The History Book Club discussion

Ooops.............was that a spoiler? Sorry....I thought I was just expanding on some of the things mentioned in the book. I will make it a spoiler. Thanks for calling it to my attention. :>

It was on the border - I think everybody was expanding which is great actually but just put it in the spoiler

You can at the top indicate what part of the book the spoiler is from.

Chapter One (page 23)

(view spoiler)[spoiler alert (hide spoiler)]

Jill wrote: The "drys' took advantage of the racial environment of the country at the turn of the century and used scare tactics about drunken blacks violating white women.

I guess it's an occupational hazard when writing a book about Prohibition to see things through that lens, but I was dubious of the numerous implications that disenfranchising Black Southern voters was so closely related to alcohol issues.

See, for example, Chapter 4 (p. 63) of the Nook Edition:
(view spoiler)[
[Hoke Smith] pushed through "a one-two combination of laws that took both ballot and bottle away from the state's black citizens. . . once the ballot was ripped from the hands for black men who might have voted wet -- the passage of harsh local-option laws was a snap."

One reads this and can't help thinking that if black Georgians had only been more "dry," they never would have lost the vote, which is not my understanding of history (and as is made clear later when Hobson loses a Senate race to a "wet" candidate who is able to tar him with not being racist enough.)

I felt the same way reading about the Income Tax -- as if the purpose of the tax was to pave the way for Prohibition. Just like with Jim Crow voting laws, I don't get the sense that the connection to Prohibition is as close as we are being led to believe.
(hide spoiler)]

Chapter 5 (pg. 74

(view spoiler)[ I was rather surprised and somewhat dubious about the veracity of the comment attributed to Lloyd George..."We are fighting the Germans, the Austrians, and drink and the deadliest of these is drink" (hide spoiler)]

Thanks everyone.

Response to Matthew:
(view spoiler)[It is interesting about the connection of Prohibition and racism. I didn't know this coming in. I agree with what you are saying, and I think Prohibition was one of many elements in the Jim Crow story, and it reads like it was the only one. Okrent doesn't give it proper context. (hide spoiler)]

The part that I found most fascinating was the plausible argument why the Prohibitionists chose to embark on the Constitutional Amendment route instead of the Referendum approach which is so popular in movements today.

Chapter 4 (p. 83)

(view spoiler)[ "When two candidates opposing each other in a popular election could be differentiated by isolating one issue out of many, Wheeler's minority could carry the day; a candidate with, say, the support of 45 percent of the electorate could win with the added voices of the ASL bloc. But when voters were offered a simple yes-or-no, dry-or-wet choice on a ballot measure, a minority was only a minority." (hide spoiler)]

Unlike most single-issue voters today, where if all you care about is "abortion" or "taxes" you are all going to vote for the same party, the Prohibitionists were really closer to European-style Third Party that cared about an issue that wasn't central to either party's platform. It would be like the Greens in Germany, which can form a coalition with either the Social Democrats or Christian Democrats.I don't know if there is a comparable interest today. (Maybe, "pro-Israel" voters who want the AIPAC seal of approval and will cross party lines if their candidate doesn't get it? But they are so successful, that there are hardly any "anti-israel" candidates anymore -- certainly not as many as there were "wets" in the 1910s.

It has always been an interest of mine how much "strength of belief" should play in to democratic government. Should 10% who care a whole lot count more than 90% who are mildly opposed, but honestly couldn't care less? If so, the Third Party kingmakers of Europe seem like a great innovation. From my perspective, it seems somewhat less democratic, as the above quote indicates. The "drys" were piggybacking on candidates who were getting votes for non-dry reasons, and then counting the candidate's election as popular support for their pet issue.

Interesting points, Matthew.

