I found the post about violence against prohibitionists to be thought-
provoking and, because Richard Hamm invited comments, I'll share a
few random thoughts on the matter.
 
Several factors strike me.  As Richard Hamm points out, violence
against the drys was predominantly southern and occasionally western.
The other way to put the same observation is that it was *rarely*
northern and midwestern.  I find this fact especially striking because
so much prohibition activism occurred in the northeast-midwest
region.  What factors might explain this regional skew?
 
Also, there's a close regional correspondence between where
moonshine/bootlegging violence commonly occurred and where the
murders took place.  Even as I accept the conceptual distinction
between violence related to reform agitation and violence stemming
from enforcement activities, the correspondence deserves more
analysis.  There are treatments about the South's "culture of
violence" or, more mundanely, there may have been a local expectation
that the murderers would not have been vigorously prosecuted.
 
All in all, I find the question of violence to merit further
attention and I look forward to Hamm's article.  Nevertheless, I have
some quibbles.
 
Even though an article on this topic would certainly be a welcome
addition to the literature, I'm not certain that I'd characterize
the lack of discussion about violence "a serious deficiency."  It is
a deficiency to be sure but why is it serious?  Is Hamm highlighting
the utter lack of discussion about this topic or is he suggesting
that the we ought to be concerned about this lacuna?  The two
interpretations are quite different.
 
I certainly agree that existing studies do not address anti-
prohibition violence.  The absence is there and it should be filled.
However, does filling this gap change any of our conventional notions
about the temperance and prohibition movements?  I'm not convinced
that it does simply because anti-dry violence was so extremely rare.
 
Six murders were committed over how many years?  Even though
the murders took place between 1874 and 1908, we easily might
expand the historical sweep to encompass the period from 1865 to
1919.  Over this fifty-four year period (and, yes, we could haggle
over the best periodization), we find that, on average, there's is
about one murder every nine years.  And, given the temporal
clustering of the events, we can conclude that, for the bulk of
the movement's history, murders were extraordinarily rare events.
 
Compared to the civil rights movement, the degree of violent
resistance to prohibition seems even more miniscule.  For example,
the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer alone triggered, according to
some reports, "1000 arrests, 35 shooting incidents, 30 buildings
bombed, 35 churches burned, 80 people beaten, and at least six
murdered."  (C.V. Woodward, _Strange Career of Jim Crow_, p. 186).
This level of repression no doubt affected the formation,
development, and strategies of the civil rights movement and, if
scholars failed to address it, then we could reasonably expect that
their interpretations of the movement would be flawed.
 
Hamm's criticism that the existing literature has failed to address
violence implies that the violence *has* played a role in the
movement's history.  Otherwise, why should we be concerned about the
failure of the literature to address the matter?  There are countless
factors about the movement that are overlooked simply because it's
assumed that their significance is negligible.  Again, the key
questions are:  does anti-dry violence really matter and, if so, how?
 
At present, Hamm is less concerned with demonstrating violence matters
and more interested in accounting for why the existing literature
doesn't address violence.  To explain the neglect, he asserts both
that contemporaneous disagreements about the reasons for the initial
homicide may have diverted scholarly attention and that current
discussions of prohibitionism "have little room in their frameworks
for the discussion of violence."
 
On the first point, I'm not certain how we should adjudicate
conflicting claims about the cause of the murders but I'm reluctant to
trust the veracity of the prohibitionist's interpretations.  More
importantly, Hamm's second assertion assumes that the frameworks of
current scholarship *should* have room for violence.  On this point,
his argument is less persuasive because, as I have argued, incidents
of anti-prohibition violence were extraordinarily rare.
 
Nonetheless, the level and characteristics of violence can be
extremely interesting in at least two ways.  A comparison across
movements might yield insights into the conditions that social
movements provoke violent retaliation.  Also, if the murders
facilitated the movement's mobilization narratives, that too might be
cause for further examination (and might prompt us to examine that
historical source material that Hamm draws to our attention).
 
But, to me, the biggest puzzle about the level of violence against the
drys is, given the size and vigor of the movement, that so *few*
people were injured.  Was it because most were women?  That they were
middle class?  That their goals directly threatened only a few
people?
 
To sum up this already wordy commentary, I welcome additional analysis
of anti-dry violence.  However, before despairing and explaining the
omission of the topic from conventional accounts, I suggest that we
better specify why it truly matters.
 
Joseph Luders
New School for Social Research
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