Prohibition: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra
"‘You have to keep in mind that in the 1830s, in the United States, the the per capita alcohol consumption level was about triple what it is today. Okay. And this caused huge problems. It caused the problems that alcohol always causes. Family issues, particularly. Domestic violence. Inability for men to support families, it's overwhelmingly a male, male issue. And this goes through the society at all sorts of levels. That continues to grow throughout the 19th century, as industrial capitalism becomes the way of the land, more and more in the United States, alcohol becomes more of a problem.
On the one hand, employers and various other social institutions begin to rely more and more on ideas like efficiency, and timing and workers need to show up and they need to be on top of things and they need to work hard in order to make the profits that they expect. That's a lot different than an older sort of rural society that works on much different sort of rhythms. Likewise, industrialization also leads to a lot of dangerous, a lot of dangerous things. Working in a factory with big machines, working around things that can hurt you, and can hurt other people, you know, a drunken railroad engineer is a problem, they can hurt lots of people’...
‘Does the average American, are they very pro prohibition? Or is there a division in society about this?’
‘It depends on where you are. And what you mean by the average American, the idea of the average American is changing, of course, through the 19th century, in the late 19th century. Essentially, prohibition is very, very strongly supported in small town, white, Anglo Saxon Protestant, and again, this is evangelical Protestantism we're talking about. And it’s very strongly supported there. Okay. Evangelical Protestantism, arises in the US. And it's formulated about the same time as the temperance movement, and they go hand in hand with one another. Evangelicals believe, you know, differently than, than a lot of other Christian groups, that sin can be purged from the world. Most Christian organizations believe that sin is, is part of God's design, you shouldn't sin, you can be forgiven for your sins, you should confess your sins, you can do all of those things. But sinfulness is part of God's design. Resist it, you don't get rid of it. Evangelicals, on the other hand, believe that sinfulness can be purged. That sin can be purged from the world. And I think there's a reason to do that. Because if they're successful, that will help to bring about the second coming of Jesus. Okay. And so they go to work doing that, and they go to work against the things that they think are sinful.
Among those things, for instance, particularly in the north, is racial slavery. Slavery, enslaved African Americans in the south. And they find it simple because it interferes with one's ability to decide. And again, for evangelicals, you know, the, salvation is a matter of personal choice. Still today, you know, evangelical meetings and revivals, they will say, who here is ready to take Jesus Christ as their personal Savior today? All right. And so that matter of choice requires someone to be free. So in the case of slavery, it's clear that, that, you know, slavery is sinful. It impedes choice and along with all the other things that it does. But you can be a slave to other things than just a southern slave master. And that is, you could pretty much be a slave to the bottle, as well...
Where isn't it backed? Well, that would be in the big cities... we're in a period of very high immigration, and particularly in the later part of the 19th century, what we see is the so called New Immigration, and the New Immigration, it doesn't mean that immigration is new. What it means is that the sources of immigration are different. And rather than the older sort of traditional immigration from northern and western Europe, what you see is a lot more people from Southern Europe, and a lot more people from Eastern Europe, particularly, you see, let's say Italian Catholics, and Russian Jews…
Alcohol and drinking is much different in Europe than it is in the US. And so a lot of those cultures bring their drinking practices with them. Italians drinking wine, also Jewish families and wine, you know, sacramental wine used in various things... we're making this sound very much city-country, that sort of old, old world, white Anglo Saxon Protestant versus the newer world.
There were also a lot of other people that we would consider to be progressive today that were very much in favor of alcohol prohibition. Booker T. Washington, the African American leader, you know, that the late 19th, early 20th century, the first real sort of major voice of black America after slavery, he was absolutely in favor of it, because he thought it held back African Americans... other, you know, progressive figures, a lot of people who thought of themselves as very sort of informed in terms of science and health, looked at it in health terms and said, no, this is very bad for people. And we really need to, we really need to control this, you know, other sort of organizations like that. The International Workers of the World, which were really very strong left wing movement, they wanted Revolution and the communal ownership of the means of production. They were for Prohibition, because again, it held workers back’...
‘Did people at the time, they really thought it would work?’
