Part of the popularity of patent medicines was their appeal to a growing segment of the American population—prohibitionists. In fact, a patent medicine called “Old Dr. Kaufmann’s Great Sulphur Bitters,” which contained 22 percent alcohol, targeted prohibitionists with ads featuring an endorsement by Mrs. S. Louise Barton, “An Indefatigable and Life-Long Worker in the Temperance Cause.” For prohibitionists, such patent medicines were a godsend, enabling them to stay pleasantly (but respectably) tipsy while toiling in the great national crusade to rid America of the demon rum.

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Prohibition is incontrovertible proof that you don’t have to be drunk to come up with a really, really bad idea. Stone cold sober but intoxicated on the powerful elixir of righteous idealism, American prohibitionists believed that the demon rum and its church, the saloon, were the world’s prime sources of evil. “When the saloon goes,” said Ernest Cherrington, a leader of the Anti-Saloon League, “the devil will be ready to quit.”

The American temperance movement is as old as America itself, but it became a political force in the mid-1800s, fueled in part by a bias against immigrants, including Irish and Italian Catholics, who were stereotyped as shiftless alcoholics. After the Civil War, it spawned two powerful groups—the Prohibition Party and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, whose slogan was “For God, Home and Native Land.”

The WCTU’s most famous member was Carry Nation, a Kansas minister’s wife, who led bands of women into saloons, where they sang hymns to the patrons and greeted bartenders with a cheery “Good morning, destroyer of men’s souls!” When those efforts failed to dry out Kansas, Nation prayed to God for direction and was awakened by a heavenly voice saying, “Go to Kiowa.” She went to the town of Kiowa, where she invaded three saloons, smashing the liquor bottles with rocks. Soon, she replaced the rocks with a hatchet and became famous, traveling across America, smashing up saloons with her trademark wrecking tool. Arrested dozens of times, she paid her fines with money raised by selling little souvenir hatchets.

But it wasn’t the antics of Carry Nation who won the fight for prohibition; it was the political savvy of the Anti-Saloon League, which added clout to the crusade for salvation of individual drunkards by strong-arming government officials. Founded in 1895, the league pioneered many of the techniques now used by modern advocacy groups. Working through local churches—generally rural Methodist or Baptist churches—it raised money, endorsed candidates and successfully lobbied for laws banning liquor in many towns and counties. In 1905 the league demonstrated its growing power by defeating Ohio Governor Myron Herrick, who had thwarted the league’s legislative agenda—an upset that terrified wet politicians.

In 1913 the league kicked off its drive for a constitutional amendment prohibiting liquor with a march on Washington and a massive letter-writing campaign that flooded Congress with mail. The amendment failed in 1914, but gained strength during World War I, when the league exploited America’s anti-German hysteria by deliberately associating beer with German-American brewers. “Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go,” declared the league’s general counsel and wily Washington lobbyist, Wayne Wheeler.

It worked. Congress passed the amendment in 1918, and the states ratified it so quickly that America’s wets barely had time to finish their drinks and start fighting back. When the new law went into effect on January 17, 1920, evangelist Billy Sunday held a funeral for John Barleycorn in Norfolk, Va. “The slums will soon be a memory,” he predicted. “We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs….Hell will be forever for rent.”

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