Alcohol and Public Policy Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition (1981) / Chapter Skim
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Commissioned Papers: Temperance and Prohibition in America: A Historial Overview
Commissioned Papers: Temperance and Prohibition in America: A Historial Overview
Pages 125-181
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From page 127... ...
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.
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From page 128... ...
As the antiliquor movement 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)
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From page 129... ...
book, Symbolic Crusade, constituted a fundamental advance beyond the psychohistorical expose favored by Sinclair. Gusfield treated efforts to curb drinking not as mass hysteria but rather as a middle-class movement designed to defend lost status.
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From page 130... ...
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.
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From page 131... ...
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 blessing.
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From page 132... ...
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 tavernAicenses.
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From page 133... ...
, demand increased and violations of licensing laws became noto4 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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From page 134... ...
The breakdown of traditional 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 period.
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From page 135... ...
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.
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From page 136... ...
29~. Throughout the colonial period, authority was embodied in direct personal relations.
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From page 137... ...
During the first decades of the 1800s, as people drank more and more in places specifically and exclusively designed to cater to consumption of alcohol and as laws governing operating hours or sales to minors were regularly ignored, public drunkenness grew to be defined as a social problem. As in England, when the gin epidemic spread during a period of social and economic transformation, the sharp rise in the amounts of alcohol consumed coupled with the deterioration of drinking behavior reflected the deepening cultural turmoil and impaired the capacity of institutions to relegitimate themselves (Rorabaugh 1979, p.
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From page 138... ...
Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a medical pioneer, and an inveterate activist, published in 1785 an enormously influential tract, An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind, of which 200,000 copies were distributed in the first three decades of the 19th century. Rush's tract was intended to change public opinion and overthrow the commonly held faith in the efficacious properties of hard liquor.
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From page 139... ...
These propositions became the central constructs for the temperance movement that began slowly in the early 1800s and burgeoned 20 years later. MOBILIZING FOR THE CRUSADE With the formation of the Union Temperance Society of Moreau and Northumberland, New York, in 1808 by farmers, inspired by Rush's
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From page 140... ...
Although Rush had seen educational and political activity as consistent and mutually reinforcing, the temperance movement had gained its adherents in its first 10 years through an emphasis on moral suasion. But as moral reform began to be increasingly undermined by an organized traffic, legislation came to be regarded as a necessary weapon.
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From page 141... ...
A pickle or wedge of cheese would be sold at an inflated price accompanied by a free drink the law, of course, banned only the sale of alcohol. Despite the persistent difficulties in enforcement, and varying degrees of control imposed by the states, the first wave of the temperance movement (1825 to 1855)
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From page 142... ...
quotes from an exchange between two rival journals in 1842. The editor of The Essex Washingtonian had suggested that if the Washingtonians prevailed, then the church-based temperance movement would be "blown to the moon." The Journal of the American Temperance Movement responded: "In the late extraordinary reformation of drunkards, a subject of thankfulness, however transient, but more especially when resulting as it has in thousands of cases of permanent sobriety, a deep sympathy was felt for this unfortunate class prejudiced against religion .
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From page 143... ...
6-7~. The maternal, caretaking ambience of the tavern and saloon to which this testimony alludes supports the thesis that a high consumption level of alcohol is correlated with punishment or deprivation of dependency needs.
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From page 144... ...
In sum, the saloon and the substance it sold supplanted the most precious functions of domesticity. Throughout the voluminous literary propaganda that temperance organizations printed, throughout the public readings of tracts and the conversion testimony of the Washingtonians (both of which constituted the popular moral theater)
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From page 145... ...
" he asked. Did not the citizen involved in the liquor traffic "minister to the utter ruin of his fellow beings?
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From page 146... ...
The war further split apart a movement whose unity had already disintegrated. But in 1869, when the national Prohibition Party was formed from the remnants of the temperance forces, its supporters proudly saw themselves as the direct descendants of the abolitionists.
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From page 147... ...
