Normalizing Alcohol
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw more systematic restrictions placed on alcohol production and consumption than the preceding two millennia. They included the noble and not-so-noble experiments with prohibition in Russia/the Soviet Union and the United States and the quasi-prohibition regimes in Canada, Scandinavia, and parts of Mexico. There was also the complex web of regulations enacted during the First World War in many countries to deal with particular challenges but maintained long after—regulations on production, drinking ages, and the serving hours of taverns and bars. In the following decades, from the mid-1920s to the 1960s, legislators in many countries wrestled with the tensions inherent in returning to more liberal alcohol regimes while simultaneously trying to restrain consumption in the interests of public health and order. Production and consumption sometimes reflected these policies, but they were also affected by economic cycles of depression and prosperity, the class- or race-based policies adopted by authoritarian states, and the Second World War.
In December 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, ending prohibition in the United States, had been ratified by the thirty-six states needed to carry it into force. But, not wanting to appear too jubilant that alcohol would flow freely again, Roosevelt drove a careful middle line, praising the amendment for restoring individual freedom but cautioning against the adoption of irresponsible alcohol policies. The amendment specified that the importation of alcohol in violation of state or territorial law was prohibited, effectively giving individual states control over alcohol policy within their borders. But Roosevelt advised them against restoring what the antialcohol lobby campaigners considered the worst aspects of former policies. “I ask especially,” he said, “that no state shall, by law or otherwise, authorize the return of the saloon, either in its old form or in some modern guise.” In a further gesture to prohibition supporters, Roosevelt called for citizens to be educated to drink responsibly, to prevent the return of “the repugnant conditions” that had preceded prohibition.1 It was a careful statement that recognized the validity of prohibitionists’ concerns while rejecting their solution.
Although alcohol policy was now squarely in the hands of the states, the federal government retained jurisdiction over matters such as interstate commerce in alcohol and the issuing of winery and brewery licenses. It established the Federal Alcohol Control Administration (FACA) to manage these and other issues, but that body (and its successors) largely adopted a hands-off position. The experience with prohibition had no doubt left the federal government with little appetite for driving alcohol policy. The first director of the FACA clearly hoped that public interest in alcohol issues would simply disappear. Much of the drinking during prohibition reflected the attraction of the illicit, he said, and once alcohol was freely available again, consumption would almost certainly decline. But officials must secretly have hoped that it would not decline too much or too quickly; the government badly needed tax revenues from alcohol to finance the public works projects that Roosevelt’s administration designed to help the country out of the economic depression. American citizens came through: taxes of $2.60 a gallon on distilled liquor and $5 a barrel on beer accounted for 13 percent of all federal tax revenues by 1936.
The Twenty-First Amendment eventually produced the same patchwork of regulations as had existed before prohibition came into force. Some states were dry and others were wet, but each adopted its own licensing and consumption regulations. Many states that had adopted prohibition policies before 1920, however, chose to permit alcohol after prohibition was repealed. Clearly, the experience of thirteen dry years had soured many state legislatures on the wisdom of trying to choke off alcohol supplies entirely. Most of the dry states were in the Southeast; Mississippi, the last state to remain dry, went wet as late as 1966. While the legislators of some states did not hesitate to make alcohol available again, in other states the repeal of prohibition sparked renewed conflict as temperance organizations campaigned to halt any renewed flow of alcohol in their states.
Florida, which had been more exposed to liquor smuggling than most other states and whose courts had been swamped by alcohol-related cases, is an example. As it became increasingly evident that prohibition was coming to an end, the respective supporters of prohibition and repeal organized to put pressure on Florida’s legislators.2 Polls showed that the state’s citizens were split on the issue. Yet within a month of Congress’s raising the definition of alcoholic beverage from half a percent to 3.5 percent alcohol in April 1933, the state legislature legalized the production, distribution, sale, and advertising of “near beer,” light wine, and similar beverages. Arguments that restoring the alcohol industry, even in this limited form, would provide employment for thousands and much-needed revenues for the state treasury overwhelmed much of the residual prohibitionist strength. The state’s newspapers, which expected to (and did) benefit from alcohol advertising, supported the measure. When the Twenty-First Amendment was referred to the states for ratification later in 1933, the delegates to Florida’s convention voted unanimously in favor, making Florida the thirty-third of the thirty-six states needed for ratification.
Once prohibition was gone, the federal courts in Florida began to dismiss outstanding charges related to smuggling and bootlegging. In one case where charges were dismissed, the defendants sued in 1935 for the return of some 75 gallons of liquor that had been confiscated in 1933. The liquor was returned to them on the condition that they pay the taxes due on it. But one federal judge warned that once alcohol was legally available, the courts would deal with unlicensed alcohol producers even more severely than they had under prohibition. One man charged with making moonshine in 1934 was told that “there is no prohibition law anymore and it is . . . unfair for a man to operate a liquor still and not pay the tax. . . . [This] business must be stopped.” Yet it was not until November 1934, almost a year after the Twenty-First Amendment took effect, that Florida repealed its own statewide prohibition law. By a two-to-one margin, Floridians voted to restore alcohol control to individual counties. This policy was adopted by many states, ensuring there would be as many regulatory variations within states as among them.
