The prohibition movement began in this country not as a movement for complete prohibition of alcohol, but as a “temperance” or reform movement. The temperance movement can be traced all the way from its origins in Colonial days to its culmination in the early 1900’s. At the start temperance work was led primarily by the churches, but gradually a wide range of social service agencies and organizations joined the campaign.
Prohibition was first tried in America to protect colonial settlers from the attacks of Indians who were inflamed by the “strong waters” which the settlers themselves had taught them to drink. Massachusetts and other early colonies enacted stiff prohibition laws to forbid the sale or gift of liquor to the Indians. But the colonial authorities found the Indian prohibition laws almost impossible to enforce.
The colonists themselves, including the stern Puritans, considered alcoholic beverages among the necessities of life when used in moderation. Colonial authorities encouraged the making and selling of beer, wine, and liquor, not only to satisfy their needs but to produce tax revenue to maintain forts and to build schools and churches.
While most colonists approved of moderate drinking, the man or woman who drank too much was a social outcast, and the habitual drunkard faced severe punishment. Normal drinking was as acceptable as eating, but if a drinker could not control his thirst the law was determined to do it for him. In all the colonies drunks were fined, sentenced to the stocks, sent to the whipping stool, or ordered to wear the scarlet letter “D” for drunkard. Laborers, servants, and slaves usually were more severely punished than men of property. For a poor man to get drunk was not only a sin against society but also against his employer, since he was wasting time that might be spent at useful work.
Regulations were intended to control the use of liquor, not to prohibit it. Where regulations were so severe that they began to interfere with the common pleasure of drinking, the first “speakeasies” sprang up, frequented by those who wanted to drink as much as they pleased free of official snooping. As the colonial governments increased import duties and excise taxes on liquor to raise revenues, smuggling, rum-running and moonshining grew.
Rum was an important beverage in the colonies; people drank it at funerals, weddings, christenings, town meetings, and even at work. Nevertheless, the colony of Georgia prohibited its use. The first real attempt at prohibition was made by James Oglethorpe, Georgia’s founding father, considered the father of Prohibition. He was determined to create a sober society that would avoid the excessive use of hard liquor. The new colonists ignored the law and the prohibition decrees set down by the Trustees. The Trustees finally got the British Parliament and King George II to put the full force of law behind the decree. The King approved an act that flatly prohibited the import or sale of rum in Georgia. It went into effect in 1735 and was almost totally disobeyed. The attempt to enforce it produced on a small scale many of the conditions that were created by the prohibition reform in the 1920’s. When in 1742 the Trustees finally realized that the prohibition laws were not enforceable, they permitted imports of rum again and established a system of licensing taverns and public houses.
Rum had been considered the key to colonial prosperity, vital to trade and to the development of commerce, and its manufacture, sale, and use were heartily approved of by most people. But by the early nineteenth century, a temperance movement designed to limit the consumption of alcoholic beverages was emerging. After the War of 1812 poverty, crime, and drunkenness were on the rise. Temperance reforms were pushed by charity organizations and civic authorities, who were faced with an apparent breakdown of public order. The temperance reformers gained the political backing of those who feared an uprising of the common people against the aristocracy of wealth, prestige, and privilege represented by the established churches. The movement coincided with a great national religious revival that began to sweep the country, and temperance became part of the accepted work of the churches, carried on with a zealous missionary spirit by those who considered drink the major obstacle to leading sinners to salvation.
While all the temperance groups agreed that liquor was evil, they disagreed over what should be done about it. State and local societies often worked at cross-purposes. Some shunned habitual drunkards as being beyond salvation and concentrated on getting moderate drinkers to give up liquor. Others argued that the fight should be directed against the manufacturers and sellers of liquor. There were many who still favored moderation rather than a ban against all drinking. In some local societies members were allowed to take pledges which permitted them to drink light wines and beer. Others who took the pledge of total abstinence from all forms of intoxicating drink had the letter “T” for “total” put after their names and were called “Teetotalers,” a term that has come to mean any person who completely shuns alcohol.
