A potentially contentious issue appeared on the agenda when the Baptist Ministers Union, a group of African American preachers based in Washington, D.C., convened in the early weeks of 1914. Some of the organization’s members harbored disdain for Black journalist William Calvin Chase and his popular newspaper, the Washington Bee. They questioned whether the Bee constituted an appropriate forum for the city’s Black community. John Milton Waldron, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, pointedly revealed his frustrations with the periodical. Chase, he complained, had “maliciously attacked him” in past editorials while also defending alcohol consumption. Waldron voiced “support for any good paper that stood for principles,” but craved an alternative Black news source in the city in hopes that “it would make the Bee behave itself and do better.” Another minister, only identified as Reverend Norman, concurred. He demanded Chase retract a previous statement in which he declared “that a man who neither smoked, chewed, or drank could not be trusted.” In response to their criticism, Chase rebuked Protestant irreproachability. An occasional drink or puff was a possible sign of immorality, he contended, but “no man was perfect, be he a minister or anyone else.”Footnote 1 Based on an account of the meeting published in the Bee, Chase and the ministers ultimately conducted a jovial exchange. Yet beneath the quips and amicable mood lay a rhetorical strategy Chase adopted as head of the Bee to wage an unforgiving campaign against anti-liquor reformers.
After he assumed control of the Bee in 1882, William Calvin Chase oversaw a vigorous journalistic effort to combat Prohibition.Footnote 2 Using his editorial authority, he lashed out at dry reformers and became a staunch defender of the public right to consume alcohol. He initially confronted the Baptist Ministers Union in 1908 under the headline, “The Colored Preachers,” in which he dismissed the clergymen as a bunch of closeted hypocritical drunks who should “let the whiskey question alone.” With his typical condescending manner, the journalist chided preachers and redirected them toward “other things that they can handle more effectively than the whiskey question.” And, he added, “if they don’t know what they are the Bee will enlighten them very shortly.”Footnote 3 These other things concerned segregation, lynching, and various other forms of racial hostility African Americans experienced during the Progressive Era.
This article examines Chase’s anti-prohibitionist sentiments and related commentary published in the Washington Bee during the dry movement. Chase’s pro-liquor apologetics flagged racism, racial violence, and Jim Crow as problems far more injurious to the Black community than a glass of beer or a shot of whiskey. In its anti-prohibitionist crusade, the Bee commonly targeted Black ministers. Fixated on the prospects of a depraved nation and what they saw as other perils of liquor trafficking, members of the Baptist Ministers Union joined a host of social reformers to advocate for the criminalization of booze. Chase considered their stance a patent display of moral and religious hypocrisy and disruptive to racial progress. He leveled the same criticism at politicians, law enforcement officials, business leaders, and temperance organizers, charging each constituent with the suppression of Black social and political advancement. Calls to codify Prohibition via a constitutional amendment rather than through plebiscite especially raised alarms for Chase, who feared that the legislative process might trigger a repeal of Reconstruction Era amendments favorable to racial equality.
Chase witnessed firsthand the type of racial discrimination he sought to underscore in anti-prohibitionist discourse. Born in the District of Columbia in 1854 to free and middle-class parents, Lucinda Seaton Chase, of the prominent Virginia-based Seaton family, and William H. Chase, a blacksmith and entrepreneur from Maryland, the aspiring journalist gained an interest in the press as an eleven-year-old boarding school student in Massachusetts and before attending Howard University Model School.Footnote 4 He initially sold newspapers to support his mother after the accidental death of his father in 1863. This experience possibly led to one of Chase’s earliest encounters with racism. According to a profile by William J. Simmons, his former teacher at Howard, “the prejudice against colored newsboys was so great that they were not allowed by the white newsboys to come where they were.”Footnote 5 Such occurrences became routine. When Chase subsequently obtained a position in the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1875, he anticipated a promotion but was denied the opportunity in another possible act of racial discrimination. Filing a complaint with the government, he openly condemned the mistreatment of Black federal employees and clashed with members of the Black community over their support for Almon Clapp, the United States Public Printer at the time.Footnote 6
Chase’s first official assignment as a reporter came with the Boston Observer in the late 1870s, after which he simultaneously wrote for the Boston Co-Operator and oversaw sections of the Washington Plaindealer. Clashes with the Plaindealer’s editor resulted in a transition to the Argus, where he possessed greater authority, evident by his decision to change the name of the periodical to the Freelance in 1880. Nonetheless, Chase moved on from the Freelance and took up a position at the Washington Bee under the direction of William V. Turner. The Bee was ripe for Chase’s anti-prohibitionist crusade. Founded in June 1882, it functioned as a main source of news for the Black community in Washington, D.C., until 1922. A prominent feature of the periodical involved the editorial section, in addition to a social column dedicated to reporting local community events. Combined with a readership numbered in the thousands for most of its existence, the focus on editorials enabled Chase to appreciate a large audience as he promoted his views. Staff members included several associate editors and office workers, but Chase maintained control of the paper until his death in 1921, shortly after which the Bee shuttered for lack of financial support.Footnote 7
