Interesting interview today with Daniel Okrent who wrote
Last Call about the gestation of the temperance movement and the passage of the 18th Amendment.
From an interview with Okrent at
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Daniel-Okrent/ba-p/2564 .
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I thought Prohibition was simply a movement of pinched, narrow people who, as Mencken put it, were worried that somewhere, somebody else was having fun. What I found is that there were very, very good reasons for the movement. The amount of drunkenness -- particularly at the edge of the frontier, in the Midwest, in the rural areas -- was terrifying. Women had no legal rights at the time, and husbands were off getting drunk, drinking away the family money, not doing their work, coming home, hitting their wives, treating the kids badly, sometimes bringing home venereal disease from the prostitutes connected to the taverns. It was a real, real problem. So beginning to build a movement around the idea of home protection, as the Women's Christian Temperance Union called it, that was really, really important. I think Prohibition was a really bad idea -- but I think there were really good reasons for the nation to want to cut down on the amount of drinking that people did in the 19th century."
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It begins with Susan B. Anthony. It couldn't be more perfect. Susan B. Anthony is involved in temperance -- that's her movement in the late 1840s, as it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton's, and various others'. Anthony got up at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Sons of Temperance to give a speech, and she was told she couldn't give a speech; only the sons of temperance could, and she was a daughter, not welcome. That enabled her to realize how politically powerless women were.
So when she and Stanton and others initiate a movement to get women the vote, one of the reasons they want it is because they hate the presence of liquor in American life. The two movements really merge by the 1870s-1880s. The Prohibitionists are supporting the idea of suffrage, and vice versa. We might think of the Prohibitionists as being narrow and conservative, but in fact, they were very progressive on many social issues: the betterment of women's condition in the home, child welfare, any number of other things.
The two amendments go into the Constitution within one year of another; they are really siblings, the right for women to vote and the limitation of people's ability to get alcohol.
In fact, the income tax comes into play at both ends of Prohibition.
Up until 1912-1913, as much as 40% of the federal government's domestic revenue came from excise tax on liquor. The excise tax on liquor goes back to the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; then it was used again to finance the Civil War, and stayed in place.
You couldn't have a government without this revenue, because there was no income tax -- the income tax had been declared unconstitutional in the 1890s by the Supreme Court.
So the Populists, who were the primary movers behind the income tax movement, say, "Look, if we can get income tax, that will enable the Prohibitionists to get their Prohibition in, because the government won't need that excise money any longer." The Prohibitionists realize the same thing, and the two groups make an alliance, just as the Prohibitionists and the suffragists did.A third factor (I'm getting ahead of your questions now) is World War One.
The anti-German feeling during World War One was incredibly strong; the Prohibitionists brilliantly took advantage of this by pointing out that all the brewers had names like Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch and Pabst. They demonized them as agents of the Kaiser trying to destroy America's will with their poison, alcohol. Given the intensity of anti-German feeling in the U.S., that's what finally put it over. So you have these three things that seem unrelated -- suffrage, the income tax, and World War One. Their combination is what gives us Prohibition.
Yes, there were people who cared desperately about Prohibition, but it was also a way to rally around a set of issues that had to do with who was going to control the country.
We haven't talked about the strongly xenophobic aspect of Prohibition. There was the White, Protestant, middle of the country movement against the growing Catholic and Jewish populations of the large cities of the East and the upper Midwest. Whose country was this? Prohibition became the issue around which the anti-city, anti-immigrant world could gather.
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