Abstract

"Wet Businessmen vs. Prohibition; or, The Politics of Personal Liberty in the Long Progressive Era"

Kyle Volk, University of Montana (kyle.volk@umontana.edu)

As temperance crusaders reorganized after the Civil War and lobbied for prohibitory liquor laws, wet businessmen forged a politics of dissent to repel what to them were two dangerous forces threatening the public interest and American democracy itself—overzealous reformers and increasingly invasive government. These self-interested capitalists built on the political tactics drink purveyors had pioneered to combat Maine-Law prohibition in the 1850s, using trade groups—liquor dealer associations—to provide mutual protection, shape public opinion, upset partisan alignment, pressure lawmakers, and find relief in the courts. But far more than their antebellum predecessors, postbellum dealers sought to broaden the appeal of their politics. Through powerful public pleas and more capaciously titled organizations—the most ubiquitous of which were christened Personal Liberty League (PLL)—they insisted that the threat of prohibition was bigger than their livelihoods, the cultural traditions of immigrants, the leisure practices of workingmen, and the consumer rights of all drinkers. Rather, they repeatedly broadcast, at stake was nothing less than the “personal liberty” of all Americans.

This paper explores wet businessmen's politics of personal liberty in the several decades before the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Focusing on the interplay between practice and ideas, it contends that antiprohibitionists' grass-roots organization had varied impacts on political life in the long Progressive Era. Most importantly, businessmen's weaponization of “personal liberty” transformed the longstanding concept by simultaneously ambiguating its meaning and broadening its utility. Indeed, their efforts made personal liberty the dominant if vague prism though which a wide range of Americans negotiated not only alcohol prohibition but also the rising power of the modern state writ large. As twenty-first-century Americans continue to summon personal liberty to reject such regulatory measures as pandemic masking requirements and abortion restrictions, we live with the ramifications of political strategies deployed by wet businessmen in the late nineteenth century.