Anti-Saloon League

This 1902 illustration from the Hawaiian Gazette newspaper humorously illustrates the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union's campaign against the producers and sellers of beers in Hawaii

The Anti-Saloon League was the leading organization lobbying for prohibition in the United States in the early 20th century.

It was a key component of the Progressive Era, and was strongest in the South and rural North, drawing heavy support from pietistic Protestant ministers and their congregations, especially Methodists, Baptists, Disciples and Congregationalists.[1] It concentrated on legislation, and cared about how legislators voted, not whether they drank or not. Founded as a state society in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893, its influence spread rapidly. In 1895, it became a national organization and quickly rose to become the most powerful prohibition lobby in America, pushing aside its older competitors the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party. Its triumph was nationwide prohibition locked into the Constitution with passage of the 18th Amendment in 1920. It was decisively defeated when Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

It continued however, and is today known as the American Council on Alcohol Problems.

Organizational structure and operation

The League was the first modern pressure group organized around one issue. Unlike earlier popular movements, it utilized bureaucratic methods learned from business to build a strong organization.[2] The League's founder and first leader, Howard Hyde Russell (1855–1946), believed that the best leadership was selected, not elected. Russell built from the bottom up, shaping local leagues and raising the most promising young men to leadership at the local and state levels. This organizational strategy reinvigorated the temperance movement.[3]

Pressure politics

The League's most prominent leader was Wayne Wheeler, although both Ernest Cherrington and William E. Johnson ("Pussyfoot" Johnson), were also highly influential and powerful.

The League used pressure politics in legislative politics, which it is credited with developing.[4] When it came to fighting wet candidates, especially as Al Smith in the presidential election of 1928, the League was less effective because its audience was already Republican.

National constitutional amendment

The League used a multitiered approach in its attempts to secure a dry (prohibition) nation through national legislation and congressional hearings, the Scientific Temperance Federation, and its American Issue Publishing Company. The League also used emotion based on patriotism, efficiency and anti-German sentiment in World War I. The activists saw themselves as preachers fulfilling their religious duty of eliminating liquor in America.[5] Lamme (2003) explores the public relations approach used by the League as it tried to mobilize public opinion in favor of a dry, saloonless nation. It invented many of the modern techniques of public relations.[6]

Local work

The League lobbied at all levels of government for legislation to prohibit the manufacture or import of spirits, beer and wine. Ministers had launched several efforts to close Arizona saloons after the 1906 creation of League chapters in Yuma, Tucson, and Phoenix. A League organizer from New York arrived in 1909, but the Phoenix chapter was stymied by local-option elections, whereby local areas could decide whether to allow saloons. League members pressured local police to take licenses from establishments that violated closing hours or served women and minors, and they provided witnesses to testify about these violations. One witness was Frank Shindelbower, a juvenile from a poor family, who testified several saloons had sold him liquor; as a result those saloons lost their licenses. However owners discovered that Shindelbower had perjured himself, and he was imprisoned. After the Arizona Gazette and other newspapers pictured Shindelbower as the innocent tool of the Anti-Saloon League, he was pardoned.[7]

State operations

At the state level, the League had mixed results, usually doing best in rural and southern states. It made little headway in larger cities, or among liturgical church members such as Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians and German Lutherans. Pegram (1990) explains its success in Illinois under William Hamilton Anderson. From 1900 and 1905 the League worked to obtain a local option referendum law and became an official church federation. Local Option was passed in 1907 and by 1910 40 of Illinois' 102 counties and 1,059 of the state's townships and precincts had become dry, including some Protestant areas around Chicago. Despite these successes, after the Prohibition amendment was ratified in 1919, social problems such as organized crime ignored by the League undermined the public influence of the single-issue pressure group, and it faded in importance.[8] Pegram (1997) uses its failure in Maryland to explore the relationship between Southern Progressivism and national progressivism. The Maryland leader 1907-14 was William H. Anderson, but he was unable to adapt to local conditions, such as the large German element. The League failed to ally with local political bosses and attacked the Democratic Party. In Maryland, as in the rest of the South, Pegram concludes, traditional religious, political, and racial concerns constrained reform movements even as they converted Southerners to the new national politics of federal intervention and interest-group competition.[9]

Failure

Unable to cope with the failures of prohibition after 1928, especially bootlegging and organized crime as well as reduced government revenue, the League failed to counter the repeal forces. Also their failure to disassociate from the Ku Klux Klan brought on negative connotations with the League.[10] Led by prominent Democrats, they helped Franklin D. Roosevelt win in 1932 on a wet platform. A new Constitutional amendment passed easily in 1933 to repeal the 18th amendment, and the League lost its power.

Headquarters

In 1909, the League moved its national headquarters from Washington to Westerville, Ohio, which had a reputation for supporting temperance. The American Issue Publishing House, the publishing arm of the League, was also in Westerville. Ernest Cherrington headed the company. It printed so many leaflets—over 40 tons of mail per month—that Westerville was the smallest town to have a first class post office.

From 1948 until 1950 it was named the Temperance League, from 1950 to 1964 the National Temperance League, from 1964 the American Council on Alcohol Problems.[11] Today the organization continues its original goal. A museum about the League is at the Westerville Public Library.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ John Rumbarger, Profits, power, and prohibition: alcohol reform and the industrializing of America, 1800-1930 (1989)
  2. ↑ Peter H. Odegard, Pressure Politics: Story of the Anti-Saloon League (1928)
  3. ↑ K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League (1985)
  4. ↑ K. Austin Kerr, "Organizing for Reform: The Anti-Saloon League and Innovation in Politics." American Quarterly 1980 32(1): 37-53 in JSTOR
  5. ↑ Margot Opdycke Lamme, "Tapping into War: Leveraging World War I in the Drive for a Dry Nation," American Journalism 2004 21(4): 63-91. ISSN 0882-1127
  6. ↑ Lamme (2003)
  7. ↑ H. David Ware, "The Anti-Saloon League Wages War in Phoenix, 1910: the Unlikely Case of Frank Shindelbower." Journal of Arizona History 1998 39(2): 141-154. ISSN 0021-9053
  8. ↑ Thomas R. Pegram, "The Dry Machine: the Formation of the Anti-Saloon League of Illinois," Illinois Historical Journal 1990 83(3): 173-186. ISSN 0748-8149
  9. ↑ Thomas R. Pegram, "Temperance Politics and Regional Political Culture: the Anti-saloon League in Maryland and the South, 1907-1915," Journal of Southern History 1997 63(1): 57-90. in JSTOR
  10. ↑ Thomas R. Pegram, “Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement,” in Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era Vol. 7, Issue 1.
  11. ↑ Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League

References

External links

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