I know it’s hard to gauge mindset from almost 100 years ago. Like trying to figure out WTF people were thinking 200 years ago about slavery being okay.
Wisconsin specifically. We’re mostly descendants of beer swilling Germans. Even more so a century ago. At one time there were almost 200 active breweries statewide. How in the world did the 18th Amendment get ratified here? How did state assembly representatives and state senators not get the living shit beat out of them for voting for it? Help me understand.
Wisconsin was the 40th state to ratify. Since you only need 36 states, Wisconsin’s ratification was just symbolic. Maybe the citizens didn’t really want to beat the shit out of the politicians for pure symbolism.
They had one last huge party the night before, and by the time their votes were required, everyone’s hangover made it seem like a good idea at the time.
It’s difficult to overstate the plague alcohol was back then. The temperance movement was not some bunch of nutballs with an insane idea; it was a real, if misguided, reaction to the worst drug problem the United States of America has ever faced.
Americans in the past drank far, far more than they do today, and booze consumption was even more heavily tilted towards men than it is now. Public drunkenness and fighting was commonplace to an extent that today would be regarded as chaotic; families were destroyed by boozing by the thousand. I would hazard the guess that far more lives and families were destroyed by alcohol in the 19th century (per capita) than by all illegal narcotics today.
So as dumb as Prohibition seems now, it was an understandable thing at the time. Imagine all the problems drinking causes today and multiply it by TEN. At least. Hell, one President of the United States (Franklin Pierce) was drunk most of the time he was in office. People were desperate to do something.
so some English and Irish drank too much hard liquor for their own good, and then the Germans were supposed to stop drinking beer because of that, in the whole country? Now that’s what I call the epitome of progressive thinking. Of course, back then the progressives preached in churches and not in the academia
Notice that nobody was stopping these prohibitionists from pushing the blue laws down the throat of their particular municipalities or even States. But no, such people do not stop until they have imposed their evil rule on everybody in the country. They are too concerned with their BS du jour to care about trampling other people’s rights.
Again, I’m not saying it was a good idea, but I would suggest to you that since you weren’t alive back then and subject to the effect of alcohol on society, you might want to consider that their position might at least be understandable given what people the were living through. Prohibition did not work but it was not based on anyone’s “BS.” It was a response to a genuine problem, and no, it wasn’t restricted to English and Irish.
I think it very likely that in a hundred years people will find the War on Drugs equally stupid, but I can quite understand why people who’ve seen what heroin or cocaine can do to people would approve of laws banning them.
I’ll second or third the recommendation to watch the recent Ken Burns PBS series on Prohibition. Well worth the time.
One quick thing to understand: at the time the amendment was circulating for approval, many, if not most, people believed that the actual laws that Congress would pass if the amendment was ratified would still allow beer and wine. It was hard liquor and saloons that voters thought were to be banned. The Volstead Act was a surprise for a lot of folks.
Then why wouldn’t the symbolism be the other way, I.E., FUCK YOU, Teetotalers??
Perhaps I and everyone else can stop asking questions on these boards and just “look it up”. I guess they can can stop paying the bills here and close this web site up up then. Thanks.
Most drunks I know are happy to promise themselves and others that they will never ever get drunk again and are really sorry that they are currently drunk or, worse, were last night. They know getting drunk is bad for everyone involved. So they promise to stop it and are serious. So they vote for it. And, whoops, it passed.
Have you ever been to Wisconsin for a considerable amount of time? Our use of ethanol may or may nor be a good or bad thing, but it collectively does not reflect your post. No offense intended.
The temperance movement had some odd bedfellows: Anti-Catholic and -immigration groups, whose enthusiasm for sobriety wasn’t that great but saw the Volstead act as a great opportunity to stick it to their enemies.
Also, 1920 was the first election where women voted in great numbers, and temperance was very much a women’s issue (Domestic violence and having a drunken man in charge of family finances were two big factors here, eclipsing any other factors on the family level). A lot of the men who might have voted down the Volstead Act-friendly politicians were still trickling back from Europe after WWI, so the vocal special interests had a one-time numbers advantage the one year elections could have impacted this bit of legislation.
RickJay addressed this but I think I’ll expand upon it. The relationship Americans had with alcohol was far different in the past than it is today. I ran across a letter written in the 19th century by a British man visiting the United States who was astounded by the amount of alcohol Americans consumed. “When they say hello, they drink. When they say goodbye, they drink. Fights are precipitated by drink and afterwards when they drink to make amends.” --paraphrased from memory. While building a rail road in Arkansas during the late 19th century, construction came to a virtual halt a day or two after every payday as many of the workers were too hungover. Saloons tended to be seedy places with gambling, prostitution, drug use in addition and violent and unruly behavior. Men would sometimes drink half their pay away on John Barleycorn leaving wives and children to do without in an era without government assistance (there were some charities and temperance societies that helped these women and children though).
