The Eighteenth Amendment

In his important study of the passage and repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, Daniel Okrent identified the powerful political coalition that worked successfully in the two decades leading to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment:  

[F]ive distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up this unspoken coalition:  racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (whose ranks included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Adherents of each group may have been opposed to alcohol for its own sake, but used the Prohibition impulse to advance ideologies and causes that had little to do with it.

Racism was unashamedly blatant. According to Okrent, “it was a familiar characterization, and its reach extended beyond the boundaries of the old Confederacy. Frances Willard herself [a leading progressive advocate of temperance] had adopted the imagery, asserting that ‘the grogshot is the Negro’s center of power. Better whiskey and more of it is the rallying cry of dark faced mobs.’” Both Prohibition and the suffrage amendment had been “linked in the holy advocacy of politicians who regarded both as expressions of moral virtue” (like William Jennings Bryan), and “had become politically welded to one another, not because of moral congruence,” but because of political convenience. With the nation at war with Imperial Germany, populists and nativists joined in moral condemnation of the beer-drinking culture of German-Americans, yet another component of the coalition that carried the Amendment to ratification.

What is all too conspicuous in the coalition supporting the Eighteenth Amendment is not only blatant racism against people of color, but also a racism of ethnic hatred against German-Americans and the more recent immigrants to the United States—the so-called “hyphenated Americanism” against which Theodore Roosevelt inveighed. These groups did not share either the religion (Catholic Italian-Americans and Jews) or the drinking habits of the dominant American Protestant majority that felt increasingly at threat. In effect, the drinking habits of these Americans became a proxy for American racism and religious intolerance, in a way that echoes and anticipates what the Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman acknowledged as the basis for Nixon’s War on Crime: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black . . . but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt these communities.”

The Eighteenth Amendment did not, in my judgment, arise from a sober secular reflection on how to deal with the harms of alcohol abuse, which it may have aggravated, but from sectarian and highly idiosyncratic perfectionist Protestant ideals. America, a nation of immigrants, remains, as our contemporary politics shows, vulnerable to sometimes irrational fear of new immigrants of different ethnicities or religions from the dominant majority.  

America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was at a vulnerable transitional moment away from the anti-racism of the Reconstruction Amendments to an increasingly racist culture (importantly supported both by American politicians and by the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)) attracted for this reason to European models of racist imperialism to its own version of imperialism. The North and South, which had fought a civil war ultimately over slavery and the cultural racism that rationalized it, buried its enduring ethical meaning as white men found common ground in racist imperialist ventures abroad.  The suggestion that the solution to civil war in a democracy is war abroad is as old as Athena’s patriarchal advice to democratic Athens in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia:

Never pluck the heart of the battle cock
And plant it in our people—intestine war
seething against themselves.  Let our wars
rage on abroad, with all their force, to satisfy
our powerful lust for fame.  But as for the bird
that fights at home—my curse on civil war.

It was this increasingly racist and imperialistic American culture that supported our entering a European war among competing European imperialisms, World War I, which most Americans of that period probably did not want to fight and which, disastrously, set the stage for the even more catastrophic World War II. Those who resisted the unpopular war (which Wilson, as a presidential candidate, had promised not to enter) had already been unjustly prosecuted in violation of what we now regard as our better traditions of free speech; the Prohibition Amendment further demonized them by racializing and indeed criminalizing their ways of life, including the role beer and wine played in their ways of life. The dominance of such fear-ridden irrationalism in support of the Eighteenth Amendment—over any secular concern with how more effectively to lower the harms from alcohol abuse—discredits its normative legitimacy.  

Further Reading:

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010).

Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017).

Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).

There were good and bad—sound and unsound—reasons to favor enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, and there were good and bad reasons to oppose it.

The good reasons to favor enactment derived from recognizing that drunkenness and alcohol addiction were responsible (as they still are today, unfortunately) for countless personal catastrophes and widespread social pathologies. These catastrophes and pathologies include, among many other things, illnesses such as cirrhosis of the liver, accidental deaths and injuries, violence (including domestic violence), unemployability and poverty, and parental and other forms of personal irresponsibility and family abandonment. Honorable supporters of alcohol prohibition hoped that a nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale, and transport of beverage alcohol would significantly reduce alcohol consumption, abuse, and addiction, resulting in fewer alcohol-related illnesses and accidents, and a reduction of alcohol-fueled violence and other social evils.

The bad and dishonorable reasons that some Americans favored the Eighteenth Amendment were rooted in racism, ethnic and religious bigotry, and nativism. These prohibitionists identified drinking and alcohol with blacks, Catholics, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and, in the wake of World War I, Germans. Many of these prohibitionists hoped that enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment would make the United States less attractive and less hospitable to the kinds of people whom they deemed undesirable.

The good reasons to oppose the Eighteenth Amendment’s enactment had to do with concerns that Prohibition would fail, mainly because the law would be widely defied and difficult to enforce. Some opponents accurately predicted that Prohibition would be a boon to criminals who would handsomely profit from a black market in alcoholic beverages and deploy some of their earnings to corrupt law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges. Some even foresaw that lax or selective enforcement of Prohibition, together with corruption of public officials, would bring the legal system into disrepute and erode respect for the authority of law generally.

The bad reasons to oppose enactment, though few Americans of the time opposed it for these reasons, had to do with the doctrinaire libertarian belief that people have a right to drink, and even to get drunk, and that law therefore has no legitimate authority to forbid the production and sale of alcoholic beverages or other intoxicants, even for the sake of ameliorating the social ills resulting from its widespread abuse. Although, as I say, this type of libertarianism seems not to have been a major factor in debates over enactment and later repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, it has in the years since the emergence of what Robert Bellah labeled the ideology of “expressive individualism” in the late-1960s, come to play a dominant role in how many people think back on alcohol prohibition, and it certainly informs the way in which many think about substance abuse policy today.