Meta Chestnutt Sager on the Depression, Roosevelt, Prohibition, and Repeal

Among the more interesting parts of the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection is a small group of letters Mrs. Sager (1863-1948) wrote from her home in Chickasha, Oklahoma to her sister-in-law, Clara Dixon Chestnutt, who was born in 1865. When the letters were written, during the 1930s and 40s, Clara was living somewhere in the eastern U.S.

Clara was the widow of Isaac Lamar Chestnutt, Meta's only brother and the first of four siblings. Until he died in in 1907, Isaac served as a preacher and educational leader among the Disciples of Christ in North Carolina and Virginia. The Dixons, Clara's family of origin, also provided leadership among the congregations in North Carolina, almost all of which were located in the eastern part of the state, in places like Lenoir, Pitt, Greene, and Craven Counties.

In letters she sent to Clara, Meta Sager revealed much of her political as well as her religious outlook. In one dated March 19, 1933, Sager wrote the following to her sister-in-law:

I suppose you have all felt more or less the depression, and have had the bank "strike." And I suppose, too, that Democrats there as here feel that Roosevelt will turn the nation upside down and set things right again. Well, I hope he can do it, but I'm not so sure be we are nearing the end. There are strange happenings on every side.

How do you people take the position of the President on the liquor question? I believe in the West the people are glad of the repeal, at least we may call it a repeal, for can a man get any drunker on pure whiskey than he can on beer and wine? I think the church people are getting what is coming to them for the manner many of them have acted under the 18th amendment. The church people have not tried in any great material way to have the law obeyed.  They have simply passed by on the other side and let the violator be. For my part I will never vote to license the sale or manufacture of any strong drink, altho [sic] I do not belong to any temperance society and never did. The Church embraces everything that is good, and if one can not give his influence for temperance there no outside manmade [sic] organization can be more effective. They have Moses and the Prophets and Jesus Christ, and if they will not hear them, neither will they hear a W. C. T. U. I am nearly seventy years old, and I still believe that the body of Christ established comprehends every good work.[1]

Note

[1] Meta C. Sager to Clara, March 19, 1933, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society. For a good overview of the history and developments connected to the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments to the United States Constitution, see Norman H. Clark, "Prohibition and Temperance," in The Reader's Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 871-75.