In the summer of 1912, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company announced that it would stop selling liquor on its buffet cars. The proliferation of local-option dry laws in Pennsylvania in the past few years had made liquor sales both too complicated and legally risky.
Above and beyond economic arguments, religious beliefs, defenses of personal liberty, and attacks on political corruption, the debate over alcohol in the Central Susquehanna Valley often came down to questions of work, children, and the common good. Whereas the anti-alcohol advocates emphasized the effects of too much liquor on the wage-earning power of a working man and the spectacle of drunken teenagers carousing in public, pro-alcohol advocates often stressed the money that the high licensing system generated. In Northumberland County alone, the gross revenue for all alcohol licenses in 1913 was about $72,000. Of that total, the county kept just under $10,000.
With reasonable arguments on either side of the issue, the question of alcohol sales often turned into two sides talking past, not with, each other. Prohibition advocates couldn’t deny that licensing fees filled county and borough coffers and relieved some of the tax burden of Central Pennsylvania residents. They might argue, however, that the financial advantages of licensing were outweighed by the moral and social dangers of drunkenness and wasted wages. Supporters of the “liquor trade” could hardly deny that alcohol destroyed lives and amplified social ills, so they tended to side-step such details.
In the decade before Prohibition, the most frequent alcohol-related complaint in this churchgoing culture was sales on Sunday. When judges fined people, put them in county jail for fifty days, and revoked their licenses, it was almost always for violating the Sunday sales law. Northumberland County President Judge declared, “There have been cases where the licensee withdrew himself from the place on Sunday, leaving the same in the charge of a bartender or boarder who sold liquors, the licensee taking the position that in the event of his absence he cannot be held responsible. This is a false position.” Before Prohibition, little legal peril awaited those who crossed the line in other ways. It took the political fervor around Prohibition to make it more acceptable—to some—to police people’s everyday movements more closely.
It is asserted that photographs have been taken of little girls leaving Shamokin saloons on Sundays with buckets of beer, while others carried packages of bottled beer to and from their homes and the saloon. — Mount Carmel Item, 22 December 1913
In 1913, Snyder County saw its most pronounced political fight between wets and drys. It came via the election of a new associate judge for the license court. The three-judge court rule on alcohol license applications each winter, making it the local government entity most directly concerned with the alcohol trade. The vast majority of licenses went to hotel keepers, who paid $200 for licenses in boroughs like Selinsgrove and $100 for licenses in townships. In surrounding counties, temperance and prohibition advocates had succeeded in electing judges who vowed to approve no licenses. Now, that movement had come to Syder County. As no-license associate judge candidate C.A. Baker told readers of the Selinsgrove Times in September 1913, “The issue in the county is booze or no booze.”
The incumbent, 40-year-old Selinsgrove resident Frank Keller, was the wet candidate in 1913. The 25-year-old C.A. Baker, the editor of the McClure Plaindealer and the superintendent of the United Evangelical Church’s Sunday School in West Beaver Township, was the dry candidate. Due to a Pennsylvania state law, if only two candidates ran in the primary, it would decide the general election, too. Whoever won on September 16 would run unopposed in November. In the lead-up to the vote, the Selinsgrove Times editor remarked that “the only worthwhile voting that an unregistered voter will be able to do this year will be to help decide the non-partisan judicial contest between…the wet and dry factions in Snyder County.” Statements made by the men in the run-up to the primary show the tone of the debate:
| Keller | Baker |
| Snyder County hotels are today without exception run strictly in conformity with the law. The holders of the licenses have been carefully chosen by the present court. | Temperance forces are on the right side, which is the winning side, and with concentrated effort, victory is assured. |
| How do the conditions in Snyder Co. compare to those in Mifflin & other dry counties? More liquor is shipped into these counties than when the hotels held licenses. Whiskey by the quart and the jug is taken into homes, where it is in many instances consumed in the presence of children and by the children themselves. Lawlessness and drunkenness are acknowledged by all to be on the increase. | Will you say, as for me, I will do my duty, as God will require of me sooner or later at the judgement bar? |
| Under present conditions in Snyder County the county receives annually $412, the townships $57 for each license located therein, or a total in this class of $912; the two boroughs receive $114 from each license or a total of $570. The state treasury receives $706. The county, boroughs, and townships are certainly not in such fine financial shape that they can easily do without their shares of fees. How is the difference to be made up except by raising the taxes of every citizen? | Ministers of the gospel, superintendents, teachers and scholars of Sunday schools, church members, citizens: you have the ballots and will decide in this great contest whether it is your desire to have the abominable liquor traffic continue to mar the happiness of the home, defame our young people, unfit a man for business, break the heart of loved ones, rob the children of food and clothing, fill our asylums, breed murderers, send men and women by the hundred thousands yearly to a premature grave and a drunkard’s hell. |
Baker, the dry candidate, ended up with 38% of the county-wide vote in the September primary. [See vote map below.] He performed best in the western and northern parts of the county, the more rural areas where population was lower and distrust of the “liquor trade” was highest. Across the United States, anti-saloon sentiment tended to be strongest in rural regions. The historian Paul Isaac showed that in Tennessee, for example, the most rural sections of the state voted disproportionately for state constitutional amendments banning the production or sale of alcoholic beverages. (Prohibition and Politics, 55)
Baker won the vote in two townships, Adams and West Perry, where he tallied 57% and 54% of the vote, respectively. Note those margins–even in his strongest voting districts, the dry platform garnered slim majorities. He came close to victory in another three townships, Spring, Beaver, and Union, where he lost by a combined six votes. In Union township, Baker was likely helped by his summer canvassing campaign. The Selinsgrove Times noted that he spent much time in the “lower end” of the county talking to residents about the evils of alcohol.
With the exception of Union township, Keller performed strongest in the eastern part of the county. His margins of victory in Selinsgrove and Middleburg, the county’s two boroughs, were comfortable. He won almost 90% of the vote in Middlecreek township, 85% in Penn township, and 77% in Perry township. In thanking his supporters for their losing effort, Baker observed that a majority of eligible voters did not go to the polls on September 16.
