The 18th Amendment

“If the Prohibition people think it is a violation of the law to mix two beverages permitted under the law and that a person doing so can be arrested,” he told the gathered reporters, “I shall give them a chance to test it.” Needless to say, La Guardia was never arrested for the prank. (Note to Jonathan Alter, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Wolff: There is ample historic precedent for abrasive New York City politicians to push the edge of the envelope in ways that sometimes outrage “respectable” opinion.)

By publicly mocking Prohibition in his Washington office, La Guardia hoped to show Americans how useless and self-defeating the law was. It is no surprise that such a challenge came from a New York City congressman, the son of immigrants who represented a polyglot district in Manhattan. For the central role the Big Apple played in the rise and eventual downfall of Prohibition is the subject of Michael Lerner’s Dry Manhattan. Politicians like La Guardia and Al Smith were leading “wets,” those opposed to Prohibition. Much of the city’s immigrant and ethnic communities hated the law and could not understand the big fuss made about alcohol. Throughout the Prohibition era, the city proved to be one of the toughest places to enforce the anti-alcohol laws.

Lerner rightly notes that Prohibition is a “key to understanding the cultural divides that separated Americans in the 1920s.” Today is not the first time Americans have been deeply divided over cultural and social issues.

Prohibition was the great “wedge issue” of its time, dividing Americans politically and culturally. By laying bare the era’s cultural schisms, Prohibition was much like abortion today. But unlike the abortion debate, Prohibition receives scant scholarly or journalistic interest, a fact that makes this book so welcome. It is an engaging narrative that brings alive the 1920s, with its speakeasies, flappers, and mobsters.

Lerner believes that the “noble experiment” of Prohibition was a failure, and not even a noble one at that. The law appealed to the bigotry of Americans concerned about large populations of immigrants and their children living in big cities, and was an attempt to regulate their behavior. The industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created great insecurities among many native-born Americans. Prohibition was just one of the many reforms designed to manage these changes and lessen their negative impact. But there was definitely a dark side to some of these reforms, as seen in the rise of immigration quotas, the Red Scare, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

The 18th Amendment was ratified in January 1919 in the wake of the anti-immigrant feelings stirred by World War I, especially against German-Americans, who owned most of the nation’s breweries. And the Volstead Act of that same year defined just exactly what would be prohibited: any drink with an alcohol content more than .5 percent.

By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, a majority of Americans were in favor of some kind of reform of the Prohibition laws, and the nation had other worries. It was a former New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the law legalizing wine and beer, making it the third piece of legislation during FDR’s first hundred days in office. The repeal of the 18th Amendment would come at the end of the year.

Was Prohibition as much of a failure as Lerner paints? In New York City, and other large urban areas, the answer is probably yes. But as Lerner notes in an intriguing footnote: “Not all historians regard Prohibition as a failure.” Oddly, he never explains exactly why these historians are wrong. Pointing to opposition to the law in New York and the very real obstacles to enforcing the law there does not exactly prove that the law was an overall failure.

A 1971 Department of Health, Education and Welfare study found that per capita drinking in America declined from 2.6 gallons consumed per capita in the first decade of the 20th century to just under one gallon in 1934, then rose to 1.56 gallons in 1940. On top of that, one historian argues that the cost of alcohol increased substantially during the 1920s, putting it out of the reach of most wage-earners on a regular basis. The wealthy could flout the law and drink at speakeasies much more readily than the rest of the population, and those reports often made their way into newspapers, thus coloring the coverage of Prohibition.

Lerner further argues that the Anti-Saloon League and other “drys” succeeded in achieving Prohibition “through pressure politics rather than democratic debate.” It is a peculiar thesis that seems to imply that special interest groups act outside the democratic process. Try telling that to NARAL, the Sierra Club, NOW, and the ACLU. By pushing this thesis, Lerner downplays the decades of activism on the part of temperance groups and the wide base of support that anti-alcohol legislation enjoyed. New Yorkers might have strongly opposed Prohibition, but there was still enough political support around the country to amend the Constitution and pass many statewide anti-alcohol laws.

