The Battles Against Alcohol
The First World War (1914–18) was a turning point in European and global history. It destroyed great empires, radically redrew Europe’s political boundaries, altered the global balance of power, forced governments to mobilize state power, and ushered in new social policies. The war was also a watershed in the history of alcohol. Under the pressure of extended military conflict, growing concerns about alcohol crystallized, and many governments introduced regulations that were unprecedented in their rigor and extent. Although many of these policies were adopted as emergency wartime measures, they were largely maintained and even intensified long after the conflict ended, and the period between the world wars saw temperance and prohibition policies extended throughout the Western world. The best-known case is the United States, which introduced national prohibition in 1920, but it was only one country that tried to stamp out the supposed evils of alcohol during and immediately following the First World War.
The anxieties about the effects of alcohol consumption on health and social order that had been building during the nineteenth century sharpened with the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914. If alcohol had a negative effect on health, then it had the potential to be particularly serious in the case of soldiers. They were expected to be fit and robust models of manhood, rather than the weak, hollow-chested, and mentally deficient specimens that temperance literature generally portrayed drinkers as being. If alcohol undermined moral order and the stability of civilian society—which became crucially important as the “home front” during the war—it threatened havoc and defeat in military society, where men had to be in peak physical and emotional form, unquestioningly patriotic, and ready to obey orders, no matter what the consequences.
Alcohol also became a sharper issue from 1914 onward because wartime conditions gave extraordinary opportunities for the antialcohol campaigners to press their case more effectively. Temperance and prohibitionist rhetoric had long employed military metaphors: theirs was a war against drink that involved recruiting forces in the campaign against the enemy alcohol. This rhetoric meshed easily with the nationalist language of war that was normalized before and during the hostilities that began in 1914. Temperance and political leaders armed themselves with one language to fight two simultaneous wars—one against the foreign enemy beyond their borders and the other against the alcohol enemy within them. The most explicit statement of this sort was the 1915 declaration of British prime minister David Lloyd George: “We are fighting Germany, Austria, and Drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is Drink.”1 It was an astonishing statement, given that the British forces had already suffered hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded at the hands of the German armies. An earlier prime minister, William Gladstone, had claimed that alcohol had been more disastrous than all the wars, plagues, and famines, but at least he had not said that while Britain was in the grip of a deadly epidemic.
The war focused on two distinct drinking populations—soldiers and civilians—and the varied responses to each displayed the ambiguities that were evident in much of the antialcohol rhetoric of the day. As far as drinking by the military was concerned, opponents of alcohol had to contend with the centuries-old practice of providing daily rations of alcohol to soldiers and sailors. Fermented beverages were often the safest drinks in battle zones, where water supplies were often contaminated by human waste and dead bodies (humans and animals) and could be a source of epidemic diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever. At sea, beer was often served, and many navies included a daily ration of rum or other distilled spirit.
Temperance movements had focused on alcohol use in the military and had drawn attention to what they considered the particular iniquity of the state, through the army, appearing to encourage alcohol consumption by young men. Some temperance advocates argued that many young soldiers had no experience of alcohol until they joined up. Others, including serving and retired officers, challenged the conventional assumptions that alcohol was beneficial to health and argued that alcohol consumption was positively correlated with problems of discipline. Some raised the question of the impact of drinking on military efficiency in the narrow sense. Former British naval officers declared that most accidents aboard warships were the result of alcohol (one asserted unequivocally that alcohol was more dangerous than gunpowder), and army officers insisted that alcohol impaired the aiming accuracy of both riflemen and the artillery.
