Civic league targeted Queen City ‘evils’

Evil walked the streets of American towns like Bangor a century ago. It lounged about in the barrooms and pool halls. It hovered over the immigrant slums and the hobo jungles. It lurked wherever socialists and anarchists convened.

A host of organizations such as the Christian Civic League of Maine had been formed to combat evil. A century ago, league representatives came to Bangor in force to deliver their findings on the status of Satan in the Queen City. Parishioners packed four churches, Columbia Street Baptist, Advent Christian, First Christian and First Baptist, on Sunday, June 17, 1906, to hear lectures illustrated by stereopticon slides.

It just so happened the Democratic Party, considered by some to be one of the most pernicious manifestations of the Devil in the Pine Tree State, was holding its nominating convention in Bangor that week. But that was only a coincidence, claimed the Rev. Henry N. Pringle, the league’s secretary and chief spokesman. There was no political significance. He told a Bangor Daily News reporter, “We shall visit other Maine cities and towns in the immediate future, preaching the gospel of civic righteousness as we understand it.”

One of the evils on the Waterville minister’s list was the slot machine, “a snare and a delusion… for the machines are so constructed that the player simply cannot win to any considerable extent.” Thanks to the efforts of the league, he added, the number of machines in Maine has been reduced from 6,000 to 1,200,” the BDN reporter wrote.

A campaign against slot machines – even those that dispensed cigars instead of money – had been launched by police on April Fools Day, 1905, in the Queen City, and Pringle had good news to report. “The slot machine in Bangor has gone. I do not believe there is one in operation in your whole city. And the obscene picture machines have been banished from the entire state.”

Another evil was boxing. Pugilism was illegal, Pringle said, but it was hard to enforce the law because the police had to prove that a particular fight was “brutal and degrading,” and not a legitimate sporting contest. The league had played a role, however, in getting some small towns to ban the showing of a movie of the recent boxing match in California between Jimmy Britt and Battling Nelson. The film was shown in Bangor, however, without protest.

Tobacco and patent medicines laced with alcohol were next on the minister’s list. Then divorce was brought to the front. “We had 1,600 divorces in Maine last year,” said the Rev. Pringle. “Do you realize what a tremendous percent that is – that it represents one divorce to every seven marriages?”

The liquor question, however, dominated his comments. It was also the chief issue in the gubernatorial contest that year as it had been in the last election and would be for several elections to come. Maine’s prohibition law had become a national joke and a breeding ground for hypocrisy and corruption. The question was this: Should state prohibition continue or should the issue be submitted to the voters for reconsideration? Resubmission was opposed by the league and by other diehard prohibition groups as well as by many Republicans.

In Bangor there were still about 30 places selling liquor despite a crackdown a year ago, Pringle claimed. “It isn’t sold openly – there are no bottles in sight when you go in; and there are spies at the door….The secrecy with which the traffic is conducted here baffles the police, who in the main, I believe, are honest and reliable,” he said.

Pringle spent much of his time talking about the league’s war against liquor advertising in daily newspapers. The ads promoted mail-order booze shipped from other states. Such advertising was illegal under the state prohibition statute, but the authorities didn’t enforce it unless somebody complained.

A year ago, eight daily newspapers in Maine were running liquor advertisements, said the Rev. Pringle. “A little diplomatic correspondence from the league and the advertisements were dropped from seven of these papers, thus leaving only one.” That one was the Bangor Daily Commercial, which, not surprisingly, didn’t bother to cover the league’s appearance in so many Bangor churches. Not surprising either was the Commercial’s vociferous opposition to prohibition.

A check of Maine court records and of the league’s publication, the Civic League Record, tells the full story. Pringle had taken the Commercial to Bangor Municipal Court the year before where a judge found the paper guilty of breaking the law 30 times. Challenging the statute’s constitutionality, the paper had appealed the case to the state’s highest court. Meanwhile, on July 9, 1906, it ran an editorial, entitled “Pringleism and the State,” accusing the minister of writing a letter to Gov. William Cobb, an ally of prohibitionists, urging him to arrest the publishers.

The court ruled in the paper’s favor on July 17, 1906, deciding, incredibly, that the state had failed to prove that Joseph P. Bass, M. Robert Harrigan and Frederick H. Strickland were the owners of the paper at the time of the infraction. On the same day the decision was handed down, the Commercial ran an illegal advertisement offering by mail 12 quarts of Old Fifty-Six Hand Made Whiskey, bottled by the Holihan Bros. of Lawrence, Mass. for $8.50.

On July 30, less than two months after the league’s foray into Bangor, Pringle filed 18 new cases against the Commercial, and Bass and company again appealed the convictions. After redesigning its argument, the state won the case on July 15, 1908. It was a victory for the Christian Civic League, which had pressured the state into taking action. The law banning liquor advertising in Maine newspapers was declared constitutional, for the time being anyway.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.