David Fahey's post on the prohibitionist killed in Key West and Anderson Thayne's book with a chapter on drinking violence in Alaska (which I did not know of when I wrote this piece) raises the issue of prohibitionists and violence. 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 last month. At that time I said I wasn't planning to publish it, for various reasons, but I have been urged to disseminate it, so today I would like to raise the general point about the limitations of the literature on the temperance movement by discussing the absence of the treatment of violence against temperance agitators. And the members of this list serve seem the best possible audience for this topic. The prohibitionists, from the end of the Civil War to the passage of the 18th Amendment, 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. But, save for some work on the women's crusades and on Carry Nation, the vast -- and ever -- growing literature on the temperance movement pays little attention to the issue of violence. This gap is a serious deficiency.(1) There are two limits to my work on this topic. First, I am most interested in violence in its most dramatic and drastic forms, killing or attempting to kill people. So I will be speaking mostly of killings, attempted killings, and mobbings -- because they can easily lead to killings. Second, I am talking about violence in response to or as a part of agitation and not violence attendant to law enforcement. Thus I am going to pass over the many studies of moonshing, 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. Scholars of other reforms recognize violence as part of the context to be explored. For example, studies of the abolitionist crusade and civil rights movement deal with the topic. The literature on civil rights is filled with works that explore the violence directed against civil rights advocates in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. The assassination of Medgar Evers, the bombing of the Birmingham churches, the mobbing of sit in protestors and freedom riders, and the killing of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney are found through out the literature and sometimes in book-length treatment. Historians of abolitionists have explored the many anti-abolitionist mobs of the Jacksonian era, including that which mobbed and killed the abolitionist editor Eliajah Lovejoy in 1837. But virtually no where in the vast scholarly studies of the prohibition movement are there similar studies of the prohibitionists and violence.(3) Its not because violence is not there. 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.(4) 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. Including such figures 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. The list includes: Dr. J. W. Beal and Judge D. R. Cox both killed in Malden, Missouri on February 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. At least another nineteen drys were mobbed, beaten, shot at, or had their homes (or businesses) dynamited for their support of temperance.(5) 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. 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 disproportionately 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. I think 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-prohibitionist sources asserted that he "was not slain because of his convictions but" because of a "personal difficulty." 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. 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?" Later the salience of religious identity and the prohibition issue emerged as a topic in political histories and worked back into the field of temperance studies.(7) 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.(8) 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.(9) This post has merely touched the surface of the topic of violence and prohibition. It does not delve into the timing of the violence against dry agitators -- most attacks seemed to coincide with local option or other elections. It passes over the topics of violence against prohibitionists who were engaged in official, semi-official, or private law enforcement. And while the original paper dealt with the topic of violence by drys, this post leaves that to another day. But even skimming the surface shows the pattern that the scholarship has mostly ignored the violence used against drys by their opponents. This pattern suggests that we need to look more deeply into prohibition as a reform movement. In particular, I think we need to use narrative or other techniques that will allow us to explore more fully than we have already the context in which the temperance crusade occurred. Do others agree? Disagree? Is there anything they would like to say on this or related issues? Richard F. Hamm SUNY Albany [log in to unmask] Notes (1) Typical 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 agitation 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, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Robert Bader, Prohibition in Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986). (2) On liquor law enforcement before national prohibition see: Stephen Cresswell, Mormons, Cowboys, Moonshiners, and Klansmen: Federal Law Enforcement 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). (3) 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: Bantom Books, 1988); Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Maryanne Vollers,Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995). On violence directed against abolitionists see "Gentleman of Property and Standing:" Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Also, three surveys of the abolitionist crusade show how integral 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 (Topeka: Temperance Society of Methodist Episcopal 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; 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) 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. (7) 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, CT: 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, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). The 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 (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 panoply 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, CT: 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, CT: 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; my work, Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), in exploring how the structure of the polity interacted with the dry movement ignores the issue of violence. We do not have a good modern history of the Prohibition Party, though Blocker, Retreat is a good start; similarly 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.