Before the First World War, the military authorities of a number of states carried out independent studies on the effects of alcohol on various military activities. A German survey of soldiers who fired some 36,000 rounds over sixteen consecutive days showed that their marksmanship was not affected by the normal ration of alcohol.2 French military authorities seem to have been more realistic about the chances of keeping alcohol out of the hands of soldiers: instead of comparing the success of soldiers who drank with that of those who did not, they compared the marksmanship of wine-drinking and beer-drinking soldiers. They concluded that both beverages impaired accuracy, but wine less so. During the war itself, other estimates of the effects of alcohol on military efficiency were bandied about. According to one account, even half the rum ration of a British soldier produced a 40 to 50 percent reduction in accuracy of rifle shooting, while the naval rum ration led to a loss of 30 percent in gunnery accuracy.3
Yet despite the familiar moral strictures and the more pointed warnings of the practical effects of alcohol consumption on military effectiveness, most European armies continued to supply their soldiers in the field with spirits or wine. By the end of November 1915, after sixteen months of war, the British had sent a quarter of a million gallons of rum to their forces in France.4 It was used mainly as a ration, each man receiving a modest twice-weekly serving that was increased for soldiers in the trenches and increased again when the weather was very bad. The justification was set out in a 1914 regulation: “On very exceptional occasions, as when the troops have been drenched or chilled through exposure on manoeuvres or training, a free ration . . . of rum . . . [may be issued] when certified by the Senior Medical Officer to be absolutely necessary for safeguarding the health of the troops.” Antialcohol activists, who had long abandoned the notion that alcohol offered any health benefits, condemned the rum ration, which, they said, should be replaced by truly nutritious foods like hot milk and soup.5
Rum was also provided as a stimulant, and an extra ration was doled out to troops before they were sent “over the top,” swarming from their trenches across no-man’s-land toward the enemy lines. One soldier recalled, “Though the rum was potent, the amount given to each man was strictly limited and the effect was little more than that of a whiskey after some nasty shock. With most of the men keyed up for the coming assault, the alcohol tended to sharpen their senses rather than to deaden them.”6
Still, there were concerns about mixing alcohol and military service. Legislation gave military authorities powers to regulate the hours alcohol could be sold in localities close to defended harbors, to seize alcohol on any premises used for military purposes, and to take action against any sailor who was drunk when he joined his ship.7 Reformers in Britain were appalled at the thought of the moral effects that an extended period on the Continent with alcohol would wreak on the millions of young Britons who were in military service. Their anxiety reflected a tendency of the British upper class to think of Europeans (and the French in particular) as morally loose and lacking self-discipline. Never mind that soldiers were engaged in an atrocious military conflict, enduring shocking living conditions, and suffering the most appalling casualties; antialcohol campaigners, including the prime minister, seemed more concerned about the effects of a daily ration of rum than of incoming shells.
But British temperance campaigners who criticized the alcohol ration knew they walked a narrow line. They wanted to stress the harm that intoxicating drink did to military morale, discipline, and efficiency, but they did not want to appear unpatriotic by suggesting that their fighting forces were undisciplined, unmotivated, and ineffective. One way out of the difficulty was to draw an implicit contrast between the British troops and those forces that were believed to be fighting without any alcohol rations.
