This article examines the dry crusade that brought Prohibition to the nation by tracing the early life and career of one of its chief state-level leaders. Born in Ohio and raised in Illinois, Edward S. Shumaker made a career for himself in Indiana, where he led the Indiana branch of the Anti Saloon League from the early 1900s until his death in 1929. His story demonstrates how religious and cultural influences merged in the American heartland into a moral reform movement that combined elements of traditional religion and politics with the Social Gospel and progressivism. As Shumaker saw it, the prohibition movement rested upon a fundamental argument about what it meant to be an American during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A powerful force in Shumaker's life as in the nation overall, the dry reform transformed Shumaker from a young man seemingly destined to hold a conventional Methodist pastorate into a political activist who helped make the nation dry.