1876-1919
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Robert W. Earnheart, a successful corn farmer in the White River bottom, opened a distillery south of Bethesda in 1887. It closed around 1914. Photo courtesy of the Old Independence Regional Museum. |
In 1876 the church women of Monticello organized the first Arkansas chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. By 1888 the state WCTU claimed 75 local unions.
The national WCTU was the largest and most influential women's organization in the nineteenth century. The WCTU anti-alcohol crusade led members to embrace other reforms touching upon child welfare, protection for women, and public health. Yet the WCTU leaders recognized their "Do Everything" goal was hampered by the lack of voting rights for women.
Many Arkansas suffragists also wore the white ribbon, the WCTU badge. While women in the state had the right to petition to halt liquor sales within three miles of a school, the WCTU unsuccessfully lobbied to allow women to vote in the local option elections that determined whether a township would go "dry." It would fall to men to banish Barleycorn. In 1894, 100 influential businessmen and politicians met in Little Rock to form the organization that would become the basis for the Arkansas chapter of the Anti-Saloon League.
By 1906 Methodist and Baptist factional rivalry almost destroyed the organization. The League was also embarrassed when its own squad of private detectives discovered a whiskey bottle in the luggage of the group's paid executive. Nevertheless, by 1910 local option elections had halted alcohol sales in all but twelve of the seventy-five counties in the state. Of the 289 saloons still in business in Arkansas, 210 of them operated in just four cities.
These victories emboldened the League to place an initiated measure on the 1910 ballot to prohibit liquor sales and manufacturing statewide. The sound defeat of this proposal by the voters moved the prohibition forces to turn up the pressure on state legislators. These efforts were rewarded with the 1915 enactment of state prohibition and the 1917 "bone dry" law forbidding liquor shipments into the state. Two years later the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution made the rest of the country as dry as Arkansas.
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