We Americans are selective in our historical memory. Some wars are constantly celebrated or argued over; others we’d rather forget. Some eras resonate with current concerns; others seem disconnected, as if they happened in some other country.
In this latter category falls Prohibition, chapter in America’s political narrative few read and no one references.
Yes, gangsters, moonshiners and speakeasies pop up from time to time in the cultural conversation. But the political side of Prohibition – how the United States came to amend the Constitution to outlaw liquor, only to reverse itself a dozen years later – is a missing piece in the national puzzle.
Yet there is much to learn from Prohibition: the difficulty of imposing a cultural norm on a diverse population, the challenge of keeping producers from reaching their markets, the futility of legislating abstinence. Those are lessons that would have better informed 50 years of debate about drugs, had Prohibition not disappeared down the memory hole.
But there are also lessons about politics from studying the half-century when the great American divide was not between red and blue but between wet and dry. There’s the old adage about politics making strange bedfellows, for instance. The anti-liquor movement brought together southern evangelicals like Billy Sunday and Bob Jones with northern socialists like Dorothy Day, populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan and union radicals like the International Workers of the World.
Prohibition was a populist cause, pitting small towns against the big cities. As Daniel Okrent explains in “Last Call,” his excellent history of the rise and fall of the 18th amendment, the “Drys” had a hand in nearly every Progressive Era advance. Drys supported state referendums, through which grassroots Drys could go around the machine politicians beholden to liquor interests. They supported the popular election of U.S. senators for the same reason. They had a large role in enacting the 16th amendment, which created the income tax, in order to end the federal government’s dependence on excise taxes on beer and liquor – making federal prohibition feasible.
The most significant alliance the prohibitionists made was with the women’s suffrage movement. Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League, described by Okrent as “the most powerful pressure group the nation had ever known,” believed newly enfranchised women would protect Prohibition from being repealed.
Familiar threads in American history are entwined in the Prohibition story. Race played a part, of course. Southern Drys made racist appeals to get liquor outlawed, and enacted Jim Crow voting laws, in part to increase their advantage at the polls.
The Drys shaped the electorate through immigration laws as well. The flood of immigrants in the first few decades of the 20th century were mostly wine-drinkers from Southern Europe, beer drinkers from Central Europe and vodka drinkers from Eastern Europe – every one of them a potential vote against Prohibition.
Wheeler helped slam America’s door by pushing through Congress the first law restricting immigration in 1921. But the immigrants had already tipped the population balance, and the redistricting following the 1920 Census would take more House seats from the dry rural areas and give them to the wet cities. Wheeler’s response was to stall the redistricting, which he managed to do for a full 10 years – and unprecedented constitutional violation, Okrent contends.
The attempt to outlaw alcohol triggered another ancient rule: the law of unintended consequences. Prohibition backers promised a reduction in crimes associated with liquor, but Prohibition gave rise to a huge spike in crime, and gave birth to the first national crime syndicates.
Prohibition was sold as a means to protect American womanhood from drunken men, but instead it empowered women to take up drinking themselves. Women started drinking socially, for the first time, at two of innovations in response to Prohibition: the speakeasy and the cocktail party.
Before Prohibition, men and women did not meet in private homes to consume liquor, nor did women frequent saloons. But when the saloons were closed, drinking moved to the living room, where cocktails – a new kind of drink created in part to disguise the foul taste of homemade liquor – were enjoyed by men and women alike.
That wasn’t what Carrie Nation and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had in mind.
Then came the Depression, and Americans found a new perspective on many things, including Prohibition. Okrent spends more time on the long struggle to enact the 18th amendment than on the swift repeal that happened once martini-drinking Franklin D. Roosevelt moved into the White House.
As we’ve seen with gay marriage, and are now seeing with marijuana legalization, once prevailing attitudes shift, change can be surprisingly swift.
One small part of Okrent’s history of special interest here in Massachusetts is his surprising exoneration of Joseph P. Kennedy. Yes, Kennedy’s father was a saloon owner in Boston, and a Kennedy company imported liquor after Prohibition ended, but Okrent could find no evidence he ever violated the law. Moreover, there’s no evidence that rumors Kennedy was a bootlegger even circulated during and after Prohibition – when he was a wealthy celebrity and a controversial political figure who went through no fewer than three Senate confirmations. The Joe Kennedy bootlegger myth appears not to have been born until Joe’s son, John F. Kennedy, ran for president in 1960.
That was a long time ago, and Prohibition even longer. But we ought to remember the lessons learned through that disastrous experiment in social policy – and lift a glass to its repeal.
Rick Holmes writes for GateHouse Media and the MetroWest Daily News and can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com. Like him on Facebook at Holmes & Co., and follow him @HolmesAndCo.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Remembering Prohibition, and learning from it