Booked: The War on Booze
Booked: The War on Booze
An interview with historian Lisa McGirr about her new book The War On Alcohol, and why Prohibition was more important than most people think.
Booked is a monthly series of Q&As with authors by contributing editor Timothy Shenk. For this interview, he spoke with Lisa McGirr about The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (Norton, 2015).
Prohibition is not remembered fondly, when it is remembered at all. Mythologized in its own time, the Prohibition era has come to seem more like folklore than history in the decades since Franklin Roosevelt brought it to an abrupt close. Lisa McGirr offers a bracing corrective to this tendency in The War on Alcohol. Placing the campaign to rid the nation of booze at the center of American history, McGirr explores the far-reaching consequences of one of the most ambitious reforms ever undertaken in this country. A first-rate work of historical scholarship, The War on Alcohol transforms our understanding of Prohibition while demonstrating its lasting influence on the rise of the carceral state and the unfolding of that other crusade to save Americans from themselves, the war on drugs.
Timothy Shenk: The War on Alcohol has a national scope, but you also zoom in on local histories. I thought the discussion of a small Illinois town called Herrin was perhaps the most revealing. What happened in Herrin, and what does it tell us about Prohibition?
Lisa McGirr: Militant white evangelical Christians in Herrin used the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act as an instrument in their wider campaign for white Protestant nationalist supremacy. This happened in many towns across the country, but in Herrin deep-seated local class and ethnic tensions contributed to a particularly dramatic series of anti-liquor raids and a campaign of terror between 1923 and 1924. City boosters, Protestant ministers, and the increasingly powerful local Ku Klux Klan selectively used the laws prohibiting alcohol to wage war against the groups they identified as the enemies of “one hundred percent Americanism.” They blamed Italians and Catholics for the wide-open conditions in Williamson County. When the government would not or could not rein in violations, white evangelicals joined with the Klan and took matters into their own hands. Herrin was extreme in the number of raids and the level of violence, but the Klan used the fight against bootlegging to recruit at the local level throughout the South, Midwest, and West, winning droves of foot soldiers in the process.
Herrin reveals Prohibition’s contribution to the creation of a citizen enforcement army—the first generation of a grassroots Christian right. It also shows how economic grievances in an ethnically and racially bifurcated working class can change direction. In Herrin, class grievances were first directed against absentee mine owners and operators seeking to break the power of the local miners’ union. Then the middle-class city leaders directed the largely white Protestant miners’ attention to other alleged threats to their way of life: the immigrant and Catholic competitors for their jobs in a tough labor market.
Shenk: Your depiction of Prohibition’s enforcement raises a lot of problems for accounts that depict the American state as unusually weak. By the standards of the U.S. federal government in the 1920s, the Bureau charged with enforcing prohibition was large—over four times the size of what would become the FBI—and the campaign to impose the law also spurred an uptick in the size of local police forces. But that still wasn’t nearly enough to get the job done, and government officials relied on a mobilized citizenry to make Prohibition a reality: “Every Citizen an Enforcer” was the motto offered by one Prohibition supporter. The important factor here is not so much the size of the state as its effectiveness. What does this mixing of public and private tell us about American state power more generally?
McGirr: I agree with historians like Gary Gerstle and Bill Novak who have argued for jettisoning the myth of the weak state. Gerstle’s characterization of the American state as an “unsteady colossus” is on target. It highlights the historic tension between centralized federal power and the authority of individual states as well as the porous boundaries between private interests and public power. My book emphasizes Prohibition’s contribution to the peculiar character of an American state that is strong in some ways, weak in others. Prohibition shows how moral crusades have served as platforms for American state building. In this case, moral entrepreneurs and powerful, private, networked groups of citizens pushed the state in the direction of policing and surveillance. Prohibition is an important chapter in the shaping of the American state, particularly its penal arm. Compared to modern Western Europe, the American state today is heavy on coercion and light on social provisioning. The underdeveloped nature of its bureaucratic capacity compared to Western Europe likely contributed to the very porous boundaries between private citizens and the state that has characterized the U.S. state-building process.
Shenk: Let’s stay with this question about the mixing of public and private for a little bit longer. You note that, outside of wartime, before the 1920s the only marker of the federal government that most Americans encountered was the post office. Then comes Prohibition, which you call “one of the boldest and most radical social efforts to alter personal behavior in the nation’s history.” I’m not sure if the division between political history and cultural history ever makes much sense, but it definitely breaks down here. Prohibition’s advocates viewed it as a way of shaping selves via constitutional reform. That was not the way earlier temperance supporters thought about their project. How did a campaign targeted at individual conversion become a movement for amending the constitution?
