"Prohibition Is Here to Stay"

Prohibition Is Here to Stay focuses on the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker, a Methodist minister who for nearly twenty-five years led Indiana's influential chapter of the Anti Saloon League. Shumaker was one of the most powerful men in Indiana in the fight against demon rum, and his influence extended well beyond the boundaries of the state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jason Lantzer uses Shumaker's life and work to shed new light on the rise and fall of Prohibition and to better understand and appreciate the interplay of religion and politics in American culture.Drawing on Shumaker's personal papers as well as archival work, Lantzer argues that understanding the role of religious faith and in particular evangelical Protestantism is essential to understanding Prohibition. Shumaker's religious faith inspired his crusade against alcohol and his efforts to make the Indiana Anti Saloon League one of the strongest political pressure groups in the country. Lantzer argues that Edward Shumaker's life and the cause to which he devoted most of it were not aberrations but exemplars of central currents in American culture of the time. Lantzer also connects Shumaker and the prohibition movement in Indiana to larger issues of America's transition from a predominantly rural society to an urban culture, with the attendant fears of change, loss of values, the impact of industrialization, and foreign immigration.

“Jason Lantzer's excellent biography of Edward Shumaker places one of America's most successful Prohibition crusaders in the very center of American religion and reform. Lantzer's careful research and thoughtful analysis sharply contradicts the tendency to see Prohibition as a mere sidebar to American history and opens our minds to the connections between political activism and religious faith.” —James H. Madison, author of Slinging Doughnuts for the Boys: An American Woman in World War II, "Historian Jason Lantzer has defied the odds. He's authored a doctoral thesis that is readable, academically sound and pertinent to current events. Lantzer tells the story of Edward Shumaker, the most politically influential church pastor in Indiana history. Shumaker was a crusader against alcohol abuse, peaking in influence from World War I to the mid-1920s.” —Indianapolis Star, "Presenting evidence that the prohibition movement in Indiana was not happenstance or abnormal, but rather an effect of the mainstream cultural currents of the era, "Prohibition Is Here to Stay" uses Indiana as a lens to further examine larger issues of America's transformation from a rural to an urban majority, as well as the consequent shift in cultural values and the repercussions of industrialization and foreign immigration. A thoughtful, well-researched and persuasively presented study, highly recommended especially for college library collections." —Midwest Book Review, “Lantzer aims to shed new light on the American prohibition movement. Among the issues he explores while discussing Shumaker’s life and work are: how dry culture transformed itself from a reformist cause to a national crusade, how the Anti Saloon League functioned at local and state levels, how its message evolved over time, how white evangelical Protestant reformers reached out to other groups, how the rhetoric of inclusion came to be superseded by the more reactionary vision of the Ku Klux Klan, and how the dominant reform of the largest religious segment of American culture came to be repealed and considered a failure.” —Research Book News, “Jason S. Lantzer’s “Prohibition Is Here to Stay” is a fine examination of the life and work of Indiana’s dry crusader, the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker. . . . Lantzer’s exploration of the dry movement’s legacy is the most interesting dimension of this work. As he points out, ‘though Shumaker’s reform was over, the culture that produced it was not.’” —Journal of American History

Jason S. Lantzer is an adjunct history faculty member of Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, and Butler University.