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TIME MACHINE
150 YEARS AGO
THE FIRST PROHIBITION LAW
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
On June 2, Gov. John Hubbard of Maine signed an act prohibiting the sale, manufacture, or “keeping for sale” of alcoholic beverages anywhere in the state. The law’s enactment culminated two decades of tireless campaigning by Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, and James Appleton, the author of a lurid and influential 1837 report on the effects of drinking. Five years earlier, they had persuaded the legislature to pass a first attempt at prohibition, but it was ridden with loopholes and had little enforcement machinery and weak penalties. The 1851 act was much tougher, though drink sellers still found myriad evasions, legal and illegal.
In the early days of the temperance movement, its advocates had shunned politics in favor of “moral suasion,” but the success in Maine led to a change in tactics. Within four years, a dozen more states had adopted Maine-style laws, with others banning taverns or allowing localities to do so. In the opposite of the pattern that would prevail in the next century, prohibition found its strongest support in the North and was rejected in the South. The reason was simple: As industrialization spread, Northerners worried about alcohol’s effects on the laboring classes, many of whom were immigrants. The South, by contrast, had little industry, few immigrants, and its own peculiar institution for keeping laborers under control. Many Southerners saw prohibition as an example of Yankee decadence, especially since most active prohibitionists—including Dow and Appleton—were also fervent abolitionists.
The movement suffered a sharp setback in 1855, when Dow’s violent suppression of a pro-drink rally in Portland brought unwelcome publicity. In other states, legislatures repealed their acts or courts threw them out. At the same time, the sectional crisis grew to overshadow temperance as a cause for reformers. By the Civil War, only Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut still had prohibition laws on the books.
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50 YEARS AGO
May 15, 1951: Communist forces launch a spring offensive against United Nations troops in Korea. The effort fizzles out within a week.
75 YEARS AGO
May 9, 1926: Floyd Bennett and Richard E. Byrd make the first flight over the North Pole.
May 10, 1926: U.S. Marines are dispatched to suppress a rebellion in Nicaragua. After a brief withdrawal, they will return in August and stay until 1933.
125 YEARS AGO
May 10, 1876: In Philadelphia, President Ulysses S. Grant opens the Centennial Exposition, which celebrates 100 years of progress since American independence.
June 6, 1876: Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer is published in England. It will not appear in America for another six months.
June 25, 1876: At the battle of the Little Bighorn, Gen. George A. Custer and more than 260 others, most of them members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, are killed by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
150 YEARS AGO
May 1851: William Cooper Nell publishes Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812, one of the earliest books about African-American history.
May 15, 1851: The inaugural Erie Railroad train from New York City arrives at Dunkirk, New York, connecting the Atlantic and the Great Lakes by rail.
June 5, 1851: The first installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most influential antislavery novel ever written, is published in a Washington newspaper.
225 YEARS AGO
May 2, 1776: King Louis XVI of France secretly agrees to send $200,000 worth of arms and ammunition to American colonists rebelling against Britain, France’s age-old enemy. Within a year, the assistance will total more than a million dollars.
June 7, 1776: In the Continental Congress, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduces a resolution calling for the colonies to declare their independence. On June 11, the congress appoints a committee to draw up a declaration.
325 YEARS AGO
May 10, 1676: Gov. William Berkeley of Virginia proclaims Nathaniel Bacon, who is leading an armed force against hostile Indians, to be a rebel.
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