Noble Experiments, Ignoble Failures
The word “prohibition” is often shorthand for prohibition in the United States, the national policy in force from 1920 to 1933 that banned the production and sale of beverage alcohol throughout the country. This period, together with the antialcohol movements that led to it, has dominated American histories of alcohol. But although American prohibition is important to the alcohol and broader cultural history of the United States, it is also important in the wider, global context. While American prohibition was arguably the most stringent policy of its kind enacted on a comprehensive national basis since Islam banned the making and drinking of alcohol by Muslims (and by others in Muslim-ruled territories), it was far from the only policy of its kind at the time it was introduced.
Many countries enacted prohibition laws during and soon after the First World War. They included Russia, which went dry at the outbreak of war in 1914, and its successor Soviet state, which continued the imperial prohibition policies into the 1920s. Some Scandinavian countries passed prohibition legislation, as did some Mexican states and most Canadian provinces. The British government imposed prohibition policies on the indigenous populations of some of its African colonies in 1919. These examples generally fell within the same period, but there were even earlier, race-based examples: the U.S. government imposed prohibition on Native American populations during the 1800s, and the government of the Republic of Transvaal and its successor white South African governments did so on native African populations from 1896 to the 1960s.
Prohibition policies have seldom been total and absolute, and there is always a question of how strictly we should define prohibition. Some prohibition policies made exceptions for lower-alcohol beverages such as light beer and wine while banning higher-alcohol spirits; some banned production and sale but not consumption, while others included consumption; some allowed consumption for religious or medical purposes. Even under Islamic law, according to some interpretations, there is some allowance for alcohol as a medical remedy when no alternative is available.1In Britain’s African colonies, indigenous peoples were permitted to make and consume their traditional grain-based beer and palm wine, which were generally considered harmless, but not to drink the stronger European alcoholic beverages. All these examples are qualified versions of prohibition, but all represented serious attempts to deprive specific populations of alcohol or, at the very least, to severely restrict their access to it.
Russia first introduced nationwide prohibition when Tsar Nicolas II decreed at the outbreak of the First World War that alcohol would not be produced or sold for the duration of the hostilities. This policy was based on the same considerations that motivated other wartime governments to restrict alcohol: the fear that alcohol would disrupt military discipline on the battlefronts and impair industrial efficiency on the home front. But although other participants in the war eventually adopted measures such as reducing the alcohol content of beer and limiting the hours during which alcohol could be sold, as the British government did, Russia opted for outright prohibition. The tsarist government was able to do so not only for the practical reason that the state’s monopoly on vodka production made it easy to control, but also because it was an autocratic regime that believed it would not have to face a political backlash such as democratic governments feared. In Britain, for example, Lloyd George’s administration was reluctant to take alcohol restrictions too far because a pint (or more) of beer at the pub was a staple of men who were not only workers but also voters.
As we have seen (Chapter 12), the Russian ban on alcohol production was widely ignored during the First World War. Clandestinely and not-so-clandestinely produced vodka quickly replaced legal alcohol, and consumption not only continued among civilians (including the imperial family) but was widespread among Russian troops. And even though the autocratic tsarist government believed itself immune from any backlash against its wartime policies, including prohibition, mounting dissatisfaction reinforced the opposition to the tsar and paved the way for revolutions in 1917.
Ironically, the adoption of prohibition had brought the tsarist government to the same position (although for different reasons) that some of its socialist opponents had been advocating for decades. While the government’s policy was based on considerations of wartime efficiency, many unions and socialist organizations had long argued that drinking was against the interests of the working class. The alcohol question was to have been taken up by the meeting of the Second International, in August 1914, and the dominant concern was the effect that alcohol abuse had on workers, not only on their health as individuals but on their ability to organize politically.2 Russian socialists had made a distinction between two ideal types of worker: backward workers who lacked intellectual and cultural character, and progressive workers who were politically engaged in the struggle against capitalism. One critical aspect of these categories hinged on alcohol: backward workers were heavy drinkers as well as womanizers, bawdy, and generally coarse, in contrast to progressive workers, who were sober, neatly dressed, and sexually restrained.3
In this sense, the continuation of prohibition after the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was consistent with the antialcohol position adopted by many workers’ organizations before it. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government (in November 1917) was to close all existing distilleries and wineries and prohibit the production and sale of all alcoholic beverages. A commissar “for the struggle against alcoholism and gambling” was established, and in the Red Army, alcoholism was included among offenses that were punishable by death. A year later, all existing stocks of alcohol were declared to be the property of the state. It was estimated that millions of rubles of alcohol were stored in 700 warehouses in St. Petersburg and that the tsar’s residence had a cellar that held alcohol valued at $5 million.4
The aim of these policies was to produce a nondrinking population, but the authorities soon had to confront the reality that most workers drank and that alcohol was embedded in their culture; drinking was a social act, and among workers, refusal to have a drink was interpreted as a gesture of unfriendliness, if not outright hostility. In early Soviet factories, managers demanded a bottle of vodka as the price of hiring new workers, and older workers required the same for training them in their jobs.5 Rather than take the pragmatic course of encouraging temperance and reserving moral condemnation for excessive drinking and drunkenness, the Soviet authorities insisted on strict abstinence. (Contrary to many accounts, Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader, drank wine, beer, and vodka, although by the time of the Revolution, he might well have portrayed himself as an abstainer for political purposes.)6
In addition to pointing out the negative health and social consequences of drinking, Soviet commentators added a political dimension: drunkenness was equated with counterrevolution, and heavy drinkers were portrayed as traitors. A Soviet newspaper declared in 1929 that any worker who drank alcohol committed a “crime . . . against himself, his family, production and the state.”7 This position, which effectively obliterated the notion of private life, gave the state a vested interest in the bodies of workers and a claim to regulate their diets.