According to William Calvin Chase biographer Hal Scripps Chase (who was no relation), “just how [Chase] became associated with the Bee is unknown.” The circumstances surrounding his ascent to the editorial position are also undocumented.Footnote 8 Yet Chase’s campaign against Clapp and the battles he waged at each journalistic post—marked by a willingness to topple the state and attack members of his own community—signaled his dedication to an indiscriminate unmasking of racial injustice. By the time he assumed the helm of the Bee in 1882, Chase had quarreled with prominent activist and statesman Frederick Douglass, the D.C. public school system, the local police force, several politicians, and the Secretary of the Treasury.Footnote 9
An exploration of anti-prohibitionist sentiment in the Bee contrasts existing studies on Prohibition, which seldom investigate the formidable role of Black thinkers at variance with the dry movement. In one of the earliest essays on southern Black Prohibitionists, Hanes Walton Jr. and James E. Taylor adopted a state-by-state analysis to locate “the precise position” of African Americans in the anti-liquor crusade. Focusing on Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, these historians demonstrated how the unique political landscape of each state influenced Black advocacy for liquor reform. In late-1880s Tennessee, they pointed out, tens of thousands of African Americans held conflicting views about dry reform. Black preachers “declared that prohibition was a slave law and it would put some in bondage and leave others to do as they pleased.” Meanwhile, Black residents in North Carolina aligned themselves with the Liberal Anti-Prohibitionist Party. These brief but critical observations raise several questions about Black resentment toward anti-alcohol policies, questions of which remain under-investigated in the historical record.Footnote 10
Moreover, Chase’s meeting with the Black Baptists illuminates the intraracial tensions central to debates over alcohol during the Progressive Era. The present work disrupts a common thread in Prohibition scholarship in which historians juxtapose the racist views of white reformers with the more egalitarian vision of Black dry activists. In these studies, African Americans championed a circumscribed wet society to contest white moral anxieties about the drink, an approach that reduces Black reformers to mere targets of white moral panic.Footnote 11 As Mark Schrad has critically pointed out, scholars of Prohibition often see Black activists “as objects—disempowered, passive and subject to the whims of some other (white) actor—rather than actors in their own right, possessing their own power, capable of action, organization and resistance.”Footnote 12 Chase’s animosity toward Black anti-alcohol reformers complicates this overarching narrative by adding a diverse set of Black voices to the dialogue on race and Prohibition.
Beyond a multi-layered account of African American perspectives in the alcohol debate, mining anti-prohibitionism in the Washington Bee recovers the subversive rhetoric deployed by journalists and other public writers in defiance of a nationwide campaign that social reformers seemingly embraced with near universality. Sitting at the periphery of Prohibition scholarship, these voices substantiate Ellen Lawson’s contention that “resistance to Prohibition is not usually a serious subject in US history.”Footnote 13 In one exception, David Kyvig has assessed pro-alcohol organizing in the years leading up to the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal. “Shortly before the adoption of national prohibition,” he writes, a disparate host of stakeholders, comprised of saloon owners, brewers, labor unions, distillers, and journalists, mounted an opposition to the dry movement.Footnote 14 More recently, scholars have documented the activities of young Black Harlemites and African American women enticed by the prospects of financial gain through the illicit sale of alcohol. Their studies unearthed some crucial motivations behind Black pro-alcohol resistance.Footnote 15 Yet questions remain. How did African Americans protest liquor restrictions and align with the drink beyond a flagrant violation of the law? Chase’s anti-prohibitionist rhetoric builds on previous analyses while addressing these questions.
Hal Scripps Chase, the biographer, has asserted that the Bee adopted a mild treatment of Prohibition.Footnote 16 While he recognized several instances in which the Bee blasted the contradictive behavior of dry reformers and warned of restrictions on individual freedom under an anti-alcohol state, Scripps Chase argued that its writers “did not consider [Prohibition] seriously and often resorted to ridicule.”Footnote 17 A closer analysis of the Bee, however, uncovers a more aggressive and socially informed rejection of liquor policing. William Calvin Chase found the racist elements of anti-alcohol reform troubling. Unlike the bulk of his contemporaries, however, he considered regulation of the drink a climax, rather than the antithesis, of Jim Crow. To emphasize this argument, Chase singled out the church for its hypocrisy, sounded the alarm about the sanctity of individual rights, and advocated for Black freedom.
