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ABSTRACT Making the Bible Belt: Preachers, Prohibition, and the Politicization of Southern Religion, 1877-1918 by Joseph Locke H.L. Mencken coined “the Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and regional life in the American South. But the reality Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Like the label itself, the Bible Belt was something new, and everything new must be made. This dissertation is the history of its making. Over the course of several decades, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding religious authority transformed southern evangelicals’ inward- looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. Late- nineteenth-century religious leaders overcame crippling spiritual anxieties and tamed a freewheeling religious world by capturing denominations, expanding memberships, constructing hierarchies, and purging rivals. Clerics then confronted a popular anticlericalism through the politics of prohibition. To sustain their public efforts, they cultivated a broad movement organized around the assumption that religion should influence public life. Religious leaders fostered a new religious brand of history, discovered new public dimensions for their faith, and redefined religion’s proper role in the world. Clerics churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a popular political movement and, with prohibition as their weapon, defeated a powerful anticlerical tradition and injected themselves into the political life of the early- twentieth-century South. By exploring the controversies surrounding religious support for prohibition in Texas, this dissertation recasts the politicization of southern religion, reveals the limits of nineteenth- century southern religious authority, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At Rice University, I have benefited from the tireless work of staff members Rachel Zepeda, Lisa Tate, and Paula Platt. Funding from Rice University and the Rice University Humanities Research Center eased my life as a graduate student. Financial assistance from the Rice University Department of History and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin facilitated much of my research. Helpful staff members at several institutions, including Baylor University, Southern Methodist University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the University of Texas at Austin, assisted me on my many research trips. I owe intellectual debts to the many individuals who have accompanied me on my long academic journey. At an early age, public school teachers in El Paso and Austin—especially Terry Peevey and Cheri Bielke—left indelible marks. Many wonderful and passionate professors at the University of Texas inspired me to pursue an academic career. Robert Smale left an enduring example of excellent teaching. Howard Miller donated much of his time and helped guide me in the early stages of this project. His assistance was much appreciated. I have benefited from a wonderful group of scholars at Rice University. In particular, my dissertation committee members have graciously offered their time, expertise, and encouragement. Allen Matusow’s critical eye has been invaluable. Caleb McDaniel’s powers of perception have been incomparable. Michael Emerson’s views on American religion have been insightful. Finally, John Boles’s commitment to his students, enthusiasm for his university, and passion for his discipline have been inspiring. His collegiality and academic rigor will long be a model for me. I have been lucky to have him as an advisor. v I presented several pieces of this dissertation at various academic conferences and many helpful commentators have shaped the final product. Moreover, the insightful editors and constructive reviewers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly helped to improve an article that was published and appears here, in a modified form, as chapter six. My fellow graduate students have been a peerless group of friends and colleagues. I have truly valued their camaraderie. I have spent half of a decade at Rice in the company of incoming classmates Drew Bledsoe, Allison Madar, Carl Paulus, and Jim Wainwright. Ben Wright indulged me in countless debates and read much of my work. Wes Phelps always provided a stimulating back-and-forth. Luke Harlow extended invaluable professional advice. Blake Ellis, Andy Lang, and Sarah Bischoff added friendship and insight. For all of the best reasons, they and others have made my time at Rice unforgettable. Finally, I thank my family. The love, guidance, and good humor of my parents, Robert and Valerie Locke, still leave me in awe. My brother, John, continues to inspire me. But I reserve my greatest thanks for my wonderful wife, Tess. No words of mine will ever capture the love and appreciation I have for her. