Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition -- Book Review
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
By Daniel Okrent. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Schribner. 2010. 468 pp.
This is the political and social story of Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933). It is beautifully written, well researched, thoughtful, analytical, and anecdotal. It is a towering achievement both for its history and its contemporary relevance. It is the kind of book that is a joy to read because it is so good and there is something interesting and important on every page.
Prohibition is central to understanding the cultural history of the United States. The struggle over Prohibition, broadly understood as the application of state power to restrict private behavior, has spanned nearly the entire history of the United States. For a country founded on the ideal of individual freedom with explicit individual rights written into the Constitution, we have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy in vehement conflict within and among ourselves over the meaning and extent of those rights and freedoms. The impact of this conflict has been felt far beyond the mere availability of alcoholic beverages. Okrent lists, international trade, speedboat design, soft drink marketing, the English language, organized crime, home dinner parties, the engagement of women in political issues, and the creation of Las Vegas as just some of its consequences (p. 4). We are still dogged by its legacy today. The ethos that gave birth to Prohibition is still alive in the United States and continues to impact many social and political issues that affect people in their personal lives. The precursors of Prohibition go as far back as the 1820s, if not further. Okrent lifts from the dustbin of history many of the diverse, colorful, and pathetic personalities who furthered the cause of temperance, which eventually became Prohibition: Carry Nation, self-described as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like." (p. 24) Wayne Wheeler, "a locomotive in trousers," (p. 39) Mabel Willebrandt, "Prohibition Portia," Frances Willard, "the Bismarck of the forces of righteousness," Howard Russell, Richmond Hobson, Andrew Volstead, Billy Sunday, among many others.
He also draws the opposing forces and their gallant charioteers in rich detail: Adolphus Busch, Samuel Bronfman, Georges de Latour, Pierre du Pont, Pauline Sabin, and Al Capone.
Politics and alcohol have always been closely linked in the United States. "When twenty-four year old George Washington first ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he attributed his defeat to his failure to provide enough alcohol for the voters. When he tried again two years later, Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider, and beer his election agent handed out -- roughly half a gallon for every vote he received." (p. 47) Abraham Lincoln, who in his early days sold liquor in the general store he operated with a partner, was a very light drinker himself, and favored temperance, but opposed Prohibition. (p. 9)
The first question one might raise about Prohibition is why it occurred in the first place? Winston Churchill called Prohibition "at once comic and pathetic," (p. 185) and "an affront to the whole history of mankind." (p. 172) Lord Curzon called it "Puritanism run mad." (p. 172) How is it that this folly became established in the Constitution of the United States? Okrent does an excellent job of explaining this. The story is very interesting and surprising, and I think, not well known.
Prohibition was closely related to two other innovations in the Constitution that occurred around the same time: the Income Tax (1913), and Women's Suffrage (1920). The idea of the income tax was to "pay" for Prohibition. Tax revenue on the sale of alcohol, which would be lost when Prohibition went into effect, would be replaced by the income tax. Women's Suffrage was thought to be instrumental in achieving Prohibition because Prohibition was widely perceived to be a women's issue. As it turned out, Prohibition was achieved without women having the vote, and women played an important role in getting Prohibition repealed. It was also thought by some wealthy Americans that repeal of Prohibition would lead to repeal of the income tax as well. But it didn't happen.
Prohibition was not a totally irrational movement. It was an attempt to address a pervasive, serious problem in American social life, and women were the impetus for it at the outset.
"The most urgent reasons for women to want the vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related. They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children from being terrorized by them. To do all these things they needed to change the laws that consigned married women to the status of chattel. And to change the laws, they needed the vote." (p. 15)
"A drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain, but many rural and small-town women also had to endure the associated ravages born of the early saloon: the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as "syphilis of the innocent" -- venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons. Saloons were dark and nasty places, and to the wives of the men inside they were satanic." (p. 16)
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Anti-Saloon League came to the fore of the Prohibition movement. Clergymen occupied at least 75 percent of the seats on the board of each state branch of the Anti-Saloon League, and they were overwhelmingly Methodist and Baptist. The ASL was singlemindedly dedicated to removing alcohol from American life. It became the most powerful pressure group in American history to that time and was able to control politicians from the local to the national level all across the nation. The Prohibition forces were predominantly white, Protestant, and native born. They were anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-black. The Ku Klux Klan supported Prohibition as a weapon against immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. (p.86) The alliances that were forged by the Prohibition bandwagon were both strange and interesting. Corporations came to support Prohibition under the idea that workers who did not drink would be more productive and less liable to Workman's Compensation claims. The Prohibition movement was xenophobic, bigoted, hypocritical, intolerant, self-righteous and belligerent. In other words, ugly in many of the same respects that we see playing out in our national politics today.
