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COMMISSIONED
PAPERS
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Temperance and Prohibition
· ~
In America:
A Historical Overview
PAUL AARON and! DAVID MUSTO
INTRODUCTION
In a recent book review about marijuana' Albert Goldman (1979, p.
250) wrote:
The only controls should be those that are imposed to protect the public from
bogus or polluted merchandise. With the dreadful example of Prohibition before
us, it seems nearly unthinkable that we should have done it again: taken some
basic human craving and perverted it into a vast system of organized crime and
social corruption. When will we learn that in a democracy it is for the people
to tell the government, not for the government to tell the people. what makes
them happy?
This "dreadful example'' is now so firmly established that it has become
a maxim of popular culture, a paradigm of bad social policy, and a ritual
invocation of opponents of a variety of sumptuary laws. The record of
the lath Amendment often has been read by libertarians as a morality
tale. Detached and abstracted from their historically specific contexts
and presented as a single crusade around which cranks and fanatics have
clustered for 150 years, temperance and prohibition have been portrayed
Paul Aaron, who was a consultant to the panel. is a graduate student at the Florence
Heller School of Social Work Brandeis University. David Musto. a member of the panel.
is at the Yale Child Study Center. Yale University.
This work was supported in part by Alcohol. Drug Abuse. and Mental Health Admin-
istration Grant DA-00037 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
127
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AARON and MUSTO
as touchstones of bigotry. The lineage of reaction is traced straight from
sin-obsessed Puritans, to evangelical extremists and Know-Nothings, to
nativists and Klansmen, and most recently to McCarthyites and anti-
abortionists.
The record of efforts to restrict drinking is, of course, far too com-
plicated to warrant such axiomatic disparagement. But despite impor-
tant, recent scholarship, and scientific validation of arguments once
ridiculed, claims established by dint of repetition have achieved a kind
of incantatory truth and ultimately have been enshrined as pieces of
political folk wisdom (Warner and Rossett 1975~.~
During the 1920s, partisan tracts featured titles like Prohibition Versus
Civilization: Analyzing the Dry Psychosis and The Prohibition Mania:
A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others (Darrow and Yarros 1927,
Barnes 1932~.2 Repeal institutionalized this propaganda and established
an ideological legacy that historians came to inherit long after the battles
had ended and the moral climate had cooled. As the antiliquor move-
ment disappeared from the nation's political agenda, it also withered
as a subject for research and study, not to reappear again until the early
1960s. Two books, Prohibition: The Era of Excess and Symbolic Cru-
'Warner and Rossett (1975), in their article "The Effects of Drinking on Off-Spring,"
revive a theory that postrepeal reaction rendered out of vogue. They observed that the
moralizing tone of pre-Prohibition temperance writers caused Americans to discount
previous work on parental drinking. They go on to say that recent renewed interest in the
effect of maternal alcohol on offspring is an example of a common phenomenon that
of an old and unfashionable idea being restored to respectability.
Fetal alcohol syndrome, noted as the result of the gin epidemic in London (1720-1750),
caused physicians to appeal to Parliament for control of the liquor industry; spirits were
identified as a cause of "weak? feeble and distempered children" (Warner and Rossett
1975, p. 1396~. Lyman Beecher, who as early as the 1820s in the United States saw liquor
as a race poison, wrote: "The free and universal use of intoxicating liquors for a few
centuries cannot fail to bring down our race from the majestic, athletic forms of our
Fathers, to the similitude of a despicable and puny race of men" (pp. 1401-1402~. In July
1979, the concept of drink-induced mental defects was given lurid endorsement in a
television news magazine feature on fetal alcohol syndrome.
2 Harry Elmer Barnes's book Prohibition Versus Civilization (1932) is an especially rich
compendium of diatribe and invective. Among the central propositions he presented were:
The sense of the invidious at the root of the prohibitionist sentiment. "It is a common
and natural trait," he argued "to hate those who are able to enjoy the good things of life
from which we are excluded. The austere Puritans of modern vintage, usually cold,
undeveloped, and desiccated personalities, shrink before the joyous intimacy promoted
by even mild alcoholic indulgence. But we can hardly hate with good conscience things
which we approve, even though we cannot enjoy or possess them. To allow the satisfying
sentiment of envy and hatred full bloom we must find that the things denied us are bad
and wicked. This saves us from the withering effects of overt and uncompensated envy
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Temperance and Prohibition in America
129
sade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, made
important contributions to this recovery.
In Prohibition: The Era of Excess, Andrew Sinclair (1962) described
the prohibitionist movement as a national St. Vitus's Dance.3 Employing
both Freudian and neo-Marxist categories, he attempted to reveal the
"aggressive prurience" behind the masks of religious zeal; he argued
that dominant economic interests, anxious to distract the gaze of re-
formers from the problem of the trusts, helped spread this "rural evan-
gelical virus." Sinclair's portrayal of Prohibition as a florid outburst of
a persistent, lurking paranoia backed by big business substituted in-
dictment for objective examination. It represented a sophisticated car-
icature that drew heavily on the stereotypes of earlier critics.
