning of the temperance movement, and the same was still true of the twentieth century English farmer. Nor, on the other hand, was there anything inherent in city life to prevent urban Protestants from supporting a movement for total abstinence and prohibition. Although the city, to be sure, did afford greater opportunities to drink and fostered a more worldly and tolerant attitude toward private morality, prudential considerations could always become sufficiently strong to cause urban Protestants to give up drink and to embrace prohibition. Although Methodism flourished most in the United States as a frontier faith, it had, in fact, begun as a sect of the urban poor, just as in England, where it had been strikingly successful in stemming intemperance among the industrial proletariat.86 In sum, more important than any differences between country and city life was the one great factor that most Americans shared in common—a middle-class faith with its historic source in a fusion of free enterprise capitalism, evangelical Protestantism, and political democracy. As a characteristic expression of this middle-class faith, prohibition secured a firmer lodging in a rapidly industrializing America than it had in a more rural America. The essentially middle-class nature of the American temperance movement is thrown into sharp relief by the attitude of many Roman Catholic reformers toward their coreligionists who, coming from a foreign tradition and still largely unassimilated, remained outside American middle-class culture. Believing that the Roman Catholic Church could never evangelize America unless it won the respect of the non-Catholic

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31

community, these reformers sought to hasten the assimilation or "Americanization" of the large body of Catholic immigrants into middle-class society. The Catholic Church, they believed, must instill in its members such virtues as industry, honesty, sobriety, and patriotism, or forfeit the respect of nonCatholics, alienating them permanently from the Church. In the eyes of these reformers, intemperance was an important factor in preventing Catholics from becoming prosperous, successful, and socially acceptable.87 T h e y thus urged the cause of total abstinence and, to foster it among their fellows, supported the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, founded in 1872 and twice commended by the Pope for its work. 88 In line with Pope Leo XIII's counsel that priests should set an example to their flocks by abstaining, a growing number of seminarians and priests also joined the ranks of the total abstainers. This led in 1903 to the formation of the Priests' Total Abstinence League of America. 89 Catholics also fostered abstinence among their young through scientific temperance instruction in their parochial schools and through the practice of administering a total abstinence pledge to children at confirmation and at first communion.90 In addition to advocating total abstinence, some Catholics joined forces with their Protestant compatriots in the crusade for prohibition. Bishop John J . Keane attended the AntiSaloon League's founding convention in 1895, and a Catholic priest regularly served as one of the league's vice presidents: Archbishop John Ireland from 1896 to 1901, Father James M. Cleary from 1901 to 1913, and Father John J . Curran after 1913. Catholic clergymen, including Father Keane, Bishop John A . Watterson, Father Cleary, and Father Curran, also addressed the league's conventions from time to time. 91 So, too, did Catholic laymen. A t the league's convention in 1916, for example, Patrick H. Callahan, a prominent member of the

32

PROHIBITION AND T H E PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

Knights of Columbus, argued that Catholics ought to support the prohibition movement in order to eliminate a source of tension between themselves and Protestants. The 350,000 members of the Knights of Columbus, he noted, were associating themselves with the league and were helping to bring the nation's foreign born up to a "high ideal" of citizenship and to "do things according to the American sense of decency." 92 Although it never officially endorsed prohibition, the C.T.A.U. cooperated with the Anti-Saloon League and often congratulated it and other temperance organizations for achieving their goals.93 Some of the more zealous Catholics, notably Father Curran and Father George Zürcher, went even further and established their own prohibitionist society, the Catholic Prohibition League of America. Father Zürcher, the most zealous of all the priests, was also influential in the formation in 1919 of the Catholic Clergy Prohibition League of America, serving as both its president and as editor of its official organ, Catholics and Prohibition.6* Most Roman Catholics, however, opposed prohibition and became especially hostile after the reform began to reach the larger cities where Catholic strength was concentrated. And when a few states enacted prohibition laws that failed to make the usual exception for sacramental wine, the Church itself, viewing this as an unwarranted interference with its right to use fermented wine in the celebration of Mass, brought the weight of its authority to bear on Catholics to oppose and resist such laws.95 A similar dislike of prohibition was felt by most American Jews. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, for example, representing the Reform wing of American Judaism, denounced prohibition in 1914 as a movement "born of fanaticism." 96 The American religious community, therefore, comprising

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33

about 40 per cent of the total population, was divided over prohibition. O n the one side were most Protestants led by the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Congregational churches; on the other side were most Roman Catholics and Jews. 97 In their attitude toward prohibition and progressivism, the leaders of the Anti-Saloon League were fairly typical of middle-class Protestants. Prior to the turn of the century, league speeches contained little to distinguish them from dozens of other temperance addresses, but, with the rise of the Progressive Movement, they soon began to reflect the growing spirit of optimism and confidence. T h e Reverend Howard H . Russell, for example, at the league's convention in 1905, rejoiced in the growing revival of national righteousness, in the triumph of municipal and state reform, in the challenge to commercial methods and standards, and in the personality of Theodore Roosevelt—that "leader of heroic mould, of absolute honesty of character and purity of life, that foremost man of this world . . . " 98 T h e United States, Russell declared, was in the midst of a "great onward and upward movement," in which the league was playing an important part by mobilizing the people against the liquor traffic. Already signs of a new day were at hand: Out of darkness of night The world rolls into the light It is daybreak everywhere! 99 Although, as a nonpartisan pressure group, the league could not commit itself to other reforms without destroying its effectiveness, 100 its members, in their private capacity, could, and, it seems reasonable to suppose, did, support progressive measures to much the same extent as other middle-class Protestants. T h e Reverend Purley A . Baker, for example, at the league's convention in 1909, characterized the labor movement

34

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

as fundamentally a holy crusade for justice and a square deal— an attempt to correct a great wrong. 101 The degree to which the league's members were caught up by the spirit of progressivism was also evident at their convention at Atlantic City in 1915. Reporting on the week-long gathering, which attracted 10,000 men and women, one observer noted that the same ideal of social service and the same fighting hymns of Christianity that had distinguished the Progressive party campaign of 1912 had also characterized the league convention.102 The progressive spirit also affected other prohibition organizations. Thus, the Prohibition party platform, which had been confined to the single issue of prohibition in 1900, became increasingly progressive after 1904. 103 As an expression of the common idealism that inspired both progressivism and prohibition, no better example could be cited than the Reverend Charles F. Aked: W e are spending our lives, many of us, in the effort to make the world a little better and brighter for those that shall come after us . . . W e are tired of poverty, of squalor, of ignorance and dullness and stupidity, of the wretchedness of women and the degradation of men. Our hearts bleed when w e look upon the misery of child life . . . W e want to change all this. W e want to open out life and liberty to all the sons of men. W e want to make possible for all a life in the whole, the good and the beautiful . . . A n d the common sale of intoxicating liquors renders our w o r k a thousand times more difficult . . , 1 0 4

In addition to a concern for otherwordly salvation and a desire to realize the American dream of life, liberty, and happiness, one other element entered into Protestant thought and provided prohibition with its full driving force. This was American Protestantism's expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth—the millennial hope. Throughout its first two centuries, American Protestantism had emphasized the Kingdom of God as the reign of God within men's hearts.

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35

But as a result of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century and the evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century, convincing proof to many churchmen of divine intervention in American history, the kingdom idea came increasingly to mean the coming of God's Kingdom on earth and the ushering in of a millennium of universal peace, righteousness, and brotherhood. As it came to be interpreted by the leading evangelical churches, this golden age was not to be inaugurated apocalyptically or catastrophically with the sudden and unannounced second return of Christ to earth, but was to come gradually and unspectacularly through the continuing spread of the Gospel and the eventual conversion of all the world to the Christian faith. The millennial kingdom was to be the spiritual rather than the literal reign of Christ on earth; yet it was to be of this world and visible in the form of a drastically transformed and redeemed social order. But although it was to be a time of ideal peace and blessedness, the millennial age was not to be a period of complete earthly perfection, for evil would never be wholly eradicated, and, indeed, would break out with renewed vigor at the very end, resulting in a brief period of apostasy and a terrible conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Then would occur the second Coming of Christ, personally and visibly, in power and in glory, followed by the general resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and eternity in heaven or hell. Thus, to nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism, history was viewed as a progressive advance toward the Kingdom of God and toward final judgment and fulfillment at Christ's second Advent. As this view became dominant, American Protestants turned increasingly from the expectation of heavenly bliss to the hope of a future heaven on earth.105 With the rise of the Progressive Movement, this doctrine of the coming kingdom gained new vitality and became the

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PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE M O V E M E N T

dominant and distinctive feature of the new Social Gospel. Except for a small group of churchmen who, as premillennialists, believed that the world was fundamentally and hopelessly evil and would grow steadily worse until Christ returned to earth to inaugurate his millennial reign, most Protestants were persuaded that the Kingdom of God was coming in a gradual manner and would be established on earth as a result of human efforts.106 The spread of democracy and religious liberty; the advance in science, technology, and creature comforts; the rapid expansion of Christianity to Asia and Africa; the broadening of intellectual horizons; and the rise of a new social conscience as manifested in private and public philanthropy, humanitarian movements, and in a broad range of political, economic, and social reforms—all of these were regarded as evidence of the "coming of Jesus Christ into the world and the development of his Kingdom." 107 Under the "guidance and uplift of the Spirit of God," declared one clergyman, "the world moves forward and grows upward . . . God is in his heaven, and all will yet be right with his world." 108 And as one religious liberal expressed it: The course of history exhibits one long process of evolving struggle by which humanity as a whole rises constantly higher in the scale of civilization and attainment, bettering its condition from time to time through its greater skill and industry. Viewed in the long perspective of the ages, man's career has been one of actual ascent. Instead of growing worse the world is found to be growing constantly better.109 Inspired by this vision of the future, Protestants threw themselves into the work of reform. And, to the average Protestant, nothing seemed to be more obstructive of the coming kingdom than drunkenness and the liquor traffic. "All denominations of Christians," said one reformer, "profess to believe that sometime in the coming future the bright morning

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37

of the millennium will dawn upon this sin-cursed and rumsoaked world. But no one . . . ever dreamed of such an event as a possibility while the liquor traffic occupies the seats of power, which it now does." 110 Dynamic faith in the coming kingdom was also expressed by Ernest H . Cherrington at the Anti-Saloon League convention in 1916: The great central value of every religion . . . has consisted in the ability of that religion to alleviate human suffering, to relieve human ills, to do away with human sorrows and heartaches, to create human happiness, to right human wrongs, and to establish not only yonder in the Heavens, but here on earth among men, God's real Kingdom of Righteousness. The first positive, vital mission of the Church does not consist merely in the selfish desire upon the part of men and women to get to Heaven and save their own souls. It consists, rather, in the larger, higher, nobler desire and effort to bring something of Heaven to this old earth and to help brighten the dark places of this world. 111 This evangelical belief in the coming kingdom was the religious counterpart of the American doctrine of progress. But present in the kingdom idea was also a Protestant version of the doctrine of America's mission and America's destiny. American Protestantism had always contained a Messianic strain that had early found expression in the Puritan view of themselves as a chosen people, in the providence of God destined to play an exceptional role. With the Great Awakening and the nineteenth century revivals and, again, in the Progressive Movement, this Messianism reflected itself in the growing conviction that, as a result of divine favor and the remarkable progress of democracy and humanitarian reform, the Kingdom of God was actually coming to the United States, that it would naturally embody American ideals and institutions, and that it was therefore America's mission to spread these ideals and institutions abroad so that the Kingdom could be established throughout the world. American Protes-

3 8

PROHIBITION AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

tants were accordingly not content merely to work for the Kingdom of G o d in America, but felt compelled to assist in the reformation of the rest of the world also. 1 1 2 This sense of mission found expression in a number of reforms, but nowhere more clearly than in the prohibition movement. Thus, in an impassioned address to the Anti-Saloon League's convention in Washington, D.C., in 1917, the Reverend Sam Small promised that if the nation were true to its faith, "then you and I may proudly expect to see this America of ours, victorious and Christianized, become not only the savior but the model and the monitor of the reconstructed civilization of the world in the future." (Applause.) 1 1 3 Having abolished the liquor traffic, Small continued, the American people will put that flag, absolutely stainless of this sin against God and against humanity, into the hands of Freedom on her great Capitolian pedestal yonder, and tell her to signal to God, upon His Throne that the land of Washington and Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee and Woodrow Wilson, has gone "bone-dry" to stay dry forever! (Applause and shouting.) Then the dome of that great capitol up yonder as it springs into the moonlit heavens like an artist's dream, will overshadow the fountain-head of the liberties of all mankind so that hereafter they shall know no king and no crown, no throne and no slave anywhere upon the planet; and the monument of Washington yonder, like the forefinger of Almighty God with its mighty daily shadow will sweep the dial plate of time as it counts off the ages of a reconstructed, civilized Christianized world—a new world of which the United States of America will be the leader, through which God will say "Well done" to all nations that live in Holiness before Him and do justice, everyone with his neighbor! (Applause and shouting.) 114

II

Tlie Scientific and Social Arguments

E x c e p t for their faith in religion, Protestant church members were scarcely to be distinguished from other middleclass Americans in their political, economic, and social beliefs. T h e y supported the temperance revival after 1900 for most of the same reasons that nonchurchgoers did. Although the purely religious motive was a powerful stimulus to temperance reform, it alone would not have sufficed to jolt most middle-class Americans into action. It was rather the prudential reasons—scientific, social, economic, and political—that aroused churchgoers and nonchurchgoers alike to a renewed interest. The reformers realized this and in their propaganda concentrated almost exclusively on the worldly rather than the religious aspects of the liquor question. The same was true of the many articles on the liquor problem that appeared in the commercial magazines and newspapers of the time—a body of writings that tended to confirm the main arguments of temperance propaganda and that played a vital role in creating temperance sentiment outside the churches. The social aspects of the liquor problem had always figured prominently in temperance reform, but never more so than during the Progressive Era. For, with the great social awakening that occurred after 1900, welfare workers, social scientists, and other middle-class Americans became concerned as never

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before with the problems of disease, crime, poverty, vice, and suffering, and the extent to which these were caused by alcohol. What gave the liquor problem unusual urgency, however, was the rapid spread of new scientific data concerning the physiological effects of alcohol, the results of which convinced thousands of Americans that even moderate drinking was harmful to the human system and that total abstinence was the only wise course to follow. T o a generation of Americans that was coming to place more and more of its faith in science, the scientific argument was probably more important than the religious one in promoting temperance reform. 1 Prior to i860 there had been little scientific research into the effect of alcohol on the human body. What was commonly known about the subject was based on a few experiments and on popular tradition. Alcohol was everywhere regarded as a stimulant; it was used by manual workers as an aid to muscular activity, was valued by many as a promoter of mental effort, and was commonly prescribed by physicians as a therapeutic, especially in cases of heart failure, debility, and certain kinds of disease.2 Alcohol was also popularly believed to create and sustain bodily warmth, and was frequently used during cold weather for that purpose. Alcohol, moreover, was widely held to be a food; scientific investigation had shown that, like ordinary foods, it was burned or oxidized in the body and liberated heat and energy.3 Although none of these ideas was conducive to total abstinence, it was the doctrine that alcohol was a food which temperance reformers found particularly pernicious and which they blamed for much of the popular reaction against total abstinence after the Civil War. 4 During the last half of the nineteenth century, however, and especially after 1890, scientific interest in the physiological effects of alcohol increased greatly and resulted in numerous experiments that provided more accurate knowledge of the

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subject. The first myth to be exploded was that alcohol warmed the body. In 1866 Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, a famous English physician, reporting on the results of his investigations, declared that instead of warming the body, alcohol actually lowered bodily temperature. The sensation of warmth that accompanied a drink was illusory; what happened, he observed, was that alcohol paralyzed the nerves controlling the blood vessels of the body, causing the latter to dilate and allow more blood to reach the surface of the body, where it rapidly cooled. The flow of blood to the surface, though it gave a temporary feeling of warmth, actually caused the entire body to lose heat. Richardson's conclusions were supported by the practical experience of men who worked in cold climates, especially Arctic explorers who had found that to drink liquor on an expedition was to court death.5 More important than Richardson's findings was the discovery that alcohol was not a stimulant but a depressant. The reversal of this time-honored belief was the result of the pioneering work of Professor Emil Kraepelin of the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich. On the basis of extensive laboratory experiments, the results of which were published in 1892, Kraepelin concluded that alcohol, instead of stimulating the brain and nervous system, acted as an anesthetic or narcotic. This finding was especially significant because Kraepelin had used very small quantities of alcohol in his experiments, usually about an ounce diluted with water—less than the amount consumed by most moderate drinkers at mealtime. There had never been any question about the depressant action of large doses of alcohol; what Kraepelin's experiments showed was that even small quantities of alcohol depressed the brain and nervous system.6 Continued investigation by scientists over the next dozen years, especially by Kraepelin and his pupils in Germany, but

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also by scientists in France, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States, threw much additional light on the narcotic action of alcohol on the central nervous system. These experiments showed that the toxic action of alcohol exerted a most pronounced influence on the brain, striking first at the higher centers and progressing downward to lower and less complex areas of the brain. Small amounts of alcohol, the experiments revealed, immediately depressed the more involved mental processes of apprehension, memory, association of ideas, and judgment—and eventually the more elementary motor reactions as well.7 Small amounts of alcohol, moreover, were found to depress muscular activity. Contrary to popular belief, alcohol did not enable a person to do more work, nor did it stimulate a tired person to new exertions. Instead, after initially strengthening the muscles, it soon paralyzed the nerves controlling the muscles and seriously diminished a person's capacity to do physical work. 8 As one investigator concluded: Both science and the experience of life have exploded the pernicious theory that alcohol gives any persistent increase of muscular power. The disappearance of this universal error will greatly reduce the consumption of alcohol among laboring men. It is well understood by all who control armies or large bodies of men engaged in physical labor, that alcohol and effective work are incompatible.9 Scientific investigation further revealed that small quantities of alcohol did not stimulate the circulatory system as physicians had long supposed. The acceleration of heart action that followed the ingestion of small amounts of alcohol was not due to the direct stimulation of the heart muscle but to the partial paralysis and depression of the nerve centers that controlled the heart. Taken in large quantities, however, alcohol did directly and powerfully depress the heart.10

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But whereas small amounts of alcohol were found to depress mental activity, muscular work, and the nerve centers that governed the heart, they were found to stimulate the flow of the digestive juices. When consumed in immoderate quantities, however, alcohol proved to interfere seriously with digestion and to harm the stomach. 11 The vulnerability of the brain and nervous system to alcohol was underscored by a number of investigations into the relationship between alcohol and insanity. In 1896 the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that of 1,836 cases of mental disease investigated, 20.86 per cent owed their plight to the influence of liquor. A similar survey by the American Medico-Psychological Association, covering 5,145 cases in 117 state hospitals, placed the number at 24.08 per cent. 12 Subsequent studies corroborated these figures. In 1908, for example, an investigation of patients in a Long Island asylum showed that alcohol was the sole cause of insanity in 14.4 per cent of the cases and the exciting cause in another 14.4 per cent of the cases. 13 Thus, according to available statistics, about one-fourth of the cases of insanity in the United States were directly or indirectly due to the influence of strong drink. Although alcohol had its most pronounced physiological effect on the central nervous system, investigation showed that it also had important effects on various other organs of the body. When habitually used to excess, alcohol was believed to cause chronic catarrhal inflammation of the stomach, cirrhosis of the liver, Bright's disease, and heart disease.14 The continued use of alcohol, moreover, was found to lower the resistance of the body to many infectious diseases, to aggravate the severity of disease when once contracted, and to lessen the chances of recovery. 1 5 Although the intemperate use of alcohol was generally held to be an important factor in disease, mounting evidence

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seemed to show that even moderate drinking might cause liver, kidney, and heart diseases. There was no positive proof of this, but growing knowledge of the pathological effects of the regular and continued use of alcohol, together with increasing knowledge of the narcotic effect of small quantities of alcohol on the nervous system, led some scientists and physicians to lower radically their standard of what constituted a maximum safe drink of alcohol—that is, the amount that could be habitually taken without causing harmful results of any kind.18 In addition to throwing new light on the role of alcohol in insanity and disease, scientists also gathered evidence indicating that inebriety in parents was a cause of physical, mental, and moral degeneracy in children, and that alcohol might therefore be a racial poison. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of studies were made of the relationship between alcoholism and heredity and the conclusion was reached that, although the appetite for drink itself was not transmittable to offspring, parental inebriety, especially in the mother, was frequently responsible for the child's inheriting a defective mental and physical organism that later led to intemperance. Such deterioration in the offspring was thought to be the result of alcohol damaging the germ plasm and weakening the mother's body during pregnancy. 17 Parental alcoholism was generally believed to be a responsible factor in four classes of mental deterioration in children: idiocy and imbecility, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, and less severe mental deficiency. One study of defective children in the New York area concluded that parental alcoholism was a cause of idiocy and imbecility in about 5 per cent of the cases.18 Other studies showed that of the 160,000 epileptics in the United States, 32,000, or 20 per cent, owed their affliction to the intemperance of parents.19 Another study of 20,147

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New York school children found that 53 per cent of those with drinking parents were mentally retarded, whereas only 10 per cent of those with abstaining parents were backward.20 Still another study showed that of 57 children produced by 10 alcoholic families, 10 were deformed, 6 were idiotic, 6 were epileptic or choreic, 25 were nonviable, and 10 were normal. Thus, about 82 per cent were defective and about 17 per cent were normal. Of 61 children produced by 10 nonalcoholic families, however, 88.5 per cent were normal.21 These studies, of course, involved only intemperate drinking. Whether small amounts of alcohol affected the germ plasm and caused degeneracy in children was not known. But in light of the new knowledge that small quantities of alcohol depressed the nervous system, some authorities believed that it was reasonable to assume that it did.22 As one physician asked, "Until the degree of this influence in man is determined, which should properly receive the benefit of the doubtalcohol or the baby?" 23 Although scientific investigation confirmed the results of earlier experiments that alcohol, like other foods, was oxidized in the body, the evidence that small quantities paralyzed the brain and nerves and might be an important factor in insanity, disease, and heredity more than offset any value it may have had as a food. Alcohol, to be sure, had always been regarded as only a partial food, since it could not build or repair tissues, could not be stored in the body for future use, and injured the body when consumed in excessive quantities.24 Some authorities, indeed, even insisted that alcohol was not properly to be classified as a food at all.25 Now, however, a few scientists, including several of the most prominent European physiologists, went further and declared that alcohol, when taken in small quantities, was not only not a food but was a narcotic poison; that is, a substance which, when taken into the body in relatively small amounts, caused disturbances in any bodily

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function. T o label alcohol as universally a poison was something new under the sun. Most scientists, however, believed that on the basis of existing evidence it was incorrect to designate alcohol as always and everywhere a poison. All poisons, they observed, could be taken in certain quantities without demonstrable injury to the body.27 Up to a point, they asserted, alcohol could be consumed without any untoward effects; only beyond that point did it become harmful. But what was that point? Although the answer depended to some extent on the individual's bodily condition, the quantity taken, and the rate at which consumed, they concluded that, on the basis of Kraepelin's and other experiments, the maximum safe amount was the alcoholic equivalent of two to four glasses of beer a day.28 This amount, of course, was frequently exceeded in actual practice. What had once been considered moderate drinking, therefore, was now regarded as excessive. Science, in short, had made out a practical case for almost total abstinence. The scientific argument against moderate drinking ultimately proved to be of decisive importance in changing the public attitude toward liquor. The first groups to be affected by the new knowledge were the scientists themselves. On the basis of their own experiments, such outstanding European psychologists and physiologists as August Forel, Gustav von Bunge, and Emil Kraepelin changed the habits of a lifetime and became total abstainers.29 Alcohol, said Kraepelin, "is leading civilized humanity on the path of degeneracy." 30 By the turn of the century, scientists generally were becoming increasingly aware of the evidence against alcohol as a result of articles and reviews by their colleagues in professional journals, personal contact and study abroad, and the biennial meetings of the International Congress Against Alcoholism.31 As the new knowledge spread, a radical change also occurred in the medical attitude toward alcohol. Physicians

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began to abandon the practice of prescribing alcohol as a stimulant and as a therapeutic in the treatment of disease.32 The amount of alcohol used in hospitals steadily declined. The Massachusetts General Hospital, for example, spent $3,002 for alcohol in 1899, but only $738 in 1906. 33 Other hospitals in leading cities made similar reductions.34 B y 1915 doctors had so generally reduced using alcohol in medical practice that the committee in charge of the United States Pharmacopoeia voted to remove whiskey and brandy from the list of authoritative medicinal drugs.35 The reversal of medical opinion was further reflected in official action taken at professional conventions. In 1914 psychiatrists and neurologists meeting in Chicago adopted a resolution declaring that alcohol was a "definite poison to the brain and other tissue" and was responsible for a large amount of mental, moral, and physical degeneracy. The resolution condemned the use of alcoholic beverages, recommended that state legislatures ban their use, and urged the medical profession to take the lead in securing prohibitory legislation.36 Four years later the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association unanimously passed a similar resolution: Whereas we believe that the use of alcohol is detrimental to the human economy and Whereas its use in therapeutics as a tonic or stimulant or for food has no scientific value: Therefore be it Resolved, That the American Medical Association is opposed to the use of alcohol as a beverage; and be it Resolved further, That the use of alcohol as a therapeutic agent should be further discouraged.37 At this same convention, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, president of the A.M.A., expressed his conviction that the medical profession would welcome national prohibition.88

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In popularizing the new scientific evidence, the temperance organizations naturally played an important role, and, as might have been expected, were quick to seize upon the new data as sanction for total abstinence and prohibition. T o indoctrinate the public, they continued to rely heavily upon compulsory scientific temperance instruction in the public schools, a program that had long been the special province of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. As the results of European and American scientific experiments became known, Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, national superintendent of the W.C.T.U.'s Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, saw to it that public school textbooks in physiology were revised to include the new ideas.39 Much to the chagrin of the reformers, however, temperance instruction came under sharp attack about 1900 from certain American scientists and educators who charged that the school hygiene texts, which had to be officially endorsed by the W.C.T.U. in order to find a market and publisher, contained inaccuracies, distortions, and exaggerations, and that the methods of teaching scientific temperance, which were prescribed by state laws, were pedagogically unsound.40 This attack became particularly strong after a report by the Committee of Fifty became known. The Committee of Fifty was an organization of prominent men from all walks of life who had banded together in 1893 for the purpose of studying the liquor problem and gathering objective evidence that would serve as a basis for intelligent private and public action. Working through four subcommittees, the Committee of Fifty investigated the economic, social, political, and physiological aspects of the question and reported its findings in a series of volumes published between 1897 and 1903. 41 The last to appear were the two volumes entitled The Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem,

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and it was the first of those that criticized the W.C.T.U.'s program of temperance instruction. This it did on both scientific and pedagogical grounds. On scientific grounds the Committee of Fifty criticized the W.C.T.U.-endorsed hygiene textbooks for two reasons: for denying that alcohol is a food, and for asserting that it is a poison always injurious to the body. On the first point the W.C.T.U. took sharp issue. It maintained that children ought not to be taught that alcohol is a food merely because it is oxidized in the body, since in other respects, particularly in its drug action, alcohol is not a food and can do positive harm. Children could hardly be expected to understand the meaning of food in any other than its popular, wholesome sense.42 On the second point the W.C.T.U. was more vulnerable. By such unqualified assertions as, "Alcohol is a colorless liquid poison," the school hygiene texts conveyed the impression that alcohol is always a poison and always harmful to the body. 43 This is not true, of course, but by constant repetition of the word "poison" and by similar exaggerations, the W.C.T.U.-approved textbooks seemed calculated to frighten children into total abstinence.44 The committee's report also scored temperance instruction for violating principles of sound pedagogy. For one thing, the committee asserted, it is impossible to teach physiology and pathology to very young children; such instruction ought to be given only in the higher grades. Furthermore, the committee noted, scientific temperance laws and the endorsed hygiene texts forced teachers to repeat themselves unnecessarily and to instruct in a manner contrary to their own experience. And finally, the committee charged, the endorsed physiology texts compelled teachers to uphold as truth what they believed to be false, and forced children to memorize statements that were certain to backfire when later found to be incorrect. 45

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Similar criticisms of temperance instruction were made by professional educators. Despite such criticisms, however, neither educators nor the Committee of Fifty had any desire to see this instruction abolished; what they objected to was its methods, not its purpose.46 In the end their criticisms had a salutary effect, for they prevented the W.C.T.U. from seeking even more stringent temperance laws and forced it to revise some of its textbooks.47 After scrutinizing school hygiene texts in 1908 and again in 1914, a committee of the American Academy of Medicine reported that they were being steadily improved and were keeping abreast of progress in both science and pedagogy.48 T o what extent temperance instruction contributed to the success of the prohibition movement, it is impossible to say. But that it aided materially in creating dry sentiment can hardly be doubted, for it was during the Progressive Era that children indoctrinated in the scientific argument for temperance first began to reach voting age. Temperance reformers themselves were inclined to credit it with being a major factor in bringing about national prohibition.49 Other observers competent to judge tended to agree. Thus, the United States Commissioner of Education declared in 1920, In the creation of a sentiment which has resulted first in local option, then in state prohibition, and now in national prohibition, the schools of the country have played a very important part, in fact probably a major p a r t . . . T h e instruction in physiology and hygiene with special reference to the effects of alcohol . . . has resulted first in clearer thinking, and second in better and stronger sentiment in regard to the sale and use of alcoholic drinks. 50

In educating the public in the scientific aspects of the liquor problem, temperance reformers also relied heavily on propaganda put out by the Anti-Saloon League, the National Temperance Society and Publication House, the denominational

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temperance committees, the Commission on Temperance of the Federal Council of Churches, and other dry organizations. Fully aware of the facts science had placed in their hands, these agencies exploited them accordingly. The Commission on Temperance of the Federal Council of Churches, for example, regarded the scientific argument as the key to victory; it had lifted the problem out of the realm of emotion and prejudice and had placed it on the solid bedrock of indestructible fact. The moral argument might not persuade many to become total abstainers, the commission believed, but the scientific argument certainly would. 51 T o spread further the scientific case against moderate drinking, a group of reformers in 1906 established the Scientific Temperance Federation, with headquarters in Boston. This agency kept abreast of the latest scientific developments and acted as a clearinghouse of information for temperance organizations and other groups. In addition, it disseminated scientific data by means of books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, addresses, press circulars, traveling exhibits, and a quarterly magazine, the Scientific Temperance Journal.62 Like the endorsed school hygiene texts, some temperance propaganda tended to go beyond the evidence and to assert that alcohol was always poisonous and injurious to the body. Thus, the general secretary of the National Temperance Society flatly declared in Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1908 that alcohol "is a poison pure and simple." 53 Some reformers even went so far as to urge that alcoholic beverages be marked "poison" and subjected to legislation like other drugs.64 "If alcohol is a poison, destructive and degenerating to the human organism," declared one temperance tract, "it should, at least, be put under the same restrictions as to its sale as are arsenic, strychnine, etc . . . " 6 5 This position, however, brought these reformers onto dangerous ground, for if alcohol was always

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a poison, then was not Jesus wrong in having used it? And if wrong in this, then in other matters also? T o avoid this pitfall, these reformers usually adopted the two-wine theory, asserting that the wine used by Jesus was actually grape juice rather than fermented wine. In popularizing the scientific evidence against alcohol, the larger middle-class magazines also played an important role. With the revival of interest in the liquor question after 1900, these magazines began to devote more and more attention to the subject, giving it especially full treatment during the years from 1907 to 1909, and again from 1914 to 1917. 66 Among these journals were The Outlook, The Independent, The Arena, McClure's Magazine, Collier's Weekly, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly Magazine, The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Current Literature, The World's Work, and The Atlantic Monthly. The scientific argument against alcohol was nowhere more forcefully presented than in the October 1908, issue of McClure's Magazine. In an article aimed at the moderate drinker, Dr. Henry Smith Williams, described by the editor as "perhaps the ablest living popularizer of medical science," summarized the latest scientific evidence against alcohol and concluded that it was the "most subtle, the most far-reaching, and judged by its ultimate effects, incomparably the most virulent of all poisons." 57 Regular moderate drinking, he declared, was an unquestionable menace: You are tangibly threatening the physical structure of your stomach, your liver, your kidneys, your heart, your blood-vessels, your nerves, your brain; . . . you are unequivocally decreasing your capacity for work in any field, be it physical, intellectual, or artistic; . . . you are in some measure lowering the grade of your mind, dulling your higher esthetic sense, and taking the finer edge off your morals; . . . you are distinctly lessening your chance of maintaining health and attaining longevity; and . . . you may be

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entailing upon your descendants yet unborn a bond of incalculable misery . . . As a mere business proposition: Is your glass of beer, your bottle of wine, your high-ball, or your cocktail worth such a price?68 About this article, the editor of McClure's noted that, without exception, scientific investigation had shown that "every function of the normal human body is injured by the use of alcohol—even the moderate use; and that the injury is both serious and permanent." 69 At the same time that the scientific argument was being popularized, the results of investigations by life insurance companies of the effect of alcohol on mortality were also made known and brought striking confirmation of the case against moderate drinking. Here, too, the evidence was exploited by temperance organizations and given widespread publicity by the popular magazines. Although by the 1890's most life insurance companies had come to discriminate strongly against habitual and intemperate drinkers, they did not yet agree as to whether the moderate use of liquor materially shortened life.60 Most life insurance companies, in fact, still granted no favors to total abstainers in the form of bonuses or reduced premiums. Indeed, one English company had once refused to sell a policy to a certain teetotaler except at a higher premium, because he was "thin and watery and mentally cranked in that he repudiated the good things of God as found in alcoholic drinks." 61 The first significant investigation by a life insurance company into the comparative mortality of drinkers and nondrinkers was made by an English firm. On the basis of its records from 1866 to 1910, this company concluded that drinkers in general had a mortality rate 37 per cent higher than abstainers. In the case of drinkers between the ages of 35 and 40, the mortality rate was 83 per cent higher than that

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of nondrinkers. Other English and Scottish companies disclosed similar facts. As a result, life insurance companies soon began to favor total abstainers with bonuses and lower premiums.62 In the United States the first scientific attempt to investigate alcohol as a factor in mortality was made by Edward B. Phelps, editor of The American Underwriter. On the basis of the records of three different companies, Phelps estimated that in the year 1908 alone alcohol was a factor in approximately 66,000 adult deaths, or 7.7 per cent of the total.63 More comprehensive, however, was an investigation by a joint committee of the Actuarial Society of America and the Medical Directors' Association, representing 43 life insurance companies in the United States and Canada. Drawing on the experience of two million policyholders between 1885 and 1908, this investigation provided mortality statistics for four classes of drinkers: those who drank two ounces or more of alcohol each day, those who occasionally drank to excess, one-time intemperate drinkers who had since reformed and become abstainers, and those who drank only two glasses of beer or their equivalent in alcohol each day. The first category was found to have a mortality rate 86 per cent higher than insured lives in general, and showed a death rate from cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and suicide twice that of the average. The second category had a mortality rate anywhere from 46 to 74 per cent higher than the average and showed a higher than average death rate from suicide and accident. Abstainers who had formerly been intemperate showed a mortality rate 32 per cent higher than the average. Most significant of all, however, was the experience of the regular moderate drinkers—those who drank the equivalent of only two glasses of beer each day. This group showed a mortality rate 18 per cent higher

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than the average. 64 Thus, according to actuarial statistics of that time, life was materially shortened by the consumption of a quantity of alcohol even less than the two to four glasses of beer that science had pronounced as the maximum safe amount. Life insurance statistics, in short, had also made out a strong case for almost total abstinence. A s the statistical and scientific evidence against alcohol gradually filtered down into the public consciousness, a marked change occurred in the drinking habits of many Americans. Businessmen and professional men began to drink less. Elbert Hubbard noted that 16 of the 47 banquets he attended during the winter of 1913-1914 were dry, and recalled the time "when a banquet without booze was considered a barren ideality, worse than Hamlet with the melancholy Dane omitted." 65 Another observer reported that during one month in 1916 the entire liquor bill for lunches and dinners at the Advertising Club in N e w Y o r k City had come to only $30, indicating that no more than one diner in 40 had taken a drink with his meal.66 Many college officials and students gave up drinking. Among those academicians w h o changed their mind about liquor was Charles W . Eliot. Heretofore a moderate drinker, Eliot became a total abstainer as a result of the new scientific evidence. 67 T h e change in attitude of college students was shown by efforts to discourage the use of liquor at class banquets and on the campus. In 1917 the national interfraternity conference, representing 36 American college fraternities, adopted a resolution recommending that intoxicating liquors be eliminated from all fraternity banquets and functions and be banned from chapter houses.68 T h e senior class of Columbia College in 1916, after concluding its graduation exercises with the "Columbia Drinking Song," retired to Furnald Hall and drank tea.69

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T H E LATEST RECRUIT Carter in the New York Sun

College and professional athletes likewise began to stop drinking. Cornell, Wisconsin, California, Princeton, Michigan, and other universities forbade their athletes to drink during the training and playing season.70 In professional baseball, Connie Mack, manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, took the lead against liquor. "Alcohol," said Mack, "slows a man down. I don't bother with youngsters that drink." 7 1 Mack attributed the Athletics' four championships in five years to the fact that none of his men used alcohol during the baseball season.72 Science, however, not only convinced thousands of Amer-

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icans that moderate drinking was harmful to the body but also made them more aware of the part that alcohol played in certain social problems. If small quantities of alcohol slowed down the brain and nervous system, it seemed probable that drinking was a more prolific source of poverty, crime, vice, misery, and death than had previously been thought. Although it was impossible to determine the exact extent to which alcohol caused these ills, a number of surveys and social studies left little doubt that it contributed substantially to them all. The most thorough investigation into alcohol as a factor in poverty and crime was undertaken by the Committee of Fifty, which published the results in 1899 under the title of Economic Aspects of the Liquor Problem. On the basis of returns from 33 charity organization societies and allied bodies in 18 states and the District of Columbia, the Committee found that poverty was traceable to liquor in some 25 per cent of all the cases. Similar returns from 50 almshouses in 10 states revealed that 37 per cent of the cases of pauperism were due to liquor. The latter figure closely approximated the findings of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had previously reported in 1895 that 39 per cent of the paupers in the state's almshouses owed their plight to liquor. The committee concluded that, although the faults of society undoubtedly accounted for a considerable amount of poverty, over one-fourth of all poverty was directly due to drink. 73 More serious was the role of alcohol in crime. On the basis of an investigation of the records of 13,402 convicts in 17 prisons and reformatories in 12 different states, the Committee of Fifty concluded that intemperance had been the sole cause of crime in 16 per cent of the cases, the primary cause in 31 per cent, and one of the causes in nearly 50 per cent.74 Convicts themselves were likely to put the figure even higher. In 1914, for instance, 1,008 out of 1,478 prisoners in the East-

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em Penitentiary at Philadelphia petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature for state prohibition on the ground that fully 70 per cent of the crime in the state was directly due to the excessive use of liquor.75 As some observers pointed out, however, convicts were prone to exaggerate the role of alcohol, preferring to attribute their downfall to drink rather than to more serious causes of crime.76 Other investigations focused attention on the close relationship between liquor and prostitution. In its report of 1902 on this social evil in New York City, the Committee of Fifteen, a group of private reformers, concluded that alcohol stimulated social vice and that prostitutes used saloons to get men to drink.77 In a more detailed study, the Vice Commission of Chicago reported in 1911 that prostitutes frequented more than one-half of the saloons it investigated, and that next to the brothel itself, the saloon was the most important element contributing to "the social evil." 78 If alcohol stimulated social vice, it followed that it also played a role in venereal disease. On this point, one physician reported that 70 per cent of all venereal infection in men under 25 was contracted while under the influence of alcohol.79 Alcohol was also found to be responsible for a large number of deaths through disease, suicide, accidents, and violence. Either directly or indirectly, liquor caused an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 deaths each year.80 A factor in poverty, crime, vice, disease, and death, alcohol was also shown to be an important source of domestic unhappiness and broken homes. According to a study by the United States Bureau of the Census for the years 1887 to 1906, nearly 20 per cent of all divorces in the nation were granted for reasons of intemperance.81 The chief victims, of course, were children. The Committee of Fifty found that nearly 45 per cent of the children in charitable institutions were there because of intemperate parents.82 And statistics,

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The White Man's Burden.

