Prohibition as a Rural Reform Movement in the United States and the Rise of the American Southern Rebellious Spirit

Abstract

Early scholarship interpreted Prohibition (1920-1933) as the product of an anxious rural population in an age of modernity. Similarly, popular opinion has stereotyped American Southerners as religious, law-abiding, and abstemious citizens when it comes to Prohibition. This dissertation examines the reliability of Prohibition as a reform movement that is established and supported by rural Americans through the detailed exploration of American Southerners’ behaviour towards Prohibition, keeping in mind that the American South was predominantly rural during the 1920s. Following a descriptive analytical approach, this work contends that American Southerners’ establishment of an infrastructure for moonshining in the Appalachians in addition to a wide-ranging smuggling market that stretched all over the Gulf Coast proves how they were neither abstemious nor willing to honour Prohibition. This fact, thus, invalidates the notion of Prohibition as a rural reform movement