The Anti-Saloon League Controversy

The Anti-Saloon league was founded as a state organization in Oberlin, Ohio in 1893. It became a legitimate national organization in 1895, and overtook the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party to seize leadership in the crusade to prohibit alcohol in the United States in the early 1900’s. In 1909, the League moved to Westerville, Ohio where it founded and operated the American Issue Publishing Company: a propaganda front for the League which it adroitly used to distribute pamphlets, leaflets, magazines, and books all centered around the single issue of prohibition. The League spread across the United States to work with churches to realize its objective of Prohibition, and in 1913 publicly announced its ambitions to prohibit alcohol nationwide through a constitutional amendment. In 1916, it oversaw the election of the two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress required to inaugurate the 18th amendment. The 18th amendment was ratified in 1919 and took effect in 1920. The meteoric rise of the Saloon League in the early twentieth century and its brief triumph after the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1920
Both the ASL and the KKK acted to enforce prohibition, the ASL through legal and political means, the KKK through grassroots political pressure and extralegal vigilante methods. Wet observers and, more recently, historians of the Klan movement claimed that the ASL cooperated with the Invisible Empire in direct enforcement of dry laws. ASL activists and prohibition historians, in turn, denied league involvement with the intolerant, occasionally violent, dry vigilantism of the Klan and instead stressed the nonpartisan bureaucratic operations of the ASL. The actual ambivalent relationship reflected shortcomings in the dry regime and in the two organizations.