In 1841 the Washingtonian Movement was founded. The forerunner of Alcoholics Anonymous, it collapsed almost as swiftly as it had risen. Interest in the temperance movement was on the decline; even the older organizations found membership dropping off. Temperance reformers, once so optimistic that success was near, began to admit that moral persuasion was not enough to dry up America.
The whole strength of the early temperance movement had been in its appeal to drinkers to decide for themselves to give up liquor. Leaders publicly declared they would never seek laws to force people to quit drinking and that their campaign was strictly educational and not political. However, political pressure directed not against the habits of the individual drinker, but toward the total destruction of the liquor trade through legal means, had begun to appear even before the Civil War. The first state-wide attacks were aimed at putting grogshops out of business. Massachusetts in 1838 passed a law which in effect forbade retail sales. Reformers then tried to put through local option laws to let towns or counties decide whether to issue licenses. But their victories were temporary. A town that went dry in one election would sometimes vote wet the following November.
In 1847 a decision by the United States Supreme Court held unanimously that the states not only had full power to regulate liquor sales but also to entirely prohibit intoxicating liquors. Maine passed a prohibition law and within the next four years twelve states from New England to the Midwest passed prohibition laws. In half a dozen others, battles were narrowly lost. New Hampshire in 1855 passed a stringent version of the Maine law. Then one by one, every state that had voted in prohibition either repealed or drastically modified its law, until Maine itself was the only one where full prohibition remained in force.
There were many reasons for the reversal of prohibition laws. In some places laws had been put through almost before people realized what was happening. When hastily-enacted laws failed to work, voters became disgusted with the tangle of enforcement problems. Liquor interests recovered from their first defeats and began to match the pressure groups of the reformers. But more than anything else, what really halted the prohibition movement was the growing threat of Civil War, which caused Americans to lose interest in less crucial issues. Many temperance leaders were abolitionists, and as they turned to fighting slavery they had little time for other causes.
The Civil War gave prohibition another blow when the federal government adopted the Internal Revenue Act as an emergency measure to raise the money that was desperately needed to prosecute the war. On July 1, 1862, a federal fee was imposed on every retail liquor establishment in the Union, as well as a direct federal tax by the gallon on the manufacture of liquor, beer, and ale. Opponents charged that this amounted to federal licensing of the liquor trade.
President Lincoln signed the Internal Revenue Act with the implied promise that the liquor tax would be repealed as soon as the Civil War was over. But, like most tax measures, it remained on the books and grew to be the single most important source of funds for financing the entire national government in the years before there were direct income and profit taxes. From 1870 to 1915 the liquor tax provided between one-half and two-thirds of the whole internal revenue of the United States. After the Internal Revenue Act was adopted, the “drys” were put at a disadvantage by the virtual stamp of federal approval, but also by the fact that many people in government favored and encouraged increased sales of liquor to produce more federal funds. The liquor tax was providing some $200 million a year after the turn of the century, and through the years one of the strongest arguments against prohibition was that it would greatly increase all other taxes by cutting off a good part of government revenues.
Suffering successive attacks from all sides after their first quick victories, the prohibitionists found little to encourage them during the 1860’s. But a new force was rising in the temperance movement, the power of women, who were beginning to demand the right to speak out on such issues. In November, 1874, two hundred women from seventeen states met in Cleveland and organized what they called the Women’s National Christian Temperance Union. The W.C.T.U. soon declared, “We hold prohibition to be essential to the full triumph of this reform,” a position it never abandoned. Its early strength was built almost entirely by Frances Willard, who saw in the Union a chance to help women free themselves from the tragedies liquor brought to many homes. The W.C.T.U. was first led by wealthy and conservative middle-class women who hoped to make it an extension of church and missionary work in reforming the character and conduct of the lower classes.
The W.C.T.U.’s greatest success was in promoting its views among young people, the voters of the future, through temperance teaching in the public schools. The women went to work to organize political strength in the various legislatures, and with lobbies, pressure groups, and petitions gradually won the passage of laws that made “scientific” study of temperance compulsory in the schools.
