Free Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America by Edward Behr Page A

the nineteenth century came to an end to equate Prohibitionists with cranks.
    It was the Anti-Saloon League’s sophisticated understanding of the confused, often contradictory, nature both of Prohibitionist activists and of the anti-Prohibitionist forces arrayed against them that made the ASL into the driving force that would eventually lead to the passing of the Volstead Act. Between 1893 and 1918, a handful of its leaders would bring about nothing less than a social, moral, and political revolution.
    Whereas moral propagandists such as Ernest H. Cherrington brought the Prohibition message to the masses, it was Wayne Wheeler — the ASL’s behind-the-scenes political manipulator (“controlling six Congresses, dictating to two Presidents” and “becoming the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States”) 5 — who, more than any other Prohibitionist activist, engineered the political change.
    By all accounts, including those of his subordinates and fellow ASL executives, Wheeler was in many ways a deeply flawed, utterly ruthless manipulator of singularly limited vision. His conversion to Prohibition was not religious in origin, nor did he come from an alcoholic family. His later reminiscences about the evils of drink are curiously undra-matic, though he did his best to sensationalize them: in one instance, he was forced to listen to the divagations of an “ ‘Old Soak’. . . acting out the story of Ten Nights in a Bar Boom while mother and we children gasped in alarm. . . . My dreams were long colored by that scene.” On another occasion, a farm laborer “stuck the tine of his fork into my bare leg while I was packing down the hay he pitched on the wagon. He had been drinking but did not believe his condition required any excuse.” Wheeler’s career suggests that he chose to make his mark as a Prohibitionist because he realized that with his natural talent for manipulation and intrigue this was the surest means of acquiring the behind-the-scenes power he craved.
    His credentials were impeccable. The fourth of nine children of an Ohioan cattle dealer and farmer, young Wayne displayed from childhood onward the entrepreneurial skills so admired in nineteenthcentury puritan society. As a schoolboy, he earned pocket money operating a sausage-making machine in a local butcher’s shop. No sooner did he move to Oberlin College than he took a job as a dormitory janitor. “Wherever he saw a remunerative position open, he entered the gap,” whether this meant waiting on tables, deputizing for the college chaplain, publishing scorecards, or dealing in books, rugs, or blackboard-desks. With this background and his trading skills, he might well have joined the ranks of the robber barons who were already changing the face of America.
    But Wheeler also fancied himself a poet, orator, and debater, and it was this need to thrust himself into the limelight that first attracted him to the Prohibitionist cause. Oberlin college had been, since its early establishment as Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1832, at the forefront of the abolitionist battle — and abolitionists were also, overwhelmingly, Prohibitionists. This deeply Calvinist college was a nurturing-ground for fledgling missionaries, and Wheeler quickly started mining a rich seam. In debates at religious meetings he began speaking out on the plight of the African Negro — whose wretchedness, at least according to American missionaries there, was not due to colonial abuses (about which Wheeler was curiously silent) but to overindulgence in alcohol.
    As a freshman, Wheeler’s speech to the college debating society, “Rum on the Congo,” made considerable impact, and has been preserved. Based on letters to a fellow student of a missionary father, it was a typical example of the hyperbole that passed for eloquence at the time (1890).
Today, the eyes of the Christian world are turned to the “Free State” of the Congo. Its present condition and its