Joseph Gusfield's (1963) book, Symbolic Crusade, constituted a fun-
damental advance beyond the psychohistorical expose favored by Sin-
clair. Gusfield treated efforts to curb drinking not as mass hysteria but
rather as a middle-class movement designed to defend lost status. He
rejected the view of temperance and prohibition as repositories of a
Snopes-like aberration and reoriented the terms of discussion. His analy-
and puts us in a frame of mind to go out and take these damnable things from our more
fortunate contemporaries" (p. 32~.
Prohibition as a hypocritical deceit. "A man may desire to cover up dubious economic
transactions, hard bargains with widows on mortgages, cruelty in the domestic circle, sex
delinquency, and what not. He finds a stern attitude towards drink a splendid alibi and
art effective means of securing approval of the good people in the community" (p. 33~.
Barnes also creates a rouges' gallery of "health cranks," "sadistic abnormals,', "com-
mercial evangelists," "designing capitalists bent on the realization of 'Fordismus,"' "rac-
ists," and "boot-laggers and racketeers" (p. 37~.
3 Sinclair's impugnings in Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962) are often remarkably
similar to the tales of horror told by antiprohibitionists in the 1920s: "With a terrible faith
in equality," he observes, "the prohibitionists often wanted to suppress in society the sins
they found in themselves" (pp. 2~27~. He quotes G. K. Chesterton approvingly: "When
the Puritan or the modern Christian finds that his right hand offends him he not only cuts
it off but sends an executioner with a chopper all down the street, chopping off the hands
of all the men, women and children in the town. Then he has a curious feeling of com-
radeship and of everyone being comfortably together." Sinclair goes on: "It was in this
wish to extend their own repression to all society that the drys felt themselves most free
from their constant inward struggle. Indeed, they defended their attacks on the personal
liberty of other men by stating that they were bringing these men liberty for the first time.
. . . Of course, in reality, the drys were trying to bring personal liberty to themselves, by
externalizing their anguished struggles against their own weaknesses in their battle to
reform the weaknesses of others. The conflict between conscience and lust, between
superego and id, was transferred by the drys from their own bodies to the body politic
of all America; and, in the ecstasy of that paranoia which Freud saw in all of us, they
would have involved the whole earth" (pp. 2~27~.
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AARON and MUSTO
sis established a new standard of inquiry dispassionate, free from po-
lemical shrillness, and motivated by the desire to explain rather than
carp or debunk. Nonetheless, Gusfield's work was not primarily-directed
toward explicating alcohol control as a thing in itself. "Issues like fluor-
idation or domestic communism or temperance," he wrote, "may be
seen to generate irrational emotions and excessive zeal if we fail to
recognize them as symbolic rather than instrumental issues." As an
example of what he termed "expressive politics," temperance "operates
within an arena in which feelings, emotions, and affect are displaced
and where action is for the sake of expression rather than for the sake
of influencing or controlling the distribution of valued objects" (Gusfield
1963, pp. 11, 23~.
Gusfield's approach provided a store of subtle insights, but its con-
ceptual richness tended to overwhelm other investigative strategies. The
explicit, self-identified concerns around which people in the antiliquor
movement moblilized, the particular regulatory techniques that were
experimented with, and the nature of their impact are all areas that, to
a large extent, have lain historically fallow. The emphasis on the "ex-
pressive" and on rationalization, projection, and displacement as key
analytic tools has had the effect of distracting attention from the actual
content of the movement and shifting the level of discourse from the
literal to the figurative.
Gusfield's influence is a mark of the power of his formulations. But
the struggles that people waged in the past to regulate or proscribe
alcohol do not necessarily have to be treated as a nexus of symptoms.
Without denying the continued usefulness of Gusfield's concept of ex-
pressive politics, it is necessary also to recognize the worth of comple-
mentary models of investigation. If, as Room (1974, p.11) suggests,
"Our chief aim is to open up the range of frameworks within which the
prevention of alcohol problems is discussed," and if accomplishing this
requires that we better understand how the governing images evolved
around that which we orient our current strategies of remediation, then
we must attempt to understand the antiliquor movement, both as a
symbolic crusade and as a massive, sustained organizing effort with a
highly developed set of tactics and coherent, tangible goals.
Any attempt to discover a "usable past" in the history of American
temperance and prohibition requires first that investigators abandon
contemptuous reductionism and disenthrall themselves from lurid
myths; this process has been largely accomplished, and scholars like
Gusfield deserve respect and appreciation for breaking ground. Those,
however, who seek to develop improved policy instruments around al-
cohol use and abuse must be creative scavengers willing to approach
prior efforts both as cultural artifacts and as a body of experience capable
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l emperance and Prohibition in America
131
of yielding valuable clues to the possibilities of regulation today.
Through examination of how consumption patterns have changed and
the basis for computing the social costs of drinking and through iden-
tification of various tactics of control, their original settings, and the
reasons for their relative success or failure, the historian can develop
a perspective that elucidates the policy choices to be debated.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD
The colonists brought with them from Europe a high regard for alcoholic
beverages. Distilled and fermented liquors were considered important
and invigorating foods, whose restorative powers were a natural bless-
ing. People in all regions and of all classes drank heavily. Wine and
sugar were consumed at breakfast; at 11:00 and 4:00 workers broke for
their "bitters"; cider and beer were drunk at lunch and toddies for
supper and during the evening.
