A Part of the Public Discourse

The month of January has been full.  Full of getting back in the swing of a new semester.  Full of getting my children back to school after a fun filled vacation.  And still quite full from all the eating that was done in December!  But it has also been full of public speaking events.

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak about the 1920s in Indiana, detailing to a local group the rise and fall of the second Ku Klux Klan.  This week, I talked to another local group about Prohibition in the 1920s, and got to be part of a panel at the Indiana State Museum to discuss Indiana's "blue laws," pertaining especially liquor laws that grew out of Prohibition around Sunday liquor sales.  Next week, there will be another talk to another local group about the second Klan in Indiana.

Why all the sudden interest again in the 1920s? Of course, I'd like to think it has to do with the new literature on the topics (including my own work on the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker--published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009, and my more recent work on how museums have interpreted the dry years--which was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2014), Ken Burn's miniseries, and the recent exhibits at places like the Indiana Historical Society and at the National Constitution Center.  There is also the analogies between alcohol prohibition and drug legalization efforts.

But there is more to it than that.  Prohibition forces us to talk about religion, politics, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, the nature of business, race, law, rural life, international relations, the Constitution....the list goes on and on and on! It remains timely, topical, interesting, and very much part of the public discourse.

There are few issues that cut across issues in American History like Prohibition.  That is probably why people come out to hear about over 80 years after it was repealed.  And that  is probably why, even though my interests take me in other directions, I will come back to it again at some point.

Repeal Day

Yesterday was Repeal Day.  Don't know what that is?  It is the day that the United States ratified the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, repealing the 18th Amendment, and ending national Prohibition.  I saw several articles, most lite on History and strong on how bars have started using Repeal Day as an excuse to throw a party.



Mixed in with the tales of revelry, I also saw a few "politically" themed articles as well.  Coming from the Right side of the political spectrum, these articles hailed repeal as a triumph of individual rights over progressive "values"and misplaced "big government" programs.

This line of "attack" on Prohibition have always struck me as interesting.  First, because they conflate modern liberals who claim the mantle of Progressive for their own with the historical Progressives of the early twentieth century, a group that is much more complex than modern political labels often capture.  Second, they often make an economic argument for repeal (mimicking many of the attacks of New Deal era wets) which don't hold up to the historic evidence (the 1920s economy did just fine without legal drinking, unemployment was hardly caused by Prohibition, and repeal did not end the Great Depression). Thirdly, they hold Prohibition to an impossible legal standard (100% acceptance) that no other law is expected to meet. And lastly, they ignore the complex moral reasons that caused many to support Prohibition to begin with (not to mention how different drinking was before Prohibition versus after repeal became).

One of the great things about the study of Prohibition for me (I have written two books on the subject after all) is finding out just how much we assume we know about Prohibition versus what actually happened.

So, when Repeal Day comes along next year, feel free to raise a glass.  But take a moment before you do to understand the complex History behind what you are toasting.

The View from a Mile High City

Last week I had the good fortune to travel to Denver, Colorado to take part in a conference on university honors programs.  It was a great time to be out in Denver, I met colleagues from around the country, got to tour the city, and came home with all sorts of new ideas for the honors program at Butler University.

Part of my time was spent taking part in a City-As-Text exercise.  My group traveled to the Colorado State Capitol building as well as Molly Brown's house (she of unsinkable/Titanic fame).  It was a wonderful time, with some breathtaking views.  The steps up to the statehouse itself have been confirmed via GPS to be a mile above sea level -- and if you take the tour, your view can get even better, via the observation deck that is around the golden dome.

In what little down time I had, I did some further exploration of the city, witnessing Denver as a city proud of its past in many ways, excited about its future, and grappling with issues caused by growth, tourism, and homelessness (the climate, both environmental--generally temperate with 300 days of sunshine--and political contribute to all three).  I even managed to get a little writing and revising done on my next book.

As an author, I know all to well what it means to grapple with a text.  But the rewards (and most often they aren't monetary) are worth it.  I have been thinking about that quite a bit as my third book (Interpreting the Prohibition Era at Museums and Historic Sites) is due to come out this month.  As I relate in the book, at one point I never thought I would return to the world of wets and drys (which was, after all, the topic of my first book).  But with this new book, I got to engage that material in new ways, and found if not new understanding, at least new ways to view the Prohibition Era.  You don't always have to look at things from the mountain top perch, but some times doing so helps you appreciate the view.