Drawn by May for the Patriotic Postcard Co., Saginaw, Mich.

of course, could never measure the suffering inflicted on children through neglect and maltreatment by drunken parents. As the results of all these investigations became known, the temperance reformers were once again quick to exploit them in their propaganda. As was true of the scientific and statistical evidence, the fact that these findings came from impartial sources rather than from temperance investigators themselves gave dry propaganda far more credibility than would otherwise have been the case. And, as before, the reformers had the invaluable support of the great middle-class magazines in getting these facts before the public. T r y as they might, the opponents of prohibition were simply unable to controvert this evidence. 83

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The chief effect of these sociological data was to persuade many people to turn to saloon suppression and prohibition as a means of curbing the use of liquor. Lending support to this movement was the new doctrine of environmentalism that influenced so much of progressive thought. Hitherto, poverty, crime, vice, and other evils had been largely attributed to character failure; now they were also seen to be the result of unfavorable environmental conditions. It followed, then, that the solution was not merely to succor the individual directly, but to reach him indirectly by creating a more favorable environment. In dealing with the liquor question, progressive social scientists rejected laissez faire and insisted that, since alcohol was retarding the progress of mankind, the state had a duty to intervene and control it.84 One of the most extreme statements of this position was made by George E. Howard in an article that appeared in the July 1918 issue of The American Journal of Sociology. In that article Howard argued that there was no such thing as a hereditary criminal class, but that the criminal was the creature of his environment and was driven to his actions mainly by bad social conditions. The remedy, he concluded, was to transform the environment. And since alcohol was one of the chief factors making for crime, the state ought to abolish it. This might prove to be a more difficult task than abolishing slavery, he confessed, but it could and would be done.85 Of the progressive sociologists, none spoke out more forcefully for prohibition than Edward A. Ross. The Ross thesis was that upon first contact with liquor all races literally went crazy over it, with the result that they immediately began to undergo "alcoholic selection." Races unable to resist alcohol sooner or later drank themselves to death or left a weakened progeny that quickly perished; those that cultivated sobriety

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survived. T h e older races, therefore, represented peoples who had gradually become temperate, whereas the younger races, such as populated the United States, were forced to undergo a long period of alcoholic selection before becoming temperate. In the United States, Ross believed, such selection would perhaps entail the loss of a million lives and the wrecking of half a million homes every decade, but by the year 21 oo would probably have produced a race constitutionally resistant to alcohol. 86 Stoic submission to alcoholic selection, however, Ross rejected as too drastic. T h e remedy, he said, was prohibition— "wringing the neck of the liquor business so that our unfortunate temptables, no longer teased and baited and snared for the sake of the profit to be extracted from their weakness for alcohol, will be left free to pursue the normal interests of life." 87 T h e result, Ross believed, would be to reduce crime and poverty, improve the position of women and children, benefit the home, purify politics, and elevate the status of the wage earner. 88 Among progressive economists, Simon N . Patten was particularly vocal in support of prohibition. In the United States, Patten believed, three considerations militated against the liquor habit: better food, which made drink unnecessary; a clear, bracing climate, which made drinking both unnecessary and unwise; and the increasing speed and complexity of modern industry, which made drinking dangerous. If Americans were to survive in the competitive struggle for existence, Patten declared, they would have to adapt themselves to these environmental factors and abstain from liquor. 89 "Shall we fight our environment and suffer," he asked, "or accept it and be free?" 90 Fortunately, he believed, Americans were accepting their environment, for they were now turning to prohibition, and, in time, would all become abstainers. " A n old world

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is passing," he concluded, "a new one is raising its framework about us and regenerating our lives . . . Alcohol will go with pain, poverty and disease. W e need it as little as we need them." 91 One of the outstanding social reformers to war against the saloon was Judge Ben B. Lindsey. As judge of the county court in Denver, Colorado, Lindsey became deeply concerned over vice and juvenile crime, and, after much investigation and study, concluded that bad environmental conditions caused most of the crime and vice in that city.92 And one of the agencies chiefly responsible for these conditions, he found, was the saloon, for it not only debauched and ruined many of the young girls brought before his court but also allied itself with other corrupting influences, namely, predatory corporations, venal politicians, and commercialized vice.93 "The saloons," Lindsey declared, "protected by the political power of the corporations, debauched the parents and destroyed the homes of our children, and the protected gambler hunted and preyed with the protected saloon." 94 Opposed to the environmentalist assumptions of Lindsey and other progressive reformers, however, were certain conservative social Darwinists who believed that only through competition and struggle could society evolve toward greater happiness, and that the surest way to impede progress was for the state to intervene and protect the weak against the strong. These men rejected prohibition on the ground that alcohol, by killing off generation after generation of the unfit, was acting as a progressive factor in natural selection and improving the race. This view was especially strong in the field of eugenics, a science which held that heredity, not the environment, was the important factor in individual achievement, and that the way to insure progress was to improve the human race. Since alcoholic selection was thought to eliminate

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degenerate stocks, many eugenists accepted it as a beneficent process that would lead to racial betterment. 95 But even some eugenists supported prohibition. Paul Popenoe and Roswell H. Johnson, for example, the authors of Applied Eugenics, believed that prohibition might indirectly benefit the race in two respects. First, by eliminating the factor of alcoholism, it would assist the eugenist in selecting for eugenic improvement, since it was desirable not to have to select for too many traits at once. And second, by abolishing liquor, it would remove a source of sexual imprudence and result in smaller families by those of inferior strains.96 Although social workers were well aware of the close relationship between alcohol and crime, poverty, disease, vice, misery, and death, most charity organization societies and settlement houses sought to ameliorate these conditions through rescue work and welfare programs, rather than through temperance reform itself. 97 W i t h the revival of public interest in the liquor problem, however, and especially with the spread of the new scientific knowledge of the physiological effects of alcohol, social workers began to take a more active interest in the question.98 Thus The Survey, a magazine devoted to philanthropy, on October i, 1910, gave special attention to the scientific and social aspects of the liquor problem. 99 That same year the National Conference of Charities and Correction appointed for the first time a Committee on Drunkenness, which, the following year, sponsored three sessions on the liquor problem. A t these sessions papers were read and discussions held on the physiological effects of alcohol, the treatment of inebriates, the need for temperance education, and the legislative approach to liquor reform. 100 A s a result of these efforts, social workers began to understand better the problem of chronic alcoholism, its treatment

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as a disease, and the role they could play in helping restore the drunkard to a useful place in community life. The greatest need, they found, was for institutions where the alcoholic could be sent for specialized medical treatment, rather than being committed to an insane asylum, confined in an alcoholic ward of a hospital, or simply being arrested and jailed. Institutional care was necessary in order to treat the alcoholic and cure him; temporary confinement or arrest merely sobered him up and turned him loose to repeat the process all over again. As of 1908, however, only three states, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Minnesota, had established special institutions for the alcoholic. 101 Another pressing need, social workers discovered, was to persuade public authorities to distinguish between chronic alcoholism and less serious cases of drunkenness by releasing first offenders on probation without trial, by adopting a system of cumulative punishment for repeaters, and by sending only confirmed alcoholics to special state hospitals for treatment. Still another need, they found, was for follow-up work among cured alcoholics to help restore them to normal family and community life. 102 As interest in the liquor question rose, social workers were also drawn into the work of temperance reform itself. Here the initial emphasis was on scientific temperance education. The leader in this field was the Boston Associated Charities, which, in 1 9 1 1 , printed a series of posters and stamps declaring alcohol to be a narcotic poison, injurious to health, an enemy of efficiency, a cause of insanity, poverty, crime, and disease, and an important factor in prostitution.103 Asked one poster: " W h o is the first man to be laid off and the last man to be taken on? The man who drinks." And read a diamond-shaped sticker, designed to be pasted on boys' baseball bats: "Speed! Aim! Ambition! make a good ball player!

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Liquor injures all three! Ask the Red Sox!" 104 First tried out in Cambridge, these posters enjoyed such success that they were soon adopted by other cities and towns in the state as well. 105 As public opinion continued to mount, social workers began to take a more active interest in the legislative side of the reform. Among the earliest and most vocal converts to prohibition were Robert A. Woods of the South End House in Boston and Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton of the Boston Associated Charities. Although they both admitted that prohibition might not prohibit absolutely, they were nevertheless convinced that it would do more than anything else to prevent crime, poverty, insanity, domestic unhappiness, and prostitution.106 By neglecting prohibition, Tilton wrote, social workers had been "bailing water out of a tub with the tap turned on; letting the drink custom and the liquor traffic run full blast while we limply stood around and picked up the wreckage." 107 Woods, who had served on the Boston Licensing Board, had been convinced by that experience that the liquor business would never reform itself and that legal compulsion was absolutely essential.108 Growing interest among social workers in the legislative side of the reform was reflected at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1916, when another special session was held on the liquor problem, this time to help the delegates reach sound conclusions on the question of prohibition.109 The Survey also reflected this growing interest when on December 30, 1916, it listed national prohibition for the first time as one of the N e w Year's Goals in Social Work. 1 1 0 What clinched the prohibition argument for many social workers, however, was that social conditions seemed to improve in dry cities. In 1916, after a little more than a year of

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no-license, social workers in Des Moines reported that the number of relief cases had fallen from 2 6 per cent to 9.6 per cent. In Denver, charity cases fell off at the rate of over 100 a month in the first four months of prohibition, and in Spokane they dropped from 1,070 during the first four months of 1915 (wet) to 700 during the corresponding months of 1916 ( d r y ) . 1 1 1 With the entry of the United States into the European War, the interest of social workers in prohibition reached its climax. At their annual conference in June 1917, they departed from their custom of not passing resolutions on controversial subjects by unanimously endorsing national prohibition for the duration of the war and for at least one year thereafter. 112 And at their conference two years later Robert A . Woods, addressing a group of social workers who had gathered to celebrate the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, expressed the joy many of them undoubtedly felt. " T h e event we are celebrating today," he declared, "is certainly one of the greatest and best events in history." 1 1 3 Already, he noted, social workers were seeing evidence of the benefits of prohibition in decreased poverty, prostitution, and crime. But the greatest advance, he predicted, was yet to come, for prohibition was going to stimulate business activity; raise the standard of living; foster sound, productive labor organizations; unleash vast suppressed human potentialities; and elevate the moral sense of the plain people. 114

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The

temperance movement fell squarely within the American tradition of self-help and success. In nineteenthcentury America, when opportunity was held to be boundless and open to all on an equal basis, the chance to succeed and acquire wealth, power, and prestige seemed to depend largely upon a man's own character and ability. Good character, it was believed, led to success; bad character to failure. Since no man of intemperate habits could hope to succeed and prosper, Americans naturally came to esteem sobriety and to rank it high among the virtues that guaranteed success. T o promote success had, indeed, been one of the main reasons for the founding of the temperance movement and accounted for much of its driving power. B y the turn of the twentieth century, economic developments in the United States were conspiring to give the economic argument for temperance an additional boost. "As more things are done by machinery," noted the Committee of Fifty in 1899, "as trolley-cars supplement horse-cars, as implements of greater precision and refinement take the place of cruder ones, as the speed at which machinery is run is increased, as the intensity with which people work becomes greater, the necessity of having a clear head during the hours of labor becomes imperative, and the very conditions of modern business life necessitate sobriety on the part of the workers." 1 Businessmen thus became increasingly concerned

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with the problem of temperance and, as competition grew, they began to demand stricter standards of sobriety on the part of their employees. Commenting on this in 1908, the Cleveland Leader observed that large corporations had already shut the door on intemperate drinkers. "Now the great majority of them . . . draw the line still closer. The man occasionally under the influence of liquor has to go as w e l l . . . Business profits are too valuable to be hazarded in the slightest degree, in these days of keen, incessant, and often merciless competition." 2 But the factor more than any other that caused large corporations to take up the matter of employee temperance was the desire to prevent accidents and insure safety. In this the lead was taken by the nation's railroads. T o reduce accidents and avoid heavy loss of property and expensive damage suits, the railroads established safety committees, inaugurated safety contests, and began to enforce temperance among their employees. By the end of the 1880's, well over half of the nation's first-class carriers had forbidden their workers to drink while on duty.3 The need to enforce temperance among railroad employees became even more urgent when the states passed safety legislation. In general, these laws held the railroads responsible for all damages caused by the negligence of an intoxicated employee, made them liable to a fine for employing anyone addicted to the excessive use of alcoholic beverages, and in Michigan and Vermont actually forbade the railroad to engage anyone who drank at all.4 In response to the growing need for greater sobriety, the American Railway Association in 1899 proposed the adoption of a new operating rule, known as Rule G , which read as follows: "The use of intoxicants by employees while on duty is prohibited. Their habitual use, or the frequenting of places where they are sold, is sufficient cause for dismissal." 5 This

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rule was adopted and put into effect by practically every railroad in the country. A number of roads went further and forbade their employees to use alcoholic beverages at any time, even off duty. By 1904 approximately one million railroad employees were under Rule G or a more stringent regulation.8 Railroads also resorted to other methods to insure greater sobriety among operating personnel. Nearly all companies inquired into the drinking habits of prospective employees and, by means of letters of reference, made it practically impossible for a worker who had been discharged for drinking to get another railroad job.7 Some roads, moreover, discriminated against wet territory; the Atlanta and Birmingham Railway refused to consider the town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, as the location of its new building and repair shops, because the town had six saloons.8 Partly as a result of all these measures, the number of railroad accidents declined.9 The Railway Age boasted that transportation lines had come to be among "the grandest and most effective temperance organizations in existence." 10 By the late 1890's, some employers in manufacturing and mining were also beginning to enforce temperance among their employees. But they still lagged far behind the railroads. Of 3,644 manufacturing concerns investigated by the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1897, o n ty about 23 per cent forbade the use of liquor during working hours, and only slightly more than 24 per cent required all or certain key workers, such as engineers, watchmen, foremen, mechanics, and whitecollar workers to abstain while both on and off duty. Of 1,158 mining establishments investigated, about 26 per cent forbade the use of liquor on duty, and about 29 per cent required workers engaged in more dangerous and responsible positions to abstain at all times.11 Apart from the railroads and a few manufacturing and

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mining concerns, however, few industries at the turn of the century bothered about safety and temperance regulations. Not until about 1908, in fact, did American industry in general begin to take an active, organized, formal interest in either. In that year the United States Steel Corporation inaugurated a safety movement that soon spread to other industries and in 1912 led to the formation of the National Safety Council. First stressing the need for physical safeguards around equipment and machinery, the safety movement soon shifted its emphasis to human factors, such as carelessness, ignorance, inexperience, and drinking.12 The result was a marked increase in industrial temperance activity. The safety movement, observed an editorial in the American Machinist, "started by advocating mechanical safeguards around machinery, has gone on spreading through the region of all sorts of safeguards and warnings for all kinds of danger, has surrounded and taken for its own the field of shop sanitation, and is now including the temperance movement." 1 3 A major factor in the rise of the organized safety movement was the enactment of the first workmen's compensation laws. Congress led the way by passing a compensation law for federal employees in 1908. In 1911 the first effective state law was passed, and by 1920 forty-one states had followed suit.14 These laws proved particularly powerful in stimulating industrial temperance, since they compelled employers or their insurers to compensate workers for industrial accidents (unless caused by the workers' own willful misconduct) and saddled industry with an additional cost that it immediately sought to reduce by an intensified campaign for safety through sobriety.15 Concern about drinking as a cause of industrial accidents became even more marked as the results of the new scientific evidence against alcohol became known. Having heard that

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even small quantities of alcohol impaired the mental and physical faculties, many employers and company physicians concluded that the only safe worker was the absolutely sober worker and that the moderate drinker, because not visibly intoxicated, was actually a greater menace to industrial safety than the heavy drinker. This belief, together with the constant repetition by company physicians, safety experts, and others that alcohol was a poison, led many employers to forbid their employees to use it altogether. 16 Although most safety experts came to believe that alcohol was an important cause of industrial accidents, they were unable to say exactly what part it played. It was relatively easy to determine whether a worker had fallen, been struck by a flying object, or been run down by a car, but it was almost impossible, they found, to ascertain whether alcohol was responsible for his failure to avert these dangers. Most safety men merely concluded that alcohol played a substantial role in many of the 35,000 deaths and t w o million injuries that occurred annually in American industry. 17 Safety experts expressed their attitude toward alcohol at the third annual meeting of the National Safety Council in 1914. W i t h some 300 in attendance, they adopted a resolution declaring, "the drinking of alcoholic stimulants is productive of a heavy percentage of accidents and of disease affecting the safety and efficiency of working men," and urging the abolition of their use in American industry. 18 In order to reduce alcohol as a factor in industrial accidents, some employers undertook to educate their workers in the principles of temperance. This they did through the medium of house organs, special leaflets, and displays of posters and bulletins put out by the Anti-Saloon League, the National Safety Council, and other organizations interested in sobriety. 19 One bulletin, for example, read as follows:

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Start a saloon in your own house. Be the only customer. You'll have no license to pay. Go to your wife and give her two dollars to buy a gallon of whiskey, and remember there are sixty-nine drinks in a gallon of whiskey. Buy your drinks from no one but your wife . . . Should you live ten years and continue to buy booze from her, and then die with snakes in your boots, she will have enough money to bury you decently, educate your children, buy a house and lot, marry a decent man, and quit thinking about you entirely.20 Such educational efforts, together with the introduction of safety equipment, did much to lessen the frequency and severity of industrial accidents. 21 Next to safety, efficiency was the most important reason why businessmen took up the cause of industrial temperance. But although they had always regarded alcohol as an enemy of efficiency, businessmen did not become vitally concerned with this aspect of the problem until after 1910 when scientific management became the vogue. 22 The purpose of the new scientific management program was to expand production and maximize profits by increasing the efficiency of industry. This it sought to do by applying a set of scientific principles derived from the analysis and study of industrial management and organization, the physical conditions of labor, and the task of each individual worker. Although adopted by a variety of enterprises, scientific management principles were chiefly applicable to manufacturing, where they had the greatest impact, rather than to mining and railroading. 23 Because it found that alcohol lowered human efficiency, scientific management reinforced the case against drinking and gave the movement for industrial temperance an additional boost. "Alcohol must go," declared one observer. " T h e thing that temperance fanatics have been unable to accomplish, that a political party has failed to do, that even religion

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has not been able to bring about, is shortly to come to pass. Efficiency demands it. Industry calls for it. This is a scientific generation, and we are willing to see things as they are." 24 Although safety and efficiency were the major reasons for industrial temperance, they were never justified on business grounds alone. During the Progressive Era nearly everyone aspired to higher ideals of service and citizenship, and businessmen were no exception.25 The chairman of the committee of Accident Prevention and Workmen's Compensation of the National Association of Manufacturers, for example, gave voice to the basic humanitarianism of the time when he addressed the National Safety Council in 1914. The safety movement, he said, "answers the query of the Old Testament, 'Am I my brother's keeper' with an emphatic 'yes,' and reasserts the golden rule of the New Testament, 'All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.' " 26 Scientific management was presented in similar light. " [ W e ] can only reach that millennium when poverty, disease and unhappiness will disappear, by the straight and narrow path of increased industrial efficiency," declared one exponent of the new science, "and anything which impedes that efficiency is in reality as great a crime against humanity as the . . . adulteration of drugs." 27 Caught up by the general spirit of reform, many businessmen decided that they too should become total abstainers.28 As B. C. Forbes remarked, if renunciation of the freedom to drink would do "even a little bit to lighten the misery of the slums and save from wreck [mc] and ruin millions of our fellow men and women, then we ought to be not only willing but delighted to undergo so mild a self-sacrifice." 29 Richard H. Edmonds, editor of the Manufacturers Record, struck an even more exalted note. In fighting against liquor, he declared, "we are fighting the nation's battle for civilization and Chris-

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tianity, for manhood and womanhood, and for the cause of Almighty God." 30 Largely because of the growing power of the safety and efficiency crusades and the general improvement in business morality, the industrial temperance movement gained ground rapidly during the second decade of the century. As before, the railroads continued to take the lead. Rule G , by now the standard on all the larger roads, was enforced even more strictly after 1912, when an engineer who admitted having had two drinks about seven hours before going on duty ran his train into the rear of a stalled passenger train, killing 39 people.31 Although the Interstate Commerce Commission did not conclude that drinking played any role in the accident, some observers thought it might have and decided that all railroads ought now to go beyond Rule G and forbid all of their employees engaged in the work of train operations from drinking either on or off duty. Indeed, an increasing number of roads, including the Baltimore and Ohio, were already enforcing such a rule.32 In addition, some roads began to prohibit the sale of liquor in their trains and stations. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, discontinued the sale of liquor in its terminals, in its dining and buffet cars, and at its company hotel in Altoona, Pennsylvania.33 Manufacturing corporations also made strong efforts to obtain employee sobriety. But though most of them came to prohibit drinking during working hours, few endeavored to regulate the drinking habits of their employees while off duty. Probably typical in this respect was the iron and steel industry. According to a 1916 survey of 113 large iron and steel concerns, nearly all forbade their men to drink while at work, but only 10 prohibited the use of alcohol entirely.34 Among those manufacturing companies that did require total abstinence, however, were the Henry C. Frick Company, the

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du Pont Powder Company, and the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company.3® On the whole, mining companies lagged far behind both railroad and manufacturing firms in enforcing sobriety among their employees.38 This was the cause of much regret to the editor of Coal Age, who wrote frequently and vigorously for stricter standards: Science and experience [he observed] have each demonstrated the uselessness of alcoholic stimulants. A business as inherently hazardous as that of coal production requires the exercise of constant and neverfailing vigilance, sound reasoning and careful judgment . . . The lawmakers and the clergy may legislate and preach against liquor as much as they please . . . Safety and efficiency have recently, however, become terms to juggle with, and anything that injures or detracts from either is doomed to the scrap heap.87 In their effort to enforce sobriety, employers tightened up their hiring standards, adopted more rigorous disciplinary measures, and made more use of their right to discharge. In order to ferret out drinkers, some railroads even went to the length of employing detectives to spy on their men. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for instance, had its detectives make an average of six observations yearly on each of its 125,000 employees.38 Other methods were also used to encourage sobriety. Many firms continued to depend heavily on bulletin board literature and lectures by foremen. Some companies began to discriminate against the drinker by giving preference to teetotalers for promotion and by letting drinkers go first whenever reductions in force became necessary. Others incorporated clauses in their employees' benefit associations, denying payments to any worker whose sickness, injury, or death was caused directly or indirectly by the consumption of liquor.39 Employers, however, did not rely solely on direct per-

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suasion and compulsion to obtain sobriety. T h e y also sought to improve the conditions of work and to provide counterattractions to the saloon. Many employers realized that exhausting labor and disagreeable surroundings were among the compulsive factors that drove their workers to liquor. Thus the Lake Carriers' Association made over its boats in 1910 to provide good sanitation and ventilation, better food and water, and more comfortable quarters. Similarly, a Cleveland concern found that by installing an attractive lunchroom with inexpensive but wholesome food, it achieved an immediate reduction in the number of men taking their lunches at neighboring saloons. Other firms discovered that boosting the sale of milk at lunchtime effectively discouraged their employees from drinking beer.40 The railroads catered to the special needs of their men. With management's support, for example, the Railroad Y.M.C.A. established clubhouses all over the country, providing railroad workers with such comforts as beds, baths, reading rooms, and food. The two most elaborate of these were financed solely by prominent railroad families: one at Grand Central Terminal, N e w York, by the Vanderbilts, and one in St. Louis by Mrs. Helen Gould Shepard. 41 For many businessmen the same reasons that justified industrial temperance also justified prohibition. But state-wide prohibition had a number of additional reasons to support it. In the first place, some businessmen believed that it would lead to greater industrial efficiency and help give them a competitive advantage over rivals operating in wet territory. This argument was particularly appealing to Southern businessmen, who were striving to catch up with the North and who looked to state prohibition to help them win a place in the industrial sun. This same argument was also applied at

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the national level: Prohibition, it was asserted, would enable American industry to meet intensified competition from abroad, especially from Great Britain.42 Another argument attracted businessmen: the prospect of increased business. By transferring to other products the approximately $1.8 billion that consumers spent annually for liquor, and by diverting the resources tied up in the liquor industry into more productive channels, prohibition, it was believed, would raise the standard of living and increase national prosperity.43 This argument was especially appealing to those firms that stood to gain directly from the destruction of the liquor industry. Among these was the Welch Grape Juice Company, which advertised the delights of its grape juice cocktail with a caption that read: "Get the Welch habit—it's one that won't get you." 44 The Coca-Cola Company also stood to gain and worked for prohibition.45 Still another reason that prompted businessmen to support prohibition was the promise of lower taxes. With greater sobriety, they believed, there would be less crime, poverty, and disease, and consequently less need for taxes to support prisons, police, hospitals, mental institutions, orphanages, and charitable agencies.46 Finally, some businessmen supported prohibition as a means of maintaining order during times of strike. Most strikes that erupted into violence, they believed, were caused by intoxicated workers.47 "It was not until crazed by drink that the men began to act like wild beasts," observed the Iron Trade Review of the Youngstown strike in 1916. 48 Businessmen, however, were by no means unanimous in their support of prohibition; like other groups they were divided over the question. Indeed, some employers who were active in industrial temperance opposed prohibition. The

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du Ponts, for example, required total abstinence of their employees, but were among the most outspoken critics of prohibition. There were several reasons for this hostility of some businessmen to prohibition. For one thing, a number of businessmen were convinced that instead of increasing prosperity, the destruction of the liquor traffic would hurt business and deprive thousands of their livelihood.49 Moreover, some of them believed that any savings in taxes from prohibition would be more than offset by the loss of public revenue from the liquor traffic and would result in higher, not lower, taxes.60 Some businessmen also opposed prohibition because it would destroy the liquor industry and thus weaken the foundation of their own political power. This was particularly true of those privately owned utilities that depended upon their alliance with the liquor interests and the politicians to extort franchises and other privileges from government and to protect their interests from hostile legislation.51 Still other businessmen opposed prohibition because of the direct economic stake they had in the liquor industry. Some bankers, for instance, fought the reform because of the heavy loans they had made to distillers and brewers.52 By the end of 1919 bank loans to owners of bonded liquors amounted to approximately $20 million.53 Finally, some businessmen feared that prohibition would provide a further precedent for governmental regulation of the business community. It is a "singular component of reform," declared The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, that nothing is so important as the task in hand, whether it be the manufacture and sale of intoxicants, or the eight-hour day, or daylight saving, or the removal of signboards from vacant lots . . . The moral of it all is . . . that we cannot preserve either our

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liberties, our institutions, or our peculiar form of governnment, if we are to let self-appointed guardians of the public weal seek the cover of general law for the purpose of obtaining their selfsatisfying ends. This prohibition measure and mandate is but one of these ends. It is . . . a theory of the proper social life. In precisely the same manner theorists are seeking to control individual life in commerce. 54 In the opinion of most businessmen, however, the economic arguments f o r prohibition more than outweighed those against it. A n d the more it spread the more invincible it became, for wherever it was tried it seemed to bear out its promises. 55 In W e s t Virginia, f o r example, state prohibition was credited with increasing the output of coal from 908 tons per man in 1914 to 964 tons in 1915, and with decreasing the number of accidents from one per 128,968 tons of coal extracted to one per 156,243 tons during the same period. 56 T h e Anaconda Copper Mining Company of Butte, Montana, announced similar results w h e n local saloons were closed as a result of a strike and the imposition of martial law. 5 7 O n e survey, covering 18 cities each with a population of over 100,000, concluded that Everywhere it [prohibition] has been accompanied by an increase in bank deposits. It is invariably beneficial to employers of labor and in cities where it has been in force for more than a year there is but little discontent with the dry regime among the masses. It has stimulated retail trade, improved collections, and greatly increased attendance at amusement places.58 B y 1915 business support of prohibition had become so crystallized that the Anti-Saloon League was able to pass a resolution hailing with delight the entry of this new and powerful ally into the reform. A n d b y 1917 business sentiment had become so responsive that the league was able to establish a committee of industrialists and other businessmen for the special purpose of more actively enlisting captains of industry

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in the cause. With S. S. Kresge as its chairman, this committee spread rapidly throughout the country and by the end of the year boasted a membership of more than ιο,οοο.59 With the entry of the United States into World War I, greater efficiency became a matter of national survival, and prohibition received a further boost.60 "Drastic prohibition," declared the editor of the Manufacturers Record, "would increase the efficiency of the army. It would increase the efficiency of the workers in industrial plants and mining operations. It would increase the efficiency of men on the farms and add enormously to the potential power of the nation." 61 By the time of ratification in 1919, the bulk of American businessmen had joined other middle-class Americans in the crusade to promote sobriety. Without their support, national prohibition could never have attained such power and sweep. Indeed, it might even have failed to become law. As the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick later remarked: A l l the churches, social reformers, W . C . T . U . ' s and Anti-Saloon Leagues in the United States never could have put the law on the statute books had not the business motive become involved. One of the basic facts necessary to understand the prohibitory campaign is that American business found it impossible to run modern machines with drink-befuddled brains . . . Canny, shrewd, businesslike America knew that it would be a good financial bargain . . .® 2

It is a measure of the power of middle-class ideals in American culture that wage earners were also concerned about sobriety. Despite the decline of economic opportunity, many wage earners still aspired to rise into the middle class by becoming independent businessmen, farmers, or professional men. Since they were at the bottom of the economic and social scale, they realized that they would have to cultivate the virtue of sobriety if they were to succeed.

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By the late nineteenth century, however, self-help and success were being supplemented by another consideration that spurred workingmen to greater sobriety. This was the rise of labor unions. Just as the demand for safety and efficiency led capitalists to impose sobriety on their organizations, so, too, the demands of organized labor led workingmen to enforce sobriety in some of their unions. For if wage earners were ever to win their rights, they would have to depend upon the fighting power of their unions. More and more, the laboring man's welfare depended upon the success of his union rather than upon his own unaided efforts to rise into the selfemployed middle class. Labor unions were forced to turn their attention to the liquor problem for several reasons. In the first place, intemperance deprived the workingman of his faculties, dulled his class consciousness, and prevented him from striving for better industrial conditions. T o o often, unions found, the worker sought to escape from his misery and poverty by getting drunk rather than by organizing and fighting.®3 "Cut out the booze and increase your efficiency as a fighter for the common good by ioo per cent," advised one labor editor. "If we workers were all sober and in our right senses we would be on top of the social and industrial heap inside of five years . . . whisky is a most valuable friend of capitalism; and so long as you drink it you're an enemy of your class." 64 Intemperance also proved to be a special menace during times of strike. It was the intoxicated striker, the unions found, who was usually responsible for the acts of violence that led to property destruction and loss of life and that usually resulted in alienating public opinion and provoking state authorities to intervene on the side of capital. One of the first steps necessary when calling a strike, union leaders agreed, was to keep the men sober. 66

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Labor unions likewise found that intemperance subverted sound practices. Intoxicated workers, they learned, were not only a source of disturbance at union meetings but were usually the ones responsible for giving away secrets to the enemies of labor.66 Intemperance, moreover, made union officials and organizers unfit to occupy their positions of trust.67 "The first agency through which the corporation spy seeks to attain his end with the convivial labor leader is the whisky bottle," remarked one labor journal, "and it generally proves effective." 68 Then, too, unions found, intemperance so increased the number of accidents, sicknesses, deaths, and discharges among workingmen as to place an impossible burden upon union benefit and insurance plans. As a purely business proposition, they believed, the average worker simply could not afford to contribute his hard-earned savings to support men who were fired, disabled, or killed as a result of intoxication.69 Self-interest alone, therefore, impelled labor unions into the work of temperance reform. The question arose, however, as to how they could best promote this work. Although they differed somewhat in their answers, they all agreed on one point—that as far as the workingman was concerned, the unions themselves were the most effective temperance agencies in existence. This was true, they felt, because unions introduced the wage earner to a higher order of corporate life, educated him, enhanced his self-respect and dignity, awakened in him a greater sense of social responsibility, and inspired him with higher ideals. As a result, he was less inclined to waste his time and money on liquor.70 "Since we have had an organization . . . ," declared the general secretary of the Journeymen Tailors, the change of habits of the Customs Tailors is something marvellous as to this one habit. I can well remember when there could

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be found in no city, from Sunday until Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week, any tailors who were sufficiently sober to work at their trade, or if any, they were very few. I believe most earnestly that organization has been the cause that has cured and eliminated this evil. You can now go to the same cities where our unions have existed from ten to twenty-five or thirty years, and you will scarcely find a single member of the organization that is an habitual drunkard.71 Unions were also pre-eminent as temperance agencies, labor leaders believed, because they were doing more than any other organization to remove the bad industrial conditions that led to drink.72 Prior to the formation of the International Longshoremen's Association, for example, dockworkers were usually hired by contractors who were also saloonkeepers. The result: dockworkers were often victimized by having to spend their wages in the contractors' saloon or lose their jobs. Once the union was organized, however, this practice was wiped out.73 "No force in our country," declared an official of the American Federation of Labor, "has been as effective in the promotion of temperance among working people as the organized labor movement. The labor movement has achieved more for the cause of temperance than all the temperance societies combined . . ." 7 4 Most labor unions, however, were not content merely to rely on improving wages, hours, and working conditions as a means of promoting sobriety, but attacked the liquor problem directly. This they did in a number of ways. Some unions enjoined temperance and proscribed the liquor traffic by means of clauses in their constitutions and bylaws. Nearly all of them exerted influence on their locals to meet in halls separate from liquor saloons.75 Many union editors and officials, moreover, wrote and spoke on temperance and often practiced total abstinence themselves. Unions with benefit or insurance programs also promoted sobriety by allowing only

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those of temperate habits to join, and by refusing to pay claims when sickness, injury, or death were occasioned by intoxication.76 In general, the more sympathetic a union was to the American tradition of self-help and success, the more active it was in behalf of temperance. A good example of this was the Knights of Labor. Under the influence of Terence V . Powder ly, who dominated and led the union from 1879 to 1893, the Knights became such a force for temperance that Frances E. Willard once remarked that it had done more for the cause than the W.C.T.U. itself.77 The Knights of Labor was an attempt to unite in one big union all who toiled regardless of race, creed, or sex, whether skilled or unskilled. Although necessarily concerned with immediate demands for better wages, hours, and working conditions, the Knights were mainly interested in ultimate objectives—restoring economic opportunity and educating the worker so that he might escape the wage system and become his own master and employer. T o this end, the Knights eschewed strikes and espoused instead such middle-class nostrums as monetary reform, antimonopoly legislation, land reform, public education, and above all, producers and distributors cooperatives.78 Nothing did more to frustrate their work, the Knights believed, than strong drink. Liquor deprived a worker of his reason, destroyed his self-respect and reputation, caused him to lose his job, reduced him to poverty, and inflicted misery and suffering on his wife and children. Liquor, Powderly once remarked, "has done more harm to workingmen than all other causes." 79 The liquor habit, Powderly believed, also injured the labor movement: it weakened the will of the worker to fight, interfered with union organizing, and caused strikes to get out of

