FbF Book Club – Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Okrent, 2010)

Niccolo Soldo

Dec 22, 2023

∙ Paid

The Drunkard’s Quest” (1846) by Nathaniel Currier warns that moderate drinking leads to total disaster step-by-step.

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Previous Entry – Introduction

Tomorrow evening, I am hosting a small pre-Christmas party at my brother’s house. A good number of us cousins will be getting together to “eat and drink and make merry”, or however that line goes. My mother has prepared food for us to eat that she will deliver to my brother’s house tomorrow afternoon. I took care of the alcohol supply earlier today.

You can’t go wrong with vodka for a party. You can’t go wrong with red wine either, so long as it is of a certain minimal quality. I will partake in the former, but I am one of those who cannot drink red wine at all, whether it be a Chianti or a Cabernet, or anything in between. After a single glass I find myself dehydrated, sleepy, in possession of a headache, and not in a good mood. I am incredibly jealous of those who can and do enjoy drinking red wine, because it appears to me to be the most enjoyable buzz that alcohol can deliver. Therefore, I am forced to turn to other solutions, with bourbon being a particular favourite.

Some 15 years ago, I met a woman who is originally from Kentucky, but lives halfway around the world these days (she will be reading this series as she is a subscriber here already). Upon our first meeting, she chastised me for drinking Jack Daniel’s, insisting that I try Maker’s Mark bourbon instead. “Jack Daniel’s is a whiskey, not a bourbon. Bourbon can only come from Kentucky, and Jack is from Tennessee”, she explained. I took her up on her offer to try Maker’s Mark, and it has been a friend of mine ever since. In fact, I bought a bottle of it earlier today in anticipation for tomorrow’s festivities. I enjoy bourbon. I enjoy it neat. No mix, no ice, just straight up.

Both of my grandfathers each had one brother who had trouble with the bottle. My maternal grandfather’s brother managed to go sober at a young age and lived into his 80s, so his alcoholism wasn’t a beast that could not be contained. My paternal grandfather had several brothers, and his one brother was an alcoholic with a crippling addiction, dying of cirrhosis of the liver in his 60s. Check out his colourized pic (his eyes should be blue):

(A serious guy!)

Of all my cousins expected to be there tomorrow night, two have alcoholic parents (one has a father who is an alcoholic, and another has a mother who likes to drink far too much, and these two are brother and sister, with both their parents having been alcoholics). My one cousin drinks responsibly, and my other cousin has always been a teetotaler, as his mother’s alcoholism has always severely embarrassed him. No families are perfect, and those with very large extended families like myself are the perfect example.

In the Western World, alcohol and festivities naturally go together. Jesus did turn water into wine at that one wedding, didn’t he? The idea of a dry celebration is such an anachronism to us these days, but even now you will from time to time find celebratory events that eschew alcohol or other intoxicants, usually to make a point that they are not needed for a celebration. These exceptions only serve to prove the rule, and that rule is that we modern westerners do love our alcohol.

A World without Alcohol

Statistically speaking, there are some of you reading this that are alcoholics and have managed to enter sobriety (one day at a time!). Statistically speaking, there are some of you for whom alcohol isn’t interesting at all. For the former, alcohol can be life-threatening and no celebration is worth tempting fate. For the latter, partying (or even blowing off some steam) requires no alcohol whatsoever.

What about the rest of you? What about those of you who look forward to that Friday (or Thursday) night drink with friends and/or co-workers? What about those of you who like to pour yourselves a glass of scotch when you get home? And what about those of you who love to crack open a cold one on a hot summer afternoon? What is your first reaction when you think of a world where the manufacturing and sale of alcohol is forbidden? How does it make you feel when one of life’s great pleasures is denied to you in the name of the “greater good”?

“I can handle my intake of alcohol, so why should I be denied the right to do so even if others cannot?” is the immediate reply that I would offer up if confronted with this question. And it’s this very question that is the central one when it comes to the subject of this book: Prohibition. The “common good” decided to take on “the individual’s right to choose”, with the field of battle being alcohol. In the end, individual liberty won out….but to reduce this subject to such a simplistic dualism would be both unfair, and more importantly, ahistorical.

