“One fact must be accepted to begin with—the railroad system has burst through State limits. Already not a few corporations have carried their operations into half the States of the Union. Capital does not recognize the territorial divisions of a common country; nominally it may evade them, but practically it destroys them.”
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1871Footnote 1
In the late nineteenth century, prohibitionists sought state-level liquor bans. Following the Civil War, state constitutional framers in Western and Southern states financed railroad construction. The resulting boom in interstate railroad building bridged regions. These railroads carried liquor across state lines, undermining state-level prohibition enforcement. Tentatively, and then with more conviction, national prohibition organizations lobbied Congress into statutorily restricting interstate liquor transportation in 1890 and 1913, and when wet state bootleggers circumvented these bans, into a constitutional amendment prohibiting liquor manufacturing, sale, and transportation nationwide in 1919. By winning overrepresented rural districts and Western and Southern states, drys won disproportionate House and Senate majorities and a national prohibition amendment of which the public was skeptical. Reform associations’ strategies evolved haphazardly, increasingly seeking national constitutional reform as industrialization, railroad expansion, and improved liquor manufacturing undermined state dry laws. The case illustrates how industrialization encouraged interest groups to shift lobbying and legal strategy from the state to the national level.
Prohibitionists’ legal reform strategy evolved through cyclical trial and error, moving between the states, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Initially, antebellum temperance and moral reform groups worked locally, pushing scattered towns and counties to ban or tax liquor licensing, sale, distribution, and manufacturing. In response, some state legislatures formally recognized this “local option” system, with a few states passing statewide bans. These “dry” laws often inadvertently concentrated liquor and beer production in a handful of “wet” cities that then shipped alcohol by rail into dry towns and counties, and via expanding interstate rail shipping, into dry states. Believing that interstate bootlegging undermined state dry laws, prohibitionists formed the Prohibition Party in 1869 and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1874 to secure national reform, pushing Congress to pass the 1890 Wilson Act, affirming state-level bans on interstate liquor shipment. The Act was a stopgap measure, punting the divisive liquor question back to the states. The Supreme Court then interpreted state-level bans on interstate shipping to apply only after interstate delivery. Growing Western and Reconstruction Southern state lawmakers encouraged interstate rail expansion to better import finished goods, thereby increasing legal beer and liquor importation. Believing that this trade undermined state dry laws, the Prohibition Party and WCTU sought to ban the interstate liquor shipment outright. With renewed lobbying by the WCTU and the newly formed Anti-Saloon League (ASL), Congress passed the 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act, prohibiting railroads from shipping liquor into dry jurisdictions. But this did little to stopper liquor and beer production in holdout Midwestern manufacturing cities like St. Louis and Milwaukee, which became hubs for the now-illegal interstate alcohol traffic to the West and South. Parallel to passage of the Webb-Kenyon Act, national strategists in the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League pivoted to a new, final strategy of state-level mobilization to build a congressional majority for a national prohibition amendment. By the late 1910s, drys won the rural Western and Southern electorate, which, overrepresented in the House and Senate, pushed Congress to pass the electorally unpopular national prohibition amendment.
The case offers a few lessons. First, it shows how interest groups, spurned in their early appeals to Congress, sought state constitutional reform on both principled and tactical grounds, targeting friendlier state venues to test policy and gradually build congressional support. Second, the article recounts how interstate rail liquor shipment weakened this state-level regime, forcing the Prohibition Party and WCTU back to Congress. Congressmen, many now representing dry states, backed bans on interstate shipment. Because the Senate and malapportioned House overrepresented rural Western and Southern dry interests, in 1917, the ASL pushed for a national amendment before the 1920 congressional reapportionment added urban, wet seats. The ASL, by targeting rural states and districts, rushed the national amendment without building a dry consensus among consumers or voters nationwide. The article complements scholarly accounts of progressive-eraFootnote 2 and dry social movement strategy,Footnote 3 tracing Prohibition Party,Footnote 4 ASL,Footnote 5 and WCTUFootnote 6 lobbying at the stateFootnote 7 and then the congressional level.Footnote 8
This article recounts how the growth of the interstate rail system undermined state dry laws, parallel to which drys increasingly sought nationwide prohibition. The article proceeds in four chronological steps, first recounting the emergence of early state dry laws and interstate rail networks in the 1860s–70s, second, drys’ appeals to Congress to regulate interstate liquor railroad shipment and dry’s piecemeal state-level victories in the 1880s–90s, third, Southern and Western states’ fraught statewide bans in the 1890s–1910s, and finally, the spread of statewide bans in the 1910s and passage of nationwide prohibition under the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. By spurring interstate rail development while banning liquor importation, states invited enforcement struggles that pushed prohibition organizations to seek a national amendment.
