Niccolo Soldo

Jan 25, 2024

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Previous Entry – Chapter 3: The Most Remarkable Movement

We’re going to keep this entry lighter and also shorter in length, because the two chapters being covered describe how the Temperance Movement (now led by the Anti-Saloon League) went national based around a coalition of “racists, progressives, suffragists, populists, and nativists”. I want to get to the more interesting parts of this book, but there are some important highlights that we shouldn’t skip over before doing so.

Prohibitionists faced a big problem: much of the funding of the US Government came from taxes on alcohol. In the post-Civil War decades, that figure was around 20-40% of the overall federal revenue generated. Tax on alcohol was re-introduced by Lincoln in 1862 to pay for the Union’s war efforts, and it also helped finance the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. So reliant was the federal government on taxes on alcohol that the brewers and distillers learned to love them, because they viewed this as the best bulwark against the Temperance Movement. If alcohol sales were banned, the federal government would be starved of money.

Okrent:

By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg—71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall. Only external revenue—the tariff—provided a larger share of the federal budget, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the tariff’s continuation was the most intensely debated issue in American public life. It would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax.

Looking at it objectively, all the Christian activists saying prayers as part of the Temperance Movement did seem to bring God on their side. Not only did a strange confluence of events manage to create a coalition of “racists, progressives, suffragists, populists, and nativists” to popularize their efforts, a populist reaction to the so-called “Gilded Age” and its newly-minted millionaires made the case for a national income tax, a tool that could plug in any financial hole left by Prohibition. Call it another stroke of luck or an Act of God….it doesn’t matter. Everything was working towards the benefit of the Temperance Movement.

On the push for a National Income Tax:

For the progressives, it was an obvious way to enhance the power and effectiveness of government. For many of the racially motivated prohibitionists of the South, whose populist anger was monochromatic but nonetheless real, it was a way to avenge Reconstruction by striking back at the economic and political imperialists of the North.

The big day for the ASL was December 10, 1913 when thousands upon thousands of people descended on Capitol Hill to present its petition for Prohibiton to Congress:

But no one could challenge the impact of the spectacle that unfolded in Washington when the ASL presented its petition. Washington in the late autumn of 1913 was filled with mendicants seeking the charity of Congress. Two weeks after a national meeting of suffragists was convened in the capital (the Washington Post had headlined its front-page story “Fair Cohorts Meet”), and just two days after the International Antivivisection and Animal Protection Congress was gaveled to order (featured speaker: William Jennings Bryan), Washington was occupied by the dry armies. From one mustering point fifty young girls dressed in white led a long column of women from the WCTU; from another marched the men of the ASL, representing all forty-eight states. After the two parades merged on the steps of the Capitol they presented a petition demanding a constitutional amendment to the men who would introduce it in their respective chambers: in the House the flamboyant Richmond Hobson of Alabama, and in the upper chamber Morris Sheppard of Texas, a Shakespearean scholar who was one of the Senate’s leading progressives. Thousands of bystanders had left the city’s sidewalks to follow the two parades to the Capitol. Apart from presidential inaugurations, Capitol guards told reporters, it was the largest crowd ever to gather on the building’s steps.

This was the moment when the Temperance Movement made it to the national stage, and they arrived in such large numbers that their collective power and influence could not be denied. According to Okrent, it was at this point that the Temperance Movement had in the Suffragettes their most important political ally:

THE MERGED CHORUS of male and female Christian soldiers singing on the steps of the Capitol that December day was an expression of the drys’ most valuable alliance. The adoption of the income tax amendment and subsequent passage of the Revenue Act of 1913 may have confirmed the virtue of tacit collaboration with other interest groups, but the ASL’s partnership with women who backed a suffrage amendment proved the value of a far more active embrace. The social revolution that was the suffrage movement would bring the Prohibition movement to the brink of success.

A congressional resolution calling for a Prohibition amendment to the Constitution had been introduced in every Congress since 1876, but none had ever emerged from committee. No version of the universal suffrage amendment had gotten as far as floor debate since 1890.

Susan B. Anthony knew the score when she concluded that: “The only hope of the Anti-Saloon League’s success lies in putting the ballot into the hands of women.”

Richmond P. Hobson, a charismatic orator, war hero, and member of the US House of Representatives from Alabama, introduced a resolution for a constitutional amendment in the House on December 22, 1914 that, if adopted, would move to the US Senate. This was the Temperance Movement’s first stroke of bad luck, as Hobson was a lame-duck at the time, failing in his bid to secure the nomination of the Democrats of Alabama to run as their candidate for US Senate. Okrent:

“What is the object of this resolution?” he began, his deep baritone ringing with purpose. “It is to destroy the agency that debauches the youth of the land and thereby perpetuates its hold on the nation.” He argued that because his amendment forbade only the use, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol “for sale”—critical words—it was not coercive; it would not prevent men and women from making and drinking their own.

