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

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 63 Despite these shortcomings, Race in the American South will benefit students who want an introduction to the complex histories of race and racism or to the scholarship that informs this discourse. The authors are especially successful in emphasizing the diversity of racial ideas and experiences among southerners. The historiographical asides, however, might prove tedious for laypersons. BARCLAY KEY Western Illinois University Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement. By Joe L. Coker. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. x, 329 pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-8131-2471-1. Alluding to the prevalence of alcohol consumption in the South, a Confederate general once remarked that the region’s epitaph should read “Died of Whiskey” (p. 33). His assessment provides a stark contrast to the subsequent popularity of prohibition in a region that was traditionally suspicious of Yankee reform movements. Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause explores this phenomenon between the years 1880 and 1915, arguing that the willingness of white evangelicals (primarily Baptists and Methodists) to accommodate and adapt their temperance message “to the peculiar cultural baggage of the South” helped southerners overcome their “natural disinclination toward governmental restrictions on drinking” (p. 11). Nine southern states enacted statewide prohibition by 1915, including Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, the three states examined in this study. The first two chapters outline the history of temperance in the region . While a nascent temperance movement existed in the antebellum South, its association with the North and abolitionism, along with the limited scope of political influence from evangelicals, curbed its viability. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, several signi ficant changes in evangelical thought marked the emergence of a powerful , organized temperance movement in the South. First, evangelicals embraced teetotalism, having formerly stipulated that moderate alcohol consumption was a matter of personal opinion or was permissible for medicinal purposes, in keeping with the Pauline admonition to “use a little wine” for a stomachache. Second, evangelicals became politically engaged and accepted legal prohibition, rather than persuasion alone, T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 64 as a means of instituting their moral values. Amid struggles for political power in the New South, evangelicals clearly gained an edge that they did not previously enjoy. Under increasing pressure from evangelicals, every southern state utilized various types of local option laws by 1890, and the goal of statewide prohibition soon followed. In 1907 Georgia became the first southern state to implement statewide prohibition. Between 1908 and 1915, Alabama vacillated between prohibition and local option laws. Governor B. B. Comer signed a prohibition bill in 1908, but evangelicals also pressed for a prohibition amendment to the state constitution. Ratification failed to win a popular vote, in which only six of the state’s sixty-seven counties approved the amendment. The state reverted to a local option law in 1911, yet another prohibition bill passed the legislature in 1915. A state legislature sympathetic to the evangelicals’ prohibition cause overrode Governor Charles Henderson’s veto. Chapters three through six are the most instructive, as the author explores how evangelicals crafted their cause to broaden its appeal. These chapters are organized thematically around politics, race, honor, and gender. In the chapter on politics, for example, readers learn that revising , or perhaps redirecting, the doctrine of the spirituality of the church proved most important for evangelicals who pursued prohibition. The doctrine stipulated that matters of the church and state should never overlap, and that ministers who championed state sanctions against alcohol defied the doctrine. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians subscribed to this doctrine in varying degrees. After much internal debate and strife, evangelical churches gradually accepted political activity when issues of moral reform were at stake. “I do not care to have much politics in my religion,” wrote one reader to the Alabama Baptist in 1884, “but I do want a good deal of religion in my politics” (p. 94). This reinterpretation of the doctrine, however, never extended to race relations or economic inequalities. Nevertheless, the support that...