Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes
344
Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes
344eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Combining historical research with the insights of social movement theory, Pathways to Prohibition shows how a locally based, moderate strategy allowed the early-twentieth-century prohibition crusade both to develop a potent grassroots component and to transcend the limited scope of local politics. Szymanski describes how the prohibition movement’s strategic shift toward moderate goals after 1900 reflected the devolution of state legislatures’ liquor licensing power to localities, the judiciary’s growing acceptance of these local licensing regimes, and a collective belief that local electorates, rather than state legislatures, were best situated to resolve controversial issues like the liquor question. "Local gradualism" is well suited to the porous, federal structure of the American state, Szymanski contends, and it has been effectively used by a number of social movements, including the civil rights movement and the Christian right.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822385301 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 761 KB |
About the Author
Ann-Marie E. Szymanski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma.
Read an Excerpt
Pathways to Prohibition
Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement OutcomesBy Ann-Marie E. Szymanski
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2003 Ann-Marie E. SzymanskiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822331810
Chapter One
Political Strategy and Social Movement Outcomes
Radicals and Moderates
For radical social movement activists, moderation is usually not a virtue. For example, the radical environmentalist David Brower has said that his moderate colleagues "don't seem to learn ... that whenever they compromise they lose." Moreover, moderates are suspect because their pragmatism seems incapable of challenging the broader political, economic, and social relations that constitute the status quo. The radical pacifist Daniel Berrigan once accused moderate antiwar activists of being "obsessed by the necessity of delivering results." Instead of worrying about "efficiency," Berrigan argued, the movement had to realize that "the spiritual dismantling of the American empire is going to consume at least our lifetime, and perhaps the lifetime of the next generation." Finally, many radicals question whether modest reform efforts are worthwhile if the public has yet to adopt the "correct" beliefs. In 1840, for instance, a radical abolitionist issued this warning to hismoderate counterparts: "All attempts to abolish slavery by legislation before the people of the country are converted to anti-slavery principles must of necessity be unsuccessful." But is moderation really so lethal to a social movement?
Like other social movements, America's anti-liquor crusade divided along ideological lines after 1875. On one side stood the radicals, who favored state and national prohibition, particularly if these policies were incorporated into state and national constitutions. On the other side were the moderates, who believed that the movement should initially focus on restricting local liquor retailing, and only later seek prohibition on a broader scale. Both sides believed that theirs was the best approach to the liquor question, and both sought to mobilize citizens who shared their visions.
For the radicals, only the state and national governments had the power to crush the liquor traffic. "Penalties sufficient to destroy the traffic will never be made," wrote one orthodox dry, until these governments brand it "an outlaw and enemy." Furthermore, radicals preferred constitutional prohibition to mere laws, as it created "an established standard of right principles exerting its instructive influence upon public sentiment-a beacon of essential truth illuminating and guiding public thought." Conversely, they frowned on agitation for prohibition in one's neighborhood, town, or county, for "it was wrong for the state to surrender its sovereignty, evade its duty and divest itself of responsibility on a matter vitally affecting the welfare of the state by shifting the decision to localities, a procedure making it practically certain that some localities would vote to perpetuate plague centers." Indeed, the radicals often dismissed local prohibition as no better than Stephen Douglas's "squatter sovereignty."
Though acknowledging that many did not share their views, the orthodox drys were nevertheless confident that they could command public support for prohibition. All it took was for courageousmen and women to unapologetically rally round this policy and to persuade the public of its value. As F. A. Noble put it,
When there is a vigorous public sentiment on any question of morals, it is because somebody has taken an advanced position, and educated and drawn the people up to it. If all who think and even say [prohibition] would be a good thing ... would only say it without any 'ifs,' and 'ands,' and 'buts,' ... public sentiment on this liquor business would swell and press on like an incoming tide, and in a little while there would be laws looking to the suppression of this evil which would have in them the force of the right hand of God.
During the 1880s the radicals had good reason to believe that prohibition measures would soon be embodied in state constitutions. By swamping the state legislatures with petitions, and by carefully navigating the quagmires of the amendment process and the party system, the drys forced referenda in eighteen states on whether to include prohibition in their constitutions. In one state, North Carolina, the prohibitionists failed to frame prohibition as a constitutional issue but nonetheless compelled the legislature to hold a referendum on a state prohibition law.
