In Washington State, the era of Prohibition spanned more than fifteen parched years. Begim1ing with the passage of the anti-saloon Initiative Number Three in 1914 and closing with the repeal of statewide Prohibition more than a full year before the 1933 ratification of the Twenty First Amendment, the Evergreen State's experience with de jure temperance continues to provide students of American history with fresh opportunities for reappraisal. Using the city of Spokane, the largest between Minneapolis and Seattle, as a lens through which to evaluate the legitimacy of popular memory's cynical appraisal of the nation's Dry years, one encounters two particular historical constructs of enduring salience. The fist pertains to motivation, the second to enforcement. To the former, the arc of Spokane's Prohibition era narrative adds a layer of regional nuance to the accepted veracity of Professor Joseph Gusfield's influential "status anxiety" thesis as a means to understand the popularity of a temperance movement very few individuals ever indented to adopt personally. That is, while voters in Spokane were indeed motivated by a desire to censure the behavioral nom1s of "the other," the maligned subgroup in this case being comprised of a very different socio-economic class than in the major metropolitan areas that so often serve as the backdrop for Prohibition era histories, they lacked wholesale the courage of their ostensibly Dry convictions. To the latter, a consideration of the distinctive patterns of the local enforcement of temperance-related violations reveals a disturbing link between status and prosecution evocative of contemporary anxieties over the relationship between disadvantaged sub-groups and law enforcement.
