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  PROHIBITION

  Prohibition

  A Concise History

  W. J. Rorabaugh

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rorabaugh, W. J., author.

  Title: Prohibition : a concise history / W. J. Rorabaugh.

  Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025526 (print) | LCCN 2017038948 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780190689940 (updf) | ISBN 9780190689957 (epub) |

  ISBN 9780190689933 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Prohibition—United States—History. |

  Temperance—United States—History. |

  BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century.

  | HISTORY / Modern / 21st Century.

  Classification: LCC HV5089 (ebook) | LCC HV5089 .R667 2018 (print) |

  DDC 364.1/730973—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025526

  Frontispiece: At a prohibition tent revival in Bismarck Grove, Kansas, in 1878, the rural faithful rallied against the Demon Rum. kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society, 207891

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Drinking and Temperance

  2. The Dry Crusade

  3. Prohibition

  4. Repeal

  5. Legacies

  NOTES

  FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My curiosity about prohibition began early in life when I had to negotiate the cultural differences between my mother’s wet family and my father’s dry family. During prohibition my maternal grandfather made wine in the basement from Concord grapes grown in the backyard. My mother later described the product as awful. When I was a child, my mother occasionally took a drink, but my father never did. My abstinent paternal grandfather had always declared that he would try alcohol at seventy-five. On his seventy-fifth birthday, the neighbors in the small town where he lived gathered on his front porch, knocked on the door, and presented him with a half pint of whiskey. He took one sip, set the bottle on the porch rail, muttered that he had not missed a thing, went back inside, and closed the door. His was a short drinking career.

  My interest in alcohol led to The Alcoholic Republic (1979), to other research in alcohol history, and now to this short history of prohibition. I am grateful to the many scholars whose works have helped make this synthesis possible. They are cited in the notes and bibliography. Anand Yang, the chair of the History Department at the University of Washington, provided a teaching schedule that eased the writing of this book. I would like to thank Donald Critchlow and the anonymous readers for the press for their insights on earlier drafts. I am indebted to both Nancy Toff and Elizabeth Vaziri at Oxford University Press. In particular, Nancy has been a model editor at every stage of the process. For help with photographs, I would like to thank the staffs at the Denver Public Library, Indiana Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society, Ohio Historical Society, Washington State Historical Society, and Wisconsin Historical Society.

  Introduction

  From 1920 to 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution banned the production, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages. This book is about both prohibition and the century-long campaign that led to that result. The American dry movement was part of a global effort to ban or control alcohol and other drugs. This worldwide effort against pleasurable but addictive and often destructive substances began with the Enlightenment, gained strength during religious-based moral uplift and industrialization in the 1800s, and peaked after 1900 amid rising concerns about public health, family problems, and the power of producers to entice overuse. Many of these same issues belong to the war on drugs. Global trade and imperial politics have played major roles both in the spread of alcohol and other drugs and in the battle to control or stop use.

  How, then, should a government handle alcohol? Can more be gained by controls or by prohibition? Sweden adopted a state control system, and Britain long used restrictive policies to reduce consumption. Although a number of nations considered a ban, only a handful have instituted one. Prohibition seldom worked the way it was intended. For example, Russian prohibition during World War I helped bring down the tsar’s regime.1 American prohibition also failed. The price of alcohol rose, quality fell, and consumption dropped sharply. Even during prohibition, however, many Americans continued to drink, which generated corruption and organized crime. Moonshine was dangerous, bootleggers got rich, and the government lost alcohol taxes. In 1933, a disgusted country abandoned national prohibition.

  This book about American prohibition addresses several related questions: How and why did one of the hardest drinking countries decide to adopt prohibition? How did a religious-based temperance movement to stop the abuse of whiskey turn into a political crusade to stop all alcohol consumption? What role did women play in this movement? How did immigration affect drinking and the campaign against alcohol? What happened during prohibition that caused Americans to change their minds? What kind of alcohol policies were adopted when prohibition ended in 1933?

  The road to prohibition began with heavy drinking in colonial times. After the American Revolution, a plentiful supply of cheap untaxed whiskey made from surplus corn on the western frontier caused alcohol consumption to soar. Whiskey cost less than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk, and it was safer than water. By the 1820s, the average adult white male drank a half pint of whiskey a day. Liquor corrupted elections, wife beating and child abuse were common, and many crimes were committed while the perpetrator was under the influence. Serious people wondered if the republic could survive.

  The growing level of alcohol abuse provoked a backlash. Reformers, rooted in the evangelical Protestant revivals of the 1820s, urged Americans to switch from whiskey to beer or light wine. Commercial beer, however, was available only in cities, and imported wine cost too much for the average drinker. Reformers then demanded that everyone voluntarily abstain from all alcoholic beverages. By 1840, perhaps half of Americans had taken the pledge, and reformers decided that the rest of the population needed to be sober, too. Beginning with Maine in 1851, eleven states passed prohibition laws during the 1850s. These laws failed in large part because Irish and German immigrants refused to give up whiskey and beer. Alcohol policy was temporarily put aside during the Civil War.

