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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2025
This article considers the link between industrialization and social movement strategy. In the late nineteenth century, temperance organizations, rebuffed by Congress, won prohibition at the state level, especially in the American South and West. Simultaneously, lawmakers in the Reconstruction South and West built railroads to Midwestern rail hubs, which housed breweries and distilleries that shipped liquor by rail back into dry states. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League lobbied dry state congressmen to ban this interstate liquor traffic through the 1890 Wilson Act and 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act and eventually sought a complementary national amendment prohibiting liquor manufacturing, sale, and transportation. As railroad expansion and advances in liquor manufacturing undermined the state-level dry regime, prohibitionists pushed for a nationwide ban, contrary to voters’ preferences. This case shows how interest groups adapted a new legislative strategy, partly in response to industrialization and interstate rail development at the turn of the twentieth century.
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9 In practice, state constitutional framers authorized liquor licensing provisions and many other quasi-statutory clauses. See the Report of the Proceedings and Debates in the Convention to Revise the Constitution of the State of Michigan (Lansing: R. W. Ingals, 1850), 187; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, 29–48; Musmanno, Michael Angelo, Proposed amendments to the Constitution: A monograph on the resolutions introduced in Congress proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 226–28Google Scholar; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 23–64, 70–81, 100–106; Dinan, John, The American State Constitutional Tradition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 256–68Google Scholar; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 7–8; Beienburg, Sean, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 15–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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12 See the Ohio Constitution of 1851, Article VIII, Section 2, the Nevada Constitution of 1864, Article VIII, Section 10, Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1876), and Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of California, Convened at the City of Sacramento, Saturday, September 28, 1878 (Sacramento: J. D. Young, 1880), 548; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 474–75Google Scholar; Tarr, G. Alan, Understanding State Constitutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 110–1710.1515/9780691188553CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ely, “The Railroad System Has Burst through State Limits,” 935–38; Bridges, Amy, Democratic Beginnings: Founding the Western States (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 62–63, 81–88, 141–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dinan, The American State Constitutional Tradition, 72; Dinan, John, State Constitutional Politics: Governing by Amendment in the American States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 48–54, 167–6810.7208/chicago/9780226532950.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 See Wines, Frederick Howard and Koren, John, The Liquor Problem in Its Legislative Aspects (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 15, 28, 40–45, 206, 334Google Scholar; Kerr, “Organizing for Reform,” 40; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 63–67, 179; Okrent, Last Call, 31–32.
14 Quoted in Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 61.
15 Data on state-level prohibition from Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, checked against Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, 135–44, 202–27, 435; Cashman, Prohibition: The Lie of the Land.
16 Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 35–36.
17 Bittenbender, Ada, The National Prohibitory Amendment Guide (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1889), 28 Google Scholar; Musmanno, 226–28; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 18–31, 62–63, 130; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 36–42; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 9–10; Chamberlain, Yanus, and Pyeatt, “From Reconstruction to Reform.”
18 Mugler v. Kansas, 123 U.S. 623 (1887)
19 Bowman v. Chicago & Northwestern Railway, Co., 125 U.S. 465 (1888) and Leisy v. Hardin, 135 U.S. 100, 123–25 (1890). On Bowman and the Court’s narrow interpretation of the states’ power to inspect interstate shipments and expansive intrastate police powers, see Odegard, Pressure Politics, 130–31.
20 Joseph Shippen, “Original Packages and Prohibition,” The Chautauquan, April 1890, 459–60.
21 Quoted in Bittenbender, The National Prohibitory Amendment Guide, 45–46. See also Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 63–70.
22 Leisy v. Hardin.
23 Quoted in Bittenbender, The National Prohibitory Amendment Guide, 45–46.
24 Minutes of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Fourteenth Annual Meeting (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1888), 58; Musmanno, 228–30; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 48, 73–78; Ely, “The Railroad System Has Burst through State Limits,” 958. Note also that the brewing industry blacklisted the Pennsylvania Railroad for contributing to the Anti-Saloon League and the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad for forbidding employees from drinking, suggesting that railroad management could have dry tendencies. Odegard, Pressure Politics, 264–165.
25 The Congressional Record: Fifty-First Congress, First Session, vol. 21 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 5325–26; The Congressional Record: Sixty-Second Congress, Third Session, vol. XLIX (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 828.
