Prohibition Read online

  After the anti-liquor fanatic Carry Nation smashed a saloon in Enterprise, Kansas, in 1901, the city marshal led her away to jail. kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society, 503

  After testing strategy in the key state of Ohio, the ASL in 1895 became a national organization dedicated to banning alcohol throughout the United States with an amendment to the US Constitution. The ASL attracted both men and women, including many members of the WCTU, although its leadership remained male. The organization had a paid professional staff. In 1903, the national ASL employed 300 staff members; in 1915, 1,500. After Willard’s death, the ASL frequently coordinated strategy with the WCTU. Often described as the first political pressure group, the ASL intensely lobbied elected officials, especially state legislators and members of Congress, to pass dry legislation. Unlike the WCTU, the ASL was willing to work with elected officials who drank, so long as officials voted the way the ASL dictated. The approach was based on hard-boiled politics rather than moral fervor.

  The ASL believed that there was a dry majority in the United States. “It is the plain church-going people of the towns and the countryside,” wrote the progressive reformer Robert Woods, “who by their inherent moral force are bringing about this stupendous achievement.”18 In 1910, half of all Americans lived on farms or in towns with fewer than two thousand people. Pioneering the idea of the single-issue group, the ASL cared only about prohibition. The short-term goal was to dry out as much of the country as possible. The ASL pushed state prohibition where it was viable. If drys could not win statewide, the ASL got states to pass laws allowing local option. After a large number of counties had been made dry and thereby weakened the liquor interests, the ASL sought statewide prohibition. In 1900, thirty-seven states had local option statutes. Meanwhile, alcohol sales were restricted by state laws or local ordinances stopping sales on Sundays, imposing closing hours, limiting the number of liquor licenses, creating dry zones around churches and schools, setting age restrictions, or banning sales to known alcoholics. Once a state was legally dry, the ASL tried to ban the import of alcohol into the state and restrict medicinal use of alcohol.

  The methodical and gradual approach of the ASL proved to be more effective than the WCTU’s rigid moralism or the Prohibition Party’s fanaticism. Gradualism allowed local people to attack key local issues. It also encouraged further political mobilization. “Reforms are not revolutionary,” said Ernest Cherrington of the ASL in 1911. “They are evolutionary.”19 Less ideological and more inclusive than the WCTU or Prohibition Party, the ASL also saw increased liquor regulation as the temporary means to reach abolition. Although evangelical Protestant churches were morally opposed to alcohol, they were unable to create an effective political strategy; the ASL provided a political strategy without being committed to a moral absolute, but the organization’s strategy harmonized with evangelical goals. The ASL avoided other issues that had distracted the WCTU.

  In the one-party South, the ASL supported Democrats, but in the North, the ASL worked with both major parties. In an election in which a wet Republican faced a wet Democrat, the ASL might endorse the Prohibition Party candidate, but it also might sit out the election, since it wanted access to elected officials rather than protest votes. In the case of two dry candidates, the ASL backed the incumbent or the candidate whom the ASL judged best fitted to the jurisdiction for the long run. The ASL provided endorsees with financial aid, temperance press endorsements, church pulpit recommendations, practical assistance in running a campaign, and help with turnout. The organization tried to pass legislation only when it had a majority pre-committed to its agenda. The ASL’s presses in Westerville, Ohio, turned out millions of leaflets and pamphlets. In 1907, its American Issue had 300,000 monthly subscribers; in 1919, circulation was sixteen million.

  After 1900, the Anti-Saloon League benefited from three new political developments. One was the rise of women’s suffrage. In western states, where women first gained the vote, the prohibition movement grew as soon as women could vote. “Put the ballot in the hands of woman,” preached Charles Locke at the First Methodist Church in Los Angeles, “and she will send the saloons to the damnation of hell.”20 In these states, the ASL tried to keep the liquor issue quiet until women’s suffrage passed. In other states, suffragists were urged to hold off until prohibition was won. In reality, women voted about the same way as men, although dry women were energized by having the ballot. In 1917, there were nineteen dry states. In five western states women’s suffrage preceded prohibition, but prohibition came first in the other fourteen states.