Local Liquor Law and Interstate Railroad Consolidation
Alcohol regulation began at the town and county level, mainly in the antebellum Northeast. Steeped in the moral reformism and evangelism of New England’s Second Great Awakening, the early temperance movement of the 1840s and 1850s operated as a loose network of local, overlapping groups. Chapters of the American Temperance Society, the American Temperance Union, the Independent Order of Good Templars, and the Washingtonian Temperance Society, borrowing from moral suasionist abolitionism, sponsored antiliquor rallies, lectures, pamphlets, and newspapers, hoping to convince alcoholics to stop drinking. Towns and counties restricted liquor licenses and distribution. Indiana first instituted prohibition by “local option” in 1832, with Georgia following in 1833, and Arkansas in 1838 letting county courts regulate saloon and liquor retailor licensing. As local option bans proliferated, itinerant drinkers and alcoholics, undeterred, sought liquor in wet jurisdictions, often cities. Maine prohibitionist Neal Dow thus pushed for a statewide ban in 1851. Within four years, in New England and the upper Midwest, ten states went dry, hoping statewide bans could shutter taverns, distillers, and brewers in cities. State-level mobilizing was partly practical, as drys’ power was limited to these regions but was also principled, as Jacksonians understood that the federal Tenth Amendment deferred police powers, including liquor regulation, to the states. Reflecting particular policy objectives, these state bans passed as statutes rather than as state constitutional provisions. In 1850, a Michigan Constitutional Convention delegate explained that prohibition was a statutory matter, not a constitutional one: “we should only embrace general principles. We should not define the sale and use of ardent spirits to be a crime… . What may be considered proper now, may be deemed immoral hereafter; and what may be thought wrong in our day, may be esteemed proper in the next generation.” This consequently left these early local option laws more vulnerable to repeal.Footnote 9
Railroads, too, operated locally in the antebellum era. Wary of adopting unenumerated constitutional powers, Jacksonians in Congress left infrastructure development to the states. Municipal governments and state legislators chartered and subsidized railroads to funnel intrastate commerce into their districts, often prohibiting connection to out-of-state competitors. For example, in 1853 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court forbade a railroad in Erie from linking to Buffalo in New York state and Cleveland in Ohio, hoping to preserve the “interests of our own commerce and the prosperity of our own public works … against lawless invasions” by out-of-state railroads. Pennsylvania was not unique—between 1866 and 1873, state legislatures granted over eight hundred aid measures to local railroad companies, totaling $70 million between New York, Illinois, and Missouri alone.Footnote 10
Rail traffic increasingly crossed state borders after the Civil War, connecting the Northeast to the South and West. As economic crises in 1857 and 1873 bankrupted smaller railroad companies, voters and reformist lawmakers constrained state legislators’ power to charter and finance new railroad corporations. Lawmakers instead began authorizing consolidation of existing railroads, particularly in the Northeast. This prompted interstate track gauge standardization across the North, eventually aiding the Union war effort. Reconstruction state legislators chartered companies to rebuild Southern railroads under standard gauge, easing mergers that united the once-divided regions. For example, in 1869, Cincinnati voters defied their state constitution by funding the Cincinnati Southern Railway, thereby connecting Cincinnati to Chattanooga and points south. The New York Central, chartered in 1853 by combining six local routes, spanned the state by 1869, crossing from Buffalo to Chicago, and then connecting to the allied Rock Island and Chicago and Northwestern railroads, which reached the Pacific Railroad by 1870. Similarly, delegates to Nevada’s founding 1864 convention exempted railroads from their constitution’s loan prohibition clause, hoping that Pacific Railroad traffic would connect them to Eastern markets. The sentiment was common among postwar Western territories with few rail lines and growing populations and mineral wealth. For Western territorial lawmakers, interstate railway development and consolidation promised immigration, population growth and economic development, and eventually statehood. This changed the regulatory landscape. Whereas antebellum Eastern state legislators had sought to constrain railroad development, legislators in Reconstruction-era Southern states and growing Western territories sought to encourage instate railroad consolidation and construction. As Charles Francis Adams, Jr. concluded in 1871:
Either through the machinery of different corporations, or through consolidation, one great moneyed and managing interest is destined at no distant day to own every mile of railway on a direct line from New York to San Francisco … as such they cannot much longer be organized or controlled under State laws. The Federal government must assume a certain degree of active jurisdiction.Footnote 11
Adams represented a progressive skepticism of monopolies, having proposed and served on Massachusetts’ railroad regulatory commission. Likeminded progressives, populists, and agrarians constitutionalized commissions in several other states, with the Supreme Court’s blessing. But as Thomas McFarland, delegate to California’s 1879 constitutional convention, noted—citing Charles Francis Adams—state commissions often struggled to properly regulate interstate railroads. Reformers thus urged broader congressional Commerce Clause regulation to cap inflated shipping and storage rates and curb monopoly and corruption.Footnote 12
