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S. S. Kresge: Prohibition: White Supremacy: August Kreis III: Ed Gein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._S._Kresge

In 1924 Kresge established The Kresge Foundation, a non-profit organization whose income he specified simply "to promote the well-being of mankind." By the time of his death, Kresge had given the foundation over $60,000,000.[7] A strongly committed prohibitionist, he organized the National Vigilance Committee for Prohibition enforcement and also heavily supported the Anti-Saloon League financially, though he later stopped contributions.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Saloon_League

Failure

Unable to cope with the failures of prohibition after 1928, especially bootlegging and organized crime as well as reduced government revenue, the League failed to counter the repeal forces. Also their failure to disassociate from the Ku Klux Klan brought on negative connotations with the League.[10] Led by prominent Democrats, they helped Franklin D. Roosevelt win in 1932 on a wet platform. A new Constitutional amendment passed easily in 1933 to repeal the 18th amendment, and the League lost its power.

http://archive.is/5ZTvW | http://bigthink.com/delancey-place/political-alliances-the-kkk-and-the-anti-saloon-league

In today's excerpt – the alliance between the church and the Ku Klux Klan that was crucial both to enacting Prohibition and the maintaining it for thirteen years.

Prohibition began in 1920 and lasted for thirteen years before it was repealed – primarily because of the tax revenues needed from alcohol sales as the Great Depression deepened. Prohibition did not spring forth overnight – in fact it took political activism over a period of almost eighty years to bring about Prohibition. ~

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~ "This became tragically clear in 1923 and 1924 when Williamson County, in southern Illinois, saw its law enforcement apparatus taken over by a vigilante army of between twelve and thirteen hundred Klansmen. Through the intervention of dry congressman Edward E. Denison, the Klansmen had been deputized by Haynes to clean up the county, which had been in the grip of bootleggers. The vigilantes were led by S. Glenn Young, who had earlier been drummed out of his position in the Prohibi­tion Bureau as 'a distinct and glaring disgrace . . . unfit to be in govern­ment service.' After midnight on February 1, 1924, Young's marauders raided the homes of immigrant Italian mineworkers, terrorizing women and children, and, if they found wine in the house, hauling their hus­bands and fathers off to jail. Rev. A. M. Stickney of the Marion Methodist Church provided ideological support, declaring that Catholics and Jews controlled America's newspapers and insisting that only the Klan could protect America from disaster. Stickney also took pains to note that the assassins of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley had all been born Catholic."