From: [f--ca--t] at [paranoia.com] (Tommy Ranks)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Alcohol Prohibition text
Date: 14 Jul 1996 23:23:13 GMT

This is an excerpt on alcohol Prohibition from _The Age of 
Reform_ by Richard Hofstadter, chapter 7.  The parallels 
between it and the current drug prohibition should be obvious:


    When the crusading debauch was over, the country's chief 
inheritance from the Yankee-Protestant drive for morality and 
from the tensions of the war period was Prohibition. To the 
historian who likes to trace the development of the great 
economic issues and to follow the main trend of class politics, 
the story of Prohibition will seem like a historical detour, a 
meaningless nuisance, an extraneous imposition upon the main 
course of history. The truth is that Prohibition appeared to the 
men of the twenties as a major issue because it _was_ a major 
issue, and one of the most symptomatic for those who would 
follow the trend of rural-urban conflicts and the ethnic tensions 
in American politics. It is also one of the leading clues to the 
reaction against the Progressive(*) temper. For Prohibition, in 
the twenties, was the skeleton at the feast, a grim reminder of the 
moral frenzy that so many wished to forget, a ludicrous 
caricature of the reforming impulse, of the Yankee-Protestant 
notion that it is both possible and desirable to moralize private 
life through public action.

    To hold the Progressives responsible for Prohibition would 
be to do them an injustice. Men of an urbane cast of mind, 
whether conservatives or Progressives in their politics, had been 
generally antagonistic, or at the very least suspicious, of the pre-
war drive toward Prohibition; and on the other side there were 
many advocates of Prohibition who had nothing to do with other 
reforms. We cannot, however, quite ignore the diagnostic 
significance of prohibitionism. For Prohibition was a pseudo-
reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform which had a 
widespread appeal to a certain type of crusading mind.(9) It was 
linked not merely to an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils 
that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the 
pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes 
and cultivated men. It was carried about America by the rural-
evangelical virus: the country Protestant frequently brought it 
with him to the city when the contraction of agriculture sent him 
there to seek his livelihood. Students of the Prohibition 
movement find it easy to believe that the majority sentiment of 
the country stood in favor of Prohibition at the time the 
amendment was passed and for some years before; for even 
many drinking people were sufficiently persuaded by the note of 
moral uplift to concede that Prohibition might, after all, be a 
good thing.(1) And even if the desire for Prohibition was a 
minority sentiment, it was the sentiment of a large minority, one 
whose intensity and insistency gave its members a power 
disproportionate to their numbers. Politicians, at any rate, 
catered to their demands, and there were among them some -- 
one thinks of Bryan as Secretary of State with his much-
ridiculed wineless dinners or of Josephus Daniels with his 
absurd insistence on depriving the Navy officers of their drink -- 
who unquestionably believed that the conquest of the demon 
rum was one of the important tasks of political life.

    Prohibition had not been a sudden product of the war. The 
demand for liquor reform, long familiar in American politics, 
seems to have quickened during the Progressive era, notably 
after about 1908, and the final victory of the amendment was the 
culmination of five years of heightened agitation by the Anti-
Saloon League. The alcohol issue had been approached with the 
usual Populist-Progressive arguments: it was one of the means 
by which the interests, in this case the "whisky ring," fattened 
on the toil of the people. Drinking was pre-eminently a vice of 
those classes -- the plutocrats and corrupt politicians and 
ignorant immigrants -- which the reformers most detested or 
feared. The saloon, as an institution pivotal in the life of vice on 
one side and of American urban politics on the other, fell under 
particular reprobation. Like everything else, drink was subject to 
muckraking, and the readers of the magazines were entertained 
by articles on alcohol as "the arch enemy of progress," "The 
Experiences and Observations of a New York Saloon-Keeper," 
and "The Story of an Alcohol Slave, as Told by Himself," and 
were even titillated by such pale efforts as "Confessions of a 
Moderate Drinker." (2)