A number of British commentators pointed to Russia, Britain’s ally against Germany, because the Russian government had ordered the country’s 26,000 vodka shops closed during the mobilization of millions of men in August 1914. This was a significant break with tradition, because bouts of vodka-drinking had been the common way that communities sent their young men off on military service. This time, the huge Russian armies were massed in an orderly and efficient way, a sharp contrast with the drunken sprees that had passed for mobilization on earlier occasions. As a result (and also to preserve grain supplies for food) the next month the tsar’s government ordered liquor shops closed for the duration of the hostilities. For its part, the Russian army command banned the consumption of all forms of alcohol by troops on active service, and this, too, broke with tradition. Until then, Russian soldiers had been given vodka on nine holidays during the year and on special occasions determined by commanders. During war, rations of vodka had traditionally been distributed to soldiers three times a week (with more doled out as a reward for good performance), while Russian sailors had a ration of vodka every day while they were at sea.8
Western temperance organizations described the results of Russia’s dry wartime policies as both amazing and predictable. British prime minister Lloyd George said productivity had increased by 30 to 50 percent on the Russian home front, “just as if she had added millions of labourers to the labour force.”9 As for the battle front, Russian soldiers were said to exhibit as much enthusiasm for battle when they were cold sober as other soldiers did when fortified by drink; but the Russians were more disciplined and fought as well or better, and those who were wounded recovered more rapidly. “There was never a more clear-headed or more sober army in the field,” one author exclaimed, “than that which is now facing the hordes of the Teutons at this present moment.” He continued that, because Russia was “one of the most democratic of countries” (an assertion that would have astounded most Russians), “once the peasant had been deprived of vodka it was unseemly that the wealthier classes should be able to enjoy champagne,” and that as a result, all alcohol consumption in Russia had been suspended for the duration of the war.10
Such accounts of a dry Russian army contrast vividly with descriptions of heavy drinking on the eastern front during the war. Alcohol was no less prominent on the Russian home front. Illicit distilleries sprang up to serve a ready market, and peasants and workers produced vast volumes of samogon (homemade alcohol). In Tushino, near Moscow, illicit vodka was so plentiful and inexpensive by 1916 that peasants no longer bothered to make their own, and reports throughout the war suggest that alcohol was widely and readily available, despite government regulations.11Temperance supporters in the West ignored the failure of wartime prohibition in Russia and instead stressed the apparent resolve of the government so as to highlight what they portrayed as the British government’s weak-kneed policy of doling out alcohol to the troops.
Nor did the Russian upper classes let the war interfere with the appetite that had made them one of the largest markets for champagne during the nineteenth century. Imports continued, although the war could interrupt supplies: one ship carrying vintage champagne (Heidsieck 1907) for the imperial court in St. Petersburg was sunk by a German submarine in the Gulf of Finland in 1916. (The bottles were recovered in 1998, and the wine was found to be in excellent condition.) If anything choked off the supply of champagne to the Russian elites, it was not any sense of wartime duty or wish to set an example for peasants and workers, but the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
The real loser from Russia’s wartime prohibition was not consumers (although most probably drank poorer-quality alcohol than before) but the government. Before the war, taxes on liquor sales accounted for more than a quarter of the Russian state’s revenues, but illicit producers, of course, evaded taxation.12 The loss of this major contribution to the state budget undermined Russia’s ability to sustain its war effort and contributed to the unrest that led to revolutions in 1917.
The French took a much less restrictive view of the military alcohol ration and made provisions for it from the beginning of the war. It was not rum they issued to their soldiers, however, but wine, the beverage that even the French temperance movement accepted as healthy. The 1914 grape harvest, brought in largely by children, women, and older men during the first months of the war because the younger men had been called up on military service, was an especially good one, up 50 percent from the previous year. The winemakers of Languedoc, the southern region that produced vast volumes of inexpensive wine for working-class consumption, presented 20 million liters to the army for distribution in military hospitals. As patriotic as this gift was, it was also profitable, for it prompted the French military authorities to purchase much more Languedoc wine to provide soldiers with generous rations throughout the war.
In 1914 the French military wine ration was set at a quarter of a liter a day, but in 1916, as the war dragged on and conditions at the front deteriorated, it was increased to half a liter. In 1918 officers were permitted to add a further quarter-liter and soldiers had the option of purchasing another quarter-liter at subsidized prices. By the end of the war, then, French soldiers had legitimate access to as much as a liter of wine a day, and no doubt there was a brisk trade in illicit supplies of wine and other alcoholic beverages. Reflecting current views of the effects of different forms of alcohol, the authorities fought a constant battle to keep spirits out of the hands of French soldiers, and the generous ration of wine was intended to reduce the demand for stronger alcoholic drinks. In 1916 the Academy of Medicine in Paris issued a statement to soldiers that addressed a number of myths, such as that alcohol gives strength and warmth. It warned against distilled spirits but allowed that a man might drink a liter of wine a day, as long as it was with meals.13
During 1917 the French army went through 1,200 million liters of wine, and it was estimated that it would have consumed 1,600 million liters in 1918 if the war had continued to the end of that year. Thousands of railroad tankers were requisitioned to supply French troops with wine. Supplying military rations helped sustain the French wine industry through the war; the men in military service were in the prime drinking demographic, and the loss of this market for years on end would have been disastrous for wine producers. Government requisitions of wine for soldiers were a boon to southern producers of cheap wine, although the prices paid were well below the peacetime market rates for the producers of the more expensive wines in regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy.