26 In re Rahrer v. United States, 140 U.S. 545 (1891).
27 Ames, Herman Vandenburg, The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States during the First Century of Its History (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 272–73Google Scholar; Musmanno, 225–33; Grimes, Alan Pendleton, Democracy and the Amendments to the Constitution (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1978), 82–84 Google Scholar; Kyvig, David E., Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1995 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 218–21Google Scholar; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 78–88. Culberson quoted in Hamm, 84.
28 As Chamberlain and Yanus conclude, “the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union … was able to strategically mobilize first in states with unified Republican state legislatures” and in those with greater WCTU membership with adoption of WCTU policies in neighboring states. The WCTU’s state campaigns thus did not happen in isolation. Chamberlain and Yanus, “Membership, Mobilization, and Policy Adoption in the Gilded Age,” 364.
29 The Prohibition Party similarly in 1882 rebranded itself as the “Home Protection Party” to capitalize on shared membership, structure, and goals with the WCTU. For more on this connection, see Chamberlain, Yanus, and Pyeatt, “From Reconstruction to Reform.”
30 Odegard, Pressure Politics, 130.
31 “The Battle Shifts to the City,” The American Issue, January 1, 1910, 9.
32 See the Maine Constitution of 1820, Article XXVI; the Rhode Island Constitution of 1843, Amendment 5, Article 5; the Iowa Constitution of 1857, Article I, Section 26; the Kansas Constitution of 1861, Article XV, Section 10; the North Dakota Constitution of 1889, Article XX; and the South Dakota Constitution of 1889, Article XXIV. Four states constitutionalized the local option. See the Texas Constitution of 1876, Article XVI, Section 20; the Florida Constitution of 1885, Article XIX; the Kentucky Constitution of 1891, Section 61; the Delaware Constitution of 1897, Article XIII, Section 1–3; and Norman Egbert Richardson, The Liquor Problem (New York: Association Press, 1915), 126; Odegard, Pressure Politics, 130; Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 68–198; Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform, 85–94, 102–11; Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 52–71, 117–40; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 40; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 10–12; Dinan, The American State Constitutional Tradition, 256–70; Dinan, State Constitutional Politics, 238–41; Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 37.
33 Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 11.
34 Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 61.
35 As Beienburg notes, “The league would cooperate with and even employ Klansmen, but only those who kept their Klan and league responsibilities separate.” Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 12.
36 Pegram, “Hoodwinked”; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 139–41.
37 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 17–18.
38 Key, V. O., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 1949), 3–12 Google Scholar; Erikson, Robert S., “Malapportionment, Gerrymandering, and Party Fortunes in Congressional Elections,” The American Political Science Review 66, no. 4 (1972): 1234–4510.2307/1957176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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40 See the Oklahoma Constitution of 1907, Article I, Section 7 and Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 105–7; Steedman, Marek D., “Demagogues and the Demon Drink : Newspapers and the Revival of Prohibition in Georgia,” in Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, ed. Nackenoff, Carol and Novkov, Julie (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 65–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 17–18.
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43 Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform, 108.
44 Stewart, Charles and Weingast, Barry R., “Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 6, no. 2 (1992): 223–7110.1017/S0898588X00000985CrossRefGoogle Scholar,; Woodward-Burns, Robinson, “Federal Experimentation through State Constitutional Initiatives,” Nebraska Law Review 101, no. 1 (2022)Google Scholar.
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51 Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 149.
52 Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900-1920, 166.
53 State courts affirmed in 1909 that the legislature could institute a local option for “saloon territories.” See the Colorado Constitution of 1876, Article XVIII, Section 5 and Article XXII, Section 1; People v. Parsons, 76 P. 666 (Colo. 1904); Schwartz v. People, 104 P.2d 92 (Colo. 1909); and Collins, Richard and Oesterle, Dale, The Colorado State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 238–39, 371, 429Google Scholar.
54 See the Texas Constitution of 1876, Article XVI, Section 20.
55 See the Kansas Constitution of 1861, Article XV, Section 10.
56 See the North Dakota Constitution of 1889, Article XX, Section 217; State v. Fargo Bottling Works Co., 124 N.W. 387 (1910); and Leahy, James E., The North Dakota State Constitution: A Reference Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26 Google Scholar.
57 Note that this clause was soon repealed. See the South Dakota Constitution of 1889, Article XXIV and Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 157, 160; Garry, Patrick M., The South Dakota State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 30 Google Scholar; Dinan, State Constitutional Politics, 240.
