The “Public Sentiment Building Society”

Abstract

The Anti-Saloon League of America was a Midwestern, church-based, social reform group founded in 1895, whose drive for national prohibition played a major role in the ratification and subsequent enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment. The purpose of this article is to expand the current model of public relations history by examining the ideas and methods that the League established in its first fifteen years to generate public sentiment for a dry, saloonless nation. Many of these concepts not only echo what are considered today to be basic principles of public relations, but they were conceived and implemented at the turn of the century by two Ohio men who did not define themselves in terms of public relations and publicity practitioners but in their roles as ministers in fulfilling what they considered to be their religious duty of eliminating liquor in the U.S. The article concludes that while there is still much to learn about public relations from those already labeled as “pioneers, “such as Edward Bernays or John Hill there is even more to mine from those people or organizations who sought to influence public opinion and generate change in the pursuit of a cause or an idea.