Drinking was pervasive for a number of reasons. First, alcohol was
regarded not primarily as an intoxicant but rather as a healthy, even
medicinal substance with distinct curative and preventive properties.
The ascribed benefits corresponded to the strength of the drink; "strong
waters," that is, distilled liquor, had manifold uses, from killing pain,
to fighting fatigue, to soothing indigestion, to warding off fever.
Alcohol was also believed to be conducive to social as well as personal
health. It played an essential part in rituals of conviviality and collective
activity; barn railings, huskings, and the mustering of the militia were
all occasions that helped associate drink with trust and reciprocity. Hired
farm workers were supplied with spirits as part of their pay and generally
drank with their employer. Stores left a barrel of whiskey or rum outside
the door from which customers could take a dip.
Alcoholic drinks were also popular as a substitute for water. Water
was considered dangerous to drink and inhospitable and low class to
serve to guests. It was weak and thin; when not impure and filled with
sediment, it was disdained as lacking any nutritional value. Beer or wine
or "ardent spririts" not only quenched the thirst but were also esteemed
for being fortified. They transferred energy and endurance, attributes
vital to the heavy manual labor demanded by an agricultural society.
Official policy also endorsed consumption as trade in liquor provided
an important source of revenue to the early colonists. Beginning in the
1630s, an ad valorem tax was levied on both imported wines and spirits
and domestic products. The resulting monies were used to finance a
wide range of local and provincial activities, from education in Con-
necticut, to prison repair in Maryland. to military defense on the frontier
(Krout 1925, p. 19)
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AARON and MUSTO
People drank, too, because alcohol was readily available. Although
domestic production of gin, rum, or whiskey did not commence until
the latter part of the 17th century, fruit brandies and especially cider
were native beverages of daily consumption. Alcoholic drink was a staple
that individual farmers created from local stuffs; people wanted it be-
cause they thought liquor was good for them and because they connected
its production and consumption with traditional forms of civility. To
brew ale or press cider were activities that supplied a valuable food,
helped domesticate a natural wilderness, and helped restore a sense of
continuity with a distant mother land.
Drunkenness was condemned and punished, but only as an abuse of
a God-given gift. Drink itself was not looked upon as culpable, any
more than food deserved blame for the sin of gluttony. Excess was
personal indiscretion. Although Georgia did attempt an initial ban on
ardent spririts, the colonial period was otherwise notable for a loosely
pragmatic approach to control (Krout 1925, pp. 57-58~. But while prag-
matism reigned and strategies of regulation were improvised according
to the distinctive conditions in each colony, there were basic models
that could be found in all regions. Beyond sanctions for drunkenness,
which ranged in severity from fines, to whipping, to the stocks, to ban-
ishment, conventional mechanisms of control were: (1) limits on the
hours that taverns could stay open, on the amount that customers could
consume, and on the time that could be spent "tippling"; (2) prohibitions
against serving slaves, indentured servants, debtors, or habitual drun-
kards; (3) laws that proscribed certain activities in conjunction with
public drinking (e.g., gambling or loud music were generally forbidden
in taverns); and (4) requirements that taverns provide lodging and food,
and that retailers sell only for home consumption not small amounts
to be drunk on the premises.
Although acceptable patterns of consumption were thus set forth in
law, informal social controls played a much more significant role than
legislation. Throughout the colonial period, legislatures delegated to
boards of selectmen or county courts the authority to grant tavernAi-
censes. Since the bodies holding this power were composed of,the so-
cially prominent, it naturally developed that licenses were issued to men
of similar station. This arrangement proceeded less *om the wish to
maintain a class monopoly on a lucrative trade than from a deep sense
of civic obligation with which the clergy and the leading men of property
were imbued. As a community institution a place that provided the
amenities of life to travelers as well as a comfortable setting for local
recreation the tavern was a resource whose administration had to be
both moral and efficient. The proprietor was expected not only to dis-
pense food, drink, and hospitality, but also to monitor behavior by
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Temperance and Prohibition in America
133
relying on the deference and respect accorded his social position to keep
customers in check. In return for such a responsible oversight, the inn-
keeper was often granted an exclusive operating right within a particular
area; franchise was awarded, or sometimes imposed, for maintaining
this service along crucial thoroughfares or adjacent to key bridges.
Tavern owners were often men of rank, as evidenced by the early
records of Harvard University, where the names of students, listed by
social position rather than alphabetically, showed that the son of an
innkeeper preceded that of a clergyman (Krout 1925, p. 44~. It was
often the case that leading citizens would conclude their public career,
having served as town clerk, justice of the peace, or deputy to the
General Court, by securing a license to run a public house. Men ha-
bituated to moral surveillance could thus continue their scrutiny.
There was always circumvention of rules, however, regulating the
flow of liquor. Unauthorized sellers, for example, evaded the prohibition
against keeping a tippling house by taking advantage of an ancient right
of Englishmen to brew and sell without a license in brush houses at fair
times. Thus, in Virginia, "divers loose and disorderly persons set up
booths, arbours, and other public places where, not only the looser sort
of people resort, get drunk, and commit many irregularities, but servants
and Negroes are entertained, and encouraged to purloin their master's
goods, for supporting their extravagancies" (Pearson and Hendricks
1967, p. 21~. Though slippage existed, the system of control did work.
