Evils more Deadly than the Carnage of the Battlefield: the Fight for Prohibition in McLennan County in 1917

East Texas Historical Journal Volume 40 Issue 1 Article 12 3-2002 Evils more Deadly than the Carnage of the Battlefield: the Fight for Prohibition in McLennan County in 1917 James B. Seymour Jr Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ethj Part of the United States History Commons Tell us how this article helped you. Recommended Citation Seymour, James B. Jr (2002) "Evils more Deadly than the Carnage of the Battlefield: the Fight for Prohibition in McLennan County in 1917," East Texas Historical Journal: Vol. 40 : Iss. 1 , Article 12. Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ethj/vol40/iss1/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SFA ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in East Texas Historical Journal by an authorized editor of SFA ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact . 58 EAST TEXAS mSTORICAL ASSOCIATION EVILS MORE DEADLY THAN THE CARNAGE OF THE BATTLEFIELD: THE FIGHT FOR PROHmITION IN MCLENNAN COUNTY IN 1917 by James B. Seymour, Jr. During the First World War, Texas enjoyed a special relationship with the military. It hosted more training camps and military bases than all other states and nearly thirty communities eventually contained some form of military installation by war's end. These facilities ranged in size from the military training camps, in which thousands were stationed, down to schools to train aviators and nurses which contained less than a hundred people. I The federal government established four of the sixteen military training camps, or cantonments, in the Lone Star State, scattering the others throughout the country.2 By the time of the Armistice, more than 200,000 men and women had been trained in Texas, ranging from the large and populous Camp Travis in San Antonio to the smaller nursing school in Houston, pouring millions of dollars into the state's economy.3 Texas drys argued that their state had a special obligation to the rest of the nation, and to the mothers and fathers of the military personnel, to provide a virtuous and healthy setting for the training. 4 Alcohol, the prohibitionists avowed, would wreck the clean environment of the camps and undermine fighting strength, and had to be eliminated as a military obligation.~ W.R. Sinclair, editor of the Houston Post, outlined the interrelationship between military camps, economic motives, and the drive for prohibition. An avowed wet, Sinclair noted, "I have found every prohibitionist of my acquaintance to be a damned hypocrite. Have seen them drank [sic] and have drank with them, including candidates for governor, senate, and so on. That is my main reason for being an anti L-prohibitionist]."6 Despite his scathing view of drys, on May 5, 1917, Sinclair predicted, "Two more years and Texas will be dry... However, national prohibition as military necessity may be here first."? He reported, "Win the war is the keynote of the whole layout in Texa.~ and prohibition is dead as an issue, with a cinch that the state is hell bent for Sahara dryness in broken doses ... [Alnny camp[s] may force all to close if the bootlegging continues. R" Sinclair also understood the economic consequences if communities failed to eliminate alcohol from the vicinity of military installations. He predicted, "If Houston lost the [army] camp this town would be as dull as Mexia in midsummer. The camp saved this burg."q Texas drys heightened concerns about the dire economic consequences if military cantonments stayed awash ln alcohol, appealing both to Texans' patriotism and economic sense to enact prohibition. Initially, drys concentrated on local option elections, as outlined in the Texas Constitution, to eradicate alcohol near military facilities. A hostile, prowet governor, James Ferguson, threatened to veto any state prohibition law, while a divided state legislature seemed incapable of genemting enough James B. Seymour, Jr. is a visiting ~'sistant profeITor of history at Texas A&M University. EAST TEXAS HISTORlCAL ASSOCIATION 59 support to override his veto. Instead, the drys utilized their strong grass-roots movement to influence voters at the county level with their wartime arguments. While continuing to agitate for a federal constitutional amendment, Texas drys worked to achieve short-term goals at the county level, with each victory providing fresh ammunition in subsequent county option campaigns. Consequently, several Texa...;; counties held referenda on prohibition in the nine months following American entry into the First World War. 10 Ultimately, the drys encountered strong resistance in hard-core, wet counties, which forced them to modify their tactics to press for a state-wide white zone law. McLennan County provided the initial testing grounds for the new military focus for prohibition. On July 5, 1917, Waco secured a cantonment, Camp MacArthur, that would instruct men conscripted from Illinois. II Within weeks of the announcement, prohibitionists in McLennan County began to agitate for a local option election to eliminate alcohol from their community as a military necessity.'2 Pat M. Neff, later governor of Texas in the 1920s, headed the executive board of the local option committee and coordinated the campaign. 13 In August 1917 Neff went before McLennan County commissioners to petition for a local option election. Revealing keen political acumen, he proposed dropping Axtell and West preclnets from the referendum because they traditionally voted wet. 14 Neff contended, "Fighting the whiskey traffic is a practical rather than theoretical proposition, and the [local option] committee... decided to begin the campaign in a way that would be absolutely sure of winning this election."'s Because Neff knew the drys' chances of enacting county-wide prohibition would improve dramatically without these districts, he opted for expediency over principle and worked to remove them from the boundaries of the referendum. O.L. Stribling, a notable wet, submitted a petition containing over 4,000 signatures of "pros and antis alike," protesting the "gerrymandering" of the county to exclude West and Axtell. 1tl Stribling charged that the drys " ... are not willing to let Waco decide this matter for herself, but are taking the votes of a lot of dry precincts to vote Waco dry."I? Neff denied this allegation, claiming the drys " .. ,are combining wet Mart, wet Riesel, wet HaJlisburg, wet Harrison to wet Waco in order to vote all of those spots dry."I~ By a vote of three to one, the county commissioners denied Neff's recommendation to omit the wet precincts. 19 He then withdrew the petition, but promised "[b]y the time the last bale of cotton is picked this season. _.," the drys would again petition for a referendum. 20 Privately, Pat Neff confided to R.H. Kirby, a fellow dry, different reasons for withdrawing the petition to hold a local option election at the August meeting. Demonstrating the interconnectedness of the Texas prohibition (...truncated)