  The second change was the rise of the Progressive movement. Although reformers were split on prohibition, many Progressives endorsed the idea because they saw saloonkeepers as key players in corrupt political machines, liquor sales were often tied to gambling and prostitution, and alcohol played a major role in family destruction. Both drys and Progressives stressed a scientific approach, the use of experts, fact finding, social research, and statistics. Southern Progressives, in particular, embraced prohibition, perhaps because it enabled them to enjoy powerful evangelical support while avoiding economic questions that threatened the power of the southern white elite.

  Finally, beginning in 1903, Wayne Wheeler, an Ohio-born lawyer and Congregationalist, proved to be a brilliant political strategist for the ASL at first in Ohio and then in Washington, DC. He threatened elected officials who opposed the ASL with annihilation at the ballot box, and his electoral prowess intimidated many politicians. Large campaign contributions and masses of dry volunteers usually brought electoral success. Local option was used to dry out rural areas. ASL-sponsored local option elections featured children’s parades and temperance bands. To stoke enthusiasm, the ASL imported popular speakers, including the former major-league baseball player turned evangelical temperance reformer Billy Sunday. “The saloonkeeper and the devil are both pulling on the same rope,” he argued.21 Wets countered with the attorney Clarence Darrow, who denounced “fanaticism and intolerance.”22 The next step was statewide prohibition. However, great cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco kept New York State, Illinois, and California wet. After most states were dry, Wheeler planned to get an amendment to the US Constitution passed to capture the holdouts. “A national evil requires a national remedy,” he said in1917.23 The plan was to encircle the wet cities and then cut off their liquor.

  During the Progressive Era, increased scientific knowledge about alcohol produced disturbing new findings. In 1909, Professor Winfield Hall of Northwestern University stated, “Alcohol is a narcotic in its drug action.”24 Alcohol was a depressant, caused a decline in mental capacity, and resulted in loss of muscular control. This information flooded the new middle-class magazines. Life insurers reported that drinkers had shorter lives, and medical researchers linked alcohol abuse to insanity and degenerate children. Scientists constantly reduced the amount of strong drink that could be considered safe, and fewer physicians wrote prescriptions for distilled spirits. Social scientists linked drinking, crime, poverty, and prostitution. The National Conference of Charities calculated that alcohol was responsible for 50 percent of crime, 45 percent of desertion of children, 42 percent of broken homes, and 25 percent of poverty. Leading dry Progressives included Jane Addams of Chicago’s Hull House and Robert Woods of Boston’s South End Settlement House, as well as the economist Irving Fisher of Yale.

  Between 1907 and 1916, dry forces won major victories at the state level, particularly in the South and West. Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907 with a dry constitution that established statewide prohibition. Southern states suddenly shifted into the dry column. In the aftermath of the Atlanta race riot of 1906, the Georgia legislature passed statewide prohibition in 1907. Women paraded and lobbied legislators prior to the vote. The main argument was to protect southern white women from rapes by drunken black men. Racial hysteria appeared frequently in southern dry campaigns. The anti-liquor cause was aided by the rise of cheap liquor disti
lled in St. Louis for the southern African American market. Many brands had vulgar names. One, called Black Cock Vigor Gin, had a label that featured a partially nude white woman. Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi adopted statewide prohibition in 1908, and Tennessee joined the list in 1909. By January 1917, there were ten dry southern states. Some African Americans who were denied access to liquor switched to cocaine, which was legal.

  During these same years, a number of western states also adopted statewide prohibition. In 1914, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona went dry at the ballot box. In all four states the voters acted after the legislature had declined to do so. By late 1917, there were twenty-three dry states, seventeen of which had gone dry by popular vote. How well did these laws function? “Kansas has prohibition, and among the rural population it is fairly well enforced,” noted the Los Angeles Times in a 1915 editorial. “But in the cities there is a supply of blind pigs whose styes [sic] are crowded with worshipers of Bacchus.”25 Not only was there an urban-rural split, but prohibition also played differently across class lines. The policy threatened the working-class saloon, while the middle class used the mail to import alcohol for personal consumption. The Boston Transcript, the voice of the New England elite, was blunt: “So long as the well-to-do individual was free to import liquors for his own use he has often inclined to favor prohibition enactments for the ‘lower classes.’ ”26 Ethnicity and class were often identical. In Boston, the lower classes were Irish immigrants.

