Repealing National Prohibition

Second Edition

Hans P. Krings

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781612772561
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this new edition of the most comprehensive study of the political reaction against the Eighteenth Amendment, a response that led to its reversal fourteen years later by the Twenty-first Amendment, David E. Kyvig examines the operation of the national liquor ban, discusses central issues of U.S. constitutional development, and illuminates continuing public policy issues of alcohol and drug control.

Employing previously unexamined archival evidence, Kyvig calls attention to a little-known but broad-based bipartisan movement led by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. These organizations ad their allies amassed political power, particularly within the Democratic party. In the midst of the Great Depression they engineered a complicated, yet very democratic process of formal constitutional change, in the end achieving the only amendment reversal in U.S. constitutional history.

1ADOPTING NATIONAL PROHIBITION

The crusade to abolish the use of alcoholic beverages through an amendment to the Constitution hit the United States like a whirlwind in the second decade of the twentieth century. In November 1913 the Anti-Saloon League of America first publicly appealed for a prohibition amendment. By January 1919, scarcely five years later, Congress had approved and forty-four state legislatures had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, which proclaimed:

1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

3. The article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

A tremendously significant social reform affecting the lives of millions had suddenly become part of the nation’s rarely altered basic law.

Proponents of the so-called dry law faced little organized resistance as they marched to their triumph. Only brewers, distillers, and other commercial interests made strenuous efforts to block the reform. Individuals and groups offended by the challenge to their ethnic cultural traditions or by the limitation of their right to choose what to drink objected to the national liquor ban, but they lacked the channels and agents to give their protest focus and strength. New opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment began to form, however, in the midst of the prohibitionist victory in response to the law itself, the manner of its adoption, and the political assumptions upon which it was based. The reaction against this important constitutional innovation, therefore, can only be understood in light of the circumstances of national prohibition’s creation.

The Eighteenth Amendment was the product of a century-long temperance crusade, the early-twentieth-century progressive environment, and a temporary spirit of wartime sacrifice. Various historians of the reform have tended to emphasize one or another of these factors.¹ However, it is hard to imagine national prohibition being adopted without all three interacting.

The temperance movement’s long and rich history began early in the nineteenth century as clergymen, politicians, business leaders, and social reformers became concerned about American society’s increased drinking.² They appealed for moderation in the use of intoxicants in the interests of health, morality, and economic well-being. From the start, evangelical Protestant churches stood in the forefront of the antiliquor movement. These churches felt that intemperance seriously interfered with their soul-saving mission because it destroyed man’s health, impaired his reason, and distracted him from the love of God. Intemperance also undermined society by producing poverty, crime, and unhappy homes; this conflicted with the church’s obligation to create a Christian social order. Finally, sobriety was considered to be the foundation of economic success and political liberty—visible signs of God’s grace. For all of these reasons, evangelical Protestants became increasingly militant temperance agitators as the nineteenth century wore on.

In the mid-1820s the Reverend Lyman Beecher and others started urging total abstinence. They had come to believe that even moderate use of liquor started people on the downward path to drunkenness. The argument that intemperance was a disease preventable only by complete avoidance of spirits became a crucial article of the prohibitionist faith. Never again would moderate liquor consumption satisfy most temperance reformers; the complete elimination of intoxicants became their goal.

By the 1840s, temperance advocates had been disappointed several times by the results of crusades to win individual abstinence pledges, and they began asking for statutory curbs. Initial efforts in Massachusetts to confine the sale of alcoholic beverages within taverns and in New York to establish local option—the right of a community to ban the sale of intoxicants within its boundaries—proved unsuccessful. Next came the first attempt at statewide prohibition, the Maine law of 1851 which outlawed the manufacture or sale of “spiritous or intoxicating liquors.” A dozen states quickly followed suit, but for the moment the movement had abated. The Maine law and others imitating it were repealed before the end of the 1850s. Then, for a time, the turmoil of the Civil War diverted reformers.

A new wave of temperance agitation began with the formation of the Prohibition party in 1869 and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1873, two organizations which put prohibition at the top of a list of desired social and political reforms. By the 1880s their efforts had helped make prohibition a vital issue in many states and territories. Five states adopted prohibitory legislation during the eighties, though only Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota retained their laws for long. The rising tide of populism soon overshadowed and pushed aside the antiliquor crusade. Although once again aborted, the crusade for enforced temperance at this time recorded one significant achievement: the creation in 1893 of the Anti-Saloon League.³

The Anti-Saloon League proved the most single-minded and politically effective of all dry organizations. Established by men willing to confine their efforts solely to temperance reform, the league operated as a nonpartisan pressure group. Recognizing that whenever two political parties or two factions of the same party competed with approximate equality the support of a relatively small unattached group could be crucial, the league sought to demonstrate that it controlled enough votes to make the difference between election and defeat, thereby gaining candidates’ acceptance of its program in return for its endorsement. Drawing its support primarily from the evangelical Protestant churches, the Anti-Saloon League became a political force to be reckoned with by the early twentieth century.⁴

