Ballot in One Hand, Bottle in the Other
- charlesthrasher8
- Oct 8
- 10 min read
Updated: Oct 9
2 of 3 on Prohibition
In 1832, Washington, NC, resident and physician William Shaw delivered a series of lectures to the Washington Temperance Society where he indicted intemperance as a “source of disease” and a “national evil.” The consumption of alcohol “fills prisons with dishonest, weak, and wicked criminals…fills alms houses with paupers…makes tens of thousands of men poor and wretched, and leaves their widows indigent and destitute [and throws] on the charity of this cold world great numbers of helpless poor orphans.” [1]
It would be a long, fitful path from Dr. Shaw’s lectures at the Washington Temperance Society to a patchwork of wet and dry counties, statewide prohibition, nationwide prohibition and its eventual repeal.
On that path there would be uneasy alliances between evangelical preachers, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Jim Crow politicians, the Anti-Saloon League, even the Ku Klux Klan.
Politics & Preachers
By the end of one century and the beginning of another, the argument for enforced abstinence and legal prohibition had shifted from the doctor’s office to the preacher’s pulpit.
By 1906, 89.6% of church members in the South were evangelicals (Baptist, Methodists, and Presbyterians), over one-third of the South’s population. Evangelical Southerners took a dim view of human nature. Humans were inherently sinful. Exposure to sin tempts all humans, not just the morally weak or insufficiently vigilant. If left to themselves, most people would likely sin. [2]
If not willing to be redeemed by faith, then by force of law.
The separation of church and state mandated by the constitution had largely restrained preachers from making blatantly political statements from the pulpit, but after 70 years of the failure of “moral suasion” to convince the public to abandon alcohol, many were ready to reconsider.
“For prohibitionists, the locus of godly social reform thus shifted from the church to the state, with the church playing a secondary role as a pressure group to ensure the progressive advancement of human morality—not through the regeneration of souls by the power of the Holy Spirit but the coercion of bodies by the power of government.” [3]
If men were not willing to be redeemed by faith, they should be redeemed by force of law.
A War of Words
In Washington, the controversy between the pulpit and politics flared into the press in 1915. North Carolina had already voted for statewide prohibition, but Congress was debating a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the manufacture or sale of liquor nationwide.
On a Sunday in December, three prominent advocates of national prohibition spoke in Washington churches and held a mass meeting in the high school auditorium. Rev. E.C. Dinwidde was a staunch prohibitionist from Washington, DC, the Rev. R.L. Gay was formerly the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Washington, NC, and Rev. R.L. Davis was the state superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League.
An editorial in the Washington Daily News took exception to political meetings held in churches on the sabbath.
“There was only one object in holding these meetings and in making these addresses and that was to stir up sentiment in favor of an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” They were “political meetings and they were held in the churches to give them the appearance of being religious gatherings.” [4]
Other than the religious subterfuge, the editor’s primary objection to a constitutional amendment was the sacrifice of a state’s right to choose their own path, as North Carolina had already done. Sixty years after the end of the Civil War, the South was still smarting over what they considered the Federal government’s usurpation of states’ rights.
The Daily News concluded that the reverends Dinwidde, Davis and Gay would better serve the cause if they campaigned in states like New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts that didn’t have statewide prohibition and quit conflating religion with politics from Washington’s pulpits.
“While this matter may be one of politics,” Rev. Gay protested, “it is also moral and spiritual and therefore within the precincts of the church.” [5]
Gay had resigned as pastor of the First Baptist Church and taken a paid position as the field secretary of the Anti-Saloon League in North Carolina.
The Daily News wasn’t above a parting shot. “What is Mr. Gay’s reasons for this change of work? We can see no other excepting that he is offered a greater renumeration for his present efforts than as a minister of the Gospel.” [6]
Anti-Saloon League
Dinwiddie, Davis and Gay were all paid by the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), an organization with the single, relentless purpose of securing national prohibition. It was also one of the most effective lobbying organizations in U.S. history.