  The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, resum
ed the long campaign to dry out America by fighting to ban alcohol at the local, state, and national levels. Under Frances Willard, the organization also advocated women’s suffrage. Until Willard’s death in 1898, the WCTU was the main organization pushing anti-liquor legislation. Local option prohibition enjoyed considerable success in rural areas, where evangelical churches were strong.

  In 1893, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) joined the fight. Led by the brilliant Washington lobbyist Wayne Wheeler, the ASL mobilized voters for prohibition. The ASL elected legislators and members of Congress loyal to its agenda. The group pushed local option where it could not win statewide prohibition. Once liquor dealers were eliminated from large areas of a state, a statewide ban was easier to enact. Wheeler believed that great wet cities such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco eventually could be dried out by encirclement. Prohibition then could be made permanent with a national constitutional amendment.

  To defeat ASL-backed dry candidates, wet opponents took money from brewers, who made hidden donations through the German-American Alliance, an immigrant organization with two million members. When World War I began in 1914, the Alliance backed Germany, and by 1916 no candidate could be seen taking money either from brewers, almost all of German ancestry, or from the Alliance. Wets lost the 1916 election, and Wheeler pounced. Once the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Congress imposed temporary wartime prohibition to prevent food shortages and passed the Eighteenth Amendment. Ratified in little more than a year, the amendment enjoyed popular support.

  When prohibition arrived in 1920, some Americans stopped drinking, and consumption of alcohol during the early twenties may have dropped by two-thirds. Alcohol, however, did not disappear. By the mid-1920s, bootlegging gangsters such as Chicago’s Al Capone had accumulated fabulous untaxed wealth. Gang violence turned many Americans against prohibition. Prohibition changed where and how alcohol was consumed. The all-male saloon, notorious for fights, prostitutes, and vote-buying, gave way to the speakeasy, which attracted both men and women. Admission required a pass, a code word, or an introduction from a trusted customer. Police were paid to look the other way. Raids from the federal Prohibition Bureau, however, could cause trouble. Harlem residents held rent parties, where strangers paid to eat, drink, and dance; the tenant earned enough to pay the rent. Many people drank liquor supplied by the bellhop in a rented hotel room. The home cocktail party also gained popularity.

  In 1924, Al Smith, the wet Irish Catholic governor of New York, ran for president. At the Democratic National Convention in New York, rural dry forces led by the prohibitionist William Jennings Bryan blocked Smith’s nomination. Four years later Smith won the nomination and promised to modify prohibition to allow beer. Southern evangelicals crusaded against Smith as a wet urban Catholic. Five southern states bolted the Democratic Party, and Herbert Hoover, who ran on the promise of better enforcement, easily won the election.

  Even before prohibition went into effect, opponents organized for repeal. In 1918, wealthy business executives founded the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, which aimed to replace high income taxes on the rich with alcohol taxes. More important was Pauline Sabin, an heiress who despised the hypocrisy and criminality surrounding prohibition. In 1929, she founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Arguing on radio, in public appearances, and in pamphlets, Sabin gave wet politicians the cover they needed to confront the WCTU. By 1932, Sabin, a lifelong Republican, decided to back a wet presidential candidate regardless of party.

  That candidate turned out to be Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. Roosevelt had long waffled on prohibition, at least in part because his wife, Eleanor, was dry. When Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination in 1932, he endorsed repeal. Governments at all levels needed alcohol taxes to fight the Great Depression. Congress sent the Twenty-First Amendment repealing the Eighteenth Amendment to the states in early 1933, and a month after Roosevelt’s inauguration, legal beer flowed. Tax collection started immediately. In 1933, John D. Rockefeller Jr., a former dry, urged states to restrict alcohol sales. He opposed tied houses, which was the practice before prohibition whereby brewers and distillers had owned saloons, because powerful brewers had used their numerous outlets to control much of American politics.

  In 1933, a strong control system replaced prohibition, and since then state governments have limited sales, banned tied houses, imposed high alcohol taxes, and punished alcohol abusers, particularly drunk drivers. Alcohol consumption was low in the 1930s but grew during World War II. The war generation remained heavy drinkers, as were the oldest baby boomers. Per capita consumption peaked in 1980. In the 1980s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving successfully lobbied to raise the legal drinking age to twenty-one. The health movement, fetal alcohol syndrome, and federal policies led to declining consumption until the late 1990s. Since 2000, alcohol consumption has increased as millennials have discovered hard liquor.