Interstate railroad consolidation undermined state-level bans. Enforcement had long been difficult—even staunchly dry Maine failed to implement a transportation ban along its extensive coastline, inland waterways, and rail terminus at Portsmouth, which became a center for illegal beer wholesaling and distribution. Other states faced the same problem. Nationwide, urban rail hubs, with their proliferating saloons, became wetter, shipping alcohol into neighboring dry jurisdictions, and with the postwar interstate rail boom, into far-flung dry states. Industrial advances let a few beer and liquor manufacturers increase output and corner national markets. As K. Austin Kerr notes, it was the “brewers … who exploited the nation’s newly integrated rail system, [and] began to penetrate urban markets distant from the site of production.” Adolphus Busch, founder of Anheuser-Busch, acquired rail lines to funnel coal into his mammoth St. Louis plant, manufactured refrigerated cars to extend the reach of his beer exports, and purchased American rights to the new, experimental diesel locomotive. Including Anheuser-Busch’s products, by 1898, St. Louis annually produced two million barrels of beer, exporting half, in addition to shipping a quarter million barrels of whiskey and wine, usually by rail. To that point, a contemporary Anheuser-Busch ad showed a rural farmer unloading a full beer crate from a rail station. Imports from Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana stocked cities and saloons to the west. Neighboring Iowa struggled in vain to certify and limit interstate importation through a pair of statutes in 1885 and 1886. To circumvent dry laws, a Keokuk, Iowa, brewery moved to nearby Peoria, Illinois, shipping wholesale beer cases by rail back to a company-owned outlet in Keokuk.Footnote 13 Compounding the issue, as a contemporary journalist noted, “most Iowa people lived where they could obtain whiskey in 24 hours by [rail] express from a neighboring state,” making state law dead letter.Footnote 14
Remaining dry states repealed their statewide prohibition laws in the years around the Civil War. Failing to convince state constitutional framers, drys had settled for less durable statutory reforms. Liquor industry lobbying, declining temperance society membership, and public frustration pushed state legislators and judges to rescind or invalidate six of the thirteen original dry statutes in the 1850s so that with additional repeal and reimplementation, only seven statutes remained by 1870.Footnote 15 The 1870s brought new Republican state legislators, still unsold on prohibition law, and four more repeals.Footnote 16
Congressional Affirmation of State-Level Bans
Temperance groups began petitioning Congress to ban interstate liquor shipment. With the failure of Maine dry laws, in 1869 Neal Dow formed the Prohibition Party to win voters, elect congressmen, and change federal law. The Party emerged from the International Order of the Good Templars, a secretive temperance organization open to men and to women, some of whom also founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. The WCTU shared membership and purpose with the Prohibition Party, boycotting and occupying neighborhood bars and saloons. But, as WCTU head Ada Bittenbender noted in 1889, local protest, boycott, and regulation alone could do little: the “quasi-prohibitory legislation of individual States is expected to accomplish that which is impossible.” The issue was “a national one. The traffic is carried on everywhere. No place and no person of this great nation is free from its polluting influence. How to end its pernicious existence is peculiarly a national question—more of a national question than was slavery.” So, she sought to “introduce into the National Constitution provisions of the same general character as those which now confer power in Congress to establish uniform laws respecting bankruptcies, slavery, involuntary servitude, and the like.” Drys found a few early allies in Congress. New Hampshire congressman Henry W. Blair proposed the first prohibition amendment in 1876, followed by another six federal amendments regulating interstate liquor traffic by 1889. Vermont’s Charles Joyce and Rhode Island’s Latimer Ballou proposed a pair of 1881 amendments regulating sale and manufacture. And between 1881 and 1885, Kansas’s Preston Plumb proposed another four amendments regulating traffic, manufacture, and sale. But, by shunning the major parties, the Prohibition Party and WCTU limited their lobbying power such that by 1890, only Kansas, the Dakotas, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont were dry. Between 1876 and 1895, Congress heard only eighteen amendment proposals, and sponsors came only from these six dry states. Thus in 1884, WCTU legislative director J. Ellen Foster urged the organization to forego the federal amendment for the local option and, later, for an accompanying congressional statute regulating interstate traffic. Early drys thus looked beyond the federal amendment.Footnote 17
Prohibitionists also turned to the federal courts. The Supreme Court in 1887 upheld a ban on intrastate liquor manufacture and sale under the Kansas Constitution, prompting the WCTU’s J. Ellen Foster to ask the Court also to prohibit interstate sale.Footnote 18 But in Bowman v. Chicago & Northwestern Railway (1888) and Leisy v. Hardin (1890), a pair of cases on interstate liquor shipment by rail, the Court held states could not ban interstate shipment or seize alcohol sealed in the original package, asserting that such regulation fell under congressional Commerce Clause powers.Footnote 19 By placing interstate liquor shipment under congressional power, the Supreme Court gutted dry state laws. The Chautauquan magazine deemed the high Court’s decisions