The ASL was neither Republican nor Democrat but would ally with anyone that furthered their purpose, even the Ku Klux Klan. Conversely, they would actively campaign against any politician who opposed them, whatever their party, organizing voters, placing political ads, and financing opponents.
The Rev. R.L. Davis, state superintendent of the ASL, fell afoul of the Daily News when stumping for the ASL in Washington. He claimed that the Daily News was the only newspaper in North Carolina that accepted paid ads from the Liquor Dealers Association, an organization opposed to the ASL.
That smarted. But the newspaper really objected when Davis attacked Congressman John H. Small.
Small had been a lawyer in Washington and twice town mayor before being elected to North Carolina’s First Congressional District where he served from 1889 to 1921. When he retired from politics he returned to Washington, inherited Rosedale (the Wharton House), and was eventually buried in Oakdale Cemetery.
The Daily News didn’t take kindly to the ASL lobbying against Small simply because he had voted against national prohibition. State prohibition was already in place, they reasoned, and the Rev. Davis was being paid to smear John Small’s good name.
“Let the Anti-Saloon League do its work where it is needed—in the States where prohibition has not yet been voted in. Let them preach and argue there and not in a State that has already expressed itself in favor of prohibition.” Of Rev. Davis, the Daily Times said, he “…is probably doing more harm to the cause of prohibition than any other man in the State.” [7]
The Anti-Saloon League wasn’t the only organization lobbying for prohibition in Washington. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had been active in town for some years.
Woman's Christian Temperance Union
The WCTU was founded in 1874 to promote a “sober and pure world” by abstinence, purity, and evangelical Christianity. Their reform platform included women’s suffrage, equal rights, child welfare, prison life, international arbitration, world peace, narcotics and tobacco control, child labor, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and gambling. In North Carolina they mostly campaigned for the prohibition of alcohol.
In 1881, Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, toured the South, including North Carolina, mobilizing women to advance the WCTU’s goals of prohibition and women’s suffrage.
“Everywhere the Southern white people desired me to speak to the colored,” Willard recalled, but her aims differed from her white Democratic hosts. Willard desired to “liberate the suppressed colored vote” and “divide the white vote on the issues” and make a partisan “realignment” uniting drys North and South. In short, Willard advocated for a multiracial Prohibition Party to challenge Republicans and Democrats alike.” [8]
Historically, the South had been hostile territory for prohibition.
Also In 1881, North Carolina voted on a referendum to prohibit alcohol statewide. It was the first major referendum on prohibition in the South. It was crushed 166,325 to 48,370, a margin of 117,955 votes of nearly 215,000 cast, or more than three-to-one against prohibition.
According to the 1880 census, North Carolina had 807,242 white and 581,277 “colored” residents. Jim Crow laws hadn’t yet throttled the Black vote. Tens of thousands of Blacks could still participate in the 1881 election; almost all of them were Republican. When the Republican Committee declared against prohibition, Black and white Republicans fell in line. It was the white Democratic Party that splintered.
Despite the fact that 77% of the votes cast were against prohibition, which meant that many whites had voted against it as well, Democratic politicians blamed Black voters for the debacle at the polls. They would never forgive them.
The WCTU in North Carolina organized white and Black chapters where both races interacted as equals. It was an uneasy equality. Many southern women felt Black women inferior.
The Demon of Rum is abroad in the land,
His victims are falling on every hand,
The wise and simple, the brave, and the fair,
No station too high for his vengeance to spare,
O Women, the sorrow and pain is with you,
And so be the joy and the victory too;
With this for your motto, and succor divine,
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.
The home that were happy are ruined, and gone,
The hearts that were merry are wretched and lone,
And lives full of promise of good things to come,
are ruined and wrecked by the demon of Rum,
Wives, maidens, and mothers, to you it is given
To rescue the fallen and point them to heaven
With God for your guide you shall win by this sign,
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.
Lyrics from a popular temperance anthem.
