The 18th Amendment
CANNATO, VINCENT J.
The 18th Amendment When the Constitution just said no' to alcohol by Vincent j. Cannatq At the height of Prohibition, Fiorello La Guardia, then a New York congressman, held a demonstration in his...
...But as Lerner notes in an intriguing footnote: "Not all historians regard Prohibition as a failure...
...By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, a majority of Americans were in favor of some kind of reform of the Prohibition laws, and the nation had other worries...
...In his zeal to praise those who opposed the moral crusaders, Lerner nearly makes a hero out of the frivolous and corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker...
...By laying bare the era's cultural schisms, Prohibition was much like abortion today...
...Was Prohibition as much of a failure as Lerner paints...
...A 1971 Department of Health, Education and Welfare study found that per capita drinking in America declined from 2.6 gallons consumed per capita in the first decade of the 20th century to just under one gallon in 1934, then rose to 1.56 gallons in 1940...
...Prohibition overstepped that careful balance, but Americans corrected their mistake through the democratic process...
...While lacking in the scope of Prohibition (yet), these issues do carry more than a whiff of a moral crusade...
...It is an engaging narrative that brings alive the 1920s, with its speakeasies, flappers, and mobsters...
...But there was definitely a dark side to some of these reforms, as seen in the rise of immigration quotas, the Red Scare, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan...
...Needless to say, La Guardia was never arrested for the prank...
...The link between alcohol and various social ills was real, and saloons helped damage the lives of many working-class families...
...The discussion of Prohibition in Dry Manhattan presents an entertaining narrative, but oversimplifies this debate...
...If the Prohibition people think it is a violation of the law to mix two beverages permitted under the law and that a person doing so can be arrested," he told the gathered reporters, "I shall give them a chance to test it...
...Americans have a healthy skepticism about grand moral crusades, without losing their concern for larger issues, such as the moral complexities of abortion or the health effects of tobacco, alcohol, or drugs...
...When the villain of the book, the Anti-Saloon League's William Anderson, is convicted of forgery and sent to prison, Lerner glides over concerns that Tammany Hall may have framed Anderson...
...Today is not the first time Americans have been deeply divided over cultural and social issues...
...On top of that, one historian argues that the cost of alcohol increased substantially during the 1920s, putting it out of the reach of most wage-earners on a regular basis...
...But unlike the abortion debate, Prohibition receives scant scholarly or journalistic interest, a fact that makes this book so welcome...
...For the central role the Big Apple played in the rise and eventual downfall of Prohibition is the subject of Michael Lerner's Dry Manhattan...
...By pushing this thesis, Lerner downplays the decades of activism on the part of temperance groups and the wide base of support that anti-alcohol legislation enjoyed...
...The 18th Amendment When the Constitution just said no' to alcohol by Vincent j. Cannatq At the height of Prohibition, Fiorello La Guardia, then a New York congressman, held a demonstration in his Capitol Hill office for some newsmen and photographers to show them how to make beer easily by mixing legal "near beer" with flavored malt tonics...
...The laws that Gore and his allies would like to pass would likely prove far more intrusive in the private lives of individuals than Prohibition ever did...
...Prohibition was the great "wedge issue" of its time, dividing Americans politically and culturally...
...Lerner believes that the "noble experiment" of Prohibition was a failure, and not even a noble one at that...
...that sometimes outrage "respectable" opinion...
...Reformers have not stopped trying to regulate private behavior...
...That sounds pretty democratic to me...
...Oddly, he never explains exactly why these historians are wrong...
...The wealthy could flout the law and drink at speakeasies much more readily than the rest of the population, and those reports often made their way into newspapers, thus coloring the coverage of Prohibition...
...Whether the issue is drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, abortion, or the environment, the issue of how much the state can regulate individual behavior for the common good is what the democratic process is all about...
...Sounds like the warning labels on cigarette packages...
...Prohibition ended up being a big overreaction to these problems, but not all "drys" were fanatical and bigoted prudes, and not all "wets" were tolerant cosmopolitans...
...Today's New York is still a cosmopolitan stew of various races and ethnicities and, at first glance, seems immune to moral crusades...
...Lerner further argues that the Anti-Saloon League and other "drys" succeeded in achieving Prohibition "through pressure politics rather than democratic debate...
...But the issue that most resembles Prohibition is drugs...
...Throughout the Prohibition era, the city proved to be one of the toughest places to enforce the anti-alcohol laws...