a stunning blow to the cause of temperance… . The immediate practical result is fully known and accepted and promptly acted on by all liquor dealers. Newspapers are now teeming with accounts of saloons established where before they were unknown. To Leechburg, Pa., where no license has been granted, a Cincinnati brewing company has shipped carloads of beer which it has announced for sale in original packages, which were soon sold and distributed. It is said beer is now shipped into Maine and sold with an impunity hitherto unknown. In Marshalltown, Iowa, the “original package” business is budding to bloom in the receipt of carloads of beer from St. Louis packed in bottles wrapped individually at the factory … by the force of these decisions, temperance is made a national question.Footnote 20
As legal “package houses” proliferated, peddling individually wrapped liquor flasks and beer bottles, the WCTU’s Union Signal declared that lone “States can not be expected to absolutely enforce any State law in face of combined opposition of neighboring States, the liquor traffic and the National Government. Bring the National Government to their aid, and that would bring the neighboring states into harmony with their action.” The Bowman and Leisy decisions thus emboldened the WCTU in its national approach.Footnote 21
Bowman and Leisy directed prohibitionists back to Congress. Leisy rejected state-level bans made “without congressional permission,” but noted that Congress could “remove the restriction upon the state in dealing with imported articles of trade within its limits.”Footnote 22 This encouraged the WCTU to lobby for interlocking congressional and state bans. After “the late decision of the Supreme Court,” the WCTU resolved by convention in 1888 that “suppression of the liquor traffic must come through National Legislation.” The Union Signal informed local WCTU members of this change in strategy, explaining that “[h]owever strong, theoretically, seem arguments in favor of securing the abolition of the liquor traffic through State action alone, experience proves their weakness… . National prohibition is the most direct road to State prohibition.”Footnote 23 As the Union Signal clarified, the Court had not doomed all state action but rather “state action alone” made without congressional authorization. Georgia, Kansas, and Maine WCTU chapters and members joined their Office of National Legislation and the national Prohibition Party seeking congressional support for state-level bans on liquor importation. The United States’ Brewers Association, representing producers of 80% of the nation’s beer, had blocked prior bills for a federal liquor trade commission and for prohibition in the District of Columbia and held their 1890 convention in Washington to counter WCTU lobbying. John St. John, the Prohibition Party’s recent presidential candidate, feared that Congress would capitulate to liquor interests and absolutist drys, splitting from the WCTU platform, condemned congressional authorization of piecemeal state bans as a halfhearted measure, a poor substitute for a nationwide ban on all interstate commerce.Footnote 24
Congress bent to prohibitionists, affirming state bans on interstate shipping. As his national prohibition amendments failed, Henry Blair instead sought statutory reform, working with the more pragmatic dry congressmen William Frye, Alfred Colquitt, John H. Reagan, and Isaac S. Struble. The push for a congressional statute on interstate shipment reframed prohibition from a contentious national moral issue into a technical one of Congress’s interstate regulatory powers, or as wet Missouri Democrat George Vest, noted, a more innocuous “question as to the power of Congress of the United States and as to what are the reserved powers of the States.” Further, by reframing their cause as a states’ rights issue, drys won Southern congressmen like Mississippi Democrat James George, who in the 1890s sought to shield their new state racial disenfranchisement laws from federal oversight, including through the pending 1890 Federal Elections Bill. George therefore defended the states’ regulatory powers, including over liquor access: “Congress may create the [regulatory] power and donate it to the states,” preserving the states’ “necessary and essential police powers.” This consensus helped “remove prohibition, always a troublesome political issue, from the Senate debates” according to the historian Richard F. Hamm. Queued by Chief Justice Fuller’s instruction in Leisy, congressman James Falconer Wilson penned the 1890 Wilson Act, letting states ban liquor importation and inspect suspected liquor shipments. This delegated Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce to the states. As Wilson noted, his Act let the states enforce “local option, [and] to allow them to do as they please in regard to the liquor question.”Footnote 25 Still, some states’ rights hardliners, drys included, objected that the bill usurped the states’ formerly exclusive prerogative to regulate liquor—the states had long policed traffic and illegal production, including homebrewing and distilling within their own borders. As Texas Representative David Culberson objected, the Act would make the states “a mendicant at the footstool of federal power.” The Court upheld the Wilson Act the following year.Footnote 26 With the exception of four proposals, Congress would not hear another prohibition amendment until 1913.Footnote 27
