Prohibition - Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Edward Behr

  The WCTU was predominantly middle class. Its members were largely the wives of doctors, lawyers, merchants, and wealthy farmers. They wanted to better the working class economically, socially, and morally — even against its wish and inclination. They had plans (which, predictably, failed) to replace the hated saloon by the innocuous coffeehouse — a typically paternalistic, middle-class ambition that showed how out of touch they were with the working class.

  There were a few working-class Prohibitionists, in a handful of trade unions, but they were mostly left-wingers who wanted to educate the workers politically and found that the lure of the saloon in terfered with their indoctrination attempts. The International Workers of the World (IWW) did later claim that “the capitalists use saloons to tranquilize and humiliate the proletariate,” but working-class Americans showed no signs that they were averse to such humiliation.1

  Almost as worthy a cause, to WCTU members, as Prohibition was women’s suffrage, and this proved a double-edged, confusing issue, for not all Prohibitionists were in favor of the vote for women, and anti-Prohibitionists were overwhelmingly against it. The Women’s War triggered a fundamental change in attitudes. While it was at its height, an anonymous suffragist wrote in a letter to the New York Herald Tribune, which published it in 1874:

  To deny her the use of that most efficient weapon, a vote, and then urge her into contest with the liquor trade is like saying that women cannot use artillery. . . but ought to form the advance in an attack on an army well drilled in their use, sending them forward with broadswords, javelins and other implements of medieval warfare.

  Much more averse to publicity than the WCTU, another lobby, established at the start of the Civil War, became increasingly active in the Reconstruction period. Understandably shocked by what they regarded as discriminatory taxes in 1862, the brewers formed the United States Brewers Association to ensure that they would never be taken by surprise again. Their dues (from $25 to $1,000, according to their size) enabled them to use considerable slush funds on cooperative politicians and consumers alike.

  The most vocal opponents of Prohibition were the “new Americans.” From 1840 onward, millions of Germans, Irish, and Italians entered the country, bringing their wine-, whiskey-, and beer-drinking culture with them, fueling a brewers’, distillers’, and winemakers’ boom. At the Brewers Association’s first meeting in 1862, many of its members spoke in German — the only language in which they were fluent. In increasingly expensive lobbying and newspaper campaigns, they quickly focused on the issue of women’s suffrage: the brewers and distillers knew that women were the Prohibitionists’ chief allies and saw the WCTU as its most formidable foe. The repeated failures of many state legislatures to bring about women’s suffrage must be laid at their door. Wherever state suffrage amendments were introduced, they went into action. In Oregon in 1853, for instance, Arthur Denny, a leading Prohibitionist, introduced legislation to give the vote to (white) women. He failed by one vote. Some thirty years later, the Supreme Court of Washington State, invoking “technicalities,” declared the newly passed women’s suffrage law invalid. Insiders knew that the behind-the-scenes artisan of this decision was Tacoma’s Harry Morgan — gambler, local political boss, and saloon supporter — an early precursor of the “mobster generation” of the 1920s and 1930s.

  The Prohibition drive was mixed. Among its advocates were both “liberals” — with a left-wing political agenda that included women’s suffrage, abolitionism, labor law, and other reforms, and trade unionism — and members at the opposite end of the political spectrum. These were the increasingly vocal opponents of unrestricted immigration and railroad and farm support grants; in other words, conservative (at that time) America’s rural or small-town not-so-silent majority.

  Because both Democratic and Republican politicians demonstrated their shifty venality, purists in both parties decided salvation lay elsewhere. The Prohibition party, established in 1869, and active in some twenty states, was by no means confined to cranks and religious fanatics. Among its members were distinguished liberals of all types, including partisans of women’s franchise and of prison reform. But despite considerable media interest, and its later role as the Prohibition issue gathered momentum, this “third party” never changed American voting patterns significantly. Its first presidential nominee, James Black — a distinguished former preacher who had in earlier days been a Democrat and then a Republican, running for the presidency against Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 — made an abysmally poor showing in the election: the brewers, distillers, and saloon keepers all brought out the vote for the popular general, who was also a notorious drunkard. And though Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, was a Temperance sympathizer with a WCTU activist wife (a wit quipped that at White House state dinners, water flowed like champagne), the brewers’ lobbying power made Prohibition not only unlikely but unthinkable. If Prohibition was — as the excesses of the nineteenth-century preachers showed — a confused, inchoate search for material as well as spiritual order in American life, the massive influx first of beer-drinking Germans, then of beer- and whiskey-swilling Irish, and finally of wine-drinking Italians made it at the turn of the century look like a hopeless, long-lost cause.

  But the Prohibition movement would soon develop a new, and formidable, weapon. The broad-based Anti-Saloon League (ASL), established in 1893, was dependent neither on women (though it welcomed their participation) nor on political parties. Although its board of directors consisted of leading representatives of the Protestant Church, which raised considerable funds for the ASL, church control was nominal. Decision-making was in the hands of a new breed of Americans — business-oriented, sophisticated, and almost self-consciously “modern.” Religious fanatics were kept at arm’s length.