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hand and be defeated. 80 Powderly declared in 1887 that the worst weapon that is wielded against labor today is held by the strong right hand of labor itself, and when that weapon is raised to strike the blow it is raised in the shape of a glass, that carries with it the rum which drowns man's reason . . . Give me one hundred thousand or fifty thousand sober, honest, earnest men, and I will wage the battle of labor more successfully than if you give me twelve million of men who drink either moderately or drink to excess.81 Before the Knights could reform existing evils, Powderly felt, they would first have to reform themselves.82 As a result of Powderly's influence, the Knights of Labor tirelessly sought to promote sobriety. It excluded from membership anyone connected with the liquor traffic, revoked the commissions of organizers who attempted to perform their duties while under the influence of liquor, allowed no intoxicants to be sold or used at any of its meetings or social functions, and urged its local assemblies not to rent halls or meeting places connected with saloons.83 Powderly himself refused to enter a saloon or take a drink as long as he remained head of the order, constantly sermonized the Knights in behalf of temperance, and in 1886 drew up and circulated a five-year total abstinence pledge that won 100,000 signatures before the year was out.84 In the end Powderly and the union embraced state prohibition as a w a y of helping the workers help themselves.85 Declared the Knights' official journal: W e would have this one great curse to the industrial masses—this strong temptation to spend their meagre earnings at the expense of their manhood—removed as far as possible from them. If the appetite can be controlled in no other way we would make it impossible for them to get the stuff with which to satisfy i t . . . the work of labor reform can be accomplished quicker and better with clear brains and pure water than with muddled brains and poor whisky. 86

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Although Powderly believed that the workingman more often became poor as a result of intemperance rather than the other way around, he by no means overlooked the fact that poverty also caused drunkenness, and that one way to promote sobriety was to eliminate the bad industrial conditions that led to drink. With good pay and steady employment, he believed, wage earners would be "more inclined to seek their homes than saloons when the day's work was done." 87 As long as Powderly headed the order, the Knights of Labor maintained its aggressive attitude toward the liquor problem, but after his ouster in 1893, the union relaxed its stand and repealed the constitutional provision denying membership to anyone connected with the liquor traffic.88 At the same time, the rapid decline of the order from a peak strength of some 700,000 members in 1886 to around 30,000 members in 1900, reduced it to impotence and removed it as a significant force for temperance reform.89 Also thoroughly middle class in their ideals and equally zealous in promoting temperance were the four big railroad brotherhoods—the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the Order of Railway Conductors, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. As independent craft unions, the brotherhoods had successfully weathered the labor storms of the 1890's and thereafter grew rapidly. From about 139,000 members in 1900 they increased their strength to slightly more than 492,000 by 1920.90 Predominantly of old, Protestant stock, members of the Big Four were among the highest paid American workers and were often called the aristocracy of the labor movement.91 As with the Knights of Labor, the desire for self-improvement accounted for much of the brotherhoods' interest in temperance reform.92 "When was beer or alcohol, in any

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form, anything but a curse to workingmen?" asked one railroad employee. "It is the devil in solution, distilled damnation, more destructive than war, pestilence and famine; a cancer in human society; and the saloon a rat-hole for men's wages, a prolific hotbed of anarchy, vile politics and profane ribaldry." 93 T h e hazardous nature of their work provided the brotherhoods with an additional interest in temperance reform. As was pointed out in one of their journals, "There is no place for a muddled brain in the dangerous work of performing the duties of a locomotive engineer, with thousands of tons of merchandise, or thousands of lives behind him . . ." 94 O n this point the unions emphatically agreed with management; indeed, they heartily endorsed the latter's efforts to enforce temperance through Rule G and other measures.95 T o foster sobriety among their members, the brotherhoods relied on articles in their constitutions and bylaws proscribing the use of liquor and forbidding their members to engage in the liquor traffic, refused to pay insurance claims to members injured or killed as a result of intoxication, taught the virtue of sobriety at their altars and in their official journals, and disciplined members w h o transgressed their rules against liquor. 96 T h e engineers and trainmen, in fact, refused even to defend a member if he lost his job as a result of drinking. 97 And, finally, the Big Four turned to prohibition as a means of solving the problem. 98 Like Powderly, members of the Big Four prided themselves on their temperance record and became understandably irritated when management, rather than they themselves, received credit for fostering sobriety. 99 Likewise a force for temperance among workingmen was the American Federation of Labor and its affiliated unions. Having triumphed over the Knights of Labor, the A.F.L. emerged at the end of the century as the leading labor organ-

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ization in the country. With a membership of about 265,000 in 1897, the Federation grew rapidly and by 1920 had attained a strength of about four million.100 As a national federation of autonomous trade unions concerned primarily with organizing the skilled and semiskilled rather than the unskilled, the A.F.L. rejected the Knights of Labor's concept of one big union and labor solidarity and scorned its middle-class reformism; other than bringing about a general improvement in the economic and social order, the A.F.L. soft-pedaled ultimate objectives and concentrated instead on immediate demands for better wages, hours, and working conditions. At the same time, it spurned the ideals and practices of socialism and revolutionary unionism. In short, it proposed neither to restore nineteenth century conditions of economic opportunity and competition in order to help the wage earner escape from his position and become a successful businessman, farmer, or professional man, nor did it propose to nationalize industry in order to help the worker escape from his wage-earning status and become an owner of the machines of production. Desiring to abolish neither the wage nor the profit system, the A.F.L. sought merely to use its economic strength to win a fair share for labor within the existing framework of American capitalism.101 Because the A.F.L. believed that most workingmen would remain wage earners and would not become their own bosses, it interested itself in temperance for reasons of union selfinterest rather than individual success. And because it was more class-conscious than the Knights of Labor and the Big Four, it was more inclined to argue that intemperance was caused by poverty rather than poverty by intemperance, and that the best way to promote sobriety was to eliminate the industrial evils that led to drink.102 "Banish the cause of poverty," declared the United Mine Workers Journal, "and the cause of drunkenness will disappear. Lift a part of the

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burden that rests upon the shoulders of labor, and the laborer will not seek to drown the memory of it in drink." 103 But although the A.F.L. unions put less faith in direct temperance measures than did the Knights of Labor and the Big Four, they by no means neglected them. As early as 1900, a survey of 39 of the Federation's constituent unions revealed that 33 of them, comprising nearly 90 per cent of the A.F.L.'s total membership, took direct steps to promote sobriety and to counteract the influence of the saloon. This they did by the usual methods: rules proscribing intemperance and the liquor traffic, clauses excluding intoxicated members from disability and death benefits, temperance messages by union editors and officials, and efforts to induce locals to meet elsewhere than in saloons. Only six unions took no special steps to promote temperance, and, of this number, two, the Brewery Workers and the W o o d Workers, were positively hostile to the reform. 104 W i t h the general revival of temperance sentiment after 1900, the A.F.L. and its affiliates devoted increasing attention to the subject. More determined efforts were made to find halls away from saloons where locals might meet. Steps were also taken to abandon the use of saloons as labor bureaus where men were hired and paid their wages. In addition, labor temples, which were being established in many cities, adopted constitutional clauses forbidding the introduction of alcohol on their premises. Union officials, moreover, continued to encourage temperance by precept and example; two-thirds of the members of the A.F.L.'s Executive Council in 1911 were said to be total abstainers. For the most part, the labor press also served the cause of temperance; of the approximately 250 weekly papers and 100 monthly magazines published by labor, only a f e w printed material sent in by liquor organizations. 105 Although most A.F.L. unions continued to exert themselves

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in behalf of temperance, they soon found this side of the reform overshadowed by the legislative question. For by 1909 middle-class reformers, recognizing that the ultimate fate of prohibition depended on the attitude of the workingman, began a concerted campaign to reach the urban worker and wift him over to saloon suppression. In this effort they had the support of such prominent labor officials as John B. Lennon, John Mitchell, and James B. Duncan, all members of the A.F.L. Executive Council, and Thomas L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers. 106 The issue of prohibitory legislation came before the A.F.L. for the first time at its Toronto convention in 1909. At that convention the Reverend Charles Stelzle, a fraternal delegate from the Federal Council of Churches, called a meeting to discuss the possibility of forming an anti-saloon fellowship within the A.F.L. Over 4,000 workingmen attended, including most of the A.F.L.'s 400 delegates. Of the Federation's leaders, Lennon, Mitchell, and Lewis each addressed the meeting and endorsed the project. Although about one-half of the A.F.L. delegates expressed their willingness to consider forming such a fellowhsip, Stelzle, at Samuel Gompers' request, dropped the matter in order to avoid splitting the federation at a critical juncture. In return, Gompers promised to have certain resolutions withdrawn calling upon the A.F.L. to commit itself against prohibition. Thereafter the liquor issue was successfully kept out of A.F.L. deliberations; not until 1919 did it arise to disturb another convention.107 In their effort to enlist the support of wage earners for prohibition, dry leaders in and out of the labor movement relied mainly on an appeal to self-interest. The abolition of the saloon, they argued, would increase the workingman's wages and standard of living, he would become more efficient and dependable, would have more money to save and spend on food, clothing, and other necessities, and would become a

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more effective agent in helping his union fight for better industrial conditions.108 "What has the saloon done for you?" asked one miner of his fellows. "How many of your children has it educated? How many churches, schoolhouses, or orphans' homes has the saloon ever built? How much better morally, financially, physically, does the saloon make you? How much better men are you? Why not allow your superior officer to booze as well as yourself . . . ? " 109

CONSISTENCY Wellington in the Knoxville Sentinel

The advocates of prohibition also sought to convince the workingman that dry legislation would result in greater employment. Denying the claims of the wets that over one million men would lose their jobs if the liquor industry were

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destroyed, prohibitionists maintained that the money spent for drink and the capital invested in the liquor business would be diverted into more productive channels and would give work to four times as many wage earners who would earn four times as much. Only about 80,000 wage earners in 1917 were actually employed in the production of alcoholic beverages, they noted, and of these only a few were specialists who would have to learn another trade. Bartenders, saloonkeepers, and other persons connected with the liquor industry would readily find new employment.110 Prohibitionists also endeavored to win labor's support by showing that the liquor industry was the enemy of organized labor. They cited statistics to prove that the degree of exploitation in the liquor industry was greater than in any other American industry, and made much of the fact that there was no union among distillery workers at all. 111 Labor journals, moreover, lent force to these charges. A letter to one union magazine, for example, accused August Busch of the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company of having laughed in the face of a union organizer when a group of machinists requested the eight-hour day. 1 1 2 And a letter in another labor journal charged that the San Francisco liquor dealers association had sided with the Chamber of Commerce in a fight to maintain the open shop. 113 But although some A.F.L. members supported prohibition for these reasons, the majority stoutly opposed it to the end. One of the chief reasons for their hostility was their belief that the destruction of the liquor industry would deprive thousands of union men of their jobs, including not merely the brewery workers and bartenders, but members of certain allied trades as well—cigarmakers, tobacco workers, glass workers, coopers, waiters, and musicians.114 As evidence of this, the Cigarmakers Union reported in 1916 that 1,247 members had lost their jobs in prohibition areas. 115 Haunted

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by the fear of unemployment, these particular trades naturally resented it when other workers voted dry. The Brewery Workers were especially bitter: T h e fight f o r the extermination of our international organization, waged by the combined forces of the Anti-Saloon League, the Methodist Church, and supported b y the big money interest and employers of America will be dealt with b y the future historian of the struggle of manhood in its advance march to freedom as one of the amusing side-lights in which part of the workers helped their exploiters deprive them of the things which make life, at least in part, a little more endurable to the men and women w h o produce all. 1 1 6

Some union workers also opposed prohibition because they feared it would lower the standard of living of the working class in general. D r y arguments notwithstanding, they believed that prohibition would result in lower not higher wages, for what the workingman saved on liquor would be taken from him by his employer who would immediately cut wages in order to increase his own profit. 117 Neither did they believe that prohibition would lead to greater prosperity; the destruction of such an important industry, they felt, would seriously depress business activity and bring further hardship to laboring men. 118 N o r would prohibition result in lower taxes; the loss of $300 million a year in public revenue from the liquor industry would have to be made up—and would be at their expense. 119 Many workingmen also opposed prohibition because it smacked of paternalism and class exploitation. T o them it was a hypocritical and insulting attempt to control their personal habits in order to exact greater profits for their employers, who themselves had no intention of giving up liquor. 120 It "is class legislation of the most offensive character," complained one labor journal. "It can only be made operative against the lower classes. N o law can be framed that would stand the test

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of the Supreme Court that would prevent a man of means from stocking his cellar and sideboard with all the viands he desired." 121 Gompers attacked prohibition on the same ground: "The cry is against this discrimination, which is almost inevitable, except so far as a business man or a man of means may be himself a total abstainer. Where a wage earner can not get a glass of beer, still a very large proportion of the men of means can have and do have a stock of intoxicating drinks to last men their lives." 122 Finally, many union workers opposed prohibition simply because they liked to drink and go to the saloon. There was no compelling reason why they should be deprived of liquor, they felt, and any attempt to do so was an unwarranted violation of their personal liberty.123 "The saloon exists in our town," asserted one worker, "because it supplies a want—a need. It offers a common meeting place. It dispenses good cheer. It ministers to the craving for fellowship. T o the exhausted, worn out body, to the strained nerves—the relaxation brings rest." 124 Fondness for drink and hostility to temperance legislation were particularly strong among the foreign-born. Two West Virginia coal miners, for example, applying for a job in Ohio because their own state had gone dry, wrote: "Here is bad time and bad place for us. Too much and too very much dry . . . Me and Martin no get job close to some place where we can get some whiskey we pretty soon go back and join Franz Josef's army. Lots of whiskey there now." 125 Because of working-class hostility to prohibition, many union leaders believed the reform would never succeed.128 "Prohibition never yet prohibited," declared one labor journal. "People can not be made good by law, and every effort to make people do something under compulsion which they did not wish to do has proven a failure." 127

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Exactly what proportion of the A . F . L . membership opposed prohibition it is impossible to say. The only clear expression of opinion on the subject came at the Federation's convention at Atlantic City on June 1 1 , 1919. A resolution was put forward opposing the W a r Prohibition A c t of November 21, 1918, due to take effect on July 1, 1919. T h e resolution also favored the exemption of mild beer from the provisions of the Volstead Act, then before Congress. T h e delegates cast 26,476 votes in favor of the resolution and 3,997 against. 128 Since each vote represented one hundred members or a major fraction thereof, this meant that roughly 81 per cent of the A.F.L. constituency was wet. But as some observers noted, labor delegates often endorsed resolutions introduced by the Brewery Workers and allied unions, not because they favored the measures, but because they might need the support of these unions at some future date when their own interests were at stake. 129 On the whole, however, Gompers was probably correct when he said that the great majority of the A.F.L.'s members were opposed to prohibition. 130 Apart from the four Railroad Brotherhoods and the A.F.L., the only significant organizations that claimed to represent the workingman were the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist party. Unlike the A.F.L., the I.W.W., which was launched at Chicago in 1905, was an industrial union dedicated to the goal of overthrowing capitalism by direct action. It made its greatest appeal to unskilled and unorganized miners, lumberjacks, construction workers, and migratory farm hands in the West, and to textile workers in the East. But although enjoying some spectacular successes, it never attained great strength and was able to claim a membership in 1920 of only about4i,6oo. 1 3 1 Composed of a tough, turbulent, and downtrodden element, committed to strikes, sabotage, and violence, the I . W . W . scorned middle-class ideals and

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dismissed prohibition as a capitalistic scheme to pile up "more profits through greater physical efficiency and endurance on the part of the slaves," and to divert the workers' attention from the industrial struggle.132 The Socialist party, on the other hand, devoted considerable attention to both temperance and prohibition. This party differed from the Knights of Labor, the Big Four, and the A.F.L. in its desire to eliminate capitalism and establish a collectivist economy, but it felt the same compulsion to deal with the liquor problem, and for the same reasons: the belief that liquor debauched the workers, sapped their strength, demoralized their spirit, dulled their class consciousness, and prevented them from emancipating themselves from the evils of the industrial order. 133 To combat the liquor evil, the Socialist party advocated a twofold approach. The first was to establish socialism itself. Since bad economic and social conditions under capitalism caused most drunkenness, socialism, its followers believed, would automatically inaugurate a new era of sobriety. Some day, declared one prominent Socialist, the new social order of Socialism, the higher civilization which is its purpose to achieve, will be established. In the new environment of that day, a healthier and a happier humanity will be reared. On that day we shall give back to the working class a childhood sacred to education and play; a womanhood redeemed from the devil's dilemma of degrading toil or sexual damnation; a manhood armed with the conscious power of fully requited toil. . . Then will he drink and be drunken?134 By nationalizing the liquor industry, moreover, the Socialist party promised to take the profit out of the business and destroy the main incentive to the sale of alcoholic beverages. This, Socialists contended, would further promote sobriety.135 But pending the final triumph of socialism, its followers

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advocated direct attack on the liquor habit itself. In this connection nearly all Socialists approved of educational efforts to encourage temperance. But when it came to restrictive legislation, they differed. On one side were those who urged the party to take an official stand in favor of prohibition.136 "The tendency of the prohibition movement," argued the Finnish-American Socialists, "is for the general welfare and uplift of the human race, and in this sense is in accord with the ideals and purposes of the Socialist party." 137 Chief spokesman for the prohibitionist element in the Socialist party was John Spargo. Deploring the fact that American Socialists had not emulated their European comrades in supporting prohibition, Spargo tried to show that they had special reasons for doing so. For one thing, he noted, the organized liquor traffic was one of the most concentrated and influential components of the capitalistic system and one of its greatest bulwarks. At the same time it was politically corrupt and a determined foe of social democracy. Liquor drinking itself, he further noted, was incompatible with the maximum human and industrial efficiency that socialism demanded. The only solution to the liquor problem, he concluded, was prohibition. T o those Socialists who advocated public ownership of the liquor business, Spargo replied that socialism did not mean the nationalization of parasitic forms of industry, but, as in the case of prostitution, their extirpation. And to those who objected that prohibition would violate personal liberty, he merely pointed out that all social legislation interfered with someone's freedom of action. 138 The majority of American Socialists, however, rejected the reform. Several factors accounted for this: the influential role played by Germans in the party; the fear that prohibition would result in unemployment; the danger that the issue might disrupt party unity and solidarity; dislike of the sort of dry

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propaganda that crudely assumed that poverty was caused mainly by drink and that prohibition would eliminate poverty and help solve the social problem; and the desire to avoid any further extension of the police powers of the capitalistic state. 139 T h e liquor question first came before the Socialist party at its convention in 1908. A t that meeting a resolution was adopted calling the attention of Socialists to the evils of intemperance and urging the working class to practice moderation. Amended and amplified, this resolution was again endorsed by the convention in 1 9 1 2 . 1 4 0 It read as follows: The manufacture and sale for profit of intoxicating and adulterated liquors leads directly to many serious social evils. Intemperance in the use of alcoholic liquors weakens the physical, mental and moral powers. W e hold, therefore, that any excessive indulgence in intoxicating liquors by members of the working class is a serious obstacle to the triumph of our class since it impairs the vigor of the fighters in the political and economic struggle, and w e urge the members of the working class to avoid any indulgence which might impair their ability to wage a successful political and economic struggle, and so hinder the progress of the movement f o r their emancipation. W e do not believe that the evils of alcoholism can be eradicated by repressive measures or any extension of the police powers of the capitalist state—alcoholism is a disease of which capitalism is the chief cause. Poverty, overwork and overworry necessarily result in intemperance on the part of the victims. T o abolish the wage system with all its evils is the surest w a y to eliminate the evils of alcoholism and the traffic in intoxicating liquor. 1 4 1 Taken together, the labor unions represented no more than about 10 per cent of all wage earners in 1910. 1 4 2 The question remains, therefore, what was the attitude of the roughly 17 million unorganized workers toward prohibition? T h e answer to this, it seems safe to say, is that they were emphatically

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opposed. Being mostly unskilled, largely non-Protestant and of foreign stock, they had even less reason to be enthusiastic about prohibition than their organized fellows. Unlike the middle class, then, the great majority of American wage earners was probably opposed to the prohibition movement. But despite the fact that they comprised over onehalf of the nation's gainfully employed population, they were unable to defeat the reform, for their strength lay largely in the great urban-industrial centers and was therefore too localized to prevent the urban and rural middle classes from joining hands and putting through the Eighteenth Amendment. But though unable to thwart the enactment of prohibition, wage earners were still strong enough to insure its ultimate failure, should their opposition continue.

IV

T k e Political A r g u m e n t

Ο

η its political side, prohibition was one of the reforms of the Progressive Movement, which was attempting to use the power of government as a positive instrument of reform in order, as Woodrow Wilson said, "to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up in the beginning and have always carried in our hearts." 1 Prohibition, like the other reforms, sought to deal with the two major problems that had arisen by 1900 and that threatened to undermine and destroy traditional American ideals. These were the growing power of big business on the one hand, and the mounting discontent among the lower classes on the other. A t the turn of the century, Americans were confronted by a new wave of financial and industrial consolidation that surpassed any previous ones. The result was to alarm the middle class thoroughly, for concentration brought monopoly and this meant the decline of that economic opportunity that had so long stood at the center of the American democratic faith. 2 Middle-class Americans had long since come to believe that equal opportunity enabled the average man to get ahead, acquire wealth, prestige, and power, and that the struggle for individual success brought material progress, prosperity, and happiness to the nation as a whole. T h e y had also come to believe that their highly competitive economic order was the foundation of their moral strength; as long as opportunity

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remained open to all on a relatively equal basis, the test of success was a man's own effort, character, and ability. Since good character led to success and bad character to failure, men were encouraged to develop and practice such virtues as industry, thrift, sobriety, and honesty. The result was not only individual improvement but national greatness. Americans had also come to believe that their free economic order was the foundation of their social and political democracy. Monopolies would create men of great wealth and, by restricting opportunity, would prevent the lowly from rising. This in time, they believed, would create rigid and permanent class distinctions. If allowed to grow unchecked, monopolies would also eventually control the government and transform America from a democracy into a plutocracy. 3 In addition to the threat from big business, middle-class Americans were haunted by the danger of lower-class unrest and discontent. Labor and agrarian upheavals in the late nineteenth century had already frightened many middle-class Americans. Although the farmers and laborers had gone down to defeat, the middle classes continued to be apprehensive, seeing in the rapid growth of monopoly and the lessening of opportunity an ever-increasing source of revolutionary danger. This apprehension increased as they watched the rapid growth of organized labor, the rise of the Socialist party, and the revolutionary activities of the I.W.W. Fear of lower-class unrest, together with a genuine desire to eliminate the inequities and injustices of the social order and to improve the lot of the underprivileged, propelled many middle-class Americans into the work of reform. Essentially a middle-class movement, progressivism attempted to preserve economic opportunity and restore social and political democracy so that all Americans might continue along the road to greater progress, prosperity, and happiness.

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It endeavored to do this in two ways. First, it sought to democratize the machinery of government in order to take politics out of the hands of the special interests and restore it to the people. And, second, it sought to use the government to curb big business and to alleviate the distress of the lower classes.4 But progressivism could not succeed, many Americans believed, unless it came to grips with one of the most predatory and dangerous of all big businesses—the liquor industry. Like other enterprises, the liquor business, comprising the brewers, distillers, vintners, and wholesale and retail liquor dealers, had undergone a remarkable expansion after the Civil War. It continued to grow rapidly during the early years of the twentieth century and by 1915 ranked fifth in invested capital among all manufacturing industries in the United States. Of the three branches of production, brewing enjoyed the most spectacular gains and was by far the richest and most powerful. Between 1899 and 1914, the capital invested in brewing rose from $415,000,000* to $793,000,000, while the annual value of its product increased from $237,000,000 to $442,000,000. During this same period, capital invested in distilling grew from $33,000,000 to $91,000,000, while the annual value of its product rose from $97,000,000 to $207,000,000. The relatively small wine industry also grew rapidly, increasing its capitalization in the same period from $10,000,000 to $32,000,000, and the annual value of its product from $7,000,000 to $17,000,000. By 1915, the combined capital of the liquor industry was $9i6,ooo,ooo.5 As the industry grew in size and importance, its profits also increased. Between 1900 and 1911 the annual per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages increased from 17.73 gallons to 22.81 gallons, nearly all of it beer. In terms of brewing revenues alone, this meant a rise in gross income from about * All figures given in this section have been rounded off.

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S1.2 billion to over $1.8 billion. Allowing for taxes, the liquor industry was estimated to be netting close to $1.5 billion by 1911.® Like many others, the liquor industry was becoming increasingly concentrated. Between 1899 and 1914, the number of breweries declined from 1,509 to 1,250, while the number of distilleries decreased from 967 to 434·7 Breweries tended to be larger than distilleries and to concentrate more of their production in larger units. By 1914, one-half of all the beer produced in the United States was being made in about 100 breweries, most of them family enterprises.8 Despite increasing concentration, however, the production of beer and whiskey was still widely scattered. This was especially true of brewing, which, because of the bulky product, was more profitably carried on at the major points of consumption, the cities. Here they served a strictly local market. Some breweries, however, notably Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz of Milwaukee; Moerlein of Cincinnati; and AnheuserBusch and Lemp of St. Louis, sold nationally advertised brands of beer and competed actively in the national market.® The leading beer-producing states in 1900 were N e w York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, N e w Jersey, and Missouri. Originally confined to the North, brewing spread to the South after the development of refrigeration in the 1880's. But even then a considerable quantity of beer continued to be shipped into the South from Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.10 The leading states in the production of distilled liquors in 1900 were Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Because whiskey was less costly to ship than the grain required, distilleries tended to locate at points where the cereal supply was ample and cheapest and were therefore less widely scattered than breweries.11 Increasing concentration in the brewing and distilling in-

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dustries was marked not only by the trend toward fewer and larger establishments but also by the consolidation of these plants into major groupings. Because of overproduction and instability in the distilling industry, it had long been a special object of attempts at monopoly control and had been gradually consolidated into larger and larger combinations. By 1900 the bulk of the whiskey made in the United States was concentrated in the hands of the Distilling Company of America. 12 Consolidation in the brewing industry assumed a different pattern. Instead of nation-wide groupings, breweries tended to form local combinations for the purpose of controlling prices and production in a strictly local market. A number of such combinations were formed at the turn of the century. Among them were the United Breweries of Chicago, embracing 13 of the leading concerns in that city; the Boston Breweries Company, later known as the Massachusetts Brewery Company, comprising 10 establishments and producing 50 per cent of the total output in Boston; the Maryland Brewery Company, composed of 16 of the 20 breweries in Baltimore; and the Cleveland and Sandusky Brewing Company, comprising 13 firms in those two cities. An exception to this general pattern of local consolidation, however, was the American Malting Company, a nation-wide trust organized in 1897. It acquired malt houses throughout the country and by 1900 was selling about 60 per cent of all the malt used by brewers. 13 Concentration of ownership also occurred in the retail liquor business. For this the brewers were largely responsible; by 1909 they had come to own or control about 70 per cent of the saloons in the country. At the same time they also increased the number of outlets.14 From 1900 to 1910 the number of bartenders and saloonkeepers rose from 172,563 to 186,21ο. 15 T w o main circumstances promoted this growing concentra-

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tion of ownership in the saloon business. The first was the intense competition that drove brewers to control as many retail outlets as possible in order to increase their sales. Brewers thus came to own thousands of saloons which they leased to saloonkeepers, who were then required to handle only the brewers' own brand of beer.16 The second was the high cost of licenses. Originally intended as a reform to drive irresponsible liquor dealers out of business, the high price put upon licenses had, in fact, only succeeded in throwing the saloons into the hands of the brewers. Already plagued by overcompetition, the average saloonkeeper was often unable to raise the $500 to $1,500 required in annual license fees and was compelled to borrow money from the brewer in order to stay in business. In return, the brewer took a chattel mortgage on the saloon furniture and fixtures and required the saloonkeeper to handle only his brand of beer. Whether the brewer controlled the saloon through ownership or debt, both brewer and saloonkeeper benefited. The brewer gained an exclusive outlet, and the saloonkeeper was set up or kept in business.17 Like other big businesses during the Progressive Era, the liquor industry came under fire for its monopolistic tendencies.18 Among its attackers were certain small businessmen who felt themselves squeezed by its growing power. Typical of these was a Wisconsin manufacturer of alcohol burners and heaters who complained that farmers were reluctant to distill their own grain for fear of antagonizing the distillery trust, and that this in turn prevented him from selling more of his own firm's products. Only by smashing the trust, he believed, would farmers be free to produce their own alcohol cheaply and without restraint.19 The brewing industry came under similar attack. "Fortytwo breweries," declared The Chicago Tribune, "situated in

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this and neighboring cities take out 72 per cent of the saloon licenses issued in Chicago. It appears that they are gradually monopolizing the saloon-keeping business and are driving the 'small, respectable, struggling saloonkeeper,' of whom so much has been heard of late, out of it." 20 That some members of the liquor industry were sensitive to the charge of monopoly was indicated by a statement in the magazine Malt. "Our malt," it read, "is not made by any T R U S T and our prices are not regulated by any one, nor are we affiliated with any association or combination tending to I N F L A T E the value of malt to the C O N S U M E R . " 2 1 Had the concentration of economic power been the only charge against the liquor industry, it might have fared no worse than other businesses. But what aroused special hostility was its arrogant and ruthless control of government and its practice of gross political corruption. Like many other businesses, the liquor industry sought to influence or control all levels of government in order to promote its interests and to protect itself against unfavorable legislation. But unlike most businesses, it had a special reason to engage in politics: no other enterprise paid such high taxes or contributed such large sums to government. B y 1 9 1 7 it was contributing $52 million a year to municipal governments, $6.6 million to the counties, $21 million to the states, and $262 million to the federal government. This burden, however, was not without benefit to the industry, for it gave government a vested interest in the business and hence a stake in its preservation. 22 Three national organizations looked after the economic and political interests of the liquor industry. These were the United States Brewers Association, the National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association—representing distillers, importers, vintners, and wholesale dealers—and the National Retail Liquor Dealers Association, later renamed the National

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Liquor League of the United States.23 Each maintained a well-organized lobby in Washington, D.C., and financed its activities by annual assessments of its members, amounting to 20 cents per 100 barrels in the case of the brewers, and $25 to $50 per member in the case of the distillers. Subordinate to these national organizations were many state and local associations, organized similarly and for the same purpose.24 In normal times these organizations were sufficient to protect the industry, but when prohibition became a burning issue they formed special agencies and raised emergency funds to combat the reform. The National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, for example, alarmed at the rising tide of prohibition sentiment, established a Protective Bureau in 1902 for the sole purpose of raising money to fight prohibition. The following year the National Retail Liquor Dealers Association showed similar alarm by raising $5 million for defensive purposes.25 The United States Brewers Association, the richest and most powerful of the three organizations, likewise supplemented its work by special agencies and emergency assessments. T o help fight prohibition, it created a businessman's "front" in 1913 called the National Association of Commerce and Labor, liberally supplied it with funds, and placed it under the direction of Percy Andreae, a public relations expert, at a salary of $40,000 a year. The brewers also enlisted wage earners in the fight against prohibition by organizing trade union liberty leagues. They also gained a particularly useful and willing ally in the National German-American Alliance. Established in 1901 for persons of German birth or background, this organization boasted. a membership of nearly two million and was staunchly wet. In 1914 it made an agreement with the National Association of Commerce and Labor to carry on wet propaganda with funds supplied

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by the latter. Over the next two years alone it received $41,000 from Percy Andreae for this purpose.26 In addition to these efforts, the brewers, distillers, and retailers also formed joint defense committees in times of acute crisis. Thus, to stave off a threat of prohibition in Ohio in 1908, they formed the Personal Liberty League and soon extended it to other states as well.27 With large revenues at their disposal, the liquor organizations enjoyed unusual power in their efforts to obtain favorable legislation and to prevent reforms that were hostile to their interests. Like their dry opponents, they spent large sums in an effort to influence public opinion. During the first year of its existence, for example, the Protective Bureau of the National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association printed over 2.5 million pieces of literature which it mailed directly to voters in critical areas or sent to local managers in the field. It also induced local newspapers to publish 92 columns of printed matter.28 Disadvantageously to themselves, however, the liquor interests were not always scrupulous in their publicity methods. The brewers, for example, established a national press bureau that was suspected of buying and secretly subsidizing news space in country and small-town newspapers. This seemed to be borne out when the St. Joseph, Missouri, Observer, in its issue of February 22, 1908, printed a two-column attack on the Anti-Saloon League, "clipped," it said, from a Detroit church paper called Truth. Truth, however, was a liquor journal, and the article in question did not appear in it until March 17, 1908, nearly a month after the Observer had "clipped" it.29 How easy it was for the liquor interests to obtain space in newspapers was dramatically illustrated on two separate occasions by William E. Johnson, a well-known dry. Under

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cover of a fake protective liquor alliance, Johnson in 1902 wrote newspapers throughout Texas requesting their terms for advertising, news, and editorial space. A total of 168 newspapers responded by sending Johnson a list of their prices. This information he promptly published, together with the names of his correspondents. In 1912 Johnson laid a similar trap for West Virginia newspapers. This time he wrote 219 publications offering to pay $1,000 or more for antiprohibition editorials. Of the seventy respondents less than ten unequivocally refused to sell their columns. One editor, after offering to run wet editorials for ten cents a line, assured Johnson that he could also get control of other newspapers and turn them into wet journals.30 In addition to influencing or controlling news space, the liquor interests hired well-known persons to write antiprohibition articles for publication in respectable journals, without revealing, however, their source of support. Among those thus hired by the United States Brewers Association was a physician named Ε. H. Williams, who succeeded in planting articles in The Survey, leading medical journals, and the New York Tribune and other important newspapers. Also retained by the brewers, was John Koren, author of the Committee of Fifty's volume, The Economic Aspects of the Liquor Traffic, one-time president of the National Municipal League, and a frequent contributor to influential journals.31 The liquor interests also used their vast financial resources to influence and control politicians and elections. "From all I can learn," wrote one of Gustave Pabst's agents in 1900, "Dubois will surely be the next senator from Idaho. I think it could be for the interest of the brewers to have his cooperation—he is aggressive and able—if you think well of i t send me $1000-$ 5 000. I think it will be the best investment you ever made." 32 In Texas the brewers spent $ 1 million

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between 1900 and 1911 to fight prohibition, much of it in violation of the state's election laws. As a result of these activities, seven large brewers in the state and two in Missouri, one of which was Anheuser-Busch, were indicted, pleaded nolo contendere, and were fined $289,000 and costs.33 In raising money, the brewers did not confine themselves to taxing members of their own trade but also assessed manufacturers and dealers who did business with them, usually to the amount of about one per cent of their sales to the brewers. All of the liquor trades, moreover, resorted to business reprisals against firms that supported prohibition. Thus when the Santa Fe Railroad promoted the incorporation of a dry village in California, the Personal Liberty League sent out thousands of circulars to its members, calling upon them to ship freight by other roads. And when the Garlock Packing Company of Palmyra, New York, supported a local dry movement, the Personal Liberty League forced it to reverse itself by means of a boycott.34 Whenever necessary, the liquor interests also resorted to bribery. In 1904 a grand jury in New York found that the state liquor dealers association had raised a large fund for the corruption of the state legislature.36 The liquor industry became thoroughly involved in political corruption through its connection with the saloon. The root of the trouble here was that the ordinary saloonkeeper, confronted by overcompetition, was practically forced to disobey the liquor laws and to ally himself with vice and crime in order to survive. Unable to make a living honestly, he did so dishonestly.36 One of his chief difficulties was the Sunday-closing laws. These laws, which forbade saloons to sell any liquor on Sunday, reflected the moral standards of middle-class Americans and ran directly counter to the wishes and desires of most

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city dwellers, especially the Irish and Germans. T h e result was that the saloonkeeper not only found it profitable to cater to the Sunday demand but had to remain open in order to keep from losing his customers and going out of business.37 In N e w Y o r k City, for example, over 5,000 of the 5,820 saloons in Manhattan and the Bronx were open each Sunday in 1908 in defiance of the law. 38 T o increase their profits, many saloonkeepers also adulterated drinks or sold cheap whiskey from expensive bottles. Other saloonkeepers encouraged hard drinking among their patrons and sold liquor to anyone who would buy it, including women, children, and known drunkards. 39 Remarked one liquor dealer before the Retail Liquor Dealers Association of Ohio: W e must create the appetite for liquor in the growing boys. Men who drink . . . will die, and if there is no new appetite created, our counters will be empty as well as our coffers. The open field for the creation of appetite is among the boys. Nickels expended in treats to boys now will return in dollars to your tills after the appetite has been formed.40 Some saloonkeepers entered into partnership with prostitution, gambling, and petty crime. B y allowing their rooms to be used for immoral purposes, they were able to increase their liquor sales and enlarge their profits. In one working class district in Chicago, for example, 34.5 per cent of the saloons investigated in 1900 were found to be frequented by prostitutes. Nearly all of these places exhibited nude pictures, either in the form of costly wall paintings or cards furnished by the brewing companies. In addition to prostitution, some saloons sought to increase their income by permitting gambling on their premises, and, in a f e w cases, by allowing pickpockets and other petty thieves to operate among their customers. 41 Although illegal activities enabled saloons to make a profit,

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they also put them at the mercy of the police and politicians. As it turned out, however, these officials were usually quite willing to allow saloons to break the law, provided the saloon paid them protection and gave them their support. Thus arose a formidable alliance between the liquor interests and the city machines.42 For the privilege of breaking the law, saloons delivered to the politicians both money and votes. Money, of course, was needed to finance elections and to satisfy the politicians' more personal needs. The method of collecting this graft and the amount saloons were required to pay varied from place to place. In New York City, for example, a saloon paid $5 a month for Sunday openings, $25 a month for harboring prostitutes, and $25 a month for permitting gambling. These fees were collected by a Tammany wardman who later divided the money with those higher up. The patrolman got his graft from the local retail liquor dealers association, supported by a monthly contribution of about $6.50 from each saloon.43 The New York state excise department also profited from lawless saloon operation. As the authority responsible for liquor licenses, this department developed the practice of revoking the licenses of lawless saloons and then allowing them to buy new licenses and operate freely until they had recouped their losses. Whereupon it repeated the process.44 The saloon also provided politicians with votes. As the chief social center of the lower classes, the saloon was a natural and convenient political unit and was able to deliver votes at election time. In general, the political power of a saloon varied with the class it served: those that catered to the respectable middle classes were usually unimportant, whereas those that served the lower classes were usually quite powerful. T o politicians the most valuable saloons of all were those that were always able to deliver a dependable bloc of

