--- title: Temperance, Prohibition and the wets:the dry campaigns and their opponents, 1874 to 1933 url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/ description: for sixty years "drys" and "wets" fought over alcohol with petitions, votes, lobbying, textbooks, posters, paid advertising and newspaper money; most of… section: Case studies --- ![Illustration: a pre-1914 imperial intelligence-dossier collage of colonial telegraph logs, sepia field photography and empire maps.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-pre1914.jpg) [Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/) # Temperance, Prohibition and the wets:the dry campaigns and their opponents, 1874 to 1933 At a glance For sixty years "drys" and "wets" fought over alcohol with petitions, votes, lobbying, textbooks, posters, paid advertising and newspaper money… - **When:** 1893 - **Actor:** Dry side: Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Anti-Saloon League of America and its American Issue… - **Target:** U.S. voters, legislators, schoolchildren and newspaper readers - **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are - **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures - **Techniques:** [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) Full details - **Actor:** Dry side: Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Anti-Saloon League of America and its American Issue Publishing Company. Wet side: United States Brewers' Association and individual brewers, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, and wet-leaning newspaper cartoonists On this page - [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#what-happened) - [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#how-it-works) - [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#then-and-now) - [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#positions-on-the-record) - [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#same-method-test) - [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#how-to-spot-it) - [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#images) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/temperance-and-the-wets/#sources) On this page **Content note:** this page quotes a 1918 speech calling German-American brewing families "the worst of all our German enemies", shows a 1923 cartoon of a hooded Klansman before a burning cross, and discusses ties between some dry officials and the Klan. **In one line:** for sixty years "drys" and "wets" fought over alcohol with petitions, votes, lobbying, textbooks, posters, paid advertising and newspaper money; most of it was open advocacy under the campaigners' own names, and both sides also used techniques in this archive's taxonomy. ## What happened - **1874.** The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is founded in Cleveland. Under Frances Willard, president from 1879, it campaigns under the slogan "Home Protection", linking prohibition to votes for women. - **1880 onward.** Mary Hunt leads the WCTU's Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, which presses states to require alcohol education in public schools and endorses textbooks for it. - **1893 to 1895.** The Anti-Saloon League (ASL) forms in Ohio and goes national. It backs any candidate, of either party, who votes dry. Wayne Wheeler becomes its best-known strategist; Peter Odegard's 1928 study of the League is titled *Pressure Politics*. - **1893 to 1903.** The Committee of Fifty, a private group of scholars and businessmen, studies the liquor question and concludes that the school programme is "neither scientific, nor temperate, nor instructive". - **1907 to 1918.** Brewers answer in paid newspaper space: Budweiser runs series on the Framers of the Constitution and on European national heroes, Pennsylvania brewers run "Facts Versus Fallacies", and Budweiser calls its beer "liquid bread". - **1909 onward.** The League's American Issue Publishing Company in Westerville, Ohio prints its newspaper, pamphlets and posters, including the "Series G" posters below. - **1917 to 1918.** Congress sends the prohibition amendment to the states in December 1917. In early 1918 dry leader John Strange, a former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, says: "We have German enemies across the water. We have German enemies in this country, too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller." - **September 1918 to 1919.** Alien Property Custodian A. Mitchell Palmer announces that brewers pooled money to help editor Arthur Brisbane buy the *Washington Times*. A Senate Judiciary subcommittee (S. Res. 307) investigates the United States Brewers' Association "and allied interests" and publishes its report and hearings in 1919. A Miller family member confirms the investment: "We invested the money in the paper for the sole purpose of protecting our interests," and "to oppose the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of beer." The hearings do not establish a link between brewery owners and the German war effort. Congress revokes the charter of the National German-American Alliance, which the brewers had backed. - **1919.