Raising the banner of "home protection," local chapters were formed across the country. In 1880, Francis Willard gave her support to the Prohibition Party, which, to commemorate the alliance, changed its name temporarily to the Prohibition Home Protection Party.
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From page 148... ...
More state legislatures voted on prohibition and submitted to the people the question in the form of state constitutional amendments than at any other time. But though the issue was fiercely contested in threequarters of all the states, only six enacted prohibition laws by 1890.
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From page 149... ...
If attempts at control like the one experimented with in South Carolina were regarded as futile and misconceived, prohibitionists saw in federal regulation an even more flagrant example of law serving the greedy interests of the liquor traffic rather than curbing them. In 1890, the Supreme Court, in its Original Package Case, reversed a ruling that had been in effect since 1847, and then held that a dry state was powerless to bar a liquor dealer from importing alcohol and then reselling it in its original package.
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From page 150... ...
A demonic pattern was detected behind compromise measures like those enacted in South Carolina and in the apparent unwillingness of the federal judiciary to allow dry states to enforce the law. Prohibitionists blamed the organized, conspiratorial might of the liquor industry for whatever failures dry forces suffered.
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From page 151... ...
102~. The liquor industry was a perfect archetype of unbridled, plutocratic self-interest, and the prohibitionist campaign against it represented a critique of both the economic and moral order.
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From page 152... ...
At the same time, there was deep anxiety about alliances with other political groups that shared a commitment to social justice but were not equally dedicated to the drive against alcohol. During the 1890s, a struggle was fought within the Prohibition Party; its outcome would decide the ultimate future of the entire antiliquor movement.
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From page 153... ...
Momentum began to develop for an unequivocal, single-issue approach. "To succeed," wrote Thomas Carskadon, a Methodist farmer, "we must bring to us that steady, Christian, patriotic element now constituting the best element of the old parties, and the populist party, too." He went on to denounce broad-gaugers in the Prohibition Party who sought to attract "moneyloving, unsanctified brother farmers." While dwindling in influence, there continued to be those who argued for fusion: "Ours is a political party," declared one promiment fusionist, "and not a church.
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From page 154... ...
When you have brought into the Prohibition Party Debs and Altgeld and Coxey, and Blood-to-theBridle Waite, and all their tattered and dirty followers, and have washed from them the stains of the gutters .
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From page 155... ...
In its place were only smug self-congratulation and moral primping; the party's self-image was as the "large and enthusiastic gathering of intelligent, sober, clean and prosperous citizens, willing to sacrifice year after year for the good of others." But such protests of social conscience had grown wholly ritualistic; fear and loathing of the "rumsoaked rabble" had tipped the balance against joining a movement for social change in which sober citizens might be sullied by the blood or dirt of the misbegotten. By 1905, the Prohibition Party had surrendered leadership of the movement to the Anti-Saloon League.
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From page 156... ...
With hundreds of full-time, professional organizers funded through subscriptions from local churches and donations from national corporate leaders and with a publishing house that, during its first 3 years, printed the equivalent of 250 million book pages, the league brought bureaucratic rationality to the antiliquor movement. Its leaders, from H
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From page 157... ...
216~. But even though the 18th Amendment went beyond abolishing the saloon—the goal that had provided the basis for unity for the antiliquor movement and imposed a degree of abstinence that was unfamiliar to residents of most dry territories, the elimination of these loopholes was accepted as a more thorough purifying.
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From page 158... ...
Designed with the help of the league, it was intended to integrate the best features of various state prohibition laws. However, far from crystallizing the collective experiences of Prohibition, the Volstead Act was a bewildering melange.
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From page 159... ...
25~. Such charades not only made it innocent and amusing to circumvent Prohibition but also revealed a pervasive ambivalence at the root of the lath Amendment and its enforcement statutes.
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From page 160... ...
Most of this increase, of course, can be attributed to the greatly expanded use of industrial alcohol. As a basic chemical, it was required in the manufacture of cosmetics, leather goods, dyes, and synthetic textiles (one rayon plant used 2 million gallons of denatured alcohol annually)
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From page 161... ...