  The ASL’s slow but inexorable Prohibition campaign, one of the most exemplary lobbying feats the world has ever seen, was enormously helped by the turn-of-the-century industrial revolution boom and its attendant communications revolution, bringing railroads to the remotest parts of the Northwest, then street-cars and electricity to the cities. With this revolutionary urban change came the predatory monopolies, and increasingly profit-oriented manufacturers. These in turn gave new strength to all those campaigning against child-labor abuses and for shorter working hours. The new breed of do-gooders also included socially conscious drys, intent on preserving both the physical and moral health of workers.

  The “whiskey tents” of railroad workers; the rapid, nationwide industrial growth, especially in “new” territories, such as the Northwest, that had earlier been remote, rural settlements; and the influx of new Americans all contributed to a climate of fear caused by a sharp increase in crime of all types. America became increasingly aware in the nineteenth century of the havoc brought about by social and economic change: delinquency, poverty, prostitution, and excessive political corruption. It had long been a cliché that “liquor releases the brute nature in man.” It was only too easy for the new generation of Prohibitionist activists to argue that liquor provoked and exacerbated all of these scourges. In their eagerness to put an end to them, the drys demonized not only all drinkers but all saloons that dispensed liquor.

  In the pre-Prohibition era, there was a saloon for every three hundred Americans, but by no means all of them corresponded to the grim picture painted by the ASL and the WCTU. Jack London described the saloon as “a terribly wonderful place where life was different.” Coming from an underprivileged background himself, and a born outsider, he saw it as a place “where men come together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and days.” More prosaically, a Washington State committee of prominent citizens in the 1890s wrote that the saloon “met the thirst for fellowship, or amusement and recreation.”

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the saloon was not only the one place working-class men (the presence of women was not encouraged) got together and socialized, but it also served as
their only available employment agency and club. There were newspapers, mailboxes, pencils, paper, bulletin boards advertising jobs, card tables, and sometimes bowling alleys and billiard tables. The saloons also served the much decried “free lunch,” which although invariably salty to stimulate thirst was often of reasonable quality. Not all saloon keepers were ogres, throwing out those who cost more in food than they paid back in drink. And although prostitutes used some saloons to ply their trade, most saloons did not countenance their presence, and on weekends perfectly innocent social gatherings involving singing, dancing, and recitations took place. In short, the saloon was, except for the free lunch, not much different from the average English pub — except that until local “dry” restrictions started taking their toll, saloons were open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. This was because the saloon keepers were under considerable pressure from the brewery owners, eager to maximize their profits and recuperate their loans. Saloon keepers were also heavily taxed: just before Prohibition was introduced, they paid a yearly $1,000 fee.

  The war for Prohibition was also a struggle for racial purity.

  In the North-West, local legislators knew they were moving from a frontier to an industrial society, with the construction of the Pacific Highway, the growth of the railroads. They were determined that the laborers should not be a prey to the “hell on wheels” that accompanied the workers elsewhere. . . . the feeling was strong that workers must be protected from the saloon keepers.2

  William Newell, Governor of Washington Territory (it only became a state in 1889) denounced “the fearful destruction of property

  and happiness which [liquor] occasions in its march of desolation, disease and death. . . . The vice, degeneration and crime which it engenders . . . with no redeeming influence for the good, may well cause it to be a subject of the greatest solicitude to our race.” One of the many nineteenth-century Temperance movements that prospered from the Civil War days, the International Order of the Grand Templars, also tirelessly equated Prohibition with family morality. Its message, published in the Seattle Mirror,3 was also a call to war: “The temperance war! It is coming! It is here! The issue involves the sanctity of the home, the chastity of youth, the moral and political purity of voters.”

  Class lines were increasingly drawn up. In 1890, an editorial in a Prohibitionist paper asked: “Where else shall we look but to the farmer to counteract the venality and corruption of the slums of our cities’ population, that seems to be so rapidly increasing by the aggregation of alien voters, anarchists and saloon influences?” It was all part of that constantly recurring element in American social and political life: the “politics of virtue.” But as various states, under pressure from increasingly assertive dry groups and opportunistic politicians, began to introduce their own local laws, the battle remained fairly even-handed.

  In the small town of Everett, in Washington State, where there were forty saloons, the churches energetically campaigned for local prohibition in a 1910 election, though not all religious groups were dry. Some Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews were in favor of “good” saloons, and raised the issue of personal liberty and choice. The local Labor Journal, a militant unionist newspaper, argued that the dramatically lower life expectancy of working men (60 percent that of the rich) was due not to drink but to the disastrous consequences of low wages and working conditions generally. “Wets and drys boycotted each other’s businesses. There were street brawls, a frenzy of meetings, parades, prayers.”4 In the event, Everett voted dry, but a subsequent state-level vote rejected Prohibition entirely.