Drunkenness was inveighed against, but it had not become recognized
as a serious social problem.
As the 17th century came to a close, this "stable, conservative, well-
regulated" system changed (Rorabaugh 1979, p. 29~. As large quantities
of imported West Indian molasses began to arrive in New England, the
domestic distilling trade burgeoned. Soon rum was being manufactured
in large enough quantities to supplant French brandy in the triangular
slave trade. As hard liquor achieved an increasingly central commercial
role, "the public accorded it," Krout wrote "that approbation which
attaches to most things indispensible to the world of business" (Krout
1925, p. 50~.4 But while leading citizens amassed fortunes from trading
rum for Africans, a glut of alcohol began to erode the structure of class
control by which drinking behavior had been regulated. As the price
for rum plummeted (in 16 years the cost per gallon was cut almost in
half), demand increased and violations of licensing laws became noto-
4 For another account of the commercial role liquor played in the dealings of fur traders
and other merchants with North American Indians, see MacAndrew and Edgerton (1969~.
These authors also argue that the Indian tribes had no exceptional natural urge toward
drunkenness or alcohol consumption.
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AARON and MUSTO
rious (Rorabaugh 1979, p. 29~. As the regulations against the selling of
drams by retailers were less frequently observed and as the services that
taverns were required to provide shrunk from minimal to nonexistent,
the enforcement capacity of local officials was overwhelmed. In Boston,
surrendering to pervasive circumvention, officials expediently granted
licenses to many of the violators. Operating permits, once awarded only
after assessment of the character of the propsective tavernkeeper, were
now dispensed pro forma, and their number increased from 72 in 1702
to 155 in 1732 (Rorabaugh 1979, p. 25~.
By the middle of the 18th century, management as a moral guardi-
anship and community service gave way to management as a business
venture. The innkeeper had lost status; his son fell from rank at Harvard
as the occupation as a whole was increasingly dominated by the common
folk (Krout 1925, p. 45~. John Adams bemoaned the deterioration of
control: "I was fired with a zeal," he wrote? "amounting to an enthu-
siasm, against ardent spirits, the multiplication of taverns, retailers and
dram shops and tippling houses. Grieved to the heart to see the number
of idlers, thieves, sots and consumptive patients made for the use of
physicians in these infamous seminaries, I applied to the court of ses-
sions, procured a committee of inspection and inquiry, reduced the
number of licensed houses, etc. But I only acquired the reputation of
a hypocrite and an ambitious demagogue by it. The number of licensed
houses was soon reinstated? drams, grogs, and setting were not dimin-
ished, and remain to this day as deplorable as ever" (Kobler 1973, p.
31~. The futility that Adams felt in trying to curb this disorder was
shared by other representatives of his class. The breakdown of tradi-
tional controls and the social turmoil seen to proceed from it were
associated with the increasing commercial exploitation of distilled liquor.
Once a largely imported substance whose distribution was an aristocratic
monopoly, it had become democratized by the end of the colonial pe-
riod. Cheap rum from Boston and Providence widened the availability
of hard liquor (90 proof, compared with the milder and less potent
domestic fruit brandies). People drank more and did so in a context that
was less strictly monitored than when taverns had been under the aegis
of a proprietary civic elite.
THE DECLINE OF AUTHORITY
The Revolution accelerated the breakdown of class deference and my-
thologized the public drinking place as a bastion of liberty of the common
man. Indirectly, the war also helped to topple the domestic supremacy
of rum and replace it with cheaper domestic whiskey. Because trade
with the West Indies was disrupted, thereby cutting off the source of
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Temperance and Prohibition in America
135
rum, a need developed for a substitute hard liquor. Scotch-Irish settlers,
arriving in America during this period, brought with them a tradition
of pot still whiskey making.
In 1789, the first Kentucky whiskey was made by a Baptist preacher
named Elijah Cook; by 1810, the known distillers totaled 2,000 and the
annual overall production was more than 2 million gallons (Roueche
1960, p. 424. The rum-producing states attempted to defend themselves
against this encroachment. In 1783, Congress voted to help finance the
central government by taxing imports; the ratification of this legislation
was delayed until 1789 when the New England states, afraid that an
excise on molasses would price rum out of the domestic market, suc-
ceeded in having whiskey taxed at a level that maintained the preexisting
ratios between the two drinks. The farmers of western Pennsylvania
resisted this compromise, and their 2-year rebellion, during which tax
collectors were tarred and feathered, was crushed only after President
Washington (acting after Governor Mifflin refused to call out state mi-
litia) occupied the region with 15,000 troops. The imposition of the tax
did nothing, however, to stem the decline of rum and its displacement
by whisky. Prices for rum had doubled during the 1780s. Annual imports
fell from one gallon per capita in 1790 to less than one-half gallon by
1827 to below one-fifth gallon in 1850. The repeal of the whiskey tax
in 1802 simply made the position of whiskey even more advantageous
(Rorabaugh 1979' p. 684.
The whiskey trade became an indispensible element in the economic
expansion westward. H. F. Willkie, writing in 1947, noted: "There were
no roads in the new territory and most of the trade was by packhorse.
