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by Richard Hamm
Today I want to post part of a paper I delivered at a Meeting of the Alcohol and Temperance History Group as an Affiliated Society of the American Association for the History of Medicine, at its 68th Annual Meeting at Pittsburgh in May 1995. At that time I said I wasn't planning to publish it, for various reasons, but I have been urged by people whose views I value to disseminate it, so I placed it-in pieces-on the List serve of the ATHG. It brought forth a good string, so I have agreed to place this piece (essentially the Pittsburgh paper) on the Web page of the ATHG.
The prohibitionists were social reform agitators who sought a major change in their society's customs. Social reformers have been, of course, a nearly constant presence in American society since the early 19th century. Accounts of many social reformers' campaigns, often deal with the violence inflicted upon reformers seeking change in society and the violence engaged in by some reformers to achieve their ends. Indeed, violence, even killing and attempted killing, seems almost endemic to the history of social reforms in the United States. But, with the special cases of the Women's crusades of 1873 and Carry Nation aside, the vast- and ever-growing literature on the temperance movement pays little attention to the issue of violence.(1) This gap is a serious deficiency.
There are two limits to my work. First, I am most interested in violence in its most dramatic and drastic forms, killing or attempting to kill people. So I will be talking mostly of killings, attempted killings, and mobbings (because after all they can easily lead to killings). Second, I am talking about violence in respons to or as a part of agitation and not violence attendant to law enforcement. Thus I am going to pass over silently the many studies, popular and not, of moonshining, bootlegging, and violence.(2) Violence in resistance to law or violence undertaken by law officers is somewhat separate from violence associated with a social reform movement's agitation for change. Such violence grows out the state's presumption to have a monopoly of force and its willingness to resort to force to gain the ends of its policy. To break the law of the state is to risk its use of violence against you, hence the likelihood that the law breaker will engage in violence. Law enforcement and violence go together hand and glove.
But within these limits there still broad area of violence to be explored as reform and violence also seem to go together. We can break down violence associated with reform into two large categories. First, violence, used by their opponents, to stop reformers from agitating. Second, violence by reformers directed at achieving their ends-in their view, a righteous violence. A brief look of some reforms in American history shows the existence of these two types of violence.
Violence to deter reform, for example, surfaces in studies and memory of the civil rights movement. The literature is filled with works that explore the violence directed against civil rights advocates in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. We all know of the bombing of the Birmingham churches, the mobbing of sit in protesters and freedom riders, and the killing of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.(3) Similarly, contemporary commentary on the anti-abortion movement has focused on the wave of violence against doctors and workers at women's health centers, most notably in the cases of Pensacola shootings and the recent the shootings in Brookline.
Historians of abolitionists, perhaps the most deeply studied of all social reform movements, have delineated both types of violence in that crusade. They have explored the many anti-abolitionist mobs of the Jacksonian era, including that which mobbed and killed the abolitionist editor Eliajah Lovejoy in 1837. Also, they have spent considerable effort exploring the forces and meaning of John Brown's and other abolitionists' willingness to engage in terrorism to bring about the end of slavery.(4) But virtually no where in the vast scholarly studies of the prohibition movement are there similar studies of the prohibitionists and violence. Its not because violence is not there
On the issue of deadly violence against agitators, the recent scholarly literature is almost silent on the subject but the drys themselves recorded that it happened. The temperance movement at its peak, sought to encourage the faithful and to preserve the records of its achievements and struggles by publishing, among other things, prohibition encyclopedias. Two standard reference books produced by the drys, The Pocket Cyclopedia of Temperance (1916) and Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem (1925-1930) show that drys included information on violence against prohibitionists. Both works contain articles on so called "Temperance Martyrs." Indeed, scattered through the six volumes and 2940 page Standard Encyclopedia are many accounts of mobbings, attempted killings, and killings of drys. Some of the stories in the Standard Encyclopedia are classics. For instance, it details in the article on Pennsylvania how a county chairman of the Anti-Saloon League was shot at in 1913, but "fortunately the bullet, intended for his heart, was arrested by a copy of the bible which he carried under his arm." The article includes a picture of the page where the bullet was stopped. While such miraculous tales were rare, pedestrian tales of violence were common in the temperance movement.(5)