Waves of immigration, meanwhile, had brought hundreds of thousands of Germans and other Europeans to settle in America, people who by long tradition were strongly committed to the moderate drinking of beer and wine. Within the U.S. itself there was a migration of people from small towns and rural areas to the cities, which swelled city populations and took workers from farms into factories. The new industrial urban society was strange and frightening to many in a nation that had been largely agricultural. Saloons and the corruption they brought were looked upon by some as an evil that grew out of the other changes that threatened the old small-town ways of life and the established social order. Prohibition grew into a battle of rural against city patterns, of native-born Americans against immigrants, of home government against political machines, of conservatives against liberals, and of religious prejudice that turned many Protestants against Catholics.
In 1896 Dr. Howard Russell, a Protestant clergyman in Ohio, established the Anti-Saloon League, which sought to suppress the saloon. Working through the churches, it formed a mighty political organization that translated its strength into direct action to dry up America step by step. It worked for anti-liquor laws first in towns and villages, then in counties, then in states, and finally nationwide.
In 1880 Kansas had written prohibition into its Constitution, something that no state had ever done before. By 1905 three states had prohibition laws—Kansas, Maine, and North Dakota. The year 1907 saw prohibition enacted in Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. All of these states lay south of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers. All of them were primarily agricultural states, scarcely touched by the industrial revolution which had changed the interests and point of view of many Northern states.
The prohibition movement advanced readily toward its goal mainly because of the attitude displayed toward all this agitation by the brewers and distillers. By 1913 they had at stake estimated assets worth a billion dollars or more. Underestimating the strength and determination of the prohibition movement, however, they put up little opposition at first. At any time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the brewers could have tried to reform the saloon, the institution which was the chief point of attack in the campaign against their vested interests made by the prohibition movement. The brewers’ power over the saloon was absolute. They controlled it under mortgage bonds and it was in their power to shut off its supply of spirits. The brewers could have changed the saloon or even destroyed it had they wished to act.
Later on, in 1916, when it was too late to profit them, the brewers showed themselves aware of the power which they held and regretted not having made effective use of it. The members of the U. S. Brewer’s Association advertised in the press that they were sorry that a “false mental association . . . had coupled the brewers with the worst of the saloons, and that this negative association was largely their fault and offered to show the country, if it would give them time, that they were ready to reform the saloon and to promote temperance—real temperance, which means sobriety and moderation, not prohibition, which has proved a fallacy and a failure.” Reformation by the brewers and distillers of their own trade might conceivably have avoided national prohibition. The distillers were convinced that a billion-dollar business was a stronghold in the country and refused all reformation and all compromise. They could have attempted to protect their business by putting it in order but they preferred to argue that there was nothing in their business which needed to be put in order. They chose to spend their efforts in creating an elaborate system of protection. Money and energy was wasted on a system of alliances. The brewers dumped money into various states to win elections for friends who promptly failed them; they financed dummy chambers of commerce which existed largely for the purpose of fighting liquor legislation; they employed experts to investigate the strategy of the prohibition movement when it was not a secret at all. They organized a blacklist system which threatened to withhold trade from a long list of businesses regarded as unfriendly to the brewer’s interest. Such a boycott is typical of the tactics employed by an industry which misjudged its power. The brewers and distillers were confronted by a larger problem than they knew how to handle.
By 1913 the Anti-Saloon League was capable of raising large sums of money and spending them to good advantage. Its political objective was to destroy the liquor traffic primarily by destroying the saloon. Its plan was to endorse dry candidates regardless of party, permitting the voter to vote dry without bolting his own party. The League had the support of the local churches, which had the necessary influence to help elect members of the legislatures favorable to temperance legislation as well as public officials who would enforce the laws. The churches had not easily been won over, since the tradition of separation of church and state raised certain doubts as to the propriety of church intervention in politics. But by 1913 the League had won its fight and a long list of churches supported the League.
