Chapter one of Mark Schrad’s new book opens with a gut-wrenching episode of state brutality. It’s 1859 in Spassk, Russia, and the tsar himself has dispatched the military to put down a protest of rebellious serfs. Gen. Yegor Petrovich Tolstoy responds ruthlessly, ordering imprisonment, court-martial, hourslong beatings, running of the gantlet, forced labor, and exile to Siberia for the noncompliant. This violent abuse of serfs in the Russian empire is not surprising, but for modern readers, the motivation for their protest likely is. The act of civil disobedience that brought the wrath of the state upon them was their refusal to drink alcohol.

The incident is smartly chosen by Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, to startle readers out of their preconceptions about Prohibition. In Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, he seeks to change the way we think about temperance movements by recognizing that they were neither exclusively American nor only the work of rural, white, busybody Protestants. Schrad reveals temperance as a global phenomenon and attempts to reclaim Prohibition, for better or worse, as a fundamentally progressive cause.
Schrad writes not as an advocate for Prohibition nor as a demonizer of drink. He notes in the preface that he composed much of the book with Manhattan in hand. He aims instead to break down stereotypes of prohibitionists, offering a fuller and more sympathetic view of activists such as notorious hatchet-wielder Carrie Nation and highlighting figures less often remembered for their anti-liquor stances: William Jennings Bryan, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Kemal Ataturk, Mahatma Gandhi, Hjalmar Branting, and Leo Tolstoy, to name a few.
“My hypothesis,” Schrad writes, “is that prohibitionism was part of a long-term people’s movement to strengthen international norms in defense of human rights, human dignity, and human equality, against traditional autocratic exploitation. More precisely, temperance advocates held that building the wealth of the state or of moneyed elites upon the misery and addiction of society was no longer appropriate.” Schrad inverts the contemporary American view of Prohibition as a restriction on individual freedom imposed from above to one in which the least well-off in society struggled from below to liberate themselves from predatory liquor traffic.
The abstinent serfs and the violent response from the Russian state are a striking illustration of this dynamic. “Some who doggedly held out had liquor poured into their mouths through funnels, and were afterward hauled off to prison as rebels,” a British journalist reported of one such incident. “These things sound incredible, but they are true.”
The conflicts detailed in other countries aren’t quite so vivid as forcing peasants to imbibe at gunpoint, but Schrad bolsters his case for recasting alcohol as a tool of oppression with a thorough international survey. Take India, where the British Raj instituted its own system of liquor tax farms, fueling alcoholism while expropriating wealth through its monopoly. Temperance in India was both a fight against drunkenness and for independent nationhood. While Indians were by no means united in desiring prohibition, it was also true that the British were complicit in compelling participation in the alcohol trade.
“Alco-imperialism” was also proceeded by legally disadvantaging or banning native forms of alcohol production — typically lower-strength fermented drinks such as wine or beer — and displacing them with European competitors and hard liquor. The Dutch in South Africa banned traditional African brews to force workers into Dutch-owned beer halls. In Turkey, domestic wines were taxed at much higher rates than European imports, contributing to a flourishing of liquor shops in British-ruled Constantinople, few of them owned by Turks.
In later chapters, Schrad expands the roster of temperance advocates with leading figures from the movements for abolitionism and women’s rights. In this telling, Prohibition was part of a greater unity of progressive causes. “All great reforms go together,” as Frederick Douglass put it. Schrad’s diverse portrayal of the temperance movement is an explicit rebuke of histories that tell the story of Prohibition with an exclusive emphasis on its white advocates. More than that, though, it’s a challenge to the way we typically think about prohibition as an infringement on individual liberty.
This is not, Schrad argues, the way prohibitionists themselves understood their aims. Take William “Pussyfoot” Johnson, one of America’s leading advocates and enforcers of Prohibition. “I am definitely and irrevocably against any law prohibiting a man from taking a drink; or getting soused, for that matter,” he wrote in his post-repeal memoirs. His ire was reserved for the drink seller. “Our laws against selling liquor rest upon exactly the same basis as our laws prohibiting the selling of rotten meat, impure milk, or dangerous drugs,” he wrote in 1930, situating Prohibition with other progressive reforms.