** The Eighteenth Amendment is ratified on 16 January; the Volstead Act follows on 28 October. - **1920s.** The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), founded in 1918 by William H. Stayton, grows with money and leadership from Pierre, Irénée and Lammot du Pont and John J. Raskob, and argues that liquor taxes would reduce the need for income taxes. New York ASL superintendent William H. Anderson declines in 1923 to answer questions about League funds and is convicted of forgery in 1924. In 1928 Bishop James Cannon Jr., the ASL's main Democratic lobbyist, leads southern Democrats against their party's nominee, Al Smith, a wet and a Catholic. - **1929 to 1933.** Pauline Sabin founds the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) in May 1929. The Twenty-first Amendment, ratified by state conventions, ends national Prohibition on 5 December 1933. ## How it works - [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/): *Dry.* American Issue posters put the harm on children. A saloon keeper nails "Inherited appetite for liquor" to a sleeping baby's cradle above the line "Thirty-Six States Can Stop This By Constitutional Amendment": one staged harm, one remedy. *Wet.* Alfred Frueh's 1923 strip "Anti Saloon League uber alles" shows the League's consent being needed for a son's swim, a daughter's engagement and a man's entry to heaven: a staged chain of future bans, with one remedy, resisting the League. - [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): *Dry.* Strange's speech places the war's danger at home on four German-American brewing families, and Palmer's charge did the same for the trade as a whole. This page found no documented wet material aimed at an ethnic or religious population; the wet cartoons here target an organisation, the League. - [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): *Dry.* "He Can't Put It Out" (1917) draws "Liquor Interests" as a heavy-set man in a top hat. *Wet.* Rollin Kirby's recurring "Mr. Dry", "the cartoonist's puritanical symbol for the Prohibitionists" in the Library of Congress catalogue's words, stands in for every dry, as in "It's none of the public's business" (1923). - [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): *Wet.* Budweiser borrowed the prestige of the Framers, and of Garibaldi, Kosciusko and Kossuth for immigrant readers. Frueh's "über alles" pastes wartime anti-German stigma onto the League, the stigma drys had applied to brewers. Kirby's "Swear!" (1923) shows Mr. Dry and a Klansman swearing an oath before a burning cross; the catalogue notes the two groups "were separate". *Dry.* The label "Scientific" lent science's authority to a curriculum the Committee of Fifty judged unscientific. - [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): *Dry.* The Committee of Fifty's charge was that the endorsed textbooks taught one conclusion and left out the evidence against it. *Wet.* Budweiser's "liquid bread" advertising, in the Library of Congress guide's summary, suggested "that because beer and bread come from the same ingredients that they are nutritionally equivalent". - [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): *Dry.* "He Can't Put It Out" draws "Public Indignation" as a giant lit firecracker the liquor trade cannot stop; momentum is the argument. **What was plain open persuasion.** Much of the record is not a technique in this taxonomy. The 1874 Women's Crusade's hymn-singing outside barrooms, the WCTU's petitions, the League's candidate endorsements, Wheeler's lobbying, the brewers' signed advertisements answering dry claims, and the AAPA's and WONPR's pamphlets and membership drives were all done in each organisation's own name. The AAPA's tax argument was a stated interest and a testable forecast. Both sides argued openly over whether "temperance" meant moderation or abstinence (a Seattle brewer's 1913 advertisement read "True Temperance Does Not Mean Prohibition But Moderation"); open argument over a definition is excluded from [Semantic hijacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/semantic-hijack/). Both sides won through the amendment process. ## Then and now ![He Can't Put It Out, American Issue Publishing Company, 1917](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/he-cant-put-it-out-1917.jpg) *[He Can't Put It Out](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/he-cant-put-it-out-1917/), American Issue Publishing Company (Anti-Saloon League), 1917. Public domain.* ![Putting the mortgage on the cradle, American Issue Publishing Company, 1917](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/mortgage-on-the-cradle-1917.jpg) *[Putting the mortgage on the cradle](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/mortgage-on-the-cradle-1917/), American Issue Publishing Company (Anti-Saloon League), 1917. Public domain.* !["It's none of the public's business", Rollin Kirby, 1923](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/none-of-the-publics-business-1923.jpg) *["It's none of the public's business"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/none-of-the-publics-business-1923/), Rollin Kirby, 1923. Public domain.* !