French soldiers consumed red wine, which was thought to be more masculine and more likely than white wine to put fire into men’s blood. Other nationalities seem not to have had the same qualms. Australian soldiers are said to have drunk cheap (and almost certainly awful-tasting) white wine, and they pronounced vin blanc “van blonk,” a phrase that was soon corrupted to “plonk” and applied to any cheap, poor-quality wine. But the French drank red, and one of them, writing to the London Times in 1917 in response to criticism of French drinking habits, noted, “The fine health of the French troops in Gallipoli and in France is considered to have been largely due to their consumption of red wine—our light Burgundies and Bordeaux.”14 This overlooked the fact that most of the wine provided to soldiers came from southern France, not from prestigious regions like Burgundy and Bordeaux. Even so, wine was given some credit for the final victory when, at the end of hostilities, a French military newspaper proclaimed, “No doubt our brilliant generals and heroic soldiers were the immortal architects of victory. But would they have been without the ordinary wine [ pinard] that kept them going to the end, that endowed them with spirit, courage, tenacity, and scorn for danger, and made them repeat with unbreakable conviction, ‘We will prevail!’?”15
It is pointless to wonder whether the French and their allies prevailed because of alcohol or despite it. If a modest wine or rum ration helped make conditions more bearable, there were occasions when drinking interfered with the military effort. Ernest Hemingway wrote of one experience in the war: “Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk, going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying, ‘I’m drunk, I tell you mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.’”16
In the end, alcohol on the battlefronts proved to be a less contentious issue than regulating its supply and consumption on the home fronts, and European governments enacted restrictions on alcohol during the war with urgency and decisiveness they had not shown before it. Most of the restrictions were aimed at the production and sale of beer and distilled spirits. Some reflected wartime conditions, such as the need to protect grain supplies for bread by limiting beer production or to reduce drunkenness so as to maximize industrial productivity. In other cases, specific policies were adopted not because wartime conditions made them urgent but because the war provided the opportunity to impose regulations that would have been unacceptable in peacetime.
Among the war-related policies were the British alcohol regulations issued in 1914 under the Defence of the Realm Act that ushered in a wide range of emergency measures, including restrictions on the production and sale of alcohol. Then, in mid-1915, the government set up the Central Control Board, the first bureaucratic body designed specifically to develop and oversee alcohol policy. Legislation and cabinet orders, buttressed by local regulations issued by municipalities and military authorities, created a web of restrictions designed to keep alcohol from interfering with the war effort. They reflected the concern expressed by the prime minister: “A considerable percentage of workers failed to turn up on a Monday morning, and when they appeared on Tuesday they were much the worse for their week-end debauch. . . . One bank holiday a great number of men failed to turn up for the whole week. No wonder output was unsatisfactory.”17
Early measures included raising the price of all forms of alcohol and lowering the strength of beer. The latter was designed partly to reduce the breweries’ consumption of grain and partly to reduce the frequency of drunkenness among workers in the all-important war-related industries. Although no limits were initially placed on the production of beer in England, output fell during 1915, and in July 1916 it was reduced by government order to about three-quarters of prewar production. Further restrictions were added the next year amid a vigorous debate within the cabinet over two issues: whether to nationalize or to simply regulate the brewing industry during the war and whether to ban production entirely or to merely limit production of the diluted product.18
Other measures designed to achieve maximum economic wartime efficiency in Britain included restrictions on the hours that bars could open. They were limited to serving drinks at lunchtime and in the evening, thus encouraging the consumption of alcohol with food and discouraging drinking during regular working hours. Confronted by evidence that drinking was still interfering with munitions production—the British Medical Journal wrote that “the critical supply of munitions and armament of war is imperiled by whisky drinking in Glasgow”—the government imposed further limits in 1915.19 Bars were permitted to sell alcohol for only five and a half hours a day (noon to 2:30 PM and 6:00 to 9:00 PM), rather than the sixteen to nineteen and a half hours (hours varied by district) permitted up to that point. Other regulations included restrictions on the hours that spirits could be sold for consumption off the premises (two and a half hours a day during the week and none at all on weekends), and bans on selling alcohol on credit, serving bonus measures, and treating. Additional restrictions were imposed in militarily sensitive areas near dockyards and munitions factories. Such measures limited opportunities for drinking, but workers were also urged to exercise self-restraint. The royal family was persuaded to set an example by abstaining from alcohol for the duration of the war.
