Prohibition Cartoons

The passage of Prohibition in 1919 was no slam dunk. To some it seemed like a rural, Protestant campaign against urban, Catholic immigrants. The cartoons here are included to represent the tortuous history of good intentions gone bad that in a little less than thirteen years disgraced municipal law enforcement, enriched shrewd gangsters like John Torrio and Al Capone, and established organized crime in this country.

Alcohol was perceived by many God fearing Americans to be the root of all evil: a scourge ruining American workers and their families and threatening the American way of life.

Americans who opposed Prohibition were accused of callousness.

The Dries tried to convince the public that they offered the only solution to the plague of drunkeness and the proliferation of saloons.

Propagandists on both sides of the issue tended to demonize the opposition, although there was a qualitative difference between Wets decrying the Dries as prigs and killjoys and Dries depicting the Wets as demons.

The Wets tried to dispel the public’s perception of Dries as bleak and austere killjoys with images depicting them as manly, muscular champions of virtue defying the corruption of Wet politicians.

Ever since the Civil War the “Wets” had carried the day, bolstered by Eastern European immigrants who saw nothing wrong with a friendly round of beer. Temperance advocates tried to stake out a middle ground between the “wets” and the “dries.”

For various reasons, politicians in both parties generally opposed Prohibition.

But they were reluctant to commit themselves publicly to one or the other side.

Prohibitionists painted German brewers and drinkers as alien enemies of the State.

They were depicted as crusading for Old World sin and corruption, out to drown America in lager (when up to then America had been content to drown itself in apple cider).

But the Wets were able to hold their ground until the onset of the First World War marginalized German-Americans.

Another boost came from the women’s suffrage movement, with which the Dries allied themselves.

After Prohibition was passed, it met with a cold reception in some states.

From the beginning, enforcement was a nightmare.

Suddenly both parties had to contend with an unstoppable black market in alcohol.

In cities all over America Uncle Sam fought a losing battle against bootleggers, rum runners, and elicit saloons.

Prohibition cost the Federal Government tens of millions in lost revenue even as the program demanded more and more agents to enforce it.

Nobody wanted to take the lead — least of all J.Edgar Hoover — in a war that looked less and less winnable.

Opponents like cartoonist Winson McKay denounced the fearful bloodshed Prohibition was fostering, including deaths at the hands of enforcement itself.

No amount of public health warnings against poisonous bootleg booze, adulterated as it often was with everything from turpentine to embalming fluid, seemed to discourage “respectable” Americans from consuming the stuff.

Just as public support was waning, Herbert Hoover made the fatal mistake of endorsing Prohibition as a “noble Experiment.”

And despite the Dries’ efforts to defeat him, Franklin Roosevelt was elected on an anti-Prohibition platform and dismantled their “Noble Experiment” in 1933.

By then the consensus had become that the great war on booze had done so much more harm than good as to become “an American Tragedy.”

Text copyright © 2017 by Andrew Ward. All rights reserved.