Grappling with Demon Rum

Grappling with Demon Rum PDF Author: James E. Klein
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806185821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Social classes collide over morality and social propriety in a brand-new state Well before the Volstead (or National Prohibition) Act of 1919, Oklahoma was dry. Oklahomans banned liquor at their state’s inception in 1907 and maintained the ban even after the repeal of national prohibition. In this book, James E. Klein examines the social and cultural conflicts that led Oklahomans to outlaw liquor and discusses the economic and political consequences of the ban. Grappling with Demon Rum identifies who favored and who opposed prohibition, showing that its proponents were largely middle-class citizens who disdained public drinking establishments and who sought respectability for a young state still considered a frontier society. Klein tells how the Oklahoma Anti-Saloon League orchestrated a dry campaign to raise moral standards, reduce crime, and improve the quality of life, twice convincing voters to support prohibition. Going beyond the usual evangelical-versus-ritualist, rural-versus-urban, and ethnocultural oppositions used by other historians to explain prohibition, Klein shows that Oklahoma’s immigrant and Catholic populations were too small to account for those voting against the measure—or for the large customer base that supported bootleggers. He points instead to the large number of working-class Oklahomans who patronized saloons, whether legal or not, and focuses on class conflict in early efforts to control alcohol. He also describes the trials of enforcement officers who worked to plug leaks in statewide and later national prohibition. A cultural and social history of liquor in early Oklahoma, Grappling with Demon Rum provides a fresh look at crusaders against vice at the regional level. In portraying this conflict between middle- and working-class definitions of social propriety, Klein provides new insight into forces at work throughout America during the Progressive Era.

Grappling with Demon Rum

Grappling with Demon Rum PDF Author: James E. Klein
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806185821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Social classes collide over morality and social propriety in a brand-new state Well before the Volstead (or National Prohibition) Act of 1919, Oklahoma was dry. Oklahomans banned liquor at their state’s inception in 1907 and maintained the ban even after the repeal of national prohibition. In this book, James E. Klein examines the social and cultural conflicts that led Oklahomans to outlaw liquor and discusses the economic and political consequences of the ban. Grappling with Demon Rum identifies who favored and who opposed prohibition, showing that its proponents were largely middle-class citizens who disdained public drinking establishments and who sought respectability for a young state still considered a frontier society. Klein tells how the Oklahoma Anti-Saloon League orchestrated a dry campaign to raise moral standards, reduce crime, and improve the quality of life, twice convincing voters to support prohibition. Going beyond the usual evangelical-versus-ritualist, rural-versus-urban, and ethnocultural oppositions used by other historians to explain prohibition, Klein shows that Oklahoma’s immigrant and Catholic populations were too small to account for those voting against the measure—or for the large customer base that supported bootleggers. He points instead to the large number of working-class Oklahomans who patronized saloons, whether legal or not, and focuses on class conflict in early efforts to control alcohol. He also describes the trials of enforcement officers who worked to plug leaks in statewide and later national prohibition. A cultural and social history of liquor in early Oklahoma, Grappling with Demon Rum provides a fresh look at crusaders against vice at the regional level. In portraying this conflict between middle- and working-class definitions of social propriety, Klein provides new insight into forces at work throughout America during the Progressive Era.

The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum

The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum PDF Author: Joseph Chamberlain Furnas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Alcohol and Drugs in North America [2 volumes]

Alcohol and Drugs in North America [2 volumes] PDF Author: David M. Fahey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 968

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Book Description
Alcohol and drugs play a significant role in society, regardless of socioeconomic class. This encyclopedia looks at the history of all drugs in North America, including alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and even chocolate and caffeinated drinks. This two-volume encyclopedia provides accessibly written coverage on a wide range of topics, covering substances ranging from whiskey to peyote as well as related topics such as Mexican drug trafficking and societal effects caused by specific drugs. The entries also supply an excellent overview of the history of temperance movements in Canada and the United States; trends in alcohol consumption, its production, and its role in the economy; as well as alcohol's and drugs' roles in shaping national discourse, the creation of organizations for treatment and study, and legal responses. This resource includes primary documents and a bibliography offering important books, articles, and Internet sources related to the topic.

In League Against King Alcohol

In League Against King Alcohol PDF Author: Thomas J. Lappas
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806166630
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in their communities, a critical chapter of American cultural history explored in depth for the first time in In League Against King Alcohol. Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. His work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership. Lappas’s work places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century.

Smashing the Liquor Machine

Smashing the Liquor Machine PDF Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190841591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you've never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States. Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.

