The Devil in the Bottle (Jan 7, 2024)
by Scott Sosebee
While enjoying a little libation at one of my favorite spots in Nacogdoches, it dawned on me that taverns across the country had recently noted the 90th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, that ill-guided attempt to end drunkenness by making the distilling, brewing, and passion of alcohol illegal. It was generally such a failure that it was surprising that it lasted fourteen years and ended. However, the campaign against “demon rum” was not just a twentieth century battle, as efforts across rural America to ban booze began much earlier. East Texas was no exception.
The anti-liquor movement became a part of Lone Star politics a few years after Texas’ most famous reformed drunk, Sam Houston, took power in 1836. Many of the state’s settlers were fundamentalist Protestants who believed drinking was immoral. There can be no dispute that untold numbers of shooting affrays and cutting scrapes were the result of rough-cut men imbibing John Barleycorn or one of his cousins. The Civil War largely suspended temperance efforts in Texas until Reconstruction ended. The United Friends of Temperance, founded in 1870, was the first statewide abstinence organization.
A history of the temperance movement, written by a committed prohibitionist in 1910, described the United Friends of Temperance as “a secret fraternity:”
“Its members were pledged to total abstinence and fraternal helpfulness toward each other and toward drink-cursed humanity. It labored to reclaim inebriates, to fortify the young against the drink curse, and to cultivate public sentiment against the drink traffic.”
The Prohibition Party first offered candidates for office in Texas in 1886, nominating E.L. Dohoney for governor and Dr. F.E. Yoakum for lieutenant governor. The pair racked up six percent of the vote in the race, won by Democrat Sul Ross.
That would be the party’s best performance, but efforts to win local-option elections were increasingly successful, first in Northeast and North Central Texas and spreading into East Texas—albeit slowly. The 1876 Texas Constitution—under which the state still operates—required the Legislature to create a local-option provision, which is still in existence. Jasper County held the states’ first local-option election on December 18, 1876, and went “dry,” followed by an election nine days later in Lamar County in North Texas, in which the “wets” overwhelmingly defeated the “drys.”
By 1887, only three counties had gone dry. Voters in Rockwall and Jones counties joined those in Jasper and elected to close the saloons. Thus encouraged, prohibitionists were determined to hold a statewide election. Pushed by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—whose often on-target message was that the “drinking man” quite often failed to provide for his family and was abusive—voters were asked to decide upon a constitutional amendment that year on statewide Prohibition.
The statewide move to go dry went down to overwhelming defeat, garnering just thirty-seven percent of the vote. But as one ardent abolitionist put it, the election “sowed the seed from which was reaped a harvest of local option victories that drove the saloons from a hundred and forty odd counties and hundreds of precincts in other counties, in the decade extending from 1893 to 1903.” During the next fifteen years after 1903, twenty more counties joined the “dry” ranks, and even hundreds of more precincts. The tide was also turning nationally against liquor. A product of decades of work by the temperance movement, in 1917 Congress proposed and passed the 18th Amendment, and it moved to the states for passage. The requisite number of states ratified the Amendment on January 16, 1919, when Nebraska became the 36th of the then 48 states to approve the measure. Texas did so much earlier when the Legislature approved its ratification on March 8, 1918. After ratification, Congress responded with the corresponding Volstead Act, which allowed for enforcement of the Amendment. Thus, on January 1, 1920, it became illegal to possess, buy, or sell alcoholic beverages. The United States was a dry nation.
Prohibition may have been the law of the land, but—predictably—it did not end the consumption of alcohol. All it did was take the practice and distribution of spirits “underground,” which aided the rise of organized crime in the nation. Speakeasies became ubiquitous in the nation’s cities, and the manufacture and sale of “moonshine” became common in rural areas. Enforcement of the law was also haphazard and tended to fall along racial and class lines; the poor, rural residents, and non-white citizens were the overwhelming victims of arrest for possession of alcohol, while law enforcement tended to look the other way when the rich and powerful indulged in a drink. Ultimately, Prohibition was seen as a failed exercise and was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.
Today, a little less than four dozen Texas counties are considered “dry,” meaning one cannot purchase a six-pack of beer or bottle of wine or spirits. Almost a score of those are in East Texas, but many of those counties allow private clubs to operate and serve alcohol by the drink. A few such places in East Texas are jokingly called the “wettest dry” counties in Texas.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu; www.easttexashistorical.org.