["Swear!", Rollin Kirby, 1923](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/swear-dry-and-klan-1923.jpg) *["Swear!"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/swear-dry-and-klan-1923/), Rollin Kirby, 1923. Public domain.* Both methods recur. The brewers' signed advertising answering health claims has a later parallel in the tobacco industry's [A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/frank-statement-1954/). The difference: a federal court later found the tobacco statement to be part of a decades-long effort to keep doubt alive about documented harm, and this page found no comparable finding about the brewers. State-backed health teaching for the young has a later parallel in the FDA's [The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/), also tagged fear appeal. The FDA campaign draws on the U.S. Surgeon General's 2014 report on smoking, itself built on a documented evidence base; the temperance textbooks' claims, by contrast, were judged "neither scientific, nor temperate, nor instructive" by the contemporary Committee of Fifty study cited above. This page does not otherwise rank the two campaigns' underlying science against each other. The wartime framing of German-American brewers drew on the same enemy stigma as posters like [Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/beat-back-the-hun-1918/). ## Positions on the record - **Drys, in their own words:** the saloon threatens the home and children ("Home Protection"); schools should teach the harms of alcohol as science; in wartime, brewing served the enemy. - **Wets, in their own words:** beer is a food and a drink of moderation; prohibition limits liberty; brewers funded a newspaper "to oppose the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of beer"; in the 1920s, national prohibition overreaches federal power, fails in practice and costs tax revenue. - **This archive's reading:** *Documented:* the posters, advertisements and cartoons shown and cited; the Committee of Fifty's verdict; Strange's speech; the brewers' money behind the *Washington Times* purchase; Anderson's conviction; and, in historian Thomas Pegram's words, that "ineffective enforcement pushed some ASL officials into informal ties with local Klans, while the league tolerated pro-Klan sentiments among some leaders". *Not shown:* that brewery owners served the German war effort; that the ASL as a national body directed Klan enforcement (Pegram calls the relationship "ambivalent"); that the AAPA's leaders acted only for tax reasons (a Business History Conference paper on Pierre du Pont also cites lawlessness, property rights and federal power). Anti-Catholic statements attributed to Cannon are widely quoted, but this page could not check their wording against a primary source and does not quote them. This page does not rule on whether Prohibition was good policy. - **Power and violence:** in 1918 state power was used against the brewers (a Senate investigation, a revoked charter). From 1920 to 1933 federal law enforced the drys' position. Klan dry vigilantism, which Pegram describes as "intolerant, occasionally violent", was the Klan's own; Pegram finds informal local ties with some ASL officials, not a formal alliance. None of the wet organisations named here is shown to have used violence; the illegal liquor trade is a separate matter from their record. ## Same-method test Swap the sides. A wet speaker in 1918 calling League leaders "the worst of our German enemies" would be tagged name-calling and scapegoating, as Strange's speech is; Frueh's "über alles" strip is close to that swap and is tagged transfer. The dry poster's top-hatted "Liquor Interests" and Kirby's Mr. Dry get the same tag for the same reason, and so do "liquid bread" and the temperance textbooks. The findings hold both ways. ## How to spot it - Ask whether a poster offers a mechanism and a number, or only a child in danger and a single remedy. - When a curriculum or advertisement calls itself "scientific" or "a food", look for who reviewed the claim at the time and what they found. - When a cartoon places a group beside a hated symbol (the Kaiser, the Klan), check what the record shows about the link. - Look for who paid: a newspaper's owners, an advertisement's sponsor, a campaign's donors. ## Images | Image | Source | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | *He Can't Put It Out* (1917) | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001703874/), American Issue Publishing Co., Series G no. 13 | Public domain (published 1917) | | *Putting the mortgage on the cradle* (1917) | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006690206/), American Issue Publishing Co., Series G no. 19 | Public domain (published 1917) | | *"It's none of the public's business"* (1923) | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016682736/), Rollin Kirby | Public domain (LoC: no known restrictions) | | *"Swear!"