It cost more to transport a barrel of flour . . . than the flour would have
sold for on the eastern markets. If the farmer converted the grain into
whiskey, a horse, which would carry only four bushels in solid grain'
could carry twenty-four bushels in liquid form. Practically every farmer,
therefore, made whiskey. So universal was the practice that whiskey
was the medium of exchange" (Roueche 1960, pp. 39-40~. Albert Gal-
latin, drafting an appeal to Congress in 1792, wrote: "Distant from a
permanent market, and separate from the Eastern coasts by mountains,
we have no means of bringing the produce of our lands to sale either
in grain or meal. We are therefore distillers by necessity, not choice"
(Rorabaugh 1979, p. 54~.
Though the estimates of the per-capita consumption vary, it is gen-
erally agreed that, beginning at the turn of the 19th century, demand
for distilled liquor exploded. In 1972, when the population was 4 million,
domestic production was 5.2 million gallons and imports almost 6 million
gallons more. Within the next 18 years, the number of distilleries in-
creased 6 times; production tripled. According to the most conservative
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Temperance and Prohibition in America 171
The guiding assumptions for Catlin that spirits posed a greater threat
than beer and wine and therefore required a more restrictive tax and
that the liquor trade must not be run for private profit were tenets of
the control position.
In discussing the alcohol control movement it would be a mistake to
exaggerate the degree of its influence in changing public opinion. As
a theoretical concept, management of consumption was an approach set
apart equally from Prohibition and laissez-faire; its stance was too sci-
entific and too dispassionate to gain a following. While the AAPA
incorporated in its membership those who made serious attempts to
devise regulatory policies as alternatives to Prohibition, the movement
for repeal mobilized its support primarily through the use of polemics
and propaganda. Despite the earnest and objective inquiries of men like
Catlin and Koren, such policy analysis had little impact on the immediate
struggle. The battle lines were split between wet and drier, and ideological
third parties were anathema. It must be understood, too, as the decade
of the 1920s came to an end, that the forces favoring the maintenance
of Prohibition were more than holding their own.
The gradual displacement of one model of individual and social be-
havior (virtue inherent in austerity and self-restraint) by another (virtue
inherent in moderate consumption and easy-going compliance) did not
constitute a sudden ideological transformation that swept away support
for the lath Amendment. For all the heavily funded organizing of the
AAPA and for all the scandals involving both agents of the bureau and
Anti-Saloon League members themselves (these latter exemplars of rec-
titude became implicated in various shady transactions), Prohibition was
still strong in 1928. In the election of that year, dry political candidates
swept the field. Hoover was an overwhelming victor; 80 of 96 senators,
328 of 424 House members, and 43 of 48 governors elected were backers
of the lath Amendment. The Wickersham Committee, appointed in
1928 to investigate the 18th Amendment, came out with a report that,
while including minority opinions, nonetheless endorsed Prohibition and
urged stronger enforcement. Even William Randolph Hearst, one of
the principal opponents of Prohibition, as late as 1929, regarded repeal
as out of the question. The prize-winning essay in the national contest
sponsored by his papers proposed redefining beer as nonintoxicating;
a more direct attack on the 18th Amendment was seen as political
adventurism (Hearst 1929~.
Prohibition was part of the Constitution and thus protected by an aura
of the immutable. Breaking the law defied but did not overthrow official
legitimacy. "Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment is pure nonsense-
thirteen states with a population less than half of New York state can
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172
AARON and MUSTO
prevent repeal until Halley's Comet comes in," Clarence Darrow had
observed (Dobyns 1940, p. 389~. But beyond this practical consideration,
repeal involved an element of the blasphemous.~3
Economic collapse created the possibility for extreme and unprece-
dented measures.~4 By 1930, the AAPA-backed referenda drives had
produced victory for repudiation in nine states. The primary argument
now made for repeal was no longer the demoralizing effects of Prohi-
bition on civil liberties or class harmony; the end of the 18th Amendment
was presented as the key to economic salvation. In the pamphlet Pro-
hibition and the Deficit, the AAPA declared that "by the end of 1931
annual liquor tax collections since 1920, if national prohibition had not
intervened, should have totalled practically eleven billion dollars. This
money might have been used (if all other sources of revenue had been
availed of) to reduce our 1931 indebtedness from $16,801,000,000 to
$5,801,00D,000, If we continue our-estimate, by the end of 1933 we
should have a balanced budget and a public debt of $7,306,000,000
instead of $20,341,000,000" (Dobyns 1940, p. 377~. Alcohol was now
linked to a patriotic cause; just as Lincoln had turned to the liquor trade
t3 Felix Frankfurter declared that "if the process by which this Amendment came into the
Constitution is open to question, one can hardly dare contemplate the moral justification
of some of the other amendments, or of the Constitution itself. Whether we like it or not,
the 18th Amendment is!" (Frankfurter 1923, p. 193~.
