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.