1920-1950
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The interior of a "barrelhouse" in the Smackover oil field. Fashioned from oil barrels and rough-sawn lumber with sheet-metal roofs, barrel houses flowed freely with liquor and were frequently scenes of shootings and stabbings. Photo courtesy of the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources, Smackover. |
Anti-liquor activists had long argued that a society free from alcohol would be one less plagued by crime, poverty, and political corruption. Prohibition America in the 1920s fell short of this vision. Alcohol consumption plummeted but the law was also openly evaded.
In Arkansas, as elsewhere, the newly formed Ku Klux Klan marked bootleggers as one of the groups that needed to be purged from a morally upright community. In 1922, 200 Klansmen torched saloons that had sprung up in Union County in the wake of the oil discovery boom. The national Klan office ended up in Dallas, Texas, but Little Rock was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this female auxiliary was a former president of the Arkansas WCTU.
By mid-decade the Ku Klux Klan collapsed amidst scandal just as the "noble experiment" of Prohibition was losing popular support. Doubts even grew in stalwart Arkansas.
In 1928, state temperance leaders championed Herbert Hoover, the Republican presidential nominee, over Al Smith, who favored ending Prohibition. Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas was Smith's running mate, and he made certain the liquor issue did not divert his state from its traditional Democratic loyalty. Four years later, Pres. Hoover's devotion to Prohibition failed to sustain his re-election bid in the gloom of the Great Depression. Following Franklin Roosevelt's victory, Sen. Robinson spearheaded the congressional proceeding to submit to the states a new constitutional amendment repealing the Eighteenth. In July 1933 Arkansas became one of the first southern states to ratify the 21st Amendment. Nevertheless, Arkansas remained dry until a desperate need for new revenue during the Depression compelled the 1935 session of the legislature to repeal the state prohibition laws.
The WCTU persevered, and the Anti-Saloon League reorganized itself. In 1950 the groups staged rallies and parades to support an initiated act that would make Arkansas the first state since Prohibition to outlaw liquor once again. In November the people overwhelmingly decided not to turn back the clock. Throughout the rest of the century, local option elections continued to fracture Arkansas into a generally wet eastern region and a dry north and west. John Barleycorn was always one to inspire strong opinions.
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