'Two Flights Up and Ask for Gus'
GARRATY, JOHN A.
'Two Flights Up and Ask for Gils' PROHIBITION: THE ERA OF EXCESS By Andrew Sinclair Little, Brown. 480 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by JOHN A. GARRATY Professor of History, Columbia...
...The record of lesser political figures is even worse...
...While he of course believes that people should be able to drink if they want to, he suggests that drinking is bad for "the poor...
...At the same time, he criticizes the wets because they did not "prevent the return of the saloon" when the Twenty-first Amendment was passed...
...The dry position, Sinclair points out, "left no room for temperance," insisting that prohibition would provide "a total cure-all for society...
...Prohibition has interesting things to say about many peripheral aspects of the subject...
...His attitude toward the saloon is also ambivalent...
...Reviewed by JOHN A. GARRATY Professor of History, Columbia University The entire history of the United States, a cynical reporter for the New York Evening Sun suggested in 1930, could be told in 11 words: "Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead...
...Perhaps inevitably, given his subject, the author is occasionally guilty of exaggeration and overstatement...
...The spectacle of the people's representatives cowering before the power of lobbyists, voting dry and living wet, making speeches about enforcing the law but refusing to appropriate funds to make adequate enforcement possible, is certainly a sordid one...
...This quotation, one of many fascinating bits uncovered by the Andrew Sinclair's researches in Prohibition: The Era of Excess, reveals much about the subject and about Sinclair's approach to it...
...The hard core of convinced prohibitionists were actually never more than a minority, and, Sinclair argues, a bigoted, fanatical and thoroughly unpleasant minority at that...
...To a man, he demonstrates, they were trimmers, hypocrites and selfserving frauds whenever the liquor question came up...
...Sinclair shows, for example, that Southern support of prohibition grew in great measure out of the feeling that it would help to control the Negro, but in fact Southern Negroes frequently became the bootleggers and procurers of the region: " instead of keeping the Negroes from vice, [prohibition] put them in control of it...
...A clever, unscrupulous and wellheeled dry lobby managed the campaign...
...Its corrosive influence on moral standards, its encouragement of law-breaking, and other wellknown aspects of the subject are carefully pointed out...
...In a brilliant passage he describes it as the church and clubhouse of the lower classes, and among the grounds on which he condemns prohibition is that it struck down the saloon but left the rich man's club intact...
...Emphasis is placed on the fanaticism of prohibitionists, who would settle neither for temperance nor local option, as well as on the equal unreasonableness of the wets, who insisted, once the tide finally turned, upon complete repeal when a useful measure of Federal regulation of drinking could easily have been preserved...
...Even William Jennings Bryan, the driest of politicians, "did not adopt the cause of national prohibition until he was fairly certain he would never be able to run for President again...
...Prohibition, Sinclair explains, represented a victory of rural, Protestant, nativist Americans over the city, the immigrant and sophistication in general...
...Calvin Coolidge was capable of "holding the communion cup in one hand and a glass of beer in the other and spilling neither...
...Herbert Hoover besmirched his "reputation for integrity and honesty" in dealing with the question, and Franklin Roosevelt spent much time "searching for an acceptable straddle...
...To the question, Could prohibition have been made to work?, Sinclair answers that given the kind of urban-industrial society that exists in America, it could not...
...But in his treatment of most matters the author is both clear and well-balanced...
...It must fail in the crowd of the streets...
...Sinclair's own views about certain aspects of prohibition are also a little unclear...
...It is a heavy tome laden with hundreds of footnotes, but also an imaginative recreation of an era recent in time though ages removed from our own day in mood and spirit...
...Here is a book of real social history, at once scholarly and entertaining, full of wisecracks, doggerel and flights of fancy, yet at the same time thoughtful, penetrating and analytical...
...The book sparkles with clever and concise statements: "As prohibition brought respectability to the criminal, so the speakeasy brought respectability to the saloon...
...Sinclair makes heavy use of psychology in explaining the prohibition controversy...
...But most interesting of all is Sinclair's account of the effect of prohibition on the political leaders of the era...
...Best of all, it manages to be lively without becoming a mere collection of amusing anecdotes and exaggerated descriptions of the gaudy and sordid aspects of the dry decade between World War I and the New Deal...
...The final triumph came with World War I, which placed a premium on conserving the grains from which alcohol is made and which put beer, a "German" drink, under a cloud...
...Indeed, if the book has a serious weakness it is that the color and the personalities of the period are too much played down...
...Al Smith "specious and evasive...
...The wets, he adds, "were as pitiless in power as the drys had been...
...Its adherents were aided by the Progressive movement—then reaching its peak— with its stress on improving the moral basis of society, and the drive for women's suffrage (women were believed to be almost unanimous for prohibition...
...Woodrow Wilson "seemed to be ready to fit his convictions to his political advantage...
...The pervasive corrupting effect of prohibition is a major theme of the book...
...The book is also informative on such topics as the impact of prohibition on the labor movement, the changing attitude of business leaders toward the liquor question, the significance of the rise of the cocktail, and several others...
...A wide variety of sources are handled smoothly and with imagination...
...Behind Theodore Roosevelt's stand on prohibition, Sinclair finds "careful expediency...
...Sinclair uses the word "nasty" in summarizing it and, in view of his findings, the word is aptly chosen...
...The drys," he writes, "were trying to bring personal liberty to themselves, by externalizing their anguished struggles against their own weaknesses in their battle to reform the weaknesses of others...
...the Eighteenth Amendment was one of the last victories of the Corn Belt against the conveyor belt...
...This thoughtful and sensible conclusion is typical of the tone and manner of his fine book...
...Two flights up and ask for Gus...
...Sinclair's suggestions that American doctors favored prohibition because patent medicines containing alcohol were a "menace" to their "profits," and that the "alliance" between big business and the gangsters gave "immunity" to the former in their defiance of unions and to the latter in their bootlegging operations, seem less than judicious...
...Moreover, the book is sometimes repetitious: We are told at least half a dozen times, for instance, that the wets were just as fanatical and vindictive as the drys when the times turned in their favor...
...The Yale Club lay in a 14-year supply of liquor in the days just before the Eighteenth Amendment became operative...
...Robert La Follette was "a trimmer on prohibition...
...It seems scarcely possible that all honest believers in prohibition either "became bigots or left the cause by the time of repeal.' Similarly...
...For alcohol is easy to make and simple to sell and pleasant to consume, and few men will refuse so facile a method of escaping from the miseries of living...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 17