Prior to 1913 the Anti-Saloon League and its allies in the temperance campaign concentrated on winning local option elections and obtaining state statutes or constitutional amendments barring liquor sales. Nine states and many communities by then had adopted some sort of prohibition, though generally their laws allowed the continued sale of beer and wine and often permitted residents to mail order distilled spirits for their own use from outside the dry district. (Only half of the twenty-six states which instituted prohibition laws before 1920 went “bone-dry,” banning alcoholic beverages totally.) Encouraged by such signs of progress as six state prohibition laws since 1907 and congressional passage early in 1913 of the Webb-Kenyon Act, a long-sought federal statute against transporting liquor into states that wished to block its entry, the Anti-Saloon League declared in November 1913 that it would seek a federal constitutional amendment providing for nationwide prohibition.

An amendment to the Constitution obviously appealed to temperance reformers more than a federal statute banning liquor. A simple congressional majority could adopt a statute but, with the shift of a relatively few votes, could likewise topple one. Drys feared that an ordinary law would be in constant danger of being overturned owing to pressure from liquor industry interests or the growing population of liquor-using immigrants. A constitutional amendment, on the other hand, though more difficult to achieve, would be impervious to change. Their reform would not only have been adopted, the Anti-Saloon League reasoned, but would be protected from future human weakness and backsliding.

“Although the Eighteenth Amendment would probably never have materialized except for the [Anti-Saloon] league,” observed James H. Timberlake, a perceptive historian of the prohibition movement in the 1910s, “it is equally certain that the league would never have attained its success had not temperance reform been caught up in the progressive spirit itself.”⁵ Progressivism and prohibition were, in his view, closely related middle-class reform movements seeking to deal with social and economic problems through the use of governmental power. They drew on the same broad base of support and moral idealism, and they proposed similar solutions to society’s ills. Examinations of temperance campaigns in such varied states as Texas, Washington, Tennessee, New Mexico, Virginia, California, and Missouri support Timberlake’s conclusion that “prohibition was actually written into the Constitution as a progressive reform.”⁶

Progressivism, the reform spirit which gripped the United States in the early twentieth century, involved a variety of impulses, some parochial, some national, some complementary, some independent, some innovative, and some conservative. The various strands of progressivism were united, however, at the level of basic assumptions. Sensitive to the upheavals caused by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of America, progressives rejected the populist response of opposing modernization and instead sought to impose an order on the emerging society which would be consistent with their own values and interests. Far more optimistic than the preceding generation about man’s capacity to solve problems and mold a satisfactory world, progressives believed that their goals could be reached by creating the proper laws and institutions. Whether the particular task into which they plunged was raising the quality of life for the urban working class, conserving natural resources, establishing professional societies and standards, improving governmental morality, democracy, and services, or controlling business practices, progressives repeatedly displayed their unshakable confidence that legal and bureaucratic instruments could be found which would permanently uplift that aspect of their environment.⁷ “They believed,” as Ralph H. Gabriel put it, “that man, by using his intellect can re-make society, that he can become the creator of a world organized for man’s advantage.”⁸

From the progressive viewpoint, temperance arguments made sense. In a modern society, liquor both reduced men’s efficiency and spawned a multitude of social, political, and economic evils. Such a phenomenon should be reformed or outlawed for the common good. It is wrong, suggests Paul A. Carter, to think of prohibition as “exclusively the work of moralizing Puritans compensating for the repressions of their own harsh code in a spurious indignation at the pleasure of their neighbors.” In his study of progressivism within the Protestant churches, the so-called Social Gospel movement, Carter found “thousands of sincere and not particularly ascetic folk who believed that they fought liquor, not because it has made men happy, but because it has made men unhappy.” He concluded that “the dry crusade spoke the language of social and humanitarian reform—and had the profoundest kinship with the Social Gospel.”⁹

Arguments in behalf of national prohibition by the Reverend Charles Stelzle, a Presbyterian Social Gospeler and ardent prohibitionist, suggest some reasons why liquor reform appealed to many progressives. Stelzle, in a 1918 book, Why Prohibition!, held that banishing alcohol was essential for the material advancement of American society. Drinking, he asserted, lowered industrial productivity and therefore reduced wages paid to workers; it shortened life and therefore increased the cost of insurance; it took money from other bills and therefore forced storekeepers to raise their prices in compensation; and it produced half of the business for police courts, jails, hospitals, almshouses, and insane asylums and therefore increased taxes to support these institutions.¹⁰