World War 1 proved decisive for the anti-liquor forces. The Anti-Saloon League skillfully capitalized on the war effort and on anti-German hysteria to turn the legislative tide decisively in favor of Prohibition. The brewers tended to have German names: Busch, Blatz, Miller, Schlitz, Carling, Pabst, and they did not muster themselves well against the onslaught of negative propaganda thrown at them in the midst of the war effort.
"The wartime emergency enabled Wilson, with scant public opposition, to 'sieze railways, requisition factories, take over mines, fix prices, put an embargo on all exports, commandeer all ships, standardize all loaves of bread, punish all careless use of fuel, draft men for an army, and send that army to a war in France.' (quotation from Charles Merz) Compared to all that, closing down distilleries and breweries didn't seem so radical at all." (p. 100)
It recalls the current use made of the "war on terror" by the government to justify a whole range of restrictions on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights in our own time. From 1918 to January, 1919, Prohibition was enacted by wide margins all across America in remarkably short time compared with other constitutional amendments. It went into effect one year from ratification, 1920 -- giving people plenty of time to lay in supplies. Over the next thirteen years subversive drama became a way of life in the United States. It was said that "the drys had their law, and the wets would have their liquor" (p. 114) and "Prohibition was better than no liquor at all." (p. 128)
The last two thirds of the book deal with the new social reality brought about by Prohibition in the United States and its eventual precipitous demise. It is an interesting, deeply tragic, and at the same time, comical story, told with great skill and color by Okrent: smuggling, legal loopholes, official corruption, organized crime, sporadic enforcement, told through countless, interesting anecdotes often with surprising outcomes. Prohibition turned America into a nation of criminals. It created a deep sense of alienation and mistrust of the government across broad sectors of the population, a culture of hypocrisy and corruption in political leaders, and an international network of criminal enterprises well integrated into the legitimate mainstream of society. This criminal underground continues to operate today in the legacy of Prohibition corrupting politicians, the judicial system, and sapping resources from legitimate businesses.
I have come to see Prohibition and legacy movements like it as a low intensity civil war. An organized element within society, whether a majority or a minority, strives through political and legal muscle to impose its conception of appropriate conduct on everyone in the society in matters that intrude on private, personal autonomy: drinking alcohol, recreational drugs, commercial sex, same sex relations, deviant sexual practices or relationships, abortion, gambling, pornography, and shopping on Sunday. To be sure all of these activities, while ostensibly private, have public implications, which may well merit some governmental regulation, but what Okrent effectively documents is that Prohibition is a blunt, overreaching, and ultimately ineffective instrument. It is a lesson we are only slowly learning, and Prohibition battles continue to rage in our public discourse and our political life creating distortions, contradictions, perversities, and injustices throughout society.
There are a number of issues Okrent does not deal with that I wish he had paid some attention to: (1) the relation between drinking and masculinity, and the changing conception of masculinity in American culture in the wake of Prohibition (2) The disappearance of commercial sex throughout the United States by 1920, as well as gambling, which had been widely available everywhere not too long prior and the relation of these developments to the movement to Prohibit alcohol (3) The persecution of same sex relationships, particularly between males, was in ascendance in tandem with the prohibition of alcohol. A sea change occurred during this time from about 1900 to 1930 in men's relations with one another, their relations with women, and their own understanding of themselves. It was closely related to Prohibition, which was spearheaded by men of decidedly ascetic sensibilities: Wayne Wheeler, W.D. Upshaw, Richmond P. Hobson, William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and many less well known. What the experience of Prohibition shows is that these aggressive, self-righteous, demagogues cannot be the definers of public policy. They are misguided, fear mongering, and at the same time ruthless and intolerant. They are among the worst kind of people to have influencing legislative decision making. This is the real value of Last Call, in that it exposes the fatuousness of governmental prohibition in the realm of private conduct and it removes credibility from the ascetic mentality that oversimplifies private and public vice and seeks to squash it with legal proscription. It is a very valuable contribution both to our cultural history and to our present public discourse.