"Prohibition Is Here to Stay": The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America

Introduction

 Introduction In February 1929 the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker, the leader of Indiana’s “drys”—those who opposed the drinking of alcohol and supported its prohibition—left his Indianapolis home for Putnam County. The route was one he had traveled many times before in his lifelong struggle against the forces of Demon Rum. Indeed, he had gone to college in the county, at DePauw University in Green­ castle, and had begun his ministry in its outlying communities. But this trip was different. It came at the end of a protracted legal struggle , and Shumaker was going not to deliver a temperance address in defense of Prohibition but rather to surrender to authorities and to begin serving a prison sentence for contempt of the Indiana Supreme Court. With his devoted wife of nearly thirty years at his side, the sixty-one-year-old minister-reformer headed toward martyrdom for the dry cause.1 There are no monuments to Shumaker in the Hoosier State. But if one looks closely, traces of his reform and the culture that produced it are visible, despite the common assumption that Prohibition was an utter failure and properly done away with when the Twentyfirst Amendment repealed the Eighteenth in 1933. In the Indiana statehouse rotunda, a place where Shumaker held sway from 1907   | “Prohibition Is Here to Stay” until his death, there are plaques commemorating Frances Willard’s elevation to the presidency of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), another touting the first organized religious meeting in the capital city (a Methodist gathering, which happened to be Shumaker’s denomination), and another displaying the motto of the American Legion (whose national headquarters is a few blocks north of the statehouse), “For God and Country.” The main floor of the rotunda, with its public displays of religious faith and political activism, is just one story below the Supreme Court chamber where Shumaker was found guilty of contempt. They are visible reminders that the “wall of separation” between church and state in America is hardly as solid or as historic as has often been suggested. Had Shumaker lived in another time, he almost assuredly would have been counted among the “moral values voters” of the 2004 election, who placed social issues, as shaped by their religious faith, ahead of economic and foreign policy issues. If this at times confuses observers, it should not.2 American culture has always had an exceedingly moral cast because of the influence and importance of evangelical Protestantism in the nation’s history. Understanding the relationship between that faith and politics is fundamental to understanding both America as it is now and how many people think it should be. In the early twentieth century, the defining moral issue for many Americans was Shumaker’s reform, prohibition. A Methodist minister , Shumaker served for nearly a quarter of a century as the head of the Indiana Anti Saloon League, the state arm of one of the most successful Progressive Era reform groups. Historians have identified him as “a great person, violent in his hate for liquor . . . for many years the most powerful man in the prohibition movement in the Midwest,” and as a “potent force in Indiana politics” among “the half dozen most politically powerful men in Indiana” during the first third of the twentieth century.3 His life and work offer us an opportunity to under­stand better and appreciate both the dry worldview and the larger interplay of religion and politics in wider American culture. Shumaker’s story is that of an America in the midst of a dramatic transformation in its search for the proper path to follow. Born Introduction |  into an agrarian world where the frontier remained a reality, Shumaker witnessed unprecedented immigration, industrialization, and urbanization along with all their associated problems. Reformers in his mold believed they needed to craft an orderly society to deal with this state of cultural flux, which both venerated the past as well as embraced the modern world. They acknowledged that their vision was only one possible path for the country to take; and if it were to be followed, it needed to be contested in the public square. Following his conversion to Methodism as a youth, which came at the same time as his conviction that alcohol was a sin that needed to be eradicated , Shumaker accepted the call to the ministry. Though at first he seemed destined for a life within the...