Francis Scott Mcbride

Background

Francis Scott McBride was born on 29 July, 1872 in Carroll County, Ohio, and was the son of Frank and Harriet Miller McBride.

Education

He graduated from Muskingum College in 1898 and from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1901.

Career

Mcbride was ordained a minister in the United Presbyterian Church and served until 1909 as pastor to a congregation in Kittanning, Pa. Transferred to a church in Monmouth, Ill. , he entered upon his career as an Anti-Saloon League official, first as district superintendent and from 1912 to 1924 as state superintendent for Illinois. In 1924, following the death of Purley Baker, who had directed the Anti-Saloon League nationally since 1903, McBride was a compromise choice for general superintendent, being acceptable to the two most powerful rivals for control of the national organization, Wayne B. Wheeler, the league's legislative superintendent, and Bishop James Cannon, chairman of the league's national legislative committee. McBride held office until 1936. From 1936 until 1943 he served as state superintendent of the Pennsylvania Anti-Saloon League, before retiring to Barnesville, Ohio. He died on April 23, 1955 at his winter home in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Achievements

• Mcbride is known as Presbyterian minister, who was active in the Anti-Saloon League. He featured on the cover of Time magazine on 3 June 1929.

Religion

McBride represented the dominant evangelical wing of the Anti-Saloon League, as opposed to the "social gospel" wing, which had emerged during the Progressive era and which vainly sought to redirect the activities of the league toward persuasion and away from regimentation during the years of prohibition. McBride remained a doughty advocate of the aims and methods developed nationally by the league under his predecessor.

Politics

McBride endorsed Cannon's uncompromising militancy against all wet offenders and supported Wheeler's opportunistic pressure politics, which were concerned not with how a congressman drank but with how he voted. Successful in retaining the support of the conservative law-and-order factions of the league, McBride faced opposition in the 1928 convention from Ernest H. Cherrington, director of the league's publishing operations at Westerville, Ohio, and editor of its national magazine, American Issues. Representing the social-gospel wing of the league, Cherrington called for an end to the legislative activities that Wheeler had pursued in Washington, D. C. , prior to his death in 1927, and opposed involvement in federal and state dry legislation and law enforcement. He also disapproved of the current practice of harassing individual violators of prohibition laws, especially in the case of middle-aged and older drinkers, who, he supposed, were in most cases irredeemably confirmed in their habits. He called upon the league to concentrate its efforts upon winning over the public, especially the young, to a willing acceptance of the Eighteenth Amendment.

McBride narrowly defeated Cherrington, but, to appease the social-gospel faction, the convention created a new office for Cherrington, the department of education and publicity. National policy, however, continued to be set by the uncompromising evangelical conservatives for whom McBride spoke. McBride, in fact, immediately involved the league in the 1928 presidential campaign for Herbert Hoover to an extent unprecedented in the history of the league's political activities. The campaign succeeded in rallying the dry forces as no previous issue had since the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment; but it also exhausted the resources of the organization, which found itself hard-pressed during the Great Depression to finance its desperate campaigns against the wet organizations. Following repeal, McBride momentarily gained national attention in 1935, when he announced that the results of a two-year league survey indicated the probable return of prohibition by 1945.

Views

Quotations: "The League was born of God, it has been led by Him, and we will fight on while He leads. "

Personality

McBride was described as "dynamic, raw-boned, gaunt, clean-shaven, with a full head of unruly black hair".

Connections

McBride married Geraldine Van Fossen on July 10, 1901; they had three children.

Father:

Frank McBride

Mother:

Harriet Miller McBride

Wife:

Geraldine Van Fossen