The reality on the factory floor was very different from the official prescription. During the Soviet period of prohibition, as before, there were countless incidents of workers arriving for their shifts intoxicated, and many workers brought before courts and tribunals vigorously defended their customary right to drink. Workers consumed the illicit alcohol that was plentiful on the black market and treated the new revolutionary holidays as they had treated holidays under the tsar: as occasions for festive and sometimes heavy drinking. When they did not make their own alcohol (a third of rural households were said to be making vodka in the 1920s), they were able to draw on widespread production in tens of thousands of illicit breweries and distilleries. In 1918 one village in Voronezh province (in southwest Russia) distilled grain equivalent to the amount that would have fed a town of 9,000 to 12,000 people for a year. In the spring of 1918, twice as much grain was distilled into vodka in Siberia as was shipped across the Urals as food.8
This massive diversion of grain supplies alarmed the authorities as much as the fact of illicit distilling, and they blamed the kulaks, a wealthy peasant class that later became a target of Stalin’s repressive policies. Yet despite serious penalties for making illicit alcohol (set in 1918 at a minimum of five years’ imprisonment, with hard labor), many citizens evidently considered the risk worth taking; in 1922 alone, there were more than half a million prosecutions for liquor crimes in the Russian republic, and that was after strict prohibition rules had been eased somewhat.
Faced with resistance by consumers, the inability to halt illicit production, threats to the grain supply, and the loss of tax revenue from alcohol, the Soviet government changed course and gradually abandoned prohibition. In August 1921, after seven years of total prohibition (four of them in the Soviet period), the government permitted the production and sale of wine, and in early 1922 it authorized beer sales. In January 1923 the production of low-alcohol (20 percent) vodka was permitted, and in October 1925 regular-strength (40 percent) vodka was allowed. All alcohol production was in the hands of a state monopoly. Despite making alcohol again available to the population and wanting to maximize the tax revenues that alcohol produced, the Soviet government continued its antialcohol campaigns, but alcohol consumption persisted at high levels. In Leningrad there were 2,000 arrests for drunkenness in 1923, but by 1927 there were 113,000—one arrest for every four adults in the city.9 (Many were probably repeat offenders.) It is unlikely that such an increase can be explained simply by changes in policing and enforcement, and it must indicate an increase in heavy drinking.
The strict prohibition policies adopted by the tsarist and Soviet governments lasted for seven years (1914–21), half as long as prohibition in the United States. Often referred to as the “Noble Experiment,” American prohibition was not enacted simply out of a desire to stop Americans from drinking. The framers of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the production, sale, transportation, and importation of alcohol for beverage purposes, were motivated by a desire to improve their society. They believed that the citizens of an alcohol-free America would be healthier, more moral, and more law-abiding. Life expectancy would rise as alcohol-related mortality fell, offenses against the person and property would decline as alcohol-related crime rates plummeted, and there would be less poverty and better health as people redirected their spending on alcohol to food and housing. Marriages would be more stable as alcohol-driven divorce rates fell. If alcohol was the foundation of almost all of America’s social ills, prohibition was the cure. That was what made it noble.
National prohibition was the culmination of decades of lobbying by politicians, church groups, and ordinary citizens, and it came long after individual states began to enact their own prohibition laws. By 1919, twenty-seven states were dry and twenty-one remained wet, with the greatest support for prohibition in the South and West and the greatest resistance in the Northeast. State prohibition policies were buttressed by federal legislation: the 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act prohibited the transportation of alcohol into states with prohibition policies. The federal government took further action in 1917 when the United States entered the First World War. Distilleries were closed down in the interests of wartime efficiency and grain conservation; then grain shipments to breweries were limited, and the alcohol level of beer was set at a maximum 2.75 percent. At the end of the same year, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. But Congress was so keen to stop the flow of drink that it passed the Wartime Prohibition Act on November 21, 1918, ten days after the end of the war. This act banned the sale of intoxicating beverages effective July 1, 1919. Before that date, the Eighteenth Amendment received the overwhelming support of forty-six of the forty-eight states, and national prohibition was set to take effect on January 1, 1920.
When national prohibition came into force on that date, it was far more inclusive than many people had expected. The specific terms of prohibition and its enforcement were set down in the Volstead Act, which instead of focusing on distilled spirits and exempting wine and beer, as many people had expected and hoped, prohibited any alcoholic beverage that had more than half of 1 percent of alcohol by volume. Protests by brewers, who had hoped to be able to continue producing the low-alcohol beer mandated during the war, were unsuccessful, and they were among the casualties as prohibition virtually wiped out America’s beverage alcohol industry.
The number of breweries producing regular-strength beer fell from about 1,300 in 1916 to 0 ten years later; the number of distilleries declined by 85 percent (the survivors made industrial alcohol and alcohol for medicinal purpose); wineries declined from 318 in 1914 to 27 in 1925 (the survivors made wine for religious purposes and grew table grapes); and only 4 percent of liquor wholesalers and 10 percent of retailers remained in some kind of business.10 The economic costs to governments and individuals were enormous, not only in terms of lost tax revenues but because the near-closure of the alcohol industry threw thousands of employees out of work. It also affected workers in other sectors of the economy associated with alcohol, such as glass manufacturing, transportation, and hospitality (saloons and bars), although some new employment was generated when the saloons (many strategically located on street corners in cities) were replaced by retail stores.
The few exceptions to total prohibition were predictable and few and were based on the principle that the ban applied only to alcohol used for beverage purposes. This meant that alcohol could be made for industrial use and that alcoholic beverages (fermented and distilled) could be made in small quantities for nonbeverage purposes. Doctors could prescribe wine and spirits, for example, and priests, ministers, and rabbis could obtain and serve wine in religious rituals. Apart from these exceptions, which were expected to represent minuscule volumes of alcohol, breweries, wineries, and distilleries would go out of business, and bars, saloons, and taverns would close.
Finally, Americans were permitted to keep alcohol in their homes for consumption by family members and bona fide guests, a provision intended to allow for existing alcohol stocks to be used up. Many of those who could had probably stocked up on alcohol. One Virginia newspaper publisher ordered 16 gallons of whiskey in advance of a state vote on prohibition, noting, “I believe in looking ahead. I don’t know what the pro-hibs will do in September, but I do not mean for them to catch me high and dry in any event.”11 As they consumed the last dregs of their bottles, which could not legally be replaced, Americans were expected to abjure their alcohol-drinking habits and turn en masse to healthy beverages like milk, water, fruit juices, coffee, and tea, none of which was linked to mortality, crime, immorality, and social disorder.
The popular image of prohibition, reinforced by movies and television series like The Untouchables, is a far cry from this ideal. It is an image of speakeasies (clandestine bars where men and women continued to drink), illicit stills producing moonshine, rum-running and other forms of alcohol smuggling, shootouts between enforcement officials and prohibition breakers, and the rise of organized crime led by gangsters such as Al Capone. These sensational images distort the complex picture of prohibition in the United States, but they do highlight an important theme: just as soldiers, workers, peasants, and the middle and upper classes resisted prohibition in Russia and the Soviet Union, so did millions of Americans, whether they were men or women, whether they lived in town or country, whether they were workers, farmers, and professionals or in business.
Resistance took many forms. Some emanated from individual states, even though the great majority had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment. While states that had enacted prohibition regimes before 1920 were happy to see it adopted federally—for one thing, it promised to put an end to the importing of alcohol from other states—some state legislatures soon rebelled against being drawn into the federal liquor regime. Several tried to override the Volstead Act; the legislatures of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey passed laws in 1920 to permit the sale of wine and light beer in their respective states. But in each case, the Supreme Court struck the state legislation down and upheld prohibition throughout the whole country.
Some states passively resisted prohibition and thus undermined joint state-federal enforcement of prohibition. Maryland never passed enforcement regulations, and starting with New York in 1923, a number of states that did repealed their legislation. By 1927, twenty-seven of the forty-eight states made no budgetary provision at all for enforcing prohibition. But although such acts—or failures to act—weakened the impact of prohibition, they could not restore the right of citizens to obtain legal alcohol.
More resistance came from wineries and clandestine distilleries. A number of wineries began to sell dehydrated grapes and concentrated grape juice, both of which could be turned into regular grape juice and then fermented into wine by the addition of yeast. Wine made under these conditions might not have been commercially viable, let alone of high quality; but it was wine of sorts, and it contained alcohol. Much more alcohol was produced by small-time moonshiners (illicit distillers) and by the smaller number of large-scale clandestine distilleries. Whiskey was the main alcohol sold on the black market because its far higher alcohol level by volume made it much more efficient to store and transport. To this extent, the period saw a dramatic shift away from beer and also from wine, which had historically run a distant third in alcohol popularity in the United States.
Beyond the alcohol illicitly produced in the United States, volumes were smuggled in from outside the country. Some came from Canada, where provinces began to enact prohibition policies from 1915. But when the Canadian government regulated the production of alcohol in the nation and its movement among the provinces, it permitted distilleries, breweries, and wineries to continue making alcoholic beverages for export, and much of this production went clandestinely to the United States. Some was shipped across Lake Ontario to the north shore of New York, while on the east coast, rum was shipped to New England from Nova Scotia. The 1920s saw a depression in the fishing industry, and smuggling was a welcome source of income. It was reported in 1925 that half the Lunenberg (Nova Scotia) fishing fleet of 100 vessels were engaged in the rum trade, with many leased to American syndicates for $2,500 a month.12 Yet more alcohol reached the United States from Europe. Ships laden with wine and spirits lay outside American territorial waters, beyond the reach of prohibition enforcement officers and the U.S. Coast Guard, and the alcohol was ferried to shore at night by flotillas of small boats.
Further supplies of alcohol moved across the American border from Mexico. Many Mexican states had introduced prohibition after the 1910 Revolution, but there was little popular or even official support for it. By the 1920s, just as prohibition was applied in the United States, most Mexican prohibition policies were being abandoned, and production of alcohol was again in full swing. Some Mexican alcohol crossed the border in the bellies of Americans who had traveled to Mexico to drink in the saloons that multiplied to cater to a new phenomenon, alcohol tourism, but most was simply smuggled across the border. The bulk of it was beer, and the Mexican brewing industry, no longer facing competition from American beers, flourished during American prohibition. In addition, a number of Americans set up distilleries in the Mexican border states with the aim of smuggling liquor to the United States. A whiskey distillery jointly owned by Mexicans and Americans opened in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, in 1920, and another with owners from Colorado started production in Ciudad Juárez six years later.13
The continuous supply of alcohol that flowed into the United States during prohibition—a precursor to the later flow of narcotics—speaks not only to strong demand but also to ineffective federal enforcement. The enforcement of prohibition fell to the Treasury Department, and its agents were given the power to seize, close, or sell any property (including houses and vehicles) that was used to make, sell, or transport illegal alcohol. First offenses against the law could be punished by fines of $1,000 and imprisonment for up to six months, while repeat offenses carried penalties of up to $10,000 in fines and five years in jail.
The Volstead Act provided for overall enforcement to be shared between the federal and state governments, and there was an implicit understanding that state police and courts would carry most of the burden. In fact, many states were reluctant participants, and as we have seen, most had canceled enforcement funding entirely by 1927. The result was that the burden fell on federal enforcement offices, and they were underfunded. Although their annual budgets rose from $3 million to $15 million during the 1920s, enforcement was thin, and there were never more than 3,000 agents in the field at any time. Another problem was the high turnover of enforcement staff, which meant that there were few experienced agents. Nearly 18,000 men were appointed to positions between 1920 and 1930, many of them to replace agents who had been dismissed. One in twelve agents was fired, most for drunkenness or for taking bribes, although there seems to have been an improvement in training and professionalism toward the end of the 1920s.
Although enforcement was uneven and seemed, to many observers, arbitrary and capricious, it was possibly most effective in states that had enacted prohibition policies before the federal law came into effect. When Kansas enacted state prohibition in 1881, many Kansans (living on “an island entirely surrounded by liquid territory,” as one commentator described it)14 brought liquor in from other nearby states, but once national prohibition was in place, illicit alcohol production sprang up throughout Kansas. Much of it, according to prohibition officials, contained toxic ingredients such as ether, chloroform, and fusil oil. The officials claimed to have reduced the flow of alcohol in Kansas to a trickle, but they were likely to exaggerate their success, since they had an interest in appearing to be effective and efficient.
The detection and prosecution of moonshine (illicit liquor) production often depended on the diligence of the agents, and it was often inconsistent, at best. In many cases, agents were effective at identifying and prosecuting small-scale producers, resulting in an impressive number of arrests, but they did not have the resources (or failed to use them) to do the investigative work necessary to track down the major sources of illegal alcohol. Informers were also important. In some cases they were antidrink citizens who alerted the authorities to the existence of illicit stills, but other, less civic-minded informers were motivated by different considerations. Some moonshiners blew the whistle on their competitors so as to increase their own market share, some clients informed on producers who refused to give them credit, and one woman in Florida turned in her husband because his heavy drinking was affecting their family’s well-being.
The sheer number of prosecutions overwhelmed some court systems. In the Southern District of Florida in 1921, the federal courts handled 551 criminal prosecutions, 463 of which were violations of the federal liquor law. By 1928 there were 1,319 prosecutions, 85 percent of which concerned liquor. Florida’s long coastline made it an obvious destination for alcohol smuggling, a factor that contributed to the high proportion of liquor prosecutions on the courts’ dockets. In order to clear a backlog of nearly 3,000 cases, a third judge was added to the Southern District in 1928.15
Although most prohibition prosecutions across the United States involved small producers, many people were concerned with the involvement of organized crime in liquor production and distribution. The relationship of criminal syndicates to prohibition is debated by historians. Organized crime did not come into being with prohibition, and it did not disappear when prohibition was repealed. The relationship could be no more complicated than that organized criminals have historically exploited goods and services that are illegal but in demand, including not only alcohol during prohibition but also prostitution, gambling, firearms, and narcotic drugs. Still, the activities and exploits of criminal syndicates received substantial media coverage during the 1920s. One of the most sensational events was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in February 1929, when seven men associated with one of the city’s gangs were shot, apparently by men working for gang boss Al Capone. It is thought that, as part of a conflict over territory, the victims’ syndicate had been hijacking Capone’s liquor shipments. The killings outraged citizens and drew attention to the role of organized crime in the supply of liquor, especially to speakeasies. In addition to provoking anger at the criminal syndicates, the massacre also fueled demands for the repeal of prohibition—or at least a liberalization of policies to allow low-alcohol beverages—on the ground that the law, as it stood, was causing a crime wave.
Consumers also felt the force of the law as prohibition focused attention on public intoxication. In Philadelphia, arrests for intoxication, intoxication and disorderly conduct, and habitual drunkenness rose dramatically during the 1920s. From a total of 23,740 in 1919 they increased to 44,746 in 1922 (including intoxicated drivers, a category added in 1921) and then to more than 58,000 in 1925.16 In other words, there were more than 1,000 arrests a week for public intoxication in Philadelphia (with a population of about 1.3 million) in the mid-1920s. Of course, we should bear in mind that these statistics need not reflect an increase in drunkenness; more rigorous enforcement might explain some of the increase in arrests. But it is also likely that more alcohol was consumed at home during prohibition than before and that this shift in patterns of consumption and sociability ought to have depressed the incidence of public drunkenness.
One of the unintended consequences of prohibition was what might be called the normalization of public drinking. During the nineteenth century, the antialcohol movement had been fairly successful in portraying drinking as pathological behavior. From being a shared social activity on festive and other occasions, as it had been for centuries, public drinking was gradually confined to the saloon and to men. The saloon was then demonized as a space where men, fueled by alcohol, swore, gambled, neglected their families, and generally behaved coarsely, lewdly, and criminally. Prohibition closed the saloons but inadvertently gave rise to new sites of alcohol-centered sociability, the speakeasies. Despite the constant threat of being raided and having their alcohol stocks confiscated, they flourished in many cities, and the police in New York City, which was one of the leading centers of opposition to prohibition, estimated that there were 32,000 speakeasies in operation by 1931.
Speakeasies ranged from gloomy basement bars that encouraged solitary male drinking to bright clubs that served cocktails and where bands and singers entertained clients.17 Ironically, speakeasies attracted middle- and upper-class clients, including women who would never have stepped into a saloon for fear of compromising their reputations. Women had been the invisible drinkers of nineteenth-century America: physically invisible because, effectively excluded from saloons, they drank in the privacy of their homes; culturally invisible because the rhetoric of the antialcohol movement gave the impression that men were the drunkards and that women did not drink. The club style of speakeasy was far more welcoming to women, who could drink there without being regarded as immoral—despite the fact that they were supporting criminal activity by doing so. The fact that some women frequented speakeasies, rather than continuing to drink alcohol (illicit alcohol) at home, speaks to the unintended emergence of a new drinking culture during prohibition.
In the small communities and rural areas of the United States, illicit alcohol consumption had little of the romance of the speakeasies, which with their middle-class clientele and music were forerunners of the clubs and cabarets of the 1930s and 1940s. The experience of prohibition in the countryside was a network of small-time producers making whiskey in 5-gallon milk cans, 50-gallon steel drums, or any other vessel that did the job, in their houses, in barns, or in shacks hidden in forests and swamps. Most producers were poor—or at least most of the producers who were prosecuted were poor. A sample of convicted moonshiners in Florida showed that three-quarters of them had an average net worth of only $74.50; many were women, and some were African Americans who turned to making moonshine when prohibition made it an activity that promised a regular income. Their customers paid prices like 50 cents a pint or $3 a gallon for a beverage whose flavor and quality can only be imagined and that might well have been dangerous to consume.