'4 Historians have debated the extent to which the Great Depression and New Deal
constitute a fundamental break or turning point in the American experience. Degler has
written that "as the Civil War represented a watershed in American thought, so the
depression and its New Deal marked the crossing of a divide from which, it would seem,
there could be no turning back." Louis Hacker uses the description of "the Third American
Revolution," and Hofstader argues that a "drastic new departure in the history of Amer-
ican reformism" was set in motion after 1929. On the other hand, Richard Kirkendall
cautions against exaggerating the extent to which the changes produced during this period
should be construed as a "divide," and emphasizes instead the important continuity with
the past that the decade of the 1930s still maintained (Braeman et al. 1964, pp. 146, 148,
et passim).
But whether one holds with Kirkendall that the Great Depression simply accelerated
"the rise of a collectivistic or organizational type of capitalism evident since the third
quarter of the 19th century," or whether one is persuaded that some more fundamental
cleavage took place, it seems clear that economic collapse did require people to take stock
of a whole range of traditional beliefs and values. In the New Deal's pragmatic approach
to reconstruction, and in the corresponding advent of the "guarantor state," the bulwarks
of Prohibition disintegrated. The ideal of individual abstinence came to be perceived as
wrongheaded and even cruel, an artifact of a discredited ideological system. As Gusfield
puts it, "The Great Depression dissolved the magic power of the old symbols...."
(Braeman et al. 1968, p. 305~; the sources for public disorder and misery so obviously
transcended personal indulgence that the struggle against drink took on an almost ante-
deluvian irrelevance.
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Temperance and Prohibition in America
173
in 1862 to finance the war effort, so too did Roosevelt campaign in 1932
on the promise to repeal the lath Amendment and revive an industry
that could provide both jobs and tax revenue. Nine days after his in-
auguration, Roosevelt sent before Congress a piece of legislation mod-
ifying the Volstead Act and legalizing the sale of beer. During the
summer of 1933, the administration stumped for repeal; with James
Parley in charge of the effort, and the AAPA and WONPR providing
organizational support, repeal was promoted as a key element of a
recovery program.
In a series of state elections to select delegates to conventions, the
degree of shift in popular sentiment was measured. Michigan, which
had a plurality of 207,000 for the 18th Amendment in 1919, voted for
the 21st Amendment by 547,000; overall, repeal triumphed 3 to 1 (15
million to 4 million). The necessary 35 states ratified the amendment
by December 1933, and what Roosevelt described as the "damnable
affliction of Prohibition" came to an end (Blocker 1976, p.242~.
EPILOGUE
r ~ ,
While retreating from prohibition enforcement, the federal government
retained responsibility to regulate the legitimate production of distilled
spirits, wine, and beer and to prevent the illegal production of these
products. These functions have been consolidated since 1972 in the
Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATE). After
repeal, most questions regarding alcohol devolved to the states. Seven
continued with prohibition, though 5 of these declared beer to be non-
intoxicating; 12 states decided to permit liquor, but only for home con-
sumption; 29 states allowed liquor by the glass. Legislators vowed rit-
ualistically to prevent the return of the saloon and exclude the liquor
traffic from political influence.
The Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) laws that the states did adopt
were designed in part to curb the most notorious abuses of the pre-
Prohibition era. Restrictions were imposed on hours and days of sales
in an effort to diminish the bar's seduction of the breadwinner from his
domestic obligations. Sunday closings were observed; liquor could no
longer be sold on election days: the "tied-house," blamed for inciting
extreme forms of consumption behavior, was banned. Visibility require-
ments were instituted; in some states they mandated that bars be open
to public inspection, in others they kept the spectacle of the drinking
act safely hidden from the eyes of children or decent citizens.
These laws were full of conceptual confusion. On one hand, they
embodied a ceremonial deference to those Americans sensitive to the
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174 AARON and MUSTO
morally fraught nature of alcohol use. But on the other, it was precisely
this problem-oriented attitude toward alcohol that repeal had under-
mined. The issues of public sensibility or public morality were inextric-
ably linked to a discredited past; temperance, which once had denoted
moderate use, now conjured up the image of prohibitionist fanaticism.
The role of the state was to oversee orderly distribution rather than to
curtail availability.
A wariness of moral intervention was only one element in the position
that the states assumed. Economics was another major factor. The ex-
igencies of the fiscal crisis forced many commonwealths to turn to the
beverage industry for help. Between 1933 and 1935, 15 states adopted
monopoly systems; these states were broke and in order to stock their
chains of stores had to buy on credit from the distillers. In Ohio in 1935
the Department of Liquor Control boasted that "without one cent of
capital, the Department faced the problem of purchasing on credit a
sufficient amount of liquor to supply Ohioans with safe, palatable, and
legal liquor" (Harrison and Laine 1936, p. 119~. This dependency cre-
ated a pattern whereby revenue rather than social control became the
guiding concern; indebted to the industry and desperate to generate
funds to help finance local government, states found themselves in the
position of stimulating demand and participating in what only a few
years before was still widely considered "the nefarious trade."
The alliance between state government and the liquor industry pro-
duced revenues that were often earmarked for special purposes; hos-
pitals, schools, drought relief, and mothers' aid all received funds that
served to heighten enthusiasm for sales. A trade magazine underscored
the industry's own promotion of these benefits (Dobyns 1940, p. 4184.
A little child is playing happily in the streets of a big city. With all the strength
of a twelve-year-old, he throws the ball against the side of a building. It bounces
off his hand on the rebound. Quickly the youth runs after the ball into the
middle of the street. Brakes screech wildly. One anguished scream rends the
air. Johnny lies unconscious beneath the wheels of a big truck, his two legs
broken.