The Anti-Saloon League drew up a proposed law which Senator Kenyon and North Carolina’s Representative Edwin Webb put before Congress, designed to give states instead of the federal government control over liquor shipped across state boundaries. It became the first national test of the League’s political power, and the drys won a far greater victory than they had expected with the overwhelming passage of the Webb-Kenyon Bill. But the real measure of the League’s strength in Congress came after President William H. Taft vetoed the act. Taft called it unconstitutional and declared that “it clearly violates the commerce clause of our fundamental law.” But Congress stood with the Anti-Saloon League against the President and early in 1913 passed the law over Taft’s veto by more than a two-thirds majority in both House and Senate.
After enactment of the Webb-Kenyon Bill the Anti-Saloon League switched from the state law plan which had been its goal for twenty years and demanded a Constitutional amendment. In the 1914 elections the drys had gained many seats in Congress. Although they still lacked enough votes to get a Constitutional two-thirds majority in both houses, they decided to make a trial run to determine how close they would come. On December 22, 1914, Congress began its first debate over whether prohibition should be made part of the Constitution. When the vote was taken, the House was almost evenly divided, 197 in favor of prohibition to 190 against, far less than a two-thirds majority. Even though the amendment had not passed, the Anti-Saloon League had demonstrated its power.
Whether the League could have implemented prohibition if the United States hadn’t become involved in the First World War is a question still debated. Wartime hysteria changed the whole atmosphere of public opinion. The League capitalized on the war in every way possible to convince the nation that the emergency demanded prohibition as an act of patriotism, to help speed victory and to create the sort of morally clean country to which its fighting heroes should return.
Wets charged later that prohibition was “put over on the country” while most of its men were away fighting the war. But the fact is that the decisive elections of 1916 came five months before America entered the war and more than a year before soldiers reached the European fighting front. Another charge was that women voted prohibition into law while men were off fighting, but in most of the country women still had no right to vote.
When the war first broke out in Europe in 1914, there was a strong feeling against the Germans, and many brewers were German-Americans. The drys began a campaign of propaganda to ban beer as unAmerican and to picture the entire brewing industry as spies, traitors, and “murderous Huns.” After America entered the war in 1917, hatred of everything German became an emotional frenzy. Saloons were suspected of harboring nests of saboteurs or enemy agents, and people were terrified by false rumors that germ warfare was being spread in poisonous beer. League propagandists claimed that it was German troops under the influence of alcohol who committed alleged war atrocities and that beer and German militarism went together. The League helped inspire a Senate investigation that revealed a link between brewing interests and the German-American Alliance, first founded around the turn of the century to promote German culture in the United States. Much was also made of the patriotic argument that grain wasted in the making of alcohol would provide millions of loaves of bread to feed America and its fighting allies. Another dry argument was that brewers and distillers took thousands of men from home-front jobs vital to war production, used trucks and trains needed for the transportation of war materials, and burdened industry’s attempt to gear for war.
During the war debate began over what would become the Eighteenth Amendment. It was to prohibit “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States. . . . Congress and the several states shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” “Concurrent power” became a subject for bitter debate. There were some who believed that the Eighteenth Amendment placed an obligation on the states and those who denied this theory. Many stated that the government was removing from states the right to control their own domestic affairs.
The wets mounted no organized protest when the Amendment was debated by Congress. They felt that prohibition would eventually go away like the war, overlooking the fact that the battle was now to be fought in the state capitals, where the Anti-Saloon League was most effective. The wets had no organization to represent them at the state capitals, no lobby, and no real leaders. The drys, on the other hand, had effective leadership. In addition, they had precedent on their side, since some form of prohibition had been adopted in 26 states before April, 1917. They had devoted followers, and won votes even in many of the wet states.
