When I came back after a week away from my desk I was very pleased
to see all good responses to my post on violence and prohibition.  I was
unable to reply to them right away because I only come into the office once
a week during the summer.  But, maybe I can carry the conversation a little
further along by responding to the postings by Andersen Thanye, David
Fahey, Cheryl Warsh, James D. Ivy, and Joseph Luders.
        Andersen Thayne is right, I don't mention the economic motivations
that might have prompted action against drys.  Certainly the
prohibitionists thought it was there.  They delighted in pointing out that
the assailants were often (sometimes untruthfully) liquor sellers or
employees of liquor sellers.  Of course that allowed them to frame their
struggle as one of virtue against greed.  Who else but the greedy would
sell a commodity "known" to be evil in all its effects?  His added details
on Charles Edwards shows some of the complexities that I think await us in
this topic.  He clearly dies in an attempt to citizen enforce an existing
policy -- a huge category of violence that my paper skirts, but which I
think deserves exploration.
        Joseph Luders, David Fahey, and James D. Ivy all point to the
cultural context in which the temperance agitation and violent response
occurred.  Fahey has a good point about the less violent British culture as
do Luders and Ivy about the levels of violence in the South and West.  Or
maybe Fahey is right, that southern and western temperance workers took
more risks -- his example of Bain attacking the KKK is paralleled by my
work on the Moffett case where he challenged the system of electoral
control used to keep political power in white hands.  The questions that
Luders and Fahey pose about gender are intriguing, certainly given the
cultural constructs of the day it seems likely that their gender protected
(somewhat) the women's crusaders of 1873/4 and Carry Nation (more on her
below).
        Joseph Luders comments on the importance of the frequency of
violence against drys has been in part answered by Ivy's later post.  I do
not disagree with his point as to the relative level of violence against
the prohibition and civil rights movement.  But I disagree with the
conclusion he draws from it.  Even rare events can point us to the tensions
in which a movement aroused and can explain twists and turns in a
movement's history.  Hence for abolition history the death of Lovejoy in
the 1830s and the violence against of free-soilers in Kansas in the 1850s
are major points in that reform's histories, even though the frequency rate
would fall far below that of the prohibitionists.  Moreover, I think,
killings stand as the tip of the iceberg of the violence against drys; if
we look we will find much more violence directed against dry than existing
interpretations allow.
        In response to Cheryl Warsh's question about the connection to
modern anti-abortion movements I relate prohibitionist violence to
anti-abortion violence through the example of Carry Nation and through
example of violence by abolitionists.  I call this violence directed at
advancing the reform righteous violence for reasons that will become clear.
What follows is the 2nd half of the Pittsburg paper, without notes, if
there is a demand, I'll do the notes when I come back next week.
        There was no dry equivalent to John Brown, there was no dry
equivalent to Michael F. Griffin or John Salvi  The closest that the
prohibition movement ever came to such figures was Carry Nation.  Thus a
look at Nation and her movement in the context of the righteous violence of
other movements is illuminating.
        When we talk about figures in reform movements adopting violence,
two things stand out.  First that they believed that their violence is
justified; violence -- even killing -- has become an acceptable means of
bringing about the change that they want.  Second, they act violently
because they perceive that their movement is loosing ground.  Hence John
Brown's moral certainty of the evil of slavery and belief that sin could
only be expatiated by the spilling of blood convinced him that violence was
acceptable.  He, in turn, convinced others to fight and kill with him in
Kansas and Virginia because, after the Compromise of 1850 with its Fugitive
Slave Law and the Kansas Nebraska Act repealing the Missouri compromise,
for the abolitionists crusade their enemies seemed to have gained the upper
hand.  Similarly, the justifiable homicide argument used by the advocates
of violence in the anti-abortion movement give them a moral base for their
actions.  Significantly, also, the first killing by anti-abortionists came
after it became clear that the Supreme Court was not going to overturn Roe
v. Wade, the second came after a pro-abortion candidate was elected
president.  How do these two factors, developing a view that see the
violence as acceptable and acting out of fear of failure of the reform play
out in the prohibition movement and in the career of Carry Nation?
        There was a potential for developing an ideology of righteous
violence, in the prohibition movement.  And evidence of it does not rest
alone on the career of Carry Nation.  Before I turn to Nation and her ideas
for justifying her violence, let me turn to another source that show that
drys did enunciate such ideas.  The 1915 novel Quarrytown, written by
Douglas Dobbins and published by the American Issue Publishing (the press
of company of the Anti-Saloon League) shows community organized righteous
violence in a favorable light.  In this fictionalized account of the
struggle against the return of saloons to a stone quarrying town, the drys
ultimately resort to violence.
        At the opening the town is dry and virtually free of crime.  But
the dry utopia vanishes, as neither law nor community action offer adequate
protection from the evil trade.  Drys fail to block the issuing of a liquor
license at a state liquor licensing board (dominated by politicians
beholden to the organized liquor interest), a dry organized boycott falters
when its denounced by a new editor of the town's newspaper, and citizen
prosecutions of the saloon keeper for violations of the law falter before
corrupted juries.  Thus the saloon spreads crime and disorder throughout
the community, literally turning brother against brother in drunken brawls.
After all other means have been tried the dry townsmen resort to violence.