These policies were not without their critics. An editorial in the influential British Medical Journal argued that the failure in the supply of munitions was due not to alcohol, which it argued was inherently no worse to health than tea, coffee, sugar, and lack of exercise. Rather, the productivity problems should be attributed to the strain of overtime and poor work conditions that delivered bad air, noise, high pressure on workers, and monotonous tasks. The editors explicitly linked drinking to the environment: “The excessive spirit drinking occurs in those parts of the country where the atmosphere is begrimed with smoke and the natural beauty of the world most hidden by the dirt of man’s handiwork—in London, Lancashire, Glasgow, Tyneside.” It recounted the story of a little girl who, seeing a picture of the sun rising behind a mountain, exclaimed, “Oh, it’s as beautiful as a public-house!” In order to improve wartime productivity, the editorial suggested the government improve working conditions and limit alcohol to drinks with a maximum of 4 percent alcohol. Whiskey would be served already diluted, at a ratio of one ounce of whiskey to half a pint of water.20
There was an irony inherent in the various alcohol policies adopted by governments such as Britain’s during the war. They were put in place while a sizeable proportion of the country’s prime drinking population—adult males—was absent. By 1917 some 4 million British men of drinking age were on military service abroad, and the ratio of females to males over eighteen years of age in Britain was 61:39, a big shift in favor of women, compared with the 52:48 ratio of 1914.21 This meant that rigorous alcohol policies of the kind long advocated by temperance campaigners were applied to a population that was now skewed toward the two broad demographic groups that historically consumed relatively little alcohol: women and children.
The shift in gender ratios in wartime civilian society underlay a broader cultural movement that in some respects blurred existing boundaries between women and men. Hundreds of thousands of women were employed in war-related industries where they enjoyed relatively good wages, and they took advantage of the new context of drinking (restricted hours and lower alcohol levels in drink) to patronize pubs in unprecedented numbers. This was a radical break with existing behavior that had seen “respectable” women—especially single women who did not want to be mistaken for prostitutes—avoid pubs. From 1916 on, however, middle-class and better-off working-class women appear to have patronized public bars in considerable numbers, a phenomenon described by one historian as “the first major shift in popular drinking habits in more than a century.”22
This change in the balance of men and women in British pubs was, if anything, encouraged by the regulatory body set up by the government to control all aspects of drinking. It overruled regulations imposed by the military authorities in some naval and garrison towns that would have banned all women from bars—regulations imposed to deal with perceived heavy drinking by the wives of enlisted men. The official spirit of gender equality was not entirely a matter of principle. The women’s suffrage movement had suspended its agitation for the women’s vote for the duration the war, but its leaders had threatened to renew their activities if the government fostered inequality in any sphere to the disadvantage of women.
