Nineteenth century history and major events

Prohibition

One of the most conflicted points of United States history is associated with the temperance movement, which culminated into a federal constitutional amendment prohibiting the production, transportation, and sale of all alcoholic beverages. The 18th Amendment to the constitution marked the end of a long and ardent campaign to eliminate all the ills of American society. The root of prohibition is seated in the reality of the alcohol, problem in the Americas stemming almost from the first settlements in the area, alcohol was even a form of currency in some areas of the country. The culmination of the high profit potential and the seemingly endless demand for it, alcohol could be seen as the source of many cultural problems, and it was viewed, by some as the not so hidden but largely tolerated source of countless human and community failings.

In 1920 a 200-year campaign culminated in the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which stated that 'the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors ... For beverage purposes, is hereby prohibited'. Prohibition struck a chord with many citizens, who believed it would transform America into 'a law abiding, pure and healthy country' by alleviating alcohol's destructive effects, such as crime, poverty and low productivity. (Bryce 37)

The reasons for the development of the temperance movement are many and the degrees of the demands of temperance were many.

In 1919, the 18th Amendment - making the United States officially "dry" - was ratified and set to take effect in 1920. America's "Noble Experiment" with Prohibition lay on the road ahead like black powder and blasting caps. Not much good would come from it. ("Running Rum Was a" BM4)

Some believed in absolute abstinence while others believed in simply maintaining moderation in consumption that should never result in drunkenness, while still others believed that the most evil of the alcoholic beverages were those with higher concentrations of alcohol, the spirits while bee and wine were fine if consumed in moderation.

When Congress and then the states approved the 18th Amendment, they did so after a century's experience in local regulation and at a time when a majority of the people in a majority of the states wanted this truly national effort to influence national morality. Many people who rejoiced in the triumph of the 18th Amendment did not regard beer and wine as thereby prohibited. Others, to be sure, hoped that all such beverages would in fact be prohibited; and even some of them, were still dedicated and determined drinkers. Their case did not rest on foolishness or prejudice alone. Prominent psychologists and neurologists-more ominous even than Increase Matherhad declared that alcohol in any form was in fact a poison. (Clark 9)

Yet, the extreme nature of acceptance of alcoholic consumption and its effects, coupled with the power of the "dry" rhetoric created a campaign unlike almost any other political movement.

Nevertheless, social acceptance of this drug still remains. These laws have neither crippled nor eliminated the problem. The more a behavior is suppressed, often the more it occurs. The alcoholic prohibition experiment in the United States was very revealing about American culture (Norton, Katzman, Escott, Chudacoff, Paterson & Tuttle, 1990). Prohibition Attempts to prohibit alcohol usage have been made since colonial times. Temperance movements began to gain sizable support by the public and government. The first national temperance society was formed in 1836. The temperance movement led to the adoption of full prohibition, rather than just temperance alone. Since the major parties of the political sphere refused to take a stance on the prohibition issue, a third party known as the Prohibition Party was formed in 1869. Although the party was never successful, their ideas spread throughout the country. (Krohn and Pyc 459)

Prohibition was seen as a solution to all the problems facing a rapidly growing culture. The stress and strain of industrialization determined the need for change, and the era of the progressives was marked by a popular belief that the evolution of change would begin with the creation of social controls. Social controls would take the form of laws, which were believed to eventually be realized in changed perceptions about the need for self-governing constraint to solve social problems. Yet, this did not occur in any region as the demand completely won the day and created even greater profitability and demand.

The prohibition movement reached its peak in the late 19th century, however, it was not until the southwestern states turned to prohibition that the issue gained mass popularity. There were many factors leading to the passage of this ineffective legislation. In order to conserve grain during World War I, federal legislation passed a series of laws to help ration supplies that were needed for the effort. This rationing established the roots for prohibition legislation. The national prohibition amendment was ratified by all but two states on January 16, 1919 and went into effect one year later. Between 1920 and 1933 prohibition was in effect in the United States. Prohibition is the illegality of manufacturing, selling, or transporting any type of alcoholic beverage. (Krohn and Pyc 459)

Yet, the challenge of the progressive ideal was mighty as the cultural acceptance of alcohol was massive, it was consumed at alarming rates, even by today's standards and had seemingly exponential growth potential. The modeling, said to be eminent with the development of social change was largely unsuccessful as the reality of the secondary effects of legal restrictions began to be felt and alternative, illegal forms of trafficking in alcohol began to exponentially expand the illegal activities of any given location with alarming severity.

Even though the prohibition amendment was passed by an overwhelming majority in Congress, it soon became evident that the amendment was unenforceable. The enforcement was minimized because the 1920s saw a revolution in social (1) manners, (2)customs, and (3) habits, which led to mass inclination to ignore existing prohibition legislation. "Prohibition did not achieve its goals. Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve" (Thorton, 1991 p.15). Prohibition caused an explosive growth in crime and increased the amount of alcohol consumption. There were also numerous speak-easies which replaced saloons after the start of prohibition. Approximately only five percent of smuggled liquor was hindered from coming into the country in the 1920s. Furthermore, the illegal liquor business fell under the control of organized gangs, which overpowered most of the law enforcement authorities (Wenburn, 1991). As a result of the lack of enforcement of the Prohibition Act and the creation of an illegal industry, an overall increase in crime transpired. The problems prohibition intended to solve, such as crime, grew worse and they never returned to their pre- prohibition levels. (Krohn and Pyc 459)

The revolution for change therefore caused more problems than it solved as the subtext of the culture was forever altered and the infrastructure of illegal activities grew stronger and stronger.

The major goal of the 18th Amendment was to abolish the saloon. By outlawing the manufacturing and sale of alcohol only, the patronage of a bootlegger emerged. The Volstead Act was intended to prohibit intoxicating beverages, regulate the manufacture, production and use of spirits other than beverage purposes, and promote scientific research in the development of lawful purposes. Initially, all of these regulations were left for the Treasury Department to oversee. The ineffectiveness in preventing illegal diversions and arresting bootleggers led to the creation of the Prohibition Bureau. This was another incompetent strategy based on the spoils system which filled positions with men who discredited the enforcement efforts. Prohibition was intended to solve over-consumption of alcohol, but inevitably encouraged consumption. (Krohn and Pyc 459)

Despite the demands of the culture for change the demands of the desire for alcohol and wealth won the day and the Volstead Act produced an almost unenforceable subsystem of home production and storage. So, in hopes to remove such problems from the home the laws actually returned the problem to the family.

A clause in the Volstead Act made search and seizure virtually unobtainable because any warrant issued was dependent on proof that the liquor was for sale. No matter how much alcohol a person had at home, and no matter how it was obtained or used, agents of the bureau had to have positive evidence that a commercial transaction took place (Aaron & Musto, 1981). This requirement inadvertently promoted home and cottage industry manufacturing of liquor. For example, during the first five years of Prohibition, the acreage of vineyards increased 700%, accompanied by insincere warning labeling such as "do not place liquid in bottle away in the cupboard for twenty days, because it would turn into wine" (Binkley, 1930). Although possession of illegally obtained alcohol was prohibited, the act of drinking alcohol was legal. This suggests that even prohibitionists understood the limits of regulating individual behavior. (Krohn and Pyc 459)

The evolution of the prohibition movement from the point of preaching moderation to the point of preaching absolute abstinence from its consumption is visible in many regional acts of state and local rulings. Later in this work the father of prohibition will be addressed as his own opinions evolved into those that are held by the most ardent of what he called "teetotalers." Moderation had always been an unachievable goal for the people in the new worlds, facing industrialization and top down profit systems.

All societies in which alcohol is consumed employ a range of strategies to minimize the harm associated with its use. The most effective public policies are those that affect the environment of drinking or influence the drinker's demand for alcohol. These include taxation and price policies, controls on access to alcohol such as limiting the condition and time of sale, modifying the drinking environment, a minimum legal drinking age, and countermeasures against drinking in hazardous circumstances such as when driving ... Having control over the amount of alcohol consumption allows people to make better judgments for safety and health purposes. Social drinkers use alcohol in moderate amounts, while alcoholics do not limit their intake. The first step to moderation is practicing safe use of the drug. This means setting boundaries for the amount of alcohol consumed. After establishing a salubrious program, maintenance is the key to continuous moderate use of alcoholic beverages. (Krohn and Pyc 459)

The political as well as social issues regarded by the progressives pulled the directions of the laws toward local issues and enforcement, yet, collective view of the problem was so great that the national venue was where the official issues played themselves out. Yet, as has been said before there are several localities that instituted "dry" laws or at least restrictive laws related to production, sale and transport of alcohol.

Underlying the insistence that liquor was fundamentally a municipal problem was the traditional aim of progressives to free the cities from their political entanglements with state legislatures, as well as the older temperance position that reform was best handled by local property interests. (Rumbarger 120)

The reality of the problem even in the most well established of the American states was foundational. The following passages explain the extreme nature of the voluminous problem and show the monumental nature of the attack waged by the prohibitionists.

When difficulties of transportation and other factors are taken into consideration, the consumption of hard liquors in early America was truly extraordinary, especially during the thirty years or so that followed the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1792, when the population of the United States was a little more than four million, the per capita consumption of ardent spirits was estimated at approximately two and one half gallons, with a grand total, including imports, of 11,008,447 gallons. Of this quantity, about 5,200,000 gallons were produced in this country by 2,579 registered distilleries. By 1810 the number of distilleries had increased to 14,191 and the consumption had tripled, while the population had not quite doubled. In 1814 the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance published a report dealing with the consumption of distilled liquors in 1810, signed by Samuel Dexter, LL.D., president of the society and formerly Secretary of War and Secretary of the Treasury. It said:

The quantity of ardent spirits consumed in the country surpasses belief. By the marshals' return to the Secretary's office in 1810 of domestic manufacturers in the United States, it is ascertained that 25,499,382 gallons of ardent spirits were distilled in that year, of which 133,823 gallons were exported, leaving 25,365,559 gallons to be consumed at home. Considering the caution with which accounts of property are rendered to government through fear of taxation; considering, also, the quantities distilled in private families, of which no account may have been rendered, there is a high probability that millions might be added to the account rendered by the marshals. Let it stand, however, as it is, and add to it 8,000,000 gallons of distilled spirits in the same year imported, and the quantity for home consumption amounts to 33,365,559 gallons. (Asbury 12)

The report broke down these figures to obtain a per capita consumption for 1810, of four and seven tenths gallons. The population of the United States in that year was 7,239,903. Thirteen years later, in 1823, the Boston Recorder, a temperance journal, said that the total annual consumption of the country was seventy-five million "gallons of liquid fire," although no detailed statistics were published. (Asbury 13)

The war waged against alcohol ran almost as deep as that of the consumption itself as the infrastructure for change began to strengthen its hold on public opinion the strength and extremity of the message also increased. The resulting statistical realties for local and regional consumption statistics are the result of this expansion of the message of the temperance leagues, and parties across the nation.

The first annual report of the Executive Committee of the Connecticut State Temperance Society, dated May 19, 1830, said that "in one of the most moral and regular towns of Litchfield County, whose population is 1,586, the amount of distilled liquors retailed during the last ten years has been 36,400 gallons." These liquors were chiefly rum and gin, other kinds not being reckoned. The report also said that licensed retailers in Hartford County, Connecticut, exclusive of the city of Hartford, sold annually 178,000 gallons of hard liquors, or four and one fourth gallons per capita. In 1826 the nineteen hundred inhabitants of Dudley, Massachusetts, drank ten thousand gallons of rum. In 1827 the town of Salisbury, Connecticut, consumed twenty-nine and one half gallons of rum for each of its thirty-four families. Two years later, in 1829, Troy, New York, with a population of ten thousand, consumed 73,959 gallons of rum. Albany, New York, appears to have been the champion. According to a report of the Albany Temperance Society, which made a careful survey of the town, Albany's twenty thousand inhabitants in 1829 consumed two hundred thousand gallons of ardent spirits. This was an average of ten gallons for each man, woman, and child. 4 (Asbury 13)

The reality of the problem, both regionally and nationally even went so far as to adhere itself to the most trusted and respected members of society.

Nobody drank harder during the great era of intemperance than the clergy. The autobiographies and other writings of ministers who survived the ecclesiastical guzzling to become leaders of the temperance movement are filled with accounts of gigantic drinking bouts in the homes of their parishioners, at ordinations, funerals, and other religious exercises in which they participated, and elsewhere. There were few who didn't drink at every opportunity, and to excess, while many were engaged in the liquor business, owning interests in distilleries and taverns. Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College at Schenectady, New York, for many years, said in a famous series of temperance lectures in the late 1840s that "not a few pioneer ministers were distillers and sold to their neighbors the products of their stills." The Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, about 1800, and a noted revivalist who saved many souls by the fervor of his preaching, operated a prosperous distillery within sixty rods of his church. He was thus able to keep an eye on both his businesses at the same time. The authorities of many towns encouraged the establishment of drinking places conveniently near the churches, so that the preachers and their flocks might be able to refresh themselves before and after services. A temperance historian of the 1880s, the Rev. Daniel Dorchester, D.D., quoted the Rev. Leonard Woods, a noted professor of theology at Andover Seminary, as saying that: "I remember when I could reckon up among my acquaintances forty ministers, who were either drunkards, or so far addicted to drinking, that their reputation and usefulness were greatly impaired, if not utterly ruined." The same historian quotes "another gentleman" who said in a Boston newspaper that "a great many deacons in New England died drunkards"; he had "a list of 123 intemperate deacons in Massachusetts, forty-three of whom became sots." 1 Edward C. Delavan of Albany, New York, who according to the 1891 edition of The Cyclopedia of Temperance and Prohibition amassed a fortune as a wine merchant and then became an ardent temperance worker, wrote to the governor of New York in 1857 that an "aged divine, well acquainted with the clergy in Albany," had found that "fifty per cent of the clergy, within a circuit of fifty miles, died drunkards." This was in the 1820s, when only one of Albany's twenty-eight preachers was willing to say a good word for temperance. (Asbury 14)

The messages of the temperance seekers were well founded and yet the desire to imbibe was still ardently stubborn and creative in its ability to gain footholds in every aspect of the nation and this clearly did not change with national prohibition, nor did it change with local temperance laws and restrictions.

The vices of the cities have been the undoing of past empires and civilizations. It has been at the point where the urban population outnumbers the rural people that wrecked Republics have gone down. There the vices of luxury have centered and eaten out the heart of the patriotism of the people, making them the easy victims of every enemy. The peril of this Republic likewise is now clearly seen to be in her cities. There is no greater menace to democratic institutions than the great segregation of an element which gathers its ideas of patriotism and citizenship from the low grogshop and which has proved its enmity to organized civil government. Already some of our cities are well-nigh submerged with this unpatriotic element, which is manipulated by the still baser element engaged in the un-American drink traffic and by the kind of politician the saloon creates. (Sinclair 9)

The reality of the changing nature of alcohol consumption and desire, even before prohibition led to the downfall of many and to the devaluing of many localities and regions as the individuals within them spent a great deal of time impaired and ineffective in their projects and goals The toll that alcohol must have had upon social conditions was extreme and this resulted in an extreme response by the prohibition movement.

The real tragedy of the prohibitionist ideology was that it left no room for temperance. The dry crusade slipped slowly from a moderate remedy for obvious evils into a total cure-all for society. The creed of the dedicated dry would not admit the existence of the moderate drinker. By definition, all drinkers were bound to become alcoholics. The moral of the famous propaganda piece Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was that the first sip of beer always and inevitably led to a drunkard's grave. So believing, the Anti-Saloon League could not attract moderate support by allowing the sale of light wines and beers. National prohibition had to be total. Yet if prohibition bad been confined to prohibition of ardent spirits, as the early nineteenth-century temperance associations had recommended, the Anti-Saloon League might have had the support of the brewers, the winegrowers, and the majority of the American people to this day. A survey conducted in 1946 in America showed that fewer than two-fifths of the adult population ever drank spirits, either regularly or intermittently. 11 (Sinclair 28)

The title of the father of prohibition can be said to be owned by the first temperece leader to successfully establish as state wide prohibition in the state of Maine. The evolution of the mans opinions upon the dangers of the consumption of alcohol, being from the desire for all who consume to avoid drunkenness and drink in moderation to the idea that all consumption of any kind of alcohol is detrimental to the health and well being of everyone, almost mirrors the evolution of the temperance movement itself. Though the individual American, may still have had a personal belief in the acceptance of alcohol as a natural, normal and even healthy form of recreation the tenmperence movements became increasingly conservative as time went on and the more powerful the message the more powerful the speaker.

(Neal) Dow was born in 1804, and he came into the Temperance Movement as an advocate of what he called "moderation," which meant that he was opposed only to drunkenness. But at the age of twenty-five, after considerable thought, he decided to become what he called a "teetotaler" and to instruct his friends in the doctrine of total abstinence. He was soon opposed to the use of any intoxicating drinks, and as a wealthy young businessman he went about his daily affairs urging everyone to react as he consistently reacted to the havoc spread in Portland by the many grogshops. "I saw health impaired," he wrote, "capacity undermined, employment lost. I saw wives and children suffering. . . . I found helpless victims of a controlling appetite that was dragging them down to ruin." In these experiences he found what was to be the central theme of his life for over half a century, "that the traffic in intoxicating drinks tends more to degradation and impoverishment of the people than all other causes of evil combined. (Clark 36)

In fact, in retrospect the evolution of the father of temperance and some would say the creator of the absolute prohibition movement is demonstrative of the most fundamental questions of the story of Dow's life. The evolution of the movement from a seeker of individual social change through information to the creation of a foundation of laws that in fact forced individuals to moderate or stop all consumption of alcohol can be seen as the story of Dow's life and the greatest question of the possible success and real failure of the 18th amendament.