But while the Volstead Act, which set out the practicalities of prohibition, made producing and selling alcohol for beverage purposes a crime, it specified that “liquor” could be prescribed for medicinal purposes, to “afford relief . . . from some known ailment.” It was limited to 1 pint in a ten-day period (about an ounce and a half a day), and a prescription could be filled only once. To write a prescription for liquor, a doctor needed to obtain a permit from a federal official. Many doctors opposed these provisions, not because they were against prohibition (the medical profession was divided on the issue), but because the law effectively gave the government the power to interfere in the way doctors practiced medicine.
A further issue arose because the law referred only to “liquor” and not to beer, and many doctors as well as laypeople believed that beer had therapeutic qualities. One of the prominent physicians who led the campaign against government regulation of prescriptions, John Patrick Davin, executive secretary of the New York Medical Association, argued that beer had been shown to cure diseases as diverse as anemia and anthrax poisoning.18 In the months following prohibition, physicians deluged the authorities with applications to prescribe beer, and the attorney general agreed that, because the intention was not to regulate doctors, each physician should be free to set the amount of beer each patient needed for therapeutic purposes. A government survey showed that “many physicians said that they had patients who should have from one to three bottles of beer a day to help them recuperate” and that beer was especially useful for “certain ailments of women.”19
These doctors were not quacks; it is clear that well into the twentieth century, mainstream doctors in America regarded alcohol as therapeutic. A 1921 survey of 53,900 randomly selected physicians showed that 51 percent were in favor of prescribing whiskey, and 26 percent thought that beer was “a necessary therapeutic agent.” A smaller percentage of physicians argued for wine; even though it had a long therapeutic tradition in Europe, wine was not consumed nearly as widely in the United States as whiskey and beer. Still, one Texas doctor told of the successful use of champagne in treating some of the symptoms of scarlet fever. Such arguments in favor of medicinal alcohol were not necessarily part of a broader antiprohibition stance. Many doctors shared the argument of one respondent to the survey, that “whiskey as a medicine is fine, as a beverage it is absolutely unnecessary.” Others condemned the Volstead Act as creating “state medicine,” while some told of cases where patients deprived of alcohol had suffered needlessly and even died.20
In April 1921 Andrew Volstead, who had crafted the initial legislation, tried to pass an amended law to ban the prescribing of beer for medical purposes and to restrict the therapeutic use of spirits even more. The loophole allowing for therapeutic beer threatened to undo prohibition. There were estimates that doctors would be able to prescribe three bottles a day per patient and arguments that, in those circumstances, the government might just as well legalize brewing. Despite concern that upsetting the medical profession would have political consequences, as doctors could wield influence in their communities, Congress passed legislation in November 1921 closing the loophole that allowed beer to be prescribed. One result was that the American Medical Association, which in 1917 had supported prohibition and taken a stand against therapeutic alcohol, reversed itself. Physicians took their fight to prescribe alcohol as far as the Supreme Court, but in a split decision in 1926, the justices sided with the government.
Pharmacists were no happier than physicians with their role in prohibition. Alcohol was the single most important ingredient in many prescription drugs, and because they had licenses to possess alcohol, the country’s 50,000 pharmacists were given responsibility for dispensing alcohol, in the form of whiskey, when it had been prescribed by a doctor. To do this, they needed to apply for a license that cost $25, and although many were reluctant to do so, most did for fear of losing collateral business. Not only did pharmacists resent becoming, in their own eyes, liquor retailers, but the number of pharmacies increased rapidly as entrepreneurs realized the profits to be made by dispensing liquor. To deal with this trend, the government passed regulations limiting revenue from liquor prescriptions to a maximum of 10 percent of any pharmacy’s sales.21
The scope and enforcement of prohibition were still evolving when it was repealed in 1933. The Democratic candidate for president in the 1932 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt, ran on a repeal platform that reflected a shift in public sentiment during the 1920s. In addition to declining support for prohibition in Washington, D.C., there was growing pressure from the states, some of it driven by the economic and financial realities of the Great Depression, which struck the United States in 1929. As industrial and agricultural production declined and unemployment rose, federal, state, and municipal budgets shrank, and politicians grew nostalgic for the revenues that alcoholic beverages had brought in before prohibition. Federal tax revenues on distilled spirits were less than $13 million in 1929, a far cry from the $365 million collected in 1919. Revenue from beer and wine was virtually nil in 1929, compared with $117 million ten years earlier.22 The revival of alcohol production would not only enrich governments but also bring back to life an industry that, directly and indirectly, employed millions of Americans.
There was also the experience of prohibition that, among other things, had represented a massive intrusion by the state into what many Americans regarded as their private lives. Prohibition supporters pointed to tangible benefits such as declines in the incidence of some diseases and illnesses, fewer traffic accidents, and falling homicide rates, but prohibition had also entangled millions of Americans in the criminal law. The number of small-time moonshiners seems to have risen during the depression, as the unemployed turned to making and selling illegal alcohol as way to make a living. One man who went to Florida from Georgia in 1932 in search of work started “selling whiskey to negroes for fifty cents per pint” when no jobs were available.23
The arrival of the depression must, in itself, have undermined support for prohibition. A drink-free America was supposed to be a place of peace, happiness, and prosperity, but as the 1930s opened, the nation seemed populated by the miserable and the poor. Prohibition cannot be blamed for the depression, of course, but it must have been caught up in the mood of despair. In the most banal sense, prohibition deprived ordinary, moderate-drinking Americans of the bottle of beer or shot of whiskey that might have provided a little pleasure in an otherwise bleak landscape.
New movements emerged, such as the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), formed in 1929, which showed that women were far from unanimous in their support for prohibition. Within two years of being founded, it had more than 300,000 members, and when prohibition was repealed in 1933, it claimed a membership of 1.3 million. Turning the prohibitionist argument on its head, the WONPR argued that prohibition had been harmful to the family, women, children, and the home by halting a trend toward moderate drinking, stimulating alcohol abuse, and encouraging crime, political corruption, and disrespect for the law. Most members of the WONPR were middle- and upper-class women, not the sort of people to trifle with important social and moral issues. Their work contributed a dimension of respectability to the repeal movement, which had been portrayed by die-hard prohibitionists as made up of unreconstructed males who wanted nothing more than a return to the bad old days of uncontrolled drinking in saloons.
