“What American Needs is a Good Strong Drink”

That’s what President Franklin Roosevelt said 81 years ago this week, Dec. 5, 1933, on the day Prohibition was repealed and Americans could drink again legally.  After a 13-year failed attempt at improving America’s moral character by outlawing booze, the nation returned to drinking, and per capita alcohol consumption has risen every year since.

I’m going to write my next three or four columns on Americans and alcohol, and maybe drugs too.  So many very American themes:

- how we are a nation both puritanical and decadent,

- how our very varied religious landscape tries to effect a national morality, but often makes things worse, and how very much American Protestantism has changed (hint: there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court.)

- how we keep trying to improving ourselves and others, from social reform to self help, with mixed results and unintended consequences.

- the interesting role of women in the temperance movement, the place of temperance in the first wave of the women’s movement, and the role of women in the burgeoning self help movements like AA and NA, all the way up to Oprah,

- the weird and scary interplay of organized crime, smuggling, violence, drug wars, police corruption, a hundred years ago, and today,

- the weird and scary interplay of drugs and alcohol and our economy; we make so much policy based on drug and alcohol money, licit and illicit.

- Bonus question: Why did so many anti-alcohol movements start in Ohio?

I took a class once in seminary about bread as a mirror or lens on all of society – its history, variety, symbolism, economics, labor, nutrition, etc.   One could use booze as a similar mirror or lens on America.  Put another way, let’s look at America the way author David James Duncan looked at his own life in his great book, My Story as Told By Water.  

So for the next few weeks I’ll offer some thoughts and themes on “Our America as Told by Alcohol.”

So for today, a little about Prohibition and how familiar it sounds today.

Filmmaker Ken Burns did a good series on Prohibition, which aired on public TV last year.  (One could also use Ken Burns films as an American mirror or lens: Civil War, baseball, jazz, the miscarriage of justice in the Central Park Rapist case, the Roosevelts, and now Prohibition.)

He called the three episodes: A Nation of Drunkards, a Nation of Scofflaws, a Nation of Hypocrites.  That pretty much sums it up: we’ve always drunk a lot, we ignore laws intended to improve society (civil rights, the speed limit) and we say one thing and do another.

The temperance movement began as early as the 1840’s, one of many 19^th century social reform movements. Women were getting organized and advocating publicly for a variety of social issues – child labor laws, the vote, property rights, education.  And temperance, in an effort to reduce domestic violence (a nice way of saying “drunken attacks”) against women and children.  At the same time, the growing industrial complex supported temperance as a way to improve workplace efficiency.  Not only abused women but also robber barons like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie wanted the guys out of the saloons and back to work.

The century’s reform efforts came in waves, with women’s rights having to, or choosing to, take a back seat to abolition, in the first half of the century.  Then the temperance movement stalled because revenue taxes from alcohol sales were required to finance the Civil War. But Evangelical Protestants kept at it, preaching that the nation needed to improve its morality.  The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, in Oberlin, Ohio, gave women a less threatening issue to organize around than suffrage, but women went public and radical pretty fast; they did their own version of Occupy protests at saloons and whisky distilleries. 

It was actually another group, the Anti Saloon League, that eventually became the more effective temperance lobbying organization; it virtually invented pressure politics and single issue lobbying.  Like today’s gun lobby, ASL and WCTU were able to intimidate and shame legislators, who hurriedly voted for a constitutional amendment in 1920 that outlawed the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol.  And just as hurriedly voted to repeal 13 years later.

One commentator writes, “It is no mistake that President Hoover’s 1928 description of Prohibition as “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose” entered the poplar lexicon as “the noble experiment.”  It was unfortunate for the entire nation that the experiment failed as miserably as it did….The ultimate lesson is two-fold.  Watch out for solutions that end up worse than the problems they set out to solve, and remember that the Constitution is no place for experiments.”

So many of these issues linger today, like a bad hangover.  What did we learn from this failed experiment?  Sadly I am as conflicted as the next person about any lessons learned.

-Should we solve problems by amending the Constitution?  I don’t think so, when it comes to issues like a Constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception, or naming English as the official US language.  But I do like the idea of amending the Constitution to overturn Citizens United; let’s say only people are people, not corporations. 

-In general I am suspicious of people who practice single-issue politics, be it temperance or gun rights or Benghazi.  Life is more complicated than that.  But I would never ever  vote for someone who didn’t support abortion rights, even if they were good on everything else.

-Protestants – don’t be so high and mighty about your morality.  It’s easy to make fun of the Protestant temperance clergy who condemned sacramental wine, tried to write wine out of the Bible, and made racist slurs about Irish and Italian immigrants.  But I hear echoes of that today in conservative evangelical slurs about large Hispanic families and teenage mothers.  But what about little Protestant me - I disapprove of San Francisco’s Catholic Cardinal taking Mormon money to oppose gay marriage.  Keep your religion out of the bedroom.

-Attorney General Eric Holder has been trying to make it so blacks and whites aren’t sentenced so disparately for drug offenses, but I still hear white conservatives assuming all drug dealers and users are black or Hispanic, as the prohibitionists assumed about immigrants.  It’s the white suburban kids buying the drugs that go free, and go to work on Wall Street. But even in the so-called “War on Drugs” (like the “War on Cancer,” bad metaphor), a simplistic prohibition attitude (just say no) ignores the deep complexity of issues around addiction and treatment and economics.

-Prohibition actually made people drink more, rather than less.  Just saying no, any parent can tell you, makes the product or behavior more appealing.  People in the 1920’s drank more, and drank illicitly and dangerously.  Women especially started drinking a lot more because they were allowed into speak-easies as they hadn’t been into saloons.  We see that pattern in binge drinking today, especially in college.  Like sex – abstinence teaching does not work.   Teach responsible drinking.

-Don’t pass laws and then fail to enforce them or enforce them fairly.  A generation of Americans broke the law in speak-easies or their own bathtub breweries.  That scofflaw and hypocritical attitude of Americans toward the law hasn’t gone away.   Likewise our suspicion about the sincerity and truthfulness of the police has only gotten worse, and it’s not all their fault.

-Figure out a better way to pay for government than so-called “sin taxes.”  Government  hurriedly passed Prohibition but didn’t realize that in some states, like New York, 75% of revenue came from liquor taxes.  The federal government lost $11 billion in tax revenue during the 1920’s and had no money to enforce the laws.  Today we continue to fund a lot of programs with these “sin taxes” on cigarettes and booze.  Our citizen taxpayer rate actually has gone down for the past few decades, we are less willing to pay our fair share.  What does that teach about citizenship?

Ok, enough rant about our sad nation and its sadder government.  Don’t read this and drown your sorrows in drink!  Pick a designated driver and get home safe.  Cheers!

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter