Prohibition as Seen in a Hermann Newspaper
From the Hermanner Volksblatt printed on Friday, October 13th, 1916. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri Digital Newspaper Project.
The Prohibition Movement faced understandable, state wide pushback from the German community in Missouri. This article, “The Square Deal”, takes a moral stance on the legislation to be voted on in the next month. The authors bases his claims on ideas of fairness and a “square deal” writing that if a rule does not make sense when the roles are reversed it is inherently injustice. So if the cities could not force the counties to open more saloons, the counties should be able to force the cities to close saloons.
This article is clearly against Prohibition and at its core argues that everyone should be left alone to make the own decisions about making and buying alcholol. The agruments used to support this claims are different that the ones explains in the background material for this week. Ken Burn’s “America, A Multi-Ethnic Nation” documentary clip articulated that in general, opponents to the Prohibition used economics to persuade others of their side, while proponents of the movement used morality. The author of “The Square Deal” attempts to influence the reader by appealing to their sense of fairness, a moral ideal, not their economic desires.
Additionally, the article makes no mention of the anti-German sentiments or World War I. The two issues were used in tandum to further the Prohibition cause. “WORLD WAR I PLAYED KEY ROLE IN PASSAGE OF PROHIBITION” explains how the rise of anti-German sentiments, accompanied by the need to conserve valuable resources that were needed during wartime, painted the the German beer companies as traitors living among patriotic Americans. Perhaps, the authors felt that he would be unable to win over the readers on either of these issues and instead decided to changing the framing of the anti-Prohibition argument in hopes that taking a different approach would win favor.
