November 22, 2024: AmericanTemperanceStudying: Prohibition

[150 yearsago this week, the Women’s Christian TemperanceUnion was founded at anational convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handfulof key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874convention!]

On threegreat scholarly books that can help us analyze an incredibly multi-facetedhistorical period and its many legacies.

1)     Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Riseof the American State (2015): Yesterday I argued that theAnti-Saloon League’s successful pressure politics were instrumental in finallyachieving the movement’s longstanding goal of nationwide Prohibition. That wasabsolutely a factor, but it’s also far from a coincidence that the 18thAmendment passed Congress in 1917 (the same year as theEspionage Act) and was ratified in 1919 (the same year that the post-WWI PalmerRaids began). As McGirr argues convincingly, World War I specificallyand many wartime contexts more broadly were crucial to turning Prohibition froma movement priority into a nationwide policy—and while that particular policyended with theamendment’s repeal in 1933, many of those wartime contexts have enduredin the 90 years since.

2)     Stephen Moore’s Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox ofProhibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland(2014):Another crucial legacy of the Prohibition era was the creation of—and yes, Imean that precisely; not just newfound attention to, but in many ways thecreation of—the U.S.-Canadian border as a spacefor law enforcement concerns and activity. My paternal grandfather and hisparents moved across that border and into New Hampshire in the mid-1910s withno hassle or legal attention of any kind; but just a few years later, thatwould have been impossible, and as Moore argues Prohibition enforcement was thereason why. While the U.S.-Mexico border was not as much of a Prohibition focalpoint, it’s no coincidence that it was likewise during the1920s that that border became genuinely patrolled. The end ofProhibition was only the start of U.S. border patrols, of course.

3)     Marni Davis’ Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Ageof Prohibition (2012): I wrote a bit in yesterday’s postabout the interconnections between white supremacy, race, and Prohibition,especially in the alliance between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan.The 1920s Klan focused equally on anti-Black and anti-immigrant domesticterrorisms, of course; and as Davis’ book traces powerfully, so too wasProhibition driven by anti-immigrant and anti-Semiticnarratives. I’ve argued for many years in many different settings that the1920s represented a nadir of American racism, xenophobia, and exclusion—andyes, I’m well aware that this is a very competitive contest; but the more Ilearn, the more convinced I am that this was indeed a stunning low point—andit’s crucially important that we include Prohibition in our understanding ofthose elements of 1920s America.

WCTU postthis weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?