A century ago today, constitutional Prohibition of the nation’s alcohol traffic took effect.
It lasted for barely a dozen controversial years, but it was nearly another century in the making.
Americans had long loved alcohol, often not wisely, but too well. Antebellum drunkenness was a national pastime. In 1830, Americans swilled an amazing 1.7 bottles of 80-proof hooch per capita (including all men, women, children, and teetotalers) per week. This level of drinking triggered the nation’s first wave of temperance or prohibitionist fervor. The Civil War sidetracked Prohibition’s momentum, but, when the dry crusade resumed, it marched alongside a host of disparate allies.
First and foremost were the nation’s women and their nascent suffrage movement. Women not only yearned to vote, but they also hankered to crack down on their husbands’ and fathers’ inebriation. It’s no coincidence that the 18th (Prohibition) and 19th (women’s suffrage) amendments arrived within a year of each other.
Both movements often employed attention-grabbing and sometimes extralegal methods. Suffragettes found themselves jailed and force-fed for picketing the White House. Scowling wild woman prohibitionist Carrie Nation busted up scores of saloons with her trusty hatchet.
Saloons had a very bad name in those times. They fostered images and realities of husbands and fathers squandering their paychecks, returning home sozzled and abusive, or sometimes returning not at all, and, perhaps, worse still, contracting a venereal disease while under the influence. Moreover, in cities large and small, saloons were often the headquarters of corrupt political machines such as New York’s Tammany Hall, machines usually supported by the waves of recently arrived immigrants. Scratch a crooked Irish alderman and you often found a saloonkeeper.
Prohibition also possessed even larger racial aspects. Southern whites feared that liquor fueled black indolence and lust. Black leaders feared it fueled mob violence. “Two-thirds of the mobs, lynchings, and burnings at the stake,” warned Tuskegee Institute’s Booker T. Washington, “are the result of bad whiskey drunk by bad black men and bad white men.”
But reform movements wax and wane. And hatchets can only cut so deep. Organization remains the key to any good (or bad) movement, and at about the turn of the century, prohibitionists were blessed with an organization par excellence in the Anti-Saloon League and with an organizer par excellence in Wayne Wheeler.
Prohibitionists had long played the political game. A Prohibition Party had nominated presidential candidates since 1872, but it rarely accomplished much. Wheeler, on the other hand, worked through the existing parties with threats and promises: Back Prohibition, and we back you. Don’t, and we cut your throat. In 1905, only three states had enacted Prohibition. By 1912, enough throats had been cut that it became nine states; by 1916, 26. Three years later, 33 states, plus Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, were dry in one form or another.
World War I massively boosted the cause. The bulk of American brewers, Anheuser-Busch, Schultz, Pabst, Blatz, Heileman, Piels, Strohs, etc., were German, thus linking demon Rum (or, at least, demon brew) with the infernal Kaiser bill. Beyond that, patriots questioned why precious grain supplies should produce beer and hard liquor rather than feeding doughboys on the Western Font or our hard-pressed allies — “Shall the many have food, or the few have drink?”
Dry sentiment extended far beyond American shores. Muslim nations had long been dry. In 1914, Nicholas II decreed prohibition across Russia. Wartime Canada enacted prohibition in every province save Quebec. Berlin, London, and Paris severely restricted sales. In a 1919 national referendum, Norwegians voted themselves dry. Clearly, the liquor bottle would soon find itself in the trash heap of history.
In the United States, Wheeler’s plan was coming together, and if he needed further assistance, he gained it from businesses large and small. Manufacturers such as Henry Ford didn’t need sloshed workers ruining quality control or losing limbs in high-speed machinery. Theater owners and restaurateurs saw a source of potential new customers — empty out the saloons, and you could fill the seats in your vaudeville house or eatery.
It was, after all, the Progressive Era, when yearnings for the perfectibility of human spirits and institutions ran high, from primaries and referenda and suffrage to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. If racetracks, narcotics, child labor, transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes, and even the interstate transport of prizefight films could be banned, well, why not ban far more pernicious alcohol?
By 1917, Wheeler stood poised upon victory’s doorstep. Other dry leaders might have demanded banning the mere possession or consumption of alcohol. But Wheeler’s 18th Amendment wisely only proscribed the alcohol trade — “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” Drys also consented to a seven-year limit on state ratification, ratification’s first such time limit. Wheeler realized that the 1920s census would soon shift the balance of political power further away from rural and small-town voters. So, it was now or never. He rolled the dice, and he won.
In August 1917, Congress sent the 18th Amendment to the states for ratification. In the Senate, the vote was 36-12 Democratic and 29-9 Republican. In the House: 141-62 Democrat and 137-62 GOP.
Ratification sailed through the states within a mere year and a half, with Nebraska shoving it over the top on Jan. 16, 1919, followed by congressional enactment of the Volstead Act providing for Prohibition’s actual definition and enforcement. It prohibited all beverages with an alcoholic content at or above 0.5, essentially banning not only hard liquor but also beer and wine. It took effect Jan. 17, 1920.
“This law,” Woodrow Wilson’s Prohibition Commissioner John F. “Honest John” Kramer guaranteed, “will be obeyed in cities, large and small, and, where it is not obeyed, it will be enforced … The law says that liquor to be used as a beverage must not be manufactured. We shall see that it is not manufactured. Nor sold, nor given away, nor hauled in anything on the surface of the Earth, or in the air.”
He was, of course, a tad optimistic.
