From what I’ve heard, people of those extractions were largely responsible for the original settlement of areas like Nebraska and Kansas. To this day, I’m told, a quarter of the family names are of German or Scandinavian extraction.
Germany is traditionally a beer-drinking country, and I don’t know about Scandinavia, but the people there are mostly Lutheran AFAIK, and Martin Luther enjoyed a mug of beer himself.
Yet, up to and during the time of national Prohibition, 1920 - 1933, it seems that the areas of the United States where they tended to settle were the most fervently Prohibitionist. How did this attitude take root in these people? Where did it come from? It can’t be because of the hardness of life precluded such frivolous pleasures. Life was hard in Europe, too, but I have never heard of any Prohibition movement there.
Well, people that went to overseas areas from Europe were often farmers that couldn’t hack it back home because of land shortages, cattle prices, et cetera. They tended to be undereducated and (overly) religious. And while Luther himself may have enjoyed a mug of beer, the Protestant church in the 1900’s sure did its part in fighting the problems of alcoholism among low-class labourers and farmers. Maybe some of the people venturing to the New World took that attitude along with them.
And to this day, Sweden is a country with a very stringent alcohol policy. Buying a beer in a Stockholm bar may cost you as much as $6, or so I’ve heard.
Are we sure that the correlation is correct? I am not suggesting that the Great Plains were not settled by those groups, but I wonder if they ever became a genuine majority. If they made up (picking numbers out of the air) 33% of the population and 60% of the people favored prohibition, would it not be possible that the original Anglos were the hard-line prohibitionists and your immigrants actually provided the (fairly large) minority that did not favor prohibition?
I’d be curious of the actual make-up of the various prohibition supporters.
One of the things that drove prohibition (and that Henry Ford accidentally destroyed) was the cost of liquor. One of the strongest arguments in favor of prohibition was that a man earning a dollar a day would spend two dollars on alcohol on Saturday night. If he had a family to support, that was an exorbitant amount of money (33%) to spend on his own drinking. It was not hard to get support for prohibition among groups that were victimized by that sort of spending. In that connection, I was always puzzled about the great support for prohibition among farming communities where daily wages were less of an issue. (I haven’t ever tracked that link down.) The Henry Ford connection was his institution of the $5 daily wage. He single-handedly forced most labor-intensive industries to raise their wages to compete with him for decent labor and the higher wage lowered the relative price of liquor. I have often wondered if Prohibition might have been avoided had Ford instituted his wage just a few years earlier than he did. (He instituted the wage in 1914, but by then the Prohibition movement was in full swing and the Amendment was passed only five years and 11 days later.)
Not all Germans supported Prohibition. My grandfather, a city-dweller, originally followed the law as a dutiful, Germanic citizen. Some jerk turned him in on “suspicion” of having a still, just to harrass him, bringing on a raid. Once the revenooers left, Grandpa decided that if he was going to be punished, he was going to give them cause, so he began brewing his own beer. (They never came back.) Coldy, it is certainly true that you folks don’t serve pints. I arrived in Europe just a few months after the Dutch and Belgian bars switched from 36ml to 33ml glasses and I was afraid that I was going to get caught in the riots that seemed to be threatened nightly. Later I heard that they dropped to 28ml glasses, but that is hard to believe.
Not in Nebraska at least. There are far more czech-fests around here than Oktoberfests. When the German immigrants began showing up in Grand Island before the turn of the century they were ostracized for their partying, dancing, beer-drinking ways.
The standard glass size used to be 40 centilitres, but nowadays I’d say it’s a pint (and I’m talking about a real pint here. Not the tiny American thimblesized one).
The immigrants did not necessarily represent a true cross-section of their home country. Most Norwegian emigrants, for example, left the western part of the country, as that area was relatively overpopulated. The farms could not be divided any further, so younger sons who could not find work left for America rather than starve. As it happens, Western Norway also has a strong pietistic tradition. A fair number of those who left Germany did so for religious reasons. And so on…
Only a quarter of the population are Scandanavian or German? Heck, that’s nothing compared to real Nordic strongholds like Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, etc.
There are indeed differenct alchohol attidutes in the Scandinvian areas and the German areas. As they say where I grew up:
What makes a small town in (mostly Scandunavian Protestant) Minnesota? A crossroads and a church.
What makes a small town in (more heavily Catholic German) Wisconsin? A crossroads and a bar.
In any case, neither Scandinavians nor Germans were the foremost proponents of Prohibitionism. That honor belongs to WASPs. (Ask some of the Chicago Dopers about the WASP vs. German immigrant conflict during the 1840s Beer Riot.)
I’d wager that if you looked at map of existing dry counties today, there’d be more in the south than in the upper midwest.
One other factor with the Germainic people who came to North America, was the number of imigrants who were religious minorities in thier own country.
Hutterites, Mennonites, and other strict sects that were not welcome in Germany started communites in the US and Canada.
Many of these sects were for prohibition.
Along with these groups, the American Quakers (Anglos) were also pushing for prohibition.
The US midwest was quite a religious place in the early part of the 1900’s (Many parts still are) - and from the history I have read - the people who spearheaded the prohibition movement were religious leaders.
It is harder to object to something put forward by your church, then by a polititian.
Someone wondered above regarding the strength of Prohibitionism in farm regions, where wage loss was less of an issue. Maybe it was because morning hangovers were definitely not conducive to getting the cows milked or the chickens fed.
Late 19th century America was indeed a religious place. Actually in the early half of the century there was a religious revival movement called the Great Awakening. It was here that ideas of Evangelical Protestantism were formed, and which would be manifested for the next 100 years in various ways, including tent revivals, advocacy of Prohibition, and opposition to the teaching of evolution.
Then, too, women were enfranchised beginning around 1900, and this gave a lot of political strength to Prohibtion.
Now, in the U.S., the language used by establishment politicians and government agencies against tobacco are beginning to sound exactly like the anti-booze language of 100 years ago. It looks like in a few years we’ll be repeating our Prohibition mistake, only this time with cigarettes.
