This photo is of a water fountain in Petaluma Calif. Built in 1891 by the WCTU, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It reads: "Total Abstinence is the way to handle the alcohol problem." A typical Lefty idea of the time (Petaluma has always been Lefty) that grew into a national single litmus test issue in nearly every election for thirty years (The Left, Socialism, agrarian reform and Puritan religious fervor were in one political cluster one hundred years ago). In 1920, the threat of the impending women’s vote scared the Congress into passing the first step in a constitutional amendment that went on to be passed by the states as Prohibition. In the 1950s I remember meeting people for whom "wet or dry" was still a single litmus test issue.
Funny, we still have a single issue litmus test more than thirty years after the new issue first raised its head. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice. It, like the first litmus test issue, is mostly a women's issue.