The Anti-Saloon League (ASL) was an American temperance organization founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, and formally established at the national level in 1895. It became one of the most influential single-issue pressure groups in American political history, coordinating a broad coalition of Protestant churches, civic reformers, and progressive activists to advocate for the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. The ASL is widely credited as the primary organizational force behind the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919 and the subsequent Volstead Act, which together established National Prohibition from 1920 to 1933.

The ASL operated as a “pressure group” rather than a political party, endorsing and opposing candidates across party lines based solely on their position on prohibition. This non-partisan strategy distinguished it from earlier temperance organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party. The League coordinated its activities through a network of Protestant congregations, using churches as organizational units for fundraising, voter mobilization, and political lobbying at the local, state, and federal levels.

The ASL's leadership included figures such as Wayne Wheeler, whose mastery of legislative lobbying gave rise to the term “Wheelerism” - a descriptor for aggressive single-issue political pressure. Howard Hyde Russell founded the organization, and Ernest Hurst Cherrington led its publishing and educational arms. The League operated the American Issue Publishing Company, which produced enormous volumes of temperance literature distributed across the country.

The ASL pursued a strategy of incremental prohibition - securing dry counties and states before targeting federal action - rather than demanding immediate national legislation. This step-by-step approach proved more effective than previous temperance campaigns and is frequently cited as a model of pressure-group political strategy.

For a detailed account of the ASL's founding, campaigns, and dissolution, see Anti-Saloon League - History.

The ASL drew support from the broader Progressive Era reform movement, which sought to use government power to address social problems associated with industrialization and urbanization. Alcohol consumption was linked by reformers to poverty, domestic violence, industrial accidents, and political corruption - particularly the urban “saloon” as a hub of machine politics. The League also drew on nativist anxieties about immigrant communities whose cultural practices included alcohol consumption.

The League's success depended on coalitions that included suffragists, labor reformers, and social gospel Protestants, as well as some constituencies whose motivations were ethnic or racial rather than purely moral. Scholars differ on the degree to which anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment shaped the organization's base and rhetoric. See Anti-Saloon League - Debate for competing interpretations.

The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, following widespread non-compliance, the rise of organized crime, and shifting public opinion. The ASL disbanded in the years following repeal. Assessments of the organization's legacy vary: some historians treat it as a case study in effective democratic mobilization around a moral cause; others emphasize its role in enacting a policy broadly regarded as a failure, and in advancing moralistic uses of state power that conflicted with individual liberty. The ASL is also discussed in the context of debates about the proper relationship between religious organizations and political advocacy.

• Effective Reform Model - The ASL demonstrated that disciplined single-issue organizing through civic institutions can achieve durable constitutional change, and its methods remain a template for advocacy movements.
• Cautionary Tale - The ASL illustrates the dangers of moralistic politics: it succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment that proved unenforceable, generated widespread lawbreaking, and empowered organized crime.
• Religious Coercion - The ASL's reliance on Protestant church networks represents an improper entanglement of sectarian religious institutions with the machinery of the state.
• Nativist Movement - The ASL functioned in part as a vehicle for cultural anxiety about immigrant and Catholic communities, with prohibition serving as a mechanism of ethnic and cultural dominance.

• Anti-Saloon League - History
• Anti-Saloon League - Debate
• Prohibition
• Prohibition - History
• Volstead Act
• Eighteenth Amendment
• Twenty-First Amendment
• Women's Christian Temperance Union
• Prohibition Party
• Progressive Era
• Wayne Wheeler

1. Kerr, K. Austin. Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League. Yale University Press, 1985.
2. Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Scribner, 2010.
3. Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933. Ivan R. Dee, 1998.
4. Hamm, Richard F. Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920. University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
5. Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Harvard University Press, 2007.