  The remaining wet states included major markets such as New York, Illinois, and California, each of which was home to a hard-drinking city. Trying to dry out such places was a gargantuan task. New York City alone had thirteen thousand saloons, and the state’s per capita consumption of alcohol was three and a half times the national average. Many wets, however, were complacent. In 1916, the Congress of Hotel Associations met in New York. One hotelier told the New York Times, “The great American hotel will never go dry because the great majority don’t want that kind of a hotel.”27 Nevertheless, the rural-dominated New York State legislature authorized local option in 1917.

  America’s great cities were teeming with immigrants. In 1910, 14.9 percent of Americans were foreign-born; they were concentrated in the fast-growing, populous, industrial cities. In New York and Chicago, immigrants and their children were a majority of the population. Most came from hard-drinking European cultures. Many immigrants lived and worked in ethnic enclaves; their saloons were sanctuaries. As prohibition gained strength, so did the wet urban backlash. On November 7, 1915, forty-four thousand wets paraded in Chicago carrying banners in many languages. A coffin in a buggy was labeled “Here lies our liberty.” On the same day, Representative Richmond Hobson, the Alabama prohibitionist, spoke at Chicago’s Second Presbyterian Church, which was along the wet parade route. As the noisy protesters passed the church, he blasted the “parade of degenerates.”28

  One could feel the pressure building inside President Woodrow Wilson’s new administration in 1913. In 1911, Wilson had appeared to favor statewide prohibition in Texas by citing the state’s “homogeneity,” but in 1912, in need of support for the presidential nomination from both dry southerners and wet big-city machines, he endorsed local option. Leaning in the popular direction, Wilson declined to serve wine in the White House, and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical, a teetotaler, and a prohibitionist, substituted grape juice at receptions. Diplomats responded with mirth and scorn. Bryan considered demanding a teetotal pledge from all State Department employees. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, another dry, banned alcohol from the US Navy.

  As dry territory expanded, so did alcohol consumption. The best explanation for this paradox was increasing importation of alcohol across state lines for personal use. The brewers and distillers who shipped it thrived. “The success of the mail order business,” noted an official of the National Model License League in 1910, “has been proportionate to the spread of ‘dry’ territory.”29 In the first half of December 1911, forty-five railroad cars filled with Christmas cheer arrived in dry Macon, Georgia. Producers solicited sales in many newspapers and magazines, which angered the dry forces. Alabama made it a crime to sell an out-of-state newspaper that contained liquor advertising, so a Birmingham news dealer carefully cut out the ads before he sold the papers.

  In 1913, Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League decided to cut off this out-of-state supply. Riding the reform wave and threatening to unseat uncooperative incumbents, Wheeler persuaded Congress to pass the Webb-Kenyon Act, which made it illegal to ship alcohol into a state that banned it, even if the product was for personal use. Prohibition advocates began to distinguish between dry states, where retail sales were illegal, and bone-dry states, where importation even for personal use was barred. At the time, only three states were bone-dry. Because of the interstate commerce clause in the US Constitution, many observers thought that the Supreme Court would overturn Webb-Kenyon. Wheeler personally argued the dry case before the justices, and in January 1917 the high court cited congressional power to control interstate commerce to validate the law by a vote of 7–2. In this era, the court was inclined to accept Progressive legislation. Similarly, the court upheld the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (1914), which brought opiates under federal control for the first time.