The most important question to ask about Neal Dow is why -- after having determined for perfectly good reasons to leave booze alone and to encourage others to do so -- he later wrote laws which required others to do so. We should next ask why apparently most of his fellow citizens at least for a while wanted him to write these laws. For Dow became the driving force of Prohibition, bringing the first real Prohibition law in American history to his state of Maine in 1851. As the personification of a social movement, he would lead people throughout the English-speaking world to demand laws modeled after his achievement in Maine. The Prohibition Movement before the Civil War was "Maine Law" Prohibition. Dow was called both the "Napoleon" and the "prophet" of Prohibition because he made his crusade a principal issue in American political and religious life. (Clark 36)

One of the founders of the nation and a molder of public opinion also spoke out on the dangers of alcohol consumption and with help created a greater national movement for legal restrictions. Yet, the extremity of the messages also put the government and the people in a difficult position. As any wise person knows the moderation of laws, especially with regard to social control is a necessity, as the more extreme the law the more likely it is at the worst, likely to fail and at the least, likely to cause a backlash, completely subverting its purpose.

Yet this internalization and these new relationships could too soon be perverted. Laced with alcohol, they could -- precisely because of their vital importance and inevitable rigidity -- extend intolerable threats of psychological and physical violence. Lincoln's temperance speech carried just such a message when he pictured the drunkard with his "naked and starving children" and his wife "long weighed down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart." This echoes one of Lyman Beecher's early temperance sermons, in which the preacher contrasted the sober village of "temperate, thrifty farmers and mechanics" with his vision of alcoholic wreckage in the "village of riot and drunkenness, made up of tipplers, widows and degraded children, of old houses, broken windows and dilapidated fences." These phrases so impressed the young Neal Dow that many years later, as a very old man, he quoted them in his reminiscences. When he first heard them, Dow had already thought long about the "wretchedness and squalor" of a drunken neighbor's home in Portland, Maine. There, in a population of 12,000 in 1840, he numbered 500 "common drunkards." He saw also at least 1,000 "addicts to excessive use" -- men who, when under the influence, Dow noted somberly, would lose more money, wreck more ships, derail more locomotives, explode more boilers, and cause more physical disasters and moral delinquencies than the sodden drunks who could not stagger beyond their taverns. (Clark 35)

Even the most conservatively viewed of our American ancestors regarded the use of alcohol as a necessary and even divine expression of the human condition. This history left the individual with a collective cultural memory of a great desire for alcohol, that could scarcely be halted by a big brother approach to social control.

This was a folk wisdom fixed as early in the American conscience as when Increase Mather had preached to the Puritans that "the wine is from God" but had warned them sternly that "the drunkard is from the Devil." Thomas Jefferson. had hoped to develop in his countrymen a taste for the "temperance" beverages of wine and beer so that they might be cured of drunkenness. Thus "the wine of life" endured as a rich metaphor and "Demon Rum" became a terrifying personification. This was carried into the twentieth century. By 1916, a majority of the states had what were without hypocrisy called Prohibition laws, and these laws had come about because the case against the saloon, the drunkard, and the liquor traffic then rested on the social statistics of crime, delinquency, poverty, prostitution, disease, and corruption that careful students of these problems had accumulated for three generations. But hardly any of these laws prohibited the personal use of wine and beer outside the saloon. (Clark 9)

The transnational transportation of alcohol, was attached as a way in which to demonstrate to the local "drys" that the federal government was at least interested in officially creating an enforceable set of laws. This beginning was the link between local prohibition laws, and the creation of a national movement to force abstinence for alcohol, through laws prohibiting its creation and sale.

1913 when, to the rejoicing of bone-dry advocates, Congress had passed the Webb-Kenyon Law. This was an act to ban the shipments of "intoxicating liquor of any kind" into states where such liquors could be used "in violation of" state laws. On the face of it, the act simply provided the kind of formal protection which drys in the dry states had for years said they deserved. While it did implicitly condemn the national liquor traffic and the drunkard-making commerce, it required no appropriations of money and it carried no specific provisions for federal enforcement. It seemed to be the kind of noble, if harmless, statement one expected from Progressives and idealists, and on that basis even some wets voted for it. But President Taft, who regarded the law as both repressive and unconstitutional, rejected it. Then, in a dramatic, even stunning, victory, the drys put it through Congress again with a majority large enough to override the President's veto. (Clark 119)