“Is This Consistency or Hypocritical?”: Chase’s Anti-Prohibitionist Critique of Black Ministers
Many socially conservative African Americans came to reject Prohibition as the country neared enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, but William Calvin Chase had long propagated an anti-dry message throughout the pages of the Washington Bee. Footnote 18 In 1891, decades prior to his meeting with the Baptist Minister Union, Chase castigated George Washington Moore, pastor of the Lincoln Memorial Congregational Church, after the minister lobbied the D.C. Board of Commissioners to quash saloon patrons in Hell’s Bottom, a section of the city notorious at the time for its high crime rates. Writing in the American Missionary Quarterly, Moore detailed the community’s blight: “seventeen saloons within two squares of our mission and several gambling places … more cutting and shooting affrays, more police on duty and more subjects for the hospital and station-house than in any other section of the District of Columbia.”Footnote 19 To combat these conditions, Moore established the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor under the umbrella of the American Missionary Association and requested that D.C. politicians limit the approval of saloon licenses for proprietors near his church. Chase labeled Moore grumpy and his efforts inane. City officials, he noted, had already deauthorized saloon operations in Hell’s Bottom. To Chase, Moore’s seemingly cranky attitude belied an obstructed view of reality fueled by an anti-liquor fervor.
In Chase’s opinion, the religious zeal Black preachers like Moore embodied and the moral high ground they occupied impeded the struggle against racial segregation. “If [Moore] would devote the same energy in asking the District Commissioners to close up every lunch room, restaurant, in other public inns that discriminate against a man on account of his color,” he wrote, “he would receive the thanks of the people.”Footnote 20 Chase directed the same criticism at the Star Chamber Civic Association, a network of Black businessmen committed to the anti-saloon cause, when he instructed the organization to instead “devote its time to a most profitable avocation.” The city’s ills, he argued, comprised “thousands of things that are more harmful to the negro than the whiskey saloons. What is this Civic Association doing to establish civil and political rights of the colored man? What is it doing to abolish the ‘Jim Crow’ corners in the government departments, on steamboats and railroads?” Black residents in post-Reconstruction Washington experienced entrenched discriminatory practices in public spaces that relegated them to second-class citizenship and persisted well into the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 21
The battles Chase waged with D.C.’s elite foreshadowed his relentless approach to reporting. In 1905, the Washington Bee attacked the Civic Association again, accusing the organization’s members of mimicking white reformers in their denunciation of alcohol. “Negroes … are imitators,” the piece read, “and they are of the opinion that they must do what they see white people do.” Rather than view the potential dangers of alcohol consumption as a legitimate problem with broad-reaching consequences for the Black community, the newspaper considered anti-liquor reformist rhetoric a source of white moral panic. The writers at the paper called for Black reformers to instead place a higher priority on addressing “those banking schemes that periodically spring up in a community … mak[ing] the servant girl, the laborer, and hundreds of charitable institutions penniless.” They also questioned the Civic Association’s character, counting the organization among other institutions and individuals “that will make spectacular performances to influence or betray the weak mind,” among them “preachers [who] will condemn immorality from the pulpit and at the same time attempt to corrupt the morals of the youth.” Invoking a label that would become a common refrain in Chase’s contempt for Prohibitionists, the newspaper designated the organization and related ministers as “shams.”Footnote 22
In a separate editorial, Chase furthered his protest of racial violence and his aversion to Prohibition. A wave of rampant unscrupulous activity existed across Washington, D.C., he insinuated, but “the Temperance sham” represented “the most boisterous and less effective and more destructive.” Too many community leaders and politicians had rallied around the dry movement to the detriment of the anti-lynching cause. Chase challenged the predominance of dry advocacy in their attempts to regenerate the country. “Suppose drunkenness is stopped, what is to be done with other graver crimes committed upon a helpless people, for instance, the colored people?”Footnote 23 The question was consistent with the newspaper’s history of reporting on lynchings and its numerous calls for reforms at the state and federal levels.Footnote 24
The attacks that the Bee launched on the Baptist Ministers and the Civic Association would have come as no surprise to the newspaper’s frequent subscribers. Chase had long outlined his discontent with Black leaders, annoyed by what he saw as their complacency around the race problem. “The state of indifference and callousness to public affairs into which the colored people are falling is something alarming,” he stated in an editorial published in 1905, “and unless something is done to arouse the masses to a proper sense of public responsibility, direful results will speedily follow.” Chase cited the 1900 census and its depiction of Black progress, including “diminished illiteracy, diminished criminality, diminished mortality, increase of teachers, increase of preachers, increase of land owners, and increase of business enterprises.” Yet he felt Black advancement would stall if community leaders failed to retain a “sense of justice, liberty, and equality before the law” and displayed a lack of “manly courage, political sense, and political aggressiveness.” To ensure Black political and social viability, Chase proposed a broad public policy program comprised of an eradication of debt peonage, the pursuit of educational equality, and an end to racial segregation on public transportation.Footnote 25
