As Tiana Lowe noted in her excellent piece earlier today on the 85th anniversary of the end of Prohibition, the nanny-state Prohibition experiment surely would have left America’s Founding Fathers “horrified.”
Thomas Jefferson’s Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, once gave Jefferson this warning: “Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated, and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should try to regulate the concerns of individuals, as if he could do it better than themselves.”
Decades later, Abraham Lincoln, this time directly referring to nascent efforts to ban alcohol, wrote — despite his own personal temperance — that “Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not a crime. A prohibition law strikes at the very principle upon which our government is founded.”
Certainly, alcohol in excess can cause grievous harm. But some ills are best controlled through moral suasion or private restraint, not by coercion. The law is too blunt an instrument, especially when it newly restricts behavior that has been accepted as a matter of free choice for thousands of years.
As the disastrous experiment with Prohibition showed, people who once have enjoyed freedom tend to rebel when their freedom is eliminated. Respect for the law diminishes precipitously, and social ills arise that are even worse than the ones the busybodies want to eradicate.
And as we all know, Prohibition didn’t work. Bootlegging became rampant, not just in hard-partying cities such as New York and New Orleans, but even in the culturally dry heartland. In Hutchinson, Kansas, for example, a Prohibition-supporting newspaper editor lamented a decade into the experiment that “there is ten times as much drinking in Kansas today as there was ten years ago … and consumption is increasing rather than diminishing.”
Bootlegging in turn gave rise to mobsters such as Al Capone, among a host of other ills and expenses. The official Wickersham Commission, appointed by former President Herbert Hoover in 1929 to analyze Prohibition’s results, featured in its final report a Section III called “Bad Features of the Present Situation and Difficulties in the Way of Enforcement.” Its subsection titles themselves were a litany of ills:
- Corruption.
- The Bad Start and its Results.
- The State of Public Opinion (described underneath as “a serious obstacle to the observance and enforcement of national prohibition laws”).
- Economic Difficulties.
- Geographical Difficulties.
- Political Difficulties.
- Psychological Difficulties.
- The Strain on Courts, Prosecuting Machinery, and Penal Institutions.
- The Invitation to Hypocrisy and Evasion Involved in the Provision as to Fruit Juices.
- Nullification.
Of course, the report provided copious evidence, replete with hard numbers, to illuminate these subsections. Notably, the commission apparently found no reason at all to produce a subsequent section called “The Good Features of the Present Situation.” Apparently there were no results good enough to be worth describing. Far better to indulge a party than to countenance government’s repressive jackboot.
