Prohibition: Moral values as legislation and a social experiment doomed to failure

by Julio E. Quiñones 

By the turn of the century, a roaring Industrial Revolution urbanized America and shifted an agricultural, cattle and hand manufacturing focused workforce, into an industrialized, citydwelling modern population. As jobs and industries moved to the cities, immigrants and low skill laborers were exploited in manufacturing plants after the inception of the assembly line. Arts and society bereaved man’s shift from the countryside and nature to the cold, modern and itinerant businesses that boomed after the aftermath of The Great War (World War 1). Workers responsibilities in this new cold, mechanical realities were one of the proposed causes of the average man’s addiction to alcohol and the saloon-counterculture that had permeated American society up until then. “Men would go to the tavern, drink away mortgage money, drink so much they couldn’t go to work the next day, beat their wives, abuse their children That’s what launched the beginning of the temperance movement”.[1] It would be the increasing momentum of this movement, its religious ties, as well as an imposition of Prohibition as a social well fare matter such as women’s suffrage and abolitionism, that would later succeed in establishing the 18th amendment of the United States’ Constitution that came into effect on January 16, 1920.  

The road to Prohibition was a long one to hoe, indeed. After several attempts throughout the late 19th century to establish “dry (anti-alcohol use) options” were legislated in a few states, like the “Maine Law”, which banned the manufacture and sale of liquor. It was later repealed by 1856, after around to 12 states had followed the total prohibition example.[2] Nevertheless, this would be only the first of many victories that the itinerant “teetotalers” (another way of addressing total alcohol abstinence enthusiasts) would achieve. Many of the early attempts to moderate alcohol consumption were unintentional through taxation, the original “sin tax”, imposed in the 18th century, to recuperate monies to pay off the new national debt obtained by the war for independence. [3]Not surprisingly, this would later be repealed by the Democratic Party when they came into power in 1800. One of the first physicians to act for moderation was Benjamin Rush, who wrote a treatise: “The Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind”, (1784). He theorized that excessive used of alcohol was bad for the physical and mental health, calling “drunkenness” a disease. From the end of the 18th century onwards, several organizations calling for temperance formed in different states. The most notable of these being: the American Temperance Society (ATS), established in 1826, became the foremost organization of its kind reaching 1.5 million members by 1835. Though after the repeal of the aforementioned Maine Law and during the Civil War, support for these early attempts were marginalized and dispersed.  

After the Civil War, taxation on the manufacturing, selling and distribution of alcohol became the main source of revenue for the federal government. [4] The anti-alcohol sentiment increased as organizations as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), were borne after a spontaneous crusade against saloons and liquor stores began in Ohio and the midwestern states between the middle 1870’s. The prohibition movement since its inception was a religious revival idea that was further championed with similar religious progressivism as women’s suffrage and abolition.[5] Through the mandate of its second organization president: Frances Willard, that they would assume great political power influencing and instructing women from the middle and upper classes in public speaking, leadership and political thinking. They lobbied for the instruction of temperance in the schools and were infamous for producing textbooks that spread misinformation, fear-mongering and perpetuating stereotypes.[6] As it happens on many movements, especially religiously influenced ones, the fiery passions and convictions can breed extremist tendencies of all kinds. If the once peaceful crusades carried out by the WTCU, weren’t enough, there were radical bulwarks like Mrs. Carrie Nation, who took a literal hatchet to saloons, liquor stores and any purveyor of the detested spirits. Mrs. Nation was arrested upwards of 30 times and received plenty more fines and incarcerations for entering establishments and destroying furniture that contained alcohol, as well as shouting and scolding patrons of the establishments for drinking. The anti-alcohol or dry movement would gain a bigger foothold on the nations politics after the inception of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), commanded by Wayne Wheeler (himself a stout denouncer of the evils of drink on an account of having had a childhood injury caused by a drunken farmhand).[7] The ASL turned into a powerful lobby that slowly, but surely managed to get many pro-prohibition candidates elected as mayors, governors and congressmen.  