Were it not for alcoholic beverages, Johnny might go through life a helpless
cripple. Thanks to the revenue derived from liquor taxes, however, the state
has been able to build and maintain a large hospital just for cases like this.
And this is only one of the many splendid causes to which liquor revenue is
put. Publicity has been often given in the past to the so-called evils of liquor
while the sale has been, and is, attacked vigorously by varying numbers of drys.
Small stress, on the other hand, is given to the enormous benefits derived from
liquor taxes.
However, the postrepeal rehabilitation of the liquor industry stemmed
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Temperance and Prohibition in America
175
from more than such putative public service. Not only did the manu-
facturers of alcohol subsidize indirectly the general welfare, but they
also produced a commodity that had become decontaminated. The ex-
perience of the lath Amendment endowed drinking with a new prestige,
both social and moral. Consumption was exhibited as a badge of tol-
erance and civility. Conversely, efforts to regulate availability grew
tainted; as Roosevelt had said in his repeal proclamation, the proper
interventionist role of the government was limited to "educating every
citizen towards temperance." Responsible individual behavior could be
encouraged and even taught, but not imposed or coerced. After Pro-
hibition, the problems associated with alcohol were seen more and more
as ones of personal choice or personal disability.
Today the emphasis on individual accountability and the distaste for
vigorous governmental action appear more firmly enshrined than ever.
Self-care and a corresponding antagonism toward a beneficient "Big
Brother" have become tenets of a popular critique of the welfare state.
Institutionalized altruism is increasingly perceived as counterproductive,
the cause rather than the cure for the ills that afflict us. Overregulation
is now a code phrase conjuring up an elaborate set of inept and self-
righteous rules, impossible to enforce and corrosive in the sweep of their
mandate. Citizens, it follows, are best protected by being left to their
own devices. Of course, a basic education for living should be provided.
("Many of the same decision making mechanisms involved in deciding
how to use alcohol will be involved in deciding how to drive a car, how
to handle finances, when to get married, and how to plan for a future
life," Chafetz writes t1974~.) But once such skills have been imparted,
then their application depends on free, individual choice.
Health has become conceptualized as a duty: "One has an obligation,"
Leon Kass writes, "to preserve one's own good health. The theory of
a right to health flies in the face of good sense, serves to undermine
personal responsibility, and in addition, places obligation where it can-
not help but be unfulfillable." In this same context, John Knowles groups
"sloth, gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy
and smoking" together as at-risk behaviors that people select as part of
a personal life-style (Crawford 1978, pp.14-164.
But while powerful, this concept that individuals are held accountable
for themselves is still not unchallenged. An important countervailing
theoretical perspective has emerged. The environmental movement, the
antismoking campaign, the protests against atomic power, and the oil
companies all have a collective view of hazards. For example, a growing
contention is that pollution is so pervasive that individuals cannot avoid
being exposed to its hazards.
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176
AARON and MUSTO
The political configurations of this alliance are unclear. However, a
concern for the social and physical ecology has already led some groups
to develop sophisticated lobbying techniques and mobilize successful
and massive campaigns of public education.
Prohibition will certainly never return. Above and beyond the me-
chanical problems of enforcement, it failed originally because it created
no stabilizing vested interests. No reform movement can survive unless
it is rooted in new institutions. But while extreme forms of controlling
consumption of alcohol are utterly lacking in feasibility, there is the
chance that state policy may once again assume a more interventionist
role. The boundaries between personal and governmental responsibility
constantly shift. Although a mass movement to curb drinking will never
reemerge, one can conceive that new, extensive regulation of the liquor
industry might be integrated into a paradigm of environmental safe-
guards and corporate responsibility.
Antialcohol organizing reached its pinnacle of influence during his-
torical periods in which agitation against the plundering of the social
and physical landscape was most intense. Efforts to curb drinking
emerged from broad- reformist sentiment. The relative obscurity today
of any alcohol control movement may be deceptive. The conditions are
present for a revival of widespread interest in the problems of alcohol.
No one can predict if such a resurgence of popular concern will, in fact,
develop, but the record of the past suggests that movements once
thought safely interred do not always remain in their graves.
A brief review of the shifting attitudes toward cigarette smoking dem-
onstrates how quickly a substance once thought innocuous or even ben-
eficial can be redefined as dangerous and deviant. (The material pre-
sented here is a synopsis of Nuehring and Markle 1974, and Markle and
Troyer 1979.) Cigarettes were brought back to America in the 1850s by
tourists returning from England. Smoking was initially tolerated and
even endorsed; rations of cigarettes provided to soliders during the Civil
War were regarded as crucial to their well-being. By the 1870s, however,
cigar manufacturers, wary of competition, attempted to discredit ciga-
rette smoking. Lurid accusations were made: cigarettes were laced with
opium and the paper bleached with arsenic; the content was derived
from garbage and packaged by Chinese lepers. Transformed into a vice,
cigarette smoking began to be taken up by the temperance movement;
pledges against smoking and drinking were often made together by
churchgoers. Cigarettes and drinking were attacked as an evil partner-
ship threatening to undermine physical and moral health. Young people
were considered especially vulnerable, and delinquency and school fail-
ure were often traced directly to indulgence in these dirty and debili-
OCR for page 177
Temperance and Prohibition in America 177
sating habits. So widespread was the association between smoking and
antisocial behavior that 14 states passed prohibition laws against ciga-
rettes during the period 1895 to 1914.
