Although only a few states adopted exclusive state stores for wine, eighteen states adopted state store systems to sell hard liquor. In the popular vote on repeal, these were the states that had cast the highest percentage of dry votes. Fear of the return of statewide prohibition played a role in the adoption of state stores. Along the Canadian border, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Michigan, Montana, and Washington wanted to stop untaxed, illegal Canadian imports. Washington influenced Oregon. Dry Mormons led Utah and Idaho to adopt state stores. Political patronage jobs in state stores were important in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Bible belt prohibitionists affected Iowa as well as West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Wyoming used state control of wholesale hard liquor to raise maximum revenue, but retail sales were private. Maryland authorized several counties to operate county-run liquor stores.
Some state regulations bordered on the bizarre. Many were designed to forestall a new attempt to impose prohibition, which had been a political issue for a hundred years. To get a drink in Texas, the customer sometimes had to join a “private club,” which was a euphemism for what looked like a saloon. California, predictably, had low taxes on wine, while Illinois, home of major distilleries, lightly taxed hard liquor. Wisconsin not only had low taxes on beer, but the age to purchase beer there was eighteen. Brewers hoped that by the time beer drinkers turned twenty-one, they would have little interest in spirits. Most states set the drinking age at twenty-one, but New York’s minimum was eighteen, which made New York City a magnet for teenagers from New Jersey and Connecticut. In the 1930s, hundreds of counties, particularly in the Bible Belt, had local option prohibition. Although most states quickly legalized alcohol to gain tax revenue, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mississippi remained legally dry, except for beer, until after World War II. In 1966, Mississippi became the last state to drop prohibition.
Before prohibition, alcohol had been largely unregulated and lightly taxed. The result had been the emergence of powerful producers, sleazy tied houses, corrupt politics, alcohol abuse, crime, and family violence. Reformers had promised that prohibition would end drinking, corruption, crime, and poverty. Instead, the dry policy yielded bad, overpriced liquor; promoted lawlessness; enriched gangsters; and hurt government revenues. Prohibition certainly did not end drinking. By 1933, a disillusioned public was ready to try a different type of alcohol policy, one that stressed government control rather than a free market or prohibition. Under repeal, the United States established an effective state and federal regulatory system that acknowledged alcohol as an inherently dangerous product that needed to be monitored closely. Alcohol became widely available, but substantial taxes kept the price high enough to reduce consumption, state governments determined where alcohol was sold or consumed, and control boards decided the circumstances under which it was drunk.
Chapter 5
Legacies
The most important legacy of prohibition in the United States concerned a dramatic change in drinking habits. The raunchy all-male saloon did disappear for good, and per capita consumption of alcohol was reduced for a very long time. Consumption in the 1930s was one-third lower than before prohibition because people had little money to spend on drinks during the Great Depression and because a generation that had come of age during prohibition never imbibed much alcohol. An American born in 1900 could not drink legally until age thirty-three, past the age when use normally peaks. Consumption drops with each decade of adult life, and by age sixty-five a majority of people are abstainers.
Another legacy of repeal was the painful recognition within the alcohol industry that it could be toppled by public opinion; for years producers worried about the return of prohibition. To head off the possibility, they avoided promotions or portrayed alcohol as an innocent relaxant. When repeal took place in 1933, vintners and distillers agreed through their trade associations that they would not advertise on radio. But brewers did use radio and benefited from this distinction, which annoyed the vintners and distillers. Beer ads moved seamlessly from radio to television in the 1940s, and as beer sales continued to increase, vintners finally broke the taboo by advertising on television in the 1960s. Distillers made a brief attempt to follow but received so much criticism that they backed off. Later, cable television allowed distillers to find a new way to access television. Indeed, television could be powerful. In the 1950s, Anheuser-Busch sponsored many sports programs to reach young male viewers and thus became the country’s dominant brewer. In 1976, Schlitz was number two. Eager to gain market share, the company ran a short ad campaign in 1977 that was described sarcastically within the ad industry as Drink Schlitz or I’ll Kill You. Sales dropped so rapidly that the brand vanished.
Even in the 1930s, the alcohol industry conceded that millions of people suffered from catastrophic drinking problems and that producers had a responsibility to try to reduce this harm. Accordingly, the industry sponsored scientific research on alcohol and alcoholism. The Yale Center of Alcohol Studies, founded in 1935, played a prominent role in this effort. Early research supported the disease model of addiction, and much of what we know today about drug reactions inside the brain began with rat studies at Yale. (In 1962 the center moved to Rutgers University.) After World War II, more robust funding came from the National Institutes of Health, which in 1974 created the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Researchers developed effective drug treatments for alcohol dependency, for example, chlordiazepoxide (Librium) and Naltrexone.