(view spoiler)[We have a situation where one-issue lobbied hard. I'm fascinated how their lobbying efforts were so successful to get passage. Impressive, however, not a great idea to make the country dry, but powerful lobby. (hide spoiler)]

Politics in this time period is weird from today's viewpoint, because the "original" Republican Party was formed from the vestiges of the Northern Whigs, the abolitionist from the "Free Soil" Party and the anti-immigrant nativists from the "know-nothing" party. The result is that black Americans "all" voted Republican because of the Lincoln anti-slavery connections do the Irish "all" voted Democrat because they were the immigrants that the Know Nothing's opposed.

The result was that the swing voters were the White Protestants. And they, coincidentally, were the large "dry" voting bloc. I don't think there is anything compable today. (It is the "family values" Hispanics in Republican planning meeting, and "Nascar" dads in Democratic ones, but never in the real world.)

Chapter 3

(view spoiler)[I never knew that Southern supremacists used the Prohibition as a tool to repress blacks. The "drunk Negro" idea has been around for a long time. (hide spoiler)]

Oh my, yes, Bryan. See my post #49.

I think it is amazing the number of disparate groups that were involved in the "dry" movement. Many had absolutely nothing in common.

chapter 5, p. 77

(view spoiler)[It is amazing what the legacy is for indifference. President Wilson didn't stop or help the ASL cause and I think it sent signals for people like Bryan and Daniels to push for Prohibition. (hide spoiler)]

Two thoughts on Prohibition and Homosexuality as I finish the first week's reading:

1. Did anyone else note the connection between the movement for a constiutional amendment to ban alcohol and the movement (largely a non-starter federally, but successful in many states) to ban gay marriage?

Chapter 5, p. 109
(view spoiler)["Continuing immigrant groups, and the accelerating fligh from the farms to the cities meant that by 1920 the urban population was almost certain to be a majority. After the constitutionally mandated decennial census, congressional districts would be redrawn, with result that could be catastrophic for the drys. . . . If the Eighteenth Amendment didn't pass the House of Representatives by 1920, Cherrington explained, "it will then be possible to redistrict the states so as to absolutely insure for the liquor forces more than one-third." (hide spoiler)]

The state constituional bans on gay marriage were also a (now seemingly unsuccessful) race against time -- locking in the anti-gay-marriage viewpoint before the demographic pro-gay viewpoints that they knew were coming along. The need for a Constitutional Amendment here is a conscious attempt to not just codify the view of the present majority, but explicitly to provide an anti-majoritarian counterweight to the future. Other Constitutional Amendment tended to capture an emerging trend, not lock in a disappearing one before it was "too late."

2. So, were most of the early leaders of the WCTU lesbians or transgender? If so, why doesn't Okrent mention it? If not, why is he hinting at it every other paragraph with late-20th-century-era gay euphemisms and innuendos?

Chapter 2, and possibly 3 also, I'm not really sure (my Nook tells me the "Part" in the footer, not the "Chapter")

(view spoiler)[Frances Willard goes by "Frank" and has a "longtime companion" and "heir" named Anna. (I felt like I was reading a lesbian's obituary from 1982!) Carry Nation had the "biceps of a stevedore and the face of prison warden." Her "put upon second husband divorced her on the grounds of desertion." (hide spoiler)](When I googled her, I saw that "Carry Nation" is the name of a prominent gay bar, but I also saw that she was Kansas's most famous personality until Dorothy Gale, and Judy Garland was a non-gay lesbian icon, so I didn't want to draw any conclusions from that. I didn't see any details on her actual sexuality, but I didn't look that hard because the first page of hits were all about the gay bar.)

Many other women mentioned in the context of the WCTU don't appear to have been married at all, or if they were married were otherwise unencumbered by the standard marital arrangments of the 1880-1920 American mainstream. It is interesting, at least, that an organization that is so explicitly religious in its orientation and sermonizing does not seem bound at all by the traditional Christian views (at that time) of the roles of women as wife and mother. Sarah Palin (and comparable Republican women) got a lot a criticism (unfair, for the most part, I think, at least compared to a lot of other fairer criticisms) that if she believed in "family values" so much, why was she out running for office and leaving her family behind. I didn't get any sense that the WCTU leaders were getting the same types of critiques.

