In his latest book on alcohol in American history, W. J. Rorabaugh reminds readers that activists worked for nearly a century to restrict access to or outright ban alcohol, claiming it would cure the nation's sociopolitical evils. Against long odds, they pulled off a veritable revolution in American alcohol policy with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. But prohibition lasted just a few short years before it was reversed by another constitutional amendment. So how in the world did a reform program that activists worked tirelessly for decades to enact reach its zenith only to collapse so spectacularly? This puzzle is the central animating question in Rorabaugh's Prohibition: A Concise History. The book is a brief synthesis of the American anti-alcohol movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In contrast to traditional accounts of prohibition, Rorabaugh dedicates much of his narrative to framing the years of prohibition within the context of the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century temperance movement. The first two chapters set this stage, describing the birth of temperance in the early 1800s, its maturation into a crusade after the Civil War, and the successful campaign to pass the Eighteenth Amendment during World War I. The period of prohibition itself, from 1920 to 1933, constitutes the third chapter, and the blitz to overturn prohibition comprises the fourth chapter. The final chapter assesses the legacies of prohibition.
Rorabaugh distills the anti-alcohol movement into a cyclical pattern of intense social and political pressure aimed at curbing alcohol consumption, alternating with periods of relatively low pressure. Americans’ alcohol consumption skyrocketed during the early republic period, as Rorabaugh documented in his seminal 1979 work The Alcoholic Republic. In Prohibition, he describes how this unprecedented heavy consumption of alcohol prompted the first cycle of pressure against the overconsumption of alcohol. The Second Great Awakening birthed the earliest organized efforts to reduce alcohol overconsumption in the United States. The temperance movement initially focused on whiskey and the social evils derived from it, such as drunkenness and domestic abuse. Antebellum activists quickly adopted moral suasion and state-level legal strategies to target all alcohol. Of course, immigrants and others resisted fiercely. This backlash sparked the first period of low pressure, coinciding with increased German and Irish immigration, urbanization, and the Union's need for wartime revenue that could be raised by taxing alcohol. Amidst this low-pressure atmosphere developed the rowdy, all-male saloon. Rorabaugh describes how saloons were centers of violent drunkenness, perceived immorality, and shady political wheeling and dealing. Women's rights activists took aim at saloon culture after the Civil War. They quickly gained popular support, provoking another period of high social and political pressure to reduce alcohol consumption in the nation.
The reborn temperance movement of the 1870s–1910s was more expressly political in tone than its antebellum iteration, Rorabaugh explains. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), evangelicals, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), and other “drys” employed pragmatic political strategies like local option and statewide bans to “dry out America” wherever possible, despite fierce resistance from “wets.” Wayne Wheeler's ASL was more effective than Francis Willard's WCTU, Rorabaugh argues. The ASL politically outfoxed the wets during World War I, when brewers were caught red-handed funneling money to wet politicians through German-linked cultural organizations. Rorabaugh is at his best describing the political dimensions of the wet-dry conflict, particularly in Chapters Two and Four. Despite the intentions of the wets, the language of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act handicapped national prohibition. This language hobbled the federal prohibition apparatus, leaving it unable to enforce prohibition in traditionally wet places like cities. The impossibility of enforcement, Americans’ sustained appetite for intoxicating beverages, and the rampant crime that resulted soured many drys’ opinions about the wisdom of prohibition as public policy. Rorabaugh is exceptionally clear on this point. He points to shifting public opinion and the desperate need for tax revenue during the earliest years of the Great Depression as the primary reasons why prohibition failed. It was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment by 1933, after which the United States entered a low-pressure period that persisted for much of the twentieth century.
Rorabaugh concludes that prohibition unquestionably failed as public policy, but its legacies did much to resolve the problems that inspired the anti-alcohol movement in the first place, such as domestic abuse, drunkenness, and disorderly saloon culture. Despite the repeal of national prohibition, the all-male saloon went extinct, replaced by establishments where men and women drank together. Americans also consumed far less alcohol in the decades following prohibition. Age restrictions on drinking and state and local laws regulating the sale and consumption of alcohol are foremost among the most durable legacies of prohibition.
To Rorabaugh's credit, Prohibition is well suited to non-specialist readers, especially undergraduates. The prose is straightforward and free of jargon, and footnotes and historiographical asides are minimal. Rorabaugh's narrative has the larger-than-life characters and exciting scenes—like Carry Nation and Al Capone, speakeasies and illicit stills—that often spring to students’ minds when they imagine temperance and prohibition. Yet these highlights are enmeshed within explications of the social and political context necessary to understand them. For example, Rorabaugh skillfully weaves analysis of the women's suffrage movement, political machines, and progressivism into the brief section on saloons in the second chapter.
Like all concise histories, there are some points in the narrative that could use more analytical depth, but only a few are serious enough to point out. Rorabaugh treats alcohol and alcohol policy in isolation from narcotics and drug policy. Coinciding with the Progressive Era dry movement, the United States experienced a cultural panic about narcotics that generated laws regulating opiates and other drugs. How did prohibition relate to the drug war originating during the same period? With this in mind, how truly exceptional was prohibition? Rorabaugh's analysis of saloon culture and the opposition to it deemphasizes gender. Additionally, Rorabaugh's claim that “Alcohol policy was temporarily put aside during the Civil War” takes too narrow a view of “alcohol policy” (2). Intemperance in the army was of the utmost concern of northern soldiers, the military, and relief organizations. Many bourgeois Union officers were ardent temperance men who wielded military discipline to enforce dry measures within their commands.
With these caveats aside, however, Rorabaugh's effort to frame the prohibition years within the long temperance movement makes a particularly valuable contribution to a literature that tends to treat the nineteenth-century temperance movement and twentieth-century prohibition separately. Prohibition certainly succeeds in Rorabaugh's goal of providing an accessible synthesis of the long American anti-alcohol movement culminating in prohibition and its failure.