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votes. These saloons got their votes from a number of sources. One was the men who lived in their back rooms and slept on the floor; for two or three dollars they would always vote right. Another source was the thieves, pickppckets, and pimps w h o made the saloon their headquarters. Then there were those fictitious voters whose names were registered and parceled out to neighboring lodging houses and whose existence could be vouched for by their landlords, if necessary. A final source was those voters rounded up by the gangs of "strongarm gorillas" whose services the saloons were able to mobilize for rough work on election day. 45 A n extreme example of the power of the saloon in politics was furnished by Louisville in 1905. In an election that year, the local city machine defeated a reform movement only by dint of faithful work on the part of its saloon allies. O n election day nearly a hundred bartenders and saloonkeepers were qualified as election officials, and at least 4,500 fraudulent votes were cast, of which about 4,000 were registered as residing in the upper rooms of saloons. Voting places in ten precincts were moved, nine of them to the rear of some saloon, and in each of these ten precincts the voters were found to have cast their ballots in alphabetical order. W i t h the help of the police, dozens of reformers serving as election watchers were thrown out of the polling places, and some were knocked down, clubbed, and beaten. 46 As a social and political center, the saloon served as a natural headquarters for precinct and ward captains and as a meeting place for the city boss and his cabinet. There they held caucuses, drew up lists of acceptable candidates, and held political conventions. 47 During a single year in N e w York City, for example, the Democratic and Republican parties held 1,002 conventions, of which 633 met in saloons and 96 in places next to saloons.48

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A key link in the alliance between the saloon and politics was the saloonkeeper. As a friend and confidant of the workingman and as a person of considerable prestige among the immigrant population, the average saloonkeeper commanded the affection, loyalty, and respect of his neighbors and was able to exert a strong influence over them. Many saloonkeepers, in fact, used their position to enter politics themselves.49 In Milwaukee, for example, 13 out of the 46 members of the city council in 1902 were saloonkeepers.50 And it was in St. Louis that, according to Lincoln Steffens, a practical joker nearly emptied one house of the municipal assembly by tipping a boy to rush in and call out: "Mister, your saloon is on fire." 5 1 A good example of a leading saloon politician was Tom Anderson of New Orleans. Proprietor of a profitable saloon and the boss of the city's "red light" district, Anderson was a powerful figure in the Louisiana legislature where he was a member of the ways and means committee and the committee on affairs of the City of New Orleans. By patronizing his saloon, one could obtain from the bartender a twenty-five cent pamphlet called the "Blue Book," a directory of the prostitutes and houses of ill-fame in the city. This pamphlet also contained advertisements of various liquors, among them Anheuser-Busch beer and I. W . Harper rye whiskey.52 The link between the saloon and the politician alone, however, fails to account for the full power of the liquor industry, for there were other interests whose position and strength made the political machines, on which the liquor interests depended for their security, practically invulnerable. These were businesses that sought and obtained public franchises, grants, and other special favors from government. Chief among these were privately owned utilities and contracting companies. They, in their turn, brought the politicians the

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respect and influence they wanted and the money they required. A n y attack on the saloon and politicians, therefore, was bound to be regarded as a blow at the whole and was certain to bring down the opposition of these interests also.53 Thus the liquor industry was not only economically powerful but also politically entrenched. This fact alone would have aroused the ire of middle-class progressives, but what provoked their opposition equally as much was the dangerous consequences of drinking among the lower classes. Fearful of the growing unrest from below, the middle classes became deeply concerned lest the sale of liquor increase this discontent. T o most middle-class Americans, this unrest seemed to lie mainly in the cities where the mass of the propertyless poor was concentrated. 54 Fear of the saloon as a fomenter of lawlessness and violence was never very far from the surface and was frequently exploited by the temperance forces. T h e y took pains to point out, for example, that the saloon had figured prominently in the three assassinations of American presidents. John Wilkes Booth, given to alcoholic indulgence, had been drinking the night he shot Abraham Lincoln and had taken his last tumbler of whiskey at a saloon next to Ford's Theater. Charles J. Guiteau, w h o shot James A . Garfield, was drinking more heavily than usual the day he committed the crime, and Leon F. Czolgosz, son of a saloonkeeper, was living in a saloon when he set out to assassinate William McKinley. Even John N . Schrank, the man who shot but failed to kill Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, had been a saloonkeeper and bartender most of his life. 55 Outside the South the problem of lower-class discontent was usually identified with the immigrant masses. T o oldstock Americans the sheer force of their numbers was sufficient to cause alarm. Between 1900 and 1917, nearly 14.3

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million persons arrived in the United States, averaging in some years more than a million. By 1910 there were 13,345,545 foreign-born in the country and 18,897,837 children of foreign-born. Out of a total population of 91,972,266, therefore, 32,243,382, or 35.2 per cent, were first- or secondgeneration Americans. Most of these newer Americans, moreover, chose to remain in the cities. By 1910, 68.1 per cent of them were residing in places of over 2,500, compared with 36.1 per cent for the old-stock whites. B y 1910 people of foreign stock comprised 51.6 per cent of the total urban population but only about 20 per cent of the rural population.66 What made this urban-immigrant population seem such a threat to old-stock Americans was that it represented an element that was becoming increasingly difficult to assimilate or "Americanize." T o begin with, the average immigrant was a peasant, and, after the 1880's, more than likely a peasant from southern and eastern Europe. This meant that he brought with him a set of cultural values alien to those held by most middle-class Americans. Having his roots in a peasant economy, with its stable and communal organization, he found it difficult to adjust to the American world of free enterprise, with its individualism, competition, and emphasis on self-help and success. Accustomed to a tightly knit and well-ordered society where his social status was fixed and where authority and hierarchy were taken for granted, he found it hard to accommodate to the American ideal of social mobility and equality. A Roman Catholic, Jew, or nonbeliever, he found himself out of tune with the theology and social ethics of American Protestantism and resisted efforts by revivalists and social gospelers to convert him. Finally, because he had never participated in government and was habituated to looking upon the state as an exploiter, he found it hard to comprehend the American ideal of political equality and of independent

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and disinterested political action. T o the peasant immigrant, politics tended to be not a means of realizing high moral principles and the general welfare, as it was to middle-class progressives, but rather a means of meeting his personal needs, to get for him jobs, relief, favors, and protection. For this reason he gave his loyalty and vote to the local boss who often satisfied these needs.57 The result of the rapid influx of millions of foreigners to a new and unfamiliar urban environment was to plant large pockets of alien culture within an already existing and welldefined American culture, and thus to create serious tensions and conflicts. T o the immigrant, the establishment of his own institutions in America was a means of orienting his life and helping him adjust to the new and strange environment. T o the old-stock American, however, the perpetuation of alien ways was an obstacle to speedy assimilation and a menace to American ideals and institutions. The remedy, in the opinion of many Americans, was to restrict immigration and to Americanize those foreigners who had already arrived.58 This conflict between old- and new-stock Americans increased during the Progressive Era by the attack on the city machines, by the identification of the immigrant with municipal corruption, and by the enactment of middle-class reforms that ran counter to immigrant interests. Although the oldstock middle classes and the immigrant population often cooperated to secure labor and other welfare legislation of benefit to the latter, they fought bitterly whenever the middle classes tried to uplift and assimilate the foreign stock against its wishes.58 Nowhere were the differences between old and foreign stock more clearly revealed than on the question of temperance reform. T o old-stock Americans, liquor demoralized the immigrant, kept him in poverty, intensified his discontent, unfitted him to exercise the duties of responsible citizenship,

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and prevented him from becoming Americanized. And the institution held to be primarily responsible for this was the saloon. As one observer put it: The saloon fosters an un-American spirit among the foreign-born population of our country. The influx of foreigners into our urban centers, many of whom have liquor habits, is a menace to good government... the foreign-born population is largely under the social and political control of the saloon. If the cities keep up their rapid growth they will soon have the balance of political power in the nation and become the storm centers of political life. The hope of perpetuating our liberties is to help the foreigners correct any demoralizing custom, and through self-restraint assimilate American ideals. 60

Keep the immigrant out of saloons and "you will soon find him and his children among the stalwart sons and daughters of America, ready to fight her battles, enter her churches, and maintain and guard her holy traditions." 6 1 T o newer Americans, however, both liquor and the saloon were regarded as a necessary part of daily existence. Accustomed to drinking in the old country, they naturally continued to drink in America, where they found alcohol an especially welcome release from loneliness, poverty, and wretchedness. After long and exhausting hours of toil, the saloon offered them escape from their squalid lodgings or overcrowded homes, and provided them with warmth, comfort, and companionship. There they often found a free lunch counter, and in some cases card tables, exercise rooms, bowling alleys, billiard and pool tables, newspapers, reading and writing rooms, and club rooms. There too they sometimes found relief and assistance in getting a job. And there they found the center of their political life. The saloon, in short, was the poor man's, and hence the immigrant's, club par excellence.62

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Although newer Americans found in the saloon one of the institutions that gave their lives meaning and helped them adjust to American ways, the native Protestant middle classes were unable to tolerate this fact. T o them the saloon was a demoralizing, disruptive, and reactionary force that kept the foreign stock from becoming Americanized; they thus sought to destroy the saloon in order to "uplift" their countrymen and force them to assimilate. Abolish the saloon, advised one social worker, "and the task of Americanizing the conglomerate foreign population would be lightened 50 per cent." 63 The result, however, was not to hasten assimilation but rather to impede it by antagonizing the newer Americans and by intensifying their alienation.64 What the foreign-stock population was to the rest of the country, the Negro and lower-class white was to the South. Practically untouched by the wave of foreign immigration, the eleven states of the old Confederacy contained several million poor whites in 1910 and 7,928,109 of the nation's 9,827,763 Negroes. 65 Unlike the foreign-stock population in the North, however, these Southern lower classes were primarily rural. Southern Negroes, for example, though migrating to the cities in increasing numbers, were only about 18.8 per cent urbanized in 191ο. 66 Taken together, lower-class whites and Negroes posed much the same challenge to middle-class Southerners as the foreign-stock population did to the middle classes elsewhere. And as always, the problem focused on the liquor question. Liquor, Southerners believed, demoralized and debauched the lower classes, kept them from acquiring property, and, what was particularly bad, lowered efficiency and prevented Southern agriculture and industry from achieving a faster rate of growth. Liquor also led to crime, vice, poverty, and suffering, and kept the lower classes from rising and becoming

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socially respectable. Finally, liquor unfitted them for civic duties and made it easier to buy or control their votes. Although Negroes were politically handicapped by poll taxes and other devices in every Southern state by 1910, they could still be bought corruptly by paying their poll taxes, giving them a few drinks and a little ready money, and voting them in droves at the polls. By this means, the liquor interests were believed to have defeated dry campaigns in Florida, Texas, and Arkansas.67 But above all, Southerners feared that liquor would result in race conflict. The danger spot here, they believed, was the saloon, where the worst elements of both races met and drank, although at separate bars. "It is realized," noted one Southern writer, "that in any Southern community with a bar-room, a race war is a perilously possible occurrence. The danger is not in the upper but in the lower levels of both races." 68 "Two-thirds of the mobs, lynchings, and burnings at the stake," declared another observer, "are the result of whisky drunk by bad black and bad white men." 69 The most explosive cause of social violence in the South was rape, a crime most Southerners believed was stimulated by strong drink. The danger from this crime, they now discovered, was being increased by irresponsible elements among the liquor manufacturers. In 1908 Will Irwin published an article in Collier's Weekly showing that in saloons throughout the black belt certain distillers were selling brands of gin whose titles and labels contained obscene pictures of naked white women and suggestions that the contents would increase sexual passion and potency. That this gin was intended for the Negro trade was indicated by the fact that it was never found in white bars but only in places patronized by Negroes. Probably the worst offender was Lee Levy and Company of St. Louis, a firm that not only distributed a popular brand

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of this "nigger gin," but also widely advertised it by circulating tons of obscene picture cards throughout the black belt.70 The result, Irwin noted, was tragedy: The primitive negro field hand, a web of strong, sudden impulses, good and bad, comes into town or settlement on Saturday afternoon and pays his fifty cents for a pint of Mr. Levy's gin. He absorbs not only its toxic heat, but absorbs also the suggestion, subtly conveyed, that it contains aphrodisiacs. He sits in the road or in the alley at the height of his debauch, looking at that obscene picture of a white woman on the label, drinking in the invitation which it carries. And then comes—opportunity. There follows the hideous episode of the rope or the stake. 71

One of the worst race riots ascribed to rape occurred in Atlanta in September 1906. Aroused by rumors of a half dozen attacks by Negroes upon white women, an angry mob erupted from the city's saloons one Saturday evening and began chasing, beating, and killing innocent and defenseless Negroes. Before the mob was through, 19 Negroes had perished at its hands.72 The liquor problem, then, was intimately bound up with the two major challenges that by 1900 confronted middleclass Americans: the control of economic and political life by big business, and unrest and discontent among the lower classes. And in responding to these two challenges, middleclass Americans naturally turned to prohibition as one of their remedies. They did so, however, not merely because prohibition would destroy the liquor industry, but because, by removing a key link in the corrupt alliance between business, vice, and politics, it would also help free government from the control of other predatory interests and thus open the way to reform in general. As long as the liquor industry remained entrenched, they believed, no lasting reform was

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But if the prohibition campaign helped to pave the way for other reforms, the reverse was also true—other reforms helped clear the way for prohibition. Initiative, referendum, and recall, the direct election of United States Senators, and woman's suffrage were all looked upon to help make it easier for the people to break the shackles of political corruption and to enable their governments to destroy the liquor traffic. 74 How closely these reforms were related and how they provoked the combined opposition of the liquor industry and its business and political allies, was illustrated by the case of woman suffrage. Most of those who supported woman suffrage believed that the woman's vote would be a power for good and would help bring about progressive legislation a:nd reform, including prohibition. Women would vote dry, they

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believed, because two of the leading women's organizations, the W.C.T.U. and the General Federation of Women's Clubs, both favored prohibition, and because election returns, wherever open to analysis, showed the great majority of women casting dry ballots. For this reason, the liquor interests and their allies were among the staunchest opponents of the suffragette movement.75 In Texas, for example, a group of brewers and eighty or more other corporations (including the Gulf Refining Company, the Santa Fe Railroad, the American Express Company, Swift and Company, and the Southwestern States Portland Cement Company) formed the Texas Business Men's Association to promote their interests and prevent hostile legislation. Under the cover of a farmers' union, this association supplied rural newspapers throughout the nation with a series of free "educational" articles, in fact nothing but disguised propaganda against business regulation and woman suffrage. 76 The opposition of the liquor interests to progressive reform was also seen in their attitude toward the Negro vote in the South. Most Southerners regarded the removal of the mass of illiterate and propertyless Negroes from politics as a progressive measure because it eliminated a source of political corruption, weakened the power of the conservative interests, and opened the way to further reform. The liquor interests, however, opposed Negro disfranchisement because they had generally been able to win or control his vote. Here again, therefore, the liquor interests aligned themselves against the progressive cause.77 Middle-class progressives, then, supported prohibition, woman suffrage, and other reforms as a means of democratizing government and securing legislation to curb big business. But this was only half their program, for they also sought to democratize government in order to improve the lot of the

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lower classes. This was the traditional way of American reform—to respond to a threat from below not by repressing the lower classes but by enabling them to become happy and prosperous themselves. Prohibition was simply a means of helping to force this process.

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formation of the Anti-Saloon League in 1895 was the result of insistent demands by temperance reformers for a union of their divided efforts to stem the growing power of the liquor industry. At the time the league was founded over one hundred temperance societies were operating along denominational, fraternal, associational, and partisan lines, frequently working at cross purposes, and sometimes more interested in fighting one another than the common foe. Those who objected to the third party approach to reform had made sporadic efforts throughout the 1870's and 1880's to unite on a nonpartisan basis, but with little success. However, stirred by a series of defeats in the late 1880's and by the obvious failure of the Prohibition party, these reformers issued a renewed call for unity and nonpartisan action against the saloon. In June 1890, a National Temperance Congress convened in N e w York City for the express purpose of exploring possible grounds of unity. In the following year a national temperance convention met at Saratoga Springs, N e w York, and passed a resolution urging the formation of local leagues to unite the various temperance elements. A t length a large number of local leagues began to form, and, in some cases, succeeded in banding together in state-wide alliances. Among these were the Christian Temperance Alliance of Pennsyl-

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vania, formed on April 4, 1893, the Anti-Saloon League of the District of Columbia, organized on June 23, 1893, and the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, formally launched on September 5, 1893. 1 The Reverend Alpha J . Kynett, chairman of the Permanent Committee on Temperance and Prohibition of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was responsible for the general convention that finally established a nation-wide league of temperance organizations. Following conversations with Archbishop Ireland of the Roman Catholic Church and the Reverend Luther B. Wilson of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Kynett got in touch with the Anti-Saloon League of the District of Columbia and persuaded it to issue a call for a national convention. This it did on October 18, 1895, after first sounding out prominent temperance workers on the subject and finding them overwhelmingly in favor of such a step.2 In response to its call 161 delegates, representing 47 different temperance organizations, assembled in the Sunday school building of the Calvary Baptist Church, Washington, D.C., on December 17, 1895. Among the organizations represented were the National Temperance Society and Publication House, several fraternal temperance orders, the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, the Non-Partisan W . C . T . U . , the Congressional Temperance Society, six state leagues and alliances, the Anti-Saloon League of the District of Columbia, and a number of church temperance committees, young people's societies, and other denominational bodies.3 On December 18, the delegates formally organized the American Anti-Saloon League, later better known as the Anti-Saloon League of America. They adopted a constitution providing for seven officers—a president, three vice-presidents, superintendent, secretary, and treasurer—all to be elected by

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delegates at regular conventions; a board of directors composed of one representative from each organization affiliated with the league; and an executive committee made up of the seven officers and eight others chosen by the board of directors. Representation at the conventions was to be on the basis of ten delegates from each national organization, five from each state organization, and two from each lesser body. Hiram Price, a former Congressman from Iowa, was elected president, and the Reverend Howard H . Russell of the Ohio AntiSaloon League, superintendent. 4 The convention established the league on a basis designed to win broad general acceptance. First, the league was not to advocate prohibition in the broad sense, but was to rally the divided temperance forces for the more modest task of saloon suppression. This was made clear not only by the call which brought the delegates together but also by the convention motto, "The Saloon Must Go," by the constitution which declared the league's purpose to be "the suppression of the saloon," and by the very name chosen for the league itself.5 Second, it was to be nonpartisan, though intensely political. It pledged itself to "avoid affiliation with any political party as such and to maintain an attitude of neutrality upon questions of public policy not directly and immediately concerned with the traffic in strong drink." 6 All persons, therefore, regardless of party, religion, race, class, or profession, and despite differences of opinion on all other questions, would be able to unite in support of the league's program. And third, it was to be a federation of existing temperance agencies, not a separate and competing force. 7 One of the chief instruments of hammering the new organization into a powerful weapon was its first superintendent, the Reverend Howard H . Russell. H e had already pro-

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moted the Ohio Anti-Saloon League into one of the most effective state organizations; he now brought to his new post the ideas and methods he had developed and applied successfully in Ohio. In building up the league's strength Russell had two choices: either he would have to depend on the league's components' increasing their own strength or else he would have to acquire new affiliates. Russell chose the latter course, and in doing so he concentrated not on bringing in those temperance agencies already in the field but on establishing new state leagues fashioned after his own organization in Ohio. Although the Ohio league was only one of many affiliates of the national league, it was thus destined to become its most important unit.8 Russell applied himself at once to the task of organizing additional state leagues. T o facilitate the work, he drew up model constitutions to guide the various subdivisions within each state. The basic unit was to be the church antisaloon league. One of these was to be formed in each congregation for the purpose of holding monthly agitation meetings, distributing temperance literature, and circulating a total abstinence pledge. The next larger unit was to be the local antisaloon league, which would embrace all local organizations interested in temperance: church antisaloon leagues, labor unions, law and order leagues, fraternal and other temperance societies. Next up the ladder was to be the county antisaloon league, which would comprise the heads of all local antisaloon leagues in the county. 9 T o cap the structure in each state was to be a state antisaloon league, which would consist of a superintendent and his assistants, and a board of trustees who would represent the various organizations affiliated with the state league. The boards of trustees were to control and govern the state leagues. Although they were ultimately to become elective,

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the boards of trustees were initially appointed from above in order to prevent them from being captured and destroyed by unfriendly partisans. The state superintendents were to oversee the work in each state. Upon them devolved the burden of building up their respective organizations and supervising all league activities, one of the most important of which was to lobby at the state legislature. The superintendents and their assistants were required to devote full time to the work; Russell had made this a condition of his employment in Ohio and now incorporated it as an essential and distinctive feature of the national league itself. 10 The first three years of the Anti-Saloon League's existence was a period of severe hardship. Launched during an economic depression and at a time when temperance sentiment was at a low point, the league had to struggle to keep alive. A serious and, at times, almost fatal lack of funds hampered the work of organization; during the first three years, the national league's receipts barely averaged $1,000 a year, hardly enough to pay the postage, much less the salaries of its officials. In addition, Russell, finding it difficult to recruit qualified and able workers, was often forced to accept men of inferior caliber. 11 But through persistence and hard work, the league survived and slowly made headway. A t the end of its first year new state leagues had been installed in Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, South Dakota, and Michigan, and the total number of affiliates had risen to 93. 12 Progress was disappointingly slow in 1897; although the total number of affiliates increased to 161, only three new state units were added: southern California, Iowa, and Tennessee. 13 In November 1897, Russell resigned as superintendent of the Ohio AntiSaloon League in order to devote full time to the national league. 14 Thereafter progress was more encouraging. N e w

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leagues were added in 1898 in Vermont, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and the number of affiliates rose to 209. 15 B y the end of 1899, state leagues had been inaugurated in 21 states and territories, most of them along the lines of the "Ohio Model." 1 6 With the revival of temperance sentiment after 1900, the league grew even more rapidly. Ecclesiastical bodies, which could not properly go into partisan politics, began to acknowledge the league as an effective agency through which their members, as citizens, could unite to attack the saloon. More important, an increasing number of individual churches began to open their doors to league workers. Russell had always recognized that success depended upon the backing of the nation's churchgoers and that they could most readily be reached through the local pulpits. 17 Encouraged by the cooperation of local churches, the league now became confident of ultimate victory: A s a sacred trust God has confided to this organization the task of offering a practical plan of Union for all the enemies of the saloon. Already He has set the seal of approval and victory upon our efforts . . . T h e horizon is full of definite indications that if we are faithful, everyone, to the commission imposed upon us, w e are soon to "stand still and see the Salvation of G o d . " 1 8

As the league's chief promoter, Russell traveled as much as 50,000 miles in some years, organized new state leagues, and encouraged old ones. B y the time he relinquished his post in 1903, the league had been established in 40 states and territories and had a combined salaried force of some 300 fulltime workers. 19 Under his direction finances also improved; league indebtedness, which amounted to $150,000 at the end of 1901, was reduced within a year to about $4,8oo.20 Additional funds made it possible for the league to launch a propaganda campaign of its own. Originally dependent

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upon the publications of the National Temperance Society, the W.C.T.U., and the Non-Partisan W.C.T.U., the league now began to publish its own newspapers, give stereopticon lectures, and scatter millions of pages of printed matter in the form of tracts, leaflets, pamphlets, and periodicals.21 If Russell was the Moses who led the hosts out of the wilderness, the Reverend Purley A . Baker, his successor, was the Joshua who led them into the promised land. Russell's main task had been to build up the league's organization; Baker's task was to complete and perfect the organization and use it to achieve the league's legislative objectives. Although his first f e w years were devoted primarily to the work of organization, Baker was able, after 1907, to direct more and more of the league's energies into crucial campaigns to suppress the saloon. This was made possible by the league's growing popular support. Almost unknown outside the churches before 1907, the league thereafter moved ahead rapidly as the nation's foremost temperance agency. Under Baker's leadership, the league developed into a major national political power, highly respected by friend and feared by foe. 22 One of Baker's thorniest problems was to expand the work in the South where antisaloon sentiment was actually farthest advanced but where the league had obtained only a partial foothold. Among other difficulties, Southern suspicions of the league's nonpartisanship hampered the work, so that by 1904 permanent organizations had been planted only in Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. That year, however, the league appointed the Reverend George W . Young of Kentucky as assistant superintendent in special charge of Southern work. Largely through his efforts, branches were soon established in most of the remaining Southern states: Georgia and Kentucky in 1905; Florida, Texas, and South Carolina in 1907; and Louisiana in 1908. 23

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The work of organization also continued outside the South. By 1908 the league was operating in 43 states and territories and in the District of Columbia; only Idaho, North Dakota, Nevada, Indiana, and Mississippi were without state branches.24 In most of the states the league installed a unit on the "Ohio Model," but in a few cases it was forced to work through independent agencies. In Connecticut, for instance, the league worked through the Connecticut Temperance Society, which had an independent history dating back to 1865.25 As the league's organization grew, so did its professional staff. From about 300 full-time salaried employees in 1903, the league's working force expanded to more than 1,500 in 1915. 26 In addition to its permanent staff, the league also called on the services of volunteer speakers. These, together with its regular field agents, brought the league's speaking force to a total of about 50,000 during the final stages of the prohibition campaign.27 Staff problems gave the most trouble during the league's early years of rapid expansion. In addition to the usual difficulties caused by resignation, death, incompetence, and dishonesty, Baker was compelled to devote considerable attention to the problem of discipline and training. T o help obtain understanding of and obedience to the league's principles and methods, Baker relied heavily upon reports to the league's national conventions and upon the columns of The American Issue, which became the official league organ in 1907. For league cadres Baker also continued an annual conference for superintendents and other officials begun by Russell in 1898. This was a three- or four-day meeting at which ideas were exchanged and strategy and techniques improved. But in establishing uniform methods and procedure, nothing proved to be more effective than actual service with the Ohio league

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or a branch modeled on it. B y 1913 nine out of ten of the league's workers had received training or experience in one of these units, and 34 state superintendents had actually come from the Ohio league itself. 28 As the league grew in power and prestige, it attracted better men to its service and was able to select them with greater care. Although the league's enemies were fond of implying that league employment was a sinecure that kept its workers from starving or having to find an honest job, it was far from such, and Baker was careful to screen out men who were seeking notoriety or who wished to escape the hard work of the ministry or the law. He was especially careful to avoid the "ministerial misfits and clerical flotsam and jetsam that are kindly recommended by their friendly, but despairing, denominational associates . . . " 2 9 Instead of a sinecure, league service came to be regarded as a regular and demanding profession. 30 As a result of the steady addition of state branches of the Ohio type, the league was gradually transformed into an organization quite different from that envisaged in 1895. With only two antisaloon leagues (those of Ohio and the District of Columbia) represented on its board of directors in 1895, control of the league remained at first with the fraternal, associational, and denominational temperance societies. But as the number and power of Ohio-model leagues increased, the center of gravity gradually shifted to them. Since they and not the other affiliates proved to be the national organization's major educational, financial, and political supporters, they were naturally given increasing responsibility for the league's management. Thus the league's constitution was revised in 1905 to vest control in a board of trustees composed of two representatives from each state antisaloon league and one representative from each of the other organizations

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affiliated with the league. In 1 9 1 1 the constitution was again revised and the representatives of the state leagues increased to three each. Finally, in 1913, the constitution was further revised to vest complete control in the state antisaloon leagues. Although they could still send delegates to the league's conventions, other temperance agencies no longer had any part in the management of its affairs. 31 Simultaneously with this development there occurred another change of great importance. Originally the state leagues, like the national league, had been conceived of as alliances of all organizations interested in temperance; in time, however, they became almost exclusively representative of the churches. In place of Russell's initial plan of church, local, and county antisaloon leagues, the national league found it more effective to base its permanent grass-roots organization on individual, cooperating churches. B y relying exclusively on local church committees, each headed by its own minister, the league avoided the danger of being discredited by impetuous action or inactivity on the part of local and county antisaloon leagues over which it had little control. 32 The constitution of 1913 also established the national machinery that served the league so effectively during its final drive for prohibition. The board of directors transacted the business of the league, adopted bylaws, and appointed the national officers. It also elected the executive committee of nineteen that actually ran the league. The executive committee, which met at least four times a year, determined questions of policy and procedure, supervised the itineraries of the national officers, controlled the finances, and fixed the time and place of national conventions. Through its national officers, chiefly the general superintendent, the financial secretary, and the legislative superintendent, the Anti-Saloon League exercised effective control over its state affiliates.33

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The machinery of the state antisaloon leagues paralleled that of the national organization. The state board of trustees determined questions of policy and procedure in harmony with the policies laid down by the national league and appointed the delegates to represent the state league on the national board of directors. It also elected the state headquarters committee that carried on the state league's day-today operations. Supervising the work in each state was a superintendent, nominated by the general superintendent and elected annually by the state league. The state superintendent appointed his own assistants, including the district superintendents, who directed activities in the administrative subdivisions of the state. Although closely supervised by the state headquarters committee and the national league, the state superintendents enjoyed considerable leeway in their freedom to try out new methods and ideas.34 By 1913 the Anti-Saloon League had become transformed into an independent temperance agency with its own organizational structure, its own constituency, its own leaders, and its own methods and policy. From a coalition of existing temperance groups, it had become a national federation of state antisaloon leagues, which, in turn, had become federations of individual churches throughout each state. With a highly centralized yet extremely flexible federal structure, the league, through its closely coordinated state branches, could reach down into thousands of local churches and mobilize at almost a moment's notice a large body of Protestant voters. With actual power concentrated in the hands of a few men, and without any real democratic control by the rank and file, the league was capable of moving quickly and with one mind to achieve its aims. It had, indeed, become the "federated Church in action against the saloon." 3 5 With its roots in the local churches, the league had access

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to a large and sympathetic constituency willing to provide the money necessary for its support. First devised by the Ohio league and then adopted as standard by the entire organization, the league's financial system was based upon a subscription card that its agents distributed to churchgoers once a year at a regular Sunday service set aside by the local churches and known as "Anti-Saloon Field Day." By filling out one of these subscription cards, an individual pledged himself to contribute to the league a monthly sum, payable quarterly, for a period of one, three, or five years. Since this same field day service was also used by the league's agent to propagate the work, the league was able to accomplish two objects at the cost of one and keep its administrative expenses at a minimum.36 The league's subscription system was naturally designed to reach a large number of small contributors rather than the few very wealthy. But the league also valued the large donation and constantly sought to augment its revenues by private canvasses among the rich. The most famous of the league's financial supporters were the John D. Rockefellers, father and son, who acknowledged giving about $350,000 to both state and national leagues between 1900 and 1919. 37 Despite large gifts, however, the league always received the bulk of its funds from people of modest means who customarily pledged from 25 cents to $2.00 a month.88 Between 1903 and 1910 the total annual income of the state leagues jumped from about $125,000 to about $1,000,000, and continued to increase until it finally reached an all-time high of $2,500,000 during the final drive for national prohibition.89 The national league, which kept its finances separate from the state leagues, at first depended upon private donations, but later supplemented these by an annual assessment of the state leagues. In 1912, however, it systematized

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its finances by organizing its own subscription department which thereafter provided most of its support. In 1918 subscription campaigns alone garnered the national league over half a million dollars. T o avoid any suspicion of dishonesty in the handling of its finances, the league provided for an audit of its books each year by certified public accountants.40 From the outset the league and the state branches each maintained three departments of work: agitation, legislation, and law enforcement. The first of these constituted a foundation for the other t\Vo. For by agitation the league set out to crystallize public sentiment, convert it into legislation and improved law enforcement, and build additional sentiment that in turn could be translated into progressively more stringent legislation and law enforcement. The league's leaders were well aware that neither legislation nor law enforcement could be effective unless based on a solid foundation of public opinion. Creating temperance sentiment, in fact, absorbed nine-tenths of the league's income and effort. 41 The chief instrument of the league's agitation as well as of its financial effort was the "Anti-Saloon Field D a y , " that Sunday each year when a cooperating church allowed a league field agent to occupy its pulpit and explain the league's work. In utilizing this opportunity, the league agent was careful not to request any change in the regular order of the Sunday service; he merely gave his address in place of the customary sermon and closed by distributing subscription cards and collecting them, together with cash contributions. The field day brought best results, the league found, when the regular pastor was in the pulpit to introduce the speaker and give the work his personal endorsement. In the cities the league preferred to concentrate its efforts by having all of the cooperating churches set aside the same Sunday as field day, then gather enough trained workers to fill every pulpit.42

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The field day was especially important during the league's early years when it needed to obtain financial support and increase its following among the churchgoing public. The effectiveness of the field day, of course, depended upon the number of churches willing to throw open their pulpits to league speakers. Between 1905 and 1915 the number of cooperating churches rose from about 19,000 to about 40,000.43 Most of these were Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Congregational. Protestant Episcopal and Lutheran churches generally refused to admit league speakers, and Roman Catholic churches excluded them entirely. Nor did the league receive any appreciable support from Jewish congregations.44 In addition to the field day, the league could expect local pastors voluntarily to commend the work from time to time and to conduct countless league meetings on their own initiative. On special occasions, moreover, local ministers in response to a league request would hold discussions on issues of current importance. Thus, at the league's suggestion, an estimated 30,000 churches throughout the country observed June 30, 1907, as a special temperance Sunday. In Illinois that same year, 2,500 pastors responded to a letter from the state league and spoke on a given Sunday in favor of a pending local option law.45 The league used the printed as well as the spoken word. During its formative years from 1895 to 1907, it had no official national journal; each state was free to publish its own independently. But the pressing need to establish uniformity of mesage led the league in late 1907 to designate The American Issue, the Ohio league's journal, as the official national organ, and to urge the state leagues to reprint from it in their local editions.4® The need to expand the league's constituency finally led the national officers to establish their own publishing house.