The battle for and against Prohibitions had many fronts. On the religious side, primarily “pious” and “historic” protestant churches were in favor of it, mainly: Northern and Southern Baptists, New School Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers and the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America. Nevertheless, the wet (anti-prohibition) denominations were Episcopalians, German Lutherans and Roman Catholics, who protested the idea and reasoning that the government should be able to define morality.[8] The fight for Prohibition was also felt as a fight between rural and urban values, propagating between the people of the US. Heavy immigration to urban centers made anti-alcohol advocates to equate the crime and “corrupt” behavior present in most American cities as the work of the immoral use of alcohol, which festered corruption by allowing political incumbents to “buy” votes from the newly arrived immigrants that passed the time in rowdy and crime-ridden saloons, by offering jobs, legal assistance, food and the like. Xenophobia played a heavy role in this view of saloons being dens of iniquity full of “heathen” immigrants, because for the poor and immigrant man, this space was where they cashed checks, received mail, learned English, got jobs and the like.[9] This was further intensified by many prohibitionists subscribing to the idea of nativism, which put forward the notion that the United States was made great by its white Anglo-Saxon ancestry.[10]  

The principal opposition against Prohibition were the German brewers that manufactured beer and the like, taking advantage of the Northern European immigration of Germans, Polish and Viennese peoples. Among these foundational brewers were Adolph Coors, Adolphus Busch, the Miller Family, the Pabst Brewing Company and D.G. Yuengling & Son. These companies would the ones that would mainly head the propaganda campaign against Prohibition, led by Adolphus Busch, the most powerful and successful of them all. He led the wet movement by paying off politicians, pay for newspapers to run pro-drink editorials, and pay immigrants and African Americans to vote against prohibition in polls and the like. In the fight against Prohibition, the brewers alienated and vilified distillers of hard liquor and tried to turn beer as a superior “health beverage”. They also funded the German American Alliance, an organization that stood to have two million members in states such as: Pennsylvania, Iowa, Illinois and New York, to lobby and vote against prohibition and of “the elimination of German culture, customs and the joviality of their people”.[11] The arguments and propaganda of the Germanic-American Brewers fell from favor among the American people after the onset of the United States declaring war on Germany in World War 1. Anti-German sentiment had native citizens rejecting and acting violently towards German Americans, suspicion on the brewers helping Germany in the war turned public opinion against them, as well as their wet campaign.  

After more than a hundred years of activism and pushing for social reform, the idea of Prohibition turned into a welfare and progressive action, to “ward the future generations, as well as the poor and immigrant from the evil of drink”.[12] The amendment to prohibit would end up being passed by both houses on December 1917 and by January 16, 1919, it had been ratified by 36 our of the then 48 states, making it into law. The legislation that would enforce the amendment would come to be known as the Volstead Act, which would come into effect in 1920. This amendment would go about to be approved alongside with the sixteenth and 20th amendment which would replace alcohol taxation that funded the federal government with a federal income tax and granting female suffrage, respectively.  

Initially, arrests for drunk and disorderly behavior, as well as alcohol related accidents went down. Mostly people in rural areas of the United States followed prohibition law. Religious citizens, as well as progressives celebrated these early victories of Prohibition and thought their labor for public safety done. People were very sure that the 18th Amendment would never be repealed, as no other amendment had been repealed up until then in the history of the country. One of the minds behind the amendment and the Volstead Act, Senator Morris Sheppard, joked that it had the same chances of being repealed, “as does a hummingbird to fly to the moon with the Washington Monument hanging off his tail”.13 Although a lot of the citizenship in the majority of the country complied with Prohibition, the majority of the big cities was another story. Slowly, but surely, underground illegal businesses took hold bootlegging alcohol all over the country. This became as easy as smuggling crates and boats through borders to places where alcohol was legal like Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean.14 After the first six months of the year, the federal government started around 7,291 cases of infractions to the Volstead Act.15 “A rich family could have a cellar-full of liquor and get by, but if a poor family had one bottle of home-brew, there would be trouble”, wrote historian Lizabeth Cohen about the difference in treatment between poor and rich families in Prohibition.16 Of course, one of the main reasons people tended to have a stock pile of alcohol was because they hoarded it before the law went into effect. Taking advantage of the incoming ban, they filled their cellars and private stashes with the wares from wholesalers, saloons and other kinds of liquor purveyors and retailers. It even became known on or after the fact that both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding moved their own supplies to the White House during their respective “dry” terms.[13]  