The wets never accepted the fact that the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified fairly. They stated that ratification was the result of war psychology and the identification of patriotism with prohibition as a means of saving food. War was at all times dominant in the discussion of the amendment. The fight over prohibition was, moreover, a dispute for power by rural districts which had more than their share of representation in the state legislatures. The wets also declared that the amendment had not been legally ratified since neither of the major parties had first declared itself in favor of such action at a national convention and since the question had not been submitted to a popular vote. The drys responded that the amendment had been ratified in strict accordance with the provisions of the Constitution.
Some historians argue that Prohibition came about as a middle-class reform movement. At the turn of the century, typical middle-class Americans did not drink liquor, although they sometimes drank wine. Respectable men were careful not to be seen in or about a saloon. The saloon was seen by the middle class as an evil institution involved with prostitution, gambling, police corruption, and crime. The middle class sought through prohibition to change the personal habits of Americans in general in such a way that both the nation and the individual would profit. They believed that a sober, temperate worker was a more productive, a more stable, and a happier worker. Many businessmen favored prohibition because of the increasing use of machinery in industry. The intemperate worker was inefficient and dangerous. For safety reasons many industrial concerns did not employ problem drinkers. Also employers felt that sobriety and industrial safety were inseparable.
Despite the social ills it produced, the saloon did serve the social needs of the working class, especially the first-generation immigrants, who tended to oppose prohibition. Wet voting strength lay mainly in highly concentrated, predominantly working-class urban areas, and was therefore not widespread enough to be effective.
A number of union leaders and social critics pointed out that the Eighteenth Amendment constituted class legislation, and that the political strength of the drys lay among middle-class progressives who wanted, essentially, to remove the saloon from American life. Moreover, it allowed those who had enough money to stockpile all the liquor they wanted while the workingman could not afford to do that.
Congress refused to appropriate enough money to enforce the law. The drys were afraid to ask for more money to spend on prohibition because they feared they would alienate many voters. Congress exempted the enforcement officers from Civil Service and allowed the Prohibition Bureau to become part of the political spoils system. Furthermore, Presidents Wilson and Harding were indifferent to Prohibition enforcement.
There was a lack of cooperation on the part of local authorities and federal authorities complained that they were being asked to shoulder the whole burden of enforcement. There was congestion in the courts, corruption in government, and the failure in the states to vote money for enforcement. Many juries refused to convict individuals engaged in breaking the prohibition law.
Enforcement officers were faced with the problems of uncoordinated efforts. Personnel was meager in relation to the task, and the vast shoreline and boundaries of the U.S. made it difficult to stop smuggling. Large industrial centers on the Eastern seaboard refused to adopt and enforce prohibition laws because they said that their set of moral values, influenced by European immigrants, differed from the moral values in the smaller towns. All these problems moved the wets to launch a press campaign of defeatist propaganda.
Some historians have claimed that Prohibition was a failure because the Eighteenth Amendment caused dangerous criminal behavior, and that in spite of Prohibition more people drank alcohol than before. Those who argue that Prohibition was a success point to a study made in the late 1920’s that purported to show that working people drank less than before and that the living conditions among low-income families had been improved. They also stated that the amendment was effective in cutting down drinking among workers, one of the primary aims of prohibition. The Anti-Saloon League did succeed in destroying the old-fashioned saloon.
In 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition. Many believe the repeal resulted from the popular belief that Prohibition had been a failure, a belief that had gained strength during the late ’20’s and early ’30’s. Most people agreed that the nearly universal disregard for the Eighteenth Amendment had caused a general disrespect for the law and an increase in crime—even though this belief may not have been correct. In the late ’20’s the liquor interest beat the Anti-Saloon League at its own game, working at the state level to do away with the concurrent enforcement acts. At first it was the object of wets to try for modification rather than complete repeal, but there was an overwhelming surge of public sentiment that called for repeal.
A second reason for the sudden shift in opinion was the Great Depression that began about 1929. It was argued that legalization of liquor manufacture would produce a badly needed additional tax revenue. The general public held that Prohibition was to blame for the depression, just as the drys had claimed that Prohibition was responsible for the prosperity of the ‘20’s.