Chase’s socio-political agenda stressed economic and electoral reforms, as well. He raised concerns about impending threats to Black businesses, enterprises he deemed indispensable to Black social and political autonomy. He also discussed the need for racially conscious elected officials and worried about the protection of the Fifteenth Amendment. Likening the station of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century to that of “a slave,” Chase charged that southern working-class white voters possessed an interest in maintaining the racial order. “In many instances, the poor white man is against the Negro in business. There are places in the South where the colored man in business is being opposed and compelled to leave his home. The ballot in the South has been taken from him.”Footnote 26 This erosion of Black economic and political rights prevailed in part because of an immoderate focus on liquor reform. The nation stood to gain the most “if one-third of these prohibition advocates would employ the same time in establishing honest elections, good citizenship, eliminating ‘Jim Crow’ cars, ‘Jim Crow’ saloons and ‘Jim Crow’ churches and other ‘Jim Crow’ institution[s].”Footnote 27
Chase additionally underscored the religious hypocrisy of temperance advocates, and launched again into an unsparing attack on Black ministers:
You very often hear a man say—in fact, many preachers say—that whiskey drinkers ought to be in the lower regions; but you will never hear these pious hypocrites condemn the man who ruins another man’s daughter, outrages his wife or corrupts the moral of a good and happy home. You will find thousands of these prohibitionist advocates guilty of these very acts. Thousands of these prohibition advocates are moral lepers—the preacher not excepted. Watch the man, be he preacher or what not, but many of these preachers, especially those who cry out against Prohibition, are unfit to enter a decent home.Footnote 28
The wayward conduct of clergy undercut the moral authority of the entire church. For Chase, adultery and sexual assault rated much higher than alcohol consumption on a list of misdeeds, and the band of sanctimonious Christians in support of liquor constraints posed the real threat to society. These “temperance shams,” as Chase referred to them in yet another column, “will drink as much whiskey as those who haven’t signed the pledge or advocate temperance … A minister of the gospel will do more lieing [sic] than a whiskey drinker will devour whiskey. Who is the greater evil to society? An honest whiskey drinker is less dangerous to society than a liar.”Footnote 29 Anti-prohibitionists were “honest and open,” but temperance crusaders and “pretended Christians” preyed on the poor through the constant solicitation of donations for their religious endeavors. Employing the rhetoric that later caused a rift between him and Rev. Norman, Chase argued that “the man who claims he neither drinks nor smokes is a dangerous element in society, and to a community.”Footnote 30 Black ministers simply lacked the level of perfection they expected from their congregations. Gamblers and adulterers, these men patronized the “sporting house” and entertained “a dozen mistresses.” If not engaged in adultery, it seemed, Black preachers pursued multiple women at once. The backroom gaming, womanizing, and clandestine drinking ultimately led the Bee to question the Black community’s loyalty to Protestant Christianity. “The frequent attacks on the saloons by the pulpit,” Chase argued, “should be sufficient cause for the people to stop and consider what it all means … The Bee is aware of certain ministers who drink whiskey and at the same time condemn others who have an appetite for it. Is this consistency or hypocritical?”Footnote 31 Chase withheld specific names throughout his rants, and the bulk of his assertions rested on general anecdotes. His commentary nonetheless emphasized his innocuous view of drinking compared to other issues.
Black allegiance to Prohibition irked Chase, given the segregationist practices of white anti-liquor reformers. When an unidentified organization “appealed to the colored people or those who believe in temperance, to annex themselves as a ‘Jim Crow’ auxiliary to their organization,” the journalist lambasted its leadership. Finding the recommendation dishonorable, he turned to the “so-called colored Christian Advocates of temperance” and challenged their devotion to the dry cause. White temperance organizers had displayed no interest in addressing “‘Jim Crow’ cars.” Rather, he explained, they “pretend to believe in God and the Christian teachings of Christ, and at the very same time they refuse to associate with the Christian colored people.” Why support “a set of hypocrites[?]” he asked of Black temperance workers.Footnote 32
Editors at the Cadiz Informer, a Baptist newspaper based in Kentucky, found issue with the onslaught of criticism Chase directed at preachers. They considered their fellow brothers of the cloth on “the right side of moral questions,” backed by several biblical passages that categorized alcohol consumption as a fixed spiritual transgression. Chase’s frequent turn to religious hypocrisy was not persuasive enough to flout religious mandates that called for Christians to abstain from alcohol. “If some preachers drink whiskey,” they reasoned, “then doubtless there are whiskey-drinking preachers. God said there would be men who were lovers of flesh and of worldly pleasure.” The Black Baptists suggested congregants adopt a measured approach to the debate on alcohol. Sure, “pastors and preachers who drink whiskey set a very bad example to their churches,” but church members should simply “find sober pastors and preachers who can do without their dram.”Footnote 33
When the Bee published the Baptist ministers’ objections in 1908, it exhibited a level of impartiality uncommon in its coverage of anti-alcohol reformers and mostly prevalent during the 1880s. In 1886, the Bee reprinted from the Issue the opinion of famed abolitionist-turned-statesman Frederick Douglass when he converted to temperance after “contemplation of the evils of intemperance not only upon the dram drinker, but upon his family, his friends, and upon society generally [original emphasis].” The Bee not only publicized the letter but commended Douglass for a “significant and valuable” contribution to the debate on alcohol.Footnote 34 The newspaper also condemned the physical violence met by Henry McNeal Turner, the episcopal head of the African Methodist Episcopal church, in 1887, when he attempted to deliver a speech on Prohibition in Texas. An editorial dubbed the attackers “an armed mob of backlegs, thieves, and gamblers” and bemoaned a political climate where “respectable citizens are not allowed to express their views without being assaulted by a mob of cutthroats.”Footnote 35