This is a lot to unpack, and at this point in the review, I should reveal my own biases: I’m a libertarian, and I work as a bartender and cocktail writer. I’m a trafficker, you might say. While that might predispose me against this book, I consider it one of the most interesting and informative that I read all year. That’s not to say that its reframing is completely convincing, however. There are a few sins of omission.
Let’s start with a minor one. Schrad notes his enjoyment of Manhattans in the preface, but what follows is 550 pages of unrelentingly condemnatory discussion of alcohol’s impact on society. He suggests that our perceptions of the past are biased by a “Ted Danson Effect” in which “we falsely project our bar experiences of today backward to the saloons of yesteryear.” The evil impacts of saloons are amply documented, but there was joy and culture there, too. Reading this history, one might wonder why anyone was attracted to bars in the first place or why anyone would miss them when they’re gone.
I also found myself curious to know more about the people who bore the brunt of alcohol prohibitions. The book provides only the briefest glimpses. Though Schrad’s history documents subaltern people’s movements for temperance, it’s still largely the story of elites within those groups. We learn little about what life was like for the dissenters.
Smashing the Liquor Machine culminates with the passage of the 18th Amendment and the imposition of nationwide Prohibition in the United States. Narratively, this makes sense. American Prohibition was the apotheosis of the temperance movement. Yet as readers, we all know what came next: constitutional repeal just over a decade later. Having devoted so much space to rehabilitating Prohibition, I expected more analysis of why it failed. Alas, repeal is glossed over in one short paragraph.
The challenge inherent to framing Prohibition as more progressive than paternalist is the tension between the noble aim of bettering society and the coercion required to enforce it. Schrad contends that prohibitionists were more concerned with reining in the liquor “traffic” than restricting individuals. “The difference between legally selling alcohol and buying (or using) it seems utterly insignificant today,” he writes of one anti-drink measure, “but it made all the difference. Indeed, the source of our popular misunderstandings of prohibition are to be found precisely here.”
This eases the tension but doesn’t erase it. There is no meaningful freedom to buy without freedom to sell, and unlike rotten meat or spoiled milk, booze is a product that buyers intentionally seek. Nor were restrictions limited to the traffic in iniquitous saloons; West Virginia went to the Supreme Court defending its power to forbid residents from having liquor shipped by mail to enjoy in the privacy of their own homes. The predictable results of Prohibition were organized crime and poisonings caused by impure products, the opposite of the outcome sought in progressive regulation of food and medicine.
The intriguing question underlying Schrad’s revisionist history is to what degree prohibitionists’ intentions absolve them for the policy’s failures. “This book is also about the politics of memory — who we honor and who we vilify in our collective past,” he writes. By giving sympathetic voice to the advocates of Prohibition, particularly those who have been overlooked or caricatured by history, he aids in understanding them on their own terms. But viewing them as more progressive does not necessarily entail viewing them as more correct. Similarly, the attempt to rebrand Prohibition as liberty-enhancing doesn’t ultimately succeed and occasionally goes off the rails. For example: “The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly took away white Americans’ perverse freedom to own slaves. In the same way, the Eighteenth Amendment took away (disproportionately white) Americans’ perverse freedom to profit from selling booze.” The logic of this comparison may work at a distant enough level of abstraction, but to put it forward seriously suggests an author becoming somewhat drunk on his own thesis.
Despite these criticisms, Smashing the Liquor Machine is very much worth reading. Schrad’s catalog of alcohol’s harms is a reminder that we should be mindful of its dangers, and his uniquely expansive view of the temperance movement, both within the United States and abroad, is an enlightening corrective to overly simplified accounts. The book’s value lies in challenging preconceptions and asking difficult questions, and it’s to Schrad’s credit that he doesn’t pretend to offer easy answers. The book also deepens understanding of the Progressive Era by reclaiming the prohibition of alcohol as a progressive cause, which may also thereby nudge some modern readers toward a more libertarian or neoliberal attachment to economic liberties.
Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, bartender, and consultant based in Portland. He is the author of The Rediscovery of Tobacco and Cocktails on Tap.