Exactly 100 years ago, on Jan. 17, 1920, America’s liberal “progressives” imposed the “great experiment” of Prohibition. It was the culmination of the Left’s crusade to reshape human life.
After 13 disastrous years, Prohibition was abandoned. But that wasn’t to be the last experiment. Nowadays, the same arguments and attitudes lie behind attempts to control how we speak, what we write, read, and look at; how we hire; whether we smoke; and what we eat.
Therefore, we need to take Prohibition seriously. It might seem quaint that drinking alcohol was ever criminal — as quaint as trying to banish the wearing of shoes. And of course, the era of Prohibition possesses a certain glamour. When we contemplate the Roaring ’20s, we know “the great experiment” will end and smile at its idiocy.
But it’s worth restating the truth: Prohibition was not just absurd and impractical but wicked.
The so-called temperance movement of the late 19th century was part of a wider tendency to remake humanity. Radical social reformers dreamed of getting rid of personal property, the traditional family, armies, the church, capital, wine, government; and they realized that such revolutionary change implied abolishing traditional notions of freedom.
For 30 years, politics was dominated by such social reformers. The Progressive Era saw reforms the modern Left would prefer us to forget: restricted immigration, wage controls, and eugenics — compulsory sterilization was a particular triumph because it seized control of the most private aspects of life.
These reforming impulses have not ended. For instance, although “population control” has been discredited since the 1990s, and although China has abandoned the tyranny of its one-child policy, many economists still argue for state pressure against reproduction, preferring, as they chillingly say, voluntary methods. Many liberals still want the state to decide whether an individual should live or die, whatever he or his parents think. Consider, for example, the Tafida Raqeeb case.
Prohibition was part of this larger movement to recast the species. That implied recasting the republic, founded on the conservative axiom that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” were “unalienable rights” instilled in the individual, not by society, but by our creator. “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” simply preclude governments from doing certain things. That’s how our republic was constituted. Radical reformers, revering neither God nor nature, therefore set about tampering with its Constitution.
The federal government relied on revenue from excise duties on beer and spirits. Thanks to the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, it was allowed to confiscate whatever proportion of our private income it pleased. The 19th Amendment turned women into voters not on the wholesome grounds that they should have the vote, but on the cynical grounds that they’d probably vote “dry,” in favor of Prohibition. The 18th Amendment, proscribing beer, was part of a more general assault on the usual pattern of human existence.
Radical social reform is insatiable. The great English commentator G.K. Chesterton, visiting “dry” America in 1922, denounced “progressive Puritanism” as the bane of our civilization: “We can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not limitation; it is unlimited limitation.” Once reformers have purified humanity of some particular pleasure and removed our right to enjoy it, they must hasten on to new prohibitions: “It is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace.”
In our age, the Puritan impulse — let’s discipline humanity into perfection! — is rampant again. It’s now mainstream to propose the outlawing of everything from gambling to tobacco to meat. Worst of all, Western governments are increasingly comfortable with regulating opinion, especially in a sphere traditionally held too intimate for law to touch: sexual ethics. If we’re not alert, we’ll find all society deemed a “safe space” where any controversial view can be criminalized as “hate speech.”
So liberty is attacked from a new direction. It’s good in these dangerous times to recall Prohibition, the Puritans’ historic triumph, and their eventual historic defeat.
Winston Churchill denounced Prohibition as “an affront to the whole history of mankind.” But the offense goes deeper than history. A Christian thinks a man is made in the image of God. In any case, he is made in the image of Man, that splendid sinful creature walking the earth, drinking wine, breeding and raising children, toiling, earning, owning, confronting death, dying. Whatever man’s fate and purpose may be, the elemental facts of his existence precede recorded history. They certainly predate and transcend the state. When the state intrudes on them, the evil is not just a matter of bad politics. It’s a violation of what we are.
Cheers!
747 words
Richard Major is a novelist living in Virginia. His eighth novel, Piracies, is published next week. His website is www.RichardMajor.com.