In light of many decades of propaganda that portrayed drinking as immoral and inappropriate for decent people, the emergence of a positive view of alcohol into mainstream middle-class American culture seemed almost effortless. Advertisements for beer, wine, and spirits soon filled the pages of newspapers, and by 1935 a fifth of the display advertising in the New York Times was for beer and wine. Neon signs in cities and billboards along highways kept alcohol in public view. The production code for movies introduced in 1930 was revised in 1934 (it remained in force until the 1960s) and might have been expected to deal with the portrayal of alcohol on the screen. But its stress was resolutely on sexuality and the representation of gender. Its administrators intervened in the making of the movie Casablanca (1942) to delete any suggestion that the two main characters, Rick and Ilsa, had had a sexual relationship, yet there was no objection to the fact that the movie was not only set in a bar (referred to in the movie as a “gin-joint”) that had many of the trappings of a saloon but was replete with scenes of alcohol and drinking and references to gambling and other saloonlike activities.
The new urban drinking cultures that had developed in the privacy of homes and speakeasies in much of urban America during prohibition came to the surface after repeal. Cocktails, made popular as a way of concealing the poor quality of much prohibition-era liquor, maintained their popularity afterward—particularly among women, for whom undiluted spirits were widely thought to be unsuitably strong. (Drinking spirits straight or on the rocks was associated with masculinity.) The speakeasy in its sophisticated form (as rare as those might have been) went public as the cocktail lounge and supper club. These new drinking places had none of the cultural baggage of the saloon, with its coarse and masculine associations, but were places where women and men could socialize without any hint of scandal. Drinking at home became more public, too, in the sense that there was no longer any need to pretend that it was not done. Women’s magazines carried articles on serving cocktails and wine at dinner parties and gave advice on the etiquette surrounding alcoholic beverages.
Of course it is possible to overstate the cultural shift that the end of prohibition made evident, as the United States encompassed many drinking cultures that were based on class, gender, race, religion, and region. A significant portion of the American population abstained from alcohol altogether; many people regarded it as a threat to morality and social order or abstained in accordance with religious principles (as with Mormons). A lot of alcohol advertising was targeted at men and associated drinking with male activities such as hunting and horseback riding. Nor was all drinking—or much of it—necessarily sophisticated. Neighborhood taverns, bars, and lounges (the word “saloon” was carefully avoided) became the places where working-class men met and socialized, but they were less often the rowdy places said to have been so common before 1920. Nuanced they must be, but the varied drinking cultures of the 1930s seem to have been quite different from their pre-prohibition forerunners.
The image of sophisticated drinking in the 1930s was largely confined to the urban middle and upper classes of the United States, but it was largely absent even from those circles north of the border, in postprohibition Canada. Each province replaced the temperance or prohibition laws enacted during the First World War with a liquor retailing system that gave provincial governments a monopoly over the sale of alcohol and the power to regulate alcohol production and the licensing of bars and other drinking places. In Canada’s largest province, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), established in 1927, created a system of permit books to regulate access to alcohol; this system remained in force, with various changes, until the early 1960s. Any resident of Ontario over the age of twenty-one who wanted to purchase alcohol had to apply for a permit book (which resembled a passport) in which LCBO store clerks would record all their purchases.3 Store managers could peruse these passbooks from time to time and were empowered to interview customers if they thought something was amiss—that a customer was buying too much alcohol or seemed to be spending more than he or she should, given his or her occupation and income (occupations were shown in passbooks). Managers could warn suspect clients or restrict the passbooks so that individuals could purchase alcohol from only one LCBO store (to give staff more effective surveillance). Anyone the LCBO decided was abusing alcohol was placed on an “interdiction list,” meaning that they were not permitted to purchase alcohol for a year, after which their case would be reviewed. The names of people on the interdiction list (400 to 500 a year during the 1930s) were circulated to the police and all LCBO stores.
If some Ontario citizens could have their alcohol privileges cut off because of their perceived alcohol-related behavior, others were deprived simply on the basis of their status. Only men and women “of good character” could obtain a permit book, and this ruled out anyone known or reputed to be an alcoholic or heavy drinker. Native people were disqualified by other legislation from drinking alcohol. A married women not in the workforce, and therefore without an independent income, could obtain a passbook only when she provided information on her husband’s occupation. Tourists and transient residents, on the other hand, could apply for a temporary passbook for the duration of their stay in Ontario.
In Europe, only a handful of countries had to deal with the perceived challenges posed by easing of restrictive alcohol policies. Sweden, Norway, and Finland all established state-owned liquor stores that survive to the present day. In the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, moderately restrictive policies had been adopted during the First World War, and many of them, such as limited opening hours for bars in England and the abolition of absinthe production in France, were maintained throughout the interwar period and beyond. Consumption patterns fluctuated with economic cycles, such as the Great Depression, when massive unemployment reduced spending power dramatically.
In England, the government set up a royal commission in 1929 to study the licensing laws and the social and economic impacts of alcohol consumption. This was not a reaction to a perceived social emergency, however, as per capita consumption of alcohol in 1929 was considerably lower than it had been thirty years earlier: since 1899, spirits consumption had declined from a gallon to a quarter of that, while beer consumption was half what it had been. By these measures, temperance had gained a major foothold in popular drinking patterns in England.
The commission’s report, published in 1932, gave little cause for alarm. It recommended maintaining the opening hours of public houses that had been imposed during the First World War, despite arguments from London’s commissioner of police and others that allowing pubs to remain open all afternoon (instead of closing between lunch and dinner) was unlikely to produce social problems. As for the drinking habits of the English, the commissioners noted that “the general decrease in the consumption of intoxicants has been accompanied by a marked decrease in insobriety.” They singled out young people as drinking more responsibly. While noting that factors such as higher taxation, lower alcohol levels in drinks, the demands of mechanization in industry, and depression-era unemployment had contributed to lower alcohol consumption, the commission declared, “Drunkenness has gone out of fashion.”4 But if they were optimistic, the commissioners were not naive; if there was a broad cultural shift away from alcohol abuse, there was still extensive intoxication, and they recommended measures that included reducing the number of licensed drinking places, improving the character of pubs, and providing more education on alcohol.
In some respects, these recommendations were already being implemented. From the early 1920s, English brewers began to reshape drinking cultures by building bigger, more comfortable pubs, often in a Tudor or Georgian style.5 Many featured dining rooms with high-quality food prepared by chefs poached from major London hotels, and tearooms that served nonalcoholic beverages during the long afternoon hours when alcohol was not available. A key innovation in many renovated pubs was a lounge. Carpeted, comfortably furnished with upholstered furniture, and with walls hung with prints and paintings, the lounge was created in the image of the rather stuffy middle-class living room. It re-created the safety of drinking at home and reassured women of the respectability of public drinking. The feminization of this space was neatly encapsulated by the instructions of Whitbread, one of England’s largest breweries: “A clean sweep should be made of fixed furniture, wall papers, heavy hangings, and such ‘works of art’ as famous racehorses, prize-fights, almanac portraits of departed statesmen and other mural eyesores.”6
Many of the improved pubs were located on the major highways and bypasses that were constructed to accommodate the growing number of automobiles. Automobile ownership in Britain rose from 580,000 in 1925 to more than 2 million on the eve of the Second World War, and the more mobile owners made up a significant clientele that was able to break from the tradition of drinking at a local pub. The automobile gave rise to a new category of drinking place, the roadhouse. Designed to appeal to the affluent, motorized class, roadhouses were more luxurious than pubs, even the improved kind, and they offered a bigger range of leisure amenities. Many featured a swimming pool, a high-end restaurant, and a dance floor with popular bands where formal dress was encouraged. Alcohol was served throughout, but roadhouses featured cocktails in addition to beer, wine, and spirits. Far from the risqué clubs of contemporary Berlin but not so different from many American cocktail bars, roadhouses caught the imagination as slightly dangerous places for illicit dalliances accompanied by drink and dancing. They were a far cry from the relatively drab petit bourgeois drinking culture of the pub lounge.
The association of improved pubs and roadhouses almost inevitably raised the question of drinking and driving, as neither offered accommodations where an overenthusiastic drinker might sleep off the effects before getting back behind the wheel. The 1929 royal commission devoted a scant fifteen lines to the subject, and then only to make the modest recommendation that drivers of buses, trucks, and other commercial vehicles should abstain from alcohol while they were on duty. This suggests that, in England at least, driving while intoxicated was not considered a significant problem. Laws against driving while intoxicated were passed only after the First World War, and because no standard measure of intoxication was available until the 1930s, evidence was based on the commonsense assessment of the police: slurred speech and the inability to walk in a straight line and perform acts like touching one’s nose with a forefinger were accepted as signs of impairment.
One of the other main recommendations of the 1929 royal commission, alcohol education, was becoming a feature of alcohol policy in a number of countries in this period. It reflected continued anxiety that populations would slide back into the heavier drinking of earlier decades, and it recognized that early education might restrain coming generations from alcohol abuse. The first official English school syllabus on alcohol, which dated from 1909, adopted a somewhat heavy-handed approach infused with temperance moralizing. When it was revised in 1922, the syllabus placed alcohol in broader contexts, and alcohol abuse was related to the abuse of food; drinking responsibly was portrayed as part of the more general exercise of self-discipline that was necessary for a healthy life. The first official textbook, Alcohol: Its Action on the Human Organism, published in 1918, became widely used in English schools and colleges in the interwar period. But it was a dry, technical book that was largely confined to the physiological implications of alcohol consumption. It stressed that alcohol was not a food and had little nutritional value, but that its effects on the nervous system could be mitigated by drinking it diluted or by eating food while drinking.7
More straightforward, less nuanced advice could be found in the many books on alcohol written in this period for a young readership. One American example, published in the 1930s, also placed the abuse of alcohol on the same plane as that of food: “Some boys, and girls, too, weaken and disease their bodies by cultivating and developing an unnatural appetite for vinegar, salt, cloves, coffee, spice and other substances. . . . Such habits, if not early abandoned, lead to secret and social vice, prepare the person who does them for intemperance, and pave the way for permanent injury, or even for total wreck and ruin.” Having established cloves as a gateway drug, it went on: “What is true of eating is also true of drinking. Drink only that which confers good health. Pure water, at the temperature it flows from the spring, is the best form of drink for both young and old. . . . Never take intoxicating liquors in any form. Look about you and see the ruin caused by rum in the lives of others.”8
The general thrust of such books, as of most government interwar policies—urging citizens to limit alcohol consumption if they could not abstain completely—was thrown into relief in 1931 when the French government launched one of the more unusual episodes in the history of alcohol: a campaign to persuade French consumers to drink more wine.9 French wine producers had had several big harvests but experienced difficulty selling wine abroad, thanks to the prohibition policy still in force in the United States and the economic depression and high unemployment elsewhere. The producers of high-end wine in Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne were also affected by the disappearance of much of their aristocratic German, Austrian, and Russian markets in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution and by the financial impact of the war on the English middle and upper classes. French wine exports fell from over 2 million hectoliters in 1924 to only 700,000 in 1932, and the result was a big surplus that would only get bigger if there were more big harvests. As the surplus grew, prices fell, as did the earnings of producers—including millions of small-scale grape-growers—and anyone involved in transporting and selling wine.