  Thanks to men such as Newell, the Alcohol Education Act (AEA), passed in Seattle in 1885-86, taught the evils of drink as a mandatory course in all schools. “The AEA was the compost heap that brought the Volstead Act into being after three generations of indoctrination.” But, as Norman Clark points out, “unlike the Indians, the manual laborers who built the railroads had a common culture and potential political clout.” The short-lived Progressive party — which included among its “populists” beer-drinking first-generation German immigrants, whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics, and wine-drinking Italians — was powerful enough as the nineteenth century came to an end to equate Prohibitionists with cranks.

  It was the Anti-Saloon League’s sophisticated understanding of the confused, often contradictory, nature both of Prohibitionist activists and of the anti-Prohibitionist forces arrayed against them that made the ASL into the driving force that would eventually lead to the passing of the Volstead Act. Between 1893 and 1918, a handful of its leaders would bring about nothing less than a social, moral, and political revolution.

  Whereas moral propagandists such as Ernest H. Cherrington brought the Prohibition message to the masses, it was Wayne Wheeler — the ASL’s behind-the-scenes political manipulator (“controlling six Congresses, dictating to two Presidents” and “becoming the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States”)5 — who, more than any other Prohibitionist activist, engineered the political change.

  By all accounts, including those of his subordinates and fellow ASL executives, Wheeler was in many ways a deeply flawed, utterly ruthless manipulator of singularly limited vision. His conversion to Prohibition was not religious in origin, nor did he come from an alcoholic family. His later reminiscences about the evils of drink are curiously undra-matic, though he did his best to sensationalize them: in one instance, he was forced to listen to the divagations of an “ ‘Old Soak’. . . acting out the story of Ten Nights in a Bar Boom while mother and we children gasped in alarm. . . . My dreams were long colored by that scene.” On another occasion, a farm laborer “stuck the tine of his fork into my bare leg while I was packing down the hay he pitched on the wagon. He had been drinking but did not believe his condition required any excuse.” Wheeler’s career suggests that he chose to make his mark as a Prohibitionist because he realized that with his natural talent for manipulation and intrigue this was the surest means of acquiring the behind-the-scenes power he craved.

  His credentials were impeccable. The fourth of nine children of an Ohioan cattle dealer and farmer, young Wayne displayed from childhood onward the entrepreneurial skills so admired in nineteenth

  century puritan society. As a schoolboy, he earned pocket money operating a sausage-making machine in a local butcher’s shop. No sooner did he move to Oberlin College than he took a job as a dormitory janitor. “Wherever he saw a remunerative position open, he entered the gap,” whether this meant waiting on tables, deputizing for the college chaplain, publishing scorecards, or dealing in books, rugs, or blackboard-desks. With this background and his trading skills, he might well have joined the ranks of the robber barons who were already changing the face of America.

  But Wheeler also fancied himself a poet, orator, and debater, and it was this need to thrust himself into the limelight that first attracted him to the Prohibitionist cause. Oberlin college had been, since its early establishment as Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1832, at the forefront of the abolitionist battle — and abolitionists were also, overwhelmingly, Prohibitionists. This deeply Calvinist college was a nurturing-ground for fledgling missionaries, and Wheeler quickly started mining a rich seam. In debates at religious meetings he began speaking out on the plight of the African Negro — whose wretchedness, at least according to American missionaries there, was not due to colonial abuses (about which Wheeler was curiously silent) but to overindulgence in alcohol.

  As a freshman, Wheeler’s speech to the college debating society, “Rum on the Congo,” made considerable impact, and has been preserved. Based on letters to a fellow student of a missionary father, it was a typical example of the hyperbole that passed for eloquence at the time (1890).

  Today, the eyes of the Christian world are turned to the “Free State” of the Congo. Its present condition and its future is the burden of every philanthropist’s soul!

  But let us for a moment turn to Germany. The representatives of the fourteen leadi
ng powers of the world have met in Berlin. They are considering the future relations of the Congo with the outside world.

  The earnest petition to keep rum from the savages is scarcely noticed. The rum dealer who represents Germany urges absolute free commerce on the Congo. Holland heartily approves and in spite of the slight objection of the U.S. and England, the resolution is carried. Their object is accomplished. Henceforth the Congo will be prey to the ravenous trader! ... Its only purpose is to increase commerce, no matter at what expense, even of innocent life.

  Wheeler went on to paint an idyllic picture of the Congo “before the liquor traffic was legalized,” with lucrative trade in ivory palm oil and coffee. “A commerce was fast developing which might have been the richest in the world, had it not been for the iniquitous rum dealer.” Richest for whom? Wheeler did not pursue this line of thought. Given the brutal aspects of Belgian rule in the Congo, later stigmatized obliquely by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness and more openly by André Gide, the beneficiaries would certainly not have been the native Congolese.

  Be this as it may, the Congo was paradise no longer, for “The stupefying climate of the Congo renders men an easy prey to this evil of drink. . . . The Caffirs and the Hottentots have been reduced by this poison, until they are no longer distinct tribes.” Wheeler cited missionary reports of