‘They did think it would work. I suppose for us looking back, we would think they were incredibly naive. And maybe they were but people in the temperance movement, thought that alcohol was something that had been foisted on the American people by, by these nasty industrialists. By the brewers, by the distillers and by the the saloon owners. In order to get rich. And they took advantage of, particularly of men, they brought them in, they, they they liquored them up, and they created habits in them. And they really thought that if you just stopped that, if you stopped them, that the Light of the Lord would shine through, everybody would straighten up, all of those rough men would stay home and bounce the baby on their knee, and everything would be fine. It's just stop the distillers and the brewers. They never seem to understand that drinking for the majority of people isn't a problem. And that it's important in their lives, particularly the immigrant communities. You know, you have lots of people supporting Prohibition because they thought that this was really hurting the sort of immigrant working class and holding them back. But they never thought to ask those people about what it meant to sit down with your family at dinner and of course, you had a glass of wine with your, with your meals and that sort of thing. Or the importance of sacramental wine or whatever. They never thought to ask them about it. But they just thought that it was holding them back’...
‘Al Capone is the most famous of the gangsters of the 1920s. It's not because what he did is so particularly different than what lots of others were doing. It's, it's because he loved publicity. And he was happy to do interviews, he was happy to talk freely about what he was doing. He dressed up in, you know, Santa Claus outfits for local children. He was happy to be in the newspapers, he had no problem with that at all’...
‘Was Al Capone's brother really a Prohibition agent?’
‘Yeah, he was. Al Capone comes from a large family. He had nine siblings. His older siblings were born back in Sicily, including his older brother. His older brother grew up in the US, he was ashamed of his accent. He thought it held him back. He did everything he could to lose that accent and he idolized cowboys. He changed his name then, to, to William Hart, Two-Gun Hart., he became known as. Did Al Capone know him well? Probably not that well. He was, he was quite a bit older and he becomes a federal agent. A Prohibition agent and is known again for extremely strongarm tough tactics. Two-Gun Hart, the guy who patterns himself on cowboys and shoots up, you know bootleggers, is his reputation. He ends up living the rest of his life as a agent on Native American reservations. Bureau of Indian Affairs’...
‘We've had a couple of questions sent in from listeners to do with taxes’...
‘It's a huge amount of money that was lost from the taxation of alcohol. But was there a compensatory tax? There was indeed, let me explain this. The brewers who, the Brewers Association that I mentioned before, led by Adolphus Busch, Adolphus Busch was a man who thought that he could turn back the entire temperance wave himself. And he could do it basically through bribery. And through the vast amount of money that he threw around. Again, he is the, he runs the Anheuser Busch brewery, which of course, still exists today with a very famous brand of beer, the most famous American brand of beer, right? And he thought that he could turn back the entire thing. Why was he so confident? Well, for a lot of reasons, they could do things like control newspapers, again, the amount of advertising, the amount of money they could throw around, he made huge amounts of money, it didn't bother him in the least. Throw around whatever it took to get their way. But the thing that he always had going, right, that the Brewers had, was the tax, because there were years when the US government made as much as 70% of their income on alcohol tax, and he knew there was no way that they would ever ban alcohol as long as it was that kind of a source of wealth.
But a very bad thing happened to them in 1913. And that was the passage of an income tax for the first time. Right. And so US income taxes suddenly come into play. The dry forces led by Wayne Wheeler, who again was absolutely ruthless, he seemed to know everything, knew that that could happen. Right. So who's pushing income tax in the US? Well, the anti saloon movement for one, because Wheeler knew that the moment that they get in the, an income tax, that that means that the dependence on alcohol tax would fall through the floor as it did. Right? And it made it made it possible then to do that, along with, you know, some of the other factors that we talked about. And, and particularly the fact that the Brewers Association conducted its business in German, they were behind Germany in the First World War, they were all about German culture... the government lost a huge amount of money in alcohol tax, but they made it and more back through income tax...