Alfalfa Bill

Alfalfa Bill PDF Author: Robert L. Dorman
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806162198
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
In this masterful biography, Robert L. Dorman traces the career of William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray from his hardscrabble childhood in post–Civil War Texas to his remarkable ascendancy as a nationally known political figure in the mid-twentieth century. The first comprehensive portrait of Murray to be published in fifty years, Alfalfa Bill is both the exploration of a larger-than-life personality and an illuminating account of the birth of political conservatism in Oklahoma. As Dorman reveals, no political label readily fit Murray. The core conservatism of his Texas years was caught up in the ferment of three major periods of American reform—the Populist uprising, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal. Over his long career, Murray strongly advocated for states’ rights, limited government, and strict constitutionalism, yet he was also a consistent foe of corporations and concentrated wealth. The society he sought was small-scale, decentralized, agrarian—and racially segregated. Although he claimed to represent high principles, Murray as a politician was an opportunist, loved a good fight, had a flair for the theatrical, and hungered for power. Dorman depicts Murray from his days as a political operative in the Chickasaw Nation to his leadership of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, and from the Speaker’s chair of the Oklahoma legislature to the halls of Congress. The book follows Murray’s quixotic attempt to found an agricultural colony in Bolivia, and chronicles his amazing Oklahoma comeback in the 1930 gubernatorial election. The final chapters detail Murray’s legendary term as state governor, his failed candidacy for president, and his emergence as a fierce critic of New Deal liberalism and racial desegregation. Unlike earlier biographies of Murray, Alfalfa Bill brings issues of race, class, and gender to the forefront, often in surprising ways. On the surface, the Murray saga was an American success story, yet his rise came at a price for Murray himself, his family, and the people of the state he helped to create. An indelible portrait emerges of an ambitious, domineering, relentless, and unapologetically racist figure whose tarnished legacy seems painfully relevant in America’s current political climate.

Father of Route 66

Father of Route 66 PDF Author: Susan Croce Kelly
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806147784
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In this engaging biography of a remarkable man, Susan Croce Kelly begins by describing the urgency for “good roads” that gripped the nation in the early twentieth century as cars multiplied and mud deepened. Avery was one of a small cadre of men and women whose passion carried the Good Roads movement from boosterism to political influence to concrete-on-the-ground. While most stopped there, Avery went on to assure that one road—U.S. Highway 66—became a fixture in the imagination of America and the world.

We Are What We Drink

We Are What We Drink PDF Author: Sabine N. Meyer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097408
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Sabine N. Meyer eschews the generalities of other temperance histories to provide a close-grained story about the connections between alcohol consumption and identity in the upper Midwest. Meyer examines the ever-shifting ways that ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and place interacted with each other during the long temperance battle in Minnesota. Her deconstruction of Irish and German ethnic positioning with respect to temperance activism provides a rare interethnic history of the movement. At the same time, she shows how women engaged in temperance work as a way to form public identities and reforges the largely neglected, yet vital link between female temperance and suffrage activism. Relatedly, Meyer reflects on the continuities and changes between how the movement functioned to construct identity in the heartland versus the movement's more often studied roles in the East. She also gives a nuanced portrait of the culture clash between a comparatively reform-minded Minneapolis and dynamic anti-temperance forces in whiskey-soaked St. Paul--forces supported by government, community, and business institutions heavily invested in keeping the city wet.

From Praha to Prague

From Praha to Prague PDF Author: Philip D. Smith
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806159618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Czechs left their homelands in Bohemia and Moravia and came to the United States. While many settled in major American cities, others headed to rural areas out west where they could claim their own land for farming. In From Praha to Prague, Philip D. Smith examines how the Czechs who founded and settled in Prague, Oklahoma, embraced the economic and cultural activities of their American hometown while maintaining their ethnic identity. According to Smith, the Czechs of Prague began as a clannish group of farmers who participated in the 1891 land run and settled in east-central Oklahoma. After the town’s incorporation in 1902, settlers from other ethnic backgrounds swiftly joined the fledgling community, and soon the original Czech immigrants found themselves in the minority. By 1930, the Prague Czechs had reached a unique cultural, social, and economic duality in their community. They strove to become reliable, patriotic citizens of their adopted country—joining churches, playing sports, and supporting the Allied effort in World War II—but they also maintained their identity as Czechs through local traditions such as participating in the Bohemian Hall society, burying their dead in the town’s Czech National Cemetery, and holding the annual Kolache Festival, a lively celebration that still draws visitors from around the world. As a result, Smith notes, succeeding generations of Prague Czechs have proudly considered themselves Czech Americans: firmly assimilated to mainstream American culture but holding to an equally strong sense of belonging to a singular ethnic group. As he analyzes the Czech experience in farm-town Oklahoma, Smith explores several intriguing questions: Was it easier or more difficult for Czechs living in a rural town to sustain their ethnic identity and culture than for Czechs living in large urban areas such as Chicago? How did the tactics used by Prague Czechs to preserve their group identity differ from those used in rural areas where immigrant populations were the majority? In addressing these and other questions, From Praha to Prague reveals the unique path that Prague Czechs took toward Americanization.

Poor Man's Fortune

Poor Man's Fortune PDF Author: Jarod Roll
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469656302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
White working-class conservatives have played a decisive role in American history, particularly in their opposition to social justice movements, radical critiques of capitalism, and government help for the poor and sick. While this pattern is largely seen as a post-1960s development, Poor Man's Fortune tells a different story, excavating the long history of white working-class conservatism in the century from the Civil War to World War II. With a close study of metal miners in the Tri-State district of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Jarod Roll reveals why successive generations of white, native-born men willingly and repeatedly opposed labor unions and government-led health and safety reforms, even during the New Deal. With painstaking research, Roll shows how the miners' choices reflected a deep-seated, durable belief that hard-working American white men could prosper under capitalism, and exposes the grim costs of this view for these men and their communities, for organized labor, and for political movements seeking a more just and secure society. Roll's story shows how American inequalities are in part the result of a white working-class conservative tradition driven by grassroots assertions of racial, gendered, and national privilege.