Unfortunately, these referenda only revealed the lack of grassroots support for statewide prohibition. Between 1882 and 1890 voters in twelve states rejected prohibition outright; in four other states, constitutional prohibition won but fleeting victories. As of 1900, Kansas, Maine, and North Dakota alone retained constitutional prohibition, and only New Hampshire and Vermont maintained statutory prohibition. At the national level, prohibitionists were hardly more successful. During the winter of 1889-90, Senator Henry W. Blair (R-N.H.) and Representative John A. Pickler (R-S.D.) introduced resolutions in their respective houses that called for submitting a prohibition amendment to the states for ratification. Although reported favorably by Blair's committee (the Committee on Education and Labor), the resolution was otherwise ignored by party leaders in both houses. By 1890 the crusade for state and national prohibition was at a virtual standstill.
While the Prohibition party, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT), and other radicals united to support state and national prohibition during the 1880s, moderate anti-liquor activists became convinced that these groups had lost touch with the gritty reality of local liquor control. As L. Edwin Dudley recalled, "In one temperance society to which I belonged I asked the question one evening of the presiding officer: 'Will you tellme, sir, what is the law of Massachusetts relating to the liquor-traffic?' and I was answered: 'I don't know and I don't care; it is not prohibition and that is all I want to know about it.'"
To Dudley, the radicals' indifference to the practical aspects of liquor control was disturbing. In pursuing nothing less than state prohibition, orthodox temperance groups offered no assistance to those who suffered daily from the saloon's illegal activities. Such prohibition may have been a noble goal, but Dudley worried about the "poor, ragged little fellows" who were enticed into Boston's saloons to drink, gamble, and mingle "with crowds of dissolute and drunken men and women, and all this in violation of the law of the state." Recalling the North's mobilization for the Civil War, he concluded that the campaign against liquor would never enlist a majority of Americans without a more pragmatic battle plan:
I remembered that at the beginning of the War of the Rebellion volunteers were called upon to enlist for the suppression of the Rebellion and the maintenance of the government of the United States. I remembered, also, ... that if the call had been at the beginning for volunteers to go to the South to fight for the abolition of slavery, not one in ten of those who went would have been at all likely to enlist, and yet I remembered that the educating influence of the conflict carried these men ... on, step by step, until ... they were all abolitionists. It seemed tome that in temperance work there should be a place for the moderate as well as for the extreme man.
In 1882 Dudley established the Massachusetts Law and Order League, a group devoted to enforcing extant liquor laws at the local level. Although short-lived, the Law and Order League would bequeath its law enforcement methods and, more significantly, its focus on securing modest, local goals to the Anti-Saloon League (ASL).
Like Dudley, the ASL's leaders believed that "reforms are not revolutions; they are evolutions." In their view, "every law on the statute books which tends to suppress or repress the liquor traffic is a weapon in the hands of the forces of reform, which, if used will hasten the day of permanent victory." In short, the ASL had grasped an essential property of collective action: its potential to radicalize the moderate adherent of a social movement, even when the goals of such action seem limited. Instead of expecting its recruits to adopt the "correct" beliefs about prohibition before participating in the movement, the Anti-Saloon League first sought to engage Americans in local prohibition skirmishes which barely dented the profits of the liquor industry, but which socialized them into the militancy of the broader movement.
The capacity of movement participation to radicalize adherents has often been noted by social scientists. For example, Doug McAdam found that Freedom Summer activists eventually shifted to the left ideologically, while others who had applied to take part in the project but ultimately did not maintained moderate political views. Unlike the Freedom Summer participants, however, the reformers who traveled the path from "damp" to "bone dry" were generally not involved in high-risk behavior which threatened their lives. Rather, dry radicalism was forged when individuals confronted the intransigence of the liquor interests, which refused to accept even the most modest restraints on the saloon. Hence, the Anti-Saloon League deliberately instigated local prohibition conflicts, and advocated state laws which authorized local prohibition referenda-commonly known as "local option" laws. Such laws brought nascent drys face to face with the obstinate saloon, and unleashed the democratic potential of the decentralized American state. As one League leader described it:
[Local option] is a law that enables a community opposed to saloons to keep them out, even though other places in the state may allow them to exist.... Its essential element is the rule of popular government. There can be no principle of legislation more American, or more democratic. To refuse the right of the people to determine such a question for themselves by communities, and thus permit saloons to be forced upon neighborhoods ... against the popular will ... is to proclaim an autocracy of rum that is thoroughly at variance with our American usages.
League strategy was not only locally based but also gradual in character. By attaining partial but positive victories in the legislative, electoral, and judicial arenas and then building on those victories, the ASL drew its adherents into an escalating conflict which eventually scaled the walls of American federalism. Engaged in an ever-widening battle that lasted twenty years (from about 1900 to 1920), a proponent of municipal prohibition could become an advocate of county prohibition, then an advocate of statewide prohibition, and finally an advocate of national constitutional prohibition. By 1919 the ASL and its allies had amassed an enormous dry army which obtained statewide prohibition in thirty states and sustained it in three more (Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota). In short, the league's crowning achievement-the Eighteenth Amendment-cannot be understood without appreciating the ASL's extraordinary capacity to involve moderates in temperance agitation and then keep them in a state of perpetual motion.