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Completed in October 1909, at Westerville, Ohio, the new plant was incorporated as the American Issue Publishing Company and placed under the direction of Ernest H. Cherrington.47 Within three years its eight presses were turning out more than 40 tons of literature a month, equivalent to 2 50 million book pages a year. This output included 31 different state editions of The American Issue with an aggregate monthly circulation of more than 500,000; The Anti-Saloon League Year Book, the first volume of which had appeared in 1908; and books, pamphlets, folders, leaflets, and tracts by the million. N o facet of the liquor problem was neglected: religious, scientific, social, economic, and political—all were thoroughly exploited.48 The output of league propaganda increased enormously during the second decade of the century; the plant at Westerville soon became the biggest temperance printing establishment in the world. Four new journals were launched and published until the advent of the war forced their abandonment: The American Patriot in 1912; the New Republic in 1913; and The Worker and The National Daily in 1915. In addition, the league took over the publication in 1914 of the Scientific Temperance Journal, edited by Cora Frances Stoddard.49 As the dry crusade rose to a climax, the plant doubled its force and began running three shifts a day "grinding out dry literature." 60 The output finally reached staggering proportions; the circulation of The American Issue alone climbed to approximately 16 million by 1919. 51 By means of its speakers and agents in the field, its adherents in the churches, and its friends in business and labor, or by direct mail to its subscribers, the league scattered its propaganda material throughout the country in a massive effort to mobilize and channel public opinion.52

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With public sentiment developed by means of its agitation and propaganda machine, the league, through its second department of work, sought to convert this sentiment into the force of law. This it did by attempting to persuade the voters in each electoral district, regardless of party and without reference to any other question, to cast their ballots only for those candidates whom the league endorsed. By controlling a bloc of voters, even if only a minority, the league hoped to win the balance of power in each legislative district and thus to dictate nominations and decide elections. By this means the league aimed to break the strangle hold that the liquor interests had long held over men in public life. The league, in short, proposed to make it safe for politicians to vote for its measures and fatal to vote against them.63 This, of course, was nothing but the well known technique of the nonpartisan pressure group that had already been developed by big business. "Jay Gould once said that in Republican districts he was a Republican, in Democratic districts a Democrat, but first, last, and all the time he was for the Erie Railroad. That," declared Russell, "is precisely our policy." 54 Unlike most pressure groups, however, the league was a reform agency and was seeking neither financial gain nor personal advancement for its members. It could not, like the liquor industry, round up or purchase its bloc of voters from the riffraff of the cities or bribe politicians. It could only rely on the voluntary support of the middle-class public.55 The league's main political weapon was publicity. It made no attempt to coerce its following, but merely recommended the most desirable candidate and left it to the voter to cast his ballot correctly. Since the people had a right to know a candidate's attitude on any public question, the league, prior to an election, customarily sent a letter to each candidate requesting his opinion on bills of interest to the league. The answers were

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then summarized and mailed directly to church voters. Data regarding a candidate's attitude and voting record were also summarized in handouts and in The American Issue; these were read by pastors to their congregations on the Sunday preceding an election. In addition, volunteers sometimes disseminated this information in house-to-house canvasses.56 T o choose a candidate to endorse, the league was realistic to a degree. If opposing candidates were equally acceptable, it made no choice, but left its adherents free to vote as they preferred. Between partially acceptable candidates, the league supported the one committed to the most desirable measure or the one most likely to be elected. In a contest between a partially acceptable candidate with a chance to win and an ideal candidate whose election was impossible, the league favored the former. Where no acceptable candidate could be nominated with a chance of election, the league backed the best candidate available. In the event that all nominees were objectionable, the league did not enter its own candidate, but depended upon its followers, as individuals, to nominate an independent candidate whom it could then officially endorse. As a matter of practical politics, the league did not make a candidate's drinking habits a condition of its support: it frankly preferred a wet legislator who would vote dry to a teetotaler who would vote wrong.57 Such realism and opportunism had long characterized its opponents; the league, as one of its leaders noted, had simply taken over the methods of the liquor interests, "deodorized and disinfected them and turned them back on the liquor traffic." 58 At the onset of an election, the state leagues, with the local churches as nuclei, would build up the political machine required by the situation. The basis of political organization varied, since conditions differed from state to state and also changed as the temperance movement progressed. In Illinois,

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for example, the preferred unit of political organization was the voting precinct, of which there were 4,000 in 1909. By mobilizing an army of 25,000 workers, mostly volunteers, the Illinois league was able to organize a committee in each precinct, answerable directly to the state league and responsible for running the local campaign and getting out the vote. In the cities, where the ward was the voting unit, the league formed similar committees, consisting of at least one member from every affiliated church in the ward. As polling lists became available, these ward or precinct committees would parcel out the names, ten to each worker. These workers, known as "Captains of Ten," would then collect detailed information on each voter, so that within a day or two league headquarters in Illinois would have a report on every voter in the state.69 During legislative sessions, the league's lobbyists at the state capitals and in Washington generally refrained from asking legislators for their vote. Instead, they concentrated on keeping a man's constituents back home fully informed of his activities, and brought pressure to bear on him when necessary by calling forth swarms of petitions, letters, and telegrams. For example, the state superintendent, Wayne Wheeler, by wiring league workers in Ohio, was able to evoke letters and telegrams from every county in the state within twenty-four hours.60 As the league gathered strength and demonstrated its power to elect and defeat candidates for office, politicians began to side with it in droves. As one eastern legislator said to a league official: "While I am no more of a Christian than I was last year, while I drink just as much as I did before, you have demonstrated to me that the boasted power of the saloon in politics is a myth . . . I will stand with you . . . if you will give me your support." 61 And the league retained this support when it proved that it would protect those politicians who

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remained loyal, that it would never go back on its friends when they sought renomination or re-election, and that it would immediately drop a man if he failed to keep his promise.82 In addition to agitation and legislation, the league also

,/^έτ-Ρ»'?". T H E POLITICIAN "That sounds like a million votes. The Prohibition issue for me."— Morris in the N e w York Evening Mail

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sought to obtain better law enforcement. As soon as possible each state league engaged an attorney who, except for traveling expenses, served without compensation. It was his task to prepare annotated pamphlets of his state's liquor laws, to draft ordinances, and to assist local prosecuting attorneys in preparing briefs and in taking test cases to court. If public officials failed to perform their duty, the league attorney would sometimes present a case himself, but usually in the name of the state or local community and not that of the league. As one of the league's professional staff, the attorney sometimes spoke in the churches on Sunday and helped to raise money.83 In the league's early days some state units maintained a regular detective force to obtain evidence against violators of the liquor laws, but this practice was abandoned after several leagues were nearly wrecked by the criticism it provoked. Thereafter the state leagues confined themselves merely to recommending private detectives whenever local organizations or enforcement officials wished to employ them.64 In addition to seeking legislation and law enforcement, the league also sought to promote temperance through moral suasion. From the start it had advocated not only legislation to restrict the supply of drink but also pledge-signing to reduce the demand. Because the league's leaders believed that moral suasion had been neglected, they decided to establish their own organization to remedy this shortcoming.66 In 1903, therefore, they organized the Lincoln Legion (Abraham Lincoln had supposedly drawn up and administered a total abstinence pledge at a temperance gathering in 1846).66 By 1913, when the new organization was rechristened the LincolnLee Legion, it had pledged more than a million persons.67 Despite its efficient organization and pressure group methods, however, the league might never have emerged from obscurity had it not been for the astute tactics that enabled it

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to keep in step with public opinion. T w o principal maneuvers accounted for its success: its early concentration on the saloon rather than the entire liquor traffic, and its emphasis on the liquor business rather than on private consumption. By adroit use of these two devices, the league avoided getting too far ahead of public opinion. At the same time it was careful not to alienate its own supporters by lagging too far behind. The league had been founded as an antisaloon organization in order to rally the divided temperance forces, but it continued to pose as such even after 1907, when it broadened its attack to include state prohibition as well. Thus in 1908 a league organ emphatically declared: "Prohibition, as the word is used in the United States, means prohibition of the saloon . . ." 88 This was only a temporary expedient, however, for prohibition of the entire liquor traffic was and always remained the league's final objective.69 Thus in 1904 Baker told the convention delegates that the league had not come "simply to build a little local sentiment or to secure the passage of a few laws, nor yet to vote the saloon from a few hundred towns. These are mere incidents in its progress. It has come to solve the liquor problem." 70 And again the following year he asserted that the league's purpose was the "ultimate extinction of the liquor traffic." 7 1 Publicly, however, the league continued to stress saloon suppression, and could be considered predominantly an antisaloon organization between 1895 and 1913. During this phase, the league concentrated on local option as the means of achieving its ends. Within each state the league's first objective was to induce the legislature to enact a local option law, giving the citizens of local units of government the right to grant or withhold licenses for the sale of liquor during a specified period. There were two main kinds of local option laws: special statutes applying to certain desig-

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nated localities only, and general statutes applicable to all units within a state. The unit of option varied, ranging from the county down to the city, town, village, ward, or precinct. The procedure for calling a local option election and the interval required between elections also varied. Local option laws were similar, however, in that they applied only to the sale of liquor; the manufacture and importation of alcoholic beverages were matters beyond the scope of local legislation. A vote for no-license, or local prohibition as some preferred to call it, simply meant a vote to abolish the local saloon.72 The league favored local option for several reasons. It kept attention focused on the saloon problem and therefore helped to educate the public. Since one could still bring in liquor supplies from adjacent wet territory, it enabled the league to win the support of many people who drank but who objected to public bars near their homes or places of business. Local option, moreover, provided experience and training for league workers on a local scale and allowed them to build up their organization and test their methods before undertaking more ambitious tasks.73 And, finally, it opened the way for national prohibition, because it permitted the league to attack the liquor traffic first at points of least resistance—rural crossroads, townships, villages, and counties. It thus enabled the league gradually to drive the saloon forces out of the country and into the cities where they could finally be defeated by the combined votes of the drys within and those without.74 Between 1895 and 1913 the number of states with effective local option laws increased from a mere handful to thirty-one. Although the league also began to work for state-wide prohibition after 1907 (six states were added to the dry column by 1913), its main emphasis continued to be on local option and saloon suppression. But by 1913, with more than one-half of the nation's counties and many of its villages, towns, and

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cities saloonless, the league finally decided that the time had come to strike for a federal amendment to abolish the entire commercial liquor traffic. 75 T h e league's other main tactical weapon was to direct its efforts against the liquor traffic rather than the drinker. Whether working for the suppression of the saloon on a local scale or for prohibition in state and nation, the league constantly maintained that its legislative program was aimed not at the private consumer but at the commercial liquor traffic. Indeed, as late as February 1917, the league was still strenuously opposing legislative measures that sought to prevent the personal use of intoxicating liquors. This policy was based partly on reasons of expediency. B y concentrating on the commercial liquor traffic, the league deprived its enemies of the argument that it was advocating sumptuary legislation and interfering with personal liberty. A s one reformer said: "Inasmuch as prohibition deals with public trade which has been considered a social matter since the time of barter it is absurd to call it 'sumptuary legislation' . . . T h e citizen is not forbidden to drink, although his opportunity to drink is lessened; but he is forbidden, for purposes of profit, to induce another citizen to drink." 76 Moreover, b y keeping the question of public sale to the fore, the league forced the liquor industry to defend itself on grounds of purely selfish gain. 77 And by directing its attack against the liquor traffic, but at the same time recognizing the right of people in dry territory to import liquor for their own use, the league was able to capitalize on the growing progressive demand for the elimination of saloon control and corruption from American political life. Until 1913 there were also legal reasons w h y the league did not try to prohibit the personal use of liquor. Ever since 1898, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in

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the case of Rhodes v. Ιοιυα, it had been established law that, although a state could prohibit the importation of liquor from another state for purpose of sale, it could not prevent the importation of such liquor for one's own private possession and use.78 Only after 1913, when Congress passed the WebbKenyon law and removed this disability, was the league free to work for state laws forbidding the private possession and use of intoxicating beverages. Even then, however, the league continued to direct its attack against the liquor traffic and to refrain from interfering legally with the right of private consumption. Not until after April 1917, did the league go the whole way and attempt to impose total abstinence on the entire nation by law. The league's success, then, was due to its organization, its agitation and propaganda machinery, its pressure group methods, and its astute tactics. But in the final analysis, the league's success depended not only upon its own wisdom and efforts but also on its good fortune to appear at a time when middle-class Americans were in a reforming mood. Although the Eighteenth Amendment would probably never have materialized except for the league, it is equally certain that the league would never have attained its success had not temperance reform been caught up in the progressive spirit itself. In the making of national prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League was a product as well as a cause of reform.

VI

T o w a r d a D r y Utopia

A t the turn of the century only five of the 45 states of the Union had state-wide laws prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages: Maine, Kansas, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Four states, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Idaho, and Nevada, relied heavily upon high license fees to regulate the liquor traffic. The 36 remaining states and the District of Columbia, although often resorting to high license rates, also allowed some form of local option.1 Despite the widespread use of local option, however, few saloons were actually voted out, because the public simply remained indifferent to temperance reform. By 1900 only 18 million of the nation's approximately 76 million people were living in saloonless territory, and about 17 per cent of these were in the five prohibition states.2 But with the upsurge of reform sentiment after 1900, the cause of temperance revived and soon became manifest in the stricter enforcement of liquor regulations, the passage of more effective local option laws, and in an increasing tendency to use local option to drive out the saloon. By 1906 about 35 million people were living in dry territory, most of them under local option. Together with the people living in the remaining prohibition states, this meant that roughly 40 per cent of the nation's population was living in saloonless territory. 3 As usual the greatest gains were registered in those areas

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having the highest proportion of old, native stock. In New England, where the town was the unit of local option, 183 of the 224 towns in New Hampshire, 221 of the 246 towns in Vermont, 16 of the 22 towns in Rhode Island, and 90 of the 168 towns in Connecticut were under no-license by 1908. Similar gains were recorded in the small towns of Massachusetts and New York. 4 In the eastern Middle West, 1,150 towns in Ohio, 1,016 towns in Indiana, 26 counties in Illinois, 708 towns and cities in Wisconsin, and 60 towns in Michigan were dry by 1908. Further West, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska registered comparable gains, as also in the Far West: Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and southern California.5 But the South made the greatest strides. B y the beginning of 1907 over two-thirds of the counties in the 11 states of the old Confederacy had voted out the saloon. In the border states of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, local option progress was a little less rapid, but by 1908 more than one-half of their counties had also banished the saloon.® Although most successful in villages, towns, and counties, local option also won important victories in some of the larger cities. In Chicago, for example, 160 precincts voted no-license in 1907 and thereby closed 199 saloons; by the following year, nearly one-half of Chicago was saloonless. In the South such key cities as Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi; and Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro, North Carolina, all voted out the saloon. In the Northeast, Worcester, Massachusetts, banished the saloon in 1908 and thereby became the largest no-license city in the country. Worcester was soon followed by 17 other cities in Massachusetts, including Haverhill and Lynn. Throughout the nation suburban communities were voting to free themselves of the saloon. Among these were eight communities

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around Boston, including Brookline and Cambridge, a number of New Jersey towns near New York City, Hyde Park outside of Chicago, and Palo Alto and Berkeley outside of San Francisco.7 Wherever cities abolished the saloon voluntarily, the nolicense system was relatively successful. Trouble arose, however, whenever prohibition was forced upon a city. This sometimes occurred where the county rather than the city was the unit of option and where the people of the county, together with a minority inside the city, were strong enough to vote the city dry. In Ohio, for example, East Liverpool, Newark, Zanesville, and Springfield, ranging in size from 20,000 to 50,000, voted against no-license in 1909, only to be forced dry by the rest of the county. In Newark serious trouble arose when officials attempted to uphold the law against the wishes of its citizens.8 As local option progressed, it assumed more and more the nature of a conflict between country and city. One reason for this was the growing determination of the old-stock middle classes to clean up the cities and rid them of their vice, crime, poverty, and corruption. Unless cleansed, they feared, the cities would undermine the foundations of American civilization and prevent any further progress toward uplift and reform. Thus they felt perfectly justified in imposing the nolicense system on cities against their will. As one reformer said: "Our nation can only be saved by turning the pure stream of country sentiment and township morals to flush out the cesspools of cities and so save civilization from pollution." 9 Another reason for the conflict was the corresponding determination of the urban masses and the liquor industry to resist this reform. Since the cities were the places where most breweries were located, and since the latter represented local

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investments and employed local labor, any attempt to interfere with them was likely to arouse the hostility of both capital and labor. Any attack upon the saloon in cities where the saloon was entrenched, moreover, was bound to provoke the opposition not only of the liquor interests but also of the lower classes that patronized it, and of the bosses, vice interests, and privileged businesses that supported it. 10 Although the prohibition movement took on the nature of a conflict between country and city, it is better understood if viewed more as a class than as a rural-urban struggle. For the movement cut across geographic lines: the old-stock, urban middle classes, which comprised about 40 per cent of the urban population in 1910, tended to favor it, whereas the lower classes in the country were more often opposed.11 In short, whether rural or urban, the old-stock middle classes and the lower classes were generally found on opposite sides of the prohibition issue. The fact that the liquor industry and the bulk of the lower classes were concentrated in the larger cities where the native middle classes were relatively weak has often obscured this truth. The middle-class character of the reform was seen when old-stock Americans living in the cities attempted to regulate the saloon in the interests of municipal reform. Aroused by numerous exposes and spurred on by the activities of good government organizations like the National Municipal League, middle-class urban dwellers throughout the nation sought to end boss rule by electing good men to office and by removing the influence of the saloon from politics. In some cities they tried to abolish the saloon outright, but in others, especially those with a high proportion of foreign stock, they contented themselves with merely limiting the number of saloons, enforcing the laws against sales to minors and drunkards, excluding saloons from the areas around schools, churches,

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parks, and homes, and requiring saloons to obey the Sundayclosing law. 12 It soon became clear, however, that attempts to enforce saloon regulations against the wishes of the foreign-stock population resulted only in defeating good government, not in promoting it. This was especially true where Sunday closing was the issue and the Irish and Germans were numerous. As the reformers soon found out, the saloon problem confronted them with an impossible dilemma: if they tried to enforce the law against the wishes of the lower classes, they insured their own ultimate defeat and threw government back into the hands of the bosses; if they winked at the law and failed to enforce it, they discredited reform and stripped themselves of the moral support they needed to succeed.13 In New York City, for example, the reform administration of Mayor William L. Strong, after overthrowing Tammany Hall in 1894, tried, through its police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, to enforce Sunday closing, with the result that it was defeated at the next election.14 In Chicago good government was constantly hampered during the 1900's by the attempt of certain reformers to enforce the liquor laws. As long as they persisted, the city's foreign population, which constituted about 80 per cent of the whole, remained implacably hostile and refused to support any other progressive measure. This, of course, suited the bosses, who for that reason naturally welcomed attempts of the reformers to enforce unpopular liquor laws. 15 The more realistic reformers made no attempt to enforce these laws. Instead, they broke free of the traditional limitations of middle-class reformers and supported only those progressive measures that the urban masses were willing to accept. Outstanding among these reformers were Hazen S. Pingree of Detroit, Tom L. Johnson and Newton D. Baker of

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Cleveland, Francis J. Heney of San Francisco, and Samuel ("Golden Rule") Jones and Brand Whitlock of Toledo. 16 In organizing the lower classes, these reformers brought into being an urban wing of the Progressive Movement that took its place alongside the middle-class wing. On many issues the two groups were able to cooperate. Thus they joined hands in Massachusetts, New York, California, and other states to enact laws democratizing government, regulating business, and aiding labor. But on other issues they divided sharply, and one of the most explosive of these was prohibition. T o the old-stock, middle-class progressive, prohibition was a way of uplifting and Americanizing the lower classes; to the urban masses, it was an intolerable interference with their personal liberty. 17 As already stated, by 1907 local option had made steady progress; in the period since 1900 the number of people living in saloonless territory had risen 16 per cent. But it was in the South that dry sentiment first matured sufficiently to carry the reform from the local to the state level. Georgia was the first to act, outlawing the manufacture and sale of liquor by statute in August 1907. The following month Oklahoma entered the Union with prohibition written into her constitution, and in November Alabama abolished the traffic by law. The following year two more Southern states enacted statutory prohibition: Mississippi in February and North Carolina in May. The last state to fall in line was Tennessee, which passed a prohibition law in January 1909. None of these laws, however, was "bone-dry"; all allowed liquor to be made and drunk at home and all permitted a person to import liquor from another state for his own private consumption. All they did was to destroy the commercial liquor traffic within their own state boundaries.18 As an effort to eliminate the influence of the liquor interests

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in politics and to discipline and uplift the lower-class whites and blacks, prohibition in the South was part and parcel of the Progressive Movement. Like the movement elsewhere in the nation, it was composed primarily of rural and urban middle-class Protestants, with leadership drawn largely from the urban elements—businessmen, lawyers, and other professional men. In Georgia, Hoke Smith, an Atlanta businessman, led the movement to victory on a platform of railroad legislation, business reform, and good government. As governor, he supported and signed the prohibition law. In Alabama, Braxton B. Comer, a wealthy Birmingham manufacturer, was elected governor on a progressive ticket and supported prohibition, and so too did Governor R . B. Glenn of North Carolina. In Tennessee, Edward R. Carmack, the progressive candidate for governor and a staunch prohibitionist, was defeated by the conservative Malcolm R . Patterson. But when Carmack was murdered a short time later by two close friends of Patterson's, the prohibitionist legislature, which Carmack had helped elect, promptly passed a dry law and sustained it over the governor's veto. 19 State prohibition in the South was not merely a countryman's measure. This was indicated by the support it received from the urban middle class. In North Carolina, for example, Winston-Salem, Wilmington, Salisbury, and Raleigh all gave prohibition a majority, and in Alabama, Birmingham did likewise. These urban majorities, Southerners believed, were largely the result of restricting the Negro's franchise; in previous elections the liquor interests had usually been able to buy and control the Negro vote. 20 Although the local option movement had made steady progress since 1900, the American public became fully aware of the reform only after several Southern states went dry. B y 1907 popular interest was thoroughly aroused and, as already

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indicated, was thereafter kept alive by a steady output of magazine and newspaper articles on the subject.21 Among the periodicals that devoted the most space to the question and that reflected most clearly the evolution of public opinion were The Outlook and The Independent, both progressiveminded journals. But probably the magazines most influential in arousing the public against the liquor traffic were the two leading muckraking periodicals of the time: Collier's Weekly and McClure's Magazine. Collier's Weekly first exploited the liquor issue with an expose by Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1907 on the subject of fraudulent patent medicines, many of which were shown to contain alcohol as their chief drug ingredient. Early the next year Will Irwin and Arthur H. Gleason began a series of articles that laid bare the corrupt alliance between the liquor interests, commercialized vice, politics, and business. McClure's Magazine opened its assault in October 1908, with an editorial denouncing the saloon's role in municipal corruption. This was followed in late 1908 and early 1909 by a series of articles presenting the scientific case against moderate drinking, and in September 1909, by an article of George Kibbe Turner's exposing the corruption of brewers and saloons. The magazine also ran two personal confessions, one by an ex-alcoholic depicting the ravages of drink and the other by an anonymous novelist urging the advantages of total abstinence.22 Because they enjoyed a nation-wide circulation, these large middle-class journals were more powerful molders of public opinion than the newspapers.23 But the latter also continued to exert an important influence and, like the periodicals, soon began to devote increasing attention to the liquor question. Superintendent Baker remarked upon this at the Anti-Saloon League's national convention in 1907 and noted with approval

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that more than one-half of the nation's press was friendly. 24 With the upsurge of dry sentiment after 1907, the AntiSaloon League rapidly emerged as the leading national temperance organization. In the South it had established branches just in time to participate in the drive for state prohibition. Assisting the league was the W . C . T . U . , which continued to play an important role in helping to form public opinion and in lobbying before the state and national legislatures.25 The Prohibition party, however, experienced increasing frustration. Although it adopted the whole gamut of progressive reforms, it failed to attract most reform-minded citizens, who preferred to remain in their own parties and work for temperance through the Anti-Saloon League. As a result, it suffered a relative decline at the very time the temperance movement was reaching new heights, a failure that some of its members naturally blamed on the Anti-Saloon League. Because of their different methods and tactics, the Prohibition party and the league found it difficult to cooperate and often worked at cross purposes.26 The rise of prohibition created serious alarm in the ranks of the liquor interests. The spread of the no-license system had already caused them to step up their defensive activities, but some of them now decided to try to take the steam out of the movement by reforming the saloon themselves.27 In line with this, the Ohio Brewers Association in 1907 established a vigilance bureau with a superintendent and twenty detectives to enforce the liquor laws and to eliminate disreputable saloons.28 The following year the United States Brewers Association condemned saloons that fostered prostitution and gambling and that sold to minors, urged the passage and enforcement of laws to regulate the liquor traffic, and offered to cooperate in efforts to clean up the retail trade.29 One of the most constructive of these reformist efforts was

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the National Model License League, created in 1907 with Τ . M. Gilmore, editor of Bonfort's Wine and Spirit Circular, at its head. Comprised of leading distillers, rectifiers, brewers, and wholesale dealers, it sought to reform the saloon by improving the license system so as to lessen the frantic competition that forced the saloonkeeper to hunt for profits in evil ways. Specifically, it proposed that liquor licenses be automatically renewed as long as the retailer obeyed the law, that excessively high license fees be lowered, and that no more licenses be issued until the ratio of saloons to population was reduced from 1 to 300, the ratio that then prevailed, to 1 to 500.30 Although these efforts improved the saloon situation in some localities, they failed to produce much real reform. Tied in as they were with the saloon, the brewers could hardly be expected to carry out a thorough housecleaning and thus seriously curtail their own profits. Neither could they afford to give up political activity in the face of advancing reform, and it was this more than anything else that outraged middleclass opinion. " A community which did not want prohibition," noted Collier's Weekly, "would try every means of regulation. Beaten at every turn by the liquor interests and their followers in politics, it would slowly be convinced that there was no way to fight the combination; outraged, it would rise and destroy the traffic." 3 1 As one liquor journal gloomily concluded in 1907: "We dislike to acknowledge it, but we really believe the entire business all over has overstayed the opportunity to protect itself against the onward march of prohibition . . . Five years ago a united industry might have kept back the situation that now confronts it, but to-day it is too late." 32 After 1909, the prohibition movement reached a plateau and during the next four years barely managed to hold its own. At

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the local level it yielded ground in Ohio, Indiana, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon, but won new territory in New York, Louisiana, Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, New Mexico, California, and Washington. At the state level it suffered defeats in Florida, Missouri, and Oregon in 1910, and Arkansas and Texas in 1911. The latter year also saw the repeal of prohibition in Alabama after the election of a conservative governor who had the backing of the railroad and liquor interests. Alabama's defection, however, was offset in 1912 by the addition of West Virginia to the prohibition column.33 The passage of the Webb-Kenyon Act by Congress on March 1, 1913, signaled another upsurge of dry sentiment, this time of sufficient force and duration to carry prohibition into the federal constitution. A major milestone, this law marked the transition of the reform from the local and state levels to the domain of national politics. The Webb-Kenyon Act, however, was by no means the first piece of temperance legislation passed by Congress after 1900. In 1901 Congress had enacted the so-called Anti-Canteen law, prohibiting the sale of intoxicating drinks on army posts, transports, and other army premises.34 In 1902 Congress had passed a law forbidding the sale of firearms, opium, and intoxicating liquors to natives on certain islands of the Pacific. The following year it had prohibited the sale of liquor at immigrant stations and in the Capitol building or on its grounds.36 Although not a temperance measure, the Pure Food and Drug law of 1906 had certain important temperance features. Enacted by Congress over the strenuous opposition of the Proprietary Medicine Association and the National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, this law required all patent medicines shipped in interstate commerce to be clearly and honestly labeled to show the alcohol, morphine, and other

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drugs they contained, and required whiskey bottles to be marked to show whether they contained straight whiskey (spirits distilled from a mash of grain and aged in charred oak barrels), rectified whiskey (neutral spirits distilled from a mash of grain and artificially flavored and colored), or blended whiskey (a mixture of straight and neutral spirits).38 In 1906 Congress also passed several other measures of a purely temperance character: it forbade the sale of liquor in National Soldiers Homes and cut off federal aid to any state or territorial soldiers home that sold liquor; it required collectors of internal revenue to furnish certified copies of the names of persons paying the federal tax as retail liquor dealers so that state officials could proceed against those selling in violation of local or state law; it inserted a provision in the Oklahoma statehood bill requiring prohibition in Indian Territory and on all reservations in Oklahoma for 21 years; and it appropriated substantial sums of money for the enforcement of the laws against the sale of liquor in Indian country and in Alaska.37 In 1908 Congress prohibited the shipment of liquor through the United States mails, and the following year amended the federal criminal code to forbid the C.O.D. shipment of liquor in interstate commerce, to outlaw the delivery of liquor to fictitious consignees, and to require all packages of liquor shipped in interstate commerce to be plainly marked as to contents, quantity, and name of consignee. In 1909 Congress also enacted a new code of liquor laws for Alaska and authorized Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee to establish jurisdiction over islands created by the shifting action of the Mississippi River in order to prevent these islands from being used as a haven for bootleggers.38 In 191 ο Congress provided for a plebiscite on the question of prohibition in Hawaii (the territory voted wet). And in

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1 9 1 1 Congress voted to pay the expenses of an American delegation to the International Congress Against Alcoholism at the Hague, an action it repeated in 1913 for the Congress at Milan. 89 Congress, however, repeatedly refused to pass the most important measure of all—a law empowering the states to shut off completely the interstate shipment of liquor into their territories. But now that prohibition was making such rapid progress, the temperance forces were becomingly increasingly eager to enable the states to plug up this loophole. For one thing, the right to import for private use was making it difficult for prohibition states to enforce their laws, since private consignees were reselling such liquor in violation of state law. Wholesale liquor houses, indeed, were making the problem worse by flooding dry states with liquor advertisements and by maintaining traveling salesmen in dry states to drum up trade and solicit orders. As long as these states were forced to permit the importation for use, they could never obtain satisfactory enforcement of their liquor laws. 40 Then, too, the right to import liquor for one's own private use tended to prevent the further progress of the prohibition movement. As long as this right existed, many states were reluctant to outlaw the liquor business within their own boundaries when to do so only meant to create a market for out-of-state manufacturers. 41 More important, however, was the fact that as long as the right of private importation remained, the states could never pass a bone-dry law. Although the reformers repeatedly maintained that their only purpose in pushing for an interstate shipment law was to enable the states to prohibit the commercial liquor traffic, their unspoken objective was obviously to make it possible for the states to outlaw the private consumption of liquor as well. T h e y consistently disclaimed any intention of interfering

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with one's right to drink, but betrayed their real intentions whenever the wets inserted a personal use exemption in an interstate liquor bill. B y 1913, indeed, the reformers were ready to repudiate any bill that contained such a proviso. 42 After ten years of steady effort, the temperance forces at last secured in the Webb-Kenyon bill the interstate liquor measure they wanted. As finally worded, the bill prohibited the importation into a state of any intoxicating liquors that were intended to be received, possessed, kept, or used in violation of the laws of that state. Introduced into Congress in December 1 9 1 1 , the bill was passed early the following year but was vetoed by President William H. T a f t . Repassed over his veto by a vote of 63 to 21 in the Senate and 246 to 95 in the House, it became law on March 1, 1913. 4 3 Opposition to the measure, including the President's veto, rested primarily on constitutional grounds. B y divesting intoxicating liquors of their interstate character as soon as they crossed a state line, Congress, the bill's critics declared, was delegating to the states the power to regulate interstate commerce which it alone could exercise. Henceforth, they said, a shipper would no longer be able to look to a uniform national law, but would have to examine the laws of every single state.44 The bill's supporters, however, contended that if Congress had the power to prohibit absolutely the interstate traffic in intoxicating liquors, as everyone agreed that it had, then it had the power to do the lesser thing and divest such commerce of its interstate character as soon as it crossed a state border. Although the operation of the rule would depend upon the laws of the states, the rule itself, they argued, was fixed by Congress. T h e y conceded, however, that the constitutional point was in doubt, but maintained that, since the bill was designed to enable the states to promote the health, welfare, and morals of their citizens, any such doubt should

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be resolved in the bill's favor. The Supreme Court, they argued, should be allowed to decide the matter.45 The vote for the Webb-Kenyon bill came primarily from those areas where the old-stock middle classes were strongest. In the Senate, 61 of the 63 votes to override Taft's veto came from the states of the South, Middle West, and Far West, whereas 10 of the 21 votes to sustain came from the seven urban-industrial states of the Northeast. 46 Among those voting to override the veto were nearly all of the Senate insurgents: from the Midwest, Moses E. Clapp and Knute Nelson of Minnesota, Albert B. Cummins and William S. Kenyon of Iowa, Asle J . Gronna and Porter J . McCumber of North Dakota, Coe I. Crawford and Robert J . Gamble of South Dakota, and Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas; from the Far West, Joseph N . Dixon of Montana, William E . Borah of Idaho, Miles Poindexter of Washington, John D. Works of California, and Henry F. Ashurst of Arizona. Although a few Senate conservatives voted to override, notably Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Jacob H. Gallinger of N e w Hampshire, Theodore E. Burton of Ohio, Charles Curtis of Kansas, and Reed Smoot of Utah, most of the conservatives voted to uphold the President. Among the latter were Frank B. Brandegee of Connecticut, Henry A . du Pont of Delaware, Simon Guggenheim of Colorado, George Sutherland of Utah, and Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania. 47 The progressive spirit expressed by the vote on the WebbKenyon bill was well stated in the House by a representative from Mississippi: Each of us is under an imperative duty to enlist in the great work of lifting up the human race to a higher and better life, and nothing, in my judgment, will so promote this work as will the giving of relief from the evils that flow from the whisky traffic. A republic . . . can be no better than the average of the men

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and women who give it concrete existence; therefore it is right and proper that we, as legislators, . . . should remove as far as we can everything that debases, demoralizes, and depraves our citizenship. In my short service here I have favored measures to reduce the tariff, because the people have been robbed by iniquitous laws in the interest of the few and against the many; a measure to restrict immigration, in order that the great hordes of foreigners who have no true conception of our form of government and who have not been trained to respect law, order, and the highest ideals of civilization and Christianity, should be kept from our borders; . . . measures in the interest of economy . . . and many others that look toward relief for the people of the Nation; but, I do not believe that any measure before this Congress is as important as legislation looking to the overthrow of the whisky trade.48 With the passage of the Webb-Kenyon law, the prohibition movement took on renewed vigor. The moral idealism of Wilsonian progressivism, the growing cult of efficiency and the intense absorption in material progress, the widening knowledge of the scientific case against moderate drinking, and the increasing public hostility to the liquor interests, all gave prohibition added momentum.49 Actual experience with prohibition, furthermore, convinced many Americans of its benefits and converted thousands to its cause.60 And, finally, the outbreak of the European War in 1914 and the efforts of the various belligerents to promote efficiency by reducing the consumption of alcoholic beverages persuaded many Americans to support the reform, especially after the United States launched its preparedness program in 1915. 61 One "of the first steps in effective preparation for defense," declared The Bankers Magazine, "is to put an entire or partial ban upon the liquor traffic." 52 In the face of rising prohibition, the liquor interests stepped up their defensive activities.58 But whatever they accomplished was more than offset by new revelations of liquor corruption. In January 1916, seven Texas breweries pleaded nolo con-

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tendere to charges of violating the state's election laws and were fined and deprived of their charters.54 The following March a federal grand jury at Pittsburgh returned indictments against the United States Brewers Association, the Pennsylvania Brewers Association, and approximately 100 other corporations for conspiring to influence corruptly federal elections in Pennsylvania. The defendants pleaded nolo contendere and were fined.65 T o make matters for the brewers still worse, the New York World in the spring of 1916 published letters and documents showing that the breweryfinanced German-American Alliance had been engaging in pro-German activities ever since the outbreak of war in 1914. 56 The World's revelations, said The New York Times, came as an "astounding chapter in the continued story of German conspiracy against the United States. They prove that a secret campaign has been carried on by a nation-wide German organization, the National German-American Alliance, to prevent legislation unfavorable to the designs and interests of Germany and to promote legislation favorable to those designs and interests."57 These exposes convinced many Americans that the only way to mend the liquor industry was to end it.58 Following passage of the Webb-Kenyon law, the temperance forces closed ranks and immediately launched an all-out drive to win new dry territory in the states and to elect enough additional drys to Congress to obtain the passage of a prohibition amendment.59 As the spearhead of the campaign, the Anti-Saloon League found that it did not have to force public opinion; all it had to do was to mobilize and channel it. "It was not manufactured sentiment," Wayne Wheeler later noted. "The sentiment was there all right; what we did was simply to direct it where and in the manner in which it would do the most good." 60 Growing dry sentiment soon led to the spread of state

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prohibition to the West. In the Far West, four states went dry in 1914: Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona; in 1915 Idaho, in 1916 Montana, and in 1917 Utah. In the Middle West, North Dakota and Kansas were joined by Iowa in 1915, by South Dakota, Nebraska, and Michigan in 1916, and by Indiana in 1917. 8 1 State prohibition also continued to make progress in the South. Virginia went dry in 1914, and Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina the following year. In the Northeast, New Hampshire adopted prohibition in 1917. By April 1917, there were 26 prohibition states in the Union. Together with nolicense territory, this meant that well over one-half of the American people were living in saloonless areas.62 As contemporaries were quick to note, the Far Western states that went dry were also the ones that were strongest for woman suffrage, the direct primary, initiative and referendum, and ballot reform. They were also the ones making some of the most vigorous efforts to regulate business and improve the lot of the underprivileged.63 Although not a prohibition state, California provided a good example of the connection between progressivism and liquor reform. In that state the Progressive Movement not only gave impetus to the temperance movement but also drew considerable strength from it. Thus, although technically nonpartisan, the Anti-Saloon League of California used its effective political machinery to help overcome the organizational weaknesses of the progressives and threw its strength into the progressive campaign of 1910 to elect Hiram Johnson governor. Johnson's running mate, indeed, was A. J. Wallace, a Methodist minister, oilman, and president of the state Anti-Saloon League, who polled about the same vote as Johnson.64 The man most responsible for bringing the temperance forces into the Progressive Movement was the Reverend

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David M. Gandier, social gospeler and superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League of California. Gandier's progressivism came out in such statements as this: The fight is just begun. The selfish forces of the land—Big Business and its ally, commercialized vice—are preparing for the death struggle. I believe the spirit of our age is against them. Everything which lives by injuring society, or which enriches the few at the expense of the many, is doomed to go. The spirit of brotherhood, which means a square deal for all and that those of superior cunning shall not be allowed to rob their less cunning fellows any more than the physically strong shall rob the weak, is abroad and is going to triumph.65 The record of the California state senate in 1 9 1 1 also throws light on the relationship between prohibition and progressivism. Among the bills passed by that body was an AntiSaloon League-endorsed local option measure. Voting for this bill were 17 senators, all of them progressives. The record of these 17 men on other reform issues was as follows: on five measures (85 votes) to democratize the machinery of government they cast 74 votes in favor, ο against, and 11 not cast; on four measures (68 votes) to regulate the railroads and conserve the state's water resources they cast 51 votes in favor, 5 against, and 12 not cast; and on seven key labor issues ( 1 1 9 votes) they cast 82 votes in favor, 19 against, and 18 not cast. These 17 men, however, comprised only about 65 per cent of the progressive contingent; the remaining progressive senators, representing the urban-labor-immigrant wing of the reform movement, voted against the local option bill. Conservative senators voted against the local option bill and all the other reform measures as well.® 6 The relationship between prohibition and progressivism was further brought out by the Progressive party, which, to a far higher degree than the two major parties, drew its strength from old-stock, middle-class Protestants.87 In Ohio, for ex-

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ample, the Progressive party in 1914 adopted an advanced platform that contained among its planks a demand for state prohibition. Strongly supported by both James R. Garfield, the party's candidate for governor, and Arthur L. Garford, its candidate for the U.S. Senate, the plank was also emphatically endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt when he came into the state to campaign for the ticket. "Whiskey and crooked politics," declared the ex-President at Columbus, "unquestionably have strong mutual affinities and it is natural that everywhere the liquor forces should line up against the Progressive party . . . " 68 "The Progressive party," noted the Ohio party's organ, "is the only political party this year that stands for State and Nation-wide Prohibition." 69 In contrast with Roosevelt's position was the attitude of a progressive like Woodrow Wilson who was forced to take into account the urban-industrial wing of his party. As Democratic governor of New Jersey, Wilson came out for local option, but refused to make it a political issue, because, he asserted, it would disrupt his party and prevent the enactment of other reforms.70 While prohibition was spreading to additional states after 1914, it was also capturing an increasing number of large cities. Rockford, Illinois, and Duluth, Minnesota, for example, both voted out the saloon, and Denver, Colorado; Spokane, Seattle, and Tacoma, Washington; and Portland, Oregon, all of which had been forced dry when their states adopted prohibition, later voted to sustain it after they had experienced its benefits.71 "Prohibition has been a revelation," said Mayor James Couzens of Detroit; "it has upset all the alarmist predictions of the wets and more than sustained all the rosiest predictions of the drys." 72 For a time it appeared that even Boston might go dry. But after a hard-fought campaign in that city in 1916, the voters

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rejected no-license by a majority of 53,431 to 30,877. The vote in Boston's 26 wards also throws light on the relationship between prohibition and progressivism, and, at the same time, makes clear the class division on prohibition. At the upper end of the social scale, the cultivated patricians of the Back Bay area voted strongly against the no-license measure. Their spokesman, the Boston Daily Transcript, also rejected the measure. At the other end of the social scale, the foreign-stock, working-class population voted even more heavily against the bill. Wards 1 through 13, the most strongly working class and the most densely populated by Irish, Italians, Jews, and Negroes, were also the wettest. In between these two classes was the old-stock middle class; this group gave the measure the only majorities it received.73 As in the cities and states, prohibition continued to make progress at the national level. After endorsing a federal amendment in November 1913, the Anti-Saloon League plunged into the task of electing additional drys to Congress the following year. In the ensuing campaign, the league entered every Congressional district where it had a reasonable chance to win and waged a sharp and aggressive fight. In hopelessly wet districts, however, it refused to contend.74 "We always distinguished between a good chance for a fight and a chance for a good fight," Wayne Wheeler later remarked.75 When the returns came in, the league found that, although it had registered substantial gains, it still lacked the necessary twothirds.''® Meanwhile, the league had gone ahead with a federal amendment. Following its convention in 1913, the league created a Committee of 1,000 men that, together with a similar committee from the W.C.T.U. and representatives from nearly a hundred different organizations, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol on December 13, 1913,