The crisis was so broad-based that the government could not ignore it. Between 1931 and 1935 it enacted the time-honored response to wine surpluses and attempted to limit production, which had increased during the 1920s. Taxes were placed on high yields, new plantings were prohibited for a ten-year period, and compulsory distillation of wine to make fuel was ordered. This last provision was enacted over protests that it would be a “profanity” to allow “the pearls of a Château d’Yquem or the rubies of a Chambertin . . . [to] end up in the fuel-tank of a motor-car.”10 But in addition to cutting supply, the French government decided to try to persuade citizens to drink their way out of the problems posed by the growing wine surplus. It was an optimistic goal. At 206 liters a year per adult in 1931, consumption of wine in France was the highest in the world. It seemed unlikely that it could be increased significantly enough to have much impact on the wine accumulating in vats and barrels all over France.
Any attempt to increase consumption of any alcoholic beverage ran counter to almost all contemporary trends. True, the United States was on the verge of abandoning prohibition, but no one there or elsewhere was calling for increased drinking—except for the chairman of England’s Brewers’ Society, Sir Edgar Sanders, who launched a campaign to increase beer consumption. This aim was no more than we would expect of such a lobby group, but it was phrased in an unusually explicit way. Sanders’s intention was to “get the beer-drinking habit into thousands, almost millions, of young men who do not know at present the taste of beer.”11 The brewing industry launched a campaign to stress the healthy qualities of beer, echoing an advertising campaign by Guinness in the 1920s that highlighted the nutritional properties of the black brew.
In France, wine, not beer, was the healthy beverage. The French had a long-standing tradition of distinguishing between wine (a natural and healthy beverage) and “alcohol,” meaning distilled spirits (which were believed to cause health and social problems). Running against the contemporary trend elsewhere, the French medical profession persisted in portraying wine as a healthy beverage, and the purported health benefits of wine were central to the campaign to increase wine consumption. Eminent doctors formed an association called Médecins amis du vin (the Physician Friends of Wine) to support the government’s wine-consumption campaign by writing letters and articles for newspapers. Advertisements stressed the health benefits of wine; one claimed that the average life expectancy of a wine-drinker was sixty-five years, against fifty-nine years for a water-drinker, and that 87 percent of centenarians were wine-drinkers.12
Allied to this theme was the message that wine, which had been declared France’s national beverage, was rooted in the French soil (occasionally irrigated with the blood of the country’s martyrs), so that consuming wine was not only a healthy pleasure but a patriotic obligation. And if drinking wine were patriotic, drinking more wine could only be more so. Wine, indeed, was linked to the sheer existence of France, as one doctor argued in a brilliant non sequitur: “For over a thousand years, wine has been the national drink of the French and although they have been surrounded by enemies against whom they have fought more wars than any other people, the French have not only survived but they are among the two or three most important nations in the world.”13
The drink-more-wine campaign used various means—posters, billboards at railway stations, newspaper advertisements, local festivals, and conferences—to convey its message, and it eagerly embraced the new mass media. Four hundred flashing neon signs were erected in Paris with pithy messages such as “Make wine your preference” and “A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.” References to wine were encouraged in French movies, an early form of product placement. Between 1934 and 1937, the new state radio broadcast a series of talks on the history of France as traced through wine. Listeners learned that Louis XVI was an unsuccessful king not because his mismanagement of the state’s finances led to the French Revolution but because he diluted his wine with water, which prevented him from thinking deeply enough. As for the great ideas of the Enlightenment, they came forth under the influence of wine.
No sector of the population that was perceived as able to drink more wine was spared the attention of the campaign. Young men would learn wine-drinking while they did military service. Over the objections of some teachers’ groups—and, of course, temperance associations—the campaign even reached into France’s schools. When children took dictation, they would copy out Louis Pasteur’s dicta on the health benefits of wine, and when they took geography lessons, they would learn the location of France’s wine regions. Mathematics classes included equations such as “One liter of wine at ten degrees [alcohol-level] corresponds as a food-stuff to 900 grams of milk, 370 grams of bread, 585 grams of meat, and five eggs.” It was even suggested that wine should be provided to children during lunch and at breaks. The French Olympic Committee got onboard and asked that French athletes at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles “be given the same consideration as French sailors in American ports. That is to say, that they be accorded a free daily consumption of a liter of wine.” The team had French chefs, but “without wine, the food will not be the same.”14
Outside metropolitan France, the colonies were identified as underperforming in wine consumption. The pro-wine campaigners had not only the expatriate colonists in their sights but the indigenous populations, particularly in France’s sprawling possessions in North Africa. Many, of course, were nondrinking Muslims, and it was thought that they could help the national cause by eating more French grapes and drinking unfermented grape juice. A conference to pursue this goal was held in 1936 in Tunis, where speakers addressed topics such as making and conserving grape juice. But the main force of the campaign was in France itself and on those who already drank wine. Restaurants were encouraged to include some wine in the price of food and to price wine fairly. More retail outlets were proposed—including wine trucks on public squares—and many of the restrictions on bars were relaxed.
