| Building on the recent renaissance in the study of temperance this dissertation shows how the federal system molded the prohibition movement. The federal government's regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure hindered the operation of state and local prohibition. In the 1880s and 1890s the predominate temperance ideology generated a Mosaic view of law that failed to provide practical solutions to the problems posed by the federal system. But by the time of national prohibition drys had changed their approach to legal issues. The legal environment pushed prohibitionists into adopting the idea of joint state and federal action against liquor. From the 1890s temperance advocates struggled to make the federal commerce power aid dry states. Before national prohibition, a series of federal statutes, the Wilson Act (1890), and COD Act (1909), the Webb-Kenyon Act (1913), and the Reed Bone Dry Amendment to the Postal Act (1917) fully mobilized that power for the dry cause. The rise of the Anti-Saloon league, with its pragmatic view of law, transformed the legal strategy of the prohibitionists. For example, dry plans for the federal liquor tax changed. Prohibitionists ceased to work for its abolition and instead successfully strove to turn it into a valuable liquor law enforcement weapon. Yet prohibitionists never gave up the idea of law as a moral statement. The drys, through the eighteenth amendment's concurrent powers clause and the Volstead Act's provisions, wrote these conceptions of law into the nation's Constitution and statutes. |
