Religion and Social Reform in the 1920s

Prohibition REVISED

The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1919, and the following year Prohibition took effect in the United States. Although uninformed parties tend to assume this was the result of some early twentieth-century fad, the reality was that the movement toward Prohibition had been occurring for decades. For example, in 1842, the great American poet Walt Whitman published a novel, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate. Whitman's book (published over a decade before the poetry that would make him famous) is a so-called Temperance novel, a piece of writing designed to convert people to shunning alcohol -- and Whitman was writing nearly eighty years before Prohibition would become a reality.

To some extent, this eighty year process represented a remarkable development: the integration of women into the American political process. In 1920, the same year that the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition a reality, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified guaranteeing women's suffrage. These two major social changes in the 1920s, however, were linked much earlier in American life. A number of the early antebellum advocates for women's rights and suffrage -- like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Amelia Bloomer -- had emerged from the Temperance movement. To some extent, this made perfect sense: alcohol was being viewed in terms of battered women and abandoned children, so it was a domestic issue. Temperance also emerged side-by-side with the abolitionist movement, which had a similar concern about the domestic ramifications of political issues: as Harriet Beecher Stowe would prove with Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was possible to awaken people to the horrors of slavery by concentrating on families split up when they were sold, or small children (like Topsy in Stowe's novel) who risked damnation because they had not been taught the Christian catechism. In other words, women's participation in Christian social meliorist causes would emerge from Temperance and Abolition would eventually result in the achievement of all three of these goals.

There is a darker side to Prohibition, however, which is seldom discussed. If Whitman's 1842 novel demonstrates that Temperance was already a popular issue, a famous Know-Nothing Party political cartoon demonstrates that there was something more than the Social Gospel at work in antebellum America. The cartoon depicts a German and Irish immigrant running away with a ballot-box: the Irishman carries a shillelagh and the German a meerschaum pipe, but more intriguingly for our subject, each of them is dressed in a barrel, one filled with Irish whiskey and the other filled with German beer. The implication, of course, is that recent immigrants to America -- largely from Catholic regions like the south of Ireland or the south of Germany -- were drunk, but were also corrupting the democratic process. Voting rights had been extended universally to white males, but many white males were Catholic immigrants. This linkage of alcohol to immigrant populations and religious minority groups is worth recalling: Catholics and Jews as religious organizations opposed Prohibition, since both groups include wine as part of their religious ritual. (Politically, they were joined by liturgical Protestant denominations like Episcopalians and Lutherans in opposing Prohibition.) But the anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic aspects of the Temperance movement have been well-documented, largely because of the Ku Klux Klan's overlap with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Klan's suprising resurgence in the 1920s largely based on its militant support for Prohibition. Indeed the re-emergence of the Klan in 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia was as an enforcer of local alcohol prohibition and a political advocate for nationwide prohibition.