The private building that’s closest to the U.S. Capitol—indeed, the only nongovernmental building on Capitol Hill proper—belongs to the United Methodist Church. The corner lot—near where the Supreme Court now resides—was a muddy hole when the Reverend Clarence True Wilson spotted it, in 1917, and decided it would be the ideal location for the denomination’s political efforts, especially its campaign for Prohibition. By 1922, built with donations as small as fifteen cents from churchgoers across the country, the five-story Italian Renaissance structure, made of Indiana limestone, was christened as the headquarters for Methodism’s Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals.

We’re used to thinking of Prohibition as a regressive failure, an attempt to legislate morals. It was a failure, and it was an attempt to legislate morals, but it wasn’t regressive. It was led, in large part, by women demanding a better life for their sisters in a country where domestic violence, usually linked to […]