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SOMETHING A B O U T T O HAPPEN Henderson in the Westerville American Issue

and presented Congress with a prohibition resolution. 77 Introduced into the House by Richmond P. Hobson and into the Senate by Morris Sheppard, the resolution read as follows: Exact scientific research has demonstrated that alcohol is a narcotic poison, destructive and degenerating to the human organism, and that its distribution as a beverage lays a staggering economic burden upon the shoulders of the people, lowers to an appalling degree their average standard of character, thereby undermining the public morals and the foundation of free institutions, inflicts disease and untimely death upon hundreds of thousands of citizens and blights with degeneracy their children unborn, threatening the future life of the Nation . . . 78 The remedy, the resolution concluded, was a constitutional

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amendment that would prohibit the "sale, manufacture for sale, and importation for sale of beverages containing a l c o h o l . . . " 79 The wording of the resolution was highly significant, for, as phrased, it prohibited only the manufacture and importation of liquor for sale, not for use. Strictly speaking, therefore, it was not a bone-dry measure at all, but merely a device to destroy the commercial liquor traffic on a nation-wide scale. Although the ultimate objective of the Anti-Saloon League and of other temperance organizations was still to outlaw private consumption, most dry leaders believed that the public was not yet ready for the principle of compulsory, total abstinence. Not a single state, in fact, had as yet taken advantage of the Webb-Kenyon law to pass a bone-dry measure.80 The Hobson resolution gave the drys a great tactical advantage, for, by dealing only with the question of sale, it avoided the issue of sumptuary legislation and forced the liquor traffic to defend itself on grounds of purely selfish gain. Furthermore, by refusing to prohibit the consumption of liquor, it won the support of many drinkers who were willing to vote against the traffic but not against private use. The possibility that home distilleries or cooperative breweries would spring up did not bother the drys very much. Such activities, they thought, would be confined to a small percentage of heavy drinkers and could easily be suppressed by state law. Once the commercial liquor traffic was destroyed, they believed, no new drinkers would be recruited, the old drinkers would die out, and within two generations America would become a completely "sober" nation.81 Some drys, however, criticized the form of the Hobson resolution and favored pushing ahead for a total abstinence amendment.82 The Hobson resolution was pigeonholed in the Senate, but was finally reported out in the House, debated, and voted upon on December 22, 1914. Although it won a majority of

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197 to 190, it lacked the necessary two-thirds and was defeated.83 The vote in the House saw many progressives supporting the measure. Of the 20 members of the Progressive party, for example, 17 voted in favor, 1 voted against, and 2 failed to vote. Seven of the party's Representatives came from industrial Pennsylvania and every one of them supported the measure.84 Defeated in 1914, the drys agreed upon another version of the Hobson resolution and introduced it into the 64th Congress when that body convened on December 6, 1915· 85 At the same time the Anti-Saloon League launched an all-out drive to elect more dry members to Congress in 1916. "All the energy we put into the 1914 election campaign," said Wheeler, "boiled and bubbled with hotter fire in the campaign of 1916. We laid down such a barrage as candidates for Congress had never seen before . . . " 8 6 And this time the league won its two-thirds.87 "On election night," Wheeler later recalled, "the lights burned late at our Washington office . . . Many hours before the country knew whether Hughes or Wilson had triumphed, the dry workers throughout the nation were celebrating our victory. We knew the prohibition amendment would be submitted to the States by the Congress just elected." 88 Hard on the heels of this victory came further gains for prohibition. On January 8, 1917, the Supreme Court in a 7 to 2 decision upheld the constitutionality of the Webb-Kenyon law. This decision removed the last doubt of a state's power to prevent the importation of liquor for personal use and thus encouraged the states to pass such laws. Prior to the Court's ruling, only three states had taken advantage of the WebbKenyon law to forbid the importation of alcoholic liquorsArizona and West Virginia in 1915, and Oregon in 1916. By

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the end of 1917, however, seven more states—Kansas, North Dakota, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Washington, and Montana—had done so.89 On February 14, 1917, Congress passed a prohibition law for Alaska, to take effect January 1, 1918. On March 2, 1917, Congress passed an enabling act giving the people of Puerto Rico the right to vote on prohibition (they voted dry in July 1 9 1 7 ) , and the next day Congress enacted prohibition for the District of Columbia.90 Meanwhile, Congress had been moving ahead slowly on the second Hobson resolution. Much to the Anti-Saloon League's annoyance, however, the Senate altered the resolution on December 22, 1916, to prohibit the use as well as the sale. Since the league still regarded this as too radical, it dropped the Senate version and threw its weight behind the House bill which had remained unchanged. 91 The following February the league received another setback when the Senate passed an amendment to a Post Office appropriation bill forbidding the interstate shipment of intoxicating beverages into any state or territory that had adopted a prohibition law. Introduced by Senator Thomas B. Reed of Missouri, the amendment automatically cut off the importation of all liquor into the twentysix prohibition states whether they wanted to or not. Since most of these states had not chosen to forbid such importation, the league also regarded this measure as too drastic and fought it. Other dry organizations, however, especially the Prohibition party, the W . C . T . U . , and the church temperance agencies, approved the amendment and supported it. Referred to the House, it passed that body and became law on March 3, 1917. Unable to control Congress, the league abandoned its efforts to bring up the Hobson resolution and awaited the convening of a new Congress.92 The 65th Congress that convened on April 2, 1917, would

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ordinarily have met in December 1917, but was called into special session by Wilson to declare war. This it did on April 6. An immediate result was to bring prohibition additional support. For one thing, the war created an urgent demand for greater efficiency.93 For another, it created a pressing need to conserve grain. Although the loss of foodstuffs through the manufacture of intoxicating liquors was less than two per cent of the annual American cereal production, this was more than enough, observers noted, to offset the world shortage of 120,000,000 bushels.94 The question was, said The Independent, "shall the many have food, or the few have drink?" 95 T o insure the efficiency, health, and morals of the armed forces, Congress, in the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, required dry zones to be established around every military camp and forbade anyone to sell or give liquor to any member of the military establishment, even in a private home. The law made intoxicated servicemen liable to disciplinary action and, by a later amendment, to courts martial.98 T o help conserve grain, Congress wrote into the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of August 10, 1917, an amendment, effective from September 10, 1917, to the end of the war, forbidding the use of foodstuffs in the production of distilled spirits for beverage purposes, and authorizing the President to limit, regulate, or prohibit the use of foodstuffs in the manufacture of wine or beer for beverage purposes, or to limit their alcoholic content.97 The Anti-Saloon League had originally intended to place wine and beer under the same ban as whiskey, but at Wilson's request had compromised in order not to provoke a wet filibuster and delay the passage of other vital war legislation.98 At the insistence of Food Administrator Herbert Hoover, however, Wilson issued a proclamation on December 8, 1917, reducing the alcoholic content of beer to 2.75 per cent by weight and limiting the amount of foodstuffs

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that could be used in the manufacture of beer to 70 per cent of that used in the preceding year." Along with these measures, Congress also took action on the Anti-Saloon League's third prohibition resolution. Introduced on April 4, 1917, this resolution differed markedly from the league's two previous versions, for it would prohibit not only the commercial liquor traffic but the home manufacture as well. Whereas the original Hobson resolution had only prohibited the sale, the manufacture for sale, and the importation for sale, the new resolution prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes.100 What this meant was that national prohibition was no longer to be confined merely to destroying the commercial liquor traffic, but was now to attempt to prohibit the personal consumption as well. The league's resolution came before the Senate on July 30, 1917, and, after being amended to require a six-year time limit for ratification, was passed by that body on August 1 by a vote of 65 to 20. The House considered the resolution on December 17, 1917, and made three important changes: it gave Congress and the states concurrent power to enforce, it allowed the liquor industry one year from the date of ratification to wind up its affairs, and it extended the time limit for ratification to seven years. The Senate agreeing to the House amendments, the resolution was submitted to the states on December 22, 1917. 1 0 1 It read as follows: Section 1. A f t e r one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. Section 2. T h e Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Section 5. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have

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been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress. The arguments in Congress over the prohibition resolution centered around four main points. One involved the matter of revenue. Those who opposed the measure contended that it would destroy about one-third of the federal revenue and lead to a corresponding increase of general taxation. This argument, however, had now lost much of its earlier force; national prosperity, together with the federal income tax and other new sources of revenue opened up by the war, promised to more than offset the loss.102 A second point concerned the question of property rights. The opponents of prohibition maintained that, although it was legal to do so, it was unjust to confiscate the property of the liquor industry without compensation. Furthermore, they argued, it set a bad precedent. "If the liquor man's property can be confiscated," asked Τ . M. Gilmore, "then, why not confiscate the tobacco man's property, and the Coca-Cola man's property, and also the multi-millionaire's property . . . " 103 T o this the drys replied that property which was harmful to the health, welfare, morals, and safety of the people had long been subject to confiscation without compensation, that twenty-six states had abolished the liquor traffic without compensating the owners, and that it was unreasonable to expect Americans living in the 85 per cent of the territory that was dry to bear the burden of compensating those in the 15 per cent that was wet. In actual practice, however, the drys conceded the justice of the wet position by allowing the resolution to be amended to give the liquor industry one year from the date of ratification to wind up its affairs.104 More important was whether prohibition would really

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prohibit. As in the debates over state prohibition, the opponents of the amendment argued that drinking was a deeply rooted custom and that many people, especially wage earners and persons of foreign stock, would regard prohibition as a violation of their personal liberty and refuse to obey it. The result, they warned, would be to discredit the law. 105 "As a measure of prohibition," declared Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, "the practical difficulties . . . will cause it to fail, and my own belief is that in a very short time we shall settle down to a condition like that presented by the Amendments which attempted to confer full political rights upon the negroes of the United States, where the constitutional provision is entirely disregarded." 108 T o this objection the drys gave their usual reply: prohibition would no more prohibit than the laws against murder, gambling, prostitution, and burglary prohibited, but that was no reason to repeal these laws. Indeed, they countered, the overwhelming sentiment in favor of prohibition gave every reason to believe that it would be more enforceable in the future than at any time in the past. 107 As for the working people, they were to be the principal gainers from the measure. Said Senator Sheppard: The laboring millions cannot afford to waste over two billions a year on a beverage that impairs strength, undermines health, corrupts morals, and sends an everwidening stream of defectives and incompetents to the asylum, the penitentiary, the hospital, and the grave. Add to this the fact that even the moderate drinker transmits the alcoholic taint to the unborn child, predisposing the helpless little being to disease, to shame, and to sin, and the horror of it all will begin to appear.108 The fourth point concerned the wisdom of increasing the power of the federal government. In the opinion of many conservatives the federal government was already too powerful and under the proposed amendment would be able to

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employ a horde of officials to enter any home in the land.109 Some Southerners were particularly sensitive, seeing in the amendment a serious blow to state's rights and a precedent that could be used to justify federal intervention in behalf of the Negro. 1 1 0 Although the drys lessened the force of the state's rights argument somewhat by giving the states concurrent power to enforce, they generally ignored it, since the people had become accustomed by reform and war to a broader exercise of federal power. 1 1 1 With the amendment before the state legislatures, the AntiSaloon League threw all of its forces into the struggle for ratification. Since twenty-seven states were already dry and would probably ratify, the league needed the support of only nine more to clinch the matter; if the war continued, it believed, ratification would be completed by the spring of 1919. 1 1 2 As it turned out, the thirty-sixth state ratified on January 16, 1919. By the end of the following month fortyfive states had ratified. Enjoying majorities of over eighty per cent in the ratifying states, the amendment was rejected by only three: New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Proclaimed as the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took effect on January 16, 1920. 113 In speeding the amendment through Congress and the state legislatures, the war undoubtedly played an important part. Although ratification was practically assured by the elections of 1916, the magnitude and speed of the victory owed much to the idealism and the spirit of sacrifice called forth by the war. 114 More important than the size and speed of the victory, however, was the kind of amendment the war made possible, for what the people got was not temperance but almost total abstinence. The Eighteenth Amendment was also speeded along by the weakened condition of the liquor interests. Immediately

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after the passage of the Lever Food Control Act the brewers took advantage of the distinction in the law between spirits and beer to dissociate themselves from their erstwhile whiskey allies. " T h e true relationship of beer," declared the United States Brewers Association, "is with light wines and soft drinks—not with hard liquors . . . For years we have hoped, with the wine-growers, that some factor might intervene which would enable us to sever, once and for all, the shackles that bound our wholesome products . . . to ardent spirits in popular mental association and actual business practice." 1 1 5 The brewers, however, soon came under mortal attack themselves. For one thing, they were assailed for refusing to stop the sale of beer during the war. "German brewers in this country," declared the Anti-Saloon League, "have rendered thousands of men inefficient and are thus crippling the Republic in its war on Prussian militarism." 1 1 6 The fact that many brewers had German names, of course, only made their position worse. " W e have German enemies across the water," exclaimed one prohibitionist. " W e have German enemies in this country too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller." 1 1 7 The brewers, moreover, were assaulted for their connection with the German-American Alliance whose charter Congress revoked on July 31, 1918, for engaging in pro-German activities. 118 But the brewers received their most damaging blow in September 1918, when Attorney General A . Mitchell Palmer accused them of subsidizing the press, dominating politics, and engaging in unpatriotic activities. Investigated by a subcommittee of the Senate, these charges were later found to be substantially correct. 119 Congress finally moved against the brewers and vintners by passing a rider to an agricultural appropriation bill placing beer and wine under the same ban as whiskey. Enacted into

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law on November 21, 1918, the War Prohibition Act, as the measure came to be called, forbade the manufacture of beer and wine after May 1, 1919, and outlawed the sale of all intoxicating beverages after June 30, 1919, both provisions to remain in effect until the end of the war and thereafter until the termination of demobilization. Although the fighting had already ceased on November 1 1 , 1918, the war emergency continued in force, with the result that the nation actually went dry under War Prohibition on July 1, 1919, rather than on January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment took effect. 120 Assured of the triumph of national prohibition, the AntiSaloon League now raised its sights even higher and embarked on a campaign to extend the benefits of prohibition to the entire world. Largely at its prompting, an international prohibition conference met in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 1919, and a new agency, the World League Against Alcoholism, was created to bring about international prohibition.121 Behind this move was the league's belief that just as prohibition was necessary to help preserve American democracy, so was it necessary to help make the world safe for democracy. 122 And just as the United States had a mission to lead the world to greater democracy, so did it have a mission to lead the world to prohibition. This mission was asserted, among others, by the Reverend A. C. Bane at the league's convention in 1917. T o a wildly cheering audience, he declaimed as follows: [Redeemed by prohibition] America will " g o over the top" in humanity's greatest battle, and plant the victorious white standard of Prohibition upon the nation's loftiest eminence. Then catching sight of the beckoning hands of our sister nations across the sea, struggling with the same age-long foe, w e will go forth with the spirit of the missionary and the crusader to help drive the demon of drink from all civilization. W i t h America leading the w a y , with faith in Omnipotent God, and bearing with patriotic hands

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our stainless flag, the emblem of civic purity, we -will soon . . . bestow upon mankind the priceless gift of World Prohibition.123 With the passage of war prohibition and the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, Congress had only to enact an effective enforcement law. Again taking the lead, the AntiSaloon League codified the prohibition laws of the various states, and selecting the best features of each, incorporated them in a bill that it had Representative Andrew J . Volstead introduce into Congress on May 19, 1919. Entitled the N a tional Prohibition Act, but popularly known as the Volstead bill, the measure came before the House on June 30, and, after extended debate, was passed on July 22 by a vote of 287 to 100. The bill was then referred to the Senate and passed by that body on September 5 without a roll call. After differences between the two houses had been ironed out, the bill was sent to President Wilson who vetoed it on October 27. The President's veto, however, was promptly overridden by the House, 176 to 5, and by the Senate the following day, 65 to 20. 124 Title I of the Volstead law provided for the enforcement of the W a r Prohibition Act and defined intoxicating liquor for that purpose as anything over 0.5 per cent alcohol. It was this Title that prompted Wilson's veto; he and others objected to it on the grounds that the war was over and that there was no longer any reason for war prohibition or its enforcement. T o this, however, the drys replied that the war was not officially over, that the army and navy were not yet completely demobilized, and that it was desirable to continue war prohibition in force until the Eighteenth Amendment took effect. T o the brewers who complained that war prohibition and its enforcement denied them the full year of grace granted by the Eighteenth Amendment, the drys had no satisfactory answer. 125

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Title III of the Volstead law provided for the regulation of the industrial alcohol industry to insure that none of its product was diverted to beverage purposes. Congress had already taken precautions in this regard in 1907 when it had stipulated that industrial alcohol, in order to enjoy exemption from the internal revenue tax on spirits, had to be denatured and made unfit for beverage purposes. The Volstead law reinforced these provisions.128 Title II was the part most directly concerned with enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment. It forbade anyone to "manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor" except as authorized in the act, and declared that all provisions in the law should be liberally construed so that "the use of intoxicating liquor as a beverage may be prevented." It again defined intoxicating liquor as anything containing over 0.5 per cent alcohol. As in Title I, this definition was adopted not because 0.5 per cent was intoxicating in fact but because it would insure the destruction of the liquor industry and the enforcement of the law. As a standard, the 0.5 per cent definition had its origins in an earlier ruling of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which, with the approval of the brewers, had adopted it as the arbitrary dividing line between a fermented beverage subject to the federal internal revenue tax and a nonfermented beverage exempt from the tax. 127 Although the bill was absolutely bone-dry when introduced by Volstead, it was subsequently altered by Congress to allow drinkers two important concessions. First, they were permitted to possess and use intoxicating liquors acquired before the law took effect, provided all such liquors were consumed at home by themselves, their families, or their guests. This was a special boon to those who had stocked up before war prohibition took effect on July 1, 1919. Drinkers were

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also permitted to manufacture "nonintoxicating" cider and fruit juices for use in their own homes. The loophole here was that these beverages were to be considered as intoxicating not on the basis of the 0.5 per cent definition but on the basis of whether they were intoxicating in fact—a question that a jury would have to determine in each case. 128 Title II also allowed the sale of alcoholic liquor for medicinal, sacramental, and industrial purposes, but established safeguards to prevent any of it from being diverted to beverage purposes. T o aid law enforcement, Title II subjected all illegal liquors to the internal revenue tax, authorized courts to issue injunctions restraining suspected violators, and made first offenders liable to a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment up to six months. Against the advice of both Secretary of the Treasury Carter Glass and Commissioner of Internal Revenue Daniel C. Roper, Title II placed enforcement of the law in the hands of the Bureau of Internal Revenue of the Treasury Department. For reasons of patronage, Congress also exempted prohibition field agents from the Civil Service. These and other provisions of Title II took effect at midnight, January 16, 1920. 129 The arrival of constitutional prohibition on January 17 th created no great excitement. Here and there wets lamented the passing of the old era in night club and restaurant ceremonies, while throughout the country drys celebrated at watch night services and public meetings. At Norfolk, Virginia, 10,000 persons saw Billy Sunday bid his old enemy John Barleycorn farewell in a mock burial and funeral oration. 130 But for the most part, constitutional prohibition came as something of an anticlimax. War prohibition had already outlawed the liquor traffic on July 1, 1919, and by early 1920 the public was becoming increasingly absorbed by the growing struggle over the Versailles Treaty and by the Red Scare.

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For the moment, at least, prohibition was overshadowed by other issues. •

*

#

Thus came prohibition to the United States. Out of an earnest desire to revitalize and preserve American democracy, middle-class Americans had turned to prohibition as one means of achieving their goal. And having secured prohibition, they now believed that they were passing into a new era of humanity, a new era of struggle, progress, and achievement. It remained to be seen, however, whether in adopting such a perfectionist measure they had overreached themselves; whether in trying to impose a rigid standard of sobriety on the entire nation by law they had undertaken something that the working classes would not accept and that they themselves would often not obey. If so, they would either have to try to enforce the law through measures that smacked of tyranny, or they would have to acquiesce in a defiance of the law that would only create worse evils than the law was designed to cure. In either case the result would be reaction, not progress. Whether prohibition would help fulfill the American dream or corrupt it, the future would disclose.

Notes ΦΦΦΦΦΦΦΨΨΨΦΦΦΦΦΦΦΨΦΦΦΦΦΦΨΦΦΦΦΦΦΦΦΦΦΦ CHAPTER I. T H E RELIGIOUS

ARGUMENT

Ι. E. L. Eaton, Winning the Fight Against Drink (Cincinnati, 1912), pp. 74-84. 2. Lyman Beecher, Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (Boston, 1827), p. 36. 3. Louis A. Banks, The Lincoln Legion (New York, 1903), p. 230. 4. Sister Joan Bland, Hibernian Crusade: The Story of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America (Washington, 1951)1 PP· 21J, 271; John Moffatt Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (New York, 1924), pp. 177-178. 5. Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, Ernest H. Cherrington, ed. (6 vols., Westerville, Ohio, 1924-1930), IV, 1615-1616. 6. Ibid., 1616; George M. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration: A Study of Immigrant Churches (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 7-8, 17-22, 374; H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Hamden, Conn., 1954), pp. 216-217; William W . Sweet, The Story of Religion in America (2d ed., rev., New York, 1950), pp. 268-269, 340; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1906 (2 vols., Washington, 1910), II, 352-353; 358-359. 7. Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 76-77, 84-90. 8. James M. Cleary, "Intemperance: The Evil and the Remedy," The Catholic World, 58:12 (October 1893). 9. General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Journal, 1908, pp. 132-133· 10. Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 67-72, 93-94; The Anti-Saloon League of America, Proceedings, 1900, p. 22. 11. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York, 1951), chaps, ii, iv, v, vi; Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 227-228. For a Catholic statement rejecting the evangelical view toward the liquor problem, see Bernard J. McNamara, "Danger in Prohibition," The Ecclesiastical Review, 58:500-501 (May 1918). 12. D. Leigh Colvin, Prohibition in the United States: A History of the Prohibition Party and of the Prohibition Movement (New York, 1926), pp. 589-590.

186

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

13. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Chicago, 1937), pp. vii-ix; idem, Social Sources, pp. 3-6, 13-16, 21-25, 264-265. 14. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, tr., Henry S. Commager, ed. (Galaxy ed., New York, 1947), pp. 336337, 200-202; Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York, 1952), pp. 47-53. 15. Beecher, Six Sermons, pp. 22, 30, 53-54. 16. H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources, pp. 86-87; idem, "Protestantism," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds. (15 vols., New York, 1930-1935), XII, 573574; Aaron I. Abell, The Urban Impact on American Protestantism, iS6$-igoo (Harvard Historical Studies, L I V , Cambridge, Mass., 1943), pp. 4-6, 64; de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 419-420. 17. Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 110-111. 18. August F. Fehlandt, A Century of Drink Reform in the United States (Cincinnati, 1904) p. 7; de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 200-202. 19. Beecher, Six Sermons, p. 56. 20. Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 42-46; The Cyclopaedia of Temperance and Prohibition (New York, 1891), pp. 86-88; E. A. Wasson, Religion and Drink (New York, 1914), chaps, i-iv. 21. Eaton, Winning the Fight, p. 43; Current Literature, 44:304 (March 1908). 22. Τ . M. Gilmore, letter to the editor, The Christian Herald, February 23, 1916, copy in the Richmond P. Hobson Papers, Library of Congress. 23. General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, Minutes, ι goo, p. 137. 24. Romans 14:21. 25. Lucian Johnston, "Prohibition," The Catholic Encyclopedia, Charles G. Herbermann et al., eds (15 vols., New York, 1907-1912), XII, 609; Wasson, Religion and Drink, pp. 106-108; Fehlandt, Drink Reform, pp. 280-286. 26. Churchmen who believed that drinking was a sin, however, were likely to go to extremes on this point also. Thus one minister asked: "What could be more incongruous than to celebrate the great sacrifice of our Lord with broth furnished by Satan!" Eaton, Winning the Fight, p. 218. 27. John Cole McKim, "Prohibition vs. Christianity," The North American Review, 208:124 (July 1918); Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, II, 667, 670. Jews also continued to use fermented wine in their religious services.

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

187

28. Fehlandt, Drink Reform, p. 113; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, January 1898, 35. On this point Catholic prohibitionists differed from their Protestant counterparts. Catholics held that since the use of liquor itself was not inherently evil, neither was the manufacture or sale. As conducted in the United States, however, the liquor business was a proximate occasion of mortal sin, inimical to the public weal, and ought to be suppressed. Joseph W . Tracy, "Prohibition and Catholics," The Catholic World, 51:669-672 (August 1890). 29. Fehlandt, Drink Reform, pp. 299-300. 30. Beecher, Six Sermons, pp. 58-59. 31. Ibid., p. 101. 32. Winthrop S. Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches ( N e w York, 1953), pp. 67-71, 88-89, 95; H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources, pp. 141-143, 171-173. 33. Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America ( N e w York, 1949), pp. 46-54, 63. Abell, Urban Impact, pp. 4-6. 34. General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, The Permanent Committee on Temperance, Annual Report, 1896, p. 340. 35. Charles F. Aked, "Man and His Neighbor," Appleton's Magazine, 12:10 ( J u l y 1908). 36. National Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States, Committee on Temperance, Report, 1910, pp. 229-300. 37. Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 311-329; Banks, Lincoln Legion, pp. 230-231; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 190η, pp. 20, 23. 38. Frank G. Beardsley, A History of American Revivals (3d ed., New York, 1912), pp. 308-331; William G. McLoughlin, Jr., Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago, 1955), pp. 40-42. 39. Ibid., pp. 28-31, 36-37, 122-123, 136-152, 221-224, 227-229. 40. The Literary Digest, 50:380 (February 20, 1915). 41. Beardsley, History of American Revivals, p. 332; McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, pp. 201-217, 2 ^ 0 · 42. H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources, pp. 32, 73-75; Hudson, Great Tradition, pp. 114, 123-127. 43. James H. Timberlake, "Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900-1919" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1957), chap. iii. 44. Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Minutes, 1900, p. 136; idem, Committee on Temperance, Annual Report, 1900, p. 311; idem, Board of Temperance, Annual Report, 1914, p. 7 and 1916, p. 14. 45. Idem, Board of Temperance, Annual Report, 1914, pp. 7-8 and 1916, p. 6; idem, Minutes, 1916, p. 179. 46. Idem, Minutes, 1912, p. 118.

188

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

47. Idem, Minutes, 1914, p. 125. 48. Idem, Minutes, 1913, p. 113; idem, Committee on Temperance, Annual Report, 1905, pp. 358-359 and 1912, p. 8. 49. Idem, Committee on Temperance, Annual Report, 1896, p. 336 and 1903, p. 311. 50. Idem, Minutes, 190η, pp. 138-139. j i. Methodist Episcopal Church, Journal, 1904, pp. 84, 108; idem, Journal, 1908, pp. 98-99, 118; idem, Journal, 1912, pp. 106-107, 141; idem, Journal, 1916, pp. 116-117, 128; idem, Journal, 1920, pp. 107, 109, 124; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I, 164. 52. Methodist Episcopal Church, Journal, 1916, p. 680. 53. Charles S. Macfarland, ed., Library of Christian Cooperation (6 vols., N e w York, 1917), V , 142; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, appropriate biographical entries; National Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States, Minutes, 1910) p. 374; idem, Committee on Temperance, Report, 1913, p. 296; idem, Commission on Temperance, Report, 191s, p. 318; idem, Minutes, 1919, p. 7. 54. Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem II, 614-615; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1917, pp. 71-73; General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Journal of the Proceedings of the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity, 1916, pp. 139, 328. 55. Stephenson, Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration, pp. 19, 374; Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1906, II, 343, 352-353, 358-359; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I V , 16151616. 56. Charles S. Macfarland, ed., Christian Unity 'at Work (4th ed., N e w York, 1913), pp. 252-253; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, III, 940; ibid., V I , 2717-2718; The Literary Digest, 43:210 (August 5, 1911). 57. Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Minutes, 1914, pp. 123-124. 58. Macfarland, Christian Unity, pp. 249, 253-260; idem, Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 121-140. 59. Ibid., 121-122; Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Board of Temperance, Annual Report, 191$, pp. 7-8; idem, Minutes, 1916, pp. 32-33; Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, Executive Committee, Annual Report, 1915, 128-133; The Survey, 35:59 ( O c t o ber 16, 1915). 60. Macfarland, Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 141; Federal Council of Churches, Executive Committee, Annual Report, 1917, p. 163. 61. Charles S. Macfarland, The Progress of Church Federation

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

189

( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 1 7 ) , pp. 91-94; Samuel M . Cavert, The Churches Allied for Common Tasks: Report of the Third Quadrennium of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 2 1 ) , p. 1 3 1 . 62. Ibid., pp. 130-136. 63. Charles H . Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865-1915 (Yale Studies in Religious Education, X I V , N e w Haven, 1940), pp. 3 1 6 - 3 1 7 . F o r social Christianity, see also M a y , Protestant Churches and Abell, Urban Impact. 64. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New Y o r k , 1 9 1 2 ) , pp. 125, 156-180. Unlike some social gospellers, Rauschenbusch stayed well within the evangelical tradition. "Evangelism," he wrote, "always seeks to create a fresh conviction of guilt as a basis f o r a higher righteousness, and this book is nothing if it is not a message of sin and salvation." Ibid., p. ix. 65. Ibid., pp. 209-210, 240. 66. Ibid., p. 209. 67. Ibid., pp. 288-289. 68. Ibid., p. 276. 69. Ibid., p. 456. 70. The Gospel of the Kingdom, 8:97-98 ( J u l y 1 9 1 6 ) ; Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, pp. 179, 259-263. 71. T h e author of these lessons was not identified. 72. Gospel of the Kingdom, 1 : 1 0 5 (November 1909). 73. Ibid., 1 : 1 0 5 . 74. Ibid., 1:105-106. 75. Ibid., 1:109. 76. Ibid., 1:111. 77. Ibid., 1:106, 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 . 78. Ibid., 6:97-98 ( J u l y 1 9 1 4 ) . 79. Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American ( N e w Y o r k , 1926), chaps, i-vii; Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, p. 280. Stelzle did not lose sight of the importance of evangelism and continued to speak extensively at evangelistic meetings. 80. Stelzle, Son of the Bowery, chaps, viii-xiv, pp. 167-174. 81. Ibid., pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 5 , 154, 160, 174-175; Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, pp. 296-301. 82. Ibid., pp. 192-193; Charles Stelzle, Why Prohibition! (New Y o r k , 1918), pp. 20-31, 9 5 - 1 1 5 ; idem, Son of the Bowery, pp. 194197, 207-208; Macfarland, Progress of Church Federation, p. 9 1 ; idem, Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 133, 137. 83. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1906, I, 74.

190

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

84. Ibid., I, 74. 85. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900: Population (10 vols., Washington, 1901-1902), I, lxv, lxiii; idem, Religious Bodies, 1906, I, 74. The average for the Presbyterians would be higher if the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., alone were considered, for the Southern, United, and Reformed Presbyterian Churches were much more rural than their northern neighbor. Growing urban support for prohibition can be readily seen in the steady increase of contributions by city congregations to the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Board of Temperance. See the Board of Temperance, Annual Reports from 1914 to 1919. 86. H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources, pp. 71, 171, 183-184. 87. Bland, Hibernian Crusade, pp. 44, 60, 104, 120, 161, 226-227; Walter Elliott, "The Church and Temperance," The Catholic World, 51:815-823 (September 1890). 88. Walter S. Shanley, "Temperance in the United States," Catholic Encyclopedia, X I V , 491. 89. Edward McSweeny, "Apologia Pro Foedere Abstinentiae," The Ecclesiastical Review, 30:248 (March 1904). 90. William J. McGurk, "Temperance Work in Our Schools," ibid., 43:366-368 (September 1910); P. J. O'Callaghan, "Catholics in the Temperance Movement," Catholic Builders of the Nation: A Symposium on the Catholic Contribution to the Civilization of the United States, C. E. McGuire, ed. (5 vols., Boston, 1923), II, 266; Congregational Churches, Committee on Temperance, Report, 1901, P- 353· 91. Bland, Hibernian Crusade, p. 241; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, list of officers, and passim. 92. Idem, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 157-158. 93. Idem, Proceedings, 190η, p. 67; Bland, Hibernian Crusade, pp. 245, 248, 268-269; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2298. 94. Ibid., I, 533; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1915, pp. 15, 17; Bland, Hibernian Crusade, pp. 262 fn. 69, 232, 244, 250, 256, 273. 95. Ibid., pp. 261-262, 265; Bernard J. McNamara, "Danger in Prohibition," The Ecclesiastical Review, 58:496-499, 504-510 (May 1918); idem, "Prohibition and the Mass," The Ecclesiastical Review, 59:187191 (August 1918); John R. Hagan, "Reply to Dr. McNamara's Article on Prohibition," The Ecclesiastical Review, 59:48 (July 1918). 96. Central Conference of American Rabbis, Year Book, 1914, pp. 117-118. 97. John Koren, "Government and Prohibition," The Atlantic Monthly, 117:526-527 (April 1916); Herbert W . Schneider, Religion

THE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENT

191

in Twentieth Century America (Ralph H. Gabriel, ed., The Library of Congress Series in American Civilization, Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 92. 98. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1905, pp. 14-16. 99. Ibid., p. 17. 100. The single exception was its endorsement of woman suffrage in 1916. The reason for this, of course, was that women were expected to vote dry. Idem, Proceedings, 1916, p. 22. 101. Idem, Proceedings, 1909, p. 46. 102. Harold T. Pulsifer, "The Anti-Saloon League Convention," I 9 I 5)· At the league's convention in The Outlook, 110:657 ( J u l y June 1916, Bishop Luther B. Wilson observed that everyone present would probably agree as to the desirability of the reform measures then before the country. This was at a time when the Progressive Movement was at its full flowering. Anti-Saloon League Proceedings, 1916, p. 25. 103. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 311-316, 328-330, 337-338, 349-351, 417-423. 104. Charles F. Aked, "Man and His Neighbor," Appletoris Magazine, 12:9 (July 1908). 105. H. Richard Niebuhr, Kingdom of God in America, pp. ix-x, 45-56, 99-105, 128-130, 141-157; George P. Eckman, When Christ Comes Again (2d ed., New York, 1917), pp. 115—135, 210, 224-235; Shirley J. Case, The Millennial Hope: A Phase of War-Time Thinking (Chicago, 1918), p. 209; James H. Snowden, The Coming of the Lord: Will It Be Premillennial? (New York, 1919), pp. 4-6, 239-241, 245, 277-278; Diedrich H. Kromminga, The Millennium in the Church: Studies in the History of Christian Chiliasm (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1945), p. 233; Le Roy E. Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers (3 vols., Washington, 1946-1950), II, 649-652, 805-807; ibid., III, 250-258. 106. Snowden, Coming of the Lord, pp. 5, 30-34, 222-235, 251-262; Froom, Prophetic Faith, I, 34, 155-156. This disagreement over whether the millennium would be preceded or followed by Christ's second Advent, and, thus, whether it would come cataclysmically through divine intervention or gradually through human instrumentalities, divided Protestants into premillennialists and postmillennialists. Both schools agreed, however, that there would be a millennium to climax the course of human history, and that Christ would come again, personally and visibly, to raise up the dead, deliver judgment, and end the world. The premillennialists comprised two main groups: the adventist or apocalyptic bodies like the Millerites, Seventh Day Adventists, and

192

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

Russelites; and a more influential, though diminishing group within each of the major Protestant denominations, who gathered periodically to hold prophetic conferences. Premillennialists were theological fundamentalists, construing Biblical prophecies literally and even indulging in mathematical calculations as to the exact time of Christ's return. Not all fundamentalists, however, were premillennialists, although in their common defense of an extreme orthodoxy they did tend to associate together. By the early 1900's, the main body of orthodox evangelical Protestantism was thoroughly postmillennarian, and, owing to the influence of modern Biblical scholarship and scientific knowledge, inclined to interpret prophetic passages figuratively and symbolically. Thus many postmillennialists accepted the millennium of Revelation 20 as an indefinitely long period of time rather than a literal 1,000 years. Closely associated with the postmillennialists, most of whom were quite orthodox, were the theological liberals who also spoke in terms of the Kingdom of God, but who rejected the doctrine of a literal second Coming, resurrection, and final judgment. They simply believed that through the natural process of evolution the world was growing better and better and humanity advancing toward higher and higher ideals of social righteousness. With them, even more than with the postmillennialists, the Kingdom idea became transformed into an uncritical belief in progress, and tended to become identified with earthly perfection. Kromminga, Millennium, pp. 227-234; Case, Millennial Hope, pp. 201-204, 2 0 9; Froom, Prophetic Faith, III, 250-254, 280; Snowden, Coming of the Lord, pp. 32-34, 141, 155, 172; I. M. Haldeman, Professor Shailer Mathews' Burlesque on the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ (n.p., n.d.), pp. 1-7; H. Richard Niebuhr, Kingdom of God in America, pp. 182-194. 107. Snowden, Coming of the Lord, p. 262. 108. Ibid., pp. 274-275. 109. Case, Millennial Hope, p. 238. no. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, January 1898, p. 37. i n . Idem, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 40-41. 112. H. Richard Niebuhr, Kingdom of God in America, pp. 141143; Reinhold Niebuhr, Irony of American History, pp. 24-25, 69-71. 113. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1911, p. 140. 114. Ibid., p. 144. CHAPTER II. T H E

SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL

ARGUMENTS

i. The President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (1 vol. ed., New York, 1934), pp. 390. 4°7. 44 !·

THE SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL ARGUMENTS

193

2. Cyclopaedia of Temperance and Prohibition, pp. 422-423, 632 fn. i. 3. John S. Billings, ed., Physiological Aspects of the Liquor Problem (2 vols., Boston, 1903), II, 178-181, 190; John G. Woolley and William E. Johnson, Temperance Progress of the Century (Toronto, 1905), PP· 373-3744. Daniel Dorchester, The Liquor Problem in All Ages (New York, 1884), pp. 403-406. 5. Sir Victor Horsley and Mary D. Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body: An Introduction to the Study of the Subject (London, 1907), pp. xxii-xxiii, 176-180. 6. The Outlook, 108:990 (December 30, 1913); The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 33:361 (March 1906); Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, pp. 87-88. 7. Raymond Dodge and Francis G. Benedict, Psychological Effects of Alcohol: An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Moderate Doses of Ethyl Alcohol on a Related Group of Ν euro-Muscular Processes in Man (Washington, 1915), p. 242; Billings, Physiological Aspects, II, 139-142; Henry Smith Williams, "Alcohol and the Individual," McClure's Magazine, 31:705-707 (October 1908); M. A. Rosanoff and A . J. Rosanoff, "Evidence Against Alcohol," ibid., 32:557, 560-564 (March 1909); Eugene Lyman Fisk, "Alcohol and Physiology," The Atlantic Monthly, 119:46, 50 (January 1917). Large amounts of alcohol, equivalent to about one bottle of wine, depressed every type of mental activity from the start. 8. Williams, in ΜcClure's, 31:704-705; Rosanoff, in ΜcClure's, 32:558-560; Billings, Physiological Aspects, II, 143-158. 9. Ibid., II, 165. 10. Ibid., II, 46-92; Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, chap, xii; Dodge and Benedict, Psychological Effects, pp. 233, 241. 11. Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 19-20, 139-305. 12. Ibid., I, 341. Alcohol was believed to be the sole cause of delirium tremens, alcoholic epilepsy, and alcoholic dementia; a major cause in acute hallucinosis and polyneuritic psychosis; and a contributory cause in other forms of mental disease. Everett S. Elwood, "Mental Defect in Relation to Alcohol with Some Notes on Colonies for Alcoholic Offenders," National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings, 1914, pp. 306-307. In 1921 the American MedicoPsychological Association became the American Psychiatric Association. 13. Rosanoff, in McClure's, 32:566. Students of the alcohol problem were coming to realize that the relationship of alcohol to mental

194

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

disease was often less simple and direct than they had supposed and that intemperance was a symptom as well as a cause of insanity. Nevertheless, it was still true, most of them agreed, that alcohol was a serious cause of mental disease in persons who had previously been normal. Billings, Physiological Aspects, II, 369-370. 14. Ibid., I, 23-24; ibid., II, 356, 364-365. 15. Ibid., II, 360, 372. 16. Ibid., II, 364-365. 17. Ε. C. L. Miller, "Alcoholism and Degeneration," The Independent, 58:261-262 (February 2, 1905); Horsley, Alcohol and the Human Body, chap, xv; Paul Popenoe and Roswell H. Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York, 1918), pp. 36, 44-48. In 1910 Professor Karl Pearson of the Francis Galton Laboratory for national eugenics in England published a study showing that children of alcoholics were not inferior either mentally or physically to the children of sober parents of the same class and surroundings. Most studies, however, concluded otherwise. Current Literature, 49:513-514 (November 1910); Elwood, "Mental Defect," National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1914, pp. 310-311. 18. Charles N. Dana, "Alcoholism as a Cause of Insanity," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 34 : 8 i (July 1909). 19. Rosanoff, in McClure's, 32:564-565. 20. Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, pp. 321, 324-326. 21. Williams, in McClure's, 3 1 : 7 1 1 . 22. Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, p. 322. 23. Eugene Lyman Fisk, "Alcohol and Human Efficiency," The Atlantic Monthly, 109:210 (February 1917). 24. Billings, Physiological Aspects, II, 171-343; Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, pp. 223-229. Whether the heat liberated by the oxidation of alcohol was transformed into bodily energy, as was the case with ordinary foods, was not known. 25. Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 3-8. 26. Ibid., I, 3-8, 17; ibid., II, 220; Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, pp. 12-15. 27. W . O. Atwater, "Alcohol, Physiology and Temperance Reform," Harper's Monthly Magazine, 101:853 (November 1900). 28. Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, xix; ibid., II, 159; Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, pp. 87-88. This was well below the amount that could be oxidized in the body. The criterion, however, was not oxidation, but the primary action of alcohol on the nervous system.

