Historian Jason Lantzer has defied the odds. He’s authored a doctoral thesis, and it is readable, academically sound and pertinent to current events.

Lantzer tells the story of Edward Shumaker, the most politically influential church pastor in Indiana history. Shumaker was a crusader against alcohol abuse, peaking in his impact from World War I to the mid-1920s.

Shumaker’s life is interesting in itself, with its mix of crusading, political infighting with Republicans and Democrats, and free-speech First Amendment issues. But Lantzer sets the story in the larger context of the Progressive Movement of the 20th Century. He also brings it up to date in drawing links between the temperance movement of nearly a century ago and today’s meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Lantzer also challenges the conventional wisdom that Prohibition was a failure in the book, Prohibition Is Here to Stay, from Notre Dame Press.

The temperance movement, which preceded Prohibition, was successful in combating the alcohol abuse that left women and children in desperate poverty when so many wage-earning men wasted their pay on the bottle. After several years of too much indulgence in alcoholic beverages, the nation turned to temperance, or voluntary pledges to abstain, in response to the spiritual revivals in the early 19th Century and the corollary conversions to Christ. These temperance pledges were part of larger reform movements, including the growing effort to abolish slavery before the Civil War.

Some states went beyond the voluntary temperance pledges to restrict alcoholic beverage sales. Through county­-option votes, citizens could curb alcohol abuse on a democratic basis. Voters in each county could decide whether to allow liquor sales. As a result, men sobered up and crime went down in the 19th Century. Those who were dying for a drink could move to a “wet” county where sales were legal.

What failed was Prohibition (1919-1933), the political attempt to impose the temperance movement on the whole nation, including the big cities where there was no consensus to go dry. Consequently, Prohibition has received a bad rap in history; and its failure is used today to argue for lowering the drinking age to 18 and legalizing marijuana. In fact, Prohibition did dry up a lot of crime and took an abused substance out of the marketplace. Sadly, it also resulted in disrespect for poorly enforced laws and the creation of links between organized crime and police officials in big cities.

Lantzer’s book clearly demonstrates that Prohibition was not the work of fanatics. These activists were part of a larger progressive movement that also gave women the vote and attempted to bring a higher level of ethics to the political process before World War I. For his part, Shumaker took the Anti-Saloon League and made it a vehicle to crusade against alcohol abuse in the Midwest. He also became a major power broker who could swing a state election to either party. In this he shared similarities to modern Religious Right organizations that have at times swayed state and national politics.

Shumaker’s influence attracted the resentment of elected political officials, including Indiana Atty. Gen. Gilliom, who had ambitions for higher office. Gilliom, upset because Shumaker contributed to his defeat in the 1928 U.S. Senate primary, prosecuted the pastor for making contemptuous comments about public officials.

Sentenced to a state farm prison, Shumaker found a ministry with men who had been imprisoned for breaking Prohibition laws. But he lost 39 pounds in prison and did not live long after his release in 1929.

Lantzer aptly concludes his story with a description of a contemporary Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, linking A.A. to the movement to make America a dry nation. “They knew the pitfalls of drink and addiction and the pain it caused to both the user and the user’s family and friends, and they tried to stop it once and for all,” he sums up. A.A. meetings, he adds, are part of that dry tradition. “Dry culture, still alive, is trying to save America one soul at a time.”

Lantzer’s book is important because so few historians have dug into the temperance movement in detail. A 1979 book, The Alcoholic Republic, by W. J. Rorabaugh, detailed the early 19th Century movement, showing its links to other reform movements. Lantzer’s story provides a helpful companion to Rorabaugh.

The tragedy of Prohibition was that temperance advocates became impatient with 85 years of efforts to prompt people to abstain from alcoholic beverages on a voluntary basis, or by county-option votes and restrictive regulation through state laws. They impatiently threw a touchdown pass and scored, only to find that their political activism was not enough to establish the necessary social consensus to really make alcoholic beverages illegal.

But these people still had their heroic moments, like some slavery abolitionists who got carried away in their zeal, though they had their sights set on a worthy objective.

Many of us grew up hearing how horrible Prohibition was because it encouraged disrespect for the law. “The first to plead his case seems just until another comes and examines him” (Prov. 18:17). Lantzer examines the Prohibition era and gives another side of the story.

–Russ Pulliam