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Neal Dow – Napoleon of Temperance

1827 – Founded Maine Temperance Society with an initial focus on distilled beverages (spirits)

1829 – Dow shifts to abstention from Alcohol- Also becomes much more involved in politics, aligns himself with Anti Masonic and Anti-Slavery causes

1837 – Maine Temperance Society disbands over disagreements surrounding whether wine should be banned. Formed Maine Temperance Union.

1842 – Convinced Portland government to introduce liquor licenses

1845 – 1850 – Continually saw legislature for alcohol bans defeated or vetoed

1850 – Elected head of Maine Temperance Union. He runs for Mayor of Portland on Whig ticket and wins. Lobbied state-wide legislature for prohibition of alcohol within a month of being in position. Legislature passed and became first state to ban alcohol. Known as “Maine Law”. Grew in popularity, neighbouring states introduced anti-alcohol reform. However, faced opposition at home.

1852 – Loses Mayor Electoral, blames illegal voting by Irish immigrants.

1854 – Runs for Mayor again, loses

1855 – Runs for Mayor again, narrow victory

1856 – Licensed alcohol for medicinal uses, ordered $1600 worth and kept at City Hall. Bought in his name in violation of Maine Law. Sparked anti-prohibitionists to march on City Hall to spill “Neal Dow’s Liquor”. Ordered militia to shoot on marchers – one man killed. When asked Dow maintained it was justified and asked if the man was Irish. Violence turned public opinion.

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The Liberty Party was a small political party formed to abolish slavery. They believed that to abolish slavery, they needed to do so through electoral politics and proof that the Constitution was an anti-slavery document.  They were originally connected to the AASS (American Anti-Slavery Society) but broke away when the AASS stated the Constitution was an "evil pro-slavery document".  This party still advocated for the abolishment of slavery but in a different way than the AASS did. Their belief was that working through the system and influencing people would make a change while the AASS did not like this idea of being involved in the system or the idea of voting.

Main source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Party_(United_States,_1840)

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The Free Soil Party was a Pre-Civil War political party, founded in 1848. The group was comprised of people from the Conscience Whig Party as well as the Barnburner Democrats. They didn't support slavery expanding into western territories. One of the more famous quotations attached to the Free Soil Party is said to be inherently racist in saying, "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, Free Men," meaning that they wanted these things for the white man more than for the African-American Slaves. The party dissolved in the midst of the the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, with most returning to their previous parties and the ideals getting absorbed by the Republican Party.

Works Cited:
- “The Free Soil Party.” Bill of Rights Institute, https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-free-soil-party.

-“Free-Soil Party.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/Free-Soil-Party.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Free-Soil Party, (1848-54), minor but influential political party in the pre- Civil War period of American history that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. Fearful of expanding slave power within the national government, Rep. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania in 1846 introduced into Congress his famous Wilmot Proviso, calling for the prohibition of slavery in the vast southwestern lands that had been newly acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot concept, which failed in Congress, was a direct ideological antecedent to the Free-Soil Party. Disappointed by the ambivalent position of the Whig Party toward slavery, "Conscience" Whigs held a convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, New York. There they were joined by delegates from 17 states drawn from the Liberty Party and the antislavery faction of the New York Democrats, known as "Barnburners." The Free-Soilers' historic slogan calling for "free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men" attracted small farmers, debtors, village merchants, and household and mill workers, who resented the prospect of black-labour competition-whether slave or free-in the territories.

In 1848 the Free-Soil Party nominated the former U.S. president Martin Van Buren to head its ticket. Though the party polled only 10 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election that year, it weakened the regular Democratic candidate in New York and contributed to the election of the Whig candidate Gen. Zachary Taylor as president. The Free-Soil vote was reduced to 5 percent in 1852, when John P. Hale was the presidential nominee. Nevertheless, a dozen Free-Soil congressmen later held the balance of power in the House of Representatives, thus wielding considerable influence. In addition, the party was well represented in several state legislatures. In 1854 the disorganized remnants of the party were absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party, which carried the Free-Soil idea of opposing the expansion of slavery one step further by condemning slavery as a moral evil as well.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Zeidan.

