As a visiting scholar and member of the speakers’ bureau at the Delaware Humanities Forum, I lecture on several subjects examining the past in the First State. The one on temperance and prohibition has received lots of attention lately, as organizations invite me to outline historical attempts to regulate the consumption of alcohol. This subject often sparks a lively, engaging conversation about the “noble experiment.”
“Pass the Rum: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” explores the centuries-long attempt to regulate the consumption of alcohol from a Delaware perspective. It’s a colorful period and we share the stories of rumrunners, moonshiners, bathtub gin, intriguing personalities, complicated First State Politics, organized crime, outgunned lawmen, and the temperance ladies.
Three Gun (Harold D.) Wilson was one of those intriguing personalities. A Federal Prohibition Agent, he was sent here to try to keep the spigot turned off after local teetotalers demanded stronger enforcement. Hoping he would “be able to take the word bootlegger out of Delaware’s dictionary,” one Dover newspaper wished him well as he arrived.
But his efforts “rocked the first state” once he started swooping down on rum joints and raiding speakeasies while smashing stills and chasing rumrunners. After a 15-month stay in Wilmington, the orders came to move on to Nebraska.
While participating in a thought-provoking discussion at a downstate organization recently, some of the audience had an interest in investigating temperance and prohibition more deeply, so I promised to share some virtual resources.
The Medical Heritage Library, a digitally curated collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, provides free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Several early works on alcoholism and temperance are found in this virtual collection of rare books, pamphlets, and journals, which are representative of centuries of increasing knowledge.
Google terms such as prohibition, temperance, alcohol, drunkenness and others. You will find plenty of texts from earlier times to help you with your examination, including titles as such “The Cold-Waterman or a pocket companion for temperance” by Doctor Springwater (1832). “Beer, its history and its economic value as National Beverage” by F. W. Salem (1880) is another one.
Three Gun (Harold D.) Wilson also published materials. One was “Dry Laws and Wet Politicians,” published in 1922. Another title with a strong Delaware perspective was “Dry Law Facts Not Fiction, 1890 – comparative facts – 1931 sensational dry fact, Delaware fact finder. It was published by the Press of Kells in Newark, DE. In 1931.
Don’t forget the Wilmington Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Star. The Google newspaper archive has made it available.