The legacy of Prohibition, you know, people look at it as this great failure. I think that we need to nuance that a lot, we can do it by looking at the, the legacy. On the one hand, if the goal is to decrease alcohol consumption, okay. It's successful, initially, at least, alcohol consumption drops by about a third in the United States. People who drank drank more, it was dangerous in many ways. You could buy you know, if you were buying the branded alcohol from you know, as a reputable, reputable criminals, you could get anything. And there are instances of people drinking horrible things, and something called Ginger Jake, in the Midwest that was laced with wood alcohol and caused a horrible nerve disorder called Jake Leg. That's sort of the most famous instance. But it was, it was tough, but people who drink, they tend to drink more.
Nonetheless, drinking levels dropped, it took until the 1970s until the average consumption of alcohol was at the same level it was before Prohibition in the US, which is striking. And I don't think that people very often realize the impact that it does have on alcohol consumption. It caused a lot of other things to change. The saloon never came back. Right, the rough male only fighting, drinking, you know, disaster, that I say disaster, you know, often and certainly in the eyes of temperance people it had its good sides as well, union organizing, finding out who's hiring and where, that kind of thing is, is done through saloons, as well. But nonetheless, the saloon never comes back. Women continue to go out to drink. This does have a calming element on men's drinking, the fighting, as bad as it can be, all of that is, nonetheless drops. Quite a lot.
Many states in many areas still have very strong anti alcohol laws. You know, it's different in different states. People who have gone on a ski holiday in Utah, for instance, will know that you have to buy alcohol from a state store. Restaurants, you have to go to a package shop in order to bring your bottle with you, as Prohibition laws often do, you often end up drinking more, you know, you walk into a restaurant with an entire bottle of vodka and all they're doing is charging you, you know, orange juice to, to mix your vodka, and you end up sitting there and you can end up drinking a lot more. I, you know, went to high school and university in Oregon, and at least then, it may still be the same, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, run, ran state liquor stores, and that's where you'd have to go, you could buy beer in the grocery store. But but spirits, you have to buy in a packet shop. So that kind of regulation is still there.
You know, there's actually a lot more regulation of alcohol after Prohibition than then during it. Things like age, things like opening hours, all of that kind of stuff can be controlled when there is, when it's legal, and the government can go in and regulate it. When it was illegal, it was everywhere, and everything. Anybody could could get a hold of whatever they can get a hold of, because it's all criminal anyway. Right. So all of those sort of controls on drinking, are there.
And also, I think it's important to keep in mind that the temperance movement is still very, very active. Still around us. You know, when you teach these things or talk to students about it, people will laugh and think, oh, yeah, time when the, you know, the country, people and their pitchforks all got angry, and they tried to ruin the city people's fun. That's all gone now, though, isn't it? Well, it's, the temperance movement is still very active, and it's still very powerful. We have it in Britain. Scientific temperance, though, rather than moral, tends to be dominant. You know, we hear all the time about 21 units, 14 units, whatever the unit number of drinks that we're supposed to drink, in terms of health is, that's, that's scientific temperance, and it's still, you know, clearly there. There's also moral temperance.
Again, I'll, you know, stick with the British examples, you know, how many times do you watch a documentary on television, about binge drinking, and there are the youth there, they are rolling in the streets. Again, it's completely sexualized, young women wearing, you know, not enough clothing to keep warm, you know, on a cold Newcastle evening, let's say. And there they are really drunk. And again, there's the moral thing about heavy drinking. Are these real problems? Sure, at some level they are. But again, we still have those same kinds of things.
I suppose the last point, you know, to make is, you know, thinking about that, particularly in the US context, is that the biggest temperance organization in the US has, the WCTU still exists. And they're still in the temperance game, although they're much smaller than they were. But it's something called Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And they were incredibly influential in the late 20th century, started by a woman whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver. And they did things like push through laws in the US, where many states allowed people to drink at the age of 18.
But Mothers Against Drunk Driving went to work with incredibly well orchestrated television campaigns, advertising campaigns, and they pushed through legislation that basically said, you don't get any federal highway money unless you raise the drinking age in your state to 21. So the state's free to say you can drink at 18, but you won't get any federal highway money. Well, needless to say all 50 states have, put in the age of 21, as the legal drinking age, so those organizations still exist, still exist with us today’"