Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (review)

The American South sacrificed more than a quarter of a million young men and its economic system ostensibly to preserve the rights of states and individuals. The region's post-Civil War movement to prohibit the use of alcohol would seem, under those circumstances, an abrupt about-face. Joe L. Coker addresses this paradox in Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement. He successfully argues that the apparent ideological inconsistency was instead a triumph of southern culture, evangelical religion, and, ultimately, racism.

Coker notes that the temperance cause was weak south of the Mason Dixon line until the late stages of Reconstruction. Previous scholars tied this perceived weakness to southern fears of the alliance between temperance activists and abolitionists in the North. Coker, however, insists that antebellum temperance activity was unnecessary in the South because its "highly prized code of honor gave liquor a prominent role" (25). Further, before the war, the consumption of alcoholic beverages was a privilege reserved almost entirely for white men. Strong drink was largely unavailable to slaves, thus slave consumption was no threat to the social order.

As Bourbon Democrats regained control of southern politics, after 1880, prohibition became a tool for controlling African Americans, and, eventually, an aid in their disenfranchisement. Among the temperate, it seemed that a lack of black support for prohibition signaled that those who profited from the liquor trade were bribing black voters to support their cause. Alcohol consumption became a key element in the "rape narrative," the classic excuse for lynching an African American man who, by glimpse or word or unlucky location, was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. The deadly combination of "liquor, lust and lynching" (158) played into the hands of would-be prohibitionists. Tying liquor to the allegedly declining morals of black men gained plenty of white votes from evangelical Christians who could hide their racism behind the righteous cause of prohibition.

Coker's well-written work is strongest on race issues and the political maneuverings of Bourbon Democrats. He recognizes evangelical Christianity's ability to adapt its anti-alcohol message to southern culture as the first steps toward its prominent influence on electoral politics in the late twentieth century.

The book has two significant weaknesses. First, Coker assumes that temperance in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia is representative of the whole South. As he points out, the three states each had both rural non-slave and plantation economic sectors, but the reader questions whether his arguments would hold true in the Upper South and Florida. Second, despite his correct identification of Baptists and Methodists with southern evangelicalism, Coker betrays a lack of understanding of Methodism, especially Methodist polity. He also misidentifies Methodist founder John Wesley and is unfamiliar with the movement from Methodism's initial limited acceptance of alcohol for medicinal and digestive purposes to its strong support for temperance by the early nineteenth century, when monetary collections from Fourth of July sermons around the nation were dedicated to the anti-alcohol cause.

Coker's book is an all-too-familiar tale of a Christianity polarized by arguments about what constitutes moral behavior. The church's nineteenth century crusade against alcohol consumption has much in common with the current anti-abortion and anti-gay and lesbian debates driven by conservative evangelicals. Partisans on both sides of those battles would do well to consult Coker's work. Their tactics run distinctly parallel to those of their prohibitionist ancestors.