“Prohibition Is Here to Stay”: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and the Dry Crusade in America (review)

In the ironically titled Prohibition Is Here to Stay, Jason S. Lantzer offers perhaps the most admiring account of the American Prohibition movement and its advocates to appear in at least a half-century. His book pursues two objectives, one successfully, one not so much. Lantzer provides a detailed account of the political history of the Indiana Anti-Saloon League and presents a limited portrait of the league’s leader from 1907 until 1929, the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker. The result is the most thorough history of the temperance crusade in a single state since Robert S. Bader’s Prohibition in Kansas (Lawrence, KS, 1986) and Jimmie L. Franklin’s 1971 Born Sober: Prohibition in Oklahoma (1907–1959) (Norman, OK, 1971), which are both inexplicably missing from Lantzer’s otherwise well-padded bibliography and poorly constructed endnotes.

Working from an unfinished autobiography and other limited sources, Lantzer makes clear that Shumaker, born in 1867, was raised in a highly religious farm family and was deeply committed to evangelical Protestant ministry and the temperance cause by his mid-teens. Working his way through DePauw, Indiana’s academy and university, by preaching, he was almost twenty-eight before he obtained a BA degree. After eight additional years as a Methodist minister, he went to work for the Indiana Anti-Saloon League. Starting as a field organizer, he climbed to the state superintendency by the time he was forty and continued in that role until his death. Shumaker’s unwavering commitment to his beliefs is clearer than the inspiration for them.

Lantzer affirms Ann-Marie Szymanski’s recent claim that local option temperance laws were the dry movement’s greatest success. Shumaker was adept at rallying Protestant church support, especially among rural Hoosiers hostile to new immigrants and their culture. He strove as well, albeit with far less success, to win African American and Catholic support. He allied with Republicans in the battles that produced county option legislation and ratification of the federal Eighteenth Amendment. Somewhat ambiguous is his connection in the 1920s with the state’s powerful vigilante prohibition enforcers, the Ku Klux Klan with its notorious leader D. C. Stephenson and the statechartered Horse Thief Detective Association.

Most evident is Shumaker’s growing frustration with widespread Prohibition violation, which prompted his alignment with Stephenson and eventually provoked his intemperate criticism of the rulings of the Indiana Supreme Court. After a protracted legal battle, Shumaker was eventually jailed for contempt of court in 1929. Once robust, he emerged from his two-month sentence at a minimum security prison farm a seriously ill man, and he died a few months later. Like the national Anti-Saloon League’s most effective leader, the unmentioned Wayne Wheeler, Shumaker died before he could rally his declining forces or witness the demise of national prohibition in 1933.

Lanzter’s admiration for Shumaker leads to an unwavering acceptance of prohibitionist claims, an uncritical treatment of the Shumaker-Stephenson relationship, and a distorted account of prohibition repeal. Lanzter does not question statements from the many dry newspapers he has read. He claims, for instance,“ample evidence” for the unsupportable Western Christian Advocate assertion that, before Prohibition, the typical working-class male spent 35 cents of his $1.25 daily wage on beer, which would have meant a daily consumption of seven nickel beers for every worker every day (p. 94). When it comes to the state vote in June 1933 for repeal convention delegates, he touts the dry vote but never acknowledges that 64 percent of Indiana ballots, not to mention 73 percent overall in the thirty-nine states that held delegate elections, were cast for repeal. A reader can learn much about the Hoosier Anti-Saloon League and its leadership from this work, but a full and balanced account of Indiana’s experience with...