Perhaps the most surprising display of objectivity was illustrated through the Bee’s criticism of John Wesley Cromwell, the founder and editor of a rival D.C. newspaper, The Advocate. In 1887, Crowell published “Woe unto You, Hypocrities!” and attacked ministers using the same tactics that the Bee and Chase later adopted as the country neared legalization of Prohibition. Crowell specifically accused Black ministers of hypocrisy, portraying them as sinners who “denounce social card playing in the pulpit, but can be seen in parlors ‘taking a hand’ with the whiskey bottle by their side or playing for beer.” The Bee took exception to these characterizations, stating that Crowell had lobbed unfair generalizations at clergymen. The editors insisted on a view of Black ministers as venerable practitioners “of the gospel in whom the people confide and who are the angels of peace and wisdom.”Footnote 36 They demanded he either retract the statement or “name one minister in this city who is guilty of immorality, gambling, drinking beer, and swearing.” In a petty display of antagonism, the Bee even offered to pay for a list.Footnote 37
During the 1890s, the Bee’s coverage of Prohibition shifted. Chase maintained his reports on the activities of dry reformers. He also continued to denounce violence and urge readers to instead resist Prohibition at the ballot box.Footnote 38 Yet much of his coverage of the dry movement materialized in combative and obstinate ways. He ramped up his anti-alcohol furor, framing Prohibition as a distraction from racial discrimination and a threat to personal freedom. One editorial compared the battle waged by “advocates of whiskey” to a fight for “equality in citizenship.”Footnote 39 This language aligned with the ideas of wet thinkers across the country, who stressed the importance of a latitudinal citizenry in the Prohibition debate. Plenty of dry advocates also voiced skepticism at legislative reforms enacted for the purpose of a liquor ban, and Chase would rely on these thinkers as he ramped up his anti-dry crusade.Footnote 40
“A Strange Coincidence”: In Pursuit of Liberty and Equal Enforcement of the Law
Chase carefully maneuvered his political networks as he fostered an anti-prohibitionist platform. A staunch Republican, he held a longstanding relationship with the party, seeking delegate positions at multiple conventions between 1884 and 1916. He also emerged as a passionate ally of William Howard Taft during the election of 1908 and throughout Taft’s presidency.Footnote 41 But Chase attempted to balance this allegiance with a strident critique of elected officials. As Hal Scripps Chase has observed, the Bee’s politics were “pragmatic and partisan.”Footnote 42 This political strategy allowed the newspaper to praise Republicans while scrutinizing the party’s embrace of dry reform and its lackluster approach to racial justice. In one piece, titled “Republican Promises,” Chase alleged that elected officials across party lines seemed more “interested in the Prohibition question than they are in human rights” and accused politicians on the whole of offering nothing but “shams and promises.” At the height of his dissatisfaction with Republicans, he advised the Black community to consider alternative political groups for social progress.Footnote 43 Yet Chase never fully distanced himself from Republican camps. He instead advanced arguments about individual freedom by turning to politicians, entrepreneurs, and activists equally dismayed by the dry movement.
In 1907, the Bee reprinted a letter authored by Edward F. Abner aimed at the United States House of Representatives in protest of legislation that proposed a citywide ban on alcohol. Abner, the owner of Abner-Drury Brewery, a beer manufacturer located in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, reminded congressional lawmakers that a dry state threatened democratic freedom. “Prohibition will … deny to that great mass of American freeman, white and Black, the boon of personal liberty,” he warned.Footnote 44 The newspaper also covered the activities of the National Personal Colored Liberty League, a group of Black activists vocal about the political drawbacks of a universal proscription on liquor. Members of the Colored Liberty League considered the defeat of Prohibition just as important to individual freedom as the dismantling of Jim Crow. Adopted in 1908 and republished in the Bee, the Colored Liberty League’s platform revealed its antipathy toward “discrimination as between the citizens in [any] capacity, whether it be ‘in politics, in Jim Crow cars, in theatres, in hotels,’ or in any other public place which obtains their rights from the Government and are depended on the public for support.” They declared that “all men are created equal before the law” and vowed to wield their “influence to prevent any Legislature, Federal or State, that shall interfere in any way with our personal liberty as American citizens.”Footnote 45
In drawing a connection between individual liberty and Jim Crow, the Colored Liberty League promoted white bar owners who maintained racially inclusive businesses, such as Anthony Felder. The group’s profile of Felder, also published in the Bee, praised his tendency to judge “no man by the color of his skin or the texture of his hair, but treats every man alike. He has no ‘Jim Crow’ bars, and every man’s money looks alike to him.” Because Felder held prior residence in North Dakota, where, as the league saw it, “prohibition has proven to be a farce and absolute failure,” the group not only heralded him as an embodiment of racial equality but also as an authority on individual liberties.Footnote 46
After Washington, D.C., implemented the Jones-Works excise law in 1914, prohibiting the sale and purchase of alcohol on Sundays, Chase wrote several editorials that, like the Colored Liberty League, bridged his anti-dry campaign with the fight for racial inequality. “Take the colored citizens in the South who are robbed of their civil and political rights. Which is more dangerous to progress and society? Whiskey or murder with the shot gun and the denial of the rights and the liberties of the people?” Jim Crow and anti-alcohol laws suppressed freedom in the same manner. Prohibitionists, he argued, should “not attempt to stop others from drinking or attempt to take from those who believe in personal liberty.”Footnote 47 A rebuke of the Anti-Saloon League reasserted this view of dry reform and Jim Crow as intertwined. “If they can get the states to consider amending the Federal constitution in the interest of National Prohibition,” he wrote, “the next step will be … repealing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, fruits of four years of fratricidal strife.” That a more restrictive form of Prohibition gained traction at the same time whites violently resisted Black political participation only solidified for Chase the link between a dry state and systemic racial discrimination. He called it “a strange coincidence that” white southern politicians pursued the disenfranchisement of Black men while implementing a national ban on alcohol outside of a popular vote.Footnote 48