Opposition to and disillusionment with prohibition, together with a desire for more general change, contributed to the election of President Roosevelt in 1932. One of his first acts on taking office in January 1933 was to amend the Volstead Act to allow the production and sale of alcoholic beverages with an alcohol level up to 3.2 percent. Breweries began to open, and soon Americans were enjoying “near-beer.” Alcohol-related prosecutions fell dramatically. Later that year, Congress passed the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed the Eighteenth, and national prohibition came to an end. Responsibility for alcohol policies reverted to the states, with federal oversight (which included the interstate transportation of alcohol) vested in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
It is difficult to determine whether prohibition in the United States was a success or a failure, not least because it is not clear how success and failure should be defined. A simple criterion would be a decline in drinking, but it is impossible to establish consumption rates with any confidence. The great bulk of the alcohol consumed during prohibition was illicit, and by definition it largely escaped official regulation and records. The exception was the alcohol seized by the authorities, but we have no way of knowing what proportion that represented of all illicit alcohol on the market. One study of the effects of prohibition used surrogate trends to calculate shifts in alcohol consumption: deaths due to cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholism, admissions to hospital for alcoholic psychosis, and arrests for drunkenness. The authors concluded that immediately after prohibition was enacted, alcohol consumption fell to 20-40 percent of pre-prohibition levels, but that it soon began to rise and by the late 1920s had reached about 70 percent of the pre-prohibition rate.24 There is a logic to this trend, in that it took some time to develop clandestine production facilities and foreign sources of alcohol and to organize distribution channels and retail outlets.
Even though we cannot know rates of alcohol consumption during prohibition with any certainty, all the evidence points to levels that were lower than before prohibition but still considerable. The explanations for lower consumption rates seem quite straightforward. Alcohol was no longer publicly available but had to be purchased clandestinely; consumers had to know a person to buy it from or a place where it could be consumed. Purchasing alcohol, whether it was backyard moonshine or whiskey in a speakeasy, meant participating in a criminal act, even though purchasing and consuming alcohol were not themselves criminal. And the price of alcohol was generally much higher—some was said to be 500 percent higher—than in pre-prohibition times, as producers and sellers covered their costs, factored in their risks, and set their prices to a sellers’ market. Under these culturally and financially restrictive conditions, it is not so surprising that Americans continued to drink, but that a relatively high level of consumption seems to have prevailed.
Beyond shifts in consumption levels, which persisted after prohibition was repealed, there were changes in America’s drinking cultures. Many clandestine bars catered to men and provided the basic facilities that pre-prohibition saloons had. But the higher-end speakeasies had ushered in a new form of public drinking, if illegal and clandestine drinking can be called public. “Respectable” women and men mingled in these places, and although these speakeasies existed primarily as places where alcohol was available, it was served with food and entertainment. We can see the emergence of alcohol’s integration into nongendered public sociability, a new phenomenon in the United States. The overall image of prohibition, then, is complex and defies easy generalization. How it was experienced by Americans depended on where they lived, their financial circumstances, and their gender, race, and age. In the end, though, more Americans found it wanting and effectively voted for its repeal.
The progress of prohibition at the state and federal levels in the United States had parallels beyond the country’s borders. In Mexico the Revolution of 1910 had ushered in periods of prohibition in various states, often not because of popular pressure, as in America, but because it was favored by the new political leadership, as in the Soviet Union. The new political elites in Mexico were concerned about the levels of drinking, which they believed lay behind much of the nation’s poverty and backwardness, and they saw prohibition as an integral part of social renewal. One vigorous proponent of alcohol control was Salvador Alvarado, governor of Yucatán, a state with a thriving rum industry. During 1915, Alvarado passed a series of increasingly rigorous regulations known as La Ley Seca, the Dry Law. He started with a law forbidding the sale of alcohol to women and minors, then he banned women from working or drinking in cantinas and later prohibited the sale of alcohol in restaurants. Cantinas, now the only source of alcohol, had to relocate if they were near schools. In the face of continued drinking at an unacceptable level, the governor banned the sale of alcohol during siestas, after 10:00 PM, on Sundays, and on national holidays—all favored occasions for drinking. When what seemed to him to be heavy drinking persisted, he banned the production and sale of all beverages with an alcohol level higher than 5 percent.25
This level of alcohol was generous compared with the half of 1 percent benchmark adopted in the United States five years later, but Yucatán’s citizens yearned for even stronger drinks. In a scenario all too familiar when prohibition has been imposed, a clandestine liquor industry sprang up to service a thirsty and receptive market. But at the same time, many women rallied to a popular antialcohol movement that drew strength partly from the belief that rum-drinking was responsible for widespread social problems (including male sexual infidelity), and partly because landowners used rum to create a system of forced labor: poor peasants were allowed to run up debts at the cantina, and employers would then assume the debts on condition that the peasants live on the landowner’s property and work off the debt.
The link between economic exploitation and alcohol reinforced a preference for prohibition among Mexico’s socialists, and at the First Socialist Workers’ Congress in 1918, women delegates pushed prohibition to the top of the agenda. But prohibition remained a policy enacted only sporadically in Mexico, and it depended on specific conditions and the leadership in specific regions. When Yucatán’s new socialist governor visited a village in 1918, he was besieged by women demanding he close all the cantinas “because in these places their husbands lost all their wages, leaving them and their children without clothes or food.” The governor closed the cantinas, and as a reprisal, the men of the village expelled the village priest, thus depriving their more pious wives of communion. By 1922, seven other villages in the state had banned alcohol (and priests).26
Even so, the socialists did not enforce prohibition in Yucatán rigorously. Although ideologically committed, the party’s male leaders were reluctant, in practice, to challenge long-standing practices of sociable drinking. They also found that offering alcohol was an effective way to persuade men to align themselves with the Socialist Party. Candidates held meetings in cantinas, and once in office, many Socialist officials profited from the illegal trade in alcohol. In 1923 there was a military coup, and one of the first acts of the rebel administration was to remove restrictions on alcohol. When the Socialists returned to power the next year, they effectively abandoned controls on consuming alcohol but created a regime that embedded alcohol within a system of corruption that profited many political leaders. Prohibition in Yucatán had initially brought the state, a popular movement, and women into an alliance, but it effectively broke down after ten years.
