In Gin, Jesus, & Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South, Brendan J. J. Payne demonstrates how southern religious leaders, African Americans, and women played important – and often surprising – roles in the decades-long battle over prohibition. Among Payne's most important interventions is his claim that African Americans shaped the debate over prohibition through participation in electoral politics well into the Jim Crow era. “To oppose Gin Crow (southern prohibition) was to oppose Jim Crow,” Payne argues, “and that opposition was stronger and went longer than scholars have previously thought possible” (80). Payne's work is full of dense research, provocative conclusions, and important implications that may shape how historians of the era view the complex politics of religion, race, and gender.
Payne coins the term “Gin Crow” to underscore how the racial caste system of Jim Crow and prohibition were closely linked in southern electoral politics. In the 1880s, the push for prohibition was a multiracial Christian reform movement. Its defeat, however, led white drys to blame black voters, and increasingly turn to disfranchisement of African Americans to win support for Gin Crow. Payne argues that southern white drys supported Jim Crow laws in the 1890s partly because it was the best hope they had of securing prohibition.
Yet prohibition was still an uphill battle in the 1910s. Many southern denominations, black and white, did not support prohibition. Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Catholics made public decrees or private statements that called into question the efficacy of government-imposed prohibition and its infringement upon Christian liberty. Additionally, African Americans allied with brewers associations to remain politically relevant. This alliance was “effectively a form of resistance to Jim Crow” for black voters (5). Surprisingly, “even white supremacists in the wet coalition unwittingly helped to prop up interracial politics by protecting the alcohol lobby,” concludes Payne, “which fought more to mobilize Black voters and subvert Jim Crow poll taxes than any other white industry at the time” (80).
By the late 1910s, however, southern wet campaigns had wedded the specter of the black rapist with the fear of free-flowing alcohol. Proponents of prohibition marshaled the rhetoric of white supremacy to argue that alcohol consumption emboldened already “surly” African Americans and led directly to assaults on white women. “To control Black bodies and suppress Black votes,” Payne effectively concludes, “white drys did not merely invoke the fear of the Lord but also fears of drunken Black men” (98).
Still, the 1910s offered a few successes for anti-prohibition African Americans. In three states, Florida (1910), Texas (1911), and Arkansas (1912), black voters tipped the scales in favor of wets in statewide referenda. These states initially had weaker Jim Crow laws that allowed for more African American voter participation than in most other southern states. This conclusion is a departure from what many historians of Jim Crow thought possible for African American voter participation.
The last two chapters trace the changing nature of prohibition politics. The 1928 presidential election temporarily cracked the Solid South. Democratic candidate Al Smith, an anti-prohibition Catholic, drew the ire of many southern Protestant drys. Yet by the early 1930s, politically connected southern women who were disillusioned with the realities of prohibition, worked to overturn the 18th Amendment. Well-known women such as Texas governor Ma Ferguson and lesser-known historical actors such as Alabamian Pattie Ruffner Jacobs feature prominently in these chapters. Indeed, the rescuing of obscure but important players in the southern prohibition debate is one of the book's strengths.
While the conclusions are provocative, there are a few instances where the analysis relies on extrapolation. For example, about the 1911 Texas election, Payne writes: given that previous historians “had estimated only 126,000 eligible Black voters in Texas's 1911 contest, and 1916 is several years after the contests, it seems reasonable that at least a quarter of the Black church membership in each state was registered to vote” (136). While his research is admirably meticulous, in cases like this, more data are needed to reach such conclusions.
The historical actors in Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow do not always behave in ways historians might expect. The book is full of African Americans who believed that prohibition ran afoul of Christian liberty, white brewers who aligned with African American voters, and southern women who worked to overturn prohibition. Readers will appreciate the complexity Brendan J. J. Payne adds to this important era in southern history.