Complaints from Black activists about the ill intentions of white anti-dry reformers almost certainly reinforced Chase’s suspicions of a dry movement tethered to Jim Crow. Under the headline, “Prejudice and Prohibition,” the Bee homed in on a story from Ohio that discussed the racist tactics Anti-Saloon League lobbyists adopted in their quest for a statewide Prohibition mandate. “In this state as in the South,” this piece read, “every effort was made to appeal to the prejudices of the whites in the large cities by the statement that the prime object of the League is to force prohibition on the blacks, without depriving any white man of his ‘tipple.’” The report additionally noted the Anti-Saloon League’s refusal to acknowledge its Black members from the organization’s “higher councils.”Footnote 49
As Congress deliberated a vote to adopt a District-wide ban on alcohol in 1916, Chase recapitulated his belief in an autonomous society, shored up by individual liberties and racial equality. He pressed politicians on the “thousands of evils in this city more dangerous to the masses than Prohibition.” The band of dry reformers and outside lobbyists flooding D.C. in support of an alcohol-free city were really “sham reformers.” Their views misrepresented the desires of the city’s residents. The Washington Bee, he declared once again, “doesn’t agree with sham reformation” but rather “personal liberty.”Footnote 50 To further bolster this stance, the newspaper featured commentary from James Gibbon, the Archbishop of Baltimore, who delivered a speech in support of Prohibition solely through a popular vote. Gibbons argued that a statewide ban on alcohol “interferes with personal liberty and rights and creates hypocrisy in the people.” While Gibbons admitted that he swore priests to temperance and “contributed in no small measure to the suppression of the sale of intoxicants” in his own county, he attributed the success of Prohibition in that instance to local circumstances.Footnote 51
The Bee also spotlighted remarks by former president William Howard Taft, delivered to the Boston Bar Association and before his later embrace of dry reform as a member of the Supreme Court. Taft expressed doubts about a Prohibition agenda “accomplished merely by legislation.” That many states with dry legislation already on the books had advocated for a nationwide ban indicated to him “a humiliating confession of the ineffectiveness of those laws … in which the majority of the people do not sympathize with the officers of the law in enforcing them.”Footnote 52 A better solution centered on a “local option, by which the sale of liquor is forbidden in communities that by the expression of a majority of the voters show that public opinion will sustain the enforcement of such a law.”Footnote 53 Months later, the Bee tendered the same argument. The imposition of a liquor ban, wrote the editorial team, “weakens the whole body of law by creating disrespect for the law. People cannot and do not respect that which they see wantonly disregarded every day: and that is precisely what happens when prohibition is imposed without the overwhelming support of the people.”Footnote 54 Taft’s speech not only bolstered the Bee’s arguments but also denoted the political networks that Chase and other nineteenth-century Black journalists maintained.Footnote 55
A survey conducted by Hugh Fox, the former secretary of the United States Brewers Association, and published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1909, further illustrated the frequency with which residents living in a dry town circumvented the law. Reprinted by the Bee, the survey revealed an increase in liquor sales except during an economic downturn. Industrialization and new machinery—“perfection of bottling machinery, improved methods of distribution, reduced cost, and the advertising campaign”—had propelled the production of beer and boosted the entire industry. “Besides this,” Fox noted, “the operation of prohibition and local option tends to bring the consumer direct to the producer, and the demand for bottled beer in dry towns has become sufficiently important to indicate the promise of a profitable mail-order business.”Footnote 56 Even as Prohibitionists embarked on a nationwide reform campaign, the widespread disregard for authorities and the use of new technologies to advance the liquor cause signaled to Fox the hurdles lawmakers faced in their attempts to enforce a dry state.Footnote 57 He echoed these statements in a speech later delivered at a Jewish synagogue, and concluded that the country lacked a sufficient police presence to maintain a complete shutdown of the liquor industry.Footnote 58
As the newspaper played up commentary from public figures with related ideas, Chase culled data from other periodicals to further stress Prohibition’s ill effects, including the notion that a forced eradication of alcohol would engender more harmful vices. When Charles Henry Brent, a bishop in the Episcopal Church, pointed to the rise in drug use in Prohibitionist territories in an article published in the Denver Post in 1916, the Bee reprinted his statements in full. Concerned about narcotics as a substitute for alcohol, Brant remarked that “the drug store has taken the place of the saloon in may [sic] of our cities where the sale of liquor is not permitted.”Footnote 59 Along the same lines, the Bee argued in another piece, “reformers eliminated the red light district,” only to find sex workers “in every section of the city, the companions and associates of the moralists.”Footnote 60 This invoking of an uncontainable licentiousness reinforced Chase’s view of Prohibitionists as hypocritical. It also projected a central argument of anti-Prohibitionists: The criminalization of vice exacerbated what politicians sought to address rather than eradicating it. Consumers either escalated their indulgence or turned to what some anti-dry reformers considered to be a more nefarious poison.
