Efforts to prevent the consumption of alcohol have generated intense political conflict in the United States. Temperance had been a major reform movement in the antebellum years, mobilizing large numbers of Americans in a crusade to persuade individuals to give up alcohol and, through legislation, prevent them from drinking. Prior to the Civil War, slavery eclipsed the temperance/prohibition issue, but during the 1870s it experienced a major resurgence. The public was concerned over the large number of saloons, their unwholesome influence in local politics, and their links to gambling, prostitution, public drunkenness, and violence. In 1873 the “Women’s war” broke out across the nation as thousands of women marched to saloons and demanded that saloon keepers give up their businesses. Individual reformers such as Carry Nation lobbied public officials for temperance and prohibition. But it was the Prohibition Party, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and several influential religious organizations that stood at the forefront of the prohibition campaign in the late 19th century.
Under zealous and determined leaders, prohibition groups worked hard to end the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Drinking was held responsible for some of the problems facing American society in the last two decades of the 19th century. Women were at the forefront of the Prohibition movement because of the large number of drunkards who abused their wives and children. Business owners blamed alcohol for industrial inefficiency and the high rate of work-related accidents. Employees often missed time because of drunkenness or came to work intoxicated and performed poorly at their tasks. Drunkenness and the saloon culture that perpetuated it were linked to violence, unemployment, health problems, urban poverty, and the corrupt practices of big-city political machines. Prohibition was viewed as a major step toward moral reform in America.
The Prohibition Party provided a voice for temperance and prohibition in national electoral politics. Its members called for the enactment of legislation outlawing the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The party was founded in September 1869 by delegates from 20 states at a national meeting held in Chicago. It drew its support mostly from Protestant, native-born, small-town,
Currier and Ives print showing a young woman as a warrior for temperance, 1874 (Library of Congress)
Rural Americans. But some native-born, middle-class Protestants living in the nation’s major cities also joined the party. In the main, its members were recruited from the Republican Party. In its crusade against alcohol, the Prohibition Party played upon the prevalent antiurban and antiimmigrant prejudices in late 19th-century America. The saloons in the slums were an inviting and fruitful target. Prohibitionists often associated urban and immigrant life with a weakening of morals that could eventually threaten American democracy.
In 1872 the Prohibition Party participated in a presidential election for the first time, but its candidate received only 5,600 votes. In 1884, however, the party’s presidential candidate John P. St. John garnered 150,369 votes, enabling the Democrats to triumph, and in 1888 Clinton B. Fisk received nearly 250,000 votes. The Prohibition Party polled its highest vote total of 264,133 in the presidential election of 1892 when it ran John Bidwell, a former congressman, as its candidate. Although the Prohibition Party never acquired numerical strength on the national level, its candidates did win election to several state and local offices.
Furthermore, one of the party’s major effects on American politics was that it necessitated more careful scrutiny of a candidate’s character.
The WCTU was formed in 1873 to focus attention on the problems associated with drunkenness. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, it became involved in social work, prison reform, public health, child nurseries, and the woman suffrage campaign. However, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) had a much narrower focus. The ASL was founded in 1893 and organized local campaigns across the nation against the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. In effect, the ASL was a single-issue pressure group whose members called for the legal abolition of saloons. The ASL used a network of local and state chapters and its presses in Westerville, Ohio, to publicize the role of alcohol consumption and the saloon in health problems, family disorder, poverty, political corruption, and workplace inefficiency. Gradually, its assault on the neighborhood saloon grew to include a call for a nationwide prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages.
The Prohibition Party, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union convinced the nation to try prohibition. In 1919 the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating beverages in the United States. Although it did indeed cut alcohol consumption in the 1920s, it also led to excessive lawlessness, and the Prohibition Amendment was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty-first Amendment.
See also nativism; progressivism in the 1890s; political parties, third.
Further reading: Jack S. Blocker, Retreat from Reform: The Prohibition Movement in the United States, 1890-1913 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976); John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Putnam, 1973); Roger C. Storms, Partisan Prophets: A History of the Prohibition Party, 1854-1972 (Denver, Colo.: National Prohibition Foundation, 1972).
—Phillip Papas
Protectionism See tarill issue.
Public health See medicine and public health.
Pulitzer, Joseph (1847-1911) journalist, publisher Although his highly successful New York World printed its share of scandal and gossip, Joseph Pulitzer is better known for the annual prizes bearing his name that are awarded
For excellence in journalism, history, biography, literature, and music. Born in Hungary on April 10, 1847, Pulitzer arrived in the United States at age 17. He served briefly in the Union army, moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and in 1868 became a reporter for Carl Schurz’s German-language We. stliche Post. The next year Pulitzer, a Republican, ran for the state legislature in a heavily Democratic district and, having campaigned seriously, won. In the legislature he fought graft and corruption and in 1872 was appointed as one of three police commissioners in St. Louis. He joined Schurz in the Liberal Republican Party movement and attended its 1872 national convention, which nominated fellow journalist Horace Greeley for president. After Greeley, who also had the Democratic nomination, lost, Pulitzer became a Democrat.
Industrious and ambitious, Pulitzer bought the bankrupt St. Louis Dispatch in 1878 and merged it with the St. Louis Evening Post to form the Post-Dispatch. In the Post-Dispatch he launched crusades against gamblers and tax dodgers and ran a number of successful drives to improve St. Louis streets though repairs and cleaning. In 1883, at age 36, he purchased the ailing New York World and made it a success by combining sensationalism with public service. Beginning in 1895 Pulitzer engaged in a circulation war with William Randolph Hearst, who that year acquired the New York Journal. The two newspapers—and their publishers—created yellow journalism as they went head-to-head in trying to best the other with stories featuring entertaining gossip, prurient scandal, and sensational crime. In the early part of his career, Pulitzer had vowed to “expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses” and disdained large headlines. However, in his circulation battle with Hearst’s Journal, he changed his outlook and went to ever-larger headlines and type to attract readers to his stories. He defended this course by saying that people needed to know about crime in order to combat it, and he claimed that there was no contradiction in his paper’s lurid news pages and its thoughtful, literate editorial pages. After a few years he ceased trying to out-Hearst Hearst, and the World in the early years of the 20th century became a responsible public-service newspaper with high journalistic and moral standards.
Believing that journalism should be more than a trade and that journalism education could elevate the job to a profession, he offered Harvard University a large sum of money to open a journalism school in his name. Harvard turned down Pulitzer’s offer, and he instead provided $2 million to Columbia University to establish the graduate school of journalism and the annual Pulitzer Prizes. He died aboard his yacht Liberty in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, on October 29, 1911.
Further reading: W. A. Swanberg, Pulitzer (New York: Scribners, 1967).
—Ellen Tashie Frisina
World History
