[400 years ago this week, the first temperance law in American history was passed. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that 1623 law and four other milestone moments in temperance history!]
On one
important innovation and one troubling interconnection for America’s most
influential temperance organization.
Each of
the posts in this series has moved between more individual and more collective
and organizational temperance activisms, and I don’t think that’s just due to
my own choices and focal points: it seems to me that any social movement that
endures and achieves significant successes likely needs both groundbreaking
leaders and widespread communal support. Similarly, the final push toward
Prohibition (on which more in tomorrow’s concluding post) in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries relied on both the individual presence and
prominence of yesterday’s subject Carrie Nation and the social and political
connections of the Anti-Saloon
League. Founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, the League certainly featured its
share of impressive individual leaders, from founder Howard Hyde Russell
to the hugely influential lawyer Wayne
Bidwell Wheeler among others. But it was precisely the League’s organizational
presence that made it so effective in shifting national conversations.
The League
utilized a number of strategies to achieve those aims, including creating its
own American
Issue Publishing Company in 1909; that publisher produced and mailed so
many pamphlets that its hometown of Westerville, Ohio became the smallest town
to feature a
first-class post office in the period. But by far the most influential
element of the Anti-Saloon League’s activist efforts was a strategy that the organization
seems to have created (and which was certainly related to those ubiquitous
publications): pressure
politics, the concept of using a variety of interconnected means, from mass
media and communication to intimidation and threats, to pressure political
leaders to support and pass particular legislation and policies. There’s no
doubt that it was the successful application of such political pressure by the
League and its allies (but most especially by the League) that convinced enough
national and state politicians to support Prohibition (after well more than a
half-century of unsuccessful temperance movement efforts toward that specific
end), leading to the Congressional passage and state-level ratification of the
18th Amendment in 1919.
I’ll have
a lot more to say about that specific League legacy tomorrow. But it’s
important to add a troubling layer and contemporary context, particularly to
the application of pressure politics: the other organization which used that
strategy with particular effectiveness in the 1920s was the resurgent Ku Klux
Klan. Moreover, this wasn’t a coincidence or even just a parallel—as historian
Howard Ball has discovered, in a setting like late 1910s and 1920s
Birmingham the two organizations were closely connected, to the point that a local journalist wrote, “In
Alabama, it is hard to tell where the Anti-Saloon League ends and the Klan
begins.” And it wasn’t just Alabama—throughout the 1920s the two organizations were allies not only in enforcing Prohibition (although I’m sure the
League would say that was their only goal) but in achieving their political and
social goals on multiple levels (an alliance, to be clear, that dated back decades by that point). The ties between white
supremacy and American social movements are far from unique to temperance,
of course—but that doesn’t excuse in any way this most influential temperance
organization’s symbiotic relationship with white supremacist domestic
terrorists.
Last
milestone tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
On Twitter, Peggy Ann Brown adds, "And, of course, part of that interconnection was through the Southern Publicity Assn. which had the KKK + ASL as clients. Edward Young Clarke + Mary Elizabeth Tyler became rich off their KKK recruiting scheme, which successfully brought in members during the 1st part of the 1920s."
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