Prohibition: busting myths about the ban on booze - History Extra podcast | Acast
"‘In the book’s introduction, there's a subtitle isn't there, which is everything you know about prohibition is wrong. I think that's a good place to start. How so?’
‘Well, it's, it, the conventional histories that we have about prohibition and prohibitionism, are just based so much more on what we think should be true, rather than what is actually true. It's got that that truthiness feel to it. And so here in the United States, you know, if you want an explanation, you know, sort of the conventional explanation for prohibitionism is it was white rural evangelical Bible thumping Protestants, who are hell bent on telling you what you can and can't drink, taking away your freedom and liberty to drink and so on.
And so that seems so, nowadays, especially it seems so anathema to our own self image as freedom loving individuals, and what a horrible thing, so that we can't really wrap our minds around the history of it today... [history is] also trying to figure out why we cannot and sort of refuse to come to terms with that history, and instead, contort it and distort it in all these these different ways...
One of the problems that we have is that we've built this narrative that temperance and prohibition was about alcohol, was about the stuff that's in the bottle, that they were enemies of alcohol, they were enemies of drinkers. But in reality, they were against the industry, they were against what they called the liquor traffic… they would say very clearly, they would say, you know, I'm not against your right to drink, I'm not against taking away, I'm against trafficking in an illegal substance or a highly addictive substance that would get people hooked on, you know, this substance and then just suck them dry...
We shouldn't have to contort our histories to understand why, you know, the crowning achievement of prohibition happened during the Progressive Era, right. It was a fundamentally progressive move, to rein in the excesses of predatory capitalism that would get people addicted for profit, kind of like the the opioid epidemic that we have nowadays...
I talk about it as the Ted Danson effect, because we had, you know, actor Ted Danson, this, this show called Cheers. Where, you know, the bartender’s your friends, he's there to, you know, you tell him your troubles, he offers you a beer, and if you've had too much, they pack you away in a taxi and send you home. There was none of that back then, you know, the the idea that the the bartender was your friend, it was it was crazy. The bartender was the, he was the local pawnbroker, he was, you know, usually he ran the whorehouse, you know, he was there to take everything that you had. And when you had nothing left, kick you out the door. Right? You know, he didn't really care much about you.
And so the one anecdote that really kind of blew my mind that kind of hammered home this point that hey, you know, when we're talking about saloon history, we're not talking about contemporary, well regulated pubs and bars was the anecdote of Carrie Nation. She's sort of this avatar of prohibitionism, and temperance, this white, Kansas, evangelical, you know, bible thumper, who walked into the saloons and smashed them up. And she was very clear why she was doing it, because they were operating illegally and making money in opposition to the law. But the thing that struck home to me is that her saloon smashing, and so sending the drunks to flights and all that sort of stuff. She usually did that between 730 and eight o'clock in the morning. You know, it wasn't at night that these guys were to drink. They were there all through the night. They were drinking through the next morning'...
‘So why do you think that we have got this so wrong? Why do you think that any idea of Prohibition as a progressive idea has been lost and replaced with this idea of it being reactionary puritanical, crazy, even as you say?’
‘Yeah, it's I think part of it is that, you know, it's our self image. It's sort of the psychology of others. Let's put it that way. Right? We are, our self image is built upon who we are not. So we fought a cold war against the Soviet Union. So we're not communist. And we fought World War Two against Hitler. So we're not fascist, right. And so we're freedom loving all this. And so it, that's just kind of our own self image. And so when it comes to looking in our own history at this particular elements of temperance and prohibitionism, it seems so illiberal in many ways, right?...
It was about small groups, reactionary groups like the Ku Klux Klan for disciplining African Americans and their leisure and taking that away, it's like, okay, but the KKK came about in 1907. But most of the country is, states of the American south were already dry by then. And their biggest proponents were African Americans. So that that doesn't make any sense, you know?...
There are a dozen other countries around the globe that instituted prohibition, all at about the same time. And let's figure out what they're all about. Right? And so I start the book and look kind of going Empire by Empire around the globe, starting with the first prohibition country, which was Russia, Imperial Russia, not a lot of Midwestern Bible thumping evangelical Protestants in Russia, right? But they were the first. So if that's your explanation, you're going to have to accommodate for all these different experiences...
Anybody who was against the Tsar, including guys like Vladimir Lenin, and, and Leon Trotsky, and so on, tended to be temperance guys tend to be prohibitionist because they were against, not against taking a drink. But against this predatory capitalism. This is how the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. And they were very, very clear about this. So you find that sort of dynamic in Russia, and then I look at Sweden, I look at Belgium and look at sort of social democrats and same sort of arguments. And then we'll look at at the German Empire, Austro Hungarian empire, same dynamics, three chapters on the British Empire, same sort of dynamics, that these great empires were built upon, selling well, I guess, in some cases, opium to China, but also selling liquor to, you know, the folks in India. Selling booze in South Africa. You know, selling alcohol in Canada and in the United States. That was the mechanism of, of, you know, imperialism in many ways. And so when you recognize that, you start to see that the movement, you know, for temperance and prohibition, it was, it was an anti colonial, it was an anti Imperial, and again, very progressive movement all around the globe, right? And so that was that was kind of like, okay, this is completely different from what I'm being told from this single case study in the United States, tells me one thing. But these dozen or so case studies and the rest of the globe, paint a completely different picture...
You find that these disempowered communities, beginning with the Native Americans, are the strongest proponents of prohibition, starting from the very beginning, starting even from, you know, before the beginning of our country as sort of an independent republic, you had Native Americans railing against this liquor traffic, because they saw it was this predatory capitalism...