If they were largely gay, that adds a whole other layer.

Chapter 6, p. 91-93
(view spoiler)[I never knew Harding wanted compensation for brewers, but failed. It is pretty amazing how the brewers were not organized and on the defensive. (hide spoiler)]

Interesting, Matthew. To be honest, I didn't parallel the prohibition/gay marriage issues but your point is well taken. The prohibition amendment was one of those "do it quick before somebody notices" type of legislative move since in another year or so, it would never have passed in enough states to be successful.

Now that Prohibition has been implemented, I don't feel that the book has adequately expressed the "Pro-Saloon" point of view. We hear lots about the evils on alcohol, and the damage that saloons do, but for the "pro drunk" side we are left with the business interests of the alcohol producers, and some sort of diffuse "libertarian" argument that people should be free to do what they want.

What is missing are the more positive goods. For example, the Saloon was the only place that pro-Union activists could get together, since employers could lawfully exclude union organizers at the time. The only other place that all the employees would gather together is in the saloon on Sunday. Also, the Saloon would rent out the back-room to unions for really cheap (or free) as a service to get them in and buying their alcohol. It is not a coincidence that the business leaders who funded the ASL care more about the "Saloon" itself than the alcohol that was served in it.

Thanks Matthew, you bring up an important part of the equation.

Chapter 7, p. 155

(view spoiler)[
The author brings up the Court case against the 18th amendment, but leaves it as a laugh line, saying that "this was an advocacy suited for a surrealist. Root and Guthrie were trying to persude the justices to declare a constributional amendment . . . unconstitutional."

Put in those terms, it does seem "surreal," but it underplays the actual merits of the case. In general, most of the claims that were not victorious were not frivolous. For example, a claim that the "two thirds majorities" requires 2/3 of all members of Congress, not merely 2/3 of all members present is a perfectly reasonable argument, even if the Court did not go along with it.

More importantly, the case also challenged the Volstead Act, and not only was that not "surreal", but the challenge actually got two Justices to dissent. In particular, the issue was whether Section 2, "The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation," explicitly created an exception to the Supremacy Clause.

For example, if the Volstead Act defined "intoxicating liquors" to mean 0.5% alcohol, and Tennessee defined it to be 2% alcohol (or 10% alcohol?), would the "concurrent power to enforce by appropriate legislation" mean that Tennessee's definition might be the applicable one in Tennessee?

The claim doesn't win, but as I said it only loses 7-2, so there were some Justices who thought that "concurrent power" meant concurrent power. It is interesting to think how Prohibition would have gone if those two could have convinced 3 others to join them.
(hide spoiler)]

Chapter 7, pg. 148-149

(view spoiler)[ I was certainly surprised at the antisemitism in Canada. I knew that there was a prejudice to the French speaking Catholic Canadians in and around Quebec but not that antisemitism was also present and virulent.

"In the west, Manitoba's chief police official guessed that 95 per cent of the province's bootleggers were Jewish.....A Manitoba cleric named R.H. Glover went a giant step further, charging that 'a group of American Jews, assisted and abetted by certain prostitute gentiles whose whose God is the dollar, have succeeded in debauching Canada from ocean to ocean.'"(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

Yes. I guess there are two ways to write history: the "Great Man" theory where we got where we got because of the unceasing labor of Wayne Wheeler and Carry Nation. But there is also the "inexorable forces" viewpoint that says this sort of stuff will happen anyway.

Last Call is written very much as the first kind of history. We got where we got because of the WCTU and the ASL and this man twisting that politician's arm and this lawyer pursuing that case.

But, in just a few short, throwaway paragraphs, it all gets undermined when we see that the same things are happening in Canada, and all of Protestant Northern Europe.

When I read that we were loving in a world where Iceland can go dry and Russia could ban vodka, I felt like we were in a world of "inexorable forces" and if Wayne Wheeler never existed it all would have turned out the same way.