Even adjusted for the demographic shift that Britain experienced during the war, per capita consumption of all forms of alcohol declined. After rising 2 percent in 1915, consumption by people eighteen and older declined by 6 percent in 1916 and 39 percent in 1917. But there were differences between the consumption rates of spirits and beer (very little wine was consumed in Britain). Consumption of spirits rose 18 percent in 1915, fell slightly (by 1 percent) in 1916, and then more sharply by 30 percent in 1917. Beer consumption declined every year: by 6, 7, and 44 percent, respectively.23 It is possible that the declining availability and quality of beer persuaded some drinkers—perhaps heavier drinkers—to switch to spirits, even though they were more expensive. The fact that income and living standards in Britain remained buoyant during the war (far more so than elsewhere in Europe) would explain how some people were able to afford spirits.
The decline in overall alcohol consumption was reflected in a drop in the number of arrests for public drunkenness. They fell by a quarter in 1915 (compared to 1914) and slid by another two-thirds in 1916 and 1917. By the end of the war the annual number of such arrests in England and Wales was 33,000, less than a sixth of the 212,000 in 1914, largely because so many men in the twenty-to-forty age group, which so generously contributed to the drinking population, were on active service.24
Despite the increasingly important share of the market represented by spirits during the war, beer remained the staple alcoholic beverage of the British working class, and the government was reluctant to go too far too quickly in restricting its availability. In 1917 the American government, which was within two years of legislating prohibition throughout the United States, tried to persuade its European allies to ban brewing entirely as part of more rigorous rationing programs. The British declined, citing “the difficulties and dangers of imposing upon the working classes any sweeping measures of prohibition especially at a moment when drastic compulsory rations are coming into force.”25 Even if beer were no longer an essential element of the British diet, enjoying a couple of pints at the local pub was deeply embedded in male working-class culture. Cutting off supplies might have led to the sort of disturbances that food shortages provoked in Germany and elsewhere in the last two years of the war.
If the British wartime administration acted cautiously to restrict alcohol to its population, the French acted with even greater care. Alcohol possessed a particular economic and cultural significance in France, where a considerable proportion of French workers were employed in viticulture and where exports of wine and brandy made important contributions to the balance of trade. These considerations alone made legislators nervous about attacking alcohol, and there was the additional fact that spirits and wine were culturally important throughout French society.
There was widespread official concern about levels of drinking in France before the war—per capita consumption of alcohol from wine and spirits amounted to 23 liters, compared with 10 liters in England and 7 liters in Germany—but governments had resisted pressure to impose serious restrictions. The law required bars to display official posters warning of the penalties for being drunk in public, measures that temperance supporters considered derisory in the face of what they believed to be widespread alcohol abuse and alcoholism. There was particular concern about the level of absinthe consumption, but even here successive prewar governments had dragged their feet, partly for fear of the reaction from consumers and producers.
The advent of war made all the difference. Within two weeks of the beginning of hostilities, the minister of the interior issued a regulation banning the sale not only of absinthe but also of similar beverages, such as the anise-flavored alcohols (made without wormwood) known by their brand names, Pernod and Pastis. Despite arguments that the government would lose tax revenue and would have to pay massive compensation to producers and farmers, and ignoring claims that the real danger to health was from cheap, adulterated versions, the Chamber of Deputies voted in March 1915 to prohibit their production and sale.
Absinthe was an easy target. It had been singled out as a particularly dangerous beverage not only by antialcohol campaigners but also by groups (such as the army) that were anything but hostile to alcohol itself. The ban on absinthe during the war is, in many respects, less surprising than the failure of governments to prohibit it before the war. But having acted resolutely on absinthe, the French wartime administration adopted very limited restrictions on other alcoholic beverages. Legislators took little issue with soldiers having a generous daily ration of wine, and attempts to regulate the availability of alcohol to civilians were modest. They included restrictions on the opening hours of existing bars and cafés and a decision not to issue any additional licenses to sell alcohol during the war.
