Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal

2: Demagogues and the Demon Drink: Newspapers and the Revival of Prohibition in Georgia

C h a p t e r 2 Demagogues and the Demon Drink: Newspapers and the Revival of Prohibition in Georgia Marek D. Steedman There is something in the whole [prohibition] movement that is hard to understand. It has come about, seemingly, with no special planning, without any special leadership, or the expenditure of any large sum of money, but it has taken thoroughly hold of the people. —Booker T. Washington, “Extracts from an Address in Brooklyn,” 1907 Modern demagoguery also makes use of oratory, even to a tremendous extent, if one considers the election speeches a modern candidate has to deliver. But the use of the printed word is more enduring. The political publicist, and above all the journalist, is nowadays the most important representative of the demagogic species. —Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 1919 On July 30, 1907, the Georgia House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming margin to pass a bill mandating statewide prohibition. The bill had already successfully cleared the state Senate, and the signature of Governor Hoke Smith was assured. Statewide prohibition would take effect on January 1, 1908, as Georgia became the first state in the South ever to adopt the policy, and the first in the nation to do so since 1889. In the wake of the House vote, 66 Marek D. Steedman crowds of temperance advocates, white ribbons waving, chose two symbolic venues to stage their celebration: the offices of the Atlanta Georgian, the city newspaper that had given essential support to the cause, and a statue of the late Henry W. Grady, New South spokesman, city newspaper editor, and staunch prohibitionist.1 State and city advocates of statewide prohibition, including members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), and local evangelical churches, had held rallies, given speeches, pressured politicians, organized local petitions and ballots, and hoped and prayed for this moment for almost twenty years. When it arrived , however, they paid tribute to the power of the printed word. This chapter examines the ability of Progressive Era newspapers to shape public discourse, influence the policy agenda of state institutions, and expand conceptions of the appropriate scope of public powers held by the state. This ability, I suggest, is obscured by a focus on the media as a national political institution, and can only be properly identified once we turn our attention to political development emerging at the state and municipal level. The argument I make, is, however, strictly bounded in time by the precise interplay of press and state institutions in the Progressive Era itself. Newspapers were no longer the sponsored organs of partisan interests: their revenue was derived more from circulation and advertising than from political patronage. At the federal level, patronage was quickly replaced by a new form of state capture, as state agencies and political leaders established public relations offices to feed reporters the “news” they hoped to report.2 At the state and local level, however, this symbiotic, but rationalized, relationship did not immediately take hold. Instead, local newspaper editors and publishers were able to parlay financial independence and influence over public opinion into direct political power in their own right. The power and influence of the “political editor” (or publisher) waned, however, as local newspapers were increasingly consolidated into national newspaper corporations and new methods of state capture developed. The arc of the narrative, then, is not a straightforward development from patronage to rationalized administrative procedures. An intervening stage, highlighting a path not taken, emerges at the level of state and municipal political development in which newspaper editors and publishers could operate as policy entrepreneurs and power brokers, both within and outside established political parties. The argument depends on reading the press itself as a political institution: a set of organizations and practices through which public opinion is constituted, expressed, and brought to bear on governing .190.167] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 17:33 GMT) Demagogues and the Demon Drink 67 structures, and thus policy outcomes.3 But it illustrates a moment in which the fragmentation of this institution across local, state, and regional markets provided platforms for ambitious power-seekers not simply to influence, but to wield political power at multiple levels of government. I illustrate these dynamics through a case study of the revival of statewide prohibition in Georgia between 1905 and 1908 and the subsequent spread of prohibition across the South by 1915. At one level I hope simply to illustrate the forms and extent...