The War On Alcohol

Lisa McGirr, “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and The Rise Of The American State,” W.W.Norton, 2016, 255 pp.

The 1918 Eighteenth Amendment prohibition of alcohol manufacture, sale, and usage is one of the nation’s most significant policy debacles.  After enactment and in less than fifteen years it became the first, and it remains the only, constitutional amendment to be rescinded.  However, the amendment had a profound and lasting effect on the nation and its acceptance of effecting social change through the federal government, effects, for example, now seen in how the ‘war on drugs’ is playing out.

My Notes:

Pg. 13:  Between 1880 and 1920 over twenty million men and women immigrated to the United States, drawn by the voracious appetite of manufacturers large and small for their labor.  The largest flows of immigration took place between 1900 and WWI.  In 1907 alone, over one million immigrants entered the country. Large-scale immigration reached its highpoint in 1910 when 14.9 percent of the population was foreign-born. 

Pg. 21:  By 1910, eight years before the amendment, approximately 50 percent of the population had already fallen under some form of liquor-prohibition legislation, local and state—however, large cities were generally left alone.  Many regions had become dry through local and county ordinance.  Additionally, in twelve states of the south and west, antiliquor crusaders succeeded in passing state laws by 1914.  These laws were diverse, even bone-dry states could do little to stop transportation of liquor from neighboring wet states.  The leaders of prohibition campaigns came to a growing consensus: constitutional prohibition at the federal level was the only real solution.

Pg. 23:  The Progressive reform era witnessed a wave of constitutional activism not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction.  After a nearly half-century hiatus, the nation adopted four amendments within the brief period of 1913 to 1919.  The Eighteenth benefited and was part of that wave.  It was introduced in the wake of state ratification of a federal income tax and the direct election of senators.  Until the establishment of the income tax, federal revenue depended upon regressive consumer taxes and the protective tariff, both disliked in the south.  The income tax initially targeted only the uppermost income brackets, leaving untouched the incomes of the vast majority of households.  Antiliquor crusaders argued that passage of such a tax was an important precondition for the success of the war on alcohol and the Eighteenth amendment.  Providing an alternative source of federal revenue would ease dependence on the alcohol tax.  In 1910 the liquor tax accounted for close to 30 percent of the federal government revenue.

Pg. 50:  After prohibition was passed, the cost of beer multiplied between five and tenfold.  The price of hard liquor spiked as well.  Not surprisingly, therefore, the war on alcohol did measurably reduce alcohol consumption by as much as half for those of lower incomes.  It had little effect on the professional class. Per capita alcohol consumption rates would not catch up with early twentieth-century levels until 1970.

Pg. 69:  By the late 1920s, the Prohibition Bureau housed around 4,000 employees.  Its budget of $13 million in 1930 (equivalent to over $185 million in today’s dollars) dwarfed Hoover’s FBI budget of just over $2 million.  Not surprisingly, the mushrooming government agency had soft, shallow roots and was soon beset by corruption, violence, and penetration by organized crime. 

Pg. 71:  Prohibition policing differed by region, by rural or urban setting, and most especially by race, ethnicity, and class. 

Pg. 102:  The 1928 presidential race provided a platform in the Democratic Party for the immigrants, industrial workers, and African-Americans to express their grievance against the unfair enforcement of Prohibition which targeted them.  They flocked to the Democratic Party and the African-Americans left the Republican Party mostly over this issue.  Although Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, did not win, the stage was set for FDR to run with this enhanced constituency in the 1932 election.

Pg. 133:  The Klan had pretty much disappeared but the war on alcohol provided a dynamic social movement and opportunity for them to leverage the broad scope of the law to pursue its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and white-supremacist agenda, winning two to five million Americans to its ranks by 1925.  Where local authorities failed to do their job, the Klan promised to step up to the plate. 

Pg. 191:  The antiliquor war forged a critical chapter of American state development.  The Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act dramatically expanded the scope of federal authority, opening the door for the revolutionizing of citizen-state relations that the New Deal later institutionalized after 1932.    Most stories of American state development usually leap frog over the Prohibition years and blame the expansion of federal authority and the upsurge of federal and state coercive power on the New Deal.  However, nothing did more than the nation’s Prohibition war to build this less-examined side of state building in the first half of the twentieth century.  Law enforcement expenditures were almost five times as great in 1930 as in 1920. (p. 208).  In December 1933 the states had ratified the Twenty-First Amendment, officially ending constitutional Prohibition of alcohol.  The war on alcohol was over, regulation reverted to the states.  The expansion of state authority that the war had engendered, however, did not disappear; it merely lurched forward in new directions. 

Pg. 249:  Mississippi kept its liquor-prohibition laws on the books until 1966.  As late as 1973, 545 United States counties banned liquor sales and 672 banned liquor sales for consumption on premises.  In Oklahoma, drink by the glass was only legalized in 1986.  (When I was younger, bars in our county had pictures of people black-listed from drinking.  Disgruntled wives had a lot to do with getting you on that list—I was single and unaffected!).

Pg. 251:  In 1971, Nixon shrilly warned that drug abuse was a ‘national emergency’ and ‘public enemy number one.’  Fourteen years later, Reagan exponentially widened the war with military analogies reminiscent of that energetic alcohol war of the past.  Between 1980 and 1997, the number of men and women serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses skyrocketed from fifty thousand to four hundred thousand.  (Just as Yogi would say: It’s Deja vous all over again.)