To me, the more important question is: How did the United States of America, a country founded on the primacy of individual rights, ever adopt Prohibition as the law of the land? Daniel Okrent’s book will guide us through this question, and will hopefully help us not only understand exactly how the USA found itself in this position, but also teach us lessons about today’s America as well. One theme to keep in mind is the constant tug-of-war between Puritanism and Libertinism that has coloured much of America’s history. Puritanism cannot be entirely blamed for Prohibition, but it did have an outsized role in successfully agitating for its adoption.

The Roaring Twenties

As I mentioned in the introductory entry to this book club, I find the first, second, and third decades of 20th century America to be endlessly fascinating, and for too many reasons to list here. I would like to focus on the Prohibition Era itself in this series, but I would be doing you a disservice by ignoring all the events, movements, and characters that led up to the passing of the 18th Amendment in January of 1919, (and the adoption of the Volstead Act in October of that same year) that ushered in Prohibition on January 20, 1920. We MUST look at the history and try to understand it, so that we can grasp why the USA found itself dry on that day. By not doing so, it would be the equivalent of starting to watch a movie halfway through.

On the other hand, a straight chronological telling of the story of Prohibition would not be the best way to tell the tale. After all, the third decade of the 20th century in the USA were described as “roaring”, DESPITE the fact that the manufacture and sale of alcohol for drinking was against the law. ‘Roaring’ implies loudness, celebration, progress, and so much more. How could a decade (and three extra years) roar if sober? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

“The most expensive orgy in history”, is how F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of that most 1920s book of all, The Great Gatsby, described that decade. The USA entered the 1920s as a creditor nation, having saved the UK’s bacon (and France’s as well), by entering the war on the side of the Triple Entente, dealing a final blow to the war efforts of the Kaiser. Unlike the belligerents across the pond, the Americans did not lose an entire generation of young men, many of whom would have formed the future elites of France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Russia, Austria, Hungary, and so on. The USA entered the war very late, and came away unscathed, losing very little blood, gaining quite a lot of treasure, and proving to itself that the absence of the squabbles of the Old World made America the land of the future.

This condition saw America not just rise in global standing and power, but also speed up its own economic, social, and cultural development during the following decade. An economic boom (that eventually went bust in 1929) did take place:

The ’20s were “a prosperity decade, no question about that,” says Dighe. Gross national product ballooned by 40 percent between 1922 and 1929. The Second Industrial Revolution—most notably electricity and the advent of the assembly line—led to a manufacturing boom. Cars could be put together in 93 minutes instead of half a day, and by the close of the decade, one-fifth of Americans owned an automobile, which they could use for leisure activities like traveling. The popularization of personal credit also enabled middle-class Americans to buy consumer goods in droves. The government, too, under the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, shared this spirit of wholehearted materialism, boosting corporations and otherwise taking a light touch to policy that corresponded with the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the time.

This was the era of Jazz, of Silent Film and Silent Film Stars…..of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The decade of flappers, of mobsters and speakeasies, of Babe Ruth, and of so, so many inventions:

1. automobiles with combustible engines
2. hair dryers
3. band-aids
4. bulldozers
5. liquid-fueled rockers
6. bread slicers
7. car radios
8. electric shavers
9. shortwave transmitters
10. Tommy guns
11. traffic signals
12. frozen food
13. instant cameras

……and many, many more!

The 1920s was the first full decade in US history where more Americans lived in urban settings than in rural ones. It was also the decade where the country decided that it had absorbed enough new immigrant populations, closing the door in 1924, and keeping it shut for the most part until 1965.

Prohibition was applauded by its supporters early on in that decade as just another form of progress to go along with that being made in technology, economics, politics, culture, and society. Idealistic? No doubt, as the “progress” of Prohibition was shown in time to be very regressive, and in many ways, counter to the spirit of the era.