I have combined the counts of the Standard Encyclopedia and the Pocket Encyclopedia to come up with some ball park figures of the violence directed against prohibitionists. These numbers exclude from them prohibitionists who suffered violence as a result of official or unofficial law enforcement or (from the sources available) who suffered violence in uncertain circumstances. For example, a minister who denounced violators of a state prohibition law and sought to bring private prosecutions in the courts and suffered violence would be in this estimate engaging in unofficial law enforcement and is not included in the figures of prohibitionist agitators who experienced violence. Including such persons would roughly double the number of assaults and triple the number of the killings. Combining the two lists, I have found the names of six drys who between 1874 and 1908 were killed over their advocacy of their cause. At least another nineteen drys were mobbed, beaten, shot at, or had their homes (or businesses) dynamited for their support of temperance.(6)
Without a doubt, advocating prohibition was a dangerous business for some of its agitators. On the other hand, the temperance advocates seemed not to have engaged in violence against their enemies. I know of no prohibitionist who engaged in violence to the point of killing to bring about their goal of a dry nation. Some prohibitionists, Carry Nation being the most prominent though certainly not alone, did engage in direct action against liquor sellers, destroying their place of business and their stock through violent means. Assaults on people sometimes emerged from such attacks. But such "hatchetation" aside, the prohibitionists did not seem to engage violence that could lead to killing. I would like to is explain two things. First, why the violence against drys has received so little attention. And second, explain the relative dearth of righteous violence by drys.
Why does the scholarly literature not contain much information on the topic of violence against prohibitionist agitators? One explanation can be dismissed out of hand, that is that those who the opponents perpetuated their deeds against were too obscure to make an impact. Among the six prohibitionist killed, are a doctor, a judge, a minister, four editors of reform or other newspapers (including the minister), and a United States Senator. (The Senator is Edward Carmack of Tennessee.) If you turn toward those who suffered assaults or mobbing for agitation on the temperance question, the trend is similar with editors and ministers predominating. Those attacked included figures of some renown in temperance history; for example Albert Banks-clergyman, dry editor, and propagandist- was shot and wounded and Samuel W. ("Sam") Small- journalist, dry, and evangelist-was mobbed and beaten. The violence occurred in all areas of the nation, though the South and West seem disproportionally represented, and extended from the decade after the Civil War through the second decade of the 20th century. It should appear much more prominently in the scholarly literature.
Two general causes seem to explain why the violence against prohibitionists for their agitation has received so little attention. First, contentions from the time of the killing or other violence that the violence had nothing to do with prohibition may have led scholars not to consider the topic. Second, and more importantly, there was little place for accounts of such violence in the evolving scholarly interpretations of prohibition.
I know of at least one example of a dry killed over his advocacy of prohibition where non-prohibitionists sources asserted that he "was not slain because of his convictions but" because of a "personal difficulty."(7) If other killings and attacks have similar conflicting accounts (and logic would indicate that they should, as it was in the interests of the opponents of prohibition to downplay violence against their enemies) it is likely that scholars have been misdirected away from the topic of violence against dry agitators. But, there is little evidence that scholars have paid any attention to the topic at all.
While scholarly interpretations of prohibition have changed dramatically over time, all of them share the trait that they either have little room in their frameworks for discussions of violence or have a tendency to turn scholars away from approaches and sources that would explore issues violence. Since World War II, scholarly interpretations of prohibition have been marked by two large trends. First, there is the focus on the social status of the members of the movement.(8) Second, there is the question of how, if at all, prohibition related to the reform movements of the day: populism, progressivism, and women's rights.(9) Scholars working in the field have thus tended to mine the sources to answer questions about these concerns. Thus by combing membership rolls, church records, tax records, census data, and other sources they have told us much about the social status of the prohibitionists. Similarly in exploring the links between anti-monopolism, regulation, peace reform, women's suffrage, divorce reform, and anti-prostitution (just to name some) scholars have illuminated the connections of the movement to other reforms. But in doing these things they have mostly eschewed writing narratives of movement history that would have confronted the sources that raise the questions of violence against drys and violence by drys.(10) It is to violence by drys that I would like to turn now.