Even though there are no available statistics from the era, it is argued that criminal activity received an unprecedented boost due to the new trade in illegal alcohol. Previously, the illegal activities related to organized merely encompassed prostitution, gambling and theft. This time around, criminals found themselves supplying a widespread product that a lot of people in the country wanted to buy. This enabled smugglers to create big organizations that had an evergrowing operation with contacts in different parts of the country. Warehouses, illegal speakeasies (bars of varying degrees of entertainment and alcohol quality), modified speeding vehicles, among other elements, were organized and put into motion by the biggest itinerant crime lords in the US. On the rural side of the country many people operated home distilleries that produced hard liquor, since it was easier to produce than beer through this method.[14] The opposition to this was the law enforcement purview of the Bureau of Prohibition, that initially possessed only 1,500 operatives that had jurisdiction over the whole country. The Republican-led federal government didn’t want to give enough resources to fund law enforcement for Prohibition and expected the States to do so. On their part, many states felt that if the government wanted Prohibition, they could enforce it themselves. This power and law enforcement void fell on the lap of Mabel Walker Willebrandt, whom President Harding named Assistant Attorney General of the United States, in charge of Prohibition enforcement policy along with the federal courts.  

Even though Mrs. Willebrandt became the most famous non-actress public figure in the US and worked tirelessly to prosecute and investigate Prohibition violations, the brunt of the work fell on her and the federal courts that were stacked up with such cases.[15] Many times during the run of Prohibition, federal courts weren’t able to prosecute other cases that weren’t related to alcohol consumption, smuggling, bootlegging and the like because of the sheer volume of cases being investigated. Despite all these efforts and partial success and impending failure by the federal government’s refusal to bigger enforcement efforts and spending, there were many officials who feigned interest while others were in the pocket of bootleggers. One such as these was the mayor of Chicago “Big Bill” Thompson, who was permanently bribed by the city’s gangsters like Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. Attorney General Harry Daugherty infamously had a “circle of harddrinking” old friends he rewarded with federal jobs and profited from Prohibition by selling bootleggers paroles and pardons from arrests and prosecution.[16] These circumstances created just the kind of perfect storm that would rain money, power and control to all the big city gangsters and clandestine brewers and distillers. While these people made heaps upon heaps of money, a growing sense of hypocrisy towards Prohibition was beginning to influence people’s thoughts all over the country.  

People started feeling that the “drys” had their law and the “wets” their alcohol. Up until the very middle of the decade, trust in the institution had eroded and an ever-growing discussion of cynicism, corruption and hypocrisy was beginning to take place in many social circles around the US. In reality, Ms. Willebrand didn’t have direct control of the Prohibition agents that worked through the Treasury Department, while speakeasies remained open and crime syndicates wreaked havoc in cities.[17]One of the figures that would play a big part against this new manner of thinking was New York socialite Pauline Morton Sabin. She founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), which through their campaign empowered women to not only say: “Women need to take Prohibition away because we brought it”, but also to show their male counterparts that they also have power over the country’s reigns. Mrs. Sabin was not an ingénu in politics, before her country wide campaign that mobilized women to vote for the AntiProhibitionist democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she had been a lifelong Republican who became New York’s first female representative to the Republican National Committee, served as delegate for the Republican Convention and started the Women’s National Republican Club. She became a symbol for independent women, demonstrating that women weren’t bound to support Prohibition.[18]

