The Plight of the Posted

The photo below was given to me by a friend who thought it was taken in an Oshkosh saloon. Judging by the signs on the back bar, I'm guessing it dates to sometime around 1914. What jumped out to me was the white sign at the upper right with a warning set in bold type: NO MINORS OR POSTED MEN Allowed Here.

To be "posted" meant that a person had been deemed to be a habitual drunkard. Posted individuals in Wisconsin were put on par with minors. They were forbidden from purchasing or consuming alcohol. It was illegal for such a person to even step foot into a saloon. It became, in essence, a form of selective prohibition.

December 25, 1913; Eau Claire Leader.

The posting law was an outgrowth of an 1872 Wisconsin statute making it illegal to sell alcohol to "minors, spendthrifts, habitual drunkards, (or) persons intoxicated or bordering on intoxication." The provision relating to minors was broadly accepted. The other restrictions were not. Many local officials complained that the broad scope of the law made it unenforceable. The Oshkosh common council's response at the time had been to say that the law simply did not apply here.

But the statute was given new life in the early 1900s after the Wisconsin branch of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) began badgering municipalities to use it to go after saloon keepers. The ASL also helped to ram through amendments in 1909 and 1913 that made the law more punitive and its application more arbitrary. No hearing or trial was required to post an individual. No complaint had to be filed. A person could be posted upon the whim of almost any city, town, or county official. It was just a part of the ASL's ongoing attack on individual rights, saloons, and the liquor trade.

A poster railing against the Anti-Saloon League.
It was displayed in many Wisconsin saloons in the years immediately before Prohibition.

In cities where local officials favored the ASL, postings went unchecked. It devolved into an ugly experiment in behavior modification by humiliation. In Fond du Lac, pictures of posted individuals were hung on the walls of saloons. In Manitowoc, they sought to have each of the posted be required to wear a mark; a red button. In Racine, their names were printed in large black type on placards mounted where liquor was sold. "Everybody has noticed, no doubt, what a host of 'posted men' have their portraits adorning telephone poles, windows, and fence posts all over the state," a dry advocate happily observed in a letter published in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern in August of 1913.

It wasn't just men who were posted. Though the majority of them were men, a woman who liked to drink was just as likely to be tarred with posting. And by 1915, a backlash was well underway.

In Stevens Point, where more than 100 people had been posted, there sprung up an underground club catering specifically to their needs. It grew into a movement called The Independent Order of the Black List. "The revolt of posted men furnishes a situation unique in Stevens Point and perhaps in any city," the Stevens Point Daily Journal reported in 1916. "The posted men have raised the time-worn cry of personal liberty."

Stevens Point wasn't the only place. In Appleton, where temperance advocates held sway, posted men and women organized with the aim of taking their fight to the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Similar efforts occurred in other Wisconsin cities, but the most common resistance tactic was also the simplest: catch a ride to a city where you hadn't been posted and drink to your heart's content.

The conflict never amounted to much more than grumbling in Oshkosh. Here, local officials applied posting measures sparingly. So sparingly in fact that by 1917 the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern was blooming with fuming letters and editorials about what a shameful place this had become. One of the screeds reported that saloon keepers were routinely "selling to minors, selling to men already intoxicated, to posted men, or in fact to anyone who could produce the necessary price of a drink.”

Their vexation was to little effect. Oshkosh remained as soaking wet as ever. It did, however, starkly illustrate the division. The most vocal supporters of the law, the people who had a vicious appetite for its application, were those who considered themselves part of the upper crust. The complaints came bellowing from the folks who lived in big houses on boulevards named Algoma and Washington. They seemed to think it only fitting that they should be allowed to regulate the social life of the working-class saloon goers who toiled in their factories. It was the people who accumulated wealth versus those who created it.

Case in point: Florence Griswold Buckstaff.

Florence Griswold Buckstaff

In a lengthy, self-serving letter to the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern published in March of 1918, Mrs. Buckstaff congratulated herself for having lived in Oshkosh for 30 years and for having devoted so much of her energy to charity. Then she dipped her pen in the well of her bleeding heart and wrote, "I can recall vividly the misery I have known in Oshkosh homes, those in which hunger and cold and immorality were due to drinking habits." She went on to say, of course, that it was the poor children she was really concerned for. Her solution was to post everyone by abolishing all saloons and making liquor illegal.

It was no skin off her ass. Florence Griswold Buckstaff was the wealthy wife of George Angus Buckstaff, president of Oshkosh's Buckstaff Company. The Buckstaffs had built their fortune here selling caskets made by a workforce, which included scores of children, paid subsistence-level wages. Her high-minded rectitude apparently didn't extend into that bleak realm.

The Buckstaff Company, circa 1915.

In the end, it was people like Florence Buckstaff who carried the day. In 1920 everybody became posted with the arrival of national Prohibition. It would take 13 years to put a halt to that disastrous experiment. And to this day its consequences remain with us in the patchwork of reactionary liquor laws that linger on in the aftermath. Few of those of Buckstaff's ilk would ever admit to how recklessly wrong they were.

Enough about that. Let's go back to the picture that started this. Here it is again.

As I mentioned, the person who gave that to me thought it was an Oshkosh saloon. I hadn't seen a shot of an Oshkosh saloon that included a "Posted Men" sign before, so naturally, I tried to figure out which saloon this was. I failed. But I suspect now that this place wasn't in Oshkosh. Look to the right side of that picture where there hangs a banner for Eulberg's Crown Select Beer.

Eulberg Brewing was in Portage, Wisconsin. I've been digging and I have yet to find anything suggesting that Eulberg beer was available in Oshkosh before Prohibition. This saloon was probably in the southern part of the state. And that makes sense when you consider how those Oshkosh dries croaked about the welcome mat being out for anyone with a nickel for beer. No minors allowed? Bosh!

End Note
I know I'm being harsh towards Florence Griswold Buckstaff here. To be fair, she wasn't entirely terrible. She was also an advocate for Women's rights. If you're looking for a more balanced portrayal of her, you could begin here. Otherwise, a simple Google search of her name will turn up plenty.