Here are some additional reasons why Prohibitionist carried the day.
#1. The Anti-Saloon League under the leadership of Wayne Wheeler was an extremely powerful lobbying group. While never the majority in any state or locality, the ASL could bring enough voters to bear in almost any locality to affect the outcome. The ASL was an umbrella organization that cared only for prohibition and counted among it’s supporters the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the KKK, and the Industrial Workers of the World. (No mean feat seeing as how the KKK and the IWW did like care for one another.) In short, ASL candidates began to win elections like they were going out of style. Politicians who wanted to stay in office tended to go with what the ASL wanted.
#2. The 18th Amendment does not define what is or isn’t an intoxicating beverage. Many people who supported the amendment believed beer or wine would be safe and that only liquor would be counted as intoxicated.
Dio Lewis was a pretty well known advocate for temperance in the 19th century who often spoke in public. One thing we need to clear up is that there’s a difference between temperance and prohibitionist. Temperance is moral suasion. I will persuade you not to drink. Prohibition eschews persuasion for making it (theoretically at least) impossible for you to drink. Lewis was a staunch supporter of temperance, believing that any man had the right to drink if he so choose or the right to sell liquor to make a living. Personally, I don’t find the prohibitionist to be evil. Alcohol was a big problem and they honestly believed they’d be able to virtually eliminate crime and poverty by getting people to stop drinking. I also wouldn’t call prohibition bullshit “du jour.” The temperance movement in the United States got it’s start in the late 18th century and took over a century to lead to Federal Prohibition. It’s one of the longest progressive movements in United States history.
Jack London was a raging alcohol who was also a staunch supporter of the prohibition movement. He believed it would be the only way he could ever stop drinking.
If it is your position that large lobbying groups and millions of voters were actually insane, then perhaps you could provide some evidence of that rather amazing claim.
The “people were stupid in the past” explanation for things rarely holds water.
I’m mildly surprised this isn’t common knowledge. I mean, just read the Wiki articles, all of which are very well endnoted from reliable and scholarly sources. One notes that liquor consumption was **three times higher **per capita than it is today.
Which strengthens my question about how it got passed in the first place.
Which strengthens my question again. Once the dumb asses realized how stupid they were and how fucked over they got, why weren’t attacks, assassinations, recalls, and such the power of the day? Why didn’t the Amendment get repealed the year after they realized this?
I’m guessing I don’t have to provide a cite that it was NOT a popular law.
Having watched most of the “Prohibition” documentary, I can tell you that a big part of what happened is that, while the amendment stayed on the books for over a decade, actual enforcement was a very different story.
Enforcement was divided up between the federal government and the individual states. While we still have stories about federal agents like Eliot Ness (who was a real Fed agent), the reality was that there were very few federal agents (no more than a few thousand at any one time, IIRC). Many of the states, particularly those in the North and Northeast (the Prohibition movement had been more popular in the southern states), chose to do little, or no, enforcement of the law.
In addition, corruption was rampant. Many federal agents, as well as local law-enforcement authorities, wound up on the payrolls of the bootleggers, and allowed manufacture and distribution to continue.
There were also many loopholes in the law. Liquors like whiskey were still allowed for “medicinal purposes”, and an awful lot of people got prescriptions from their doctors for whiskey. Jews and Catholics were allowed to have wine, and a lot of people “converted” to Judaism or Catholicism to get wine.
In short, yes, it was an unpopular law in many quarters, and many people either ignored the law, or found ways around it.
Finally, getting rid of an amendment to the Constitution is a lot more complicated than repealing a law. The supporters of Prohibition never imagined that it would be possible to have an amendment repealed (which is why they pushed for an amendment, so that it would be forever in the nation’s laws). In order to repeal Prohibition, it required another amendment to be passed.
Well, I addressed some of that in my post. In a nutshell, it got passed because enough people wanted it to pass.
I really wish you’d tone down the rhetoric here. Since you’re asking the question (and it is a good question) it’s obvious that you don’t know enough to say that they’re dumb asses. Why weren’t there attacks and assassinations? Seriously, why would there be? Recalls? I imagine that’s not an easy thing to have in most states. Repeal the amendment? It’s not easy to repeal an amendment (it took 14 years to get the 18th repealed).
It was popular when it passed and it was popular for several years after. Plenty of people today smoke pot and snort cocaine but drug laws still receive popular support.