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Free-Soil Party | Definition, History, & Beliefs

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Free-Soil Party (1848-54), minor political party in the pre-Civil War period of American history that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. In 1852 it wielded some influence, including the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives. It was absorbed into the Republican Party in 1854.

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On June 2nd, 1851, Maine became the first state in America to officially outlaw alcohol. This drastic step towards Prohibition came about due to the efforts of Portland's Mayor, Neal Dow. Dow was the co-founder of the Maine Temperance Society, and used his political influence to pass this law. Four years later, Dow himself broke the law he helped create by purchasing a large amount of alcohol to distribute to Maine's doctors. This event led to the Portland Rum Riot of June, 2nd, 1855. On this day, thousands of citizens attempted to storm the building that Dow's alcohol was kept in, leading to one death and seven injuries after the rioters clashed with the state militia. This event killed Neal Dow's chances at reelection, and he never again held a political office.

Main Source: https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2016/06/02/maine-alcohol-history/

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On May 25th 1869 the Good Templars in Oswego, New York held a meeting to form a political party in support of prohibition. Jonathan Orne was chosen as the first chairman and Julius Spencer was chosen as secretary. The party nominated their first President and Vice President in 1872. John Russell and James Black won the nomination. The Prohibition is the longest-lived political party after the Republican and Democrat Parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_Party

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United States Brewers Association (1862)

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United States Brewers Association (1862)

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The United States Brewers Association (USBA) was founded during the American Civil War in 1862 by a group of New York based brewers, primarily made up of German immigrants. In 1864 the name "United States Brewers Association" was officially adopted. The USBA was formed as a response to the institution of federal taxation, and taxation remained the association's main focus until 1867. In 1867, the USBA officially challenged the emerging Prohibition Party to showcase their opposition to temperance.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Brewers%27_Association#Twentieth_century

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This act was passed to help fund the American Civil War. It was passed by the US Congress, then was signed by President Lincoln right after on July 1st, 1862. This allowed people that trafficked liquor to basically partner up with the government, so they could tax it. They needed much more money at the time before they went into the war, so they thought this would be a way to help. This act also introduced the US's first progressive tax, which is when the tax rate and taxable amount both increase. The one major problem most people saw when this act was passed was the fact that liquor trafficking might become a regular thing throughout the years.

Main source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1862

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The ASL was founded as a state society in Ohio in 1893. Its influence spread rapidly, and in 1895 it became a national organization. It drew most of its support from Protestant evangelical churches, and it lobbied at all levels of government for legislation to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages. The growth and influence of the ASL in national politics is emblematic of the evolution of prohibition from temperance led by disparate groups to well-organized, national political parties.
https://prohibition.osu.edu/anti-saloon-league

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The Anti Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio began life as a state organization. Its first offices were in Columbus, Ohio; in 1909, the League moved to nearby Westerville, Ohio where it also operated the American Issue Publishing Company. After 1895, however, the League became a powerful national organization. The League was a non-partisan organization that focused on the single issue of prohibition. The League had branches across the United States to work with churches in marshalling resources for the prohibition fight. In 1913, in a 20th anniversary convention held in Columbus, Ohio, the League announced its campaign to achieve national prohibition through a constitutional amendment. Allied with other temperance forces, especially the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the League in 1916 oversaw the election of the two-thirds majorities necessary in both houses of Congress to initiate what became the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Although before the United States entered the First World War prohibition was widely popular in the United States, mobilization provided the League and its allies with a boost in the quest to persuade Americans to support constitutional prohibition. Mobilization called for sacrifice, for supporting the soldiers, and the dry forces quickly capitalized on the patriotic emotions surrounding the war effort.

Note: The Anti-Saloon League Web Site is an excellent resource maintained by the Westerville Public Library in Ohio. Westerville also has an Anti-Saloon League museum.

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The Anti Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio began life as a state organization. Its first offices were in Columbus, Ohio; in 1909, the League moved to nearby Westerville, Ohio where it also operated the American Issue Publishing Company. After 1895, however, the League became a powerful national organization.