Indeed, Chase counted an upsurge in crime among the unintended effects of dry reform. He cited a report from the Memphis Commercial Appeal that attributed lawlessness to illegal alcohol traffic even though lawmakers had previously placed a citywide sanction on saloons. Bootleggers simply continued to run afoul of the law. The study reinforced what several public figures had already voiced: “the illicit traffic in intoxicating liquors promotes more crime than the licensed saloon.”Footnote 61 Local counties in Tennessee, Alabama, and other southern states encountered a similar dilemma. According to one unnamed observer quoted in the Bee, the South had witnessed “the illicit sale of intoxicants on a scale never before experienced.” Alcohol bans and the ensuing illegal traffic compelled city officials to spend excessive amounts of revenue on law enforcement. The situation spurred an economic crisis and led Chase to issue one of his longest expositions about the fruitless and impractical nature of Prohibition.Footnote 62
Mindful of discriminatory practices in the selective enforcement of liquor policies, Chase lambasted dry reformers in Ohio after they attempted to “appeal to the prejudices of the whites in the large cities by … forc[ing] prohibition on the blacks, without depriving any white man of his ‘tipple.’” Angered by this blatant display of racial bias, a band of activists composed of the Colored Liberty League, Black journalists in Cleveland, and local Black women reformers mounted a campaign against the state’s racist Prohibitionist initiatives.Footnote 63 Chase also complained about the various ways Black preachers criminalized African Americans in their critiques of alcohol consumption. In his appeal to the D.C. Board of Commissioners, Chase argued, George Washington Moore had “selected two colored men upon which to base his attack.”Footnote 64 Fearful that alcohol consumption poorly reflected on the race and potentially jeopardized any chances of social progress, Black preachers entreated the community to abstain from drinking. Their rhetoric, as Chase saw it, lent tacit approval to white state officials in their biased administration of anti-alcohol laws.
Stories about Black saloon owners disproportionately denied liquor licenses by the Excise Board, or Black bootleggers unfairly prosecuted by local law enforcement, flooded the pages of the Bee. In 1914, city officials revoked the liquor permit held by Moses Dade, a Black bar owner, due to “an anonymous letter, the author of which was unknown to the party who presented it.”Footnote 65 The Bee found the lack of details about the reporter suspicious, given the Board’s history of racial discrimination. Drawing on his interrogative style of journalism, Chase questioned “why should colored bar rooms be closed in business sections of the city for no reason whatever and others of known reputations be permitted to exist?”Footnote 66 A later editorial scrutinized Raymond Pullman, the D.C. chief of police, after he sent a letter to federal lawmakers decrying the city’s bootlegging scene and urging changes to the Sheppard Bone-Dry Act. Enacted in 1917, this law imposed a complete ban on alcohol in the nation’s capital. Pullman, however, found it ineffective. Too many citizens, he complained, had discovered ways to circumnavigate the authorities. Fixated on Black bootleggers, Pullman portrayed them as a dangerous mob of “darkies” in defiance of the law. Having read the statements from a second-hand account published in the Evening Star, Chase criticized the officer’s apparent bias. “Anyone reading the article would readily decide that the colored people were the only persons to bring whiskey into this city,” he wrote. “Thousands of gallons are purchased elsewhere and shipped to this city by white men. Did Major Pullman overlook this item when he was talking to Senator Jones? Every colored person who brings liquor to this city is not a bootlegger or disreputable person. Because a man likes his liquor doesn’t degrade him as a citizen.”Footnote 67
Frustrated with the country’s seemingly incessant march toward national Prohibition, Chase yet again issued an indictment against anti-liquor emissaries. Political, religious, and social upheaval over booze, while “thousands of men, women, and children are being burnt at the stake, lynched without their consent and in violation of the United States,” signaled to Chase the menacingly fraudulent nature of the dry movement. “This is the sham class,” he declared. “Nothing is more dangerous to a community than religious and prohibition shams.”Footnote 68 But unlike the allegations he lobbed at Black ministers, Chase could point to several racially charged incidents as evidence of his claims, among them the race riot that erupted in Millen, Georgia, between local police officers and a crowd of well-dressed Black churchgoers on the heels of the Eighteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1919. Officers initially descended upon the crowd in search of “whiskey,” but to no avail. According to the Bee, they then accosted a “negro with an unconcealed gun in his hand and arrested and handcuffed him.” Joe Ruffin, a “well-respected Negro, who has built a fortune thereabout,” confronted the officers and offered to post the individual’s bond. In response, the officers shot Ruffin, a fight ensued, and “a crowd of white men” terrorized the entire community. Ruffin survived the attack, but the mobs murdered one of his sons and forced a second child to seek refuge in another town.Footnote 69
