New Concerns.

Temperance was a prominent issue in American reform movements throughout the nineteenth century, but it took on new urgency during the decade of the 1900s as part of the effort by the progressives to exert social control. Progressives blamed the "liquor trust" for promoting alcohol use and abuse and thus tied the growing crusade for Prohibition to the larger goal of curbing the influence of big business.

Saloons.

There was some truth to the charges by temperance crusaders: in 1900 brewers controlled two-thirds of bars and saloons in the Midwest. These saloons were gathering places for the urban working class, where machine politicians could find their constituents and cajole them for their votes. Indeed, urban working-class voters were known as "wets" and strongly opposed any kind of Prohibition. Many first- or second-generation immigrants drank as part of their customary recreation, and they...