T H E SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL A R G U M E N T S

195

29. Fehlandt, Drink Reform, pp. 298-299; Horsley and Sturge, Alcohol and the Human Body, pp. xxiv, 80. 30. Quoted in Rosanoff, in McClure's, 32:557. European scientists became the leading propagandists for temperance and were the prime movers behind the temperance revival that swept over Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. The Outlook, 108:990 (December 30, 1913); The Literary Digest, 67:38 (October 30, 1920); Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1911, p. 17; idem, Proceedings, 1913, p. 42. 31. R. Osgood λ ^ ο η , "The Curse of Inebriety," The Arena, 26:130 (July 1901); Rosanoff, in McClure's, 32:557; The Outlook, 108:990 (December 30, 1913); McClure's Magazine, 31:713 (October 1908); Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 30-31; Billings, Physiological Aspects, I and II, passim. 32. Fisk, in The Atlantic Monthly, 119:48-49; The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 33:361-362 (March 1906); Henry Smith Williams, " T h e Advance of the Water Wagon," The Century Magazine, 81:44 (November 1910); W . D. P. Bliss, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (new ed., New York, 1908), p. 967; The Independent, 61:890-891 (October 11, 1906). 33. Williams, in Century Magazine, 81:43-44. 34. The Outlook, 113:939-940 (August 23, 1916). 35. The Literary Digest, 51:246 (August 7, 1915); Harvey W . Wiley, "Will Prohibition Prohibit?" Good Housekeeping, 69:55 (November 1919). 36. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1919, pp. 45-46. 37. Ibid., pp. 46-47; U.S. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic and to Provide for the Enforcement of Such Prohibition and the War Prohibition Act, 66 Cong., 1 sess. (3 parts, Washington, 1919), part 1, P· 54· 38. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1919, pp. 46-47. 39. Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V, 2380; Education, 21:189 (November 1900); U.S. Senate, Mary H. Hunt, Reply to the Physiological Subcommittee of the Committee of Fifty, Senate Document no. 171, 58 Cong., 2 sess., February 27, 1904, p. 16. 40. Samuel Unger, " A History of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union" (Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University, '933)1 PP- r 4 I _ I 4 7 ; Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 25-45; William H. Allen, " A Broader Motive for School Hygiene," The Atlantic Monthly, 101:825-827 (June 1908); W . O. Atwater, "Alcohol, Physiology and Superintendence," The National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, 1900, pp. 250-256. 41. Frederick H . Wines and John Koren, The Liquor Problem in

196

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

its Legislative Aspects (2d ed., Boston, 1898), pp. v-vii; Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, pp. iii-iv, xi-xviii. Among the members of the Committee of Fifty were Seth Low, Charles W . Eliot, William E. Dodge, Carroll D. Wright, Felix Adler, Charles J. Bonaparte, Richard T . Ely, and Richard Watson Gilder; the Reverend Francis G. Peabody, Washington Gladden, and Theodore T . Munger; and Father Walter Elliott, and Father A . P. Doyle. Although the physiological subcommittee's report was not published until 1903, the results became generally known by 1900 through the publication of separate articles by some of its members. 42. Atwater, N.E.A., Journal, 1900, pp. 259-262; Henry Sabin, "Scientific Temperance Instruction," Education, 20:532-535 (May 1900). Some of the endorsed school hygiene texts, however, denied that alcohol was oxidized in the body. This was patently false. Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 27-28; The Outlook, 64:390 (February 17, 1900). 43. Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 31; Atwater, N.E.A., Journal, '900, pp. 233-235, 242-247. 44. W . B. Ferguson, "Temperance Teaching and Recent Legislation in Connecticut," Educational Review, 23:241-242 (March 1902); Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 32-33. 45. Ibid., I, 31-45; Atwater, N.E.A., Journal, 1900, pp. 250-256; Allen, in The Atlantic Monthly, 827. For the W.C.T.U.'s answer to the Committee of Fifty, see U.S. Senate, Mary H. Hunt, Reply to the Physiological Subcommittee of the Committee of Fifty, 58 Cong., 2 sess., pp. 1-28. Mrs. Hunt scored some telling blows against the report. 46. Education Review, 24:31-47 (June 1902); Billings, Physiological Aspects, I, 25; Sabin, in Education, 20:531. 47. The Outlook, 64:390 (February 17, 1900); Ferguson, in Educational Review, 23:233, 244-248. 48. Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2381. 49. Ernest H. Cherrington, The Evolution of Prohibition in the United States of America (Westerville, Ohio, 1920), p. 175; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 178-179; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2381. 50. Quoted in ibid. 51. Macfarland, Christian Unity, pp. 254-255; idem, ed., Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 129. 52. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 191$, pp. 226-227; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2379-2380; Cora Frances Stoddard, "Fighting Alcohol with Educational Exhibits," The Survey, 32:306 (June 13, 1914).

T H E SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL A R G U M E N T S

197

53. Alexander Alison, " W h y I am a Total Abstainer," Cosmopolitan Magazine, 44:556 (May 1908). 54. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 34-35. 55. Pennsylvania State Sabbath School Association, Alcohol and Alcoholism: Alcoholism a Preventable Disease (Philadelphia, 1913), p. 27. 56. The President's Research Committee, Recent Social Trends, p. 423. 57. Williams, in McClure's, 31:709, 714. 58. Ibid., 31:712. 59· Ibid., 31:713. 60. The Weekly Underwriter, 94:411 (April 8, 1916); Woolley and Johnson, Temperance Progress, p. 386. 61. Samuel Wilson, "Is Moderate Drinking Justified? The Answer of Life Insurance," The Outlook, 110:505 (June 30, 1915). 62. Eugene Lyman Fisk, "Alcohol and Life Insurance," The Atlantic Monthly, 118:626 (November 1916). 63. Edward B. Phelps, "The Mortality from Alcohol in the United States—the Results of a Recent Investigation of the Contributory Relation of Alcohol with Each of the Assigned Causes of Adult Mortality," International Congress on Hygiene and Demography. Transactions, 1912 (6 vols., Washington, 1913), I, 813-822. 64. Fisk, in The Atlantic Monthly, 118:627; William C. Johnson, "Soft Living and Easy Dying," The World's Work, 30:194 (June 1915). 65. Quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900192$ (6 vols., New York, 1926-1935), IV, 130. 66. Collier's Weekly, 58:11 (January 27, 1917). 67. Charles W . Eliot, A Late Harvest: Miscellaneous Papers Written Between Eighty and Ninety (Boston, 1924), p. 264; The Independent, 65:1136 (November 12, 1908). 68. Collier's Weekly, 59:11 (April 14, 1917). 69. Ibid., 57:17 (July 1, 1916). 70. John B. Huber, "The College Man and Alcohol," Collier's Weekly, 57:32 (May 27, 1916). 71. Elizabeth Tilton, "Efficient Alcohol Publicity," The Survey, 33··399 (January 9, 1915). 72. Campbell MacCulloch, "The Smiths are Waking Up," Ladies Home Journal, 31:18 (December 1914). 73. John Koren, Economic Aspects of the Liquor Problem (Boston, 1899), PP· 9i 16, 43. 49· 74. Ibid., p. 30. 75. The Literary Digest, 49:140 (July 25, 1914).

198

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

76. Ibid. 77. Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., The Social Evil, With Special Reference to Conditions Existing in the City of New York (2d ed., rev., New York, 1912), pp. 125-126. 78. The Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago (Chicago, 1911), pp. 119-122. 79. John B. Huber, "The Effects of Alcohol," Collier's Weekly, 57:32 (June 3, 1916). See also George Elliott Howard, "Alcohol and Crime: A Study in Social Causation," The American Journal of Sociology, 24:79 (July 1918); Henry Smith Williams, "Alcohol and the Community," McClure's Magazine, 32:160 (December 1908); Harry S. Warner, Social Welfare and the Liquor Problem (rev. ed., Chicago, 1913), pp. 79-80. 80. Ibid., pp. 69-70; John M. Barker, The Saloon Problem and Social Reform (Boston, 1905), pp. 51-53. 81. Howard, in American Journal of Sociology, 24:74. 82. Koren, Economic Aspects, pp. 27-28, 51-52, 129-132. 83. See, for example, J. A . Homan, National Prohibition: Its Supreme Folly (2d ed., Cincinnati, 1916), pp. 46-48. 84. Henry Smith Williams, "The Scientific Solution of the Liquor Problem," McClure's Magazine, 32:419 (February 1909); Current Literature, 44:667-668 (June 1908). 85. Howard, in American Journal of Sociology, 24:61-64, 80. 86. Edward A. Ross, "Prohibition as a Sociologist Sees It," Harper's Monthly Magazine, 142:188 (January 1921). This article was reprinted in Ross' The Social Trend (New York, 1922), pp. 137-160. 87. Ibid., p. 189. 88. Ibid., pp. 190-192. 89. Simon N. Patten, "The Economic Basis of Prohibition," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, II (July 1891), pp. 60-66: idem, "The Social Basis of Prohibition," Charities and the Commons, 20:705-706 (September 18, 1908). 90. Ibid., p. 706. 91. Ibid., p. 708. Patten took Hugo Münsterberg, the psychologist, to task for an article the latter wrote for the August 1908, issue of McClure's Magazine. In his article Münsterberg opposed prohibition on the ground that to deprive the masses of the emotional excitement induced by alcohol would cause them to seek compensation in other forms of release, such as gambling, recklessness, sexual disorders, money crazes, and crime. "Prohibition and Social Psychology," McClure's Magazine, 31:438-444 (August 1908); reprinted in American Problems from the Point of View of a Psychologist (New York, 1910), pp. 69-100.

THE SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL ARGUMENTS

199

92. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny (New York, 1953), pp. 121-123. 93. Ben B. Lindsey and Harvey J. O'Higgins, The Beast (New York, 1911), pp. 88-101, 132, 151-152. 94. Ibid., p. 152. In his battles for reform, Lindsey had the strong backing of the religious elements; it was their support, in fact, that helped save his famous juvenile court from destruction. Among the most powerful of these allies were the W.C.T.U. and the Anti-Saloon League. Shortly after his unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Colorado in 1906, Lindsey addressed the Anti-Saloon League's convention and gave a masterly account of his work with Denver boys. The delegates showed their appreciation by passing a resolution of thanks and commending his work. Ibid., passim.; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 51, 64-65. 95. Lilian Brandt, "Alcoholism and Social Problems," The Survey, 25:21 (October 1, 1910); Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Eugenics, pp. 49, 52. 96. Ibid., pp. 389-390. 97. Bailey B. Burritt, "Introductory Statement by the Chairman," National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 79-80; Homer Folks, "Social Aspects of Alcoholism," The Survey, 25:14-15 (October i, 1910); Elizabeth Tilton, "Turning off the Spigot," ibid., 37:417418 (January 13, 1917). 98. Charities and the Commons, 19:1441 (January 25, 1908); Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, The Settlement Horizon: A National Estimate (New York, 1922), pp. 263-267. 99. The Survey, 25:14-55. 100. National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1911, pp. 113— 147, 485, 490. 101. Robert A. Woods, "Report of the Committee," ibid., Proceedings, 1911, p. 115; Bailey B. Burritt, "The Habitual Drunkard," The Survey, 25:25-28, 30, 39 (October 1, 1910); Charles B. Towns, "Help for the Hard Drinker," The Century Magazine, 84:292-295 (June 1912). 102. Woods, National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1911, pp. 114-116. 103. The Survey, 30:448-449 (July 5, 1913); The Outlook, 105:543 (November 8, 1913). 104. The Survey, 30:449 (July 5, 1913). 105. The Outlook, 105:543 (November 8, 1913). 106. Elizabeth Tilton, "Are Social Workers Neglecting the Alcohol Problem?" The Survey, 31:779-781 (March 21, 1914); idem, in ibid., 37:417-419; Woods, "Winning the Other Half," The Survey, 37:349-

200

NOTES TO C H A P T E R II

352 (December 30, 1916); W o o d s and Kennedy, Settlement Horizon, p. 267. 107. Tilton, in The Survey, 37:418. 108. The Survey, 37:558-559 (February 10, 1917). 109. National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 79145. n o . Cora Frances Stoddard, "Prohibition," The Survey, 37:360 (December 30, 1916). HI. Tilton, in The Survey, 37:543. 112. The Outlook, 116:358 (July 4, 1917)· 113. Woods, "Prohibition and its Social Consequences," National Conference of Social W o r k , Proceedings, 1919, p. 763. 114. Ibid., pp. 763-764. CHAPTER I I I . T H E E C O N O M I C

ARGUMENT

1. Koren, Economic Aspects, p. 38. 2. Quoted in The Literary Digest, 37:543 (October 17, 1908). 3. Robert M. Woodbury, "Railroad Accidents," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 71-74; William E. Johnson, "Railroad Temperance Regulations," The Chautauquan, 39:347 (June 1904); U.S. Commissioner of Labor, "Railroad Labor," Fifth Annual Report, 1889 (Washington, 1890), pp. 7, 13, 21. 4. Reid Hunt, "Legal Provisions for Restriction of Alcoholism Among Employees of Common Carriers in the United States," International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, Transactions, 1912, V , 213; Edward Berman, "Employers' Liability," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, V , 517. 5. Johnson, in The Chautauquan, 39:348; A v e r y N . Beebe, "Enforced Sobriety," The World To-Day, 19:1164-1165 (October 1910). 6. U.S. Commissioner of Labor, "Economic Aspects of the Liquor Problem," Twelth Annual Report, 1891 (Washington, 1898), p. 72; Johnson, in The Chautauquan, 39:348, 350; Woolley and Johnson, Temperance Progress, p. 400. 7. Commissioner of Labor, "Economic Aspects," Twelfth Annual Report, p. 70; Harper's Weekly, 46:27 (January 4, 1902). 8. W . Frank McClure, "The W o r k of the Anti-Saloon League," The World To-Day, 11:850 (August 1906). 9. Woodbury, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 74. 10. Quoted in Johnson, in The Chautauquan, 39:348. 11. Commissioner of Labor, "Economic Aspects," Twelfth Annual Report, pp. 72-73. 12. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, " T h e Safety Movement in the Iron and Steel Industry, 1907 to 1917," Bulletin no. 234 (Washing-

THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT

201

ton, 1918), p. 13; H. S. Persons, "Safety Movement," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 504-505; National Safety Council, Proceedings, 1912, p. 281. 13. American Machinist, 41:476 (September 10, 1914). 14. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Workman's Compensation Legislation of the United States and Canada as of January 1, 1929," Bulletin no. 496 (Washington, 1929), pp. 5, 8; C. A. Kulp, "Compensation and Liability Insurance," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IV, 136. 15. Persons, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 505; William F. Boos, "The Relation of Alcohol to Industrial Accidents and to Occupational Diseases," International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, Transactions, 1912, pp. 832-834; Lewis Edwin Theiss, "Industry Versus Alcohol," The Outlook, 107:858 (August 8, 1914); Thomas D. West, "Back with the Saloon as a 'Safety First' Measure," The Survey, 31:322 (December 20, 1913). Over half the. states that passed workmen's compensation laws specifically disallowed compensation if the accident was caused by the employee's intoxication. But, of course, it was not always easy to prove intoxication, let alone define the term. 16. Boos, in International Congress, Transactions, 1912, pp. 830-831; National Safety Council, Proceedings, 1914, pp. 159, 211; idem, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 1304-1310; The Iron Age, 103:443 (February 13, 1919). 17. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Safety Movement," pp. 41, 153; West, in The Survey, 31:322. Cf. Gustavus Myers, " A Study of the Causes of Industrial Accidents," Quarterly Publication of the American Statistical Association, n.s., 14:672-694 (September 1915); idem, "The Real Causes of Industrial Accidents," American Federationist, 22:347 (May I 9 I S ) · 18. National Safety Council, Proceedings, 1914, pp. 221-222, 267. 19. Alexander Fleischer, "The Attitude of Large Employers Toward the Use of Alcohol by Their Employees," National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 100-101; National Safety Council, Proceedings, 1915, pp. 753-754; Ida M. Tarbell, New Ideals in Business (New York, 1916), pp. 125-126. 20. Ibid., p. 125. 21. Persons, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 505. 22. Commissioner of Labor, "Economic Aspects," Twelfth Annual Report, 1891, pp. 71-72; H. S. Persons, "Scientific Management," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 603-606; The President's Research Committee, Recent Social Trends, p. 431; The Society of Industrial Engineers, Bulletin, 7:9-10 (October 1925); Clarence B.

202

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

Thompson, The Theory and Practice of Scientific Management (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), pp. 171, 193. 23. Persons, "Scientific Management," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XIII, 603-608; Frederick W . Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management ( N e w York, 1911), pp. 9-11, 21-22, 73; Thompson, Scientific Management, pp. 2-6. 24. Theiss, in The Outlook, 107:857. See also, Taylor, Scientific Management, p. 42; Frank B. Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management (2 vols., N e w York, 1923), I, 178; Thompson, Scientific Management, p. 84; Norris A . Brisco, Economics of Efficiency ( N e w York, 1914), pp. 186, 262. 25. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny, pp. 69-70; Eaton, Winning the Fight, pp. 106-107; Tarbell, New Ideals, pp. 132-133. 26. National Safety Council Proceedings, 1914, pp. 276-277. 27. Quoted in Clarence B. Thompson, Scientific Management: A Collection of the More Significant Articles Describing the Taylor System of Management (Cambridge, Mass., 1914), p. 80. 28. Robert A . Woods, " T h e Prevention of Inebriety: Community Action," International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, Transactions, 1912, I V , 520-521; National Safety Council, Proceedings, 1914, p. 160. 29. B. C. Forbes, Forbes, 3:797 (February 22, 1919). 30. Richard H. Edmonds, Manufacturers Record, 74:74 (July 4, 1918). 31. Interstate Commerce Commission, Investigation of Accident on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Near East Corning, N.Y., July 4, 1912 (Washington, 1912), pp. 3-11; National Safety Council, Proceedings, 1912, pp. 144-145; Edward Hungerford, "Booze and the Railroad," Collier's Weekly, 56:12 (February 19, 1916). 32. John B. Huber, " A Doctor's Point of View," Collier's Weekly, 55:36 (April 24, 1915); Manufacturers Record, The Prohibition Question Viewed from the Economic and Moral Standpoint (2d. ed., Baltimore, 1922), p. 86. 33. Hungerford, in Collier's, 56:11, 24-25. 34. The Literary Digest, 52:569 (March 4, 1916). 35. Manufacturers Record, 70:40-44 (October 26, 1916); Sullivan, Our Times, III, 534; The Outlook, 111:350 (October 13, 1915). 36. Fleischer, in National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1916, p. 99; Coal Age, 7:381 (February 27, 1915). 37. Coal Age, 10:1015 (December 16, 1916). 38. Theiss, in The Outlook, 107:859. A few companies, notably the Ford Motor Company and the Procter and Gamble Company, tried to cure a man of his drunkenness before discharging him. Tarbell, New Ideals, pp. 123, 127-129.

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203

39. Fleischer, in National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 97-98, 100-102, 105; Collier's Weekly, 57:1$ (June 3, 1916). 40. Industrial Engineering and the Engineering Digest, 14:359 (September 1914); Tarbell, New Ideals, pp. 113-117. 41. Hungerford, in Collier's, 56:12-13. 42. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1915, p. 261; Manufacturers Record, 70:40 (July 27, 1916); J. Frank Hanly, "Prohibition Principles," The Independent, 138:198 (October 30, 1916); The Literary Digest, 60:21 (March 8, 1919). 43. Frank O'Hara, "The Political Economy of Alcohol," The Catholic World, 96:775-776 (March 1913); Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell, The Temperance Problem and Social Reform (9th ed., London, 1901), pp. 25-26; Fehlandt, Drink Reform, pp. 210217, 383; Clark Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition ( N e w York, 1932), p. 114. 44. The Literary Digest, 50: Inside front cover (February 13, 1915). 45. Homan, National Prohibition, pp. 16-17. 46. Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, p. 595; Forbes, 3:797 (February 22, 1919). 47. Collier's Weekly, 107:17 (May 13, 1916). 48. The Iron Trade Review, 58:214 (January 27, 1916). 49. Current Opinion, 62:443 (June 1917); The Economic World, n.s., 17:524 (April 12, 1919); The Outlook, 107:8 (May 2, 1914). 50. William H. Watts, "Socialism and the Liquor Traffic," The Arena, 36:397 (October 1906). 51. Frank A. Magruder, "Municipal Ownership of Public Utilities," National Municipal Review, 7:76 (January 1918); Isaac J. Lansing, "Reform in Scranton, Pennsylvania," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1901, pp. 85-93; Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities ( N e w York, 1904), pp. 34, 58, 101-143, 165; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 568-570. 52. Manufacturers Record, 74:53 (July 18, 1918); The Literary Digest, 58:11 (July 27, 1918). 53. Daniel C. Roper, "And N o t a Drop to Drink," The Independent, 101:166 (January 31, 1920). 54. The Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 108:1212-1213 (March 29, 1919). 55. John Temple Graves, " T h e Fight Against Alcohol," Cosmopolitan Magazine, 45:90 (June 1908); The Outlook, 107:8-9 (May 2, 1914); Manufacturers Record, 70:47 (July 27, 1916); ibid., 76:129 (December 4, 1919); Engineering and Mining Journal, 104:642 (October 13, 1917). 56. Coal Age, 10:310 (August 19, 1916). 57. Engineering and Mining Journal, 102:70 (July 1, 1916).

204

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

58. Willis J . Abbot, "Prohibition in Practice," Collier's Weekly, 63:34 (May 17, 1919). 59. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 191s, p. 20; idem, Proceedings, 1917, pp. 160-161; Peter H. Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (New York, 1928), p. 185. 60. The Iron Trade Review, 61:5 (July 5, 1917); Coal Age, 12:171 (July 28, 1917). 61. Manufacturers Record, 72:42 (July 26, 1917). 62. Harry E. Fosdick, The Prohibition Question (New York, 1928), pp. 9, 12. 63. The American Flint, 5:19-20 (May 1 9 1 1 ) . 64. Coast Seamen's Journal, 26:2 (August 13, 1913). 65. Warner, Social Welfare, pp. 139-141; Terence V . Powderly, The Path I Trod, Harry J. Carman, Henry David, and Paul N . Guthrie eds. (New York, 1940), p. 152; Stelzle, Why Prohibition!, pp. hi—113; The American Federation of Labor, Report of Proceedings, 1932, p. 369. 66. The American Flint, 2:16 (January 1 9 1 1 ) ; The Electrical Worker, 8:238-239 (April 1908). 67. Koren, Economic Aspects, p. 36; Machinists Monthly Journal, 16:9 (January 1904). 68. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine, 103:766 (December 1912). 69. Koren, Economic Aspects, pp. 36-37; Raymond Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon (Boston, 1901), pp. 308-310; The Journal of the Switchmen's Union of North America, 5:13 (November 1902). 70. Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, pp. 57-58; The Postal Record, 14:36 (February 1901). 71. Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, p. 305. 72. Coast Seamen's Journal, 26:6 (December 1 1 , 1912). 73. Henry C. Barter, "Unionism Promotes Temperance," American Federationist, 8:534-535 (December 1901). 74. Matthew Woll, "Thou Shalt Not," ibid., 26:619 (July 1919)· 75. Stelzle, Son of the Bowery, pp. 47-48; Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, pp. 304-305, 307-308, 311-312. It had long been the practice of saloonkeepers to allow unions to meet in their halls for little or no rent. In return, they expected the members of the union to drink more than enough liquor to offset the loss of rent. 76. Ibid., pp. 303-313; John S. Billings et al., The Liquor Problem: A Summary of Investigations Conducted by the Committee of Fifty, 1893-1903 (Boston, 1905), pp. 130-131; Koren, Economic Aspects, pp. 36-37. 77. Unger, "W.C.T.U.," p. 205.

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205

78. Powderly, The Path I Trod, pp. 164-165, 267-270; Helen S. Woodbury, "Terence Vincent Powderly," Dictionary of American Biography, Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds. (22 vols., N e w York, 1928-1944), X V , 142; Harold F. Williamson, ed., Growth of the American Economy: An Introduction to the Economic History of the United States (New York, 1946), pp. 615-616; Foster R. Dulles, Labor in America (New York, 1949), pp. 126-137. 79. Journal of the Knights of Labor, 11:1 (August 14, 1890). 80. Terence V . Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 1859 to 1889 (Columbus, Ohio, 1890), pp. 584, 617-618; idem, The Path I Trod, p. 364. 81. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, pp. 603-604. 82. Ibid., p. 611. 83. Ibid., pp. 589-592, 601-602, 603, 606. 84. Ibid., pp. 600-601. 85. Fehlandt, Drink Reform, p. 191; The Journal of United Labor, 9:2818 (April 11, 1889). 86. Ibid., p. 2818. 87. Powderly, The Path I Trod, p. 189. 88. Woolley and Johnson, Temperance Progress, p. 404. 89. Leo Wolman, The Growth of Trade Unions, 1880-1923 (New York, 1924), p. 32. 90. Ibid., pp. 116-117. 91. Herbert Harris, American Labor ( N e w Haven, Conn., 1938), p. 250; Labor Fact Book, 1931, p. 82. 92. The Railway Conductor, 18:25 (January 1901). 93. Ibid., 36:211 (April 1919). 94. Locomotive Engineers' Journal, 44:1068 (December 1910). 95. The Railway Conductor, 21:267 (April 1904); Hungerford, in Collier's, 56:13. 96. Grand International Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Constitutions and By-Laws, 1900, p. 135; Locomotive Engineers'1 Journal, 52:1043 (December 1918); Order of Railway Conductors of America, Constitution, Statutes, and Rules of Order, 1916, p. 39; Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine, 53:765 (December 1912); Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, pp. 304, 310. 97. Locomotive Engineers' Journal, 50:202 (March 1916); Railroad Trainmen's Journal, 28:131 (February 1911); Grand International Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Proceedings, 1910, pp. 183-184. 98. Idem, Proceedings, 191s, pp. 375-376, 602; The Literary Digest, 77:32 (June 23, 1923).

206

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

99. The Railway Conductor, 18:25-26 (January 1901). 100. Harry A. Millis and Royal E. Montgomery, Organized Labor (William H. Spencer, ed., The Economics of Labor [New York, 1945]), III, 83, 85 fn. i, 132. During this same period, the number of national and international unions affiliated with the A.F.L. rose from 58 to 110. 101. Dulles, Labor in America, pp. 150-155, 161; Lewis L. Lorwin, The American Federation of Labor (Washington, 1933), pp. 44-45; Williamson, Growth of American Economy, pp. 623-624; John R. Commons, "Samuel Gompers," Dictionary of American Biography, VII, 3 7 1 · 102. Woolley and Johnson, Temperance Progress, pp. 402-403; Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic, 66 Cong., 1 sess., part 1, p. 24. 103. United Mine Workers Journal, 22:4 (February 1, 1912). 104. Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, pp. 58-59, 303-313; Wolman, Growth of Trade Unions, pp. 110-118. 105. Charles Stelzle, "Temperance and Labor," National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1911, pp. 123-124; Macfarland, Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 135-136. 106. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1909, p. 46; idem, Proceedings, 1911, pp. 49-52, 100; idem, Proceedings, 1915, p. 19; Stelzle, Why Prohibition!, pp. 20-21, 193; Macfarland, Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 134. 107. Stelzle, in National Conference of Charities, Proceedings, 1911, pp. 121-122; idem, Son of the Bowery, pp. 197-199; Macfarland, Library of Christian Cooperation, V, 134-135. 108. Stelzle, Why Prohibition!, pp. 95-96, m - 1 1 5 ; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1911, p. 49. 109. United Mine Workers Journal, 25:9 (December 23, 1915). no. Stelzle, Son of the Bowery, pp. 194-197; Macfarland, Library of Christian Cooperation, V , 133; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 4951; John Spargo, Social Democracy Explained: Theories and Tactics of Modern Socialism (New York, 1918), pp. 330-332. hi. Ibid., p. 313; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 54. 111. Machinists Monthly Journal, 29:162 (February 1917). 113. The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators, 16:193 (October 1916). 114. The Shoe Workers' Journal, 18:13 (May 1917); The American Flint, 9:6 (November 1917); International Musician, 15:16 (July 1915); Cigar Makers' Official Journal, 41:11 (April 1917); Brauer

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207

Zeitung, 22:1 (August 31, 1907); The Miners Magazine, 9:6 (May a , 1908). 11 j . Cigar Makers' Official Journal, 40:9 (April 1916). 116. Quoted in American Federationist, 26:810 (September 1919). 117. The Paper Makers' Journal, 13:10 (June 1914). 118. Coast Seamen's Journal, 29:10 (January 5, 1916); Brauer Zeitung, 22:1 (August 31, 1907). 119. Ibid., 23:1 (January 25, 1908); Coast Seamen's Journal, 26:6 (December 11, 1912). 120. Brauer Zeitung, 22:1 (August 31, 1907); Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic, 66 Cong., 1 sess., part 3, p. 216. 121. International Musician, 7:8 (April 1908). 122. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic, 66 Cong., 1 sess., part i, p. 22. 123. International Musician, 7:8 (April 1908); Stelzle, Son of the Bowery, pp. 47-49. 124. The Miners Magazine, 12:11 (June 20, 1912). 125. Coal Age, 8:80 (July 17, 1915). 126. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic, 66 Cong., 1 sess., part i, pp. 11-12; The Garment Worker, 13:4 (May 29, 1914). 127. Machinists Monthly Journal, 16:874 (October 1904). 128. The American Federation of Labor, Report of the Proceedings, 1919, pp. v-xxiii, 193, 263-267; The American Labor Year Book, 1919-1920, pp. 149-152. There were 1,503 votes not cast. The dry votes came from 19 out of h i national and international unions, 5 out of 46 state federations, and 12 out of 816 city centrals. Delegations with the largest number of dry votes were the railroad unions, longshoremen, mine workers, public service workers, metalworkers, and stereotypere, electrotypers, and typographers. 129. Stelzle, Son of the Bowery, pp. 200-201. 130. American Federationist, 31:327-328 (April 1924). 131. Wolman, Growth of Trade Unions, pp. 50, 84 fn. 1; Dulles, Labor in America, chap. xii. 132. Solidarity, 6:2 (November 5, 1915). 133. Socialist Party, Proceedings of the National Convention, 1908, p. 316; Chicago Daily Socialist, quoted in The Literary Digest, 40:684685 (April 9, 1910); Emile Vandervelde, "Alcoholism and the Social Problem," The Survey, 36:452 (July 29, 1916); William E. Walling et al., eds, The Socialism of To-day (New York, 1916), p. 588.

208

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

134. International Musician, 11:15 (August 1911). 135. Watts, in The Arena, 36:395-397 (October 1906); Chicago Daily Socialist, quoted in The Literary Digest, 40:684-685 (April 9, 1910); Kansas City Socialist, quoted in Brauer Zeitung, 25.2 (December 10, 1910); Walling, Socialism of To-day, pp. 586-588. 136. Ibid., pp. 588-591; Spargo, Social Democracy, pp. 305-306; Socialist Party, Proceedings of the National Convention, 1908, p. 90. 137. Ibid., p. 317. 138. Spargo, Social Democracy, pp. 291, 322-332, 334. 139. Ibid., pp. 292-293, 313-314; Walling, Socialism of To-day, p. 586. 140. Spargo, Social Democracy, pp. 306-307; Socialist Party, Proceedings of the National Convention, 1908, pp. 90-91. 141. Ibid., 1912, p. 168. 142. Wolman, Growth of Trade Unions, pp. 71, 77, 85, 131; Millis and Montgomery, Organized Labor, pp. 83, 132-133. CHAPTER I V . T H E POLITICAL

ARGUMENT

1. Russell B. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics: A Historical Study of its Origins and Development, 1870-1950 (East Lansing, Mich., 1951), p. 300. 2. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny, pp. 72-75. 3. This discussion is drawn largely from Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, N. J., 1954). 4. Benjamin Parke DeWitt, The Progressive Movement (New York, 1915), pp. 4-5. 5. Bureau of the Census, Twelth Census of the United States, 1900: Manufactures, IX, 597; idem, Census of Manufactures, 1914 (2 vols., Washington, 1919), II, 982-985; A. A. Friederich, "Liquor Industry," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX, 499; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Census of Manufactures, 1914 (Washington, 1917), pp. 516-528. 6. Fehlandt, Drink Reform, p. 210; Warburton, Economic Results, p. 114; U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1922 (Washington, 1923), p. 697; O'Hara, in The Catholic World, 96:776; George Kibbe Turner, "Beer and the City Liquor Problem," McClure's Magazine, 33:528 (September 1909). 7. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900: Manufactures, IX, 597-599; idem, Census of Manufactures, 1914, II, 982. 8. Turner, in McClure's, 33:541; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, p. 547; Hugh F. Fox, "The Prosperity of the Brewing Indus-

THE POLITICAL ARGUMENT

209

try," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 34:494 (November 1909). 9. Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States (3 vols., N e w York, 1929), II, 505; ibid., III, 278; Thomas C. Cochran, The Fabst Brewing Company: The History of an American Bunness ( N e w York, 1948), pp. 72, 79; Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900: Manufactures, IX, 601. 10. Ibid.; Fox, in Annals of the American Academy, 34:494-495. 11. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900: Manufactures, IX, 601; Clark, History of Manufactures, II, 505. 12. Ibid., II, 13, 123; U.S. Industrial Commission, Preliminary Report on Trusts and Industrial Combinations (2 vols., Washington, 1900-1901), pp. 76, 79, 8j. 13. Clark, History of Manufactures, II, 175; ibid., III, 277-278. 14. Turner, in McClure's, 33:537. 15. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population, 1910: Occupation Statistics (Washington, 1914), p. 54. 16. Turner, in McClure's, 33:535-536; W i l l Irwin, " T h e American Saloon," Collier's Weekly, 41:9 (May 9, 1908); Clark, History of Manufactures, III, 278. 17. Friederich, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX, 499500; Koren, "Constructive Temperance Reform," The Atlantic Monthly, 117:201 (February 1916). 18. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1906, p. 12; Spargo, Social Democracy, p. 323; Stelzle, Why Prohibition!, pp. 104-105. 19. W . E. Shaffer to Richmond P. Hobson, April 19, 1909, in Richmond P. Hobson Papers, Library of Congress. 20. February 9, 1906, quoted in Gospel of the Kingdom, 1:108 (November 1909). 21. Malt, January 4, 1915, masthead. 22. Warner, Social Welfare, pp. 114, 248; The World's Work, 34:295 (July 1917). 23. Barker, The Saloon Problem, pp. 24, 91; National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, Constitution and By-Laws (n.p., 1896), pp. 5-6; David Stauber, "Attitude of the Distillers and Wholesale Liquor Dealers on the Regulation of the Liquor Traffic," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 32:539 (November 1908); Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, p. 551. 24. Barker, The Saloon Problem, p. 26; National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, Constitution and By-Laws, p. 15; idem, Organization and Its Work (n.p., n.d.), pp. 4-5, 19-20; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2348-2349; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, p. 551.