His resolution won 197-190 in the House of Representatives, but it fell far short of the 2/3rds majority needed for a constitutional amendment to proceed to the US Senate. Nevertheless, it was a major symbolic victory for Prohibitionists.

An interesting sidenote:

The spread of temperance sentiment in other countries—especially while World War I raged across Europe—was, for the ASL, evidence that its members were marching in step with a worldwide army of the righteous. Lloyd George never tried to institute actual Prohibition in Britain, but he did employ wartime pleas to patriotism in what the Atlantic Monthly called a “heroiconslaught” against booze, evidenced by a series of trade regulations and sumptuary laws that restricted alcohol consumption. These included a sevenfold increase in excise taxes and the imposition of the peculiar schedule of pub closing hours—not revoked until 2005—that added a phrase to the repertoire of every British bartender: “Time, gentlemen, please.” Other countries (all of them northern, none of them Catholic) were gripped by what a French economist described as “le delirium anti-alcoolique.” The new temperance laws included the issuance of individual “drinking licenses” in Sweden, the suspension of liquor sales in German industrial areas, and the suspension of all liquor sales in Iceland (a ruling revoked, at least insofar as Spanish wine was concerned, when the Spaniards retaliated by tripling import duties on Icelandic fish). Norway and Finland would both have a form of Prohibition in place before the decade was over, and provincial Prohibition laws would sweep across all of Canada save for Catholic Quebec.

The most surprising foreign expression of the prohibitory impulse came in a decree issued by Czar Nicholas II in October 1914: from that point forward, it declared, the sale of vodka was forever banned throughout the Russian Empire. He may as well have ordered fish to leave the ocean. Within a year of the decree, a Petrograd newspaper reported that “tens of thousands of illicit distilleries” had opened for business. In the United States, however, Nicholas’s action was exalted by a spectrum of drys that ranged from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to radical elements of the labor movement. In 1919 the Central Labor Council in Tacoma would even attribute the success of the Russian Revolution to an unexpected by-product of the czar’s ruling: a clearheaded proletariat, no longer befogged by alcohol, was at last able to rise and throw off its chains. This was not entirely fanciful; Lenin himself said that “to permit the sale of vodka would mean one step back to capitalism.” It wasn’t until 1923, six years after the fall of the Czar, that spirits containing more than 20 percent alcohol were again made legal in the Soviet Union.

This was news to me. The movement in the USA did not occur in a vacuum, it seems.

Even lefties in the USA joined the chorus:

The Tacoma unionists were not alone on the left flank of the dry movement. The socialist leader John Spargo, biographer of Karl Marx and Eugene V. Debs, attacked the liquor trade as an exemplar of capitalism and liquor itself as a corrupter of human potential. The great black union organizer and pamphleteer A. Philip Randolph argued that Prohibition would bring lower crime rates, higher wages, less corrupt politics, and other benefits of particular value to the black community. No less radical a group than the Industrial Workers of the World believed liquor was the enemy of the working classes, a poison poured into their lives by capitalist exploiters intent on weakening them.

Okrent lays out why the ASL was so optimistic about its future prospects despite losing the vote in the House:

The Baptist and Methodist clergy; the Progressive Party and its allies; the women of the suffrage movement; the western populists; most southern Democrats; the Industrial Workers of the World; official sentiment in other Anglo-Saxon and nordic nations—was it any wonder that the Anti-Saloon League believed constitutional Prohibition was not only possible, but imminent?

What a hodgepodge of groups!

Okrent ends the fifth chapter of the book by building on their optimism, as Woodrow Wilson is elected President of the United States of America.

One major takeaway from the fifth chapter is that the leadership of the Prohibitionists were worried about the rapid demographic changes taking place in the USA, fearing that it would leave them only a tiny window of time to push a constitutional amendment through Congress before it closed. Not only were they worried about the rising “ethnic vote”, as it was hostile to Prohibitionism, but also increasing urbanization of the country as a whole. Their fear was that as small towns and villages were emptied of people heading to bigger cities, congressional redistricting would cement at least 1/3 of all districts as “wet”, effectively blocking any proposed constitutional amendment.

We are now headed towards the juicy and meaty middle of the book.

Next Entry – Chapters 6 and 7: Dry-Drys, Wet-Drys, and Hyphens & From Magna Carta to Volstead