Temperance & Racism
“Historically, the South had been hostile territory for prohibition. When white prohibitionists adopted increasingly racist and violent rhetoric to advance the anti-liquor cause, they began to make headway.” [9]
Frances Willard had learned the lesson. When she returned to the state in 1883, she reorganized all the local white chapters into a single statewide entity. All Black chapters were shuffled into a department called “Work amongst the Colored People” ironically led by Sallie Chapin, a white woman. It was Chapin who suggested repeatedly that African Americans had been better off under the “protection” of their former owners.” [10]
“Formerly engaging as near-equals, Black women in the WCTU were now treated as objects of missionary work and racial uplift under white supervision: separate and clearly unequal.” [11]
In order to gain traction for prohibition in the South, the WCTU began mirroring the racist tropes used to justify the disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynchings of Black men.
They Multiple Like Locusts
In 1884 Frances Willard said, “Perhaps we have hardly appreciated the peculiar significance of the drink problem at the South, where an ignorant, undisciplined race, long held back from temptation by the laws the prevailed in slavery time, was suddenly left free to patronize saloons and became the prey of politicians glad to pay for their votes at so many glasses apiece.” [12]
She was quoted in print saying: “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog shop is its centre of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment.”
Instead of condemning the lynching of Black men, the 1894 WCTU convention deplored the “nameless outrages” that Black men were supposedly committing against white women. “The pernicious myth that lynching was mob justice for Black rapists had become the WCTU’s official position.” [13]
"I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary."
The Wilmington Coup
White Southern WCTU member Rebecca Latimer Felton went further. In an 1898 speech to the Georgia State Agricultural Society on Tybee Island, GA, she lobbied for more lynchings in order to protect rural white women from being raped by black men.
“When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue – if it needs lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts – then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.” [14]
Newspapers across the South reprinted the speech. Alex Manly published a rebuttal in his newspaper, the Daily Record of Wilmington, NC. His editorial claimed the rape of Black women by white men was more frequent and that sex between white women and Black men was often consensual.
“…our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with colored women.” [15]
The resulting race riot was variously called the Wilmington massacre, rebellion, revolt, and coup d’etat. As many as 2,000 white men rampaged through Wilmington. They burned the building of the Daily Record and removed elected Black officials from office. At least 60 Blacks were murdered in the resulting violence.
Wilmington, the largest city in North Carolina at the time of the riot, was populated by a Black majority. After the riot, the majority was white.
Rebecca Latimer Felton’s response was carried by the Raleigh News and Observer. “When the negro Manly attributed the crime to intimacy between negro men and white women of the South the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher’s rope…” [16]
A common thread of fear connected Jim Crow politicians and the WCTU: the image of a Black man with a ballot in one hand and a bottle in the other.
By 1900, that fear was allayed. White voters approved a North Carolina constitutional amendment that required a literacy test, the ability to read a provision of the North Carolina constitution, to qualify to vote. The literacy test would have disqualified many white voters as well, but an aptly named grandfather clause exempted from the test anyone whose grandfather had the right to vote before 1867, the end of the Civil War. Enslaved people and their descendants didn’t gain the right to vote until the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1870.
The Black population of North Carolina was effectively stripped of their voting rights.
North Carolina passed statewide prohibition in 1908. Then the people of North Carolina, and Washington particularly, had to live with the consequences.
See also Whiskey Culture and Blind Tigers & Monkey Rum for more information on Prohibition in North Carolina.
Notes
[1] The Temperance Movement in North Carolina; Documenting the American South
[2] Davis, Michael, Keeping Sin from Sacred Spaces: Southern Evangelicals and the Socio-Legal Control of Alcohol, 1865-1915,.
[3] Payne, Brendan J.J., Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South.
[4] Washington Daily News, December 6, 1915: 1
[5] Washington Daily News, ibid.
[6] Washington Daily News, ibid.
[7] Washington Daily News, ibid.
[8] Payne, Brendan J.J., ibid.
[9] Wagner, Ella, "The Saloon is Their Palace”: Race, Immigration, and Politics in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1874 – 1933.
[10] Wagner, Ella, ibid.
[11] Payne, Brendan J.J., ibid.
[12] Wagner, Ella, ibid.
[13] Wagner, Ella, ibid.
[14] Wagner, Ella, ibid.
[15] 1898 Wilmington Coup, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
