Joe L. Coker, Liquor in
the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition
Movement.
In the nearly one hundred years between the birth of the
temperance as a powerful reform movement and its fulfillment in the 18th
Amendment, evangelicals were instrumental in curtailing the traffic and
consumption of alcohol. Historians have concentrated on temperance in northern
states. Paul Johnson focused on the movement as a means of maintaining
distinctions between social classes. Yet in the South, things looked rather
different . Southern evangelicals were motivated by other factors, and hoped to
for the betterment of the South. So argues Joe Coker in his insightful, seminal
work, Liquor in the Land of the Lost
Cause.
According to Coker, southern white evangelicals promoted
temperance and prohibition as a means of preserving the moral uprightness of
southern culture. Morever, evangelicals wanted to
redefine the cult of honor in the New South. That redefinition revolved around
racial and gender ideologies. Southern white evangelical men believed that
alcohol was the root of racial violence, especially sexual violence by black
men on white women. Prohibitionists elevated the gentility of white women while
portraying black men as drunken beasts who preyed on chaste, defenseless
southern belles.
Coker has arranged the book in two distinct parts. The first
two chapters trace the history of the temperance movement in both the North and
South. The narrative is one of conflict between the spiritual and political
interests of evangelicals. The second section of the book is a collection of
thematic chapters, incorporating issued related to the church, race, gender,
and honor. Scholars interested in race and gender in the New South will find
chapters four, five, and six particularly interesting. Others, especially those
who focus on religion and politics in the post-Reconstruction era, will enjoy
chapters two and three. There Coker describes the disintegration of the
Democratic bloc over the prohibition platform, and chronicles the rise of the
Populist Party and its appeal to prohibitionists. Chapter three is unique in
its discussion of the internal debate among evangelicals on the proper
relationship of church and state. Looking at the Presbyterian argument of the
spirituality of the church, Coker describes how evangelicals were reluctant to
engage in social issues like prohibition through political channels. The reader
should pay close attention to the first two chapters, and keep in mind the
changes taking place between 1880 and 1915. Coker wisely revisits these points
in the narrative during his thematic chapters in order to track the development
of the temperance movement and the shifts in ideologies in the four decades
leading up to national prohibition.
Coker limits the scope of his study in three ways. The first
is geographical: He concentrates on
Yet Coker’s book is about more than prohibition in the South.
It is about evangelical ascendancy in the post-Civil War era. Prohibition
serves as the medium by which Coker tells this story. For example, Coker notes
that “prohibition offers a window into the process of the declining white
attitude toward and rhetoric about blacks between 1880 and 1915, with a
particular focus on the declining racial attitudes of white evangelical
Christians” (171-72). The religion of the Lost Cause provided a means for
evangelicals to exert their cultural authority. The Lost Cause operates as a
subtext to Coker’s argument. However, he is not interested in identifying the
doctrines of the South’s civil religion, as Charles Reagan Wilson has done so
successfully. Instead, Coker inherits the academic tradition of studying the
Lost Cause, but uses it as the prism for interpreting prohibitionist zeal. The
author begins by explaining that evangelicals were outsiders to the southern
cult of honor in the antebellum years, but through the religion of the Lost
Cause they redefined honor with prohibition (183-93). As evangelicals
increasingly became the caretakers of southern culture, they laid claim to
cultural and political authority. This story seems to be the one that Coker is
really telling. The conservative evangelical activity in politics that we so
commonly associate with the Religious Right today has its roots in evangelical prohibitionism of the New South period.
Scholars of various disciplines will appreciate this
important book. As historians continue to explore the intersections of
evangelicalism, civil religion, and politics in the South, they gain greater
insight. Joe Coker has aptly written a history that combines these elements in
a lucid and cogent manner.
Barton E. Price,