Not a drop to drink?
This week, I wanted to look back in history at an early American culture war: Prohibition.
In the early 20th century, the United States banned alcohol. Called a noble experiment, Prohibition was a political movement that outlawed the production and distribution of alcoholic beverages, and it was largely pushed by supporters who saw abstinence from alcohol as a moral imperative.
Through the lens of organizations that advocated for “dry” legislation, the only way to solve social issues like public drunkenness and domestic violence was to eliminate drinking culture, rather than advocate for women’s and workers’ rights directly, or implement economic policies that could help create stability in a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing country. The movers and shakers of this culture war were grassroots activist organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and big-tent lobbying groups like the Anti-Saloon League.
Figures in the WCTU like Carry A. Nation often took dramatic, headline-worthy action, like attacking saloons with hatchets, but the Anti-Saloon League built wide-reaching coalitions and political power that scaled up from the municipal stage over the course of years. They perfected pressure politics as a lobbying strategy and were absolutely ruthless.
"Opponents of the league could expect to be attacked in the dry press, bombarded with telegrams, have their personal lives probed by private investigators, and have rumors about their political and financial affairs floated in public. Its president, Wayne B. Wheeler, became one of the most feared men in American politics.” Michael A. Lerner, Humanities magazine
Saloons in the early 20th century served as a third place, and besides simply having a drink, they were also spaces where workers could organize union meetings, immigrants could speak their native languages, and men could discuss (and sometimes even vote in) local elections. Women were barred from saloons and positioned as victims of alcohol and saloon culture.1
Shutting these spaces down was framed as a moral issue, but in reality, the Anti-Saloon League built coalitions with groups who held strong allegiances to other motivations.
At the time, labor unions were gaining traction amidst tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, so business owners had plenty of profit motivation to shut down spaces where the huddled masses could organize together for livable working conditions. More and more people were moving into dense urban areas, including immigrants and people of color. The Anti-Saloon League leveraged the xenophobia and racism already present in the cultural imagination around cities to pit people against one another across gender, race, nationality, and labor positions. And they won.
In 1919, the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale and manufacturing of alcohol was ratified, and an illicit industry was born. People still brewed and drank, but it was illegal now.
Enter: the thriving underground alcohol industry. In 1931, while Prohibition was still in effect, Fortune Magazine published an overview of the U.S. liquor industry, sourced from a broad survey tallying up counts from government raids, estimates from both pro- and anti-prohibitionists, and independent observations. They created an illustrative map of their findings, which I’ve recreated as a locator map:
This map and the accompanying article detail a thriving industry, including small-quantity homebrewers, commercial-scale local manufacturing, and covert international imports. Quality suffered; there was a lot of demand, so distillers would often cut corners on fermentation time when using local ingredients like fruit, corn, mash, and beet sugar. Most production and distribution was highly local. Fortune noted that “long shipments are usually made only to fill up gaps caused either by the death or suddenly stopped operations of a local producer.”
Bigger distillers who didn’t brew locally would pose as varnish or perfume makers in order to divert industrial alcohol from sources that were never intended for human consumption, processing the non-potable and often poisoned product with mineral oil and other unregulated substances. Throughout Prohibition, an estimated 10,000 people died from drinking such diverted alcohol.
After Prohibition was fully enacted, there was backlash. People saw firsthand how the law was enforced unevenly, how the underground industry thrived, and how social ills weren’t resolved. Banning alcohol was not the magic social cure-all it was pitched as. Even people like Pauline Sabin, who originally supported Prohibition, became dissatisfied with the law in action; Sabin actually founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform in the late 1920s, and the 18th Amendment was repealed just a few short years after, in 1933.
In the end, I found that reading up on a historical culture war that ultimately failed was surprisingly reassuring. Some of the same tactics that we see used today did prove ineffective against a populace that was arguably less equipped to fight back; that knowledge is by no means a fix, but maybe a bit of inspiration as we collectively face more modern political struggles.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s history lesson! Feel free to sit down, have a drink of whatever you’d like, and share your thoughts in the comments. And don’t be a stranger, make sure to come back next week for my colleague Linus’ Weekly Chart!