...Dry Manhattan is a colorful history, but too often descends into a crude morality play of narrow-minded and bigoted "drys" facing off against decent and cosmopolitan "wets...
...It is no surprise that such a challenge came from a New York City congressman, the son of immigrants who represented a polyglot district in Manhattan...
...In more recent times, Al Gore has proclaimed that the fight against global warming is a "moral" issue...
...Grappling with moral issues is not a sign of bigotry or fanaticism, as Lerner would suggest...
...Today, a growing chorus of critics complains that Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a "neo-Prohibitionist" organization...
...Cannato, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is completing a history of Ellis Island to be published by HarperCollins...
...In New York City, and other large urban areas, the answer is probably yes...
...The repeal of the 18th Amendment would come at the end of the year...
...Yes, the state was lessening (not ending) its regulation of the private consumption of alcohol, but it was also embarking on the largest intrusion of the state into the economic life of the nation with the New Deal, to the extent that the National Recovery Administration would soon tell New York City's burlesque dancers how many strips they could perform in a day...
...Lerner rightly notes that Prohibition is a "key to understanding the cultural divides that separated Americans in the 1920s...
...New Yorkers might have strongly opposed Prohibition, but there was still enough political support around the country to amend the Constitution and pass many statewide anti-alcohol laws...
...The industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created great insecurities among many native-born Americans...
...Its allergic reaction to so-called moral reforms or moral crusades is puzzling, considering the success of America's greatest moral reform: the abolition of slavery...
...It was a former New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the law legalizing wine and beer, making it the third piece of legislation during FDR's first hundred days in office...
...That such regulation finds a congenial home in modern New York complicates Lerner's morality tale: Why are such live-and-let-live antimoralists, in favor of abortion and gay rights, so eager to ban cigarettes and trans fats...
...The book downplays any connection between saloons, prostitution, and corrupt political machines...
...However one views Prohibition, to call it "undemocratic" (as Lerner does) is to misuse the word...
...Yet recently New York has been the focus of antismoking bans and attacks on the use of transfats in restaurants...
...By publicly mocking Prohibition in his Washington office, La Guardia hoped to show Americans how useless and self-defeating the law was...
...Reading Lerner's harping against moralists makes one wonder if he isn't writing more about his concerns with America today than with the 1920s...
...It is a peculiar thesis that seems to imply that special interest groups act outside the democratic process...
...Prohibition was just one of the many reforms designed to manage these changes and lessen their negative impact...
...And lest anyone take issue with the connection between antismoking campaigns and Prohibition, Lerner reminds us that in 1916 temperance activists narrowly lost in their effort to have the New York legislature pass a law that would have slapped a label on all bottles of alcohol reading: "This preparation contains alcohol, which is a habit-forming, irritant, narcotic poison...
...Does Lerner really miss the irony here...
...While the repeal of Prohibition was a popular and sensible move in 1933, Lerner paints repeal with bright colors, praising the fact that Americans would now be liberated from "the intrusion of the state into their private lives...
...Note to Jonathan Alter, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Wolff: There is ample historic precedent for abrasive New York City politicians to push the edge of the envelope in ways VincentJ...
...I guess he had it coming...
...The law appealed to the bigotry of Americans concerned about large populations of immigrants and their children living in big cities, and was an attempt to regulate their behavior...
...There is little evidence that support for Prohibition was, in Lerner's words, the province of a "vocal minority...
...Politicians like La Guardia and Al Smith were leading "wets," those opposed to Prohibition...
...The 18th Amendment was ratified in January 1919 in the wake of the anti-immigrant feelings stirred by World War I, especially against German-Americans, who owned most of the nation's breweries...
...Try telling that to NARAL, the Sierra Club, NOW, and the ACLU...
...There is simply no comparison with drugs on that account...
...Much of the city's immigrant and ethnic communities hated the law and could not understand the big fuss made about alcohol...
...Without getting into the merits or weaknesses of the nation's drug laws, it should be noted that the consumption of alcohol was deeply rooted in America—and not just in German-American and Irish-American communities, but going as far back as the high consumption of rum in colonial New England...
...Pointing to opposition to the law in New York and the very real obstacles to enforcing the law there does not exactly prove that the law was an overall failure...
...The "drys" may have been wrong on policy and moral grounds, but they used every legal and democratic method at their disposal, including the most difficult—amending the Constitution—to achieve their ends...
...And the Volstead Act of that same year defined just exactly what would be prohibited: any drink with an alcohol content more than .5 percent...
...Liberal reformers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald understood this...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 41