* (1923) | [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016682737/), Rollin Kirby | Public domain (LoC: no known restrictions) | ### Image gaps - **Frueh, "Anti Saloon League uber alles"** ([LoC](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016685456/), *New York World*, 3 July 1923). Published in 1923 and so likely public domain, but the Library of Congress marks it "May be restricted" and no digital image is online, so it is cited, not hosted. - **Brewers' newspaper advertisements, 1907 to 1918** (Budweiser "liquid bread", the Framers series, "Facts Versus Fallacies"). Public domain and digitised in Chronicling America as full newspaper pages. **This gap can be filled** by cropping them. - **AAPA pamphlets and WONPR material.** Held by the Hagley Library; pre-1931 items would be public domain, but none were reachable from this environment. Post-1930 posters are not hosted without a rights check. - **The 1918-19 Senate hearing volumes.** U.S. government works on govinfo.gov, not reachable here. **This gap can be filled.** ## Sources - [Library of Congress, *18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Primary Documents in American History*](https://guides.loc.gov/18th-amendment) - [Library of Congress, *Brewers' Campaign Against Prohibition: Topics in Chronicling America*](https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-campaign-against-prohibition) and [selected articles](https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-campaign-against-prohibition/selected-articles) - [U.S. Senate, *Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda*, S. Doc. 66-62 (1919), govinfo](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/SERIALSET-07597_00_00-002-0062-0000); [HathiTrust record](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008611568) - [Good Beer Hunting, "Pandemic, Interrupted: A Besieged Beer Scene in 1918 Milwaukee" (2020)](https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/blog/2020/5/6/pandemic-interrupted-a-besieged-beer-scene-in-1918-milwaukee) - [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute), "Prohibition"](https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/prohibition/) - [Peter H. Odegard, *Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League* (Columbia University Press, 1928), HathiTrust](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001133601) - [Smithsonian Magazine, "Wayne B. Wheeler: The Man Who Turned Off the Taps"](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/wayne-b-wheeler-the-man-who-turned-off-the-taps-14783512/); Daniel Okrent, *Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition* (Scribner, 2010) - [Ohio State University, "The American Issue Publishing Company"](https://prohibition.osu.edu/anti-saloon-league/american-issue-publishing-company); [Westerville Public Library, Anti-Saloon League collection](https://westervillelibrary.org/antisaloon-propaganda/) - [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, *The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress: A Report of the Surgeon General* (2014)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK179276/) - [Britannica, "Woman's Christian Temperance Union"](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Womans-Christian-Temperance-Union); [Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, "Women's Christian Temperance Movement"](https://case.edu/ech/articles/w/womens-christian-temperance-movement) - [Scientific Temperance Instruction evaluated by the Committee of Fifty (Alcohol Problems and Solutions)](https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/scientific-temperance-instruction-was-evaluated-by-the-committee-of-fifty/); [review of Jonathan Zimmerman, *Distilling Democracy* (Project MUSE)](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/4473); ["Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Schools", *History of Education Quarterly*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/history-of-education-quarterly/article/abs/scientific-temperance-instruction-in-the-schools/F546053E5443EEA8E44A8D783C2AAB9D) - [Thomas R. Pegram, "Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement", *Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era* (2008)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-gilded-age-and-progressive-era/article/abs/hoodwinked-the-antisaloon-league-and-the-ku-klux-klan-in-1920s-prohibition-enforcement1/BDA3FF8FF28ACA525D510581897360A2) - [University of Chicago Library, William H. Anderson and the Anti-Saloon League Papers](https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.WHANDERSON) - [Encyclopedia Virginia, "James Cannon (1864–1944)"](https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/cannon-james-1864-1944/) - [Business History Conference, "Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of an Anti-Prohibition Activist"](https://thebhc.org/node/1266); [Tax Foundation, "How Taxes Enabled Alcohol Prohibition and Also Led to Its Repeal"](https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-taxes-enabled-alcohol-prohibition-and-also-led-its-repeal/) - [Hagley Library, WONPR Pennsylvania Division records](https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/997); [Hagley, AAPA pamphlets](https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/archival_objects/128826); [Museum of the City of New York, "The New York Women Who Dismantled Prohibition"](https://www.mcny.org/story/new-york-women-who-dismantled-prohibition)