Even without its sometimes outrageous proposals—such as giving wine to schoolchildren and paying cyclists in the annual Tour de France to be seen drinking wine while they were racing—the campaign to increase wine consumption is astonishing because it ran directly counter to so many trends in the interwar period. As President Roosevelt was warning about a return to the bad old days after the repeal of prohibition, and as Canada’s provinces were carefully monitoring and limiting their citizens’ alcohol consumption, the French government was urging its citizen to drink, drink, and drink more wine. Yet for all its work and cost, the campaign foundered on the economic realities of the depression, which struck France in 1931, a little later than many other countries. During the 1920s, adult per capita wine consumption averaged 224 liters a year; in the 1930s, despite the wide-ranging campaign, it averaged 203 liters. It was not a dramatic decline, but it was still a decline and not the increase that the government wanted.
If France’s wine crisis did not lead to higher consumption, it did contribute to a transformation of French wine. A plan was put in place to pull up vineyards, and a 1934 law forbade the use of hybrid grape varieties for making commercial wine; they could be used for wine for family consumption, even though one of the justifications offered for the law was that wine made from hybrids could lead to insanity. Even more important were measures to guarantee the provenance of wine, because falling prices had led some merchants to label wine from regions that commanded low prices as coming from more prestigious regions that produced higher-priced wines; one merchant sold wine from Spain’s La Mancha region as coming from Chablis, in northern Burgundy. A law of 1935 established a method of guaranteeing provenance, the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system that is still central to French law and has been a model for wine laws in many other countries. Various forms of the law had been enacted in France as early as 1905 in response to widespread wine fraud during the phylloxera crisis, but the 1935 law extended and codified the appellation system and cleared the way for hundreds of appellations to be created. In each appellation, regulations covered issues such as the varieties of grapes that could be used, the ratios in blends of varieties, minimum alcohol levels, and maximum yields of wine per hectare of vines.
If the democratic nations of Europe and North America adopted a variety of responses to the perceived challenges of drinking, alcohol was of no less concern to the many authoritarian regimes that emerged in Europe in the interwar period. In Germany, for example, there was a perceptible shift in policy as the liberal Weimar Republic, which came into being after the First World War, gave way to the Nazi regime in 1933. The Weimar government, dominated by center-left parties throughout the 1920s, inherited Germany’s wartime restrictions on alcohol production but quickly removed them so as to normalize living conditions. Alcohol became freely available, but paradoxically, consumption seems to have declined to historically low levels, perhaps to as little as 3 or 4 liters of pure alcohol per person each year. The reasons for this must have included the weak purchasing power of most Germans as they faced, first, postwar poverty and then the calamitous effects of runaway inflation in 1923, followed by the economic depression and its high unemployment and much-reduced purchasing power from 1929 onward. German beer production had consistently totaled about 70 million hectoliters a year in the two decades before 1914, but from 1919 to 1933 it averaged only 41 million, a decline of 40 percent.15
In contrast to the liberal alcohol policies of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime adopted a generally antialcohol position, largely based on the same eugenics theories that underlay its radical race policies. Eugenicists had frequently highlighted the dangers of alcohol for individual and social health, and what they broadly termed “alcoholism”—which often meant nothing more than the regular consumption of above-average volumes of alcohol—was considered as clear a sign of degeneracy as insanity, criminality, immorality, and epilepsy. Rather than see addiction as a response to environmental and social conditions, many German alcohol theorists had embraced the eugenics principle that addictions (of any kind) took root only in people congenitally predisposed to them; alcoholism, rather than being an illness in itself, was considered to be, in most cases, a symptom of a more fundamental pathology. This led to the important conclusion that there was no way to prevent or cure most alcoholism using medical or therapeutic methods.
Commonplace drinking—the regular consumption of alcohol in moderate amounts for relaxation and on social occasions, perhaps with an occasional binge during festivities such as weddings—was treated as a different matter altogether. The Nazis recognized that enjoying beer and Schnapps (wine was a distant third) was integral to German culture and sociability. The earliest Nazi political action, the “beer-hall putsch” of 1923, emanated from a place of drinking, and we can assume that some beer was consumed before Hitler led his followers out to the street. (Hitler himself seldom drank, and if he represented himself as an abstainer from alcohol—and from meat and sex—it was to cultivate an image of a man fully in control of his bodily passions and totally dedicated to the well-being of his country and people.)
Yet if the Nazis were critical of drinking in general because of its occasional personal and social effects (including absenteeism from work, illness, domestic violence, crime, and traffic accidents), they were pragmatic enough to know that trying to ban alcohol would cause more conflict and resistance than it was worth. The Nazis came to power the very year that prohibition was repealed in the United States, so they had a privileged position from which to observe the results of that policy. Nor did the Nazi leadership pay much attention to some radical claims from within their ranks, such as that alcohol was a substance employed by Jews to weaken the German people.
Instead, the Nazis initially embraced a moderate antialcohol position and adopted policies that were familiar throughout much of contemporary Europe. In terms of regulations, they included limiting access to alcohol, educating citizens on its dangers, restricting advertising, police supervision of drinking places, and cracking down on drinking and driving. The alcohol industry was required to produce nonalcoholic beverages, such as fruit juice, and alcohol-free restaurants were established for nondrinkers.