Another legacy of prohibition came in 1935, when Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). AA rejected the prohibition model to place responsibility for drinking on the individual drinker. In many ways this movement resembled the Washingtonian self-help movement of the 1840s. During the early nineteenth century, the temperance movement had seen alcohol in moral terms, whereas prohibition turned alcohol into a social, cultural, and political issue. After the repeal of prohibition, alcohol abuse was increasingly identified as a therapeutic issue involving the individual. In AA’s twelve-step method, the alcoholic had to admit the desire to drink, to accept personal responsibility, and to acknowledge the need for abstinence. AA eventually claimed millions of members around the world. In recent decades, the same method has been applied to other addictions.
Alcohol consumption rose during World War II both at home and abroad. Separation from loved ones, stressful defense work, and difficult military life all played roles in increased alcohol intake among both men and women. After the war this cohort continued to be hard drinkers. They favored beer, which was cheap, easy to obtain, and advertised frequently on television, but they also liked mixed drinks made with hard liquor. Their children, the older baby boomers, likewise drank beer and distilled spirits. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the older boomers and their parents constituted two exceptionally heavy drinking generations that overlapped. Unlike their parents, boomers were also attracted to wine, which was cheaper than hard liquor. Many boomers thought that red wine went well with marijuana.
American alcohol consumption per capita rose from 1933 to 1973, when it passed the pre-prohibition level, and then peaked in 1980. Consumption began to decline when younger boomers in the 1980s turned away from both alcohol and drugs to embrace a healthy lifestyle that included natural foods, meditation, yoga, running, and working out in gyms. Along with the health movement, women entering the professional workforce in large numbers in the 1980s helped change both perceptions and practices about alcohol. Traditional hard-drinking professions such as journalism and advertising, known for the three-martini lunch, became more sober as women joined the ranks in large numbers. In most cultures, women drink much less than men.
Women may also have been influenced by the discovery of fetal alcohol syndrome, which NIAAA explored at a workshop in 1977. While researchers had long recognized that alcoholic mothers frequently gave birth to low-weight babies with developmental problems, the new research stressed that as little as one drink dur
ing a certain phase of early pregnancy could produce a negative outcome. Many women decided not to drink if they were pregnant or were trying to become pregnant. In 1988, the federal government began to require alcoholic beverage labels to contain health warnings, including warnings about pregnancy.
The 1980s also brought the rise of neo-prohibition, an organized movement to reduce per capita consumption of alcohol in the United States. For decades, experts had agreed that the percentage of people in a society who had the potential for serious alcohol problems was around 10 percent, with the exact percentage depending upon the definition of what constituted a serious drinking problem. In the 1970s, however, new research showed that a heavy drinking culture led to a higher percentage of the population being at risk for severe drinking problems. This finding led to a movement in the 1980s to reduce harms by lowering average consumption. Thus, an overall reduction in consumption would reduce the number of people injured by alcohol disorders.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) headed this new anti-liquor movement, which had support inside the federal government. Candy Lightner founded MADD in 1980 after a drunk driver had killed her thirteen-year-old daughter. The driver, who had been arrested numerous times for drunk driving, received a suspended sentence. In addition to campaigning effectively for more serious penalties for drunk driving, MADD promoted the idea of a designated non-drinking driver within any group that was drinking. It also advocated that bars and restaurants be held liable for serving drunk customers, for a reduction in the level of blood alcohol considered to be proof of drunkenness, and for zero tolerance for blood alcohol for underage drinkers who were drivers. During the 1970s, a majority of states had dropped the drinking age to eighteen, sometimes with disastrous highway fatalities. MADD’s most important accomplishment was to get federal legislation passed in 1984 to withhold highway funds from any state that did not raise its legal drinking age to twenty-one. By 1988, every state had done so. The point was to stop cross-border teenage drunk driving fatalities. Since 1988, annual drunk driving deaths have been cut in half; this reduction has saved 250,000 lives over twenty-five years.
Massive immigration during the 1980s and 1990s also played a role in declining per capita alcohol consumption in the United States. For the first time in American history, immigrants came not from Europe but from Mexico, from other places in the western hemisphere, and from Asia, all of which were light-drinking cultures. The states that had the greatest number of immigrants, California and New York, had the largest declines in per capita consumption, 36 and 37 percent, respectively.