Policies such as these were mild responses to the vivid scenarios of national disaster painted by some French temperance campaigners during the war. They criticized the army for introducing young men to alcohol, and some carried reports of heavy drinking by soldiers before they went into combat. A leading public health periodical carried an article claiming that alcohol made “the good soldier . . . undisciplined, lazy, perverted,” and it went on to ask, “How will he behave when he returns from the Front? What will be the consequences of this invasion of drinkers?”26
Like their English counterparts, some French commentators portrayed drink as an enemy as dangerous as Germany and represented the wars against both as inseparable. But the French antialcohol lobby gave particular prominence to the negative effects of heavy drinking and alcoholism on fertility. This was a response to the chronic French concern about population decline—a fear that had intensified after the Prussian defeat of France in 1871 and became especially acute during the First World War, when France faced the far more populous German Empire. Seen as obstructing population growth, alcohol could be portrayed as weakening France from within and making it vulnerable to defeat by Germany.
If France’s wartime administration did not respond to these anxieties about alcohol, some military and regional civilian authorities did. One French general banned the consumption of all spirits in the region under his control, a regulation that encompassed not only French soldiers but their British and Belgian counterparts and soldiers’ families. In some localities, civilian authorities forbade the employment of minor females (except for owners’ children) in taverns, required bars to have windows so that drinkers could be seen from the street outside (presumably to prevent clandestine drinking), and banned advertisements for absinthe (which was no longer legally available).27 But such measures were only local in their reach, and even then, they tended to target spirits and largely left untouched the broader alcohol-positive culture of the French.
For the most part, the difficulties faced by French civilians in terms of getting alcohol were caused not by obstacles thrown up by the government but by wartime price inflation. Even in the Charente region, on the Atlantic coast, where vast volumes of cheap wine were produced for distilling into brandy, the price of wine rose from 20 francs in 1914 to 60 francs the next year and then to 110 francs by 1918. The price of few other commodities increased as much. Compared with the more than fivefold rise in the price of wine, bread doubled in price, meat rose threefold, and milk and cheese went up fourfold.28
On the other side of the conflict, the German administration also implemented measures to restrict alcohol, but they too were generally modest. In order to maximize efficiency and save grain for food, beer production was ordered cut by a quarter, and per capita consumption of all forms of alcohol fell by two-thirds between 1914 and 1917.29 Overall, however, the decline in consumption was due less to government regulations than to problems of production, as the grain needed for beer and spirits became increasingly scarce.
Wartime regulations extended well outside Europe, for the world war earned its name by drawing in countries from all parts of the globe, particularly colonies of the European belligerents. Restrictions on alcohol production and sales were imposed in countries as far-flung as Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. In Canada, the federal government enacted a system of almost total prohibition in April 1918, just seven months before the end of hostilities. It expired at the end of 1919, but wartime restrictions, applied by all the provinces but one, continued into the 1920s and beyond. These had been encouraged by temperance organizations that tried to leverage the war as a means of getting restrictions placed on alcohol. For example, in 1916 the Montreal Anti-Alcoholic League denounced beer as an “unsanitary and mischievous beverage” and cited as evidence “the brutality of the German nation,” which was well-known for its beer consumption. The brewing industry replied, in full-page newspaper advertisements, that “beer is a Veritable Food Product.” Ignoring the German reference and striking a slightly anti-American note, the Quebec brewers quoted the president of the British Medical Association: “Bread, cheese and beer for a meal is infinitely more scientific than the American meal of bread, tea, and jam.”30
Quebec lagged behind the other Canadian provinces in regulating alcohol during the war, for by 1917 all the others had introduced prohibition policies in some form. Ontario passed a temperance act in 1916 that banned the sale of alcohol with the exception (designed to protect local grape-growers) of wine made from grapes grown in the province. In compliance with the law, the wine could be sold only from the winery and in quantities of at least 5 gallons—presumably to reduce purchase by the poor, who could not afford to buy wine in bulk volumes. Other exemptions were allowed: clergymen could obtain sacramental wine; physicians could prescribe spirits, beer, and other forms of alcohol for medicinal reasons; dentists could administer alcohol “as a stimulant or restorative”; and veterinarians were permitted to keep up to a quart of liquor as long as it was not used for human consumption.
