If they think about Prohibition at all, most Americans probably accept Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter’s conclusion that it was a farce, a “ludicrous caricature of the reforming impulse,” an ineffective albeit financially costly moral crusade imposed on a reluctant populace.
Decades later, Harvard University historian Lisa McGirr is here to tell us that not only is this widespread view misguided, it has led us to believe wrongly that the threat and consequences of Prohibition were trivial and short-lived.
In fact, the national constitutional ban on the sale, production and transportation of alcohol was critical, she argues, to the building of our modern American state. This state had been “interventionist yet weak, heavy on coercion yet light on social welfare” before Prohibition. After repeal, Americans found themselves reeling from years of violent crime, which government authorities had handled with disgraceful incompetence and corruption.
They also found themselves with a newly established federal penal system that encompassed a powerful FBI, streamlined federal record-keeping, a national crime commission, immense prison growth combined with professionalized prison administration and, writes McGirr, “muscular federal policing” that included extensive new authority. Thanks to Prohibition, crime had become both “a national problem and a national obsession,” and the results were dire.
The logic of Prohibition, chillingly, “put the private home at special risk,” says McGirr. Liquor production had been driven from industrial plants to small, often backyard, distilleries. Government agents systematically and destructively invaded private homes, especially of poorer households. In many sections of the country African-Americans were targeted more than any other group, often by police officers allied with the Ku Klux Klan. President Herbert Hoover railed about inadequate Prohibition enforcement even as record numbers of African-Americans were lynched.
Politically, the story is chilling. Evangelical Protestant churches concerned with social ills (and there were many) joined forces with interventionist politicians confident of government’s ability to regulate morality for the good of all. Their target was the saloon, which was not only the gathering place for male drinkers but which also served in large cities as a storefront for local partisan politics. They wanted the saloon, as well as alcohol, eradicated.
Instead, the shutting down of saloons had the effect of mobilizing the immigrants they had served. Urban coalitions formed across ethnic groups, with neighborhood newspapers educating their readers on how and where to vote. Immigrants became more active politically, voting in greater numbers than ever before. Many working-class voters who had been Republican, the party in charge of the presidency — and Prohibition — during the 1920s, shifted heavily to the Democratic Party. Prohibition successfully closed the saloons, but at a huge political cost: Disgruntled, politically engaged immigrants became the foundation of the urban ethnic wing that would be the Democratic Party’s mainstay for much of the century.
Meanwhile, Prohibition also damaged the expensive downtown restaurants, elegant hotel bars and cabarets patronized by the wealthy. Famed venues such as the Knickerbocker and Delmonico’s closed, and drinking moved both underground, to speakeasies, and uptown, to neighborhoods like Harlem.
For Harlem, becoming the “epicenter” of the nightlife revolution was not an unmixed blessing. While Prohibition’s cultural upheaval helped popularize jazz and African-American musicians, its “exploitive effects” on black working–class residential communities has gone pretty much unexamined by scholars. Black newspapers protested the illegal markets, combined with their prostitution and gambling, but to little effect. Instead, notes McGirr, “a rank undergrowth of crime and social decay” was allowed to flourish.
Why does all this matter? The absolutism of what McGirr calls “evangelical Protestant perfectionism” in its war on alcohol was far more ferocious than the temperance movement in other Western countries — and the war’s economic effects on American cities was often devastating. Yet as anti-alcohol crusaders lost their first war, they turned to another less controversial one: the war on drugs, which is very much still with us, contributing to overcrowded prisons, damaged neighborhoods, and ruined lives. Is there a better way?
The analogy between the two wars is far from perfect but holds enough common elements to give us all pause.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association.