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The Origin of Indiana's Dry Leader: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker and Midwestern Dry Culture1
by Jason S. Lantzer, Indiana University, Indianapolis
This article examines the dry crusade that brought Prohibition to the nation by tracing the early life and career of one of its chief state-level leaders. Born in Ohio and raised in Illinois, Edward S. Shumaker made a career for himself in Indiana, where he led the Indiana branch of the Anti Saloon League from the early 1900s until his death in 1929. His story demonstrates how religious and cultural influences merged in the American heartland into a moral reform movement that combined elements of traditional religion and politics with the Social Gospel and progressivism. As Shumaker saw it, the prohibition movement rested upon a fundamental argument about what it meant to be an American during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A powerful force in Shumaker's life as in the nation overall, the dry reform transformed Shumaker from a young man seemingly destined to hold a conventional Methodist pastorate into a political activist who helped make the nation dry.
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Over seventy years after its repeal, Prohibition remains one of the most contested reforms to emerge from Progressive Era America. Yet it should not be. As scholars have long asserted, despite the myth of its abject failure, Prohibition succeeded on many levels. More to the point, it was obviously a significant moral and political cause in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America.2 To understand it better as a reform, we need to understand better the advocates of dry culture who mixed religion and politics to secure its triumph. Among the culture's leading advocates in the Midwest was the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker, who headed the Indiana Anti Saloon League from 1907 until his death in 1929. How he came to this reform tells us much about the interplay of religion and politics in the Progressive Era and how one influential group of reformers viewed this mixture as necessary to preserve their culture in a country that was rapidly changing around them. |
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Shumaker's story begins in post-Civil War Ohio. He was born to parents full of expectations, both for themselves and for their family. His father, David, was from Fairfield County, Ohio, and had served in the Civil War as part of the Seventeenth Ohio Volunteer Infantry.3 After mustering out of the service, he resumed his life as a farmer and in 1866 married Sarah Ann Seitz, sister to two of his former comrades-in-arms.4 Their first child, Edward, was born July 30, 1867, in Greenville, Darke County, Ohio, near Sarah's family. When Eddie was two, David bought a 50-acre, swampy farm ten miles outside of town. Once the Shumakers were settled in their new home, more children followed Eddie into the world.5 |
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While family and farming were now David's chief concerns, the war remained the central event of his life. He instilled in his children a deep love for the United States and a sense that God had a special mission for the country. For David's eldest son, these convictions never wavered.6 Patriotic idealism, spawned by having saved the Union, was important to many veterans and their hopes for their families. Having survived the war, optimistic veterans such as David Shumaker welcomed the new world they saw dramatically being created around them and were excited by its possibilities.7 |
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