The Wilson Act sent prohibitionists back to the states. WCTU lobbyist Ada Bittenbender left Washington to run for judicial office in Nebraska. And WCTU Legislative Superintendent J. Ellen Foster encouraged members to support state-level Prohibition Party candidates and statewide prohibition amendments.Footnote 28 Between 1880 and 1883, sixteen prohibition amendments passed at least one state legislative chamber. Beer and liquor interests counterlobbied, forming the National Protective Association, and between 1887 and 1890, twelve states rejected prohibition measures. Unlike the National Protective Association, which was willing to lobby the major parties, the Prohibition Party struggled to win state legislative backing, and after an abortive attempt in 1892 to merge with the Populist Party, membership declined, as drys left for the more successful WCTU and the new Anti-Saloon League (ASL), formed in 1893.Footnote 29 The ASL and the WCTU shared the growing progressive concern with the evils of drinking and shared leadership—Foster was an ASL trustee and WCTU president Lillian M. N. Stevens sat on the ASL National Executive Committee. Similarly, as Peter Odegard notes, the “League very early perceived that state prohibition could not be completely successful so long as liquor was shipped into dry states under the protection of the commerce clause of the Federal Constitution.”Footnote 30 Like the WCTU, the ASL lobbied Congress and organized locally, rallying church-going women to protest at bars and saloons, especially in the growing West. The WCTU and ASL abandoned party affiliation, promising their combined voters to Democratic or Republican state legislators who would pass county-level saloon bans. In 1910, an ASL circular described this county-first strategy as
the line of least resistance. It began in the rural communities, its first conquests being against the cross-roads bar rooms… . The next object of attack was the village saloon… . From the villages and townships, the scene of battle very naturally shifted to the counties … one thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine [of which] have outlawed the liquor traffic, leaving only one thousand one hundred and fifty-six in which saloons are permitted… . The outposts have largely been taken; the enemy has been constantly on the retreat, until the real strength of the liquor army is entrenched in comparatively few cities.Footnote 31
As Prohibitionist Norman E. Richardson observed, “the next step in the rural States was naturally for State-wide prohibition.”Footnote 32
Southern and Western State Regulation
Prohibitionists won states in the South and West. They made early gains in the South. Stoking fears of Black licentiousness, the ASL and WCTU organized Southern church-going whites around the local option. For example, WTCU and ASL Georgia chapters were nearly defunct until the 1906 Atlanta race riot stirred white voter fears of Black Georgians’ liquor access and lawlessness. As Sean Beienburg notes, “the ASL and other groups cynically ginn[ed] up propaganda warning of the particularly dangerous effects alcohol purportedly had on black self-control,” building “massive southern support for prohibition.”Footnote 33 By 1907, 125 of 137 Georgia counties limited liquor, with Atlanta closing or regulating saloons. This spurred a different kind of lawlessness, through liquor bootlegging by rail. Per Richard Hamm, “the dry counties of Georgia received over 20,000 gallons in just six months. The railroad provided ‘speedy service for the thirsty.’”Footnote 34 Southern WCTU and ASL state leadership quietly allied with fellow Christian, moralist vigilantes in the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote 35 WCTU membership overlapped with that of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, South Carolina ASL superintended E. M. Lightfoot recruited for his local Klan, and Alabama Klansman Lycurgus Breckinridge Musgrove briefly headed the national ASL.Footnote 36 Southern local option laws interlocked with antivagrancy policing, moralist vigilantism, and the poll tax and literacy test that muscled working Blacks and some poor whites out of state politics.Footnote 37 In majority-Black, agrarian “blackbelt” counties cutting across the deep South, turnout collapsed, letting a cabal of Democratic Party bosses control state and congressional legislative delegations.Footnote 38 For the WCTU and ASL, winning county or state-level prohibition did not require winning voters but rather winning Southern party leaders. As Beienburg concludes, “black disenfranchisement and prohibition came from a shared southern belief in controlling an underclass through cool deliberation by paternalistic southern elite.”Footnote 39 Thanks to WCTU and ASL organizing, by 1907, 825 of the 994 ex-Confederate counties adopted prohibition. The WCTU and ASL then won statewide bans in Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia by 1912.Footnote 40
Prohibitionists succeeded in the West for several reasons. First were regional demographic and partisan changes. Improved irrigation methods in states like Colorado and Idaho brought families, many from dry Iowa and Kansas, to agrarian counties. The population growth of agrarian counties and the relative weakness the Democratic and Republican parties let Granger, Populist, and Progressive factions steer lawmaking, including in Western states’ first constitutional conventions.Footnote 41 These legislators and constitutional framers protected farmers from predatory railroad grain shipment rates, laborers from dangerous railroad and industrial work, and families from adulterated food and drink and the lawless frontier saloon. Saloons hosted sex workers, irking traditionalists in the WCTU, and party machine organizing, alienating anticorruption progressives, who sought to constitutionally prohibit the Western saloon.Footnote 42 Rural, Western voters went dry. As Jack Blocker notes, to “safeguard their families and to enforce ‘modern’ values, farmers and their wives voted rural areas dry under the local option. They then joined with native-born allies in the urban middle class to restore order by voting their states dry.”Footnote 43