  Large piles of wooden kegs and shipping containers at this Topeka freight station in the early 1900s tangibly indicated that local drinkers legally imported large quantities of alcohol. kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society, 209348

  After 1865, the federal government’s income had come primarily from customs duties on imports and taxes on alcohol. In the 1880s, alcohol taxes had provided as much as 40 percent of federal revenue; in 1914, 35 percent.30 Collection of the tax was not always easy, particularly in southern Appalachia. In 1892, Democrats won both the presidency and Congress. Ideologically committed to lower tariff duties, Democrats decided in 1894 to finance the government by reestablishing the Civil War–era income tax. Wealthy northern urban Republicans were targeted for this tax. Lower tariffs would reduce the price of imported goods and put pressure on the price of all manufactures, which would benefit rural southerners and westerners who had voted Democratic.

  In 1895, the US Supreme Court, in a 5–4 vote, overturned the income tax because it violated a provision in the US Constitution that said taxes had to be levied proportionate to state population. Some observers suspected that the real reason the justices ruled as they did was that they were wet. Had the income tax remained in place, prohibition forces would have tried to substitute the income tax for alcohol taxes in order to ban alcohol. In 1909, Congress sent the Sixteenth Amendment, which allowed a federal income tax, to the states, and after it was ratified in 1913, the Wilson administration and the Democratic Congress enacted a small income tax on a very few wealthy taxpayers. Drys could now seek a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol without worrying about the loss of liquor revenue, since the income tax could be increased to make up the difference.

  In 1914, the Anti-Saloon League demanded that Congress vote on a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, even though the amendment could not win two-thirds in either the House or the Senate. Representative Richmond Hobson (D-AL) introduced the measure in the House. A Spanish-American War admiral, Hobson told drys on the Capitol steps, “The principles of war are the same whether it is a war between nations or a war between civilians and its destroying foe, the liquor traffic.”31 Although senators who did not want to be put on the spot blocked a vote in the Senate, Wayne Wheeler held sufficient influence to insist that the House take a vote. On December 22, 1914, the drys won a majority, 197–189, but not the necessary two-thirds. Progressive Party members voted yes, 15–1. The ASL then moved to defeat members who had cast “no” votes in the 1916 election. After wets were routed at the polls, the ASL realized that the new Congress meeting after March 1917 could pass a dry amendment.

  In the years from 1900 to 1916, the
alcohol industry fought back hard against the growing demands for prohibition coming from the WCTU, the ASL, and dry Progressive reformers. Producers tried to elect wet candidates and financed the wet side in local option or statewide votes on prohibition. The distillers, however, had been discredited in the whiskey tax scandal in the 1870s, and few elected officials wanted ties to that industry. Winemakers had no political influence outside California, the only state with substantial wine production and consumption. So the defense of alcohol fell to the brewers, who had the most to lose, since they controlled most saloons. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of saloons doubled to 300,000 and the per capita consumption of beer also doubled. After 1900, beer consumption continued to grow. Declining to defend distilled liquor, brewers promoted beer as a moderate, low-alcohol, healthful drink. “We deem it particularly deplorable that a few brewers are attempting to obtain legislative advantages for beer at the expense of other alcoholic beverages,” the New York State Wholesale Liquor Dealers’ Association complained in the New York Times in 1916.32 Distillers refused to assist the brewers in the campaign to stop prohibition. Later, both brewers and distillers realized that their infighting had sabotaged the alcohol industry.

  Only in the wettest areas inhabited by immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, or Eastern Europe did any office seeker openly take campaign contributions from brewers or saloonkeepers. The brewers devised a subterfuge. Kaiser Wilhelm II had established the German-American Alliance in 1900 to promote friendship between the people of the United States and those of the German Empire. It had two million members in 1914, when one-quarter of Americans had German ancestry. The German government financed the Alliance, which promoted German culture and gave immigrants ties to their native land. Cynics suspected darker purposes. In the event of a European war, the Alliance would rally German Americans to the German side, help keep America neutral, and, if war broke out between the United States and Germany, organize espionage and sabotage inside the United States. In 1915, 550 delegates representing 10,000 local affiliates in forty-five states met at the Alliance’s biennial convention in San Francisco. This famously wet organization adopted a report opposing national prohibition.