One thing is clear about violence by drys: there was no dry equivalent to John Brown, there was no dry equivalent to Michael F. Griffin or John Salvi The closest that the prohibition movement ever came to such figures was Carry Nation. Nation's trashing of saloons is the stuff of American legend and folklore. Moreover it has been the subject of some scholarly work.(11) Thus a look at Nation and her movement in the context of the righteous violence of other movements is illuminating.
When we talk about figures in reform movements adopting violence, two things stand out. First that they believed that their violence is justified; violence-even killing-has become an acceptable means of bringing about the change that they want. Second, they act violently because they perceive that their movement is loosing ground. Hence John Brown's moral certainty of the evil of slavery and belief that sin could only be expatiated by the spilling of blood convinced him that violence was acceptable. He, in turn, convinced others to fight and kill with him in Kansas and Virginia because, after the Compromise of 1850 with its Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas Nebraska Act repealing the Missouri compromise, for the abolitionists crusade their enemies seemed to have gained the upper hand.(12) Similarly, the justifiable homicide argument used by the advocates of violence in the anti-abortion movement give them a moral base for their actions.(13) Significantly, also, the first killing by anti-abortionists came after it became clear that the Supreme Court was not going to overturn Roe v. Wade
, the second came after a pro-abortion candidate was elected president. How do these two factors, developing a view that see the violence as acceptable and acting out of fear of failure of the reform play out in the prohibition movement and in the career of Carry Nation?
There was a potential for developing an ideology of righteous violence, in the prohibition movement. And evidence of it does not rest alone on the career of Carry Nation. Before I turn to Nation and her ideas for justifying her violence, let me turn to another source that show that drys did enunciate such ideas. The 1915 novel Quarrytown, written by Douglas Dobbins and published by the American Issue Publishing (the press of company of the Anti-Saloon League) shows community organized righteous violence in a favorable light. In this fictionalized account of the struggle against the return of saloons to a stone quarrying town, the drys ultimately resort to violence.
At the opening the town is dry and virtually free of crime. But the dry utopia vanishes, as neither law nor community action offer adequate protection from the evil trade. Drys fail to block the issuing of a liquor license at a state liquor licensing board (dominated by politicians beholden to the organized liquor interest), a dry organized boycott falters when its denounced by a new editor of the town's newspaper, and citizen prosecutions of the saloon keeper for violations of the law falter before corrupted juries. Thus the saloon spreads crime and disorder throughout the community, literally turning brother against brother in drunken brawls. After all other means have been tried the dry townsmen resort to violence. One night after the saloon is shut, they engage a Boston Tea Party type raid on it, destroying its fixtures and stock. When the newspaper editor condemns the act as lawlessness he is ostracized by the town. When the saloon keeper rebuilds, the temperance men of the town blow up the establishment with three separate dynamite bombs, the first being set away from where the proprietor slept to allow him time to escape. Moreover, the local minister preached a sermon in advance of the act calling for the blowing up of "every hell-hole in the United States tomorrow with dynamite!" And in case the message was not clear, the dynamite works. The saloon keeper never came back and the town was the better for it: no murders, or assaults, no wife beatings, and no squandering of food and education money on whisky occur within its borders.(14)
Without ever saying it in so many words, this publication of the Anti-Saloon League legitimated violence against saloons. But it did so in a rather limited way. Violence was not the first resort, but the last resort for the drys of Quarrytown. Its only because law and boycotts have failed them, and only after liquor begins to wreck havoc in their community do they take action. And their first action, does not threaten life or limb. Even the bombing is planned to allow the saloon keeper to escape harm. Similarly, Carry Nation carried the conviction that her violence was justified and resorted to violence only after other means had failed.