Early (Drunk) America

Puritanism is going to come in for a lot of bashing in this series, but oddly enough, the first ship that headed from England to Massachusetts had more beer on board than water:

“One of the things we understand now is that the initial ship that came over from England to Massachusetts Bay actually carried more beer than water,” says Bruce Bustard, senior curator of Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History.

In fact Increase Mather, a prominent Puritan minister of the period, delivered a sermon in which he described alcohol as being “a good creature of God” – although the drunkard was “of the devil.”

By 1790, most Americans averaged an intake of 5.8 galloons of pure alcohol per annum! Check this out:1

Spirits gave way to beer just as the German population began to balloon in the second half of the 19th century (more on this later).

By the time of Prohibition, the manufacture and sale of alcohol was the USA’s fifth biggest industry, as per Okrent. Drinking alcohol was as American as (eating) apple pie:

In the early days of the Republic drinking was as intimately woven into the social fabric as family or church. In the apt phrase of historian W. J. Rorabaugh, “Americans drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn.”

“Virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which literally thousands of gallons of cider were made every year”, per food historian Michael Pollan, and by 1830 “American adults were guzzling, per capita, a staggering seven gallons of pure alcohol every year”. Early America was awash in alcohol:

Soldiers in the U.S. Army had been receiving four ounces of whiskey as part of their daily ration since 1782; George Washington himself said “the benefits arising from moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in all Armies, and are not to be disputed.”

Drink seeped through the lives of the propertied classes as well. George Clinton, governor of New York from 1777 to 1795, once honored the French ambassador with a dinner for 120 guests who together drank “135 bottles of Madeira, 36 bottles of port, 60 bottles of English beer, and 30 large cups of rum punch.” Washington kept a still on his farm, John Adams began each day with a tankard of hard cider, and Thomas Jefferson’s fondness for drink extended beyond his renowned collection of wines to encompass rye whiskey made from his own crops. James Madison consumed a pint of whiskey daily.

Those were some hard drinkers!

So what happened? In Okrent’s words: “….a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes—had legally seized the Constitution, bending it to a new purpose.” Okay, but why? Well:

More and more, roadside taverns that had provided the traveler with dining table and bedroom as well as the companionship (and the cruelty) of the bottle found their clientele in nearby towns and farms. These were men seeking release from the drudgery of their lives, but in too many instances they found as well a means of escape, even if temporary, from the responsibilities of home and family.

Okrent argues that the first moves toward Prohibition did not have anything to do with prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol at all, but instead was a temperance movement that grew out of a reaction of women toward endemic alcoholism in men:

Seldes arrived at this provocative conclusion because he believed that the most urgent reasons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related: They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families’ financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children from being terrorized by them. To do all these things they needed to change the laws that consigned married women to the status of chattel. And to change the laws, they needed the vote.

The Temperance Movement led to the moves toward outright Prohibition, with female suffrage along for the ride (but we’re getting ahead of ourselves).

The Temperance Movement

Today, it is very common to conflate The Temperance Movement with the movement for Prohibition. This is because the former gradually morphed into the latter over the course of the 19th century.

At first, ‘temperance’ meant “moderation, in both quantity and in variety”. Yet by the 1830s and 1840s, moderation itself was being called into question, with William Lloyd Garrison publishing a journal bearing the slogan “Moderate Drinking is the Downhill Road to Intemperance and Drunkenness”. Around the same time, the first notable anti-alcohol movement arose out of Baltimore, Maryland. Known as the Washingtonian Movement, it was composed of six drunks pledging abstinence from alcohol, vowing to each other to hold to it. They put the sole responsibility for their alcoholism on themselves, and not on the producers of spirits or wine or beer.2

Not all of those partaking in this early anti-alcohol movement were engaged in ‘polite persuasion’:

In the grand American tradition, Washingtonian evangelists poured out a lot of sulfurous rhetoric to lure something between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand men out of the dungeon of inebriety. “Snap your burning chains, ye denizens of the pit,” John Bartholomew Gough urged his listeners, “and come up sheeted in the fire, dripping with the flames of hell, and with your trumpet tongues testify against the damnation of drink!” Certainly the most successful of Washingtonian platform speakers, Gough was a reformed drinker (and, conveniently, a reformed stage actor as well) who in 1843 alone addressed 383 different audiences and the next year achieved national prominence when he drew twenty thousand potential converts to a single event on Boston Common to bear witness to his zeal.