Elsewhere in Mexico after the 1910 Revolution, the state of Durango banned alcohol production and consumption, and all pulquerías in Mexico City were closed. In Chihuahua and Sinaloa, breaking prohibition laws was punishable by death. Even so, the general assessment is that prohibition was loosely enforced and little observed in Mexico. Governments needed the income from taxes on alcohol, and prohibition laws produced widespread corruption and a flourishing black market.27
Mexican liquor laws were important to U.S. officials, as we have seen, and Mexico eventually became a source of illicit alcohol when prohibition policies were imposed on Americans. Even before that time, however, the availability of alcohol in Mexico aroused anxiety among antidrink campaigners in the United States. In 1915, members of the WCTU branch in Imperial Valley, California, realized that their community’s water supply originated near the Mexican town of Mexicali, close to the U.S. border. Fearful that the water might be polluted by Mexicali’s many bars, they lobbied to have prohibition extended not only to California but also to the Mexican town. As far-fetched as it sounds that water with any perceptible alcohol would flow from the faucets in Imperial Valley, the U.S. secretary of state took the idea seriously enough to initiate discussions with the Mexican government.28
Alcohol policies in Canada were of interest to American authorities, too, for similar reasons. The long and (at that time) lightly monitored border between Canada and the United States provided ample opportunities for alcohol to be smuggled into the United States, and the best prevention was prohibition in Canada. Any illicit alcohol produced there under a prohibition regime would then be sold locally, since producers would rather not take the greater risks of moving their goods across an international border, as porous as it was. A problem was that alcohol was regulated primarily by provincial governments, and there was no certainty that all would adopt prohibition. From the late 1800s, all had allowed municipalities to vote on alcohol sales, and by the First World War, many districts had gone dry. Pro-prohibition organizations pressed for more comprehensive restrictions, and during the war, as so many governments did, Canada’s provinces capitulated to the pressure, even though few enacted absolute prohibition.
In 1915, Saskatchewan closed all drinking establishments and restricted sales of alcohol to government-owned stores in wet municipalities. The next year, following a referendum, even these stores were closed. Also in 1916, voters in Alberta, Manitoba, and British Columbia opted for prohibition, and the governments of Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick agreed to enact prohibition without referenda. Newfoundland, which was still a British colony, voted for prohibition the same year, and the federal government extended the policy to the Yukon Territory in 1918 after an indecisive referendum. The outsider was Quebec, whose government and population were unenthusiastic about prohibition. Early in 1918 the government scheduled a ban on retail sales of alcohol for May 1919 and permitted business as usual in the interim. But a month before this total ban on sales was to start, the government backtracked and applied it only to spirits; wine, light beer, and cider could be sold.29 In Ontario, too, prohibition was selective; under pressure from the grape and wine producers, the government allowed the sale of wine, but only from wineries and in minimum volumes of 5 gallons. This effectively eliminated the poor from the legal alcohol market.
This patchwork of provincial prohibition policies in Canada was sewn together by federal regulations that controlled aspects of alcohol policy that were not within provincial jurisdiction. In 1918 the importation of alcohol into Canada was forbidden, as were production and interprovincial trade in alcohol. All were to last until a year after the end of the war, which eventually meant November 1919. For about eighteen months, Canadians in all provinces except Ontario and Quebec lived without legal access to beverages with an alcohol level above 1.5 or 2 percent, depending on the province. Stronger alcoholic beverages could be produced for export, however, and much of it was shipped clandestinely to the United States, even though cargo manifests showed other destinations.
With the war over and Canada’s federal regulations lapsing, provinces had to decide whether to continue, modify, or abandon their wartime alcohol policies. Referenda in Ontario and New Brunswick confirmed existing policies, but British Columbia and Quebec voted to liberalize alcohol sales. In a flurry of legislating between 1919 and 1923, the federal and provincial governments put restrictions on the movement of alcohol and sharply increased the taxes on it. In national terms, Canada never enacted prohibition as comprehensively as the United States did, but the antialcohol forces were convinced that the country was part of a global movement. In 1925 the president of Canada’s WCTU declared, “The world is going dry.”30
Even by 1925 the claim was hollow, as several provinces had abandoned prohibition and allowed the sale of alcohol in province-owned stores. Quebec had done so in 1919; British Columbia, Manitoba, Alberta, and Yukon followed by 1925; and Ontario followed in 1927. By 1930 the only Canadian province not to have abandoned prohibition was Prince Edward Island, which held out until 1948. Having permitted retail sales of alcohol, the provinces then moved rapidly to allow public drinking in bars, taverns, and other licensed establishments; nearly all did so in the 1920s.
Across the Atlantic, few European nations attempted prohibition. It was never a likely proposition in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, or Spain, where alcohol consumption was part of daily life for most adult men. But prohibition did take tenuous hold in Scandinavia, which had strong traditions of social reform. Finland adopted the most stringent regulations when, in 1919, the government banned all beverages with an alcohol level over 2 percent. The policy lasted until 1932, when it was abolished in the face of widespread resistance. Alcohol consumption is reported to have risen during prohibition, as Finns consumed locally made alcohol as well as vast volumes smuggled into the country across its coastal borders.
