Pathways to Prohibition

Strategies for gradually affecting social change are often dismissed as too accommodating of the status quo. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski challenges this assumption, arguing that moderation is sometimes the most effective way to achieve change. Pathways to Prohibition examines the strategic choices of social movements through a focus on the fates of the two waves of temperance campaigns. The prohibitionists of the 1880s gained limited success, while their Progressive Era counterparts achieved a remarkable - albeit temporary - accomplishment in American politics: the passage of an amendment to the U.S. constitution. Szymanski accounts for these divergent outcomes by asserting that choice of strategy (how a social movement defines and pursues its goals) is a significant and, until now, underappreciated element in the success or failure of social movements. Her emphasis on strategy represents a sharp departure from approaches that prioritize political opportunity as the most consequential factor in campaigns for social change. Combining the insights of social movement theory with historical research, Pathways to Prohibition shows how a locally based, moderate strategy allowed the early-twentieth-century prohibition crusade to develop both a potent grassroots component and the capacity to transcend the limited scope of local politics. Szymanski describes how the prohibition movement's strategic shift toward moderate goals after 1900 reflected the devolution of the state legislatures' liquor licensing power to the localities, the judiciary's growing acceptance of these licensing regimes, and the collective belief that local electorates, rather than the state legislatures, were best situated to resolve controversial issues like the liquor question. "Local gradualism" is well-suited to the porous, federal structure of the American state, Szymanski contends, and it has been effectively used by a number of social movements including the civil rights and Christian Right movements.