Lee L. Willis. Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821–1920.

Abstract

Too often state and local historians view history absent of macro-trends, broad interpretations, and context beyond the political boundaries of the local. In this book, Lee L. Willis examines prohibition in one small southern community through multiple lenses, addressing race, class, gender, and the meaning of reform in the United States during the nineteenth century. For Willis, the political movement to regulate the sale of alcoholic beverages was intimately connected to and reflected the position of white men in relation to white women and blacks in Florida. When and how men and women are allowed to drink or even when and how men and women are allowed to politically mobilize to regulate drinking speaks to and reflects the social stratification of their communities, as Willis demonstrates. Willis connects the early nineteenth-century reform that grew out of the Second Great Awakening with the Progressives of the late nineteenth century to suggest that there was more continuity to this movement (as well as other reform movements) than previous historians have assumed. Although temperance reform might have been the issue, it was also the locus where not only public life but frustrations about race, women, and politics could be measured. Additionally Willis demonstrates that reformers in southern locations like Tallahassee were not passive or nonexistent in early temperance organizing but central to the temperance movement as part of a grassroots organizing phenomenon connected to influential groups around the country.