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 23 Heretics, Infidels, and Iconoclasts: The Freewheeling Religious World of the Late-Nineteenth Century CHAPTER TWO 64 Subduing the Saintly: The Anticlerical Tradition CHAPTER THREE 96 Of Tremor and Transition: Spiritual Crisis and the Origins of Clericalism CHAPTER FOUR 127 The Road to the Bible Belt: Mobilizing the Godly CHAPTER FIVE 158 Triumph in the Churches: The Clerical Insurgency CHAPTER SIX 189 Conquering Salem: Myth and Memory in the Struggle for the Bible Belt CHAPTER SEVEN 222 The Marker of Morality: Race, Righteousness, and the Origins of the Bible Belt CHAPTER EIGHT 268 Unto the Breach: The Politics of Clericalism CHAPTER NINE 310 Anything That Ought to be Done: The Triumph of Clericalism CONCLUSION 352 1 INTRODUCTION On an August afternoon in 1885, several thousand Texans crowded into Waco’s Padgitt’s Park to hear Congressman Roger Q. Mills and former state Attorney General George W. Clark decry prohibition and excoriate the “political preachers” championing it in that county. Two brass bands played at intervals and, after the two men’s speeches, the rally broke for two hours so the crowd, seated at six 400-foot-long tables, could enjoy barbecue and lemonade. United States Senator Richard Coke then addressed the crowd. He told of the gravity of the Prohibition issue. He told his listeners that the churches directed the battle. And he reminded them that it was a political battle. “Ah, my fellow- citizens,” Coke said, “whenever your preachers go into politics, scourge them back!” The crowd cheered. “Our forefathers were driven to the country seeking freedom of conscience against the persecutions of state religion and shall we now combine church and state?” No! cried the crowd. “The worst sign of the times that I can perceive is to be found in the delivery of stump speeches on the holy Sabbath day from God’s pulpit.” The crowd cheered louder than ever. The senator continued on about the pure gospel, about isolating religion from public life, and about all the widows and orphans and bloodshed charged to alliances of church and state. The crowd only cheered the more. Well-versed in Coke’s brand of anticlericalism, the tropes and images and fears came all too easily to mind. Prohibition collapsed, the Senator was later reelected, and public opinion muzzled politicized religion.1 1 Galveston Daily News, August 30, 1885; The Dallas Weekly Herald, September 3, 1885. 2 Whatever nineteenth-century southerners called their world, it was not “the Bible Belt.” Today, the region we know by that name exudes its faith. Political prayer rallies, school board battles, faith-based politics: the South’s pervasive religiosity bleeds so heavily into American life that the melding of region and religion seems to have been inevitable, if not timeless. But everything has a history. The Bible Belt has not always been the Bible Belt. Although distinguished scholars have ascribed its “origins” and its “beginnings” to the evangelical ferment of the early-nineteenth century, few nineteenth- century southerners would have used the term.2 The acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken coined the phrase in the 1920s, he later recalled, “to designate those parts of the country in which the literal accuracy of the Bible is credited and clergymen who preach it have public influence.”3 The label stuck: it neatly captured a commonly held assumption, something everyone knew to be true but lacked the vocabulary to define. But the reality that Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process—and the beginning of something else entirely. Like the label itself, the Bible Belt was something new, and everything new must be made. This is the history of its making. “The corruption of the present is so unspeakably appalling that disaster frowns upon the brow of the future,” future Senator Morris Sheppard told a Methodist youth group in 1896.4 Two years later, a group of Texas Methodists resolved that “We have reached in the order of Divine Providence a crisis that is recognized by the most 2 John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Bible Belt (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 3 Stephen W. Tweedie, “Viewing the Bible Belt,” The Journal of Popular Culture XI (Spring, 1978), 865- 876. See also Charles Reagan Wilson, “The Bible Belt,” in Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, edited by Samuel S. Hill et al, (Mercer University Press, 2005), 117. 4 Morris Sheppard, “His Eloquent Words on the Influences of the Epworth League,” speech delivered in San Antonio, 1896. Morris Sheppard Papers, 1894-1953, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. 3 thoughtful minds of Christendom.”5 Spiritual anxiety wracked the post-Reconstruction South. Nervous religious leaders exhausted themselves cataloging their many complaints. They denounced the era’s spiritual laziness and its lifeless commercial creed. They mourned the indolent preachers tending languid, half-filled churches.