Chapter 9:
(view spoiler)[The Bronfman family is fascinating. When I read Seagram's name, it clicked. Crazy that Prohibition fueled a beverage empire. This the point, right, so hard to enforce when you have a northern neighbor willing to help pass the booze south. (hide spoiler)]

Chapter 11, pg. 159-168:
(view spoiler)[It is interesting to read about how the alcohol business helped bring in income in the Bahamas and St. Pierre. It is like other boom businesses like oil where you bring in the good and the bad: money but also crime, for example. What happens when everything turns legal?? (hide spoiler)]

Chapter 12, p. 180
(view spoiler)[I forgot how hard it was to be a wine maker during this time. "If you were in the wine business, you could only look on sourly as the craft you had mastered was ceded to unschooled immigrants adding sugar to grape residue in basement washtubs." (hide spoiler)]

Chapter 12, p.185 - 186

(view spoiler)[ I love Churchill's comment when he visited the US that Prohibition was "at once comic and pathetic". A noted tippler Churchill kept his flasks full regardless, thanks to the efforts of his son who found all the liquor that they wanted. Liquor was available to one and all if they knew where to look, which indeed made Prohibition "comic and pathetic". (hide spoiler)]

A great quote, Jill.

Chapter 12:
(view spoiler)[Amazing how people can find a loophole in the Communion and kosher wine. No wonder Prohibition was so hard to enforce. (hide spoiler)]

Carrie Nation was a Vaudevillian. Other female temperance activists, like Susan B. Anthony, were much more respectable.

I couldn't agree more, Kressel. Her approach with her little axe, frankly, was rather comical although I'm sure she didn't think so.

Chapter 12:

(view spoiler)[ I wonder if the "drys" ever expected that prohibition would go so far as to drive more wedges between the Reform and Orthodox Jewish congregations. The issue of sacramental wine really turned ugly, especially with the New York Times headline "Ask Jews to Drop Yiddish and Wine". I would imagine that the anti-semites were wringing their hands with glee for this unexpected bonus.(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

Response to Jill:
(view spoiler)[I know and it just added to another layer of existing antisemitism. Also, I did not appreciate how the Prohibition forces were anti-immigrant. (hide spoiler)]

Hi, everyone. This is my first time commenting on this (or any other book), but the topic of Prohibition politics is right in my wheelhouse in terms of academic research--so I think it is really cool to see such shared enthusiasm for the book and the topic. Would it be appropriate to interject a couple of more general issues/questions for discussion about the entirety of Okrent's book and its underlying thesis--or would it be best to wait until everyone's finished up through the end?

Hi Mark, feel free to post anytime. If you are citing a particular chapter or page, please use the spoiler feature, just in case someone is not at that point yet.

Just copy and paste this:

<spoiler>Put Text Here</spoiler>

Thanks, Bryan!
I really enjoy Okrent's writing--and after this book came out, he curated a traveling museum display on the rise and fall of American prohibition, which was absolutely spectacular. http://prohibition.constitutioncenter...

But like generations of prohibition historians before him, Okrent's story is almost exclusively a domestic one--mentioning foreign temperance developments only in passing (p. 75). So while he excels in highlighting the different domestic social, ethnic, and religious antagonisms that played out through prohibition, he largely misses the broader international dynamics: how temperance was wrapped-up with anti-imperialist activism, consumer- and community-protection both in the US and abroad, and not just sermonizing moralists or protestant zealots.

Oh, and to piggyback on an earlier discussion (from a few weeks back) about alcohol vs. water when it comes to cholera, etc. and how that led to levels of drinking that are astronomical compared to contemporary standards--I'd strongly recommend William J. Rorabaugh's (1978) book The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition: It is really brief and entertaining, and really eye-opening in this regard.

You make some good points, Mark. I wondered about the overseas movements that Okrent's only mentions.

Thanks for the link, as well.