Stelzle held that the burden of these social and economic costs for the whole society outweighed any individual right to use intoxicants and legitimized the restriction of personal liberty. “There is no such thing,” he wrote, “as an absolute individual right to do any particular thing, or to eat or drink any particular thing, or to enjoy the association of one’s own family, or even to live, if that thing is in conflict with the law of public necessity.” Antiprohibitionists would charge drys with insensitivity to individual rights and liberties, but this was not the case. Prohibitionists simply felt that social betterment outweighed other factors. “The first consideration,” Stelzle argued, “is not the individual, but society. Therefore, whatever injures society is not permitted.” Small sacrifices of personal liberties may significantly enhance the common good. Therefore, he concluded, “You may exercise your personal liberty only in so far as you do not place additional burdens upon your neighbor, or upon the State.”¹¹

In insisting that the requirements of modern life necessitated an end to the use of alcohol, Stelzle reflected the position of many progressive advocates of prohibition in the 1910s. The doctrine of environmentalism pervading much of progressive thought held that poverty, child neglect, crime, vice, and other social evils largely resulted from the unfavorable setting in which an individual lived. Corrupt urban political machines, for instance, relied upon saloons as bases of operations and election-day recruitment centers where drinks bought votes. The solution of a wide variety of problems lay in the improvement of the environment, usually by legislative action. Outlawing saloons would allow the political system to function more democratically. Calling alcohol “the mother of felony,” a writer in The American Journal of Sociology argued that

in its use and traffic alcohol appears as a powerful antisocial force. Especially is it a social menace with respect to crime. The results of the most cautious research show that it is a producer of criminals and of crime on an enormous scale. What else could one expect. Has not the scientific laboratory proved that the habitual use of alcohol, in whatever quantity, disintegrates the moral character? It impairs the judgment, clouds the reason, and enfeebles the will; while at the same time it arouses the appetites, inflames the passions, releases the primitive beast from the artificial restraint of social discipline.¹²

The only responsible course, he concluded, was to close the saloon and ban the use of alcoholic beverages. Many social workers and economists of a progressive inclination joined the chorus of voices demanding suppression of the saloon and adoption of prohibition for the health of society.¹³

Businessmen and manufacturers often favored prohibition in the belief that it would increase industrial efficiency and reduce accidents. They felt that drinking even a small quantity of alcohol impaired a worker’s mental and physical faculties, made him more careless, and lessened his productivity. Following the lead of the railroads, a number of firms, including the Henry C. Frick Company and the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company, forbade their employees to drink alcohol either on or off the job. Other companies strictly prohibited drinking during working hours.¹⁴ Inevitably, many businessmen turned from their individual efforts to enforce sobriety to the attempt to achieve abstinence through law. Their enthusiasm for prohibition had a deep tint of self-interest but clearly shared the progressive attitude that rational men should use the power of the state to promote the general good as they understood it.

Not all progressives felt it wise to banish intoxicants. In particular, eastern urban progressives who represented alcohol-using ethnic groups opposed antiliquor legislation. Yet for the most part, prohibition drew upon the same broad base of support as other progressive reforms. Most progressives in Congress voted to pass the Webb-Kenyon Act over President William Howard Taft’s veto in February 1913.¹⁵ The pattern continued when the Anti-Saloon League began asking for constitutional action.

Congress first took up the amendment question in December 1914. The resolution won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, but not the necessary two-thirds for submission of an amendment to the states for their approval. During the next two years the resolution failed to come to a vote. In 1916 considerably more supporters of constitutional prohibition were elected to Congress, and drys became more optimistic.

The entry of the United States into World War I produced an atmosphere in which enthusiasm for prohibition accelerated. The need to sacrifice individual pleasure for the defense and improvement of society became a constant theme. The war centralized authority in Washington, loosening restraints on activity by the federal government. The importance of conserving food resources became apparent, and drys seized the opportunity to emphasize the waste of grain in the production of alcoholic beverages. Finally, the war created an atmosphere of hostility toward all things German, not the least of which was beer.

Called into special session to declare war in April 1917, the new Congress adopted temporary wartime prohibition as a measure to conserve grain for the army, America’s allies, and the domestic population. The Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of August 1917 banned the production of distilled spirits for the duration of the war. The War Prohibition Act of November 1918 forbade the manufacture and sale of all intoxicating beverages of more than 2.75 percent alcohol content, beer and wine as well as hard liquor, until demobilization was completed. Although some regarded these measures merely as ploys to speed the imposition of national prohibition, they reflected the depth of concern generated by the war and the prevailing belief that alcoholic beverages ought to be sacrificed under the circumstances.¹⁶

In the midst of the wartime emergency, Congress took up the proposal for constitutional prohibition. The brief debate over the prohibition-amendment resolution repe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to First Edition
• Preface to Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1. Adopting National Prohibition
• 2. America Sobers Up
• 3. New Critics
• 4. Kicking a Stone Wall
• 5. Thirsting after Righteousness
• 6. From the Jaws of Defeat
• 7. Hard Times, Hopeful Times
• 8. Taking Sides
• 9. Repeal!
• 10. Champagne and Sour Grapes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index