Back to the Land of the Sycamores

Last night, I had the honor of speaking in Terre Haute, Indiana to speak to the Wabash Valley Genealogy Society (you can visit their website here).  My topic was Prohibition in Indiana and despite the weather (storms moved through during my talk and all the way home), there was a great turnout and lively discussion.  It was a wonderful event and I am thankful I got to share with them a bit about my own research on the noble crusade.

It is perhaps fitting that I spoke in Terre Haute when I did.  Looking back, my professional career started there (I had to travel to take the GRE at Indiana State University my senior year of college).  And so, in talking about Prohibition, which was the focus of my dissertation-turned-first book, I got to bring it back full circle.  As an added bonus, in Prohibition is here to Stay, Terre Haute graces the pages several times--both because of the breweries and saloon-based political corruption there, but also because the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker was a pastor for a time there in his early ministry (before he made prohibition his reform).  But it was also fitting because a month from now, my third book Interpreting the Prohibition Era will be published by Rowman & Littlefield.  As that date gets closer, I grow more excited by the fact that I was given the opportunity to "go back" to the time of wets and drys and think about Prohibition yet again and in new ways.

Not every historian or academic gets that kind of opportunity.  And while my current research has taken me far from saloons and churches (in some respects), who knows, maybe I'll come back to it again.  After all, as I was reminded last night, there are still many stories waiting to be told in places both near and far away!

The Gift of Blurb

As readers of this blog already know, my third book is set to be released in November.  Published by Rowman & Littlefield, with the support of AASLH, the book is part of the new Interpreting History series, which looks at historical events and how Museums and Historical Societies have and can discuss them.  Back in the summer of 2012 I was contacted about the possibility of writing the book on Prohibition, an opportunity that I accepted.  Getting to return to the world of wets and drys was a fun intellectual experience, and getting to investigate how institutions (both large and small) have attempted to discuss and convey "the noble experiment" to visitors was a good deal of fun as well.

I was pleased to discover earlier today that the back cover review blurb has been uploaded to the book's website.  I am equally pleased to share it with you all now:


"Interpreting the Prohibition Era at Museums and Historic Sites is exactly the kind of book that busy interpreters, curators, and museum administrators need. Well-researched and lucidly written, it combines a brief history of prohibition with incisive guidelines for interpretation. Lantzer offers an informative account of the long war between “wets” and “drys” in slightly less than fifty pages. His guidelines demonstrate the enduring relevance of prohibition while offering suggestions for telling meaningful, engaging stories about it. Interpreting the Prohibition Era is sure to become a standard resource for public historians and museum professionals. In fact, by reminding us that prohibition left no part of the nation untouched, the book shows why its story deserves to be told – and how sites large and small can incorporate it into their programming."— Daniel Vivian, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public History Program, University of Louisville

 I am thankful to my editors at Rowman & Littlefield, the members of the AASLH for entrusting the volume to me, and Dr. Vivian for the very kind review.  I hope the eventual readers also find it "well-researched and lucidly written" as well.


UPDATE:   There is now a second back blurb review up (thank you to Eloise Batic, who was so helpful with the entire project):

"Interpreting the Prohibition Era at Museums and Historic Sites is a must-read for any museum professional seeking to uncover the Prohibition era in a museum gallery or program setting. Tapping into public interest by celebrating objects and stories from the local perspective is a wonderful opportunity for museums, but this book will help program developers understand the context in which their story sits. Taking the local story and asking the variety of contextual questions posed in this book will help museums explore the widest possible angle of history and spark countless new interests on the part of visitors."
— Eloise Batic, Director of Exhibitions Research and Development, Indiana Historical Society

Listen to the Radio

I had the great pleasure, for the second time, to be a guest on Hoosier History Live today.  The only radio program in the nation dedicated to state history that takes calls from listeners.  Carried on WICR 88.7 (on the campus of the University of Indianapolis) the program tackles a new topic every week.

The first time I was on the show, the topic was interesting facts about Indiana's history.  My contribution was to discuss some of the communities that disappeared (chief cause, the creation of reservoirs), the final resting place of Uncle Tom (yes, the Uncle Tom), the "anti-Dillinger" police post in Goshen (always a favorite), and the origins of the name "Wakarusa" (well, maybe!).  

But today's show focused on Prohibition.  As I often tell students, it is a topic that is near and dear to my professional heart.  So, I got to talk a bit about my first book, and Book 3 as well (as the State Museum is about to host the traveling exhibit from the National Constitution Center).  That I also got to see an old graduate school friend (who now works at the Indiana State Museum) was just icing on the proverbial cake.