There is little evidence that support for Prohibition was, in Lerner’s words, the province of a “vocal minority.” However one views Prohibition, to call it “undemocratic” (as Lerner does) is to misuse the word. The “drys” may have been wrong on policy and moral grounds, but they used every legal and democratic method at their disposal, including the most difficult–amending the Constitution–to achieve their ends. That sounds pretty democratic to me.

While the repeal of Prohibition was a popular and sensible move in 1933, Lerner paints repeal with bright colors, praising the fact that Americans would now be liberated from “the intrusion of the state into their private lives.” Does Lerner really miss the irony here? Yes, the state was lessening (not ending) its regulation of the private consumption of alcohol, but it was also embarking on the largest intrusion of the state into the economic life of the nation with the New Deal, to the extent that the National Recovery Administration would soon tell New York City’s burlesque dancers how many strips they could perform in a day.

Dry Manhattan is a colorful history, but too often descends into a crude morality play of narrow-minded and bigoted “drys” facing off against decent and cosmopolitan “wets.” Its allergic reaction to so-called moral reforms or moral crusades is puzzling, considering the success of America’s greatest moral reform: the abolition of slavery. In more recent times, Al Gore has proclaimed that the fight against global warming is a “moral” issue. The laws that Gore and his allies would like to pass would likely prove far more intrusive in the private lives of individuals than Prohibition ever did.

The book downplays any connection between saloons, prostitution, and corrupt political machines. The link between alcohol and various social ills was real, and saloons helped damage the lives of many working-class families. Liberal reformers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald understood this.

Prohibition ended up being a big overreaction to these problems, but not all “drys” were fanatical and bigoted prudes, and not all “wets” were tolerant cosmopolitans. In his zeal to praise those who opposed the moral crusaders, Lerner nearly makes a hero out of the frivolous and corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker. When the villain of the book, the Anti-Saloon League’s William Anderson, is convicted of forgery and sent to prison, Lerner glides over concerns that Tammany Hall may have framed Anderson. I guess he had it coming.

Today’s New York is still a cosmopolitan stew of various races and ethnicities and, at first glance, seems immune to moral crusades. Yet recently New York has been the focus of antismoking bans and attacks on the use of transfats in restaurants. While lacking in the scope of Prohibition (yet), these issues do carry more than a whiff of a moral crusade. Reformers have not stopped trying to regulate private behavior. That such regulation finds a congenial home in modern New York complicates Lerner’s morality tale: Why are such live-and-let-live antimoralists, in favor of abortion and gay rights, so eager to ban cigarettes and trans fats?

And lest anyone take issue with the connection between antismoking campaigns and Prohibition, Lerner reminds us that in 1916 temperance activists narrowly lost in their effort to have the New York legislature pass a law that would have slapped a label on all bottles of alcohol reading: “This preparation contains alcohol, which is a habit-forming, irritant, narcotic poison.” Sounds like the warning labels on cigarette packages.

Today, a growing chorus of critics complains that Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a “neo-Prohibitionist” organization. But the issue that most resembles Prohibition is drugs. Without getting into the merits or weaknesses of the nation’s drug laws, it should be noted that the consumption of alcohol was deeply rooted in America–and not just in German-American and Irish-American communities, but going as far back as the high consumption of rum in colonial New England. There is simply no comparison with drugs on that account.

Grappling with moral issues is not a sign of bigotry or fanaticism, as Lerner would suggest. Whether the issue is drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, abortion, or the environment, the issue of how much the state can regulate individual behavior for the common good is what the democratic process is all about. Americans have a healthy skepticism about grand moral crusades, without losing their concern for larger issues, such as the moral complexities of abortion or the health effects of tobacco, alcohol, or drugs.

Prohibition overstepped that careful balance, but Americans corrected their mistake through the democratic process. The discussion of Prohibition in Dry Manhattan presents an entertaining narrative, but oversimplifies this debate. Reading Lerner’s harping against moralists makes one wonder if he isn’t writing more about his concerns with America today than with the 1920s.

Vincent J. Cannato, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is completing a history of Ellis Island to be published by HarperCollins.