On the coercive side, anyone convicted of disturbing the peace while intoxicated could be forbidden to enter a bar or tavern and could be exposed to public shame by being included in lists of “irresponsible drinkers” that were published in the daily newspapers. More serious offenders could be declared legally incapacitated and interned in a sanatorium, work camp, or concentration camp (which at this time was essentially a labor camp). Anyone who committed a crime while intoxicated felt the full force of the law, including confinement in prison, a workhouse, or a place of “secure custody,” which frequently meant a concentration camp. Drinking and driving attracted special attention (the Nazis had an automobile fetish), and by 1938 the German police were among the first to adopt a blood-alcohol test developed only six years earlier by Swedish scientist Eric Widmark.16
These policies were designed to deal with the problems that arose when ordinary, healthy Germans, as defined by the Nazis, abused alcohol. Alcoholism was a different matter altogether, and it demanded more rigorous responses. The basic policy was embedded in the Law for the Prevention of Descendants affected by Hereditary Disorders, which was promulgated in 1933 soon after the Nazis came to power. It put alcoholism on the same basis as insanity, schizophrenia, bodily deformity, blindness, and other conditions regarded as hereditary, and it was designed not to provide treatment for alcoholics (which the Nazis thought generally futile) but to minimize the incidence of alcoholism in the future. This would be achieved by sterilizing anyone diagnosed as alcoholic. A commentary on the 1933 law noted, “Through the sterilization of inebriates, the number of mentally inferior individuals for coming generations is reduced and with that the number of inebriates from the hereditary pool.”17
Petitions to sterilize alcoholics were generally brought by medical officers or the administrators of institutions dealing with alcohol problems and were decided by a panel consisting of a judge and two doctors. No evidence of hereditary alcoholism was required, and arguments for sterilization were generally based on heavy drinking, together with behavior such as criminality, neglect of obligations to family or state, and impaired work habits. It is estimated that 90 percent of petitions were granted and that between 15,000 and 30,000 individuals diagnosed as alcoholics were sterilized under this law.
People diagnosed as nonhereditary alcoholics were not sterilized but were prohibited from marrying. The Marriage Health Law of 1935 forbade marriage by anyone suffering from a “mental disturbance” and singled out alcoholism as making “a beneficial coexistence in the community impossible for both the married couple as well as the children.” Alcoholics, the law stated, “endanger the orderly raising of children and the economic situation of the family.”18 In 1938 a new German divorce law made alcoholism a ground for dissolving a marriage.
Yet for all that the Nazis campaigned against alcohol, they only moderately regulated production and consumption, and alcohol consumption in Germany rose steadily after they came to power. The consumption of spirits doubled between 1933 and 1939, and beer production reversed its 1920s decline, possibly reflecting improved economic conditions and higher employment, as the Nazi regime embarked on massive public works and armaments programs.19 In addition, the government actually assisted some branches of the alcohol industry, such as wineries (wine production fell during the 1930s) and taverns; it appreciated that they provided employment and that the state also needed the revenues from all forms of alcohol.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union also tackled problems of alcohol in this period, but it had its own chronology and motivations. Having gradually moved away from the prohibition policies that were inherited from the tsarist government and maintained during the first years of the Soviet period, Stalin’s government adopted policies that permitted easy access to the alcohol produced by state-owned enterprises. Through the 1920s, however, the authorities struggled against the production of samogon, illicitly produced vodka. Reports throughout the decade claimed that vast amounts of grain were diverted to make this alcohol. In 1922 the Commissariat for Justice noted that “the production of [samogon] . . . has become a large-scale enterprise in several areas of the Republic; it damages national health, causes senseless waste and spoilage of grain and other foodstuffs.”20 The government suspected that many of the producers were political opponents who would rather do anything with their surplus grain than turn it over to the state. They often identified samogon producers as kulaks, the wealthier peasant class that Stalin later targeted for persecution and exile during the campaign to collectivize agriculture.
Alcohol was placed firmly in the Soviet political context. Illicit alcohol was not only illegal, but it deprived the people of grain and promoted antisocial behavior. In 1922, Pravda, the state-controlled newspaper, embarked on a campaign against samogon in unambiguously political terms: “The struggle against [samogon] is the workers’ cause. . . . The bootlegger is a parasite of the working class. Merciless war against him!” Hundreds of thousands of illicit producers were arrested and tried—191,000 in the Russian republic alone in 1923—but the great majority of those who ended up in court (as in the United States while prohibition was in force) turned out to be small-time operators. In the first half of March 1923, the police made 13,748 arrests throughout the Soviet Union and confiscated 25,114 gallons of samogon, less than 2 gallons per apprehended producer.21 In 1926 the authorities capitulated to reality, decriminalizing the production of samogon for personal consumption and focusing on large-scale, commercial producers.
The Soviet campaign against bootleg alcohol was distinctive because it took place not within a context of official prohibition but while legal alcohol was freely available. Full-strength alcohol was permitted from the end of 1923, so the existence and consumption of alcohol were not the problems in themselves. Rather, the state was losing the revenues from the taxes that made up most of the price of legally produced alcohol. Recognizing that the Soviet Union needed money to develop an industrial economy, and rejecting the option of borrowing from foreign lenders at high interest rates, Stalin posed the options starkly in 1925: “We have to make a choice between debt slavery and vodka.”22 Even so, the resumption of a state monopoly on vodka was supposed to be a temporary measure to tide the government over. As soon as other sources of income were in place, the production of vodka would be reduced and then eliminated altogether.
