After the Civil War, the American South's nascent temperance movement faced many nearly insurmountable obstacles. Alcohol consumption had been an accepted and even honorable practice; Lost Cause icon Jefferson Davis stoutly denounced the northern-born movement; and most evangelical ministers adhered to a theology that prohibited political involvement in matters like temperance. As the decades passed, however, all of this changed. Abstinence became a key tenet in the white South's honor code; the sober Confederate Stonewall Jackson assumed preferential status; and preachers eagerly entered the political arena, prepared to advance their favored cause, prohibition reform. In Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause, Joe L. Coker reveals how, from 1880 to 1915, southern white evangelicals helped make this remarkable transformation possible. Coker concentrates on three states, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, suggesting that this area sufficiently mirrored the entire South's historical, cultural, racial, religious, and material features. His sources—sermons, denominational minutes, newspapers, personal papers, and correspondences—draw mainly from white evangelical men, a limitation forthrightly acknowledged in the introduction, even though the final product is anything but limited. Rather, in mapping prohibition's journey from the periphery of southern acceptability to the center, Coker shows the rise of an evangelical population that would continue influencing public morality long after the movement's decline.

The book's first two chapters survey the history of temperance and prohibition. Temperance originated in the North during the early nineteenth century, when increased whiskey production and consumption, and the proliferation of taverns, became byproducts of a growing market economy. Alongside people from outside the church, evangelicals pushed for, and won, state legislation that banned liquor sales. Coker observes that the early temperance movement had champions in the South, including Jesse Mercer. But it failed to garner widespread support until the 1880s, when Dixie began its gradual creep toward prohibition. The author takes readers through this process, which started with ministers demanding teetotalism from their flocks. By century's end, they wanted a broader audience and deemed social sobriety a moral imperative. Evangelicals advocated local option laws and, later, statewide prohibition laws. But neither measure halted the flow of alcohol through the South, so evangelicals finally set their sights on amending the United States Constitution.

The remaining four chapters examine how the prohibition movement influenced politics, race, honor, and gender. The 1880s saw preachers like Georgia's Sam Jones dismissing the “doctrine of spirituality,” a widely held belief among southern evangelicals that church and state must remain separate. Coker identifies Jones as a proponent of a “new style of evangelicalism,” which “emphasized practical, everyday application of the gospel, and political involvement for the cause of righteousness” (97). Unfortunately for prohibitionists, the South's political climate was changing. The Populist movement of the 1890s threatened Democratic Party hegemony. Evangelicals expressing their disfavor with intemperate Democrats added to the growing political discord. For many white southerners outside the evangelical circle, party loyalty trumped prohibition. As the decade continued, however, the Populist challenge waned and race came to dominate the public discussion.

Coker's chapter on race is arguably his best and most convincing. Prohibitionists supported a premise that alcohol and “lewd” labels on bottles fueled black misdeeds, creating a “black beast” that would potentially rape white women. Removing the fuel, they reasoned, would remove the threat and, furthermore, preempt future lynchings. Southern evangelicals also injected their cause into the new honor code of the New South. Preachers emphasized that honorable men voted for prohibition and, by way of contrast, “cowards” did not. In making this case, ministers often held aloft an idealized image of female purity, which “demon rum” threatened to corrupt. While white women were valuable symbols in the prohibition movement, Coker takes great care to show their profound influence as actors, pointing to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Of course, southern female activism had its unique qualities. In the North, WCTU members often advocated suffrage, an unthinkable proposition for many white men in the South. Consequently, the southern WCTU rarely mentioned the subject.

In his concluding chapter, Coker restates that despite the northern origins of temperance, over time the movement molded “to the particularities of the southern culture” (231). He then takes on historians Jean Schmidt and Mark Noll, both of whom have reasoned that the Eighteenth Amendment's repeal in 1933 denoted the end of Protestantism's moral dominance in America. Coker concedes that this might have been the case nationally but counters that, in the South, evangelicals continued influencing public morality, a pattern that began with prohibition reform. This persuasive corrective is, indeed, worthy of further consideration.

In each chapter, Coker sets forth expert historical context while making ample use of the historiography. While overall an asset, this becomes distracting at points. His chapter on honor, for example, has two sections—“Dueling and Honor in the Antebellum South” and “A New Code for the New South” (177–194)—before the all-too-brief “Honor and Prohibition” (194–198). Readers must also endure a protracted reproach of Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), wherein Coker says the book did not properly consider the unique honor code of ministers (186–188). While perhaps a valid point, it could have been condensed and toned down (“Ownby's suggestion that Christian ministers were less manly than men outside the church undoubtedly would have been fighting words” [187]).

These are simple criticisms that should by no means diminish the value of this engaging history of the southern prohibition movement. Coker achieves the noteworthy end of making prohibition a compelling subject not only for specialists, but also for anyone interested in the American South or Protestant social reform. Future studies in these areas will benefit from his research and insights.