Furthermore, Western states held outsized congressional influence. Senate Republicans, preempting a Democratic sweep in 1890, rubberstamped statehood for underpopulated Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Washington in an eight-month span between 1889 and 1890, adding twelve Republican senators.Footnote 44 The Dakotas entered with prohibition clauses, and the remaining four states entered with progressive, dry sympathies. Further, U.S. House reapportionment in 1900 and 1910 granted more seats to rural areas than to urban ones. In underpopulated Western rural districts, prohibitionists could win seats cheaply while mobilizing fewer voters.Footnote 45 Leisy and the 1890 Wilson Act redirected drys to the states just as Western, Republican states began exerting congressional power. Uncommitted to either party, the WCTU and ASL supported Republicans in the West and Democrats in the South, as congressmen from both regions could be won by mobilizing their relatively small electorates.Footnote 46
New election and franchise measures eased the passage of prohibition measures. The West moved first in enfranchising women—between 1896 and 1918, every Western state enfranchised women in some capacity.Footnote 47 Additionally, between 1900 and 1918, nineteen states introduced the citizen initiative, half of them in the West, often to circumvent railroad-friendly legislators.Footnote 48 Further between 1890 and 1908, sixteen states in the Great Plains and West instituted direct senatorial primaries.Footnote 49 Dry organizations like the Anti-Saloon League and the WTCU used the initiative and direct election to override wet cities and mining counties by rallying agrarian voters, often women, to limit liquor access and elect prohibitionist legislators.Footnote 50 In Arizona, for example, the Anti-Saloon League allied with suffragists and progressive Democrats to place in the 1912 constitution a popular initiative clause, used several years later to secure prohibition.Footnote 51 As James Timberlake concludes, “the far Western states that went dry were also the ones that were strongest for woman suffrage, the direct primary, initiative and referendum, and ballot reform. They were also the ones making some of the most vigorous efforts to regulate business.”Footnote 52
Westerners and Southerners imposed prohibition piecemeal. A few states adopted early, targeted measures. Colorado’s first, 1876 constitution required the legislature to prohibit the sale, manufacture, and importation of “adulterated” or “drugged spirituous liquors,” although gradually this authority expanded in 1904 to judicial affirmation of tax on liquor sales, in 1909 judicial recognition of the local option, and in 1914 to a citizen amendment banning salons and regulating liquor sale, manufacture, and distribution.Footnote 53 Similarly, Texas’s 1876 constitution bound the state legislature to the local option, though a 1918 statue and 1919 amendment overrode this in favor of statewide prohibition, with normal exceptions for medical, scientific and mechanical, and sacramental use.Footnote 54 Kansas imposed prohibition by amendment in 1880.Footnote 55 In 1889, congressional Republicans added two extra Senate seats by splitting the Dakota Territory into two states, which ratified matching prohibition clauses in their individual state constitutions. North Dakota voters approved the proposed clause restricting liquor sale, manufacture, and distribution,Footnote 56 as did South Dakotans, under pressure from a $15,000 leafletting campaign by the WCTU and Prohibition Party.Footnote 57 Oklahoma voters too passed prohibition under a rider to their first constitution in 1907. Georgia, on the heels of the Atlanta riot, imposed prohibition by statute that same year, with Mississippi and North Carolina following the next year and Tennessee the year after that.Footnote 58 Railroads aided prohibitionist organizing. Local ASL and WCTU members traveled by rail during intrastate campaigns—WCTU state-level dues revenue was higher in states with greater track mileage—and national leadership used rail networks to coordinate and distribute print material across state lines.Footnote 59 But railroads continued to undermine dry state enforcement. In 1909, the Frisco Railroad Company shipped thousands of cases of whiskey and wine and dozens of railcar loads of beer into newly dry Oklahoma.Footnote 60
Yet this posed special problems. Western and Southern legislators encouraged interstate railroad development to trade raw goods for needed finished goods from rail hubs like St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago, where brewing and distilling also occurred. This spurred liquor bootlegging to Western rail termini like Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and Seattle, whose voters impeded state-level prohibition organizing and enforcement. Further, the Supreme Court in the 1898 Rhodes decision reversed Iowa officials’ seizure of an undelivered liquor shipment from the Burlington and Western Railroad, holding that state law enforcement could inspect interstate liquor shipments only after receipt by the consignee. Following Rhodes, “railroads and express companies carried the booze into dry areas, and thus the express freight offices in prohibition territory often became little more than interstate commerce liquor package stores,” per Richard Hamm. The ASL thus objected that the Court’s decision let railroads operate with impunity: “the Rhodes case … goes far to nullify State prohibitory laws,” allowing “an extensive interstate traffic in liquors.”Footnote 61 As Lisa McGirr concludes, “Even ‘bone-dry’ states could do little to stop the transportation of intoxicating liquor from neighboring wet states into their territories. To make matters worse, the geographic territory conquered by prohibitionists left large cities untouched.”Footnote 62 Kansas, which had been legally dry since 1880, in 1914 imported 4.5 million gallons of liquor, mainly from wet cities on interstate rail lines: Chattanooga, Jacksonville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and New York.Footnote 63 By encouraging interstate rail development, Western and Southern lawmakers undermined their own statewide dry laws.Footnote 64 State enforcement struggles encouraged dry organizations to petition Congress for nationwide prohibition.
