Wine and Roses
Every so often I think about how, for thirteen years, alcohol of all kinds was illegal in the United States. It’s kind of wild, isn’t it? Today advocates for legal marijuana are making strides all over the country, and one of the chief arguments they use is that alcohol is far more addictive and debilitating than weed. Which is true, as far as it goes. Their implicit argument hinges of the hypocrisy of a nation that bans one and celebrates the other, with the unspoken assumption that trying to ban booze would be totally insane and a non-starter. And yet we did, not quite a century ago, and it remained banned for more than a decade! Truly bizarre.
Understanding Prohibition requires an understanding of the Temperance Movement, which dates back to the 19th century. The 1830s and 40s was a time of great reform — abolitionists agitated against slavery, and early feminists like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton pushed for women’s suffrage. In this context, the crusade against alcohol was seen as part of a larger struggle to free society from a burden of sin. Alcohol consumption per capita was much higher then than it is today, and the the Temperance Movement took aim at the bevy of ills that accompanied it such as violence and joblessness. Political cartoons like The Drunkard’s Progress showed the inexorable progression from drinker to alcoholic to corpse.
The temperance movement suffered a setback during the Civil War as the government, reliant on alcohol taxes to help fund the military, resisted any kind of official prohibition on alcohol, but afterward came roaring back. It found root in highly urbanized New England, where the American Temperance Society was founded, as well as in more rural Midwestern and Southern states.
In 1860, doctors like Albert Day and William Marcet declared “drunkenness” to be a medical problem, presaging the modern conception of alcoholism as a disease. Women’s groups, such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, criticized alcohol consumption from the perspective of the long-suffering wife and mother helpless to prevent her drunken husband’s abuses. This image resonated strongly with 19th century women — by the end of the century, the WCTU outnumbered other women’s organizations, and some of the most prominent and forceful temperance advocates were women, like the famous Carrie Nation (who would attack saloons with a hatchet).
Those pushing temperance were not all liberal reformers. Often Protestant churches would aggressively push temperance from the pulpit. Wealthy industrialists opposed alcohol on the grounds that it would sabotage their workforce. The temperance movement took root in highly urbanized New England as well as in rural, reactionary areas. Often, anti-alcohol rhetoric was tied to anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment. Immigrants from Ireland and Germany brought with them traditions from home, including the use of the saloon as the neighborhood social center. Xenophobia and fear of “drunken immigrants” wreaking havoc led WASPs to support temperance. In response, immigrant advocacy groups like the National German American Alliance fought back against prohibition as a matter of ethnic pride.
World War I was a boon to the temperance movement. Anti-German sentiment undermined the German brewers’ associations, and wartime rationing of grain undercut alcohol production. The creation of a national income tax in 1913 (via the 16th Amendment) was another blow, as it reduced the federal government’s dependence on alcohol taxes. The brewers attempted to fight back, but often worked at cross purposes, with beer brewers demonizing hard liquor in order to promote their “milder” product — a decision that played into the hands of temperance advocates, who saw no distinction between different types of alcohol.
The disorganized, demonized and politically unsophisticated brewers could not match the political power of the prohibitionists, and in 1919, the 18th amendment officially banned the production and sale of alcohol. Of course, the image of Prohibition we get today is not of a squeaky-clean and sober nation, but of bootleggers and gangsters flagrantly violating the law with the tacit approval of local governments. Often, unequal enforcement of prohibition undermined the law in the eyes of the working class: according to Lizabeth Cohen, “A rich family could have a cellar-full of liquor and get by, it seemed, but if a poor family had one bottle of home-brew, there would be trouble.” The wealthy could stock up on alcohol before Prohibition and so were less impacted by the ban on its sale. Additionally, the law was full of loopholes: grape juice could be bought and left to ferment, and medicinal alcohol was fair game — a stark parallel to the proliferation of medical marijuana today.
Ending Prohibition, when the time came, was a no-brainer. Deep in the throes of the Great Depression, the nation needed the jobs that the revitalized alcohol industry could provide. Tax revenues from alcohol sales could help fund the federal government, and demand for grain was a boon to farmers.
Though it could not last and was almost impossible to enforce, Prohibition is still a major piece of American legal history. It is worth understanding how it came about as we consider the future of marijuana legalization — will our current prohibition one day be seen as a mistake on the scale of the 18th amendment?