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Eliza Stewart "Mother Stewart" (1816-1908)

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Eliza Stewart "Mother Stewart" (1816-1908)

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Eliza Stewart or "Mother Stewart" was a temperance movement leader. She was important during the Women's Crusade of 1873-74 which was a temperance campaign of non-violent protests. In 1873 she founded the Women's Temperance League of Osborn, Ohio and also helped found the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1874. She also spent time in the United Kingdom helping organize the British Women's Temperance Association in 1876.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Daniel_Stewart

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Amanda Way was an early member and leader in both the temperance and women's rights movements. In 1844 she joined the Winchester Total Abstinence Society, and in 1854 she led a group of women in the "whiskey riots" to get saloons and drugstores to stop selling alcohol. Way first attended a women's rights convention in 1851, and served as a prominent figure in the first Indiana women's rights convention that same year. She became the president of the Indiana Women's Rights Association in 1855. Way was also a founding member and first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Kansas.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Way#Temperance_advocate

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Sallie Chapin was one of the few prominent Prohibitionist women from the American South. Due to the South's conservative nature, the radical concept of Prohibition was far less popular, as was the concept of prominent female activism.

Sallie Chapin was an altruistic woman. During the Civil War, she was president of several women's societies that aided injured Confederate soldiers. After the war, Chapin became a prominent leader in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Chapin's gifts for writing and public speaking helped spread the message of Prohibition throughout the South. When the  Prohibition Home Protection Party was created in 1882, Chapin was a natural choice to serve as a party executive.

Sallie Chapin's activism went beyond Prohibition. She pushed to found a school for girls which eventually became the still-running Winthrop University. Chapin also worked to raise the age of consent in South Carolina from 10 to 16. Overall, Sallie Chapin paved the way for many wealthy southern women to become involved in activism and community service.

Main Source: https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/chapin-sarah-flournoy-moore/

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Lyman Beecher is a man that is know for his involvement with the temperance movement. He had a huge role as he and Justin Edwards cofounded the American Temperance Society in 1826. This group grew very rapidly as they more than 1.5 million members. This society was made to stand up for many US problems like abolishing slavery, fighting for women's rights, and alcohol problems. This society started in Boston, Massachusetts and then grew very rapidly within the next five years.  This society was the first group to spread at a national level.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Temperance_Society

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American temperance leader who is believed to have drafted the call for the convention that organized the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
At the height of a temperance prayer crusade that swept Ohio in 1873–74, Brown, who had long been an officer of a fraternal temperance society, initiated the formation of a more broadly based temperance organization. In February 1874 in Columbus, Ohio, she led in founding what apparently was the first women’s state temperance society. That August, at Chautauqua Lake, New York, she and two others planned a national society, and a convention ensued that saw the founding of the WCTU. Failing to win the presidency of the new group, probably because of her identification with the fraternal order, she withdrew. In 1876 she withdrew from the fraternal order as well when that group declined to admit African American members.
Brown then concentrated her efforts on the Prohibition Party, but in 1896 she broke with the party when it did not support women’s suffrage. From 1882 to 1892 she served as vice president and professor of art, literature, and philosophy at Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman’s College in Ohio, a financially shaky institution of which her husband was president. She also made three lecture tours of Great Britain in 1881, 1891, and 1911, but in later years she occupied herself chiefly with local philanthropies in Cincinnati.

Source:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Womans-Christian-Temperance-Union

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Table of Contents

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), American temperance organization, founded in November 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, in response to the "Woman's Crusade," a series of temperance demonstrations that swept through New York and much of the Midwest in 1873-74. Annie Wittenmyer, an experienced wartime fund-raiser and administrator, was elected president at the WCTU's founding in 1874. During her five-year tenure the WCTU developed a network of more than 1,000 local affiliates and began publishing the journal Our Union. Dissension, however, arose as a segment of the WCTU led by Frances Willard called for the addition of women's suffrage to the group's platform enjoining abstinence from alcohol ( see also alcohol consumption). In 1879 Wittenmyer, who opposed such a move, was replaced by Willard.

For the next two decades Willard led the temperance movement as the WCTU became one of the largest and most influential women's groups of the 19th century. She expanded the organization's platform to include such issues as labour laws and prison reform, and in 1891 she became president of the World WCTU (founded 1883). The WCTU also campaigned for women's right to vote, though its support posed problems for suffragists as the alcohol industry became a powerful opponent of the movement.

