Description
Book SynopsisStrategies for gradually affecting social change are often dismissed as too accommodating of the status quo. This title examines the strategic choices of social movements through a focus on the fates of the two waves of temperance campaigns.
Trade Review“
Pathways to Prohibition skillfully employs case materials from the temperance movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to frame and answer a critical question for social movement theory and research: what accounts for the success or failure of social movements? I believe it will make an important contribution to the field.”—Mark Wolfson, author of
The Fight against Big Tobacco: The Movement, the State, and the Public’s Health"Pathways to Prohibition effectively argues a distinctive claim: moderation is (sometimes) the path to success. This important claim contradicts the value hierarchy in which more radical forms of action are assumed to be morally superior and more effective. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski directs attention to a host of more moderate forms of mobilization in American political history that have been dismissed as irrevocably compromised."—Elisabeth Clemens, author of
The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925Table of ContentsList of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Political Strategy and Social Movement Outcomes 1
2. Churches, Lodges, and Dry Organizing 23
3. Modular Collective Action in a Federalist System 65
4. Legislative Supremacy and the Definition of Movement Goals 89
5. Political Alignments, Party Systems, and Prohibition 122
6. The Dynamics of Local Gradualism in the States 153
7. Turning Moderates into Radicals 182
8. Local Gradualism and American Social Movements 198
Notes 219
Selected Bibliography 301
Index 317