One night after the saloon is shut, they engage a Boston Tea Party type
raid on it, destroying its fixtures and stock.  When the newspaper editor
condemns the act as lawlessness he is ostracized by the town.  When the
saloon keeper rebuilds, the temperance men of the town blow up the
establishment with three separate dynamite bombs, the first being set away
from where the proprietor slept to allow him time to escape.  Moreover, the
local minister preached a sermon in advance of the act calling for the
blowing up of "every hell-hole in the United States tomorrow with
dynamite!"  And in case the message was not clear, the dynamite works.  The
saloon keeper never came back and the town was the better for it:  no
murders, or assaults, no wife beatings, and no squandering of food and
education money on whisky occur within its borders.
        Without ever saying it in so many words, this publication of the
Anti-Saloon League legitimated violence against saloons. But it did so in a
rather limited way.  Violence was not the first resort, but the last resort
for the drys of Quarrytown.  Its only because law and boycotts have failed
them, and only after liquor begins to wreck havoc in their community do
they take action.  And their first action, does not threaten life or limb.
Even the bombing is planned to allow the saloon keeper to escape harm.
Similarly, Carry Nation carried the conviction that her violence was
justified and resorted to violence only after other means had failed.
        Once you get past the myth and hype, Nation's short career as a
saloon smasher is revealing of the potential of righteous violence in the
prohibition movement.  Nation captured the national imagination in 1900
when she began single-handedly destroying dives in Kansas.  Her actions
were quickly overshadowed by the hucksterism to which she resorted to keep
her agitation going:  the selling of hatchets and the appearances at
resorts like Coney Island.  She remained a national figure until her death
in 1911.  Nation was motivated, like many drys, by a personal religious
belief that liquor selling was sinful.  Indeed, in her autobiography she
recounting receiving visions from God showing her the evils of liquor.  And
she adopted violence only after other she had tried other means.
        In 1900 Nation lived in state that had a two decade old, and widely
violated, policy of prohibition.  Moreover, it must of have seemed to her
that the temperance movement was in a rut.  In her town of Medicine Lodge,
working with the WCTU she closed the town's seven bars through the tried a
true techniques of the women's crusade of 1873:  picketing with song,
prayer, and moral appeals to the sellers and purchasers.  These were
techniques that had been used against legal saloons, in Kansas there were
nothing but illegal ones.  Moreover, for a decade now in Kansas the policy
had been widely violated, often with the contrivances of the state's
political leaders.  And at the national level the temperance movement was
stalled.  Between 1889 and 1907 no state adopted prohibition.  WCTU had
lost its driving force with the death of Frances Willard in 1898 and the
Prohibition Party had splintered into two warring camps.  The leading
temperance organizations seemed unable to advance the cause or indeed to
stop the rollback movements in various states with prohibition.  Hence,
with conviction, and at a time when the movement was faltering, Nation
turned away from moral suasion and turned to violence.  As she explained,
"If there's anything that's weak and worse than useless it's this moral
suasion.  I despise it.  these hell traps of Kansas have fattened for
twenty years on moral suasion."
        And her violence struck a chord among some temperance advocates.
While some debated the value of violence, others joined Nation.  She soon
headed an organization of several hundred similarly minded saloon foes.
And, in a two month period, following her lead this group, and others,
engaged in vigilante action against saloons in Kansas's major cities,
Topeka and Wichita.  Mobbings and riots swept the cities; people were
beaten and shots were fired in anger.  And among some temperance workers
the violence was welcome.  One woman letter writer to a WCTU paper wrote:
"What if a few people do get killed[?] . . . I'm tired of this sentimental
gush about 'stopping before it comes to bloodshed. . . .'  I for one, hope
a thousand more of them will be smashed in Kansas before she stops."  The
response to Nation, shows that the potential for righteous violence existed
in the temperance crusade.
        Which raises new questions:  Why was there only one Carry Nation?
Part of the answer lays in the changing circumstances of the prohibition
movement.  Soon after Nation's actions in Kansas, the Anti-Saloon League
emerged as the dominate organization in the temperance movement.  And the
League's techniques of political lobbying, official law enforcement, and
public opinion building changed the fortunes of the crusade.  For example,
take the topic of national legislation; the League's Washington Office,
between 1902 and 1919, pressured the United States Congress to enact laws
that:  prohibited the sale of liquor in federal buildings, banned the
transport of liquor through the mails, ended liquor sales in national
soldiers' homes, retained a law excluding all alcoholic beverages from Army
posts, created Oklahoma as a dry state, and limited and then prohibited the
transportation of liquor into dry states.  A similar record of success can
be found in the prohibitionists' campaigns in the states in the same
period.  The very success of the drys in gaining what they wanted through
the political process made righteous violence redundant.
        To bring this long post to an end, I would like to relate this back
to Warsh's question on anti-abortion.  Does this interpretation mean, that
the Republican filibuster of the Foster nomination, that the recent votes
in the House to limit certain spending on abortion, that a Republican
(whose main candidates have taken a very strong anti-abortion stance)
victory in 1996 will put an end to clinic killings?  Perhaps.  My guess is,
only if the victory very deep and that the Republicans are able to repeal
the clinic protection act and pass restrictions on access to abortion.
But as the Court has made, and maintained, abortion as part of a right to
privacy, I think the potential for righteous violence will still exist.