Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920

Studies in Legal History

by Richard F. Hamm

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture--that is, their ideas about what law was and how it could be used.

Originally published in 1995.

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Genres: History

352 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a brilliant look at an under-studied time and movement in American history. It's hard to remember how popular Prohibition was -- at least in some areas of the country. This is an area where history is written by the winners.

Hamm tells a fascinating story of the fights between "pragmatists" and moralist/absolutists. In particular he is very taken with the absolutists' Mosaic conception of law, one that still exists among many people. It's a little disappointing because the book seems to run out of momentum by the end. Hamm does not seem particularly interested in the ultimate resolution: a constitutional amendment. There aren't many, but that doesn't capture the internecine struggle that this book focuses most on.