It was the decade of hot jazz and short skirts. Knowing what we now know about the 1920s, the Jazz Age can feel at times like the Decameron, with beautiful people dancing on the edge of oblivion. Even though liquor, wine, and beer were prohibited, thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment, the nation kept on drinking, turning America into a land full of (technical) criminals. But of course, very real criminals like Al Capone and George “Bugs” Moran benefited the most and even became heroes to some.
This story is the focus of Lisa McGirr’s most recent work. A professor of history at Harvard, she approaches the topic like many other academics—with dry, repetitive prose and a seeming aversion to the more raucous aspects of the decade in question. Her chief concern is how the anti-liquor crusade created a new model of invasive government for “conservative ends.” Spurred on by a bevy of mostly middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Prohibition was enforced widely, but unevenly, its primary targets being working-class and urban immigrants, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and poor whites in the rural south.
McGirr connects the war on liquor with our contemporary war on drugs, describing the lopsided enforcement of Prohibition as a root cause of police brutality and the use of law enforcement as a means of social control. The temperance movement and Prohibition were correctives based on notions of cultural superiority, she explains. Begat by Protestant supremacists bent on using government to make the nation more holy, Prohibition, McGirr contends, fueled the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, expanded the penal state, promoted the centralization of “scientific” policing, and helped transform the Democrats from a dry party backed by Southern and Midwestern Protestants into a haven for blacks and blue-collar workers.
In a sense, Prohibition helped to create the modern American system, whereby the two major political parties play to their bases in the hopes that they can get a chance to further expand the power of Washington. But McGirr fails to fully recognize the political truth about Prohibition: a battle between two different interpretations of progressivism. The Anti-Saloon League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union captured the reform enthusiasm of the Progressive era to advocate “muscular action by the federal government.” In that sense, Prohibition was the apex of the progressive drive to “coerce, control, and reshape public and private behavior.” McGirr rightly asserts that such plans were anathema to conservatives (even those sympathetic to the anti-liquor cause) but she also calls to task the 1920s Supreme Court, which affirmed Prohibition in the name of a conservatism that supported “federal powers and legal positivism for conservative ends.”
With religious zealotry on the old left and big-government contrivance on the right, ending Prohibition was left up to a new Democratic coalition composed of those most affected by the law—first and second generation immigrants, the urban working class, blacks, rural whites, Roman Catholics, and others—who flocked to Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign. Even though he lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover, who was himself a progressive dedicated to expanding federal power, Smith helped pave the way for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. McGirr contends here that a “new civilization was in the making, one more self-consciously pluralist,” which held until the 1970s when Richard Nixon and subsequent presidents revamped the spirit of Prohibition in order to suppress narcotics.
This version of events, however, is too tidy. McGirr’s “new civilization” thesis, which ended once the Democrats lost their stranglehold on Washington, seems to blame Republicans exclusively for today’s decay. But while Republicans must shoulder some of the blame for the disastrous war on drugs, the great American crime wave, which began in 1963 and lasted until the early 1990s, occurred under the watch of liberal Democrats. Similarly, the Prohibition spirit of thou-shalt-not has been kept alive and well by progressive Democrats.
In any case, given her political sympathies, Lisa McGirr is to be lauded for rescuing this formative period from historical neglect. The Prohibition age was a bipartisan moment when Democrats and Republicans looked to the federal government for answers—and with what results!
Benjamin Welton is a writer in Boston.