Soviet alcohol policies thus embodied a contradiction between end (abstinence) and means (the free flow of alcohol). Thus it is not surprising that they fluctuated wildly as they sometimes favored reducing supply so as to lessen the effects of drinking on health and social order and sometimes favored increasing supply so as to maximize state revenues. For example, the 1929 conference of the Communist Party responded to fears about the extent of alcohol abuse by approving a program for the “de-alcoholization of the economy.” But a few months later, the Central Committee of the party annulled the resolution, and in the following year, Stalin ordered “the maximum increase” in the production of vodka.23
Underlying first the abandonment of prohibition and then the return to full-strength alcohol production was a shift in Soviet thinking about alcohol consumption. The Communists had come to power arguing that alcohol use by workers was a symptom of the otherwise intolerable conditions imposed on them by capitalists and that capitalists encouraged drinking so as to make workers more docile; even if binge-drinking led to absenteeism, workers well-supplied with alcohol were less disposed to revolutionary activism. But faced with the same widespread resistance to prohibition that the tsar’s government had experienced, and needing the revenue from taxes, the Soviet government gradually reintroduced alcohol. In ideological terms, it seems to have assumed that alcohol use would wither away as workers adjusted to their improved working and living conditions in Soviet society. In the meantime, however, workers could no longer justify alcohol abuse by appealing to their oppression by capitalists, and they had to take responsibility for their alcohol-affected behavior. This justified harsher penalties for drunkenness and for crimes committed while the perpetrators were intoxicated.
The production of samogon, which continued to be far more popular than official vodka through the 1920s, seems to have declined dramatically in the 1930s, possibly because the collectivization of farms allowed for far less individual enterprise and provided more social surveillance. In contrast, the state-sponsored production of vodka rose steadily through the 1930s, from 36.5 million decaliters in 1932 to 94.5 million in 1939. By 1940, on the eve of the German invasion, there were said to be more retail outlets selling alcohol in the Soviet Union than shops selling meat, fruit, and vegetables put together.24
High levels of alcohol consumption were to dog the Soviet Union for decades and even contribute to its economic decline and collapse in the 1980s. But “alcoholism”—as any form of regular, heavy drinking was often generically referred to—became a more prominent target for therapy everywhere once the impossibility of ending alcohol consumption entirely became clear. One of the most important alcohol-reform organizations to emerge in the interwar period was Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that was distinctive because it abandoned the moralistic approach to alcoholism that dominated temperance and prohibitionist discourses. With its primary purpose being to enable alcoholics to “stay sober and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety,” Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in the United States in 1935, but it really took off in the early 1940s. By 1945 there were 12,986 members in 556 local groups throughout the United States, and five years later there were 96,000 members and more than 3,500 groups.
The organization calculated that, in its early years, it was successful for about three-quarters of the people who committed themselves to the Alcoholics Anonymous method. That method involved ceasing to drink alcohol entirely, in the belief that a single drink would most likely put the alcoholic on a slippery slope to chronic and heavy drinking again. It was based on the premise that alcoholics were always alcoholics, but that there were alcoholics who drank and those who did not. At the regular meetings that members were expected to attend, there were speakers and discussions, and new members were expected to tell the story of their alcoholism. Each member was paired with another who could be contacted for advice and support when he or she felt the need to drink. Although Alcoholics Anonymous stressed the importance of each member’s spiritual and character development, it steered clear of identification with any specific religion.
Alcoholics Anonymous was not, strictly speaking, against alcohol, and it emerged at a time when the antialcohol movements that had been so influential before the First World War were declining in both numbers and influence. Although the Second World War provided another caesura in the history of alcohol, it was by no means the stark break represented by the First World War. At that time, the antialcohol movements had had their moment when the intersection of war and the momentum of temperance and prohibition produced a slew of policies banning or restricting access to alcohol. But the abandonment or dilution of many of these policies by the mid-1930s not only indicated a shift of popular and political attitudes; it also tainted the antialcohol organizations with an aura of failure. Membership in the WCTU in the United States declined from more than 2 million in 1920 to less than half a million twenty years later. It was only one example of the ebbing of support for antialcohol organizations.
In some countries, the Second World War had far less impact than the First World War on alcohol production and consumption. In Great Britain, the price of alcohol rose because of enormous increases in taxation; the duty on a barrel of beer rose from 48 shillings in 1939 to 138 shillings in 1943. Because higher-alcohol beer was taxed more, brewers lowered the alcohol to keep their product as affordable as possible. If anything, consumption of beer rose during the Second World War, but the Second was different from the First in that the mass draining of young men—the key beer-drinking demographic—from the population did not occur until the Allied invasions of continental Europe began in 1943. Even then, England welcomed a constantly revolving population of alcohol-drinking soldiers from other countries throughout the hostilities, including Americans from 1942 onward.
Women began to drink in pubs more frequently during the war, as had occurred between 1914 and 1918. But most of the women who drank in pubs during the war were younger than those who had done so in the 1930s. Many worked in what had been male occupations, their financial independence freed them from parental control, and meeting men in pubs became more acceptable.25 A survey of pubs in the early 1940s suggested that about a fifth of patrons were women, with more drinking there on weekends than during the week. The author noted that because women occupied only parlors and lounges, “it is often possible to find rooms in which quite half the drinkers are women.”26 (He also noted that women made up a disproportionately small percentage of pub drinkers arrested for drunkenness.)
This is not to say that the conditions of war from 1939 to 1945 did not have an impact of alcohol production and consumption. Whole economies and patterns of everyday life were disrupted throughout the vast expanses of Europe that were occupied by Germany from 1939 to 1945. The German, Italian, British, Soviet, and many other economies were geared up to produce war matériel, not consumer goods. It was impossible for alcohol production and consumption not to have been affected by these conditions or to have been neglected as governments adopted policies to maximize their war efforts.
