What it said
The dry poster put the harm on a baby. In 1917 the Anti-Saloon League's American Issue Publishing Company of Westerville, Ohio, issued Putting the mortgage on the cradle, Series G no. 19: a saloon keeper nails a sign reading "Inherited Appetite for Liquor" to a sleeping infant's cradle while the father drinks behind him. Under the picture is one remedy.
Thirty-Six States Can Stop This By Constitutional Amendment
The same series' He Can't Put It Out (no. 13, drawing by Sam Fickel) shows a heavy man in a top hat labelled "Liquor Interests" running from a giant lit firecracker labelled "Public Indignation." The argument is momentum: the cause is coming, so get out of its way. An 1888 lithograph for the Prohibition Party ticket of Clinton B. Fisk and John A. Brooks set "Our desire," a town of church and Sunday school, against "Present situation," a town of prison, asylum, and saloon.
The wets answered in paid newspaper space and, later, in cartoons. Between 1907 and 1918 Budweiser ran advertising series on the Framers of the Constitution and on European heroes such as Garibaldi, Kosciusko, and Kossuth, and called its beer "liquid bread." Pennsylvania brewers ran "Facts Versus Fallacies." A Seattle brewer's 1913 advertisement read True Temperance Does Not Mean Prohibition But Moderation.
In the 1920s Rollin Kirby of the New York World drew "Mr. Dry," a scowling top-hatted figure with an umbrella marked "Anti-Saloon League," who stood for every prohibitionist at once.
Who made it and why
The dry side had two great organizations. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland in 1874. Under Frances Willard, its president from 1879, it campaigned under the slogan "Home Protection" and tied prohibition to votes for women. From 1880 Mary Hunt ran its Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, which pressed states to require alcohol teaching in public schools and endorsed the textbooks. The Anti-Saloon League formed in Ohio in 1893 and went national by 1895. It backed any candidate of either party who voted dry. Wayne Wheeler became its best-known strategist, and Peter Odegard's 1928 study of the League was titled Pressure Politics. From 1909 its publishing arm printed the League's newspaper, pamphlets, and posters.
The wet side began with the United States Brewers' Association and individual brewers. After 1918 it widened: the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, founded that year by William H. Stayton, grew with money and leadership from Pierre, Irénée, and Lammot du Pont and John J. Raskob, and argued that liquor taxes would lighten the income tax. In May 1929 Pauline Sabin founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. A Business History Conference paper on Pierre du Pont also cites lawlessness, property rights, and federal power among his reasons, so the archive does not reduce the AAPA to a tax play.
Almost all of this was done in the open. Hymn-singing outside barrooms in the Women's Crusade of 1874, petitions, candidate endorsements, lobbying, signed advertisements, pamphlets, and membership drives were each issued under the organization's own name. That is how citizens are supposed to argue in a republic.
What it got right or wrong
The school program is the clearest dry failure. The Committee of Fifty, a private body of scholars and businessmen that studied the liquor question from 1893 to 1903, concluded that the curriculum was neither scientific, nor temperate, nor instructive.
The label "Scientific" borrowed an authority the content had not earned, and the textbooks taught one conclusion with the contrary evidence left out. The cradle poster offers no evidence for an "inherited appetite." It offers an infant and an amendment.
The wets cut their own corners. The Library of Congress guide sums up the "liquid bread" advertising as suggesting that because beer and bread come from the same ingredients that they are nutritionally equivalent.
Budweiser's Framers series borrowed the founders' prestige for a commercial product. And Kirby's "Mr. Dry" made one caricature stand for millions of people, the mirror of the League's top-hatted "Liquor Interests."