When you cite, don't forget book cover and author:

by William J. Rorabaugh (no photo)

Ah. My apologies.
Anyway, there's a very deep, rich history on the international side. I won't dig in too deeply, but there's something to the fact that guys like Vladimir Lenin and Mahatma Gandhi were diehard prohibitionists. It wasn't just crusty old midwestern ladies!

Mark...it is hard to think of Lenin as a prohibitionist in a country where vodka is the national drink!!!

Jill: yeah, I know, right? :)
But Lenin, Trotsky and a whole generation of 19th-century socialists the world over understood alcohol as the way that "the man" kept you down: keeping you drunk, stupefied, and easy to control, while taking all of your money. Being a socialist revolutionary meant having clarity of vision and of purpose, which was incompatible with getting drunk all the time. So most of your hardcore revolutionaries were teetotalers as a matter of principle.

Prohibition (view spoiler)[ ended on December 5, 1933 -- 81 years ago today (hide spoiler)] so make sure you have a drink of something alcoholic tonight in honor of (view spoiler)[the anniversary (hide spoiler)].

I'm thinking about laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act today, and all laws where religious exemptions are made so as to not infringe on the religious freedoms of people when the law isn't directly geared at them. Should a "No hats" rule apply to yamulkes? Should a "No jewelry" law apply to a crucifix necklace? Does the French "burqa ban" empower women or restrict their religious practice? Just half a sentence From p. 239, showing there are no "neutral laws."

(view spoiler)[ Whe Congregation Talmud Torah of Los Angeles made its jump from 180 members to 1,000 in the first months of Prohibition,..." (hide spoiler)]

Thanks Mark, Jill, and Matthew.

Chapter 15
(view spoiler)[It is interesting again to discover that many in the highest level of government didn't care to enforce Prohibition. Coolidge wasn't interested, then locals didn't, either. Another reason this whole thing failed. (hide spoiler)]

Chapter 17, page 273
(view spoiler)[It is interesting to read about how organized crime built connections to get and transport liquor on a national scale. It reminds me of today's drug trade, an international network. (hide spoiler)]

Chapter 17
(view spoiler)[I liked the part about the Coast Guard building better, faster boats, but the specs were public record, so the runners got the schematics. (hide spoiler)]

Bryan wrote: "Chapter 17
[spoilers removed]"

Doesn't that remind you of the cigarette boats used for drug trading off the coast of Florida? Prohibition taught organized crime many things that were brought forward when drugs became the big business.

Exactly, Jill, I am also reminded of the modern drug trade taking pages from the Prohibition play book.

Chapter 17, pg. 287-288

What an impossible situation Wheeler found himself in on this occasion.

(view spoiler)[ I think that Wheeler was very ill advised to attend the Carnegie Hall meeting. He was in the middle of an audience of 2,000 "wets", and surely his worst nightmare must have been facing Clarence Darrow in the debate. Although Wheeler had the facts, Darrow had the style and the support of the audience. The dapper mayor of New York City, Jimmy Walker, got in the last word...." those of us who don't like Prohibition ought to stop complaining and organize and get rid of it or shut up". It was a warning that Wheeler and his ilk should have taken seriously. (hide spoiler)]

Chpater 19, page 317
(view spoiler)[Now we have the Jones Law, making breaking Prohibition a felony. It still reminds me of the drug wars of today where we tend to throw drug users in jail. (hide spoiler)]

Chapter 21
(view spoiler)[I read somewhere else how Prohibition decimated the beer and wine industry. You were left with these large brewers that in IMHO, did not make great tasting beer. Now, you finally see the emergence of the craft beer industry. (hide spoiler)]

I thought the author gave us an interesting picture of the anti-Semitism,and anti-Catholic feelings that were whipped up and used by the "drys" to show the "excesses" of alcoholic beverages. It shows how prejudices, which have been used throughout history, can be turned to rally people to the side of their "cause".

Sad, isn't it?