In Norway, citizens voted in local referenda on prohibition, and by 1916, only nine towns permitted the sale of alcohol. That year, faced with wartime shortage of foods, the government banned spirits and, in the following year, beer (including light beer). In 1919 there was a referendum on prohibition, and 62 percent of Norwegians voted to prohibit the sale of spirits and fortified wine but to allow access to table wine and beer. However, producers of fortified wine (especially Spain and Portugal) insisted that Norway buy their product if they were to import Norwegian fish and seafood. That, together with what is thought to have been significant prescribing of spirits by doctors and veterinarians, led to a change of course. The prohibition on fortified wine was lifted in 1923, and four years later, spirits sales were permitted in the towns that had allowed them in 1916.31
In Sweden, alcohol legislation built on widespread support for control. By the early 1900s, 10 percent of all Swedes were members of temperance societies, women’s organizations had embraced temperance and abstinence as means of improving family life, and leading sections of the labor movement argued that alcohol was used by the bourgeoisie to control workers. Their efforts at the local level led to a number of communities taking over management of alcohol sales so as to remove the profit motive that was believed to lead retailers to encourage alcohol sales. This system of “disinterested management” guaranteed modest returns (about 5 percent) to shareholders, with the remainder of the profits disbursed to the community. This arrangement, called the “Gothenburg system,” after the city that was one of the first communities to adopt it, became mandatory throughout Sweden in 1905.32
While this system might have reduced alcohol consumption, popular opinion in Sweden favored outright prohibition. Prohibitionists were successful in persuading the government to impose prohibition for the duration of a general strike in 1909, on the ground that alcohol would only exacerbate the labor strife. But after the five-week period of prohibition ended, temperance organizations held an unofficial referendum on making prohibition permanent. As one historian says, “The results were staggering”: 55 percent of Swedish adults voted in the referendum, and 99 percent of them voted in favor of prohibition.33 It was much more difficult to get such a policy through Sweden’s parliament, however. The lower house agreed to laws that would allow local authorities to impose prohibition in their jurisdictions and to institute a system of passbooks to regulate individual drinking where alcohol was permitted. But the upper house rejected the local option for fear of the consequences for employment and the economy.
In 1913, Gothenburg established a system of passbooks to control individual purchases of alcohol and limited each person to 5 liters of alcoholic beverages every three months; the success of this system undermined the options of national and local prohibition. When, in 1917, parliament passed its long-awaited alcohol legislation, it opted for the passbook system, partly because it feared that local prohibition would have a severe impact on state revenues from taxes. When a state referendum on prohibition was held in 1922, the result was far different from the unofficial sounding of 1909: only 49 percent of Swedes voted in favor of prohibition, far short of the two-thirds needed.34
“Local option,” the power of municipalities or regions to impose prohibition or restrictive rules on alcohol production and distribution, was often a compromise when a national government was unable or unwilling to apply such policies to its entire population. It was the solution in India, where the legislature set up a local option system in 1921. Temperance found much support in parts of India, where it drew on the Hindu rule that intoxicating substances should be avoided. Alcohol was also part of the early twentieth-century Indian nationalist critique of imperialism, and prohibition was embraced by nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi. In 1937 he deplored the use of alcohol revenues to fund education: “The cruelest irony . . . lies in the fact that we are left with nothing but the liquor revenue to fall back upon to give our children education. . . . The solution to the problem should not involve a compromise of the ideal of prohibition, cost whatever else it might.”35
Prohibition was introduced in the state of Madras in 1937. The law not only banned the production and sale of alcohol but also encompassed anyone who “consumes or buys liquor or any intoxicating drug.” The penalties ran as high as six months in jail and a fine of 1,000 rupees. Moreover, the definition of an alcoholic beverage was more comprehensive than most: “toddy, spirits of wine, methylated spirits, wine, beer and all liquid consisting of or containing alcohol.”36 Prohibition was extended to other parts of India, and when the colony gained its independence in 1947, the principle of prohibition was included in its constitution.
Belgium, a much smaller and less populous country, introduced national prohibition—applied only to distilled alcoholic beverages—for a short time in 1918. This was named the “Vandervelde law,” after a parliamentarian of the Belgian Workers’ Party who had campaigned for prohibition. But this limited form of prohibition (which permitted the sale of wine and beer) was modified the following year in favor of a more permanent system that lasted for most of the twentieth century. It allowed the sale of spirits from retailers in minimum volumes of 2 liters, so as to prevent access to it by the poor. But it retained a ban on the sale of strong drinks (beverages with more than 22 percent alcohol) in bars and cafés.37
Other countries flirted with the idea of prohibition, but the closest any came to imposing it was New Zealand, where referenda on liquor policy were held with every general election through most of the twentieth century. In 1911, 56 percent of the votes were cast for prohibition, but the threshold had been set at 60 percent. In 1919 the prohibition vote was a mere 3,000 short of the number needed, and the country was saved from prohibition thanks largely to the antiprohibition votes of soldiers who had returned from the war. Thereafter, support for prohibition declined steadily, falling to 30 percent in referenda in the mid-1930s, and much lower later in the century.38
Mexico, the United States, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, India, and Russia/the Soviet Union all experimented seriously with prohibition, all within the period from 1914 to 1933. Other countries put in place a range of restrictions on the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. After decades of antialcohol campaigning, prohibition’s moment came and went remarkably quickly. But the national case studies were linked by a transnational antialcohol movement, and one historian describes the wave of prohibition as a “perfect storm” where the world war “provided a common reagent for the dramatic translation of internationally shared temperance ideas into concrete policies through the broad national institutional channels of policymaking.”39
The experiments with and experiences of prohibition had lasting consequences for alcohol policies and cultures of drinking in a number of countries. Even though prohibition was rejected as a failed policy, alcohol remained tightly regulated throughout the Western world. In some countries and regions (notably Canada and Scandinavia), prohibition was replaced by state alcohol monopolies where before prohibition there had been a free market in alcohol. Perhaps even more important, the lessons of the prohibition era took on a more general application, convincing many people of the futility of attempting to ban any commodity (such as drugs) or service (such as prostitution) for which there is significant consumer demand.