The year after that, Gough took part in another grand American tradition when he backslid so spectacularly it became a minor national scandal. He was found in a brothel near Broadway and Canal streets in lower Manhattan, in relative repose following a six-day bender. Gough later claimed he had been drugged, that the drugging had led him to a round of drinking, and that at one point “I saw a woman dressed in black [and] I either accosted her, or she accosted me.” By all accounts he remained totally abstinent thereafter, and by the time he stopped lecturing thirty-four years later Gough had delivered more than ten thousand speeches to audiences estimated at more than nine million people. Among his listeners was a San Francisco surveyor who named one of the city’s main thoroughfares in his honor—out of either a sense of gratitude or, possibly, irony.

Initial successes were recorded, with Maine going so far as to institute the USA’s first prohibition on alcohol in 1851, thanks to the efforts of the Washingtonians and Neal Dow, a prosperous businessman from Portland, Maine who became the town’s mayor.

These first forays into Prohibition all failed by the end of that decade, with immigrants doing by far the most damage to them, foreshadowing larger battles to take place in cities and states across the country in the upcoming decades:

In Portland, unrest broke out in 1855 among Irish immigrants who despised Dow and his law; after an angry crowd of three thousand had gathered on the night of June 2, one man was killed and seven wounded by militiamen who had been ordered to quell the riot. By the end of the decade states that had enacted versions of the Maine Law had repealed them—Maine included.

THE OPPOSITION OF Portland’s Irish community could have been seen as an augury. For the next three-quarters of a century, immigrant hostility to the temperance movement and prohibitory laws was unabating and unbounded by nationality. The patterns of European immigration were represented in the ranks of those most vehemently opposed to legal strictures on alcohol: first the Irish, then the Germans, and, closer to the end of the century, the Italians, the Greeks, the southern European Slavs, and the eastern European Jews. But the word “ranks” suggests a level of organization that did not exist among the immigrant populations in whose lives wine or beer were so thoroughly embedded.

Only the Germans were able to act in an organized manner to combat those in favour of Prohibition, but they met their match in a very powerful foe: Protestant, Anglo-Saxon women from the small cities and towns of the Midwest and Northeast.

“Protestant Nuns”

I want to re-post a quote from earlier in this entry:

Seldes arrived at this provocative conclusion because he believed that the most urgent reasons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related: They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families’ financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children from being terrorized by them. To do all these things they needed to change the laws that consigned married women to the status of chattel. And to change the laws, they needed the vote.

Without the Temperance Movement, there would possibly have been no Women’s Suffrage Movement later on, with Okrent quoting Seldes as saying that they might have been a group of “intellectual cranks” for another whole century. The Temperance Movement brought out some very determined, fanatical, and resourceful women, for whom the cause of Prohibition opened the doors to other women’s causes.

An example of this early fanaticism:

On that Christmas Eve and for ten days after, Thompson led her band to Hillsboro’s saloons, its hotels, and its drugstores (many of which sold liquor by the glass). At each one they would fall to their knees and pray for the soul of the owner. The women worked in six-hour shifts, running relays from their homes to the next establishment on the list, praying, singing, reading from the Bible, and generally creating the largest stir in the town, said a Cincinnati newspaper, since news of the attack on Fort Sumter twelve years before. If they were allowed inside, they would kneel on a sawdust floor that had been befouled by years of spilled drinks and the expectorations of men who had missed, or never tried for, the spittoon; if not, they would remain outside, hunched for hours against the winter cold. At William Smith’s drugstore, the proprietor joined them in prayer and vowed never to sell liquor again. Outside another saloon, they knelt in reproachful humility while the customers leaned against the building, hands in their pockets, unmoved by the devout spectacle before them.

