This may be a more readable version of Leonard Moore's review of the two
books (Pegram and Hallwas) than what I sent directly from H-Net.
Thomas R.
Pegram. Battling Demon
Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America,
1800-1933. The
American Ways Series. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998. xv + 207 pp.
Bibliographical references and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-56663-208-0.
John E. Hallwas. The
Bootlegger: A Story of Small-Town America.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xi + 274 pp.
Bibliographical references. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-02395-1.
Reviewed by <<[log in to unmask]>Leonard
Moore, McGill University.
Published by < H-SHGAPE (May, 1999)
Thomas R. Pegram's Battling Demon Rum is an incisive, well-written
overview of temperance and prohibition politics from the early nineteenth
century to the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. It covers much
the same ground as Jack S. Blocker's American Temperance Movements, but
from a slightly different perspective and with the advantage of drawing
on literature appearing since the publication of Blocker's book ten years
ago. It makes excellent use of that literature, folding it into a lively,
synthetic narrative that represents the best single starting place for
students interested in the history of America's long battle against
alcohol.
Pegram's story of the dry crusade focuses on the political institutions
that channeled private concerns and efforts at moral suasion into public
campaigns to regulate and eliminate alcohol. The politics of temperance
and prohibition, Pegram argues, reflected fundamental social conflicts
and conditions in industrial America, key moments of change in the
nation's political system, and the central political challenge of
balancing personal liberty and diversity on the one hand with the power
of the state to enforce democratically constituted laws on the other. At
the center of these events, he contends, is the issue of political party
involvement in prohibition politics. At times, temperance and prohibition
advocates would make use of the party system. But at other times,
grassroots political dynamics and innovative local leadership would power
the anti-liquor crusade in new, highly successful directions, while party
leaders stood on the sidelines afraid to allow the volatile alcohol issue
to disrupt party loyalties.
This was especially apparent in the Anti-Saloon League era. The League
transcended the party system and compiled so many local victories that it
was eventually able to push through the Eighteenth Amendment without
strong backing within the party system. Pegram contends that this lack of
committed support by the parties, not only in regard to national
prohibition but throughout the history of the temperance and prohibition
movements, explained why the dry crusade ultimately failed. Grassroots
pressures and innovative single-issue politics could push through state
and even national prohibition legislation, but prohibition itself could
only be enforced by a determined government. In the end, the parties had
never been enthusiastic about prohibition and were therefore unwilling to
make the extraordinary public investment that would be required truly to
enforce anti-liquor laws.
Pegram's emphasis on political institutions is more than justified.
Throughout the more than one hundred year campaign against alcohol, even
seemingly limited efforts at moral suasion were always rife with
political implications and in nearly every instance a prelude to direct
public action, whether it involved angry women taking to the streets,
activists attempting to pass a local option law, or lobbyists leveraging
congressmen to amend the Constitution. By emphasizing political
institutions, Pegram successfully weaves together familiar material with
a wide range of more recent works on such diverse topics as religion and
antebellum reform, ethnicity and cultural conflict during the Civil War
era, gender and public activism, race and southern progressivism, social
change in Midwestern immigrant communities, the culture of the urban
working class saloon, the Ku Klux Klan and prohibition enforcement, legal
and constitutional questions surrounding prohibition, and the dynamics of
the repeal campaign. Ultimately, each of these, as well as many other
forces, made it clear that conflicts over alcohol did indeed play a
central role within American political institutions.
Despite this book's many strengths, however, it seems legitimate to
wonder if Pegram takes his thesis about prohibition and the party system
a bit too far. Why did prohibition fail? Was it really because party
leaders never fully embraced the cause? It seems unlikely that any amount
of increased commitment to enforcement could have dried up the
underground market or halted the pluralistic forces that were steadily
eroding the power of a white Protestant cultural nationalism that had
always been at the base of the anti-liquor crusade.
Many of the problems of prohibition enforcement are brought to life in
John E. Hallwas's The Bootlegger, an engaging account of the prohibition
era in the small Illinois town of Colchester. The book revolves around
the colorful life and violent death of Kelly Wagle, a smalltime liquor
operator and gambler so beloved that his funeral in 1929 became one of
the largest and more memorable events in the town's history. As Hallwas
pieces together the details of Wagle's life, it is easy to see why "the
bootlegger" was such a popular local figure. He was a swaggering,
brawling entrepreneur who supplied the town with liquor, ran a gambling
hall, and toured through the area in a constantly changing fleet of
expensive automobiles. But he also doled out money to individuals who
needed help, purchased uniforms and equipment for the high school
football team, and acquired the services of Shoeless Joe Jackson and
other former members of the Chicago White Sox (banned from the big
leagues after the Black Sox Scandal of 1919) to give Colchester's team
something of an edge in a grudge match against a nearby town.
He survived a pattern of dangerous living, scrapes with the law, and the
wrath of a reform-minded, law enforcement mayor and her supporters in the
Ku Klux Klan. He was able to do so, Hallwas argues, primarily because he
was seen as a local boy who made good through his own grit, because most
people did not believe that supplying liquor for a thirsty town was
really a crime, and because the flamboyant bootlegger helped provide a
sense of communal identity at a time when the town was in a clear state
of economic decline. That is why so many mourned and why he became
something of a local folk hero after he was murdered, most likely by a
rival bootlegger.
Hallwas' account is well written and in many
sections highly entertaining. It demonstrates how, in at least one
community, prohibition simply could not be enforced. It is particularly
worthwhile to note that the community in question is a small town in
rural Illinois, not an immigrant neighborhood in an industrial city. Two
things, however, might have added to the book's success. First, and most
important, this book should have included footnotes and an index. Hallwas
bases much of his account on the many interviews that he conducted. He
doesn't clarify the nature of those interviews, and one is left wondering
how many of them could possibly have been with subjects giving firsthand
accounts of events that took place seventy to eighty years ago. As it is,
the reader is left wondering at too many turns how much of the narrative
is based on substantial evidence and how much consists of folk stories
and small town legends. The second point is that given the importance of
community in this study, Hallwas might have given a bit more
consideration to the ways in which Colchester was different from more
typical small towns of the Midwest. As a community that lived and died
with its coal mines, it may not have been as representative of "smalltown
America" as the author asserts.