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

When he died in 1899, the northern-born minister and educator in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Collins D. Elliott asked to be wrapped in an old Confederate flag and buried in his adopted southern homeland. For the last decades of his life Elliott had been an avid proponent of the Lost Cause movement and a vocal critic of southern evangelicals he accused of losing the real Civil War; the war that concerned the irascible Elliott most was not the one already decided on the field of battle but a continuing one between two opposing cultures. Elliott died before the outcome was clear, but as Joe L. Coker admirably demonstrates, he probably would not have liked how the story turned out. For in the decades between 1880 and 1915 southern white evangelicals were instrumental in transforming "the South into the standard-bearer in the agitation for national prohibition." When and how the supposed keepers of the Lost Cause "came to embrace this traditionally Yankee reform movement" makes for a fascinating story (3).

Coker's is not really a study of the prohibition movement as a whole, but of the role of white Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama evangelicals in the movement and how their engagement in prohibition signaled important changes within white southern evangelicalism. Southern evangelicals created and then clung to a doctrine of "the spirituality of the church" in the middle of the 19th century to justify their separation from northern evangelical brethren as the nation was rending itself over issues of slavery and sectionalism. After the war the doctrine became an obstacle to modernizing ministers and laymen intent on shaping southern society by banning demon rum (and everything else alcoholic) from Dixie. A minister's move from pulpit to poll could incite critics from within and without the church; as they moved from encouraging individual temperance among church members to drying up the South through legislation, evangelical prohibition activists had to overcome this legacy at the very time that southern society was changing dramatically.

Through thematic chapters on politics, race, honor, and gender, Coker explores the many ways in which white southern evangelicals were simultaneously shaped by and shapers of their cultural, political, and social environment. Their strategies to eradicate alcohol by pointing to its supposed effects on blacks heightened rather than ameliorated racial relations at the turn of the century. Thus the September 1906 Atlanta riots, four days in which white mobs attacked blacks throughout the city in response to a supposed string of black on white sexual assaults, helped Georgia evangelicals enact statewide prohibition before any other southern states. Presenting women as the helpless victims of alcoholism's effects on men and society, paternalistic white evangelicals opened space for women's cooperation and at least initially endorsed cooperation with the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). But as the WCTU expanded its objectives to include woman suffrage, male denominational leaders became suspicious of southern women's external political activism for prohibition and internal push for recognition of their leadership within churches and denominations. Thus most white evangelicals active in prohibition politics affiliated with the Local Option League, later the Anti-Saloon League, organizations to which Coker's study pays too little attention. Readers interested in the politics of prohibition will realize this Coker's not the full story, yet all should welcome this more complex view of white southern evangelicals and their relationship to southern society.