Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Jordan Jarvis

A politician doesn’t say “I beg you” unless he’s trying to turn a ballot into a moral referendum. Jarvis’s plea against “stills and open bar-rooms” isn’t just a policy preference; it’s a deliberate staging of temperance as civic hygiene. The phrasing is tellingly domestic and intimate - “I beg” evokes a pastor’s appeal more than a legislator’s platform - designed to move voters from interest to conscience, from “What do I want?” to “What kind of community am I responsible for?”

The concrete nouns do heavy lifting. “Stills” targets homegrown production, the backwoods economy of liquor that’s harder to regulate and easier to romanticize. “Open bar-rooms” aims at the public face of drinking: visible disorder, wage loss, violence, and the kind of street-level politics saloons often incubated. By pairing them, Jarvis frames alcohol as a problem that seeps from private vice into public decay, making prohibition feel like a defensive wall around “the county” - a unit of identity small enough to feel personal, large enough to sound like governance.

Context matters: late-19th-century Southern politics regularly braided temperance with social control and “respectability,” often aligning with Protestant reform movements and anxieties about modernization. Jarvis’s intent is coalition-building through moral clarity: he offers voters an enemy they can picture, then invites them to purify local life by voting against it. The subtext is authority - who gets to define order, whose pleasures count as threats, and how “community” becomes a mandate to police behavior.