With the coming of war in 1939 and the greater discipline needed in the German armed forces and among civilians engaged in industry and agriculture, the Nazi government’s tolerance of alcohol shrank. In 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland, the Bureau against the Dangers of Alcohol and Tobacco was established, and it fostered a new network of regulations to control alcohol in Germany. The production and sale of alcohol were subject to new limits, and taxes on alcohol were raised. During the war, strict rules covered alcohol consumption by anyone serving in the armed forces, although alcohol and drugs were widely supplied to German soldiers and police to enable them to carry out some of the barbarous policies ordered by the government. Men who served in the Reserve Police battalions in Poland that were responsible for shooting tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children at close quarters were given special rations of alcohol during and afterward to help them cope with the horrors of their actions.27
On the German home front, any antisocial behavior that could be attributed to drinking—absenteeism, reduced or impaired productivity, being unruly in an air-raid shelter, or being involved in a traffic accident during a blackout—was now regarded as even more harmful to the state than in peacetime. “No dangerous alcoholic, no person who has fallen under the influence of alcohol may . . . remain unknown to the state and party,” declared the regime.28 A wide range of people in positions of authority, including doctors, union officials, and factory nurses, were required to report anyone suspected to be “alcohol-diseased” or “dangerous alcoholics” to the police. Punishments included detention in a concentration camp.
In many parts of Europe occupied by German forces, particularly in eastern Europe and Russia, preexisting patterns of production, exchange, and consumption were shattered. The needs of the local populations were ignored, at best, and we should assume that little survived of prewar alcohol-related diets and sociability. In northern and western Europe, the disruption to non-Jewish populations was less dramatic. German forces occupied important centers of alcohol production such as Alsace (which was annexed to Germany), Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Cognac.
In Vichy France, the collaborationist state dependent on Germany but not occupied by German forces, attitudes toward alcohol were different. Vichy, its capital, is a city closely associated with healing waters and potable mineral water (as the final scene of the movie Casablanca reminds us) and might seem unpromising for alcohol. On the other hand, the Vichy regime was headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of the First World War who had praised the contribution of French wine to victory in 1918: “For the soldiers, wine was the stimulant of moral strength as well as physical strength. In its own way, it helped us to our victory.”29
In 1940, however, Pétain established a right-wing authoritarian regime that had a complicated relationship with alcohol in general and wine in particular. On one hand, Pétain valued wine as an emanation of the French soil and saw viticulture as representing all that was good in the French character: hard work and devotion to land and tradition. In recognition of Pétain’s appreciation of wine, the authorities in Beaune, Burgundy’s famous wine town, presented him with his own vineyard (Clos du Maréchal Pétain) in the prestigious and expensive Hospices de Beaune estate.30 Yet for all that the marshal embraced the idea of wine, he had problems with people drinking it. Wine was included in Vichy’s rationing program (there had been no rationing in the First World War), because even though supplies of wine were buoyant, the Vichy government required vast volumes to be diverted for distilling and the conversion of grape juice to grape sugar to compensate for shortages. Grape seeds were pressed to obtain oil.31
The Vichy government’s interference with the wine industry, which was significant even for France—there were more than fifty edicts, laws, and ministerial decrees on wine in the regime’s brief, four-year life—alienated growers, producers, and consumers. Among other things, new rules reduced the volume of wine that producers could retain tax-free for their family’s consumption. Nor did the regime’s crackdown on drinking go over well. Pétain regarded alcoholism as a symptom of French decadence, and reversing the pro-wine sentiments he expressed after the First World War, he blamed wine for the French defeat in 1940. In that and the following year, his Vichy administration put new limits on cafés and other drinking places.
Although there were many reasons why French people might not have supported the Vichy government, the sheer scale of its intervention in the availability of wine—a dramatic shift from the campaign to drink more wine a few years earlier—must have contributed to its unpopularity. In contrast, wine retained a strong association with the mostly left-leaning Third Republic that preceded Vichy, and the wartime Resistance frequently made the point that the Vichy government had stolen the people’s wine.
In the United States, the coming of war encouraged prohibitionists to press their case, as they had done successfully in the First World War. After the United States declared war on Japan and Germany in 1941, the president of Colgate University declared, “Alcohol and war do not mix any better than alcohol and gasoline. . . . A sober nation with the morale born of clear thinking, determination and courage can eventually defeat Hitler and the Japs, but a drunken nation will travel through the Slough of Despond to inevitable danger of defeat.”32 Despite attempts to legislate prohibition for men serving in the armed forces, military leaders successfully argued that they would resent being deprived of alcohol and would contrive to obtain supplies anyway. In the end, breweries were permitted to produce beer—“as a beverage of moderation and as an aid to national morale,” as one industry leader piously put it—for consumption domestically and overseas.33 Although distilleries were directed to produce industrial alcohol in 1942, they were permitted to make beverage alcohol for short periods in both 1944 and 1945. Beer consumption in the United States increased by 50 percent between 1940 and 1945, probably as a result of the reduced supply of liquor.
By this time, Americans were generally free to purchase and drink alcohol with few restrictions, as the United States had emerged from national prohibition with relatively liberal alcohol policies. They varied from state to state, as we have seen, but many fewer states opted for prohibition after 1933 than had done so before prohibition was implemented on a national basis. In the sense that national policies following prohibition were more liberal than those that preceded it, the United States was an exception: in Norway, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Finland, and Canada’s provinces, the state took over direct control of alcohol retailing after the repeal of prohibition so as to regulate alcohol consumption. Even countries that had not had prohibition policies were more restrictive when it came to alcohol during most of the twentieth century than they had been before. In Great Britain and New Zealand, for example, some alcohol-related restrictions imposed during the First World War (such as public-house opening hours) were retained until the end of the 1900s. In these various ways, the postprohibition world was long influenced by the experience of prohibition and its associated temperance ideas.