In 1905 a showdown erupted between Maine prohibitionists and liquor dealers. At the beginning of the year, a new state enforcement body called the Sturgis Commission promised to send deputies into counties where local police were failing to enforce prohibition. Trying to head off a humiliating Sturgis invasion, Penobscot County’s new public attorney launched his own “purity campaign,” declaring he planned to send all the liquor dealers to jail.

People were assessing the results of this yearlong battle as the new year – 1906 – dawned a century ago. By some accounts the state was a bit drier. In a few places such as Waldo County, all the bars had been shut down and the dealers sent to jail. By many accounts, however, in Bangor the liquor dealers were winning the war.

The Lewiston Journal dispatched a reporter to size up the situation. After weeks of research, he concluded the state was drier than it used to be, but there were still two “wide open” communities left – Bangor and Rumford Falls. For a town to be wide open meant the bars were running openly and anyone could walk in and get a drink.

“Bangor is the same old liquor town as for years. It is the one place in Maine which utterly disregards the prohibitory law,” the Lewiston reporter wrote in an expose on Jan. 20, 1906. “Bangor contains today fully 60 bar rooms where any person, stranger or well-known native can secure a drink, a pint or a gallon and no questions asked. … Very few of these bars carry large stocks. … This is because Deputy John C. Bowen and his liquor squad are making raids day after day. These raids are seldom effectual, because of the elaborate scout system, which the Bangor rum sellers have established.”

Of course, many of these barrooms weren’t as fancy as they used to be. The cut glass bottles, the large mirrors and the potted palms were mostly gone. Some of these bars were little more than back-alley kitchens or even “pocket peddlers” – men who cruised the streets selling from bottles they carried in their pockets.

Between April and June, it had appeared that the county attorney’s “purity campaign” was paying off. Most of the Bangor bars were closed and one supposedly couldn’t even get a drink in the Bangor House. But Bangor fell off the wagon in July when 13 cases were let off without jail time by the Bangor Municipal Court, a Sturgis Commission report concluded.

The Bangor Daily News in a series of editorials that summer blasted local lawmen for ineptitude and possibly corruption. The Sturgis law was unnecessary if local officials would do their jobs. The county already had lost the money it got under the old “Bangor Plan.” And “the self-respecting, tax-paying, responsible liquor dealers” had gone out of business, leaving behind a collection of sleazy dives inhabited by “thugs and thieves and pickpockets” where the liquor was so bad “the dealers in many instances could be indicted for selling poisons.”

Under the infamous Bangor Plan, the liquor dealers had been rounded up each year, fined and allowed to reopen. The system provided money for public works projects such as the Penobscot County Courthouse. Some people were beginning to look back on the strategy nostalgically. The old Bangor Plan might be gone, but the Pitcher Plan – the practice of keeping all the liquor in a pitcher to be smashed in the sink when the cops arrived – was thriving.

Frustrated by events, two key Republican prohibition supporters seemed to be wavering. “The evils that have grown out of that law are greater than the evils of rum itself,” declared Gov. William T. Cobb in a talk before the Maine Society of New York on Nov. 16. “I declare that the law must be observed simply because it is a law. If the people don’t like it, let them repeal it.”

Tough-talking Penobscot County Attorney Hervey Patten also seemed to be taking a step backward. “We have tried enforcement for nearly a year now, and I can’t see that we have derived much benefit from it,” he told a reporter for the Bangor Daily Commercial on Nov. 25. “I believe that the old Bangor Plan was a better way to handle the liquor business than any way that has been devised before or since.”

There were signs that the enforcement system was breaking down. Squads of deputy sheriffs raided six Bangor hotels, including the Bangor House, and failed to find any liquor, the BDN reported on Dec. 13. The next day another embarrassing report recounted how a raid at an Exchange Street dive known as Nat Ladd’s restaurant had been stymied when an employee used a large pepper shaker to smash the pitcher containing all the evidence after the police had seized it and were out in the street on their way back to the station.

The Bangor Daily Commercial, a Democratic paper with no love for prohibition, wanted to know why there had been more than 1,500 arrests for drunkenness in nine months. That was 200 more than the entire year before.

“Is it true that there are 60 open bars in Bangor?” Mrs. Lillian M.N. Stevens, head of the influential Women’s Christian Temperance Union, asked a Lewiston Journal reporter during an interview. After being assured it was true, she said, “But that is something. It used to be 120 or more.”

Those who wanted to get prohibition out of the state’s constitution were gearing up for a renewed battle with radical teetotalers like Stevens. What impact would Sturgis’ growing unpopularity have on the Republican Party and Gov. Cobb’s bid for re-election? Meanwhile, there was only one party in Bangor, and it was going on in the barrooms every night of the week no matter who was in power.

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