So, thank you Nelson and Molly, for putting this show on each and every week.  Next week's show, in which the guest is my dissertation adviser, Prof. James Madison, who is going to talk about his new book, Hoosiers, is sure to be a treat for listeners!

Kingdom of God

I have spent much of my professional life grappling with the Progressives.  My introduction came while working on my first book, Prohibition is Here to Stay, in which I had to discuss how the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker became Indiana's leading dry.  The answer, I found was the intermixing of temperance sentiment within his own Methodist tradition with the emerging Progressive political and Social Gospel theological movements.  To me it seemed then, as it still does today, that it was a rather easy leap for him to make from the pulpit to political activist, leading his (largely) evangelical dry crusade, via the Anti-Saloon League (whose slogan was "the Church in action") against the forces of "demon rum."

Of course one of the fun things about studying the Progressives is that scholars (not unlike the Progressives themselves) argue over what is or was a "real" Progressive reform.  Our problem is that there was no checklist, no requirements, to being a Progressive.  Really (and this no doubt will gall some of my colleagues) the only requirement was that you be a reformer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century advocating that your reform would make American society better.  Hence, reforms ran the gambit from Prohibition, to worker's rights, to child labor laws, to eugenics, to food and drug regulation, to many, many more.  You did not need to advocate all of these things to be a Progressive, you did not even need to support all of them.  Likewise, you did not have to be politically liberal (really by the standards of the time, and most assuredly by today's definition) to be a reformer either. Such ambiguity can be maddening at times when you are trying to write or teach about the Progressives.  It can also make it difficult to define or even defend the term within its modern use versus its historical context (note how many twenty-first century political liberals have attempted to adopt the term "Progressive" for themselves).

But, I have been thinking about the Progressives again because I have been reading posts this week about whether or not Christians can hope (or even should hope) to be able to transform their culture or not.  Hence, in the past week there have been calls for Christians to re-engage the fine arts (as a means to transform the culture), rather than seek a political solution (see here), calls to be "realistic" at what Christians can actually hope to accomplish (see here), and doubts that Christians can ever hope to actually transform secular culture at all (see here).  Perhaps interestingly, these posts come from what might be called the more conservative theological spectrum, and dovetail nicely with this piece from the Wall Street Journal in which Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention asserts that "the Bible Belt is collapsing."  Rather than a "moral majority", Moore says American Christians must now be prepared to be a "prophetic minority."

Such a discussion is healthy to have of course.  What is the role of God's people on this earth?  Is it to save society?  Or merely save souls?  Can it do both?  Can committed Christians actually live their faith and NOT affect wider society?  While some of the discussion above is related to notions of such debates over "two kingdoms theology" (see here) and what that means for Christians and culture, there is also a tinge of dejection -- that despite the best efforts of the Religious Right since the late 1970s, America seems to be only getting more secular, that perhaps they have failed to recapture or transform the culture at all, and that the best that can be hoped for is to hold on to what God has given them individually.

The Progressives grappled with this kind of dejection--of falling short of their goals--as well.  For religiously inspired reformers, what they were striving for was to establish God's kingdom on this earth.  Some believed that by perfecting American society (not unlike their parents or grandparents during the Second Great Awakening) they would literally be preparing the world for Christ's Second Coming.  Hence to them, reform work was both their Christian duty to their fellow man and a divine mandate.  That their reforms sometimes worked, sometimes failed, and sometimes never got very far was, eventually, a source of confusion and disappointment (coupled with the theological controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) that caused many denominations to pull back from the wider world and from each other by the time of the Great Depression. 

The pull back by some and the coasting of others led to a lack of cultural engagement and involvement unprecedented in American History.  As I argue in The Mainline this contributed to the decline of the Seven Sisters and the rise of what has been called the Religious Right (and to a lesser extent, the Religious Left perhaps).  Disengagement from the culture might feel nice in the short term, but holds the potential to do far greater damage to both the Church and the wider culture than staying engaged does.  And to hear one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention talk about being a "prophetic minority" is to remind me of some within the Episcopal Church (including some affiliated with retired Bishop John Shelby Spong) who, in the late 1990s claimed that they were a "righteous remnant" in the face of dwindling membership within the denomination and attacks on liberal theology.  Considering that I placed the Southern Baptists within the new Mainline, it causes one to wonder if they will not lead, who will?  And if Christians will not engage the culture, who will?

