Alcohol, temperance and prohibition in Arizona

Arizona's adoption of an alcohol-prohibition amendment in November 1914 represented less the culmination of a crusade than a point on a continuum of alcohol use and opposition to it which runs through the area's history. A native alcohol culture predated contract with European colonizers and missionaries. During Arizona's territorial period, alcohol and saloons formed the social, economic and even physical centers of its cities, towns and bonanza camps. The saloons' association with vice and corruption fuelled establishment of Arizona affiliates of national anti-drink voluntary associations, including the Good Templars, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America.; Attempts to limit saloons' extent and influence through ordinances, increased license fees and local option elections met with little success. By 1914, therefore, the Anti-Saloon League of Arizona abandoned such measures in favor of seeking a state-wide prohibition amendment, using the constitutional initiative provision to advance the measure outside the structure of the reluctant mainstream political parties. This effort was successful in 1914 and again in 1916; ultimately, however, dry enforcement proved nearly impossible. Popular support for Repeal in Arizona indicated wide dissatisfaction with the social costs of the "noble experiment." After 1933, however, a righteous remnant continued to campaign for Arizona's return to the dry fold.; This study examines the social and political history of alcohol and its opponents in Arizona, from pre-Contact times through the period of national Prohibition. Scholarship has shown that prohibition was less a delusive panacea touted by a few partisans than an important element in the thought of many Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It issued from and spoke to the tensions of a population in transition. Analysis of Arizona's alcohol culture and its antithesis reveals the extent to which Arizona represented a social, economic and political microcosm of the larger nation, sharing common national concerns and enthusiasms. The successful dry campaigns of 1914 and 1916, while presumably aimed at local problems, represented manifestations of a nation-wide cultural crusade meant to reaffirm mainstream conservative Protestant values endangered by a society undergoing rapid transformation.