For many of the same reasons that the lath Amendment was repealed
and drinking returned to respectability, smoking also underwent a re-
habilitation in public opinion. By 1927, the bans had all been overturned.
By the 1930s, cigarettes were grouped with alcohol as aids to economic
revival through their provision of important tax revenues. In addition,
smoking along with drinking became raised to the status of the nor-
mative. Nonsmokers, just like teetotalers, were suspect as antisocial
eccentrics.
By the late l950s, the discovery of the link between cancer and cig-
arettes began to erode the legitimacy of smoking. But the identification
of these risks was incorporated into an assimilative rather than coercive
approach. Consumers were to be alerted; once sufficient information
was provided, then presumably those smokers, or potential smokers,
would abandon or avoid self-destructive behavior. These educative prin-
ciples underlay congressional hearings held in 1957 on the hazards of
smoking, the antismoking curricula adopted by public schools (Florida
passed a law in 1965 requiring students be taught "the adverse health
effects of cigarette smoking"), and the Federal Communications Com-
mission's decision in 1967 to have warning labels attached to all pack-
ages.
Such initial efforts, though targeted at the consumer as opposed to
the product, nonetheless aroused the deep concerns of a well-organized
and powerful industry. Tobacco is the fifth largest cash crop for the
entire United States and is probably the best investment of all farm
products. The manufacturers have a lobbying arm, the Tobacco Insti-
tute, which Senator Edward Kennedy called the most effective in all of
Washington. Tobacco has significant alliances with other sectors of the
economy (for example, the industry contributed $400 million to adver-
tisers in 1977 alone) as well as major links to the federal government.
Some $1.3 billion were added to the balance of payments through foreign
sales in 1977, and $2.3 billion were paid in excise taxes during the same
year.
All of these resources, substantial in terms of both money and political
capital, were mobilized to defend the position of the industry. Cigarette
manufacturers made strenuous efforts to revamp their image. Compa-
nies donated funds to a whole range of worthy civic causes, from book-
mobiles in poor areas to the production of documentary films about
American Indians. Contributions to cancer and heart disease drives were
also made; the Tobacco Institute proclaimed that the industry as a whole
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178
AARON and MUSTO
was committed to research into tobacco-related health issues, but em-
phasized that "the answer to this unsolved problem cannot be side-
stepped merely because an apparent statistical association has spot-
lighted a convenient though probably innocent suspect" (Nuehring and
Markle 1974, p. 523~. Going beyond disclaimers, the industry voluntarily
imposed on itself new regulations that restricted appeals to youth.
Despite these defensive maneuvers thrown up by the industry, the
antismoking movement, far from being placated, has grown increasingly
militant and prohibitionist since the middle 1960s. Changes in rhetoric
reflect important shifts in the movement's operating premises. As Mar-
kle and Troyer (1979) observe, attacks on smoking have taken on a
distinctly coercive quality. Smokers, who before were appealed to as
unenlightened, are now regarded as noxious. Their habit, once consid-
ered a piece of personal behavior that should be voluntarily shed for
the good of the smoker, has been redefined as an invasion of the rights
of the nonsmoker that must be aggressively resisted. Gaining strength
from a general upsurge in public concern for the environment, the an-
tismoking movement has declared that freedom of choice, i.e., whether
to smoke or not, is as spurious a privilege as that invoked by industrialists
dumping pollutants into a river. From this sense that the common good
necessarily takes precedence over perverse private satisfaction, stringent
laws curtailing smoking have begun to be proposed. Federal regulatory
agencies have taken positions in support of the movement, and initiatives
on the state level have been widespread. In California, a proposition
that would have relegated smoking to the confines of private homes was
beaten back after the tobacco industry spent $5.6 million to defeat it.
Although a number of parallels between the history of antismoking
and antidrinking agitation present themselves, it is not the intention
here to enumerate them or to suggest a pattern of rigid correspondence.
What must be recognized, however, is that cigarettes once appeared as
inviolate to such public discrediting as alcohol now seems to be. The
tobacco industry was respectable and politically well connected; smoking
was so well accepted in American life that opposition was tantamount
to faddism or bigotry. The disintegration of this apparently solid struc-
ture of legitimacy resulted from a convergence of forces; growing aware-
ness of the hazards of smoking, rising concern about environmental
contaminants, the emergence of a cultural style whereby individual pu-
rity (the backpacker, the jogger, the natural-food eater) is defined as
the feasible span of self-determination.
The same constellation of elements may not coalesce in precisely the
same way to form a revived antiliquor movement. We must be aware,
nonetheless, that cycles of organized opposition to smoking and drinking
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Temperance and Prohibition in America 179
have coincided, and that in the past, many of the same impulses inspired
both. The times today are volatile, and one can easily imagine that
"moral athleticism"—the term Gusfield applied to the temperance
movement~ould once again have a broad appeal.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
temperance movement
