Twenty-four states enacted prohibition between 1907 and 1917. On the eve of national prohibition, in 1920, thirty-three states were dry, either by legislative act or state constitutional amendment. Pennsylvania was NOT one of them.
The Anti-Saloon League (ASL) published a map in 1913 to show their progress in the Keystone State. Dark areas were wet areas—those places with active alcohol licenses. Cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Wilkes-Barre, and Erie appeared as black blocks on an otherwise quite white map. Apart from four dry counties, most areas had a sporadic scattering of wet zones. Northumberland County was particularly blotted.
[In Northumberland County] the competition for business is so intense as to result in the most flagrant and wholesale debauchery of manhood, womanhood, and childhood.
— The Anti-Saloon League, 1913
In the immediate pre-Prohibition era, the anti-alcohol movement started in earnest in Snyder County around 1910 and in Northumberland County in 1914. The “white ribbon people,” as they came to be known, were concentrated in the ASL and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), aided and inspired by religious figures like the evangelist Henry W. Stough. Stough came to the area in the winter of 1914, launching several moral crusades that generated converts to the prohibition fight. The Northumberland County branch of the ASL was formed in the wake of Stough’s campaigns in Sunbury and Mount Carmel. The formation of the Tri-County Anti-Saloon League, led by the First United Presbyterian Church of Sunbury’s J.S. Heisler, soon followed.
By this time, the Central Susquehanna Valley mirrored many other rural and semi-rural areas in the United States. The national swing toward prohibition was well underway by 1910. The historian Paul Isaac notes that the liquor industry sensed the momentum of prohibition advocates around the turn of the century. Brewers created soft drink divisions, and industry leaders lauded licensing programs as a way to make saloons and hotels more respectable places. (Prohibition and Politics, 135) Both of these practices emerged in Northumberland County, which had more residents and many more alcohol licenses than Snyder County. Throughout the Valley, farming organizations, like the local Granges, issued statements in favor of national prohibition.
The ASL singled out Northumberland County as the scourge of the Central Susquehanna Valley. To convey the easy access to alcohol that county residents had, the ASL used the statistic of “licenses per voter” (a number designed to shock the conscience of readers). Shamokin had 1 license per 35 voters; Coal Township had 1 per 30 voters; Mt. Carmel, 1 for every 25; and an unnamed “outlying village” had 1 license per 13 voters. With just over six times the population of Snyder County, Northumberland County regularly had more than 30 times the number of liquor license applications in the 1910s.
But that, too, could change. At the 1914 license court session, judge Herbert Cummings announced that licensees had to clean up their act. From that point on, he declared, liquor joints would no longer be open all night, nor would multiple saloons be allowed to operate in the same building under the same license. Cummings noted that Mount Carmel had more violations itself than the rest of the county.
In Snyder County, as in many places where the prohibition spirit was lively, religious leaders led the way. Two of the county’s most vocal critics of alcohol in the mid-1910s were Rev. Herman Snyder, a 33-year-old pastor of the Reformed Church of Beaver Springs, and Rev. Samuel Snyder, a 40-year-old pastor of the United Evangelical church of Middleburg. The two Snyders brought civil charges against four hotel-keepers in the spring of 1915, after failing to thwart their license applications in that winter’s license court. The grand jury did not find enough evidence for indictment.
But the drys had a victory of sorts in 1917. In Snyder County in the 1910s, the political landscape was not as favorable to mandated temperance as it was in neighboring counties. Steady appeals to the public brought about some victories for the anti-alcohol groups. For instance, the number of licensed establishments was cut in half from 1910 to 1918, largely through hotelkeepers’ decisions not to renew their licenses. Pressure from temperance advocates surely played a role in that decrease. Although dry reformers fought to have all sales of alcohol banned via license courts, they could not bring about local prohibition. There were still roughly a dozen licensees in the county in the final years before national prohibition. So local members of the ASL and WCTU settled for establishing new rules for licensing that would change the way that licensees and customers interacted.
In 1917, they successfully lobbied for four reforms to local drinking culture:
- Treating was prohibited It might seem quaint today to think of buying someone else a drink as a lightning rod for controversy, but booze reformers targeted treating as a slippery slope that made public drinking too social. In February 1915, the Northumberland County ASL had seized upon an anti-treating measure as the first step toward a dry county.
- Selling bottles of whiskey and other hard alcohol was prohibited This was designed to stop customers from taking large quantities of distilled spirits home with them.
- All licensed establishments had to stop selling alcohol at 10:30 PM Following the logic of high license fees, this measure was simply meant to decrease the opportunities that people had to drink.
- No alcohol could be sold on Christmas and Memorial Day The symbolism of this measure was its message that alcohol degraded sacrosanct holidays.
As you can see, the movement toward more restrictions on alcohol sales in the Central Susquehanna Valley was never a straight path forward. Instead, it emerged more as a twisting path, with plenty of double-backs and dead-ends. But the issue of national prohibition soon made some of the local issues moot. Click on the articles below for more details on the political twists and turns of alcohol in Snyder, Northumberland, and Union Counties.