Once you get past the myth and hype, Nation's short career as a saloon smasher is revealing of the potential of righteous violence in the prohibition movement. Nation captured the national imagination in 1900 when she began single-handedly destroying dives in Kansas. Her actions were quickly overshadowed by the hucksterism to which she resorted to keep her agitation going: the selling of hatchets and the appearances at resorts like Coney Island. She remained a national figure until her death in 1911. Nation was motivated, like many drys, by a personal religious belief that liquor selling was sinful. Indeed, in her autobiography she recounting receiving visions from God showing her the evils of liquor. And she adopted violence only after other she had tried other means.(15)
In 1900 Nation lived in state that had a two decade old, and widely violated, policy of prohibition. Moreover, it must of have seemed to her that the temperance movement was in a rut. In her town of Medicine Lodge, working with the WCTU she closed the town's seven bars through the tried a true techniques of the women's crusade of 1873: picketing with song, prayer, and moral appeals to the sellers and purchasers. These were techniques that had been used against legal saloons, in Kansas there were nothing but illegal ones. Moreover, for a decade now in Kansas the policy had been widely violated, often with the contrivances of the state's political leaders. And at the national level the temperance movement was stalled. Between 1889 and 1907 no state adopted prohibition. WCTU had lost its driving force with the death of Frances Willard in 1898 and the Prohibition Party had splintered into two warring camps. The leading temperance organizations seemed unable to advance the cause or indeed to stop the rollback movements in various states with prohibition. Hence, with conviction, and at a time when the movement was faltering, Nation turned away from moral suasion and turned to violence. As she explained, "If there's anything that's weak and worse than useless it's this moral suasion. I despise it. these hell traps of Kansas have fattened for twenty years on moral suasion."(16)
And her violence struck a chord among some temperance advocates. While some debated the value of violence, others joined Nation. She soon headed an organization of several hundred similarly minded saloon foes. And, in a two month period, following her lead this group, and others, engaged in vigilante action against saloons in Kansas's major cities, Topeka and Wichita. Mobbings and riots swept the cities; people were beaten and shots were fired in anger. And among some temperance workers the violence was welcome. One woman letter writer to a WCTU paper wrote: "What if a few people do get killed[?] . . . I'm tired of this sentimental gush about 'stopping before it comes to bloodshed. . . .' I for one, hope a thousand more of them will be smashed in Kansas before she stops." The response to Nation, shows that the potential for righteous violence existed in the temperance crusade.(17)
Which raises new questions: Why was there only one Carry Nation? Part of the answer lays in the changing circumstances of the prohibition movement. Soon after Nation's actions in Kansas, the Anti-Saloon League emerged as the dominate organization in the temperance movement. And the League's techniques of political lobbying, official law enforcement, and public opinion building changed the fortunes of the crusade. For example, take the topic of national legislation; the League's Washington Office, between 1902 and 1919, pressured the United States Congress to enact laws that: prohibited the sale of liquor in federal buildings, banned the transport of liquor through the mails, ended liquor sales in national soldiers' homes, retained a law excluding all alcoholic beverages from Army posts, created Oklahoma as a dry state, and limited and then prohibited the transportation of liquor into dry states. A similar record of success can be found in the prohibitionists' campaigns in the states in the same period.(18) The very success of the drys in gaining what they wanted through the political process made righteous violence redundant.
This pattern of potential righteous violence in the prohibition crusade and the mostly unstudied violence used against drys by their opponents, suggest that we need to look more deeply into prohibition as a reform movement. As Robin Room wrote over twenty years ago, "we must attempt to understand the antiliquor movement . . . as a massive, sustained organized effort with a highly developed set of tactics and coherent, tangible goals." (19) Indeed, if we seek a usable past, one that might help deal with current social reform crusades, say against abortion or cigarettes, it is imperative that we look, far deeper than I have here, into tactics, strategies, and contexts, of the temperance crusade to see how they prompted or retarded violence.
(1) Typical of the treatment of the topic of violence and the prohibitionists can be found in examining the three available surveys of the movement's history. Norman Clark, Deliver Us From Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976) and Paul Aaron and David Musto, "Temperance and Prohibition In America: A Historical Overview" in Mark H. Moore and Dean Gernstein, eds., Alcohol and Public Policy: Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1981), 127-181 devote no space to the topic. Jack S. Blocker, Jr. American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 30- 34, 59-64, 74-79 mentions violence in connection with enforcement of the Maine Law and in the direct action of the women's crusades of 1873 and their precursors. Moreover, Mark Lender, editor, Dictionary of American Temperance Biography (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1984) does not contain a sketch of any prohibitionists killed, either as response to agigation or because law enforcement activities.
Three works discuss the role of violence associated with temperance reform. Jed Dannebaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washington Revival to the WCTU (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984) and Jack S. Blocker Jr., "Give to the Winds Thy Fears": The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985); Robert Bader, Prohibition in Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986).