Just as individual consumption was protected as a right, so too was private enterprise sanctified. Under the direction of the league, the antiliquor movement had aligned itself more and more closely with the cult of efficiency and had come to regard corporate leaders as benefactors rather than as plutocrats.
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From page 162... ...
Only for a brief period during the 1890s did at least some elements within the movement accept the implications of the call to liquidate an entire industry. But while a broad anticorporate agenda was rejected and though the politics of prohibition grew increasingly racist and demagogic as the league took command, the central contradiction could not be evaded.
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From page 163... ...
Gusfield, in attempting to account for the gaping loopholes of the Volstead Act, has proposed that Prohibition never seriously aimed to curb drinking. The 18th Amendment was, he said, a ceremonial victory for the middle class, "a dramatic event of deviant designation." The legislation itself, rather than its application, "affirmed one cultural standard of conventionality, and derogated another." As a "symbolic gesture," it thus made no difference if Prohibition was enforced.
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From page 164... ...
With the coming of national prohibition, that tendency was reversed" (Stayton 1923, p.
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From page 165... ...
. Defenders of Prohibition claimed improvements in the physical health and sobriety of the labor force as a vindication of their cause.
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From page 166... ...
But it is a mistake to regard the AAPA as simply a crude tool wielded by venal interests. The AAPA and its various subsidiaries (The Crusaders for Young Men and the WONPR, the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform)
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From page 167... ...
H Stayton, head of the AAPA, spoke directly to the business community and criticized it for being "singularly blind" to the real content of the 18th Amendment.
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From page 168... ...
"A man," he wrote, "may be angrily against racial equality, public housing, the TVA, financial and technical aid to backward countries, organized labor, and the preaching of social rather than salvational religion.... Such people may appear 'normal' in the sense they may be able to hold a job and otherwise maintain their status as members of society; but they are, as we now recognize, well along the road to mental illness" (Van den Haag 1975, p.
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From page 169... ...
Instead of efforts to repress consumption through a total curb on availability, alcohol control emphasized effective regulation. Whereas Prohibition required that government assume the role of punitive moral arbiter, "control" conjured up the image of the state as manager.
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From page 170... ...
In the United States, those who believed that Prohibition constituted a perversion of federal power, pointed to Carlisle as a case in which the state had demonstrated its capacity for creative control. Those who designed public policies surrounding alcohol had to be free from narrow partisan prejudice; according to the AAPA and other adherents of the control model, neither the liquor industry nor the sectarian zealots of the Anti-Saloon League were competent to maintain social stability.
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From page 171... ...
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.
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From page 172... ...
The primary argument now made for repeal was no longer the demoralizing effects of Prohibition on civil liberties or class harmony; the end of the 18th Amendment was presented as the key to economic salvation. In the pamphlet Prohibition 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.
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From page 173... ...
Seven continued with prohibition, though 5 of these declared beer to be nonintoxicating; 12 states decided to permit liquor, but only for home consumption; 29 states allowed liquor by the glass. Legislators vowed ritualistically to prevent the return of the saloon and exclude the liquor traffic from political influence.
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From page 174... ...
119~. This dependency created 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 produced revenues that were often earmarked for special purposes; hospitals, schools, drought relief, and mothers' aid all received funds that served to heighten enthusiasm for sales.
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From page 175... ...
The experience of the lath Amendment endowed drinking with a new prestige, both social and moral. Consumption was exhibited as a badge of tolerance and civility.
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From page 176... ...
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 safeguards and corporate responsibility.
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From page 177... ...
For many of the same reasons that the lath Amendment was repealed and drinking returned to respectability, smoking also underwent a rehabilitation in public opinion. By 1927, the bans had all been overturned.
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From page 178... ...
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.
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From page 179... ...
(1932) Prohibition Versus Civilization: Analyzing the Dry Psychosis.
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From page 180... ...
(1963) Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement.
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From page 181... ...
Van den Haag, E
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