The Souls of Real People

Historians have an awesome responsibility.  As a profession, we deal with the past of course.  But it is a real past, the real past, which was constructed, inhabited by real people (just like us).  In telling their story then, historians have the task of both constructing an argument about the past, as well as doing justice to the past and the people we are writing about.

Today, I had a chance to really ponder those sentiments.  Before heading downtown to teach, I stopped off at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.  The final resting place of Hoosiers since the mid-1860s, those interned there include the politicians (governors, senators, vice presidents, and a president), the infamous (John Dillinger), powerful businessmen and community leaders, as well as average citizens.  My purpose in driving through the cemetery grounds was to find a few graves of people I have studied and written about over the past few years.  It was both intellectual curiosity as well as hoping to find a few new details for my current project.

What does this have to do with The Mainline?  Well, quite a bit actually, at least insofar as we are thinking of the Mainline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter 2).  I am currently researching the life and times of Preston Davidson, a native Hoosier from a distinguished family in Indianapolis (his maternal grandfather was governor of the state), who fought for the South during the Civil War.  Indeed, his life is full of virtually every Civil War cliche one can think of, and in many ways he remained unreconstructed to the end of his life.  What makes his story compelling in terms of The Mainline, however, was more to do with his religious life.  His paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Virginia.  The Reverend Andrew Davidson was a church planter along Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, centered in and around Lexington.  The Reverend Davidson was an Old School Presbyterian, a devout Calvinist, and could by all accounts deliver a powerful sermon.  As such, he represents both a doctrinal divide within American Protestantism, the tensions involved in early nineteenth century America over slavery, and desire for evangelicals to find both acceptance and to help shape American culture (the Davidson family was a product and protector of Lexington's chief school of higher education, now known as Washington and Lee University, for virtually all of the nineteenth century).

Two of the Reverend's sons were part of the "Virginia exodus" that helped settle Indiana.  One, the Reverend Charles Baker Davidson, followed in his father's ministerial footsteps -- though exhibiting a denominational fluidity that seems much more modern than perhaps is often admitted.  Baker joined the Methodist Church in Indiana, serving congregations in and around the Evansville area, and by the time of the Civil War, left that branch of Protestantism for the Episcopal Church.  Preston's father, Alexander Davidson, became intrinsically linked to his father-in-law's political career and ambitions.  But when it came to religion, Alexander exhibited more of the evangelical streak of his family:  Helping to found Indianapolis's Second Presbyterian Church, whose first pastor (who married Alexander and Catherine Noble) was Henry Ward Beecher.  Beecher introduced his sister, Harriet, to a former Noble family slave whom the governor had brought to Indiana after the deaths of his own parents.  The former slave's name was Tom, and the Beechers often visited with him in his cabin on the Noble family farm.

To add a further layer, while Preston eventually enrolled in the then Washington College in Lexington (from which he went on to fight for the Confederacy alongside his cousins, other family members, and under the command of Lexington's famed Presbyterian warrior, Stonewall Jackson), his first taste of higher education was in Indianapolis at North Western Christian University -- which is today known as Butler University.  The driving force behind the school was Ovid Butler, who was a staunch free soiler and devout evangelical.  This was the world that produced Preston Davidson, and as numerous scholars have argued, we cannot really grasp why the Civil War was fought, or why it lasted so long, unless we appreciate the role religion played in American life during the first half of the nineteenth century.

But the Noble-Davidson plot was not the only one I visited.  I also tracked down the grave of the man who was the subject of my first book, the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker.  Not unlike Davidson, Shumaker was the product of the evangelical Midwest; though of the second half of the nineteenth century.  And while anti-slavery had been the main reform of Shumaker's father's generation, for Edward, who became a Methodist minister, the chief reform was Prohibition.  He became a champion for the dry crusade and eventually the leader of the Indiana branch of the Anti-Saloon League.  Shumaker became more a political operative than minister, fought battles against wets, damps, and even amongst his fellow drys.  Despite the ups and downs, thankfully for Shumaker, his death came before repeal of his beloved 18th Amendment.

Shumaker's story reminds us yet again of the power of evangelical Protestantism to shape American culture.  To forget that, is to forget not just one of the chief reasons why Prohibition became a reality, but also why Protestants were so invested in such a reform -- combating societal evils was sometimes easier than dealing with doctrinal and theological issues.

To forget these types of stories, to neglect religious aspect of reforms, of life, and their impact on American culture, is to miss a huge part of our history.  It also does something else:  It downplays the potential that religion has to continue to shape that culture today.  Ponder that, and for those whose graves I visited today:

Requiescat in pace