page_872 < previous page page_872 next page > Page 872 delinquencies  family violence, poverty, crime, disorder, and incompetence in shops and factories  all of which he attributed to the "excessive use" of alcohol encouraged by local custom and competition among grog shops. Dow, like Jefferson, at first hoped to persuade individuals to become temperate. But when this failed, he and many others became convinced that the state legislature should abolish the sale of alcohol. Dow's achievement, the "Maine Law" of 1851, prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. Thirteen of the thirty-one states had such laws by 1855. Such laws were especially vulnerable to the turbulent realignment of political loyalties then sweeping through these states. The emerging Republican leaders, inclined toward Prohibition but fearful that their stand against the extension of slavery might be compromised by other moral issues, removed Prohibition from their platforms. This bound to the party many opponents of Prohibition who, wet or dry, held religious persuasions emphasizing the role of the church, not the state, in matters of moral stewardship. These people were often, but not exclusively, recent immigrants: Irish and German Catholics, some German and Scandinavian Lutherans. This unity did not long survive the Civil War. In the 1870s groups of women  in the first such movement in American history  began to march from church meetings to the streets, where they halted traffic with their demands that the saloons close their doors. Spreading from Ohio in 1873, these protests demonstrated that women had found in the saloon both a symbol and an active agent of the threats raised by a new industrial society to what Frances Willard called the purity of the American home. Among these threats Willard could see drunkenness, prostitution, crime, and ignorance. As president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), she urged women in their role of home protectors to move to the streets and the legislative halls committed to direct action. In their protests, disrupting almost every major city in the North, her followers were at first asking not for the franchise but only for "home protection," though many of them did indeed want to vote so they could vote against the saloon. Republicans responded in 1888 by bringing into their platforms a delicate approval of "purity of the home" and "temperance and morality." In 1895, the leaders of the Anti-Saloon League of America (ASL), then holding their first national convention, were confident that these matters were at the center of middle-class consciousness. Enlisting Protestant congregations as basic organizational units, the ASL was strikingly successful in guiding Prohibition sentiment through a sequence of political reforms that in many states were changing fundamental democratic procedures. Early in the 1900s, direct primary laws opened the selection of political candidates to the influence of ASL leaders, who then identified for their membership those candidates  Democratic or Republican  who were safely "dry." Within a few years, dry legislatures were favoring women's suffrage and allowing popular referenda on the question of whether states should prohibit saloons. To many voters  frightened by the common knowledge that increasing competition among saloons encouraged crime and political corruption, and by the psychologists and neurologists whose research indicated that alcohol was in fact an addictive poison  there was then no more important political question. By 1916, twenty-one states had banned saloons. National elections that year returned a Congress in which dry members out-numbered the wets two-to-one. In December 1917, Congress submitted to the states the Eighteenth Amendment, which, when ratified in 1919, placed in the Constitution a nationwide ban on the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors." By that time most of the states had been dry for years. In 1920, the Volstead Act was to most Americans a belated confirmation of an earlier reality. For several years after 1920, the illicit manufacture and sale of alcohol, if not entirely eliminated, was at least inconspicuous. Many people who regarded themselves as victims of a bewildering law and expected regularly to violate it nevertheless praised it as a high-minded achievement for the next generation. But most people probably wanted to obey the law and were curi-  < previous page page_872 next page >

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