The prohibitionists of the 1880s gained limited success, while their Progressive Era counterparts achieved a remarkable-albeit temporary-accomplishment in American politics: the passage of an amendment to the U.S. constitution. How can such divergent outcomes be explained?
This book argues that choice of strategy-or how a social movement defines and pursues its goals-is important in determining whether the movement will succeed. Of course, the political system must be somewhat vulnerable to the challenge posed by a social movement for it to have a chance of winning concessions. Indeed, unstable political alignments would prove vital to both the prohibition movement's limited success in the 1880s and its ultimate triumph in the early twentieth century. Once movements have gained some access to the policymaking process, however, their fate cannot be explained solely in terms of their access. In other words, political opportunities were necessary for dry success in both the 1880s and the Progressive Era, but they do not sufficiently account for why outcomes differed across these two periods.
Instead, these divergent outcomes reflected the shift in the movement's strategy from promoting state constitutional amendments to advocating "local gradualism," the strategy which produced greater success in the Progressive Era. Local gradualism is "local" in that it initially focuses on local issues before targeting the state and national levels of government. It is "gradualist" in that it emphasizes achieving moderate goals before pursuing more radical goals. In the prohibition crusade these two aspects of strategy produced both a potent grassroots component and the capacity to transcend the limited scope of local politics. Well-suited to the porous, federal structure of the American state, local gradualism has been effectively used by other social movements in the United States, including the civil rights movement and the Christian Right.
Finally, this research suggests that a social movement's choice of strategy reflects both changes in state structure and new ideas about the appropriate distribution of political power. While novel institutional arrangements may channel a movement's energies in unprecedented directions, such innovations are often the byproduct of evolving ideas about the distribution of political authority. In the case of the prohibition movement, it adopted local gradualism partly in response to recent modifications of the political system, namely the devolution of the state legislatures' liquor licensing power to the localities, and the judiciary's growing acceptance of these licensing regimes. Moreover, these developments reflected a collective belief that the people, rather than the state legislatures, were best situated to resolve controversial issues affecting their localities-a view which gave many judges a coherent rationale for upholding local option laws and other types of local referenda. Meanwhile, whereas the moderates heartily embraced critiques of legislatures prevalent during the Gilded Age and adopted a strategy to exploit devolution, the radicals were more ambivalent about the emasculation of state legislatures and hence, its strategic implications. In short, social movements may only capitalize on new statutes, bureaucratic configurations, or judicial decisions if their leaders share the philosophy which animates them.
Explaining Outcomes: Internal Dynamics versus External Environment
According to social movement theorists, a social movement's outcome may reflect its internal dynamics and resources, its external political environment, or both. Analysts who have peered into the internal machinery of social movements link a movement's chances of success with its capacity to construct viable organizations, raise money, exploit the expertise of professional activists, recruit from existing groups, devise an effective repertoire of collective action for confronting political elites, pursue narrow goals, and articulate an ideology with widespread appeal. In contrast, social scientists who have concentrated on external factors claim that the success of social movements stems from opportunities created by political crises and unstable political alignments, and from the process by which state structures channel mobilization.
Before examining these two approaches, I should note that scholars have long disputed the definition of success and how to classify movement outcomes. Among other things, "success" may refer to a movement's attainment of tangible benefits that meet its goals, its formal acceptance by political elites, the legitimization of its goals, and the transformation of individual or group consciousness. In this study, "success" will be defined instrumentally because that is how the drys themselves measured success. In other words, the prohibitionists succeeded when their participation in collective action produced tangible benefits that met their goals. Of course, segments of the prohibition movement-such as the dry fraternal orders-also focused on consciousness raising and the transformation of social attitudes about drinking. However, as chapter 2 shows, the temperance fraternities declined in strength during the late 1800s, and by the Progressive Era played a lesser role in the movement than groups which sought to influence political institutions.
Continues...
Excerpted from Pathways to Prohibition by Ann-Marie E. Szymanski Copyright © 2003 by Ann-Marie E. Szymanski. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Figures ixList of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Political Strategy and Social Movement Outcomes 1
2. Churches, Lodges, and Dry Organizing 23
3. Modular Collective Action in a Federalist System 65
4. Legislative Supremacy and the Definition of Movement Goals 89
5. Political Alignments, Party Systems, and Prohibition 122
6. The Dynamics of Local Gradualism in the States 153
7. Turning Moderates into Radicals 182
8. Local Gradualism and American Social Movements 198
Notes 219
Selected Bibliography 301
Index 317