With Willard's death in 1898, the WCTU began to distance itself from feminist groups, instead focusing primarily on prohibition. Though its membership steadily declined following the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment ( Prohibition) in 1919, the WCTU continued to operate through the early 21st century. Opposed to the use of tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs, it ran a publishing house and was active in schools.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Brian Duignan.

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Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) | History & Facts

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Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), American temperance organization, founded in November 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, in response to the 'Woman's Crusade,' a series of temperance demonstrations that swept through New York and much of the Midwest in 1873-74.

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The Women’s Crusade of 1873 was a series of marches and non-violent protests advocating temperance. These women called for saloon owners to destroy their stock of alcohol, shut the doors and enter into a different line of business. Women at this time had no right to vote and thus no political power. The decision to take to the streets for protest and marches was born out of this lack of political power. It was one of the few ways they could seek change.

Of 19th century Women’s reform movements, Temperance was by far the largest. Of the overall temperance movement, women contributed somewhere between 1 third and 1 half of the movements overall mass support. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was born out of the aftermath of the Women’s Crusade. This was the first institutionalized women’s temperance group, free from male control.

The movement itself began in small towns around New York state and southwestern Ohio, somewhere around Christmas 1873. It would grow over the next 6 months reaching 31 states and territories plus the District of Columbia. Central to their argument was that women were the greatest sufferers from male intemperance because of pain, shame, violence and loss of economic stability when men drank to excess.

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Women's Crusade - Women's Christian Temperance Union

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The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in November of 1874, in support of the temperance movement. They were created through the Women's Crusade Movement of 1873-1874, supporting the movement for temperance. Anyone in the WCTU pledged abstinence from alcohol. The WCTU existed late into the 1900's the platforms expanded into other political areas.

Works Cited:
“Woman's Christian Temperance Union.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/Womans-Christian-Temperance-Union.

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Frances Willard was notably one of the biggest influences on the temperance movement. Willard was known as the National President of the WCTU and remained President until her death in 1898. She is now in the Women's Hall of Fame for her influence in the temperance movement, the suffrage movement, and her position which changed the role of women in the nineteenth century.  While President of the WCTU, she focused on providing women higher education and encouraged them to be more than just a wife. With Willard teaching these women leadership skills and  gave them organizational roles, we see women influenced by her begin to flourish.

Works Cited:
https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/frances-e-willard/

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In 1917 Congress sent the Eighteenth Amendment, known as the Prohibition Amendment, to the states with a seven-year deadline for passage—the first amendment to have a time restriction. Within just 13 months, the states had ratified it, but not without great debate. Pres. Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Amendment in 1919. Congress overrode the president's veto with the Volstead Act, which defined "intoxicating beverages" as anything containing more than .05% alcohol.

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October 28, 1919

On October 28, 1919, the United States Senate voted 65 to 20 to override President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act. Since the House had also voted to override the veto, America entered the Prohibition era.

The movement to prohibit alcoholic beverages had been underway for a century, led by the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League. These groups formed a powerful single-issue coalition that relentlessly lobbied local, state, and federal governments. When the states began enacting laws to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages, the temperance societies stepped up the pressure on Congress. In 1917 Congress sent the Eighteenth Amendment, known as the Prohibition Amendment, to the states with a seven-year deadline for passage-the first amendment to have a time restriction. Within 13 months, the states had ratified it.

The Eighteenth Amendment banned but did not define "intoxicating liquors." Some of the members of Congress who had voted for the amendment assumed that it referred to hard liquor and would exempt beer and wine. But the head of the Anti-Saloon League drafted a tough enforcement act, which was then sponsored by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Minnesota representative Andrew Volstead. The National Prohibition Act, better known as the Volstead Act, defined an intoxicating beverage as anything that contained more than one half of one percent alcohol. By contrast, Canadian prohibition laws set the limit at 2.5 percent. The Volstead Act made it illegal to "manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish, or possess" such beverages.