  Rising and falling patterns of alcohol consumption have been a recurrent feature throughout American history. When alcohol use is low, society shows little interest, which leads to higher use and greater abuse. The increased abuse then leads to tighter restrictions and declining use and abuse. So the cycles have come and gone. National prohibition, however, was a unique and peculiar response to high consumption that bordered on hysteria. Prohibition demonstrated that democracy does not always produce wise public policy, but democratic means were also used to repeal the ban. Democracies make mistakes but are capable of self-correction.

  Chapter 1

  Drinking and Temperance

  The earliest European immigrants to the thirteen colonies that became the United States were hearty drinkers. That fact is not surprising, since Europe, more than any other continent, embraced heavy alcohol consumption. Intoxicating beverages have always been less important in Africa, Asia, and among native inhabitants in North and South America. In 1607, the Virginia adventurers brought as much alcohol as they could on their founding voyage. The settlers subsequently produced corn (maize) beer and imported rum from the West Indies. Virginians quickly developed a reputation for hearty drinking. In the early 1700s, the diarist William Byrd recorded meetings of the Governor’s Council that ended with some members passed out drunk on the floor. Such was governance in early America. On election days, candidates were expected to treat voters to free alcohol. In 1755, when George Washington ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses, the colonial legislature, he neglected to offer the customary liquor, and the voters declined to elect him. Three years later, Washington provided 144 gallons of rum, punch, wine, hard cider, and beer. He won with 307 votes. Each vote cost almost half a gallon of alcohol.1

  Although New Englanders also drank a lot, they, unlike Virginians, frowned upon public drunkenness. Housewives did their own brewing, but because the beer they made was low in alcohol content, it did not keep long and spoiled rapidly. Stronger drink in the form of rum was imported from the West Indies. Rum was distilled from molasses, which was made from sugar cane. Considerable molasses was imported as a sweetener, and some was distilled into rum in New England. Although most rum was consumed locally, it also played a role in international trade. It was shipped to Africa, traded for slaves, and then slaves were traded in the West Indies for molasses, which went to New England to be distilled into more rum. During the 1700s, the Brown family of Rhode Island, later benefactors of Brown University, became the wealthiest and most powerful rum distillers in North America. They imported huge quantities of molasses at a low price, and their large stills had an economy of scale that small-scale producers could not hope to achieve.

  By the time of the Revolution, Americans were among the world’s heartiest topers. Indeed, much revolutionary activity took place in taverns, whether it was John Hancock and the “Indians” planning the Boston Tea Party, Thomas Jefferson penning and revising the Declaration of Independence in the back room of a Philadelphia drinking house, or recruiting sergeants buying
drinks in a public house to entice recruits into the Continental Army. Many a bleary-eyed lad discovered the next morning that he had enlisted while under the influence. Americans imbibed a lot of rum, some beer, and considerable hard cider in areas where apple trees flourished. The British, however, blockaded the colonies during the war, and access to rum was lost. Americans began to distill whiskey from corn instead. Improved distilling technology for small-batch stills had been brought to the colonies when Scottish, Scots-Irish, and Irish immigrants began arriving in large numbers during the 1760s.

  After the Revolution, whiskey made from corn and rye became the country’s patriotic drink. The distiller Harrison Hall asked, “Why should not our countrymen have a national beverage?”2 Rum importers or distillers who had to pay duties on molasses or rum that they brought in could not compete in price with the domestic product. In 1791, the federal government tried to level the playing field with a whiskey tax, but western farmers largely defied the law, which led to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in 1794. Even after this uprising was crushed, the tax was evaded until it was repealed in 1802. American whiskey was usually 50 percent alcohol; not aged; colorless; cheaper than coffee, tea, milk, or beer; and safer than water, since alcohol killed germs. Americans took their whiskey mixed with water. If sugar or lemons were available, they might add a little of each, but such additives were a luxury. Americans drank whiskey morning, noon, and night. All meals were washed down with whiskey. At 11:00 am and in mid-afternoon they took a whiskey break.

  Slaves could not drink legally, and they had less access to alcohol than whites did. Slaves, however, often bartered fish or fresh produce for small amounts of alcohol, and many planters gave slaves huge quantities of whiskey to celebrate the New Year by staying drunk for several days. Native Americans traded beaver skins for whiskey. The Indians, who learned about distilled spirits from the Europeans, amazed white Americans by the huge quantities of whiskey that they consumed. Tribes lacked cultural inhibitions against overconsumption, and a few Indians literally drank themselves to death. White Americans, however, drank the most whiskey. Children drank little, although they sometimes finished off a parental glass, especially if there was sugar at the bottom. Taking considerably less whiskey than men, women probably consumed about 15 percent of the total amount. In addition, respectable women neither drank in taverns nor showed drunkenness. By the 1820s, the typical adult white American male consumed nearly a half pint of whiskey a day. This is about three times the present consumption rate. Because they sipped whiskey with meals all day long, they were rarely drunk, but they were often buzzed.