Christian Century’s endorsement of Herbert Hoover for president in 1928 showed how invested Protestant Evangelicals of all stripes had become in the ‘noble experiment’ to achieve and maintain a dry America. Religious liberalism's flagship periodical knew that electing the Republican Hoover over the ‘wet’ Democrat and Catholic Al Smith meant the survival of the greatest achievement of Progressive social reform to date. W. J. Rorabaugh, author previously of The alcoholic republic: an American tradition (Oxford 1979), follows that acclaimed study with this short overview of the movement for temperance and prohibition from colonial times to the present. Succinct, clearly written and free from polemics, it is ideal for any student of American history curious to understand the challenges facing ambitious moral reform in a democratic society. To his credit, Rorabaugh places Evangelicals at the centre of the story. He emphasises their critical role in changing public attitudes toward alcohol abuse, in transforming the agenda from temperance to ‘teetotal’ prohibition, in mobilising political action and in securing passage of an amendment to the US Constitution in the wake of the First World War. He gives somewhat less attention to the Churches’ role in sustaining enforcement of the amendment and in opposing repeal, and at times overlooks the activism of liberal Evangelicalism, but he did not set out to write a religious history of Prohibition. Despite the limits of space, Rorabaugh succeeds in showing the complex interplay of religion, reform and war in American life. In the nineteenth century the fight against alcohol seemed as important to zealous Evangelicals as the fight against slavery in their quest to build a moral society. Indeed, the dry crusade would not have had the energy and success it did without the religious motive to preserve a Christian nation. And the crusading intensity of the First World War gave the movement the final push that it needed to emancipate the nation from alcohol's corrosive effect on marriage, the family and the workforce. Or at least that was the hope. This is a story filled with contradictions, ambiguities and ironies. The crusade for purity led the US army, for instance, to promote cigarettes as an alternative to alcohol among American soldiers in France, and prohibition soon opened the door to organised crime to satisfy a national thirst no law could ever eliminate no matter how much it reduced consumption. With a note of optimism, Rorabaugh argues that democracies have the capacity for ‘self-correction’ once a reform proves unworkable and cautions that radical reforms pushing too far in advance of public sentiment cannot produce political success.