Raise a glass to Prohibition

This week (Wednesday, Jan. 16, to be exact) marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide.

Prohibition proved to be the shortest-lived important change to the Constitution. 

Slavery, which was never mentioned by name in the document but was embedded by it in the United States, remained legal for nearly 250 years before the 13th Amendment finally ended it after the Civil War. 

Prohibition lasted only 14 years, from 1919 to 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the brief experiment.

The drive to clamp down on alcoholic beverages in the U.S. had a long and controversial history before it finally achieved success. 

Opposition dated back to colonial times, primarily from a social desire to reduce drunkenness and its attendant problems. But as time went on, other factors swirled into the prohibition orbit and made the conflict much more complicated.

The prohibition controversy grew out of long-held cultural and religious differences. 

In one corner were adherents of pietistic Protestant churches, Quakers, Latter-Day Saints and Scandinavian Lutherans who led the “dry crusade.” 

In the other corner were liturgical church believers like German Lutherans, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, the so-called “wets.”

Because America was a nation of immigrants from many cultures, battle lines formed between the two groups. 

German Catholics, for instance, maintained a time-honored tradition of brewing beer from their grain back in the old country and brought that custom to the United States, along with its consumption as a cultural practice. 

Small farmers in the western reaches of the original states found it profitable to distill spirits from their crops, and took those skills with them as they moved westward. They saw a threat to their livelihood from the dry movement and fought to retain the ability to make and sell alcoholic beverages.

As is so often the case, the controversy colored politics. 

Mainline Protestants, many of them Americans for several generations back, tended to gravitate to the Republican Party. Catholics, who counted more recent immigrant families in their number, leaned Democratic. 

In addition, Catholic immigrants often congregated in cities, while the more rural and small-town regions tended toward Protestantism, thereby adding fuel to the religious and cultural split.

World War I handed the dry movement an advantage, as anti-German sentiment muzzled German Catholic political influence in the 1910 decade. In addition, the drys could claim that grain was needed as food for the troops and for military horses rather than as alcohol for domestic consumption.

Other factors played into the successful adoption of the 18th Amendment. One was the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, which legalized a federal income tax. The income tax could replace the government’s former revenues from liquor taxes.

Another was the women’s suffrage movement, which gained enough steam in the early 1900s that it was finally legalized in the 19th Amendment. 

The push for female suffrage gave women a powerful voice in public affairs leading up to ratification of the 19th in 1920. 

In general, women were stronger in favor of prohibition than were men, since women often saw alcohol as contributing to domestic abuse, desertion and family economic problems.

What’s more, urban saloons frequented by large immigrant populations came under the strong influence of corrupt politicians, who plied customers with free food and drink in exchange for their votes. Progressives, especially those of the Republican variety, advocated prohibition as a weapon against such corruption, since the city political machines were usually Democratic.

Problems with prohibition arose almost immediately after its enactment. It proved impossible to enforce, and as a result, illegal stills and speakeasies sprouted across the nation, the stills in rural areas and the speakeasies in cities. 

The American farming economy went into depression after the world war ended and demand for ag products couldn’t keep up with the high production levels that the war had stimulated. Some farmers found it profitable to turn grain into liquor, and developed feeder systems for illegal city saloons. 

Illegal booze kept a number of farm families solvent in the South and Midwest.

Also, prohibition dried up revenue streams from state taxes on alcoholic beverages, a situation that hit especially hard after the national Depression slammed the country starting in 1929. Governments needed revenue, and liquor and beer taxes could provide it.

Thirty-six states out of the 48 approved repeal of prohibition in December 1933. Utah was the 36th. 

The experiment was a well-intentioned effort to improve economic and social life in the United States. But it proved unenforceable and caused unintended consequences. 

Its repeal was inevitable; it was only a question of when, and that came 14 years after its birth.