With the Volstead Act, the country finally enacted national Prohibition. That federal law’s passage in 1919 and implementation one year later compelled the Bee to highlight Black physicians subjected to unfair inspections. The newspaper observed that “Negroes are being arrested for setting up stills, for transporting, for selling, and for prescribing whiskey for medicinal purposes.”Footnote 70 The Bee specifically covered the arrest of two Black doctors whom police respectively accused of “using his own prescription blanks when he exhausted the supply of forms supplied by the revenue bureau” and “failing to make proper examinations of his patients” in their request for whiskey prescriptions. According to the report, the physicians were “the first to come under the liquor law ban” even though both had “followed as nearly as possible the law giving them authority to issue proscriptions.”Footnote 71 These reports exposed another layer of the dry movement’s unfair policing practices, constructed at the intersection of the law and medicine.
The Bee’s constant railing against discriminatory anti-liquor enforcement practices revealed the newspaper’s qualms about the government’s ability to administer the law fairly. Indeed, the editors stated as much when they published a historical account of racial discrimination in the dry movement under the headline “Is there Unequal Enforcement of Prohibition?” Appearing in April 1920, the editorial began with the claim that “nation-wide prohibition is the product of race hatred and religious bigotry.” It then charted a damning view of the United States in its long quest for a ban on alcohol. After the “native American” imposed negative stereotypes on Irish and German “immigrants,” it stated, Christians exercised their bias against Catholics under the guise of dry reform. Whites did the same with their “hostility to the Negro,” and an unrelenting attack on the Black community ensued. “With the advent of prohibition in the South came also disfranchisement, increased lynching, greater intolerance in the matter of travel, and a narrower educational program for the Negro. Lynching has been especially ferocious and unbridled under the prohibition regime in the South.” This entrenched form of anti-Black discrimination continued with the implementation of the Sheppard Bone-Dry Act and the Volstead Act. The Bee hammered into its readers the belief that the enforcement of both laws “was directed to the detection of Negro violators, leaving white violators to do as they would.” In typical fashion, the editorial also reminded its audience that Prohibition conflicted with a country supposedly open to personal liberty. And yet, the writer concluded, “if people will have such laws, let them be enforced alike in all cases of their violation.”Footnote 72
Conclusion
In one of its final reports, the Bee continued to underline Black alcohol peddlers detained while working for “white ‘bootleggers.’” Labeling the situation “regrettable,” the newspaper identified two cases, “a young colored woman of excellent family and Jesse Coleman, who had been at liberty only a short while.” In the latter case, an undercover Black agent arrested the unsuspecting Coleman after they traded cash for liquor. The crime landed Coleman in prison for several months along with a hefty fine. For Chase, it reflected the process by which law enforcement officials targeted Black liquor traffickers as opposed to the white bootleggers who employed them.Footnote 73 It also illustrated his ongoing resolve in presenting dry reform as a racist project, a fight cut short when he passed away suddenly just a few months later, in January 1921. In its tribute to the editor, the Bee dubbed Chase a “race man” and a journalist on a mission “to expose wrong in high and low places, which caused him to make many enemies while acting in the defense of truth and righteousness.”Footnote 74
The tribute encapsulated William Calvin Chase’s vigorous and indiscriminate pursuit of an anti-dry state. Sometimes with conjecture and often with derision, Chase railed against a myriad of Prohibitionist reformers—ministers, organizational leaders, political foes, and allies alike. Instrumental in this campaign was the Washington Bee. As chief editor, Chase leveraged the newspaper to counter the arguments of dry reformers. Yet his soapbox went beyond the mere promotion of alcohol autonomy. Chase stressed that the fight for Prohibition obscured the material conditions of Black suffering, a reality determined not by alcohol consumption but by Jim Crow. Lynching, racial segregation, labor and marketplace discrimination, and other elements of racial prejudice during the Progressive Era created more problems for African Americans than liquor did. The anti-prohibitionist sentiments mobilized by Chase in the Washington Bee highlighted these issues and fostered a robust counter-discourse to the dry movement in the struggle for African American freedom.
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