- Okrent, Daniel.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
New York: Scribner, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-7432-7702-0.
-
The ratification of the
Eighteenth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution
in 1919, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation
of intoxicating liquors” marked the transition of the U.S.
Federal government into a nanny state, which occupied itself with
the individual behaviour of its citizens. Now, certainly, attempts
to legislate morality and regulate individual behaviour were
commonplace in North America long before the United States came
into being, but these were enacted at the state, county, or municipality
level. When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, it exclusively
constrained the actions of government, not of
individual citizens, and with the sole exception of the
Thirteenth
Amendment, which abridged the “freedom” to hold
people in slavery and involuntary servitude, this remained
the case into the twentieth century. While bans on liquor were
adopted in various jurisdictions as early as 1840, it simply never
occurred to many champions of prohibition that a nationwide ban,
written into the federal constitution, was either appropriate or
feasible, especially since taxes on alcoholic beverages accounted
for as much as forty percent of federal tax revenue in the years
prior to the introduction of the income tax, and imposition of total
prohibition would zero out the second largest source of federal
income after the tariff.
As the Progressive movement gained power, with its ambitions of
continental scale government and imposition of uniform standards
by a strong, centralised regime, it found itself allied with
an improbable coalition including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union;
the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches; advocates of
women's suffrage; the Anti-Saloon League; Henry Ford; and the Ku Klux Klan.
Encouraged by the apparent success of “war socialism”
during World War I and empowered by enactment of the Income Tax
via the
Sixteenth
Amendment, providing another source of revenue to replace
that of excise taxes on liquor, these players were motivated in
the latter years of the 1910s to impose their agenda upon the entire
country in as permanent a way as possible: by a constitutional
amendment. Although the supermajorities required were daunting
(two thirds in the House and Senate to submit, three quarters of state
legislatures to ratify), if a prohibition amendment could be
pushed over the bar (if you'll excuse the term), opponents would
face what was considered an insuperable task to reverse it, as
it would only take 13 dry states to block repeal.
Further motivating the push not just for a constitutional
amendment, but enacting one as soon as possible, were the
rapid demographic changes underway in the U.S. Support for
prohibition was primarily rural, in southern and central states,
Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon. During the 1910s, population was
shifting from farms to urban areas, from the midland toward the coasts,
and the immigrant population of Germans, Italians, and Irish
who were famously fond of drink was burgeoning. This meant
that the electoral landscape following reapportionment after
the 1920 census would be far less receptive to the foes of
Demon Rum.
One must never underestimate the power of an idea whose time
has come, regardless of how stupid and counterproductive it
might be. And so it came to pass that the Eighteenth Amendment
was ratified by the 36th state: Utah, appropriately, on
January 16th, 1919, with nationwide Prohibition to come into
effect a year hence. From the outset, it was pretty
obvious to many astute observers what was about happen. An
Army artillery captain serving in France wrote to his fiancée
in Missouri, “It looks to me like the moonshine business
is going to be pretty good in the land of the Liberty Loans
and Green Trading Stamps, and some of us want to get in on the
ground floor. At least we want to get there in time to lay
in a supply for future consumption.” Captain Harry S.
Truman ended up pursuing a different (and probably less lucrative
career), but was certainly prescient about the growth industry
of the coming decade.
From the very start, Prohibition was a theatre of the absurd.
Since it was enforced by a federal statute, the
Volstead Act,
enforcement, especially in states which did not have their
own state Prohibition laws, was the responsibility of federal
agents within the Treasury Department, whose head,
Andrew Mellon,
was a staunch opponent of Prohibition. Enforcement was always
absurdly underfunded compared to the magnitude of the bootlegging
industry and their customers (the word “scofflaw” entered
the English language to describe them). Federal Prohibition officers
were paid little, but were nonetheless highly prized patronage
jobs, as their holders could often pocket ten times their salary
in bribes to look the other way.
Prohibition unleashed the American talent for ingenuity,
entrepreneurship, and the do-it-yourself spirit. While it was illegal
to manufacture liquor for sale or to sell it, possession and
consumption were perfectly legal, and families were allowed to make up
to 200 gallons (which should suffice even for the larger, more thirsty
households of the epoch) for their own use. This led to a thriving
industry in California shipping grapes eastward for householders to
mash into “grape juice” for their own use, being careful,
of course, not to allow it to ferment or to sell some of their 200
gallon allowance to the neighbours. Later on, the “Vino Sano
Grape Brick” was marketed nationally. Containing dried crushed
grapes, complete with the natural yeast on the skins, you just added
water, waited a while, and hoisted a glass to American innovation.
Brewers, not to be outdone, introduced “malt syrup”, which
with the addition of yeast and water, turned into beer in the home
brewer's basement. Grocers stocked everything the thirsty householder
needed to brew up case after case of Old Frothingslosh, and brewers
remarked upon how profitable it was to outsource fermentation and
bottling to the customers.