The Pivot to Congressional Amendment
The ASL and WCTU continued lobbying Congress. ASL chief lobbyist Edwin C. Dinwiddie and WCTU legislative superintendent Margaret Dye Ellis sent piles of petitions to Congress, which added new rural, dry districts in the 1910 reapportionment. The ASL organized a convention in Washington in 1911,Footnote 65 highlighting a recent Interstate Commerce Commission report that twenty million gallons of liquor had been shipped into dry jurisdictions, often illegally. The convention noted that “there is certain to be difficulty and embarrassment in the enforcement of state laws… . Anybody who cares to run the risk of violating state law may import liquors and have the delivery made under the Wilson Act.”Footnote 66 The convention, noting the special threat posed by railroads, concluded by calling a committee to draft a model bill prohibiting interstate traffic in “liquor while in the possession of any railway company.”Footnote 67 In 1912, rural Southern Democrats swept Congress, granting a dry majority that then passed this model bill as the 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act. The Act prohibited liquor sale or transportation into “bone dry” jurisdictions or states so that, in sponsor William Kenyon’s words, “each State should be free to determine its own policy in regards to the liquor traffic.”Footnote 68 Emboldened by the Act’s passage, ASL legislative strategist Ernest Cherrington sought to also stopper wet state liquor manufacturing, a relatively new goal. Prior to 1913, drys’ petitions to Congress rarely addressed manufacturing.Footnote 69 Such regulation, beyond Congress’s Commerce Clause powers, required a national amendment, which also might expressly prohibit interstate liquor shipments, thus protecting the nascent Webb-Kenyon Act. An amendment required supermajority votes in both houses of Congress, which required more members of Congress and more voters.Footnote 70 To add voters and members, National Superintendent Purley Baker restructured the ASL in 1913 to better finance grassroots recruitment and circulars by centralizing dues collection, budgeting, and policy planning. A 1914 ASL flyer mapped the nation, with dry counties and states in white, promising to “make the map all white by constitutional amendment—thirty-six states can do it.”Footnote 71 Imitating an earlier, successful female suffrage parade, the ASL and WCTU rallied three thousand marchers to the Capitol on December 10, 1913. Arriving at the Capitol, Baker handed to Representative Richmond Hobson and Senator Morris Sheppard an amendment banning liquor transportation, sale, and manufacturing. Representative Martin Morrison’s substitute amendment constitutionalized only the Webb-Kenyon prohibition on transportation, which even Webb-Kenyon sponsor Representative Edwin Webb dismissed as insufficient. The ASL, set on also banning manufacture, helped push the Hobson-Sheppard amendment through the House simple majority in 1914, and although the measure did not clear the Senate, Congress received thirty-eight more amendment proposals between 1913 and 1919, with nineteen modeled after the Hobson-Sheppard amendment.Footnote 72 The amendment proposals came almost exclusively from congressmen from Southern and Western states.Footnote 73
The ASL added congressional allies by adding states. The ASL reasoned that few members from dry districts or states would risk voting against a prohibition amendment. Baker and Cherrington’s New Plan of Campaign targeted urban workers and immigrants with pamphlets and newspaper ads in twenty languages, printing ten tons of material daily in 1914. Seventeen states went dry between 1914 and 1917, seven by state constitutional revision. Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington backed prohibition in 1914. Brewery closures increased reliance on St. Louis and Milwaukee manufacturers, which backed bans in other states to decrease competition. Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, and Idaho went dry in 1915, and South Carolina, Michigan, Montana, and Nebraska followed in 1916. With satisfaction, internal ASL records noted the Iowa legislature also prohibited railroads from carrying liquor, a long-standing League goal. Most Western states constitutionalized prohibition. These amendments, broader in scope, reflected the growing muscle of dry organizations and newly enfranchised women. Many amendments passed by initiative. Washingtonians, entering the Union alongside the Dakotas, had rejected a prohibition clause proposed with their 1889 constitution, but with Anti-Saloon League lobbying, rural voters by initiative overrode wet coastal cities, imposing statewide prohibition in 1914, and passed a more expansive “bone dry” law in 1917. Voters in Oregon did the same by constitutional initiative in 1914.Footnote 74