McGirr: While the early nineteenth-century temperance movement championed self-discipline, many anti-liquor crusaders soon realized excessive drinking wouldn’t be solved by appeals for individual abstinence. By the late nineteenth century, the number of saloons was growing, and prohibitionists increasingly sought to crack down on public working-class drinking and the liquor traffic that sustained it. Anti-liquor crusaders first worked for local option laws and statewide prohibition. Their call for a federal solution gained traction during the high tide of Progressive reform in the early twentieth-century, when many reformers turned to the federal government to resolve a host of problems brought about by industrial capitalism. Prohibitionists, led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, adopted the constitutional strategy in 1913 hoping to rein in the alcohol traffic in heavily urban, wet regions that would not ban the trade on their own. The idea was that once Prohibition was ensconced in the Constitution, it would be difficult to rescind, even in the face of the nation’s shifting demographics. The strategy was part of a wider wave of constitutional activism—four amendments were adopted in the second decade of the twentieth century, including those relating to income tax, direct election of senators, and women’s suffrage. The Eighteenth Amendment shared much of the same political DNA as these other amendments.
Shenk: A handful of elections are often described as critical or realigning elections. The debates over which elections make the cut is endless, but 1800, 1860, 1896, and 1932 are some of the most common. The War on Alcohol contends that we should pay more attention to 1928. The Democratic Party in the 1920s bore little resemblance to what it soon became. “It was,” you write, “far from preordained that the Democratic Party would become the home of urban ethnic working-class voters, and of a liberal-labor coalition.” Herbert Hoover obliterated New York Governor Al Smith in 1928, but the contours of that more urban Democratic Party came into sight. (There’s an obvious parallel with 1964, when Barry Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson but managed to break the Democratic Party’s hold on the South.) You give Prohibition credit for helping to make this new Democratic Party possible, but I wasn’t sure exactly how much causal weight you wanted to assign to it. After all, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t emphasize Prohibition when he was seeking the presidential nomination in 1932, and he didn’t need it to beat Hoover. Historians aren’t always wild about counterfactuals, but one might be useful here: if Prohibition had never passed, what would the Democratic coalition have looked like after 1928?
McGirr: Prohibition opposition was central to shaping new political loyalties in 1928, before economic grievances became critically pressing. Would that same coalition have been forged without the repeal issue? With the crisis of the Great Depression and FDR at the helm of the Democratic Party, possibly, maybe even probably, but that is not how history happened. And it is important to remember that FDR did not run in 1932 as the champion of vast new social programs. He ran as a friend of the common man but he kept his policy prescriptions calculatedly vague. Upon his election, after rescuing the banks, he sent Congress the Economy Act to slash government spending. He might not have needed repeal to beat Hoover, but it helped him solidify the Democratic Party’s hold of immigrant, urban, working-class men and women. Prohibition was an easily identifiable grievance with real meaning in everyday life, and the Democrats picked up on it when key leaders were less willing to appeal to specific class grievances. During the campaign, the call to re-legalize the liquor industry provided one easy means to address the unemployment issue, without requiring massive new spending. It appealed to urban, working-class men and women concerned about Prohibition and unemployment while simultaneously maintaining the support of prominent conservative party backers who provided the party new organizational strength and funding. Once established, the increasingly powerful northern wing made up of immigrant, Catholic, African-American, and working-class voters, with FDR at the lead, began to move the party in new directions.
Shenk: Prohibition, you write, “is the missing link between Progressive Era and World War I state building and the New Deal.” We touched on the question of state power earlier, but I wanted to revisit it here while thinking about the effects the history you describe had on the subsequent trajectory of the American state. One of the biggest changes that shifting attention to Prohibition highlights is the rise of the carceral state. What influence did outlawing alcohol have on a history that led to over 2 million people being imprisoned today?
McGirr: I argue that Prohibition is the missing link between the Progressive Era and New Deal state-building because until now historians have not understood Prohibition as a chapter of state-building at all. But the reality is that, despite its failings, Prohibition contributed to expanding federal government authority permanently in multiple ways. At the most basic level, Prohibition kept federal power, its possibilities and perils, under discussion for more than a decade in an era of Republican retrenchment. Conservative opponents of the Eighteenth Amendment feared that the hugely ambitious campaign would wedge the door open to wider forms of government power and it turns out they were right—the effort to rein in a perceived crisis of criminality built the edifice of the federal penal state.
After 1920 the federal government’s role in controlling crime expanded exponentially. Crime became a national obsession and government officials began a war against it, expanding and reorganizing federal agencies in the process. The era witnessed the explosive growth of municipal and state crime commissions, and the first large-scale national commission. Criminal statistics were systematized at the national level, the Uniform Crime Reports were born, and the federal prison system was expanded. The FBI won wider authority for its mission, and the government established the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Few people realize that Prohibition led the federal government to expand into anti-narcotics enforcement of all kinds, not just liquor. Prohibition didn’t cause the colossal carceral state we live with today, which is better explained by law-and-order responses to 1960s inner-city rebellions and efforts to control marginal and poor populations after explicitly racist narcotics control laws were abolished. But it did build the early edifice of an expanded federal prison state, and provided the penal logics that paved the way for the second drug war in the 1970s and 1980s and which continues today.
