Accounting for Differences in Local and State Alcohol Laws, North Carolina in 1908.

Previous shcolars have attributed the formation of prohibition laws to the presence or absence of rural, evangelical protestant groups who could be mobiized to agitate for such laws by appeals to the immorality of alochol. This paper calls this understnading into question by examining the development of North Carolina\'s anti-alcohol legislation at the beginning of the twentieth century. While every North Carolina ocunty at that time was predominantly native-born, rural, evangelical protestant, not all counties in the supported the enactment of anti-alcohol legislation. Further, some counties enacted dry legislation at the local level and then voted wet in the state election, while other counties remained wet locally yet voted dry in the state elections. Statisticval correlations demonstrate that these differences in support for anti-alcohol laws are not due to the demographic factors explored by previous researchers, but rather by the degree of conncectedness that local people felt to their local institutions, and by differrences in the methods through which local and state laws were enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]