The Eighteenth Amendment provided that the "Congress and the several states" would have power to enforce Prohibition by legislation, but the sweeping Volstead Act left the states no room for local option or any other flexibility. Ironically, the law called for a vast increase in the federal government's intervention in society just as "limited government" advocates were coming into office. Prohibition corresponded with the presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, and with a parsimonious Congress that was reluctant to appropriate sufficient funds for effective enforcement of the Volstead Act.

The result was a decade of lawlessness, with citizens flouting the law at speakeasies and bootleggers corrupting public officials. On Capitol Hill, a rumrunner known as "The Man in the Green Hat" operated freely out of the Senate office building. By 1932, polls showed that the great majority of Americans believed that Prohibition had failed. The repeal of Prohibition became a popular campaign theme for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Twenty-First Amendment, which was approved soon after he swept into the presidency, finally nullified the misguided Volstead Act.

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The Senate Overrides the President's Veto of the Volstead Act

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October 28, 1919 On October 28, 1919, the United States Senate voted 65 to 20 to override President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act. Since the House had also voted to override the veto, America entered the Prohibition era.

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Lobbied and supported by the powerful Anti-Saloon League, the Food and Fuel Control Act was a wartime measure giving President Woodrow Wilson broad powers to regulate the nation’s food supply. It banned the use of grain for distilling and restricted wine and beer production for the duration of the war. The president's power led to wartime prohibition and overlapped with the ratification process of the 18th amendment, proposed by Congress in 1917.

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The Wartime Prohibition Act, a temporary federal measure enacted in November 1918, barred the manufacture of beer and wine in the United States and prohibited the sale of beverages containing more than 2.75% alcohol anywhere in the nation after July 1, 1919.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/septemberoctober/feature/going-dry

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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We may be easily drawn to romanticized images of the 1920s, but we cannot let our collective fascination with bathtub gin, gangsters, and jazz clubs cloud our vision of the Prohibition era. There were very serious matters at the heart of the debates surrounding the legislation that ushered in the period. With the broadcast this October of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's three-part documentary Prohibition, Americans will get a chance to rethink that era's meaning.

What the film makes clear is that Prohibition was the first of the many "culture wars" that would divide the United States in the twentieth century. Before the debates about abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, school prayer, or the legalization of marijuana-all issues that put the rights of the individual in conflict with the demands of society or the state-the nation argued over prohibition. At the heart of the discussions were these questions: What are the limits of social reform? What are the consequences when reform goes too far? What are the limits of government, especially when it comes to how we conduct our private lives? Clearly, there was much more at stake here than booze.

Nineteenth-century Origins of the Alcohol Debate

Burns and Novick place this debate within a broader history of alcohol use and abuse in American history. The Prohibition experiment, in their eyes, was not the product of a sudden, naïve push for a ban on alcohol in the 1920s, but instead was rooted in a much longer debate over alcohol and social behavior extending back to the early nineteenth century. Best estimates indicate that Americans in the early nineteenth century drank three times as much alcohol as their descendants do today.

The prevalence of alcohol in daily life was plainly visible. Prohibition opens with the observations of Frederick Marryat, an English captain who noted in 1839:

The Americans can fix nothing, without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink, because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.

Had Marryat accepted every drink he was offered, he complained, he would have not been "sober for three or four weeks at a time."

As the consumption of distilled spirits increased, American fondness for drink caused clear problems: domestic violence, crime, neglected families, economic ruin, disease, and death. It was these combined effects of alcohol abuse that led
reformers to warn against "demon rum."

This context is important for understanding why the seemingly preposterous idea of prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol nationally through a constitutional amendment gained traction as the nineteenth century came to a close. Nothing else had worked. Waves of temperance reformers, including the famed pastor Lyman Beecher, and temperance groups like the Washingtonians, had tried to reform drinkers through moral suasion and by promoting voluntary abstinence, but those who believed that moral fortitude and personal resolve could conquer alcoholism were quickly disappointed.

The early temperance wave that swept the United States in the 1830s and 1840s proved to be exactly that-a wave. The moral urgency behind temperance was soon eclipsed by the other great moral concern of the time: the abolition of slavery. The Civil War proved the undoing of the early temperance movement. As Americans focused on the most urgent issue of the time, and then turned to alcohol to soothe the pains of war, the first wave of temperance activity receded.