    George Kibbe Turner, a leading muckraker for S. S. 
McClure, who specialized in exposing prostitution, probably 
went to the heart of the Prohibition sentiment when he wrote an 
article attacking the city saloon in which he pointed out that city 
people constituted each year a larger and larger portion of the 
whole population and insisted that the first thing to be done in 
the movement for city reform was "to remove the terrible and 
undisciplined commercial forces which, in America, are fighting 
to saturate the populations of cities with alcoholic liquor."(8) 
During the war the alleged need to conserve materials and the 
Germanic names of the leading brewers added some force to the 
prohibitionist propaganda; but what stood the drys in the best 
stead was the same strong undercurrent of public self-
castigation, the same reaction against personal and physical 
indulgence and material success, that underlay the Progressive 
tirades against the plutocracy and instigated those appeals to 
Lincoln Steffens to "come and show us up." The sense that 
others were fighting battles and making sacrifices in which one 
somehow _ought_ to share was greatly heightened by the war; 
and the dry agitation, with its demand for self-denial, struck an 
increasingly congenial note.(4) When one of the muckrakers 
wrote the fantasy I have mentioned about the liberation of the 
country from German invasion, he did not fail to celebrate the 
heroism of the women's clubs that drew together in a "Women's 
National War Economy League," whose members all pledged, 
among many other pledges, to buy "no jewelry or useless 
ornaments," to buy fewer clothes and cut their entertaining, and 
"to abstain from cocktails, highballs and all expensive wines, 
also from cigarettes, to influence husbands, father, brothers, 
sons and men friends to do the same, and to contribute the 
amount thus saved to the Woman's National War Fund."(5) Of 
course this sort of thing could not last forever, but while it was 
at its pitch the dry lobbyists struck, and when they were finished 
the Prohibition mania was fixed in the Constitution; and there it 
remained for almost fifteen years, a symbol of the moral 
overstrain of the preceding era, the butt of jokes, a perennial 
source of irritation, a memento of the strange power of crusades 
for absolute morality to intensify the evils they mean to destroy.

    But Prohibition was more than a symbol -- it was a means by 
which the reforming energies of the country were transmuted 
into mere peevishness. All through the period before the passage 
of the Volstead Act -- and especially before the emergence of the 
Anti-Saloon League -- when the dry crusade spoke the language 
of social and humanitarian reform, leading Prohibitionists had 
often been leading reformers,(6) and the churches that gave the 
strongest support to the Social Gospel movement in American 
Protestantism were all by the same token supporters of the dry 
cause. The victory of Prohibition, the transformation of the 
drinker from a victim of evil to a lawbreaker, the necessity of 
defending a law that was widely violated, drew many one-time 
reformers toward the camp of the conservatives, while the 
circumstances of American politics led them into Catholic-baiting 
and city-baiting in 1924 and 1928. Prohibition became a low-
grade substitute for the old Social Gospel enthusiasms.(7)

- - -

* (from the Introduction): by 'Progressivism' I mean... that 
broader impulse towards criticism and change that was 
everywhere so conspicuous after 1900, when the already 
forceful stream of agrarian discontent was enlarged and 
redirected by the growing enthusiasm of middle-class people for 
social and economic reform.

(9) It is perhaps significant that such an early test of Prohibition 
as the Webb-Kenyon law of 1913 tended to be supported by the 
Progressives in the Senate and that most of its opponents were 
conservatives.

(l)Peter Odegard: _Pressure Politics_ (New York, 1928), p. 
176; cf. Charles Merz: _The Dry Decade_ (Garden City, 1931), 
chapters i, ii.

(2) See _McClure's_, Vol. XXXII (December 1908), pp. 1544-
61; ibid. (January 1909), pp. 301-12; Vol. XXXIII (August 
1909), pp. 426-30; Vol. XXXIV (February 1910), pp. 448-51.

(3) George Kibbe Turner: "Beer and the City Liquor Problem," 
_McClure's_, Vol. XXXIII (September 1909), p. 543. For the 
importance of the saloon, which was a central institution for 
urban politics, see Peter Odegard, op. cit., chapter ii which also 
gives an excellent account of the drys' conception of the saloon. 
It is unfortunate that no one has written a full-dress history of 
the old-time saloon as an institution though there are interesting 
reminiscences on the subject by George Ade and Brand 
Whitlock.

(4)'In almost every case, I am firmly convinced, the drink 
problem is fundamentally a problem in moral education; and 
until parents fully appreciate this, and endeavor, in the 
upbringing of their children, _really to establish self-control and 
self-denial as guiding principles of conduct_, we must expect to 
be called on to extend helping hands to the unhappy victims of 
drink." H. Addington Bruce: "Why Do Men Drink?" 
_McClure's_, Vol. XLII (April 1914), p. 132; italics added. 
Here, one may see, is another arena for the exercise of that 
"absolute self-mastery" to which Woodrow Wilson exhorted the 
American people.

(5)Cleveland Moffett: "Saving the Nation," _McClure's_, Vol. 
XLVI (December 1915), pp. 20 ff.

(6) Like Frances E. Willard, for instance, and Upton Sinclair, 
who as late as 1931 wrote a book against liquor, _The Wet 
Parade_ (Pasadena, 1931). A political leader like Bryan linked 
the defense of Prohibition to the defense of popular rule. See his 
'Prohibition," _Outlook_, Vol. CXXXIII (February 7, 1923), 
p. 263.

(7) This process has been analyzed and documented by Paul 
Carter: _The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel... 1920-
40_, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 
1954, chapter iii, "Prohibition, Left and Right."