This Month in Rockingham County History: January - 1920

Proponents of Prohibition in Rockingham County showed strength in January 1920 when the Eighteenth Amendment outlawing the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages went into effect nationally.  County residents were not unfamiliar with the vigilance needed to implement Prohibition, as North Carolina had been “dry” since 1909, when a state-wide ban on alcohol (with limited exceptions for medicinal and sacramental use) had been put in place.  More than 100 county residents on the county-wide World Prohibition Movement committees were named in the Reidsville Review in early January.  Led by their chairman J. H. Allen and organized by township, these committees represented every area of Rockingham County and included many prominent businessmen, attorneys, ministers, and educators.  At least two women served on each of the four-person committees, suggesting the widespread involvement of churchwomen and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) members in the campaign against what Prohibitionists saw as the damaging effects of alcohol on the family and larger community. 
   A meeting of this large contingent of supporters was held in Reidsville at the Commercial and Agricultural (C & A) Hall on January 8, where they were served an oyster dinner and later at a Methodist church where they heard a speech from nationally known Prohibitionist E. S. Shumaker of Indiana.  Recognized for their “faithful and efficient work in organizing and pushing the campaign in Rockingham County,” locals hosted a second speaker on a subsequent Sunday morning.  Speaking at the Main Street Baptist Church in Reidsville, lawyer Wayne P. Wheeler, who was advertised as “the real genius at the bottom of all the prohibition laws in this country,” assured the local authorities that if they were faced with significant illicit alcohol use, especially moonshine stills, that they could appeal to the federal government, which would send as many as 100 agents to “stamp it out.”  
 
   Anti-alcohol forces were also supported in their efforts by the local ministerial association.  After an investigation of a “much talked about New Year’s masquerade ball,” at the C & A hall, Reidsville clergymen were particularly alarmed by the combination of “modern dancing” and drunkenness.  In a statement signed by “each pastor of the town,” they expressed their shock “that in a community like ours it should be possible, in these days of prohibition, for high school boys to get access to intoxicating liquors, yet the evidences are that this very thing has been true.”
References
Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, The History of a Southern State: North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 571, 599; William A. Link, North Carolina: Change and Tradition in a Southern State (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2009), 309-311, 318; “The Prohibitionists To Meet Here,” Reidsville Review, January 6, 1920, 1; “County Launches Big World-Wide Movement,” Reidsville Review, January 13, 1920, 1; “New Distinction for Reidsville,” New York World, January 19, 1920, reprinted in Reidsville Review, January 23, 1920, 4; “Ministers Condemn New Year Dance,” Reidsville Review, January 13, 1920, 1.

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