On liquor law enforcement before national prohibition see: Stephen Cresswell, Mormons, Cowbosy, Moonshiners, and Klansmen: Federal Law Enforcment in the South and West, 1870- 1893 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991); William F. Holmes, "Moonshining and Collective Violence: Georgia, 1889- 1895," Journal of American History 67 (1980): 589-611; William F. Holmes, "Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902-1906," Journal of Southern History 35 (1969): 165-185; Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
(2) Indeed, certain killings connected to the civil rights crusade have been used to illuminate the very nature of the movement and its opponents. See for example, Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (New York: Bantam Books, 1988) and Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachsetts Press, 1988).
(3)On the topic of abolitionist violence and their reactions to violence see, Jane H. Pease and William Pease, "Confrontation and Abolition in the 1850s," Journal of American History 58 (1972): 923-937; John Demos, "The Antislavery Movement and the Problem of Violent 'Means,'" New England Quarterly 37 (1964): 501-526; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislaery Thought (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1973); Michael Fellman, "Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854-1856," in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1979), 287-307; Silvan S. Tomkins, "The Psychology of Commitment: The Constructive Role of Violence and Suffering for the Individual and for His Society, in Martin Duberman, editor, The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 270-298. On violence directed against abolitionists see "Gentleman of Property and Standing:" Anti-Aboliton Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Beyond specific works that deal with violence, three surveys of the abolitionist crusade show how intergal the topics of violence are to the reform's history as they devote attention to both the violence against and by abolitionists: Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (New York: Norton, 1978); Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: the Growth of a Dissenting Minority (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974) and James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).
(4) Clarence T. Wilson, Deets Picket, and Harry G. McCain, editors, The Pocket Cyclopedia of Temperance (Topeaka: Temperance Society of Methodist Epsicopal Church, revised edition, 1916), 155-162; Ernest Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyclopaedia of the Alcohol Problem 6 volumes (Westerville, OH: American Issue Publishing Co., 1925-1930), 2618-2620, also for example see 85, and 1800-1801, & 2133 (bible story); even midway through the crusade, drys were recording the suffering of their martyrs, see: Cyclopaedia of Temperance and Prohibition (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1891), 201-202.
(5) The list, derrived from SEAP and Pocket includes: Dr. J. W. Beal and Judge D. R. Cox both killed in Malden, Missouri on Februray 18 1907; Edward W. Carmack, United States Senator from Tennessee, shot November 9, 1908 in Nashville; Sam D. Cox, editor and publisher of The Sentinel killed in Minatare, Nebraska on December 20 1906: Roderick D. Gambrell, editor of The Sword and Shield killed in Jackson, Mississippi on May 5, 1887; Rev. John R. Moffett, editor of Anti-Liquor shot on November 11, 1892 in Danville Virginia; and Joseph B. Rucker editor of the Somerset Reporter killed in Somerset, Kentucky on September 19, 1892. Two of these killings have received scholarly treatment, Paul Isaac, Prohibition and Politics: Turbulent Decades in Tennessee, 1885-1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1965) and Richard F. Hamm, "The Killing of John R. Moffett and the Trial of J. T. Clark: Race, Prohibition, and Politics in Danville, 1887-1893," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101 (1993): 375-404
(6) This is the case of John R. Moffett, for details see: Hamm, "Killing." The assertion that Moffett did not die for his convictions generated a controversy between the slain man's brother and William Copeland, editor of the Danville paper at Moffett's death and later editor of the Times Dispatch. See: S. H. Thompson, The Life of John R. Moffett (Salem: McClung & White, 1895), 141-144. Richmond Times Dispatch, April 17, 1903, 4; Correspondence between W. W. Moffett & Richmond Times Dispatch Concerning Reverend John R. Moffett" bound typescript, Virginia Baptist Historical Society, Botwright Library, University of Richmond, Richmond; Richmond Times Dispatch May 26, 1903, 4; Guide, Walter Scott Copeland Papers #5497, E. J. Jordan, Jr., compiler, Rare Books and Manuscripts Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
(7) After the pioneering work of Joseph Gusfield on the social status of temperance reformers, scholars rushed to test this theory, and for nearly a generation, the study of prohibition focused, as the title of one article put it, on "The Prohibitionists Who Were They?" Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963); Jack Blocker, Jr. "Modernity of Prohibitionists" and Charles A. Isetts, "A Social Profile of WCTU Crusade: Hillsboro, Ohio" in Jack Blocker Jr., ed., Alcohol Reform and Society: the Liquor Issue in Social Context (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1979), 99-110, 149-170; Robert A. Hohner, "The Prohibitionists: Who Were They?" South Atlantic Quarterly 68 (1969): 491-505; Jack S. Blocker Jr., "Give to the Winds Thy Fears": The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873-1874 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985). The salience of relgious idenity and the prohibition issue emerged as a topic in political histories. Richard Jenson, The Winning of the Midwest, Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1885-1900 (New York: MacMillian Free Press, 1970); Jed Dannebaum, "Immigrants and Temperance: Ethnocultural Conflict in Cincinnati, 1845-1860" Ohio History 87 (Autumn 1978): 125-139.
