Anti-Saloon League

The Anti-Saloon League, now known as the American Council on Addiction and Alcohol Problems, is an organization of the temperance movement in the United States.

[1] Founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, it was a key component of the Progressive Era, and was strongest in the South and rural North, drawing support from Protestant ministers and their congregations, especially Methodists, Baptists, Disciples and Congregationalists.

Unlike earlier popular movements, it utilized bureaucratic methods learned from business to build a strong organization.

[12] The League's most prominent leader was Wayne Wheeler, although both Ernest Cherrington and William E. "Pussyfoot" Johnson were also highly influential and powerful.

[13] Howard Ball has written that the Ku Klux Klan and the Anti-Saloon league were both immensely powerful pressure groups in Birmingham, Alabama during the Post-World War I period.

A local newspaper editor at the time wrote that "In Alabama, it is hard to tell where the Anti-Saloon League ends and the Klan begins".

Ministers had launched several efforts to close Arizona saloons after the 1906 creation of League chapters in Yuma, Tucson, and Phoenix.

A League organizer from New York arrived in 1909, but the Phoenix chapter was stymied by local-option elections, whereby local areas could decide whether to allow saloons.

It made little headway in larger cities, or among liturgical church members such as Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians and German Lutherans.

Local Option was passed in 1907 and, by 1910, 40 of Illinois's 102 counties and 1,059 of the state's townships and precincts had become dry, including some Protestant areas around Chicago.

Despite these successes, after the Prohibition amendment was ratified in 1919, social problems ignored by the League – such as organized crime – undermined the public influence of the single-issue pressure group, and it faded in importance.

William H. Anderson was the League's Maryland leader from 1907 to 1914, but he was unable to adapt to local conditions, such as the large German element.

[21][25] Unable to cope with the failures of prohibition after 1928, especially bootlegging and organized crime as well as reduced government revenue, the League failed to counter the repeal forces.