In New Zealand, in contrast, the nascent wine industry almost became a fatality of the war, not because of objections to wine itself but because most of the pioneer winemakers were immigrants from Dalmatia, a region on the Adriatic coast that in 1914 was part of the enemy Austrian Empire. There is no evidence that the Dalmatians were supporters of the Austrian war effort—indeed, they were as likely to be supporters of Dalmatian independence from Austria—but the New Zealand government treated them as enemy aliens and confiscated their vineyards.
Far more rigorous alcohol regulations were also adopted by the Bolshevik authorities after the Russian Revolution of 1917. They continued the prohibition policy enacted by the tsar in 1914, but they also nationalized the alcohol industry and declared any existing stocks of alcohol to be state property. To some extent they were motivated by an ideological objection to alcohol, which Karl Marx had criticized as a means by which capitalists ensured the docility of workers. Marx is better-known for having written that “religion is the opiate of the people,” but he might just as well have added alcohol to religion, because levels of consumption seem to have been very high at the time of the revolution, despite the formal prohibition imposed during the war. In more practical terms, the new Bolshevik authorities were concerned at the socially disruptive effects of alcohol. Drink was implicated in a number of the Petrograd riots in 1917, with Lenin writing that the bourgeoisie was “bribing the scum of society and the déclassé elements, getting them drunk for pogroms.” The next year there were reports of units of Red Guards looting state alcohol warehouses, even though Red Guards were required to “struggle with drunkenness so as not to allow liberty and revolution to drown in wine.”31 Beyond this there was a determination to keep grain supplies for baking and cooking, rather than for producing alcohol.
Concerns such as these confirmed the need for prohibition, but the government was faced with widespread illicit production, which it alleged was carried out by wealthier peasants (kulaks) to lure poor peasants to the anti-Bolshevik side. A series of regulations dealt with alcohol production and consumption in what was to become the new Soviet state. In December 1919 the government codified its liquor policy and made home-brewing and -distilling a crime punishable by a minimum five-year jail sentence and confiscation of property. An unusual clause—because most prohibition laws have historically not criminalized consumers—made it an offense, punishable by a minimum of a year in jail, to drink illicitly produced alcohol.32 This was the beginning of a series of policies that ran up against (mostly male) drinking cultures that proved almost impossible to change. By the mid-1920s another consideration became pressing: the state’s need for the taxes that alcohol generated. Conflicting pressures led successive Soviet governments to adopt varying policies on alcohol, which proved to be a persistent problem throughout the life of the Soviet Union.
One more country needs to be mentioned as a belligerent in the First World War: the United States, which declared war in 1917, little more than a year before hostilities ended. The American army was officially dry, having abandoned the alcohol ration many decades earlier. But when General Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, issued orders against drinking, he exempted light wines and beer. In his memoirs he observed that there was “comparatively little drinking in our armies, and what there was decreased noticeably after the prohibition of strong drink.”33
In other respects the U.S. government pursued more comprehensive antialcohol policies during the war. When negotiating the supply of grain, American officials tried to persuade Britain and its partners to ban brewing entirely so as to conserve cereal stocks for bread. Several of the American agencies that accompanied U.S. forces to France lent their support to temperance campaigns there. The YMCA set up establishments where young men and women could meet in a wholesome, alcohol-free environment, while the Rockefeller Foundation published brochures for French children that contrasted two ways of life: one with alcohol, which included violence and poverty, and the other without alcohol, which led to happiness and plenty.34
The antialcohol policies fostered by the United States government and by American organizations in Europe reflected the widespread adoption of prohibition policies in the United States by the time it entered the war. Although they varied in their terms and rigor, some forty-five states had enacted prohibition statutes by 1916. There was, therefore, an important difference between European states and the United States. The First World War represented a turning point in European alcohol policies, because the more rigorous regulations enacted during the war were, to a large extent, maintained for decades after. But the war was largely irrelevant to the course of alcohol policies in the United States. By the time the war broke out, prohibition looked like an unstoppable force, and there is no sense that American participation in the European conflict for twenty months slowed or accelerated the process that culminated in prohibition.