(8) On the issue of whether prohibition should be considered a progressive reform, Richard Hofstader in The American Political Tradition (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) and in Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955) and Andrew Sinclair, Era of Excess: A Social History of the Prohibition Movement (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) argued no. John Burnham in "New Perspectives on the Prohibition 'Experiment' of the 1920s" Journal of Social History 2 (1968): 51-68; and James Timberlake in Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963) challenged that view. Jack S. Blocker, Jr., Retreat from Reform: The Prohibition Movement in the United States, 1890-1913 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976) plotted the temperance movement's abandonment of broader social reform to concentrate on prohibition alone. Works by, Norman Clark and Austin Kerr, utilizing the organizational interpretation of Robert Wiebe, placed prohibition firmly within the panapoly of progressive reforms. See Clark, Deliver Us From Evil; K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1985). On the organizational interpretation see: Louis Galambos, "The Emerging Organizational Synthesis of Modern American History," Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1980): 279-90; Samuel P. Hays, Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 48- 70; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1977); Louis Galambos, "Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis," Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471-93. Recently, the work on temperance reform has focused on its relationship with larger question of reform in the history of women. Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 15-33; Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1981, 1986); Ruth Bordin, Francis Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World Woman's Empire: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 19.
(9) I am as guilty as any other scholar in the field, see Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). We do not have a good modern history of the Prohibition Party, though Blocker, Retreat is a good start; similarily WCTU histories have tended to trail off with Frances Willard's death. Where such narratives are to be found are in the local studies of an area or region. Local studies which have looked at the mechanics of the movement like Robert L. Hampel, Temperance and Prohibition in Massachusetts, 1813- 1852 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982); have often focused on areas that did not have significant outbreaks of violence during temperance agitation.
(10) The only full length biolgraphies of Nation are old and negative, Herbert Asbury, Carry Nation (New York: Knopf, 1929) and Robert Lewis Taylor, Vessel of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry Nation (New York: Signet Books, 1966). The recent work by Robert Bader is more sympathic and connects her clearly to events in Kansas. Robert S. Bader, "Mrs. Nation," Kansas History 7 (1984/5): 246-262; and Prohibition, 133-155. Nation is desperately in need of a biography which could use the insights of women's history, gender relations, and temperance studies to illuminate her career. The place to begin such a reinterpretation of Nation is her autobiography, Carry A. Nation, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (Topeka, KA: F. M. Stevens and Sons, 1909).
(11) Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York: Harpers, 1970); Dillon, Abolitionists 119,-243; Stewart, Holy,147-148, 151-161, 164-177; Walters, Antislavery, 28-33.
(12) Lisa Belkin, "Kill For Life," New York Times Magazine October 30, 1994, 47-50, 62, 76, 80; "Rescuing a City's Reputation," Transcript "All Things Considered" August 26, 1994, 9-16.
(13) Douglas Dobbins, Quarrytown (Westerville: American Issue Publishing, 1915), 48-48, 51-67, 71-80, 100-107, 155-159, 184-189, 201-207.
(14) Bader, Prohibition, 134-155; Taylor, Vessel, 62-94, 113-142
(15) Quoted in Bader, Prohibition, 140; Hamm, Shaping, 123-129.
(16) Quoted in Bader, Prohibition, 149-150.
(17) Blocker, Retreat, 197-234; Hamm, Shaping, 155- 255; SEAP, 177, 207, 2725.
(18) Robin Room, "Governing Images and the Prevention of Alcohol Problems," Preventative Medicine 3 (1974): 11-23, 11.
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