Repeal of the 18th amendment would come as a confluence of many factors affecting society all across the US. Hypocrisy not only came in the form of corrupt politicians all over the country, but also on the back of grape juices that “warned” against the exact process by which it could be “dangerously” turned into wine, patent medicines that included medicinal alcohol and a black market that competed with the formal economy. Many actions by the government changed people’s minds, an infamously disastrous one being the Treasury Department’s requirement to industrial alcohol manufacturers to add more deadly poisons into their product, to discourage people from producing illegal drinking alcohol from these sources. Before the end of Prohibition around 10,000 people had died from poisoning through ingestion of denatured alcohol, causing the people to become distrustful of the government, many calling for the government to be held responsible for these deaths.[19] Further enmity came from the Anti-Saloon League’s leader Wayne Wheeler who was quoted after these deaths as saying: “the government is under no obligation to furnish people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this industrial alcohol…is a deliberate suicide”. What would eventually motivate the democrats and reluctant republicans push towards repeal of Prohibition would be the crisis formed by the Great Depression. The revenue that could be received by taxing beer and other alcoholicbeverages superseded the diminishing force that looked to legislate values over the individual freedoms of people, which would be the central argument for a call to reason regarding Prohibition. By the end of March 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Volstead act that allow the manufacturing and sale of 3.2% alcohol volume beer.[20] The 18th Amendmentwas repealed on December 5, 1933, with ratification of the 21st Amendment of the Constitution.        

Prohibition was more than flapper girls (young women that led an energetic, free and sexually liberated life in the 1920’s), speakeasies, the jazz age and the tales of gangsters and rum runners. The United States as a country was on the verge of a great transformation. The dawn of the 20th century after the throes of The Great War made a modern world where the values of the people, the role of government and the individual rights and responsibilities of the governed where being put into question and redefined. Two sides of the country would fight over the definition of what would be considered as being a true American. Legislating moral values, as the rural components of the country managed to accomplish, only lead to more inequality, hypocrisy and corruption in the hands of the very government officials that proclaimed the necessity of Prohibition as a social welfare initiative. Unconscious and illogical prohibition of behaviors doesn’t make these disappear or “cure” them or eliminate them from society. One of the biggest false equivalencies that people have made over the years is that illegality equals bad and legality, good. Completely forgetting that slavery, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s suffrage and self-determination, among other protections for underrepresented and minority groups weren’t legal in many countries including the US. These kinds of societal changes and improvements can only be made by a conscious mobilization of the people with the help of date from experts that actually know the implications of these issues. As long as misinformation, religious fanatism and an abject distaste for scientific knowledge and intellectual competence are the modus operandi of thought in the United States, true worthwhile change and equality will not be achieved.  

  NOTES

[1] Olivia B. Waxman, “Prohibition 100th Anniversary: Feminists Behind the Law,” Time (Time, February 25, 2019), https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffrage-metoo/. 

[2] Henry Clubb, “The Maine Liquor Law”, Maine: Maine Law Statistical Society (1856).  

[3] Clay Risen, "How America Learned to Love Whiskey". The Atlantic (December 6, 2013). Retrieved November 

28, 2020.

[4] Joseph Bishop-Henchman, “How Taxes Enabled Alcohol Prohibition and Also Led to Its Repeal,” January 17, 2017, https://taxfoundation.org/how-taxes-enabled-alcohol-prohibition-and-also-led-its-repeal/.  

[5] 5 Ibid, 1.  

[6] Prohibition. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Washington, DC: Florentine Films, 2011. 

[7] Prof. David Hanson, "Anti-Saloon League Leadership". Alcohol Problems and Solutions. (December 4, 2015).  

[8] 8 Mc Kim, John Cole. "Prohibition versus Christianity." The North American Review 208, no. 752 (1918): 122-29. Accessed November 29, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25121953. 

[9] Ibid, 6.

[10] "US Americanization–American National Identify and Ideologies of Americanization". Science.jrank.org. Retrieved December 3, 2020. 

[11] Ibid, 6.  

[12] Ibid.  

[13] Garrett Peck.Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren't. Charleston, SC: The History Press. pp. 42–45, 2011.

[14] Rufus S. Lusk. "The Drinking Habit". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 163: 

46–52, 1932.

[15] Ibid, 6. 

[16] Ibid.  

[17] Olivia B. Waxman, “Prohibition 100th Anniversary: Feminists Behind the Law.” 

[18] Michael Lerner, A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City”. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007,

[19] Deborah Blum (February 19, 2010). "The Chemist's War: The Little-told Story of how the U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition with Deadly Consequences". Slate.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/02/the_chemists_war.1.html Retrieved November 7, 2020.  

[20] Eline Poelmans, John A Dove, Jason E Taylor. "The politics of beer: analysis of the congressional votes on the beer bill of 1933". Public Choice. 174 (1–2): 81–106. December 11, 2017