After reading the excellent Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum I was left wondering how the United States of America got involved with anything so boneheaded as Prohibition. Luckily, Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times, has written a book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition that asks, and answers this very question.
Prohibition was a project 50 years in the making and at one time the prohibition of alcoholic beverages must have seemed a mind-boggling proposition. The United States was a Nation founded on rivers of alcohol. The armed services were issued rations of alcohol and it was a common sight to see farmers in the field with a jug of alcohol strapped to their mule. Early on in the Republic there was a call for Temperance, meaning moderation. By 1840 Evangelical Christians took up the call for voluntary abolition achieved through education and persuasion and successfully lobbied for Scientific Temperance Instruction, the D.A.R.E. of its day, to be made compulsory in public schools across the nation, creating, in the words of activist Mary Hunt, “Trained haters of alcohol.”
Victorian sensibilities were worked into high dudgeon over the perceived ills that alcohol caused society and anti-alcohol propaganda exploded. In one of the most popular plays of the 19th century, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, alcohol was portrayed as causing suicides, murders and early childhood death and popular songs carried such titles as Don’t Sell My Daddy No More Wine and Total Abstinence Round.
An explosion of Progressive fervor carried over from Abolition and the Civil War was also in play. Universal suffrage, granting women the constitutional right to vote which they had in some states but not in others, mobilized thousands of women, many of whom were drawn to other progressive causes such as ending child labor and prohibiting alcohol. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became a powerful mobilizing force, so much so that the Beer Barons paid rural newspapers to run editorials against universal suffrage, but it was really the Ohio born Anti-Saloon League (ASL), under the leadership of the brilliant political strategist, Wayne Wheeler, where Prohibition gained traction.
By voting as a solid 10% block on a single issue the ASL could deliver a political race on the margins. Beyond uniting Progressives such as Jane Addams along with Industrialists like Henry Ford and the likes of Henry Ford with labor unionist Wobblies; it allied religious groups, primarily Baptist and Methodist, with the stridently Nativist and newly reconstituted Ku Klux Klan whose target in the early 20th Century were largely Catholic and Jewish immigrants who were believed by many to be taking over the country and diluting the lifeblood of “pure” America. WWI rendered the Germans a much maligned group in America and defanged any effectiveness that the Beer Barons, who had rejected an allegiance with the hard liquor distillers on the grounds that beer was healthful and good while hard alcohol was bad and un-healthful, had at that point. They say politics makes for strange bedfellows but I have always personally believed that when you start waking up with strange bedfellows it’s time to start re-evaluating your life choices.
Timing played a huge success in the passage of Prohibition as well. The Constitutionally mandated Census would be coming up soon and population shifts from rural areas to urban areas and an immigrant birthrate that was much higher than that of the pre-existing population did not favor the Dry cause. As it played out, ASL backed Legislators managed to fend off the new Census until 1928 and it was only at the point where the delay endangered the very Constitutionality of the elected Federal Government and all its works and issue was the Census finally conducted and congressional seats reapportioned to correct some of the inequity created when one Legislator might represent 19,640 citizens while another might represent 652,089.
It also took the 16th Amendment to make the 18th Amendment possible. There had been income taxes imposed in the past to fund wars but these had been temporary and in 1895 the Supreme Court struck down an income tax imposed on profits from stocks, bonds and real estate investments by Congress as unconstitutional. It took Congress until 1909 to craft the language of the 16th Amendment allowing for the collection of income taxes by the Federal government and submit it to the States with ratification complete in 1913. One of the most compelling arguments in favor of the Amendment was that revenue raised through income taxes could replace income generated through alcohol taxes. Before the income tax the Federal government raised revenue primarily through two sources, taxing alcohol and tariffs imposed on foreign goods imported into the United States. In 1910 taxes on alcohol produced $200 million in federal revenue, fully 71% of all internal revenue of 30% of all total Federal revenue.
In 1910 a Constitutional Amendment failed to get out of Congress on a 197-190 vote with 2/3rds of the affirmative votes cast by representatives who came from towns with less than 10,000 people. This vote energized the Prohibition base who made the elections of 1916 of paramount importance. Their success in this endeavor led to the House of Representatives submitting the 16th Amendment to the States on December 18, 1917 and it was ratified by the needed 36 States in just 394 days, half as long as it took 11 States to ratify the Bill of Rights. Okrent points out that Mississippi ratified in just 16 minute2 on January 8, 1918 while it didn’t get around to ratifying the 13th Amendment, the one abolishing slavery, until 1995. Ratified in 1919, Prohibition became the Law of the Land on January 17, 1920.
Prohibition of alcohol then turns into the story of the dog who chases the car and then catches it. What to do next? Prohibition didn’t outlaw the manufacture of alcoholic beverages for personal use and exceptions were made for sacramental wine used in religious services for those of Roman Catholic or Jewish faiths. Medicinal alcohol was allowed by prescription and some saloons converted themselves into pharmacies.
The Volstead Act provided enforcement be shared between the Federal government and the States but the money allocated for Federal enforcement was miniscule compared to what the need would turn out to be and many States had no interest at all in enforcement and it was enforcement, ironically, that helped bring Prohibition to an end. People rebelled against the expansion of government police powers. They were horrified by Supreme Court decisions that allowed the government to wiretap private telephone conversations, a ruling that stood until 1967, and to stop and search private automobiles without warrants or probable cause. Draconian laws were passed at the Federal level whereby low level sellers of alcohol could be jailed for life while the wealthy drank openly without much consequence at all. Soon juries began practicing nullification by refusing to convict those whose punishments seemed more outsized that the crime. Deaths, along with blindness and other disabilities, soared with the production of poisoned alcohol and the official response was to make ingredients more deadly and to blame drinkers who refused to follow the law for their own predicaments, a position that alienated many.