Shenk: Thinking about the ramifications of The War on Alcohol for histories of the New Deal reminded me of a classic work by your colleague Liz Cohen, Making a New Deal. Both books mix social, cultural, and political history; both cover a similar period; and both use extensive research on Chicago to ground broader arguments. How does your portrait of Chicago fit with Cohen’s? What do you change?
McGirr: My book owes a debt to Cohen’s terrific work on Chicago. She focused heavily on the role of mass culture and consumption in breaking down inward-looking ethnic loyalties and in forging wider class identities among the city’s mostly immigrant industrial workers. She does touch on Prohibition as a political issue, though, and it is that strand that my book delves into more expansively, leading to a somewhat different emphasis on how new political loyalties were forged. Where I place a heavier emphasis on the election of 1928 as a turning point, Cohen focuses on the three elections of 1928–36, focusing on the process that brought these workers into industrial unions and the CIO in the 1930s. The two books have distinct, but not incompatible emphases on the process by which working-class men and women developed new cross-cultural loyalties and wider class identities. Cohen’s rich research on Chicago also made it abundantly clear to me that the city is a fruitful place for historical research because of its treasure trove of primary records.
Shenk: One of your book’s most significant contributions is its demolition of the myth that Prohibition was a vestigial remnant of an outmoded politics. It was, you write, “a distinctly modern fusion of twentieth-century nation-state building with an older strand of Protestant moral righteousness.” This emphasis on the modernity of Prohibition reminded me of a passage in Alan Brinkley’s influential article, “The Problem of American Conservatism.” Brinkley suggests historians had been so slow to write about the American right because the existence of a robust conservative movement challenged the assumptions that undergirded their interpretation of the twentieth century. Reckoning with the history of conservatism revealed the limits “of the powerful, if not always fully recognized, progressive assumptions embedded in most of the leading paradigms with which historians approach their work,” he argued. “It is to admit that modernism is not yet truly secure.” Your first book, Suburban Warriors, was one of the earliest attempts to explore the consequences of Brinkley’s argument. Prohibition doesn’t fall within conventional understandings of the left-right divide—William Howard Taft opposed it; Jane Addams supported it—but it does fit into the rethinking of modernity Brinkley implied was necessary. His article came out in 1994. Where do you think this project stands today?
McGirr: The project has come a long way. We have a much better understanding of the conservative movement, particularly since 1945, than when Brinkley’s article was published. We have excellent studies of conservative business elites, intellectual movers and shakers, and the grassroots right. We now know that traditionalist ideas and emotive religiosity have flourished in the most modern of settings. Modernity can just as well provide propitious conditions for the deepening of ideas about social hierarchy, inequality, law and order, and Biblical dispensationalism. But the relative neglect of Prohibition’s unfolding suggests that many historians remain reticent to excavate movements we think of as zany or distasteful. We tend to write about movements for which we have more sympathy. Prohibition is out of sync with many historians’ understandings of what constitutes historical progress, and so it was viewed, wrongly, as a distraction. I think there is still work to be done to understand the power of emotive strands of religiosity in the twentieth century United States, and their intersection with politics.
Shenk: The War on Alcohol ends with an extended discussion of the war on drugs. Historians sometimes justify their work by insisting upon its relevance for the present, but what struck me about these final pages is how different the situation we face today is from the conditions that prevailed under Prohibition. You close with a call for “a renewed challenge to the punitive ethos animating all of America’s narcotic wars.” What guidance does the history of Prohibition supply for that effort?
McGirr: When I started this project, I did not know how much the book would speak to the current war on drugs and the crisis of mass incarceration. My archival research, however, provided insight into how much these two campaigns shared in terms of violence, selective enforcement, and rising rates of incarceration. More important, I came to understand that the two narcotics campaigns—one against alcohol and the other against other drugs—were symbiotic. Conditions are very different today than they were in the 1920s, to be sure. For one thing, the nation’s penal state is now almost unimaginably large. Still, tracing the early roots of the war on drugs to the flawed campaign for alcohol eradication can help us better understand our past and our present. Both the war on alcohol and the campaign against recreational narcotics targeted real social problems; many educators, health policy officials, scientists, social workers, and progressive reformers who were witnesses to the ravages of addiction backed these efforts. But their absolutist, prohibitionist solutions to the problem overshot the ills they proposed to remedy. Although launched with a largely humanitarian logic, these campaigns morphed into state-sanctioned targeting of poor communities and harsh forms of social control. When we understand Prohibition not as the backdrop to the roaring twenties but as the origin point for the nation’s harsh drug-control regime and as a catalyst for an expanded penal state, it adds an important historical layer to the case for more humane, tolerant, and flexible drug policies.