210

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

25. National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, Organization, p. 5; idem, One Year's Work (n.p., n.d.) p. 6. 26. Cochran, Pabst, p. 317; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, p. 552; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, IV, 18571858; U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Alcoholic Liquor Traffic, Hearings on H.R. 22001, l9°9> 60 Cong., 2 sess. (Washington, 1909), p. 12. 27. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, p. 552; Sloane Gordon, "Booze, Boodle, and Bloodshed in the Middle West," Cosmopolitan Magazine, 49:770-771 (November 1910). 28. National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, One Year's Work, pp. 5-7, 14. 29. Will Irwin, "Tainted News Methods of the Liquor Interests," Collier's Weekly, 42:27-28 (March 13, 1909). 30. Ibid., p. 28; Collier's Weekly, 49:10-11, 37 (September 7, 1912). 31. The Survey, 41:267 (November 30, 1918); National Municipal Review, 2:279 (April 1913); U.S. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda, Report and Hearing, 1918, Senate Document no. 62, 66 Cong., 1 sess. (3 vols., Washington, 1919), I, 58, 86, 87, 100-101, 107, IIO-III. 32. Quoted in Cochran, Pabst, p. 312. 33. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 176-189; National Municipal Review, 6:299 (March 1917). 34. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, p. 553; Gordon, in Cosmopolitan, 49:771-772. 35. The Nation, 79:516 (December 29, 1904). 36. Arthur H. Gleason, "The Saloon in New York," Collier's Weekly, 41:12 (May 2, 1908); idem, "The New York Saloon," Collier's Weekly, 41:16-17 (April 25, 1908); Irwin, in Collier's, 41:9; idem, "The American Saloon," Collier's Weekly, 40:11-12 (February 29, 1908); "The Experiences and Observations of a New York SaloonKeeper, as Told by Himself," McClure's Magazine, 32:301-307, 311312 (January 1909). 37. Gleason, in Collier's, 41:12 (May 2, 1908); "The Experiences and Observations of a New York Saloon-Keeper," in McClure's, 32:306; Edwin S. Lane, "Chicago Commission on the Liquor Problem," National Municipal Review, 6:447 (May 1917). 38. Gleason, in Collier's, 41:12 (May 2, 1908). 39. Ibid., p. 13; "The Experiences and Observations of a New York Saloon-Keeper," in McClure's, 32:305, 311-312; The Independent, 65:589-592 (September 10, 1908); William H. Tolman, "Competing with the Saloon," The Outlook, 76:791 (April 2, 1904). 40. Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 41.

THE POLITICAL ARGUMENT

211

41. Royal L. Melendy, "The Saloon in Chicago," The American Journal of Sociology, 6:299-300 (November 1900); Gleason, in Collier's, 41:13, 27 (May 2, 1908). 42. A. H. Woodson, "The Model License Law," Harper's Weekly, 55:24 (February 11, 1911). 43. Gleason, in Collier's, 41:12 (May 2, 1908); Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1 vol. ed., New York, 1931), pp. 231-238, 247-265. 44. John P. Peters, "Suppression of the 'Raines Law Hotels,'" The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 32:559-561 (November 1908); National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1908, pp. 56-57; Gleason, in Collier's, 41:17 (April 25, 1908). 45. Augustus R. Hatton, "The Liquor Traffic and City Government," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1908, pp. 429-430; Irwin, in Collier's, 41:11; Gleason, in Collier's, 41:27-28 (May 2, 1908). 46. Irwin, in Collier's, 41:12-13. 47. Max B. May, "The Liquor Question," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 23:377 (March 1904); F. E. Stevens, "The Liquor Question," ibid., 23:372-373. 48. Barker, The Saloon Problem, pp. 31-32. 49. Stelzle, Son of the Bowery, pp. 47-49; Hatton, in National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1908, p. 430; William C. Smith, Americans in the Making: The Natural History of the Assimilation of Immigrants (Edward A. Ross, ed., The Century Social Science Series, New York, 1939), p. 228; McClure's, 21:713 (October 1908). 50. Barker, The Saloon Problem, p. 33. j i. Steffens, Shame of the Cities, p. 34. 52. Irwin, in Collier's, 40:12. 53. Magruder, in National Municipal Review, 7:76; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 568-570; Steffens, Shame of the Cities, pp. 101-143; idem, Autobiography, pp. 169-178, 274-291. 54. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 563-576; AntiSaloon League, Proceedings, 1906, p. 12; idem, Proceedings, 1917, p. 147. 55. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1900, p. 35; idem, Proceedings, 1901, p. 2; idem, Proceedings, 1917, pp. 176-177; Robert J. Dono von, "Annals of Crime: The First Pillar," The New Yorker, 30:106-118 (November 6, 1954); William H. Townsend, Lincoln and Liquor (New York, 1934), p. 144. 56. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Population (2 vols., Washington, 1912), I, 126, 171, 188189. 57. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great

212

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

Migrations That Made the American People (Boston, 1951), passim; David F. Bowers, ed., Foreign Influences in American Life: Essays and Critical Bibliographies (New York, 1952), pp. 50-52, 86-92; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955), pp. 3-22, chap. v. 58. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny, p. 78. 59. Handlin, The Uprooted, pp. 217-221, 225; Bowers, Foreign Influences, p. 89. 60. Barker, The Saloon Problem, pp. 49-50. 61. Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Minutes, 1908, pp. 159-160. 62. Handlin, The Uprooted, p. 172; Melendy, in the American Journal of Sociology, 6:289-306; E. C. Moore, "The Social Value of the Saloon," ibid., 3:1-12 (July 1897). 63. Paul H. Benjamin, "Disgorging the Saloon," The Survey, 35:26 (October 2, 1915). 64. Constantine Panunzio, "The Foreign Born's Reaction to Prohibition," Sociology and Social Research, 18:223-225, 228 (JanuaryFebruary 1934). 65. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1910: Population, I, 126, 135, 141. The population of the United States in 1910 was divided as follows: native white stock, 53.8 percent; foreign white stock, 35.2 percent; and Negro, 10.7 percent. 66. Ibid., I, 193-194; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Wendell H. Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter, eds., A History of the South, IX, Baton Rouge, 1951), pp. 299, 354. 67. Irwin, in Collier's, 40:10-14; A. J. McKelway, "Local Option and State Prohibition in the South," Charities and Commons, 19:1452 (January 25, 1908); Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 181183, 186-187; Manufacturers Record, The Prohibition Question, p. 24; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Story of Jim Crow, (New York, 1955), p. 65; Ferdinand C. Iglehart, "The Campaign Against the Saloon," The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 48:80 (July 1913). 68. Samuel C. Mitchell, ed., History of the Social Life of the South (The Southern Historical Publication Society, The South in the Building of the Nation, Richmond, 1909), X, 576. 69. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine, 45:265 (August 1908), p. 265. 70. Will Irwin, "More About 'Nigger Gin,'" Collier's Weekly, 41:28, 30 (August 15, 1908); idem, "The American Saloon," Collier's Weekly, 41:10 (May 16, 1908). 71. Ibid. 72. John Corrigan, "The Prohibition Wave in the South," The

213

PRESSURE POLITICS: THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE

American Monthly Review of Reviews, 36:330 (September 1907); Henry H . Proctor, "The Atlanta Riot," The Southern Workman, 36:424-425 (August 1907). 73. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 569-570; DeWitt, The Progressive Movement, pp. 101-104, 108; McClure's Magazine, 34:702 (April 1910). 74. Frederick M. Davenport, "The Persistence of the Pioneer Conscience," The Outlook, 110:370-371 (June 16, 1915). 75. Ella S. Stewart, "Woman Suffrage and the Liquor Traffic," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 56:146, 148-152 (November 1914); Unger, " W . C . T . U . , " pp. 100-102, 111-112, 117-119; L. Ames Brown, "Suffrage and Prohibition," The North American Review, 203:97-100 (January 1916). 76. The New Republic, 4:62-63 (August 21, 1915). 77. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1916, pp. 181-183, 186-187; Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 254, 256, 276-277, 323; idem, Jim Crow, pp. 65, 68, 74; William G. Brown, " T h e South and the Saloon," The Century Magazine, 76:462-463 (July 1908); The Literary Digest, 36:815 (June 6, 1908); James B. Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, ιηο2 to 1943 (The James Sprunt Studies in History and Political Science, X X V I , Chapel Hill, N.C., 1943), pp. 81, 101; Daniel J. Whitener, Prohibition in North Carolina, 171; to 1945 (The James Sprunt Studies in History and Political Science, X X V I I , Chapel Hill, N.C., 1945), p. 73; W i l l Irwin, " T h e American Saloon," Collier's Weekly, 40:14 (March 21, 1908); Iglehart, in The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 48:80. CHAPTER V . PRESSURE POLITICS: T H E A N T I - S A L O O N

LEAGUE

1. Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I, 175-177; National Temperance Congress, Proceedings, 1891, pp. v, 63, 75, 90, 363, and passim; Ernest H. Cherrington, History of the Anti-Saloon League (Westerville, Ohio, 1913), pp. 8-29; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 384-386; Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, p. 250; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 5 fn. 3. 2. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1896, pp. ii, xii; James L. Ewin, The Birth of the Anti-Saloon League (Washington, 1913), p. 12; Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 261-263; idem, AntiSaloon League, pp. 29-33. 3. Ibid., p. 33; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1895, p. 5; idem, Proceedings, 1896, p. xvi. 4. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 33-34; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1895, pp. 18-20, 26; idem, Proceedings, 1900, p. 33; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I, 177. Price

214

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

died in 1901 and was succeeded as president by the Reverend Luther B. Wilson. The league changed its name in 1905. 5. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 189s, pp. iii, vi, 19; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 38. 6. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1895, p. 19. 7. Ibid., pp. 14, 19, 20, 26; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 17. 8. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 189$, p. 37; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 33-34. 9. Ibid., p. 54; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 18$6, pp. 24-26, 80-82. 10. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 37, 45; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 13-15. 11. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 8, 44, 49-52, 56; AntiSaloon League, Proceedings, 1896, pp. 14, 58, 72, 76; idem, Proceedings, January 1898, p. 90; idem, Proceedings, December 1898, p. 64. 12. Idem, Proceedings, January 1898, p. xvi. 13. Ibid., pp. xvi, 43. 14. Ibid., pp. 52-53. 15. Idem, Proceedings, December 1898, pp. 2, 8-10. 16. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 55. In some states these initial efforts proved abortive and permanent organization was delayed several years until the right leaders were found and adequate financial and moral support obtained. Thus the branches founded in Virginia and West Virginia in 1896 lapsed and were not re-established again until 1901 and 1902, respectively. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1901, p. 4; idem, Proceedings, 1902, p. 4. 17. Idem, Proceedings, 1900, p. 26; idem, Proceedings, 1901, p. 7; idem, Proceedings, 1904, p. 12; William H. Anderson, The Church in Action Against the Saloon (rev. ed., Westerville, Ohio, 1910), pp. 15, 35 fn. 59, 63; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 62. 18. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1902, pp. xxiii. 19. Banks, Lincoln Legion, p. 218; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1903, pp. 27-29. 20. Idem, Proceedings, 1902, p. iii; idem, Proceedings, 1903, pp. 4041. The league's fiscal year usually ended in November or early December. Figures are given in round numbers. 21. Idem, Proceedings, 1896, pp. 60, 64; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 57. 22. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, January 1898, p. 53; idem, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 42-44; idem, Proceedings, 1901, p. 49; idem, Proceedings, 1909, pp. 18-20, 43-44; idem, Proceedings, 1911, p. 23; idem, Proceedings, 1913, pp. 18-19, 63; idem, Proceedings, 191pp. 19-20, 249; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 73, 77, 80, 91;

PRESSURE POLITICS: T H E ANTI-SALOON L E A G U E

215

William H. Anderson, "The Anti-Saloon League," The Gospel of the Kingdom, 6:107 (July 1914). The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature contains only two entries under "Anti-Saloon League" from 1900 to 1908, but after that they become increasingly numerous. Prior to about 1908, reform literature devoted more space to the Prohibition party and the W.C.T.U. than to the league, but thereafter spotlighted the league. 23. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1900, pp. 31-32, 45-46; idem, Proceedings, 1901, p. 49; idem, Proceedings, 1904, pp. 5, 19, 26-27; idem, Proceedings, 1906, p. 40; idem, Proceedings, 190η, p. 60; idem, Proceedings, 1909, p. 149; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 5455) 65, 99-101; idem, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 265, 267, 270; J. C. Jackson, "The Work of the Anti-Saloon League," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 32:488 (November 1908). 24. Ibid., pp. 482-493. 25. Ibid., pp. 483-484; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 77 fn. 89. 26. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 73; John S. Gregory, " Ά Saloonless Nation by 1920,' " The World's Work, 30:202 (June 1915). 27. Wayne B. Wheeler, "The Inside Story of Prohibition's Adoption," The New York Times, March 29, 1926, p. 21. 28. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1905, pp. 19-21, 24-25; idem, Proceedings, 190η, pp. 50-51, 53; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 38, 128; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I, 184. 29. Anderson, Church in Action, p. 63. 30. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1906, p. 39; idem, Proceedings, 1909, p. 42; Stauber, in Annals of the American Academy, 32:543-544 (November 1908); J. Fanning O'Reilly, "The Growth of Prohibition and Local Option," The Independent, 63:567 (September 5, 1907); Gregory, in World's Work, 30:202. 31. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 189p. 37; idem, Proceedings, 1900, pp. 33-34; idem, Proceedings, 1905, p. 6; idem, Proceedings, 1911, p. 7; idem, Proceedings, 1913, p. 8. 32. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 27; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 43-44, 60; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 191$, p. no. The Anti-Saloon League of Illinois in 1905 became the first of the league branches to be taken over and managed completely by the churches. 33. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 191pp. 8-13; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 10-13. 34. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1 9 1 s , pp. 8-9, 12; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 13-14; Anderson, Church in Action, p. 43; AntiSaloon League, Addresses Delivered at the Superintendents' and

216

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

Workers' Conference, Chicago, III., November 30, to December 4, ι pop (Westerville, Ohio, n.d.), pp. 21-22. 35. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1904, p. 2; idem, Proceedings, 1913, p. 61; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 61, 62, 64; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 14-16. 36. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 37; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I, 184; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 51-54, 56. Some wealthy city churches preferred to budget the league's expenses rather than permit any special appeal. T h e league opposed this practice because it brought in less money and because it precluded the work of agitation. T h e league also declined to present its work in churches that refused to allow a subscription. 37. The Literary Digest, 113:3 (June 18, 1932). 38. Wheeler, in The New York Times, March 29, 1926, p. 21; The Forum, 62:81 (July 1919); Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 188-190. 39. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 190s, p. 29; Anderson, Church in Action, p. 46; Wheeler, in The New York Times, March 29, 1926, p. 21; ibid., April 1, 1926, p. 27. 40. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1902, p. 38; idem, Proceedings, 1909, p. 37; idem, Proceedings, 1915, pp. 11-12; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 42, 49; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 195-197. The national subscription department could conduct a financial campaign in a state only by arrangement with the state league. 41. Jackson, in Annals of the American Academy, p. 483; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 252; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1900, p. 26; idem, Proceedings, 190η, pp. 45, 48-49; Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 277-278. 42. Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 24, 50-55. 43. Ferdinand C. Iglehart, " T h e W a r Against the Saloon," The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 51:216 (February 1915). 44. Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 18; Koren, in The Atlantic Monthly, 117:526 (April 1916). 45. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1905, p. 23; idem, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 48-49; idem, Proceedings, 190J, p. 47; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 64-65; James K . Shields, " T h e Modern Temperance Movement," The World To-Day, 15:1258 (December 1908). 46. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1901, pp. 49-50; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 127-138. 47. Ibid., pp. 129-130, 133; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, >907, p. 49. T h e American Issue Publishing Company was controlled by five stockholders and directors who were elected by the national board of directors for a term of two years each. These five men held their

PRESSURE POLITICS: THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE

217

stock as trustees of the league and served without salary or compensation. All profits of the Company went directly into the league's coffers. 48. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 131; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 74. T h e national edition of The American Issue, published monthly until 1915 when it became a weekly, was sent to every person who contributed $6 a year; state editions were mailed to those who gave $3 a year. Burton J. Kendrick, " 'Frightfulness Against the Saloon,'" Harper's Monthly Magazine, 137:570 (September 1918). 49. Wheeler, in The New York Times, March 29, 1926, p. 21; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 131; Odegard, Pressure Politics, PP· 74-75· 50. Wheeler, in The New York Times, March 29, 1926, p. 21. 51. Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 74-75. 52. Ibid., p. 76; Wheeler, in The New York Times, March 29, 1926, p. 21. 53. Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 37-38; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 10, 12-17; W . M. Burke, " T h e Anti-Saloon League as a Political Force," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 32:501-502 (November 1908); Irwin, in Collier's, 40:13 (March 21, 1908); Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 250-253; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1896, p. 27. 54. Quoted in Hendrick, in Harper's Monthly Magazine, 137:565. 55. L. Ames Brown, "Prohibition and Politics," The North American Review, 202:864 (December 1915); Shields, in The World To-Day, 15:1258; Hendrick, in Harper's Monthly Magazine, 37:566. 56. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1903, p. 11; idem, Proceedings, 1913, p. 65; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 17-18, 44-45; Burke, in The Annals of the American Academy, 32:505; Hendrick, in Harper's Monthly Magazine, 137:570; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 91-92. Through the cooperation of some 4,500 churches, the AntiSaloon League of Pennsylvania in 1908 had on file the names and addresses of from 50,000 to 75,000 voters. Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 21, 98. 57. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1903, pp. 10-11; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 18-19, 2 4; Odegard, Pressure Politics, pp. 87-88. 58. The Forum, 62:71 (July 1919). 59. Anti-Saloon League, Addresses, pp. 41-43; Frank P. Stockbridge, "The Church Militant Against the Saloon," The World's Work, 26:709-710 (October 1913). 60. The Forum, 42:72 (July 1919); Burke, in Annals of the American Academy, 32:505; Hendrick, in Harper's Monthly Magazine, 137:568; Anderson, Church in Action, p. 40; Anti-Saloon League,

218

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

Proceedings, 1911, p. 29; Gordon, in Cosmopolitan, 49:770 (November 1910). The league regarded letters and telegrams as more effective than petitions, and a personal interview as the most valuable of all. 61. Burke, in Annals of the American Academy, 32:502. 62. Irwin, in Collier's, 40:13 (March 21, 1908); Burke, in Annals of the American Academy, 32:505; Anderson, The Church in Action, p. 17. In 1897 the Ohio league went after the scalp of a state senator who had been elected with dry help but who had subsequently voted against a temperance measure. The legislator, however, had the backing of Mark Hanna who was then preparing to go to the U.S. Senate. In a knock-down fight, the league defeated the Hanna machine and elected its own candidate, who then supported Hanna for the Senate as the league had promised he would. "From that time on," Wheeler later asserted, "we never had any trouble with Mark Hanna . . . W e had shown him that the drys were just as good at a caucus as they were at a prayer meeting." Wheeler, in The New York Times, March 28, 1926, section 2, p. 1. 63. Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 25-26, 28; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1900, p. 39; idem, Proceedings, 1903, pp. 24, 27. By 1908 the league had participated in over 31,000 cases of law enforcement. Jackson, in Annals of the American Academy, 32:495. 64. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1900, pp. 38-39; idem, Proceedings, 1903, pp. 12-13, 29; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 27, 29. The use of detectives by a law and order league in Newark, Ohio, in 1910, resulted in bloodshed and tragedy. Engaged by Wayne Wheeler, attorney for the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, a corps of detectives gathered evidence of graft, corruption, and law violation, and then, armed with search and seizure warrants, raided a number of Newark dives. In the course of one of these raids, a mob turned on the detectives and caught and brutally beat one of them, Carl Etherington, a boy of 17. In self-defense Etherington shot and killed one of his assailants, and, though jailed, he was seized by the mob, dragged through the streets, and lynched in the public square. Gordon, in Cosmopolitan, 49:761-775. 65. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1896, p. 59; idem, Proceedings, December 1898, p. 27; idem, Proceedings, 1903, pp. 26, 30-31; Anderson, Church in Action, p. 23; Banks, Lincoln Legion, pp. 226228; Edwin C. Dinwiddie, Report on Intemperance (Westerville, Ohio, n.d.), p. 5. 66. Whether Lincoln really drew up this pledge is not certain but it is quite possible. He is known to have addressed a number of temperance gatherings and to have induced several people to take the pledge. The legion's first two recruits, indeed, were two old men who

PRESSURE POLITICS: THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE

219

claimed to have been among the original signers of the Lincoln pledge. Townsend, Lincoln and Liquor, pp. 53-61. 67. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1903, p. 35; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, pp. 93-95; Stockbridge, in World's Work, 26:711; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, I, 184. 68. The American Issue, Virginia edition, March 28, 1908, quoted in Virginius Dabney, Dry Messiah: The Life of Bishop Cannon (New York, 1949), p. 58. Such statements convict the league of dissimulation, for in its own private lexicon the word "saloon" meant not only the retail outlet but all phases of the beverage liquor traffic. Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 9-10; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1903, p. 21. 69. Idem, Proceedings, 1896, pp. 30-31. 70. Idem, Proceedings, 1904, p. 2. 71. Idem, Proceedings, 190J, p. 2. 72. Henry C. Black, A Treatise on the Laws Regulating the Manufacture and Sale of Intoxicating Liquors (Saint Paul, Minn., 1892), pp. 126-127; Cyclopaedia of Temperance and Prohibition, p. 390; Rowntree and Sherwell, The Temperance Problem, pp. 252, 255. 73. Anderson, Church in Action, p. 33; Cyclopaedia of Temperance, p. 391; Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 252-253; Wines and Koren, The Liquor Problem, p. 8; Frank C. Lockwood, "The Anti-Saloon League," The Independent, 65:245 (July 30, 1908). 74. Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 252, 279; Anderson, Church in Action, pp. 31-33; Irwin, in Collier's, 40:13 (March 21, 1908); Turner, in McClure's, 33:539; McKelway, in Charities and the Commons, 19:1, 452; Odegard, Pressure Politics, p. 121. Some party prohibitionists have vigorously denied that local option led to state and national prohibition and have gone so far as to assert that it actually delayed their coming. See, for example, Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 356-379. Although it seems likely that the upsurge of antiliquor sentiment in the early 1900's would probably have led to state prohibition regardless of the progress of local option, it is also true that local option was indispensable to the league as a technique of operation. And it was the league, not the Prohibition party, that spearheaded the prohibition movement. 75. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1909, pp. 36-37; idem, Proceedings, 1913, p. 63; Anderson, Church in Action, p. 31; Cherrington, Anti-Saloon League, p. 9, chap, iv; Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 249, 319-320; L. Ames Brown, "Prohibition or Temperance?" The North American Review, 203:569-571 (April 1916). 76. Deets Pickett, "Prohibition's Own Story," The Forum, 57:762 (June 1917).

220

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

77. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1915, p. 100. 78. Rhodes v. Iowa, 170 United States Reports, Supreme Court, 412 (1898). See also Vance v. Vandercook, 170 U.S. 438 (1898). CHAPTER V I . T O W A R D A D R Y

UTOPIA

1. Rowntree and Sherwell, The Temperance Problem, pp. 250-279. 2. Ferdinand C. Iglehart, "The Nation's Anti-Drink Crusade," The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 37:468 (April 1908). 3. Ibid., p. 468; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2210. 4. Iglehart, in The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 37:474; idem, "Another Year of Defeat for the American Saloon," The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 39:603 (May 1909); Barker, The Saloon Problem, p. 204. 5. Iglehart, in The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 37:471474; Iglehart, in The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 39:602603; The Anti-Saloon League of America, The Anti-Saloon League Yearbook, 1909, pp. 16, 19. 6. Iglehart, The American Monthly Review of Reviews, 37:469471; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 190η, p. 73. 7. The Nation, 85:460-461 (November 21, 1907); Irwin, in Collier's, 40:10-11 (February 29, 1908); McKelway, in Charities and the Commons, 19:1462 (January 25, 1908); R. E. Pritchard, " T h e Failure of Prohibition in the South," Harper's Weekly, 55:13 (March 18, 1911); Rowntree and Sherwell, The Temperance Problem, pp. 311— 319; Sullivan, Our Times, III, 533; National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1909, p. 127. 8. Augustus R. Hatton, " T h e Liquor Situation in Ohio," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1909, p. 126; idem, " T h e Liquor Situation in Ohio," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1910, pp. 398-402; Gordon, Cosmopolitan, 49:761-775. 9. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1915, p. 231. 10. Hatton, in National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1908, pp. 424-430, 438; Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, V , 2348. 11. Country Life Commission, Report, U.S. Senate Document no. 705, 60 Cong., 2 sess., February 9, 1909, p. 44; Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1910: Population, I, 171. 12. The Outlook, 90:764 (December 5, 1908); Thomas H. Greer, American Social Reform Movements: Their Pattern Since 1865 ( N e w York, 1949), p. 112; National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1901, pp. 85-94; idem, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 124-134; idem, Proceedings, 1908, pp. 421-443; idem, Proceedings, 1909, pp. 125-128; idem, Proceedings, 1910, pp. 395-438; The Annals of the American Academy

TOWARD A DRY UTOPIA

221

of Political and Social Science, 23:372-379 (March 1904); Peters, in ibid., 32:556-566 (November 1908); Frank M. Stewart, A Half Century of Municipal Reform: The History of the National Municipal League (Berkeley, Calif., 1950), p. 137. 13. Charities, 12:96-97 (January 9, 1904); John D. Warner, "The Raines Liquor Tax Law," Municipal Affairs, 5:850 (December 1901); John G . Agar, "The Saloon Problem in New York," ibid., p. 829; William T . Jerome, "Sunday Opening by Statute," ibid., pp. 868-870; The Outlook, 69:480 (October 26, 1901); The Independent, 52:27222723 (November 14, 1901). 14. Jerome, in Municipal Affairs, p. 870. 15. F. D. Bramhall, "Some Political Phases of the Liquor Problem in Chicago," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1910, pp. 426437; Jakub Horak, "Special Report X: Foreign Benefit Societies in Chicago," Illinois Health Insurance Commission, Report, May 1, 1919 (Springfield, III., 1919), p. 523; George E. Waring, Jr., "The Drink Problem in New York City Politics," The Outlook, 69:507 (October 26, 1901); A. Julius Freiburg, "The Cincinnati Situation," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1906, p. 130. 16. Bramhall, in National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1910, pp. 434-437; Jerome, in Municipal Affairs, p. 875; Waring, in The Outlook, 69:507; George C. Sikes, "The Liquor Question and Municipal Reform," National Municipal Review, 5:412-415 (July 1916); The Outlook, 70:164-165 (January 18, 1902); ibid., 91:613 (March 20, 1909); ibid., 94:738 (April 2, 1910); The Independent, 53:2723 (November 14, 1901). 17. Handlin, The Uprooted, pp. 216-225; J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919-1933 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 66-67. 18. Wayne B. Wheeler, Federal and State Laws Relating to Intoxicating Liquor (2d ed., Westerville, Ohio, 1918), pp. 157-164. 19. Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 375-376, 389-392, 449; idem, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938), p. 385; idem, Jim Crow, pp. 65-76; Irwin, in Collier's, 40:10-13 (February 29, 1908) and 40:14 (March 21, 1908); The Literary Digest, 35:738 (November 16, 1907); ibid., 3 5 : 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 (July 27, 1907); McKelway, in Charities and the Commons, 19:1452-1453; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1906, p. 76; idem, Proceedings, 1909, pp. 153-155; The Outlook, 86:943-944 (August 31, 1907); P. H. Whaley, Jr., "Some Aspects of Prohibition in the South," Collier's Weekly, 50:32 (May 31, 1913); Frank Foxcroft, "Prohibition in the South," The Atlantic Monthly, 101:627-632 (May 1908); Brown, in The Century Magazine, 76:462-465; Graves in Cosmopolitan, 45:84; Corrigan, in The Ameri-

222

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI

can Monthly Review of Reviews, 36:331-332; McClure's Magazine, 34:701 (April 1910); Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, pp. 132-134, 154; Unger, "W.C.T.U.," pp. 78-79. 20. The Outlook, 89:272 (June 6, 1908); Pritchard, in Harper's Weekly, 55:13 (March 18, 1911); The Literary Digest, 36:815 (June 6, 1908); The Independent, 63:444 (August 22, 1908); Josephus Daniels, Editor in Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941), pp. 442-443, 521. 21. Irwin, in Collier's, 40:10 (February 29, 1908); The President's Research Committee, Recent Social Trends, p. 423. 22. McClure's Magazine, 33:426-430 (August 1909); ibid., 34:448451 (February 1910). 23. Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (new ed., Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1950), p. 30. 24. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 190η, p. 45. 25. Ibid., pp. 60, 71, 73-74, 86-87, 123; idem, Proceedings, 1906, pp. 68-69, 76-78; idem, Proceedings, 1909, p. 138; Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, pp. 102-104; Unger, "W.C.T.U.," pp. 44, 200-202. 26. Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, pp. 329-330, 336-338, 341, 343, 349, 380-404; DeWitt, The Progressive Movement, pp. 101108. 27. Unger, "W.C.T.U.," p. 76; Irwin, in Collier's, 41:9 (May 9, 1908); National Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association, Organization, p. 5; Cochran, Pabst, p. 312; Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Committee on Temperance, Annual Report, 1904, p. 362; Gordon, in Cosmopolitan, 49:771-772. 28. Unger, "W.C.T.U.," p. 77; Hatton, "The Liquor Situation in Ohio," National Municipal League, Proceedings, 1910, pp. 420-421; Hugh F. Fox, "Brewers as Reformers," Charities and the Commons, 21:722 (January 23, 1909). 29. Unger, "W.C.T.U.," p. 76; The Literary Digest, 36:887 (June 20, 1908); Collier's Weekly, 41:8 (July 4, 1908); Hugh F. Fox, "The Brewers' Convention," Charities and the Commons, 20:516-518 (July 11, 1908). 30. Stanley Bronner, "The Liquor Men's License Law," Harper's Weekly, 52:9 (February 1, 1908); The Independent, 64:1305 (June 4, 1908); Collier's Weekly, 41:11 (September 19, 1908); Irwin, in Collier's, 41:9-10 (May 16, 1908). 31. Collier's Weekly, quoted in Current Literature, 44:349 (April 1908). 32. Beverages, quoted in The Literary Digest, 35:252 (August 24, 1907). 33. Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 282-313; Anti-Saloon

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223

League, The Anti-Saloon League Year Book, 1908-1914, passim; Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, pp. 154-156; Unger, "W.C.T.U.," pp. 78-79; Robert G. Hiden, "Prohibition in Alabama," The World To-Day, 18:169-170 (February 1910); Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1911, p. 80; Sullivan, Our Times, IV, 23-24. 34. U.S. Senate, American Antisaloon League, Senate Document no. 133, 57 Cong., ι sess., January 20, 1902, pp. 2-5. The Navy had already forbidden the sale of liquor on board its ships and stations in 1899. Congress followed up the Anti-Canteen law by appropriating sizable sums of money to provide wholesome substitutes for the army saloon. Unger, "W.C.T.U.," pp. 220-221; C. E. Littlefield, "Anti-Canteen Legislation and the Army," The North American Review, 178:398, 402-403 (March 1904). 35. Congressional Record, 57 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 162, 203-204, 293, 309, 360, 506-507, 1202-1203; Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 1913, p. 49. 36. Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism, pp. 147-148; Samuel Hopkins Adams, "The Great American Fraud," Colliers Weekly, 39:11-12 (June 8, 1907); Unger, "W.C.T.U.," pp. 182-188; H. Parker Willis, "What Whiskey Is," McClure's Magazine, 34:688-700 (April 1910). 37. Anti-Saloon League, Proceedings, 190 I 9 I 9)· 121. Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, pp. 368-374; AntiSaloon League, Proceedings, 1919, pp. 13-21, 104-105, 231. 122. Ibid., pp. 25-26, 30; Proceedings, 1917, pp. 30-35, 107, 147-148. 123. Ibid., p. 24. 124. Congressional Record, 66 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 2139, 2281, 2301, 2426-2443, 2445-2486, 2552-2573, 2775-2808, 2856-2905, 2949-2977, 298a, 3005, 3920, 4836-4852, 4892-4896, 4903-4908, 6681-6698, 6955, 7611, 7633-7634; Steuart, Wheeler, pp. 148-153; Wheeler, in The New York Times, April 2, 1926, p. 21; Cherrington, Evolution of Prohibition, p. 382. 125. Congressional Record, 66 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 2458, 2564, 49054907, 7624, 7807; U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Enforcement of War Prohibition, House Report no. 1143, 65 Cong., 3 sess., February 26, 1919, pp. 1-5; U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Prohibiting Intoxicating Beverages, House Report no. 91, 66 Cong., 1 sess., June 30, 1919, part 1, pp. 2-3. 126. William H. Waggaman, "Exit Booze-Enter Alcohol," The American Monthly Reviews of Reviews, 59:385-388 (April 1919); Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, 22:513-518 (March 17, 1920). 127. 41 U.S. Statutes at Large, part 1, 308-317; Herman Feldman, Prohibition: Its Economic and Industrial Aspects (New York, 1927), 60 fn. 1; Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic, 66 Cong., 1 sess., part 3, pp. 53-54, 341; Congressional Record, 66 Cong., 1 sess., p. 2503. 128. Ibid., pp. 2572, 2957-2959, 4848-4849; 41 U.S. Statutes at Large, part i, pp. 316-317. 129. Ibid., pp. 308-317; Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings on the Bills to Prohibit the Liquor Traffic, 66 Cong., ι sess., p. 193; Senate Committee on the Judiciary, National Prohibition Act, 66 Cong., 1 sess., p. 18; Congressional Record, 66 Cong., ι sess., pp. 4837, 4850-4851. 130. The New York Times, January 16, 1920, p. 1; ibid., January 17, pp. ι, 3.

Index

Accidents, alcohol a factor in, 26, 58, 70-71, 82; decreased by temperance enforcement, 68-72, 79. See also Deaths Actuarial Society of America, 54 Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 156 A.F.L., see American Federation of Labor Aked, Rev. Charles F., 34 Alabama, 131, 150, 154, 155, 159, 166 Alaska, 160, 173 Alcohol, as food, 40, 45, 47, 49; medicinal use, 40,47, 156, 183; physiological effects, 40-47, 52-53, 63; a poison, 45-46, 47, 49, 51-52, 64, 71, 170; sacramental use, 5, 12, 32, 183 Alcoholic selection, 60-61, 62 Alcoholism as a disease, 63-64, 98 American Academy of Medicine, 50 American Anti-Saloon League, 126. See also Anti-Saloon League of America American Express Company, 123 American Federation of Labor (A.F.L.), 83, 87-90, 92, 95, 96 American Institute of Social Service, 2

5

American 141 American 139 American 60 American

Issue, The, 132, 138, 139, Issue Publishing Company, Journal of Sociology, Machinist, 70

The,

American Malting Company, 104 American Medical Association, 47 American Monthly Review of Reviews, The, 52 American Patriot, The, 139 American Railway Association, 68 American Sheet and Tin Plate Company, 75 American Temperance Society, 19 American Underwriter, The, 54 Amethyst, The, 19 Anaconda Copper Mining Company, 79

Anderson, Tom, 114 Anderson, William H., 20 Andreae, Percy, 107, 108 Anheuser-Busch, 103, n o , 114 Anti-Canteen law, 159 Anti-Saloon Field Day, 136, 137-138 Anti-Saloon League of America, 1 1 , 79, 80, 93, 156, 157; and evangelical Protestant churches, 20; Catholic support, 31-32; and Progressive Movement, 33-34, 148, 167; and millennial hope, 37, 38; temperance propaganda, 50, 71, 131, 138-139; history, 125-133; organizational structure, 133-135; finances, 136138; methods of operation, 137-148, 165; federal fight for prohibition, 169-180, 181; and world prohibition, 180 Anti-Saloon League of California, 166-167

231

232 Anti-Saloon League of the District of Columbia, 126 Anti-Saloon League Year Book, The, 139 Applied Eugenics, 63 Arena, The, 52 Arizona, 166, 172 Arkansas, 120, 131, 159, 160, 166 Asheville, N.C., 150 Ashurst, Henry F., 163 Athletics, 56, 64-65 Atlantic Monthly, The, 52 Augustana Synod, 6 Baker, Newton D., 153 Baker, Rev. Purley Α., 20, 33, 1 3 1 133. I5