Another death blow to Prohibition was the literal death of Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League in 1927. Two weeks before his death at age 57 his wife, Dorothy, caught on fire. She ran clothes aflame, into the living room where her father was recuperating from a heart attack. The old man, seeing his daughter on fire, pitched forward and died on the spot. Mrs. Wheeler died from her injuries the next day.
Wayne Wheeler devoted 34 years of his life to the ALS and after he died a schism occurred between forces who wanted to enforce Prohibition through laws and punishment and another faction who wanted to advance a voluntary acceptance of abstinence from alcohol through education and encouragement. The forces of law and punishment won that battle but were already losing the war as evidenced by the firing of Prohibition’s staunchest Federal enforcer, Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrant in 1929.
Into the vacuum created by the death of Wayne Wheeler and the resulting infighting among varying ALS factions, stepped the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, previously a powerless and little known entity revitalized in 1929 by Pierre DuPont and 69 other concerned Captains of Industry. What these Captains were specifically concerned about was taxes. Since the passage of the Revenue Act of 1916 the tax rates among the highest brackets had doubled, the first peacetime inheritance tax had been implemented, and a 12.5% tax on profits from munitions manufacturing had been instituted.
Then came The Great Depression, triggered by the stock market implosion of 1929 and extended through a series of disastrous economic decisions. Tax revenue plunged 60% in three years and the capital gains tax dropped into negative territory. Unemployment soared above 25%. Al Capone opened a soup kitchen. The demand for stimulus spending by the Federal Government rose and in 1932 the American people voted out President Herbert Hoover, the Republican President who had promised “a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage” when he had ran in 1928, and replaced him with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
FDR had been a supporter of Prohibition in his earlier career but in the election of 1932 he ran on the Democratic Plank of Prohibition Repeal and in February of 1933 the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution was submitted for Congressional debate. FDR was sworn in as President on March 4th and on March 14th a bureaucratic change in the definition of “intoxicating” allowed liquor containing up to 3.3% alcohol by weight to be sold.
The economy responded incredibly well to this sort of stimulus and a variety of businesses from trucking firms to ice houses to coopers hired thousands of new employees. Budweiser purchased its first pair of Clydesdales.
Congress voted to submit the 21st Amendment to the States for ratification and on April 10, 1933 Michigan became the first state to ratify and on December 5, 1933 Utah, somewhat ironically, became the 37th needed state to ratify and suddenly The Noble Experiment was over.
In 1934 the Federal government collected $258,911,332 in alcohol taxes, 9% of the total overall budget. This boon did not, however, signify a tax cut for the DuPonts of the world. FDR used the windfall to subsidize tax cuts for workers earning between $2,000 and $3,000 dollars a year, or about $31,700 - $47,500 in today’s dollars, and toward the implementation of new government programs, including Social Security, in the second half of his 1st or 4 terms.
Last Call is probably best when recounting the maneuvers that led to Prohibition becoming law in the first place and the author packs a lot of perspective in a not-too-weighty tome. One perspective I do miss, however, is the perspective of the average American. I got more of a feel for the real suffering Prohibition caused among average working Americans from The Poisoner’s Handbook even though the issue of Prohibition is not the main focus of that work. Occasionally Okrent will provide a quote from a newspaper editorial but the book doesn’t have the depth needed for such an analysis.
It’s still hard to believe that anybody ever thought prohibition would be a good idea or didn’t see what ended up happening as inevitable. Here’s a story that didn’t make it into Last Call: Before Prohibition became the Law of the Land with the passage of the 18th Amendment, twenty-seven of the forty-eight States had already voted themselves Dry and even in Wet States there could be Dry Counties and even Dry Towns. In 1908 Licking County Ohio voted to go Dry much to the disgust of the County Seat of Newark, which had voted to stay Wet. Newark defied the law and saloons stayed open with the help of graft and corruption. Prohibitionists were appalled by this and asked Wayne Wheeler’s Anti Saloon League for help and the League responded by hiring twenty private detectives, among them 17-year-old Carl Etherington of Kentucky who, despite his tender years, had previously been employed as a strikebreaker for the Baltimore & Ohio Railway. The detectives spent a few days gathering evidence at the local saloons which by law were only permitted to sell near-beer and soft drinks, and then with evidence in hand were deputized by the mayor of nearby Granville, Ohio and his Marshall, Edward Evans.
They newly minted deputies then returned to Newark with warrants to close down five illegal saloons. The Deputy Detectives first raided a saloon owned by Louis Bolton and beat with brass knuckles a bartender they found working there. The group of then proceeded to the Last Chance Saloon whose proprietor, William Howard, just happened to be Newark’s former, and very popular, Chief of Police. Howard and Etherington scuffled before Etherington drew his revolver and shot Howard dead. Etherington was arrested and taken to jail but that evening the crowd, which had grown to over 5,000 men, women and children, stormed the jail.
Realizing what was happening, Etherington tried to commit suicide. He first tried banging his head against the wall and when that failed he wrapped his jacked around his head and set it on fire. He was rescued by the mob before he suffocated and was taken from the jail and beaten brutally and shot at before a rope was procured and Carl Etherington was strung up from a telephone pole on the corner of South Park Place and 2nd Avenue in downtown Newark. His final words were, “I want to tell all young fellows not to make a living the way I have done – by strikebreaking and taking jobs like this. I had better not have worked or I would not be here now.”
What could have possibly gone wrong?
I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in political process, American history or prohibition policy. It may be of particular interest to the fans and followers of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire which is itself is based on the book of the same name by Nelson Johnson, also available for checkout at the Owen County Public Library. It is not a deeply engaging book so it is not a particularly quick read but it is a worthwhile effort so check it out!
~ Laura WilkersonOctober 15, 2010