The events in Hillsboro launched the Crusade, a squall that would sweep across the Midwest, into New York State, and on to New England with the force of a tropical storm. In eleven days Thompson and her sisters persuaded the proprietors of nine of the town’s thirteen drinking places to close their doors. Down the road in Washington Court House, the gutters ran with liquor decanted by repentant saloonkeepers. 

Okrent refers to it as a “crusade” (as did contemporaries), but it meshes nicely with the Third Great Awakening that swept the country at the same time. This was another period of fervent religious activism in the USA by its various Protestant sects, with a strong focus on social activism, mainly slavery abolitionism and prohibition.

A drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain, but many rural and small-town women also had to endure the associated ravages born of the early saloon: the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and, most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as “syphilis of the innocent”—venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons. Saloons were dark and nasty places, and to the wives of the men inside, they were satanic.

Frances Willard picked up the baton passed to her by earlier ‘Protestant Nuns’ like Eliza J. Thompson, turning it into a mass movement that managed to amass quite a lot of political power:

That was one way of putting it. Another would have been “Mother Thompson’s Crusade launched the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.” But Frances Willard was no more likely to utter so declarative a sentence than she was to walk into a saloon and chug a double rye. At thirty-five Willard was among the small group of women who in 1874 founded the WCTU; at forty she took control of the organization, and for the rest of her eventful life she was field general, propagandist, chief theoretician, and nearly a deity to a 250,000-member army—undoubtedly, the nation’s most effective political action group in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Willard’s rhapsodic prose style apparently inspired others as well. To one of her most ardent admirers, Hannah Whitall Smith,Willard (who was always known to her family and friends as “Frank”) was “the embodiment of all that is lovely, and good, and womanly, and strong, and noble, and tender in human nature.”

More than anyone else, Willard made temperance a woman’s issue, insisting that legal prohibition was the only proper course of action, and demanding that women have the right to vote on matters related to alcohol:

Willard’s army marched behind two concepts. The first, “Home Protection,” seemed perfectly anodyne. But beneath its surface blandness lay a subtle variation on the themes of the Crusade, repackaged for a more urgent purpose: by insisting that the elimination of alcoholic beverages was necessary for the health, welfare, and safety of the American family, the women of the WCTU were now praying not for the sinner, but for those sinned against.

Willard and her killjoy comrades wanted to go even further:

Her “Protestant nuns” (as Willard sometimes called her followers) campaigned for suffrage, of course, but also for prison reform, free kindergartens, and vocational schools. After reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in 1889, Willard declared herself a “Christian socialist” and broadened the WCTU’s agenda once again, agitating for the eight-hour day, workers’ rights, and government ownership of utilities, railroads, factories, and (she was nothing if not eclectic) theaters. Along the way she also took up the causes of vegetarianism, cremation, less restrictive women’s clothing, and something she called “the White Life for Two”—a program “cloaked in euphemism,” wrote Catherine Gilbert Murdock in Domesticating Drink, that “endorsed alcohol-free, tobacco-free, lust-free marriages.”

The zeal and fervour of Willard should remind you of some present-day types.

Their efforts began to bear fruit, with laws on the books in every state in the union mandating compulsory temperance education in all schools by 1901. Much of this education was propagandistic in nature and not at all scientific, but it was “for a good cause” (this too should ring a bell with you). Claims made by these female Temperance agitators included whoppers like “alcohol burns the throat when passing through, leaving it bare and burning”, to “the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy”.

Having amassed quite a lot of political power by this point, the cause became more important than actual facts.

Now, what of those opposed to these activists and harridans?

Next Entry – Chapters 2 and 3: The Rising of Liquid Bread and The Most Remarkable Movement

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