Legislating Morality

The next wave of reform, the one that ultimately brought Prohibition to the United States, was a very different movement. Reformers no longer emphasized temperance and voluntary abstinence, but prohibition through legislation.

For whatever reason, the popular imagination often attributes Prohibition to the work of women, such as Carry A. Nation, whose famed "hatchetations" terrorized saloon owners in Kansas for a brief period in the early 1900s. She brought attention to the movement, but achieved little beyond creating a spectacle. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which pledged to "do everything" to root out the use of alcohol in the United States, also achieved less than its reputation suggests. It galvanized women's support for Prohibition, and opened the doors to political activity for millions of women, but accomplished little to move the nation toward a ban on alcohol.

It fell to the Anti-Saloon League, an organization once known to every American, to spearhead the effort that ushered in the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. The result was a failed Prohibition experiment that lasted thirteen years, ten months, and nineteen days.

Formed in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893, the Anti-Saloon League was in many ways the forerunner of the modern, single-issue lobbying organization. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was a fearsome power in American politics. The league was no modest volunteer organization-with funding from John D. Rockefeller and contributions from tens of thousands of American churches, the league was structured like a corporation, and staffed by lawyers, statisticians, publicists, fundraisers, and researchers. It used modern advertising techniques and printed millions of pieces of literature through its wholly owned subsidiary, the American Issue Publishing Company. Its greatest power, however, was found at the ballot box.

Unlike its predecessors, the Anti-Saloon League never fielded its own candidates for elected office. Instead, it mobilized thousands of voters to sway elections. In Ohio, the league targeted seventy legislators who opposed the dry agenda and managed to drive them all from office, before turning its sights on Governor Myron Herrick. By the time its campaign helped defeat Herrick in 1905, the league had established itself as a national presence. Party affiliation and the drinking habits of individual politicians made no difference to the league-it simply supported candidates who backed the campaign for Prohibition, and it campaigned mercilessly against those who opposed it.

The Anti-Saloon League spent the first decade of the twentieth century perfecting the art of what a political scientist of the time, Peter Odegard, called "pressure politics." It lobbied elected officials to commit for or against prohibition. Opponents of the league could expect to be attacked in the dry press, bombarded with telegrams, have their personal lives probed by private investigators, and have rumors about their political and financial affairs floated in public.

Its president, Wayne B. Wheeler, became one of the most feared men in American politics. A biographer unabashedly declared that in his lifetime, Wheeler "controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents of the United States, directed legislation in most of the States of the Union . . . and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States." In New York, his deputy, William H. Anderson, was equally feared. Anderson bragged of his "hard hitting and merciless fighting," which is to say, bullying, intimidation, and insinuation. The mention of his name was enough, according to one New York official, to "make your blood run cold and your hair stand up." (And this from a moderate dry politician Anderson had targeted for not being dry enough.)

Pressure Politics

The Anti-Saloon League's reputation as a force in American politics was well deserved. It set clear legislative goals, and it met them, often steamrolling a weak and disorganized wet opposition. The league's strategy was straightforward. It sought first to dry up towns and counties by promoting "local option" laws that allowed voters to ban alcohol sales and saloons, in particular, on a district-by-district basis. Under this campaign, nearly half the area of the United States went dry by 1913. In New York alone, league efforts had increased the number of dry towns from 276 to 400, and entire states like Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Nevada had gone dry as well. Cities proved the hardest targets, with their proliferation of working-class saloons and recent immigrants, but the Anti-Saloon League saw victories in cities like Birmingham, Worcester, and Berkeley, where if the alcohol trade was not outlawed outright, it was restricted.

Incremental gains were all it took to keep the league advancing towards its ultimate goal: national prohibition. Calls to curb the abuse of alcohol by closing the saloon overlapped with Progressive efforts to improve public health and welfare. Demands for "good government" and municipal reform went with dry efforts to purge the influence of saloon owners in urban politics. Campaigns to regulate the location and business hours of saloons meshed with efforts to use zoning to regulate the chaos of the growing American city. Efforts to curb the power of the distilling and brewing industries, dominated by a few large monopolies, went hand in hand with efforts to regulate other monopolies like oil and meat. It is no coincidence that the Anti-Saloon League referred to its proposals as "distinctly progressive" legislation.