Other states followed quickly. Idaho’s Anti-Saloon League reported in 1911 that the state’s search and seizure law aided enforcement against bootlegging from wet to dry counties, and in 1916, the state went dry by amendment alongside neighboring Montana, which had passed a similar local option law in 1895.Footnote 75 South Dakota further elaborated statewide prohibition under a 1916 amendment, and Wyoming constitutionalized prohibition two years later.Footnote 76 Nevada imposed prohibition by statutory referendum in 1918. Utah’s framers refused prohibition in their 1896 constitution, presciently recognizing that “Prohibition would simply be impracticable,”Footnote 77 but Anti-Saloon League, WCTU, and Mormon church lobbying pushed Utahans to pass prohibition by statute in 1917 and amendment in 1918.Footnote 78 Finally, New Mexico and Arizona entered the Union as prohibition peaked nationally. New Mexico’s 1911 constitution exempted sacramental wine, and a 1917 amendment otherwise prohibited importation, manufacture, sale, and gifting of alcohol.Footnote 79 In 1914, Arizona voters similarly added a new article to their constitution, prohibiting alcohol manufacture or importation and two years later, at the behest of the state Temperance Federation, forbade receipt or possession and allowed public destruction of seized liquor.Footnote 80 By the late 1910s, every Western state but California mandated prohibition, all but two constitutionally.Footnote 81
By the end of 1917, dry states, mainly rural and Southern and Western, represented a minority of the national electorate but a twenty-seven-state Senate majority, nearing the thirty-six-state national amendment ratification threshold. By first targeting the underpopulated West, with fewer voters but many senators, the ASL quickly won disproportionate Senate representation.Footnote 82 Similarly, the ASL targeted rural Southern United States House districts, even though these districts comprised a disproportionately small part of the Southern electorate.Footnote 83 By targeting rural jurisdictions in a state-by-state strategy, the ASL built strong congressional support but an anemic voting base. By 1919, 2,525,000 voters had backed a state-level dry ballot measure, representing less than 3% of the national population.Footnote 84 ASL Superintendent Purley Baker, a proponent of gradual grassroots electoral mobilization, therefore called for a twenty-year campaign to broaden the dry voting base before pushing for a national amendment. But ASL strategists Wayne Wheeler and Ernest Cherrington, joined by Richard Hobson, who lost his congressional reelection campaign, in 1917 proposed leveraging existing Senate and rural House overrepresentation to pass an amendment before 1920 reapportionment added urban, wet House seats. They understood the period between 1917 and 1920 as closing window for congressional prohibition.Footnote 85 As Lisa McGirr notes: “Cherrington… illustrated the dire threat posed by populous urban centers … with the threat of reapportionment looming in 1920, the federal strategy was a radical and ambitious means of imposing prohibition on populations that would not seek it for themselves.”Footnote 86 Members of Congress seemed receptive to further restrictions on liquor manufacturing, sale, and transportation. The Court upheld the Webb-Kenyon Act, prompting Congress to also prohibit sending liquor ads to “bone dry” jurisdictions.Footnote 87 Further, Congress grew more amenable to regulating food and grain production,Footnote 88 passing the 1917 Lever Act, which diverted grain from brewers to the war effort, just as wartime voters soured to the German-dominated brewing industry. Prohibitionists added eleven states between 1917 and 1919 bringing the national total to thirty-four dry states.Footnote 89
This tipped the ASL and Congress toward passing an amendment quickly. Senator Morris Sheppard, sponsor of the original ASL Hobson-Sheppard amendment, noted the emerging consensus: “Prohibition by State or local option now prevails in an area equal to two-thirds of the United States, and that area contains more than half of the American people. Millions of American people have petitioned Congress to submit an amendment.” The amendment’s language, he noted, should also comfort Southern states’ rights congressmen: the amendment’s second section provided for “joint national and State action against the liquor traffic.” Webb-Kenyon Act sponsor Edwin Webb of North Carolina affirmed that the section “makes both the state and the federal government sovereign in enforcement of the prohibition law.” Idaho Senator William Borah too sought “national prohibition through constitutional amendment—not for the purpose of destroying local self-government but really in aid of it. There was no other way by which a State could be dry.” The Eighteenth Amendment cleared Congress on December 18, 1917, and was ratified by the states within months.Footnote 90
The path to the Eighteenth Amendment was indirect, weaving between the state and federal governments. As Reconstruction-era railroads shipped liquor across county and state lines, prohibitionists attempted to maintain state dry laws, first through state-level bans on interstate shipping and next seeking congressional affirmation of these bans under the 1890 Wilson Act. Western and Southern states, encouraging interstate railroad development, struggled to enforce statewide dry laws, prompting dry organizations to lobby Congress. Drys won an outright ban on interstate shipping via the 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act and finally a congressional amendment forbidding liquor manufacture, sale, and transportation nationwide. The social movement strategy evolved haphazardly and iteratively, adjusting to new regulatory and interstate shipping circumstances such that by the start of the twentieth century, prohibition had become a distinctly national concern.
