Someone should tell Auggie Busch, who ran Anheuser-Busch during the dark days of Prohibition: It wasn’t about stopping the manufacturer, sale and consumption of alcohol. It was all about saving beer and stopping workers from being exploited.
That was the novel spin put on Prohibition by Mark Lawrence Schrad, a Villanova University professor, who’s flogging his latest book, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition. “Prohibitionists didn’t oppose the actual liquor in the bottle nor the drunkard; instead, they consistently railed against “liquor traffic”: predatory capitalists who trafficked in highly addictive substances and then drained their customers (and their families) dry, all for immense personal profit,” he writes in Foreign Policy, an online magazine published by Slate Group, a media company formed by the former owners of The Washington Post after they sold the newspaper to Jeff Bezos.
The problem is, he’s just wrong. I’ve been writing a paper on how the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. changed the image of an entire industry. To set the stage, I’ve had to take a deep dive into the history of Prohibition. The simple fact is, Prohibitionists in the U.S. did “oppose the actual liquor in the bottle.” And the opposition began long before large bev/al producers arose.
That Prohibition succeeded in the U.S. at all is sort of a puzzle Alcohol is more American than apple pie: When the Puritans arrived in New England, the ship on which they crossed the Atlantic carried more whiskey than water. George Washington gave every member of the Continental Army four ounces of liquor a day. John Adams drank hard cider for breakfast. James Madison had a pint a day. By 1830, U.S. consumption peaked at 7.1 gallons a year.
That worked fine, when most workers were on the farm. But as the U.S. began transitioning from an agriculture-based society to an industrial society, workers in the new factories would take their pay, go to a saloon, drink away most of the pay, come home and, in many cases, beat their wives. If they then visited a bordello, they would bring home syphilis and infect their wives. In other cases they would simply spend their paycheck on alcohol, leaving no money for the family to buy food. That simple fact explains the Seagram Co.’s famous post-Prohibition ad: “We don’t want bread money.”
The women had enough. They blamed many of their problems — abuse, child neglect, not enough money to feed their families, etc. — on alcohol. But they couldn’t do anything about it. Their husbands in many cases ignored them. Susan B. Anthony’s first attempt at public speaking was at a New York Sons of Temperance convention in the 1840s. They wouldn’t let her speak, which is what led her to the suffragette movement. Women didn’t have the vote, so they couldn’t take such measures as limiting the hours in which the saloons were open. The solution was obvious: get the vote.
So, from the very beginning of the suffragette movement, a key portion of its program was a simple solution: Prohibition. If the men couldn’t spend their money on drink, they reasoned, all of the other evils would go away. But no women’s movement, not even the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, was able to get Prohibition passed.
Enter Wayne B. Wheeler. An Ohioan who had been beaten by an alcoholic father, Wheeler’s legacy extends to today. He invented the single-issue campaign. Unlike the WCTU and the various suffragette movements, Wheeler turned the Anti-Saloon League into an organization focused on just one thing: The total prohibition of alcohol.
He also understood that one did not have to win a majority, one could in fact control the outcome of a vote on a particular policy with as little as 10% of the vote. So, the ASL supporters had a one-issue test: Did the politician support complete Prohibition. If he did, they would vote for him — regardless of party or any other issue.
This was a potent plan: In one election, the ASL turned out half the Ohio legislature. Politicians everywhere became afraid of Wheeler and the ASL and would vote for Prohibition regardless of their stand on any other issue.
But, how did the 18th Amendment get passed? There was enough opposition to Prohibition in some Northern states that it would not pass. So Wheeler teamed up with the suffragettes in a deal: We”ll help you get women the right to vote and then you help us get a constitutional amendment making Prohibition national. (Some Southern states had already imposed Prohibition, with exceptions).
The Volstead Act, which implemented Prohibition, contained a number of exceptions. For one thing, any bev/al in one’s possession on the date Prohibition became effective could be retained. This loophole enabled New York’s Yale Club to serve liquor every day until Repeal. The Volstead Act also contained a provision allowing for medicinal alcohol, and it explicitly allowed the home production of beer, wine and spirits. Had Wayne B. Wheeler and his ASL compatriots had their way, none of these exceptions would not have been in the bill.
As for Europe, Karl Marx embraced Prohibition, as did most other Communist or Socialist leaders. Any hope they had, however, of achieving comprehensive prohibition was blasted away by World War II. But they achieved some other victories: The Belgians restricted distilled spirits consumption to bars and cafes, while allowing Belgium’s Trappist brewing tradition to thrive. Germany also favored beer consumption, while restricting spirits consumption.
As for workers, at least in the United Kingdom, many were employed producing Scotch, gin and similar liquors that would be smuggled into the U.S. Bacardi’s rums would be smuggled in from a boat just outside the continental limits of the U.S., and Hiram Walker and Seagram’s Canadian whiskies had only a short ride across the Detroit river to enter the Motor City and begin their journey to Chicago and other U.S. cities.
Wayne B. Wheeler and his Prohibitionist and suffragette allies understood Prohibition to mean absolute, total Prohibition: Not a wink and a nod, not allowing beer to be freely consumed while spirits distribution was constructed. They shut down Anheuser-Busch. They shut down Yuengling. They shut down Pabst. They shut down nearly every distillery and nearly every winery. Wheeler got Prohibition in the U.S. The European Socialists cited by Schrad got something entirely different.