The breadth of the Progressive movement made for unlikely, but effective, allies. Because of the sweeping influence of Progressivism, the league could count on support from allies as disparate as labor unions, industrialists, settlement house reformers, and African-American leaders, all of whom could find some reason to support Prohibition.

"Booze or Coal"

The final push for Prohibition, however, was rooted in World War I. Without the U.S. entry into the war, it is unlikely Prohibition would have ever come to fruition. To the Anti-Saloon League, the war presented the ultimate opportunity to manipulate its message to address the national emergency, and it did so in brilliant ways. Calls for sacrifice for the sake of a nation at war were echoed by dry calls to conserve grain for food. The league circulated propaganda that asked for "Booze or Coal?" Patriotism, the league insisted, meant Americans should give up drink to support soldiers who were giving up their lives. In New York, the wettest of wet strongholds, a 1:00 AM curfew was approved with the rationale that it "is a late enough bedtime for a people who are awaiting the summons to war."

The charged climate of wartime made it difficult for anyone to challenge the Anti-Saloon League's assertion that Prohibition and patriotism were one in the same. With the Anti-Saloon League loudly proclaiming, "The challenge to loyal patriots of America today is to demand the absolute prohibition of the liquor traffic," those who had reservations about Prohibition swallowed their opposition for fear of appearing disloyal.

The league was particularly insistent in its blunt reminders of the connections between the brewing industry and Germans. In 1917, one Anti-Saloon League publication crowed, "German brewers in this country . . . have rendered thousands of men inefficient and are thus crippling the Republic in its war on Prussian militarism." Another league pamphlet spoke out against "the un-American, pro-German, crime-producing, food-wasting, youth-corrupting, home-wrecking, treasonable liquor traffic." Raising the specter of sabotage and alien infiltration, another prohibitionist publication declared, "We have German enemies in this country too." Reciting the names of the country's prominent brewing companies, it noted, "the worst of all . . . are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller."

In a climate where anyone who dared oppose Prohibition risked being branded a traitor, the Anti-Saloon League used the war to win a series of increasingly strict anti-alcohol measures. The first came in August 1917 with Asbury F. Lever's Food and Fuel Control Act, a wartime measure that gave President Woodrow Wilson broad powers to regulate the nation's food supply. It banned the use of grain for distilling and restricted wine and beer production for the duration of the war. Then came the Wartime Prohibition Act, a temporary federal measure enacted in November 1918, which barred the manufacture of beer and wine in the United States after May 1919, and prohibited the sale of beverages containing more than 2.75 percent alcohol anywhere in the nation after July 1, 1919. By the time Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16, 1919, giving it the three-fourths majority necessary for enactment, many Americans were already experiencing the gradual implementation of the dry experiment. The league's final victory was the passage of the Volstead Act, the federal law enforcing Prohibition. Its severity caught many Prohibition supporters off guard, leaving them wondering what they had signed up for.

Stepping Over the Line

While World War I had given the Anti-Saloon League the opportunity to ensure the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, it had taken advantage of that opportunity at great cost. The dry victory over the saloon had been won by aggressive lobbying, opportunistic use of the Progressive movement and the war, and finally by demonizing all who opposed Prohibition. Not only Germans, but Italians, Irish, Jews, and other recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe felt distinctly singled out by the Prohibitionists. Anti-Saloon League figures like William Anderson and James Cannon Jr., bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, further inflamed matters with disparaging remarks about Catholics.

Prohibition went into effect exactly at the time when American cities began to hold the majority of the American population. In those cities, where support for Prohibition was tentative at best, there was a strong sense that the dry agenda was intended, first and foremost, to clean up, reform, and punish the American city-dweller. There was also a strong sense that "anti-saloonism" was born of the middle class and designed to target the working class. In 1919, the future mayor of New York City and staunch opponent of Prohibition, James J. Walker, reduced Prohibition to a campaign "to take a glass of beer away from the workingman while allowing the rich to have their cellars filled with wine." To Walker, Prohibition embodied the anxiety within the dry movement about the changing identity of the American people. Immigration and urbanization had transformed the United States within a generation, and Prohibition was as much a desperate effort to resist inevitable changes as it was an attempt to curb the abuse of alcohol.

