Grappling with Demon Rum: The Cultural Struggle over Liquor in Early Oklahoma. By James E. Klein. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. x, 238 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-3938-8.)

Abstract

Grappling with Demon Rum is the first book-length study of the origins and operation of prohibition in Oklahoma since Jimmie Lewis Franklin's 1971 volume, Born Sober: A History of Prohibition in Oklahoma. As such, it has much to offer students of anti-liquor policy and Oklahoma history more generally. James E. Klein has woven together a coherent narrative from manuscript sources, newspapers, and secondary works that thoroughly demonstrates that prohibition was perpetually challenged, even in a state whose citizens embraced it early and clung to a variant of it until 1959. The book's judicious use of historical detail, its emphasis on understanding the economic context of liquor control, and its revealing discussion of how jurisdictional questions impeded prohibition enforcement are among its many virtues. Less persuasive is Klein's class-oriented approach to understanding prohibition in Oklahoma. Above all, Klein seeks to distance his study from histories that have depicted prohibition as a dispute between ethnic groups, rural teetotalers, and urban tipplers, or between dry evangelical Protestants and wet liturgicals (e.g., Roman Catholics). Instead, Klein argues that “socioeconomic class played a much larger role in determining Oklahomans' stance on the liquor issue” (p. 9). Middle-class Oklahomans used prohibition to define a culture of respectability: those who eschewed the saloon were upstanding citizens, while those who succumbed to its lures were degraded by it. Meanwhile, workers resisted prohibition by rejecting it in referenda, violating the law, and electing public officials who tolerated such violations.