For those more talented in manipulating the law than fermenting
fluids, there were a number of opportunities as well.
Sacramental wine was exempted from Prohibition, and
wineries which catered to Catholic and Jewish congregations
distributing such wines prospered. Indeed, Prohibition enforcers
noted they'd never seen so many rabbis before, including some named
Patrick Houlihan and James Maguire. Physicians and dentists were
entitled to prescribe liquor for medicinal purposes, and the
lucrative fees for writing such prescriptions and for pharmacists
to fill them rapidly caused hard liquor to enter the
materia medica for numerous
maladies, far beyond the traditional prescription as
snakebite medicine. While many pre-Prohibition bars re-opened
as speakeasies, others prospered by replacing “Bar”
with ”Drug Store” and filling medicinal whiskey
prescriptions for the same clientele.
Apart from these dodges, the vast majority of Americans
slaked their thirst with bootleg booze, either domestic
(and sometimes lethal), or smuggled from Canada or across
the ocean. The obscure island of
St. Pierre,
a French possession
off the coast of Canada, became a prosperous
entrepôt for
reshipment of Canadian liquor legally exported to
“France”, then re-embarked on ships headed
for “Rum Row”, just outside the territorial limit
of the U.S. East Coast. Rail traffic into Windsor, Ontario, just
across the Detroit River from the eponymous city, exploded, as
boxcar after boxcar unloaded cases of clinking glass bottles
onto boats bound for…well, who knows? Naturally, with
billions and billions of dollars of tax-free income to be had,
it didn't take long for criminals to stake their claims
to it. What was different, and deeply appalling to the moralistic
champions of Prohibition, is that a substantial portion of the
population who opposed Prohibition did not despise them, but
rather respected them as making their “money by supplying a
public demand”, in the words of one
Alphonse Capone,
whose public relations machine kept him in the public eye.
As the absurdity of the almost universal scorn and disobedience of
Prohibition grew (at least among the urban chattering classes, which
increasingly dominated journalism and politics at the time),
opinion turned toward ways to undo its increasingly evident pernicious
consequences. Many focussed upon amending the Volstead Act to
exempt beer and light wines from the definition of “intoxicating
liquors”—this would open a safety valve, and at least allow
recovery of the devastated legal winemaking and brewing industries. The
difficulty of actually repealing the Eighteenth Amendment deterred many
of the most ardent supporters of that goal. As late as September
1930, Senator Morris Sheppard, who drafted the Eighteenth Amendment,
said “There is a much chance of repealing the Eighteenth
Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars
with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”
But when people have had enough (I mean, of intrusive government,
not illicit elixir), it's amazing what they can motivate a hummingbird
to do! Less than two years later, the
Twenty-first Amendment,
repealing Prohibition, was passed by the Congress, and on December 5th,
1933, it was ratified by the 36th state (appropriately, but
astonishingly, Utah), thus putting an end to what had not only become
generally seen as a farce, but also a direct cause of sanguinary lawlessness
and scorn for the rule of law. The cause of repeal was greatly aided not only
by the thirst of the populace, but also by the thirst of their
government for revenue, which had collapsed due to plunging income tax
receipts as the Great Depression deepened, along with falling tariff income
as international trade contracted. Reinstating liquor excise taxes and
collecting corporate income tax from brewers, winemakers, and distillers
could help ameliorate the deficits from New Deal spending programs.
In many ways, the adoption and repeal of Prohibition represented
a phase transition in the relationship between the federal government
and its citizens. In its adoption, they voted, by the most difficult of
constitutional standards, to enable direct enforcement of individual
behaviour by the national government, complete with its own police
force independent of state and local control. But at least they
acknowledged that this breathtaking change could only be accomplished
by a direct revision of the fundamental law of the republic, and that
reversing it would require the same—a constitutional
amendment, duly proposed and ratified. In the years that followed,
the federal government used its power to tax (many partisans of
Repeal expected the Sixteenth Amendment to also be repealed but,
alas, this was not to be) to promote and deter all kinds
of behaviour through tax incentives and charges, and before long
the federal government was simply enacting legislation which
directly criminalised individual behaviour without a moment's
thought about its constitutionality, and those who challenged
it were soon considered nutcases.
As the United States increasingly comes to resemble a continental
scale theatre of the absurd, there may be a lesson to be learnt
from the final days of Prohibition. When something is unsustainable,
it won't be sustained. It's almost impossible to predict
when the breaking point will come—recall the hummingbird with
the Washington Monument in tow—but when things snap, it doesn't
take long for the unimaginable new to supplant the supposedly
secure status quo. Think about this when you contemplate issues
such as immigration, the Euro, welfare state spending, bailouts
of failed financial institutions and governments, and the multitude
of big and little prohibitions and intrusions into personal
liberty of the pervasive nanny state—and root for the hummingbird.
In the Kindle edition, all of the photographic
illustrations are collected at the very end of the book, after the
index—don't overlook them.
June 2010 