The increasingly vitriolic rhetoric of the dry movement made it impossible for American city-dwellers to see it any other way. With the enactment of Prohibition, the Progressive language that had brought allies to the Prohibition campaign now gave way to increasing examples of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment and scapegoating. For those who had come to the United States fleeing oppression, Prohibition brought the painful realization that a new form of oppression was being enacted in the United States at the hands of the dry lobby. The simple act of drinking a glass of wine now not only made one a criminal, but also called into question one's patriotism and fitness to be an American. Imagining how refugees who had fled Europe in search of freedom might view the dry experiment, the Irish World asked, "Will they, who have come here from under a rule which oppressed them in so many things but left them free [to drink], . . . still think of America as the land of personal liberty and human equality?"

The question suggests that the final arrival of Prohibition in January 1920 marked both victory and defeat for the dry lobby. The enactment of the Prohibition amendment had been the result of a well-funded, well-organized, and tireless campaign by the Anti-Saloon League, a pioneering lobby that attacked its foes, silenced its critics, and built alliances of opportunity that had allowed drys to alter the Constitution to suit their vision of the United States. Theirs was an astonishing victory, but one that in all likelihood would have fallen short had it not been for the timely arrival of World War I and its masterful exploitation by the Anti-Saloon League. But the Anti-Saloon League had failed to see the costs of its strategy. Having pushed Constitutional reforms through pressure politics, the league set the stage for a spectacular wave of resistance to the reforms it had imposed on the nation, and for the dramatic failure of its own agenda.

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We may be easily drawn to romanticized images of the 1920s, but we cannot let our collective fascination with bathtub gin, gangsters, and jazz clubs cloud our vision of the Prohibition era. There were very serious matters at the heart of the debates surrounding the legislation that ushered in the period.

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After Pres. Woodrow Wilson vetoed the National Prohibition Act, Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919.  Named after Andrew Volstead (Justice Commission chairman), the Act defined the processes and procedures by which national prohibition would be implemented and enforced. It also revealed ongoing divisions between "wet" and "dry" supporters in Congress.

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On this date, the 66th Congress (1919-1921) overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the National Prohibition Act. Known as the Volstead Act (H.R. 6810), after Judiciary Chairman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, this law was introduced by the House to implement the Prohibition Amendment by defining the process and procedures for banning alcoholic beverages, as well as their production and distribution. When Volstead introduced an earlier version of the law (H.R. 3458) on May 27, 1919, Democrats countered with what would be known as the "wet law," or repeal of the Wartime Prohibition. The battle between the "wets" and the "bone-drys," as Prohibition supporters were known, ensued that summer in the House. In one debate, Chairman Volstead defended the act, stating "The American people have said that they do not want any liquor sold, and they have said it emphatically by passing almost unanimously the constitutional amendment." With a Republican majority in the House, the law passed the chamber convincingly on July 22, 1919 with a vote 287 to 100. The Volstead Act remained in effect until the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed Prohibition in 1933.

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The Volstead Act | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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On this date, the 66th Congress (1919-1921) overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the National Prohibition Act. Known as the Volstead Act (H.R. 6810), after Judiciary Chairman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota, this law was introduced by the House to implement the Prohibition Amendment by defining the process and procedures for banning alcoholic beverages, as well as their production and distribution.

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Conceived by leader of the Anti-Saloon League,  Wayne Wheeler, the Eighteenth Amendment passed in both chambers of the U.S. Congress in December 1917. As required in the constitution, the 18th Amendment was ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states in January 1919. It came into force at 12:00 am on January 17, 1920 and prohibited the production, sale, and transport of "intoxicating liquors."  It granted both the federal government and the states the power to enforce the ban by "appropriate legislation."   It did NOT provide penalties. That was left to states to decide.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Prohibition-United-States-history-1920-1933

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Prohibition | Definition, History, Eighteenth Amendment, & Repeal

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Prohibition was legal prevention of the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States from 1920 to 1933 under the Eighteenth Amendment. Despite this legislation, millions of Americans drank liquor illegally, giving rise to bootlegging, speakeasies, and a period of gangsterism.