Prohibition history
The temperance movement.
Temperance was a century-long American reform campaign that moved from persuading individuals to stop drinking, to banning the trade state by state, to writing prohibition into the Constitution in 1919. It was the largest sustained social movement of the nineteenth century, and it was never only about alcohol.
The country it was reacting to
Early America drank heroically. The usual estimate for the 1830s is somewhere around seven gallons of pure alcohol per adult per year — roughly three times the modern figure — consumed mostly as cheap corn whiskey and hard cider, and consumed steadily through the working day. Employers supplied it. Militia musters ran on it. It was in the fields and in the shops.
That is the thing temperance was arguing with, and it is why the movement is not simply a story about killjoys. In a cash-poor economy with no social insurance, no divorce for most women, no married women’s property rights worth the name and no sober mechanism for recovering wages drunk on a Friday, a husband’s drinking could destroy a household with nothing anyone could do about it.
Persuasion first
The first wave was moral and voluntary. The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, grew to thousands of local chapters and asked members to sign a pledge. The Washingtonians of the 1840s were different and remarkable: an organisation of reformed drinkers, founded in a Baltimore tavern, who worked by public testimony and mutual support. Anyone who has been to a modern mutual-aid meeting would recognise the format immediately.
What the voluntary approach could not do was reach the trade. A pledge binds the drinker and leaves the saloon untouched, and by the 1850s a large part of the movement had concluded that the saloon was the problem.
The Maine Law and the first dry wave
Maine banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol in 1851, under a law drafted by Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland. It was the first statewide prohibition in the United States and it set off a decade of imitation: a dozen states passed Maine Laws within five years.
Most of them collapsed. Courts struck some down, legislatures repealed others, and enforcement proved exactly as difficult in 1855 as it would in 1925. The Portland Rum Riot of 1855 — a crowd, a cache of liquor the city itself had bought, a volley from the militia, one man dead — ended with Dow out of office and the law repealed the following year.
Then the Civil War took the oxygen. Temperance went quiet for a decade, and the federal government, needing revenue, built a tax system on exactly the trade the movement wanted abolished.
Women, and why they led it
The second wave began in Ohio in the winter of 1873 with women praying and singing outside saloons until the proprietors closed, and it produced the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. Under Frances Willard the WCTU became the largest women’s organisation in the country and attached temperance to a wider programme: suffrage, labour reform, education, prison reform.
This is the part that gets flattened in the retelling. Temperance was, for an enormous number of American women, the first form of political organising available to them — respectable enough to be permitted, serious enough to be practice for everything else. Suffrage and prohibition travelled together for fifty years, and the brewing industry understood that perfectly well: brewers funded anti-suffrage campaigns on the straightforward calculation that women would vote them out of business.
The uglier strands
It needs saying that the movement carried a good deal else with it. The saloon the drys described was German, Irish, Italian, Catholic and urban, and a strain of the campaigning was explicitly about that rather than about drink. Rural Protestant America was being outvoted by cities it did not recognise, and prohibition was one of the few weapons that worked at a national scale.
In the South, prohibition campaigns were argued in nakedly racial terms and passed alongside disfranchisement. The revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s made Prohibition enforcement one of its causes and conducted its own raids. None of that was the whole movement, and the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League are not interchangeable with it — but it was present, it was consequential, and a history that leaves it out is not a history.
How it finally won
By replacing persuasion with pressure. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, cared nothing for a candidate’s character, party or views on anything else, and delivered a bloc of single-issue votes to whoever would promise one thing. It was ruthless, it was effective, and it is the direct ancestor of modern single-issue lobbying.
By 1917 two-thirds of the country was already dry under state or local law. The war did the rest: grain conservation, a brewing industry that was German-American to its bones, and a patriotic argument no brewer could answer. The amendment that followed was less a revolution than a ratification of ground already taken.
Carry Nation and the hatchet
She is the image everyone has, and she is not representative of anything. Carry Nation — she spelled it that way herself, and registered it — began smashing Kansas saloons in 1900, first with rocks and later with the hatchet she sold souvenir replicas of to pay her fines. She was arrested some thirty times, funded herself by lecturing, and was regarded by most of the organised movement as a liability.
What makes her interesting is the legal situation she was exploiting. Kansas had been constitutionally dry since 1881, which meant the saloons she destroyed were already illegal and their owners could not easily sue her for destroying property they were not supposed to have. Her hatchetations were a protest against non-enforcement, not against legal drinking — a distinction that is almost always lost.
The WCTU kept its distance. Frances Willard’s organisation had spent thirty years building respectability and had no use for a woman who got herself arrested in Topeka. The popular memory has them merged anyway.
What happened to it afterwards
Repeal did not dissolve the movement; it marginalised it. The WCTU still exists. So does the Prohibition Party, which has run a presidential candidate in every election since 1872 and is the oldest continuously operating third party in the country.
Its practical legacy is the map. Dry counties, state control boards, Sunday sales restrictions, the three-tier system and the drinking age are all temperance inheritances, administered by states that were handed the power to keep them in 1933 and in many cases never let go.