Culture plays a major role in drinking attitudes and practices. Mexican American men drink about as much as their Anglo counterparts in their twenties, but they drink much less after marriage because more than half of Mexican American women are teetotalers. When one partner in a couple does not drink, the other partner drinks less. Young Mexican American men, like their Anglo counterparts, primarily imbibe beer. Many Asians have the alcohol flush gene, which causes small amounts of alcohol to produce an unpleasant hot flash. Persons with this gene or from areas where the gene is common tend to be abstainers. African Americans continue to be light drinkers, and half of black women do not drink. Muslim immigrants are unlikely to drink for religious reasons. Members of certain Native American tribes drink heavily, but the country’s heartiest drinkers are white Americans who remain true to their European origins.
Per capita alcohol consumption in the United States started to rise after 1997, but consumer preferences also changed. The long-term slide in beer that began in 1981 continued to 2014, when consumption was 20 percent below the peak. On the other hand, wine consumption rose after 1993 and reached an all-time high in 2014. Wine particularly gained ground in parts of the country where little wine previously had been drunk. Millennials also discovered hard liquor, which increased in sales. Sweet mixed drinks appealed to a generation raised on soft drinks and sugary snacks. The three million veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars proved to be hard drinkers.
Prohibition marked a curious episode in the history of drinking in America, as it did in other nations that tried to ban alcohol. Where the substance has not been part of local culture, prohibition has sometimes been effective, as has been true in some Islamic areas. On the other hand, people in hard-drinking cultures have usually resisted any ban so strongly that it has had to be repealed. After World War I, Vladimir Lenin restored the Russian state spirits monopoly. Liquor revenues have continued to finance the Russian government, even at the expense of low male life expectancy due to widespread alcoholism. After a short dry experiment at the end of World War I, Finland, Norway, and Canada abandoned prohibition amid empty government coffers and widespread illegal distillation. Always eager for revenue, governments have also tended to stop other restrictive anti-liquor policies over time. Sweden gave up the Gothenburg system’s strict allotments of alcohol to individual drinkers, although it continues to use government outlets to sell hard liquor. Since the 1990s, Britain has lengthened hours of service in public houses, and youth binge drinking has soared. There are always trade-offs between harms to individuals or to society versus benefits in the form of government revenues and the popularity of easy access to alcohol. In those parts of the world where alcohol has long been part of local culture, prospects for significant restrictions remain doubtful.
Per capita annual alcohol consumption by beverage type
Date Beer Wine Spirits All beverages
1850 .14 .08 1.88 2.10
1871–80 .56 .14 1.02 1.72
1906–10 1.47 .17 .96 2.60 (peak)
1935 .68 .09 .43 1.20
1940 .73 .16 .67 1.56
1950 1.04 .23 .77 2.04
1960 .99 .22 .86 2.07
1970 1.14 .27 1.11 2.52
1980 1.38 .34 1.04 2.76 (peak)
1990 1.34 .33 .77 2.45
2000 1.22 .31 .64 2.17
2014 1.10 .43 .80 2.32
Source: US Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “Surveillance Report #104: Apparent Per Capita Alcohol Consumption: National, State, and Regional Trends, 1977–2014” (2016), 12–13.
Note: Per capita annual alcohol consumption by beverage type, United States, selected years. Gallons of alcohol within each beverage based on population ages fifteen and older prior to 1970 and ages fourteen and older thereafter.
NOTES
Introduction
1. On Britain and Russia, respectively, see James Nicholls, The Politics of Alcohol (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), and Mark L. Schrad, Vodka Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Chapter 1
1. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 152.
2. Harrison Hall, The Distiller, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: author, 1818), 17.
3. Huntington Lyman, An Address Delivered before the Temperance Society of Franklinville (New York: Sleight and Robinson, 1830), 5.
4. Ashel Nettleton, “Spirit of the Pilgrims,” in American Temperance Society, Second Annual Report (1829), 53.
5. Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 137.
6. Henry A. Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 74.
7. Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), 38.
Chapter 2
1. Jack S. Blocker, Give to the Winds Thy Fears (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).
2. Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
3. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
4. Lisa M. F. Andersen, The Politics of Prohibition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
5. Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 61, 62.
6. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition (Durh
am, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
7. Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol (New York: Norton, 2016), 8.
8. Ibid., 17.
9. Elliott West, The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 2.
10. William E. Unrau, White Man’s Wicked Water (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 103–116.
11I’ve Been to Dwight (Dwight, IL: Dwight Historical Society, 2016), 2.
12. James H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 111.
13. Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil (New York: Norton, 1976), 4.
14. McGirr, War on Alcohol, 17.
15. Michael Lerner, Dry Manhattan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 24.
16. Fran Grace, Carry A. Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
17. K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
18. Robert Woods, “Winning the Other Half,” Survey, December 30, 1916, 352.
19. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 3.
20. “Warm Words to Help Suffrage,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1911, section 2, 2.
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