Some charges against the League were earned. In 1923 New York superintendent William H. Anderson declined to answer questions about League funds, and he was convicted of forgery in 1924. Kirby's "It's none of the public's business" (February 1923), with Mr. Dry sprawled over a heap of coins marked "Political Contributions," answered a real refusal. His "Swear!" (November 1923), Mr. Dry clasping hands with a hooded Klansman before a burning cross, went further than the record. Historian Thomas Pegram finds that weak enforcement pushed some ASL officials into informal ties with local Klans, while the league tolerated pro-Klan sentiments among some leaders,
and calls the overall relationship "ambivalent." The Library of Congress catalogue notes the two groups "were separate." Informal local ties are a fair subject. A sworn alliance is not what the evidence shows.
In 1928 Bishop James Cannon Jr., the League's main Democratic lobbyist, led Southern Democrats against their own nominee, Al Smith, a wet and a Catholic. Anti-Catholic remarks attributed to Cannon are widely repeated. The archive could not check their wording against a primary source, so this page does not quote them.
Scapegoating by ancestry, then the government joined in
The worst moment in the record is the one where the war gave the drys a weapon. In early 1918 John Strange, a dry leader and former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, said:
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.
That is scapegoating by ancestry, and it was wrong. The government then joined in. In September 1918 Alien Property Custodian A. Mitchell Palmer announced that brewers had pooled money to help editor Arthur Brisbane buy the Washington Times. A Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigated the brewers' association "and allied interests" and published its hearings in 1919. The money was real: a Miller family member confirmed it: 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.
Buying a paper to argue your side is lawful and should be disclosed. It is not treason, and the hearings did not tie the brewery owners to the German war effort. Congress revoked the charter of the National German-American Alliance, which the brewers had backed. The power of the state was used against a trade and an ethnic community during a war, on a charge the record does not support. That belongs beside the Committee on Public Information's wartime record.
The rest of the constitutional story is the system working, twice. Congress sent the prohibition amendment to the states in December 1917. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on 16 January 1919, and the Volstead Act followed on 28 October. From 1920 the federal government enforced the dry position, and Klan vigilantes, whom Pegram calls intolerant, occasionally violent,
acted on their own. Then the wets used the same Article V. The Twenty-first Amendment, ratified by state conventions, ended national Prohibition on 5 December 1933. Whether Prohibition was good policy is a judgment this page leaves to the reader. On the point that is honestly open, the libertarian reading is that a free people should be slow to write rules about a private drink into the Constitution, and that the wets' stated objection to federal overreach was a serious one. Both sides, in the end, won by amendment rather than by force, and that is to their credit.
Its legacy
The methods outlived the cause. A health curriculum that calls itself scientific invites the question of who reviewed it. An advertisement that calls a product "a food" invites the same. A cartoon that sets a group beside the Kaiser or the Klan invites a check of what the link actually was. And a newspaper's owners are part of its message: the brewers' stake in the Washington Times came to light through a wartime investigation whose central charge the hearings did not bear out.
The archive found no documented wet material aimed at an ethnic or religious group. The wet cartoons in this set target an organization, the League. The dry record includes the Strange speech. That asymmetry is in the sources, and the page reports it as it found it.
Sources
- FRAME case study "Temperance, Prohibition and the wets: the dry campaigns and their opponents, 1874 to 1933," for the dates, organizations, the Strange speech, the Senate investigation and Miller testimony, the Committee of Fifty verdict, the Anderson and Cannon details, and the Pegram readings. It cites the Library of Congress guides to the 18th Amendment and to the brewers' campaign in Chronicling America; U.S. Senate, Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda, S. Doc. 66-62 (1919); Peter H. Odegard, Pressure Politics (1928); Thomas R. Pegram, "Hoodwinked," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2008); the University of Chicago Library's William H. Anderson papers; Encyclopedia Virginia on James Cannon; the Business History Conference paper on Pierre S. du Pont; and Hagley Library finding aids for the WONPR and AAPA.
- FRAME archive records "Putting the mortgage on the cradle" and "He Can't Put It Out" (American Issue Publishing Co., 1917), "It's none of the public's business" (Rollin Kirby, 8 February 1923), "Swear!" (Rollin Kirby, 11 November 1923), and "Principles of the Prohibition party" (1888), with transcriptions.