58 See the Oklahoma Constitution of 1907, Article I, Section 7.
59 For internal ASL and WCTU documents on using railroads to aid campaigns, see Cherrington, Ernest H., History of the Anti-Saloon League (Westerville, OH: American Issue Publishing Company, 1913), 29–30 Google Scholar; Forty-Third Annual Report of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (Evanston, IL: Bowman Publishing Company, 1916), 149, 272, 304. For an example of intrastate WCTU campaigning by rail, see Thirty-First Annual Report of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of the State of Maine (Portland, ME: Press of the Courier-Gazette, 1905), 38, 66. On WCTU revenue, see Chamberlain, Yanus, and Pyeatt, “From Reconstruction to Reform,” 707, 716–17.
60 Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 181.
61 As Odegard explains, “This decision made the Wilson Act innocuous, for it was possible to ship liquor into prohibition territory by merely entering into a contract of sale before shipment, in which case the state law did not apply until actual delivery had been made.” See Rhodes v. Iowa, 170 U.S. 412, 422 (1898) and Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Convention of the Anti-Saloon League of America, 1911, 30–31; Odegard, Pressure Politics, 130–32; Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 214–34; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 179; Ely, “The Railroad System Has Burst through State Limits,” 959.
62 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 21.
63 Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 180–81.
64 The Good Roads movement of the late nineteenth century aided goods delivery, albeit often on short intrastate routes initially worked by horses. For example, as Mom and Kirsch note, in summer, “people drank more beer, but the heat also exhausted horses and made it more difficult for them to provide normal service” such that beer delivery by horse was often short haul. The introduction of the automobile in the late 1900s and early 1910s aided beer shipment, but still on short routes. As Mom and Kirsch note, “Among commodity suppliers, coal, ice, and beer distributors were typical early users of motor vehicles. The distances covered were usually short, often less than five miles.” They add, “By 1906, users of commercial gasoline-engine and electric trucks … transported small and medium-sized packages to and from railheads,” leaving interstate shipment to the rail companies. Interstate regulation, the purview of Congress, thus concerned railroads, and not automobiles in the 1910s. Prohibitionists specifically targeted interstate rail shipment in their model congressional prohibition bills in 1890 and 1913 and amendments, mainly introduced after 1913. Bulk interstate trucking, including of liquor, began later, with the first mass-produced truck, the Model TT, in 1917 and with interstate road paving in the 1920s, although truck production remained marginal to Ford through the mid-1920s. Prohibitionists thus sought congressional regulation before mass interstate beer trucking and likely not because of it. However, by the late 1910s and early 1920s, the car and truck, now in mass production, became central to bootlegging, perhaps not surprisingly in Detroit, where these automobiles were manufactured, as Lisa McGirr shows. Mom, Gijs P. A. and Kirsch, David A., “Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900-1925,” Technology and Culture 42, no. 3 (2001): 496–9710.1353/tech.2001.0128CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, David W., Mass Motorization and Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 14, 46–49 Google Scholar; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 50, 100, 112, 193–94.
65 ASL and WCTU leadership traveled by rail between state campaigns and to Washington, and WCTU members distributed flyers in rail stations and on trains. In internal memos, leadership admitted their reliance on rail carriers. See Thirty-First Annual Report of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of the State of Maine, 38, 66; Cherrington, History of the Anti-Saloon League, 29–30; Forty-Third Annual Report of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 149, 272, 304. As Chamberlain, Yanus, and Pyeatt note, state-level interest groups, including the WCTU, generally had higher dues revenue in states with greater technological modernization, and railroad development in particular. As they conclude, “Modernization, such as rapid expansion of railroads, increased industrialization, and technological advancement alters citizen participation in politics. Perhaps at no time in American history was this clearer than during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” Chamberlain, Yanus, and Pyeatt, “From Reconstruction to Reform,” 707, 716–17.
66 Anti-Saloon League proceedings quoted in Odegard, Pressure Politics, 132. See also Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 203–26.
67 Cherrington, Ernest H., ed., The Anti-Saloon League Yearbook (Westerville, OH: Anti-Saloon League of America, 1913), 21 Google Scholar; Cherrington, History of the Anti-Saloon League, 153–54.
68 The Congressional Record: Sixty-Second Congress, Third Session, XLIX:828; Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 203–26.
