Free 1920 by Eric Burns

nearby children of his approximate age as playmates, and few material possessions,on a small farm outside Brookfield, Ohio. In a book called
The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol
, I wrote about Wheeler’s early boyhood. It provided him, he claimed, with a life-changing experience:
    One day a laborer on the farm had a few belts of whiskey, then began feeding a bale of hay to some horses. Wheeler stood close to him, too close, and the man accidentally stabbed him in the leg with his pitchfork. Wheeler fell backward, crying out, then quickly clutched at the wound to stop the bleeding, which seems to have been profuse. Other farmhands rushed to help, carrying the boy into the house and getting the leg bandaged. If his later account of the mishap is accurate—and one cannot help but suspect a bit of tailoring for dramatic effect—what Wheeler said at the moment was, “I hope that some day there won’t be any more liquor to make men drunk.” He also claimed that, even after many years had passed, he could still remember the terrible alcoholic reek of the man with the pitchfork, and the shimmery flush of his skin.
    Whether the account is true or dramatized, Wheeler had taken his first steps along the road that would lead him to the Anti-Saloon League, a well-financed group already in existence, founded by a minister named Howard Hyde Russell. In time, Russell would cede control of his mission to the young man who, upon his graduation from Oberlin College, Russell would come to consider his protégé. It was at that moment, when the baton was passed, that what had been just another collection of drys was transformed into a force that American lawmakers would find irresistible. Wheeler simply never tired, never ran out of ideas, never took no for an answer when he could respond with either reason or a threat.
    For instance, at one point he communicated with A. Mitchell Palmer, not yet attorney general but rather the government’s Custodian of Alien Property, a wartime office whose responsibility it was to seize and sometimes sell materials confiscated from the enemy in battle. Wheeler did not know Palmer but had made it a point to learn his sympathies, and played upon not only his latent xenophobia but, more specifically, his disdain forall things German that had resulted from the Great War. Wheeler sent a letter to Palmer, saying he had been “informed that there are a number of breweries in this country which are owned in part by alien enemies. It is reported to me that the Anheuser-Busch Company and some of the Milwaukee companies are largely controlled by alien Germans. … Have you made an investigation?”
    It didn’t matter to Wheeler whether an investigation had been made or not.
Of course
Germans owned breweries in the United States; the very name of their products made that clear, and the very nature of the German culture made it inevitable. Wheeler’s intention was merely to call attention to the issue—to raise consciousness, as it would be said today—and, according to plan, he had done so with a man who was especially receptive to the dangers of outside influence in the United States.
    Wheeler’s first widespread effort to affect public opinion was as direct as could be. He instructed ASL members all over the country to stop their fellow citizens on the street and, once they did, writes historian Ethan Mordden, they “pleaded, they wheedled, they harangued, they threatened. And they appealed to voters’ lambent Christian righteousness: ‘Don’t you want to end the distress of the wine widow and her starving children? Close the saloon and bring her husband home!’”
    But the League was more effective operating behind the scenes than in being the scene themselves. To clergymen, for instance, Wheeler’s minions privately suggested that a congregation whose members were not hung over from Saturday-night revels would be a