All these abolitionists, whether they were free white abolitionists, or African Americans, like Frederick Douglass, tended to be very vocal on this question of the liquor traffic, and they saw it as being the same sort of slavery, especially after, you know, the Civil War. You ended up having people like, like Frederick Douglass, arguing that we have to have prohibition, because it would, you know, it doesn't make sense to take the chains of bondage of all these millions of African Americans, and take them out of the hands of the white slave owner, and then just give those same chains over to the white tavern keeper. You know, it was the same sort of bondage and they said, if we're really going to liberate ourselves, we have to liberate ourselves from from addiction. And if we're going to achieve sort of a truer sense of freedom, we have to remove these impediments that are keeping us down and those were something that was applicable not only to African American communities but to white communities as well...
Joshua Vandruff… he refused to stop selling liquor to the Native American tribes. Right. And so, so Black Hawk pled with him, he was very accommodating to the settlers, you know, they tried to cohabitate and he's like, okay, we can get along just fine. Just don't sell liquor to my people, and don't take their furs from them and don't barter with them. And everybody seemed to be okay with that, except for this one guy who ended up building an entire tavern… Eventually, Black Hawk takes a band of tribesmen over to Vandruff’s tavern, and smashes it… it was very clear that he was against, not against settlement. It wasn't against, you know, white people who were around him. It was against the people who were getting his people drunk…
Vanruff, instead of talking to sort of the local military installations that are there, he goes overland to the Governor of Illinois, and concocts this whole story about how these native savages are threatening his life and all these horrible, horrible things. And the governor, you know, without the authorization of the American government, by the way, essentially raises a militia and goes to war against this and that's the start of the Black Hawk war. It’s started over alcohol… if you go back through most of American history with all these bloody Indian Wars, pretty much every one of them starts with alcohol in some way. Starts with somebody getting Native Americans drunk, taking advantage of them, taking their their food, their clothing, whatever, and then sort of returns back and forth, you know, eye for an eye. And then the next thing you know, 10s of hundreds, maybe even 1000s of people are dead, right. And so, incredibly, a lot of those cases of you know, we see them as Indian Wars, were temperance wars, they were prohibition wars, but since they happened to non white Americans outside the usual purview of our white prohibition history, we don't think about it in those terms. So we don't get told that it's in those terms.’...
‘How do you think that we should alter our image of temperance campaigners?’
‘I hope that we stop vilifying them, you know, and seeing them as somehow, you know, these these enemies of freedom and these enemies of liberty, because they weren't, right. You know, in many cases, they are the people that we celebrate as the the great champions of freedom. So looking out through American history, you see that, you know, the great proponents of temperance and prohibitionism, were people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. And those are the four people whose faces we chiseled into Mount Rushmore, right, those are our most American of Americans for good and for ill, they are not some sort of anathema. Those are, you know, and they're not sort of some anti freedom cabal. Those are the people who were pushing for the removal of this barrier, that would allow people to achieve a greater freedom in their own understandings, and in greater liberty that way. So I hope that we stop vilifying them and treating them as some sort of aberration from our past and start to understand temperance, not as a bad thing. But as part and parcel of that larger, not only national movement in the United States, but international movement of, of greater liberty, of greater human rights. So, you know, Frederick Douglass had this famous line that all great reforms go together. And by that he meant temperance, and suffragism, and abolitionism. All of them were about expanding human freedom, rather than constraining it.’
‘So after looking back at all of this history and reframing the story of prohibition, do you think that prohibition could ever make a comeback?’
‘I don't think so. I don't think, you know, it comes up in some context. It comes up in terms of our contemporary political rhetoric, that it's like a cudgel, it's a one word term that you can use to apply to anything you don't like, to any government program, you don't like that conceivably infringes upon individual freedom. You know, and it just shuts down all debate. Right. You know, so that could be anti maskers. Anti vaccine. People say, Well, this is like prohibition. Right? This is an impingement upon my freedom. When people talking about abortion rights, you know, they say, well, you know, restrictions on abortions are against my freedom, right. And it's not even partisan, right, everybody, anti gun rights, or, you know, we had restrictions on in New York City on soda, right? Oh, this tyranny, right. And it also has that sense in it, that it's this kind of teleology that if I call it prohibition, not only is it a bad program, but it's also destined historically to fail, right? So it kind of puts you in the right, and they are in the wrong, right. So.
But I don't think, you know, as much as it gets utilized nowadays, I can't imagine that there would be a contemporary prohibition, precisely because our understandings of freedom and liberty have changed. And that's kind of the big takeaway of the book, aside from the history that we kind of dredge up, that we may not have known before. Is this understanding that, hey, part of the reason that we can't understand temperance and prohibition is that not because of anything that they did, but it's our inability to understand it, and our own understandings of freedom and liberty, have changed dramatically over time, especially since World War Two, with Thatcherism in the UK, and Reaganomics, here in the United States, we now have this understanding that any impingement upon my economic freedom is necessarily an impingement upon my political freedom. And that was never the case before then, that those were very separate things for people to understand. But if you look at our founding documents, if you look at the Constitution, there's no right to buy anything, there's not a right to go drinking at a bar, there's not a right to go get a haircut. But those are things that people say, you know, that's an infringement upon my constitutional rights, that I can't get these sorts of things. It's like, no, that's not those are, those are economic liberties, that has nothing to do with your rights as a citizen.’"
Is it still racist if it's blacks and native Americans who want to stop their own people from drinking?
Clearly the US was not influenced by the rest of the world. Then again, this is fake news about the Black Hawk war, since there was a treaty and land dispute that began many years before Vandruff ever settled in the area so maybe more of his claims are fake news too (maybe that's why it's one of the few episodes which seem to have disappeared from the website)
This is basically making a case for positive liberty. But then, one could claim that one is banning, say, the internet to make people "more free"