69 Prior to 1914, drys petitioned Congress to statutorily regulate the interstate trade using the Commerce Clause, yielding the Wilson and Webb-Kenyon Acts. Congress’s Commerce Clause power to statutorily regulate interstate liquor shipment was itself subject to judicial approval, per the Bowman and Leisy cases, such that drys also sought an amendment to protect these congressional acts. Most constitutional amendment proposals between 1876 and 1914 sought to expressly empower Congress to regulate interstate traffic—there were twenty-three such proposals, whereas only eleven amendments in these years sought to regulate manufacture. That is, drys’ initial decision to petition to Congress was likely not motivated by an attempt to stop manufacturing; regulating manufacture became a later goal alongside regulating interstate traffic.
70 Though in principle, drys could have used a convention called by the states to initiate an amendment. Such efforts have traditionally been futile, as drys may have known. Caplan, Russell L., Constitutional Brinksmanship: Amending the Constitution by National Convention: Amending the Constitution by National Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
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72 Grimes, Democracy and the Amendments to the Constitution, 82–90; Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform, 111–19; Bernstein, Richard B. and Agel, Jerome, Amending America: If We Love the Constitution So Much, Why Do We Keep Trying to Change It? (New York: Random House, 1993), 173 Google Scholar; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 3–6; Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 27–30. The Hobson-Sheppard amendment provoked states’ rights resistance, particularly from former President William Howard Taft, who held the amendment’s enforcement provision would level a “direct blow at local self-government.” Taft quoted in Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, 230. Taft had also opposed the Webb-Kenyon Act, proposed only ten months before the Hobson-Sheppard amendment. As James A. Morone notes, it was not the failure of enforcement under the Webb-Kenyon Act but rather Congress’s success in passing the Act over Taft’s veto that emboldened the ASL to propose the amendment so soon after. Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 309–10Google Scholar.
73 From the proposal of the first dry amendment in 1876 to 1895, amendment proposals came only from the six dry states: Kansas, the Dakotas, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont After 1895, members of Congress stopped proposing prohibition amendments, save for proposals in 1908 and 1911. At ASL and WCTU behest, members of Congress resumed proposals in earnest in 1913. Between 1913 and 1919, Congress heard forty proposals, twenty-eight of them from members representing Southern or Western states. Amendment proposals thus shifted from New England in the early years to the South and West in the later years, following the shift in distribution of dry states. For more on voting coalitions in Southern and Western states in these years, see, for example, Sanders, Roots of Reform.
74 See the Oregon Constitution of 1857, Article I, Section 36 and Cherrington, The Anti-Saloon League Yearbook, 95; Blocker, Retreat from Reform, 216; Clark, Norman H., The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 36, 138 10.1515/9780295800011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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82 Stewart and Weingast, “Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation.”
83 Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, 3–12; Erikson, “Malapportionment, Gerrymandering, and Party Fortunes in Congressional Elections.”
84 Cashman, Prohibition: The Lie of the Land; Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, 435.
85 See the Arizona Constitution of 1912, Article XXIII, Section 1; the Colorado Constitution of 1876, Article XXII, Section 1; the Oregon Constitution of 1857, Article XXXIX, Section 36; and Richardson, The Liquor Problem, 128–29; Kerr, Organized for Prohibition, 139–59, 187–94; Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform, 111–19; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 22–23; Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 37–38; Kingdon, John W., Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (London: Longman, 2003)Google Scholar.
86 McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 21–22.
87 Clark Distilling Co. v. Western Maryland Railway Co., 242 U.S. 311 (1917) and Odegard, Pressure Politics, 147.
88 Mainly thanks to pressure from Southern and Western Grangers and agrarian, populist voters, who formed the dry electorate. Sanders, Roots of Reform, 127, 144.
89 Colvin, Prohibition in the United States, 435; Dinan, State Constitutional Politics, 238–41; Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 33–34; McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 33–35.
90 Webb quoted in The Southern Reporter, vol. 87 (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1921), 413. See also Report of the Senate Education and Labor Committee (Washington, DC: Fiftieth Congress, First Session, March 2, 1889); The Congressional Record: Sixty-Fifth Congress, First Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 5552; The Congressional Record: Sixty-Sixth Congress, First Session, vol. 58 Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 562; Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States’ Rights, 35–36, 43, 51–54, 101–2, 265n86.