Prologue and Chapter 1: Thunderous Drums and Protestant Nuns
FbF Book Club - Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Okrent, 2010)
The Drunkard's Quest" (1846) by Nathaniel Currier warns that moderate drinking leads to total disaster step-by-step.
Previous Entry - Introduction
Tomorrow evening, I am hosting a small pre-Christmas party at my brother’s house. A good number of us cousins will be getting together to “eat and drink and make merry”, or however that line goes. My mother has prepared food for us to eat that she will deliver to my brother’s house tomorrow afternoon. I took care of the alcohol supply earlier today.
You can’t go wrong with vodka for a party. You can’t go wrong with red wine either, so long as it is of a certain minimal quality. I will partake in the former, but I am one of those who cannot drink red wine at all, whether it be a Chianti or a Cabernet, or anything in between. After a single glass I find myself dehydrated, sleepy, in possession of a headache, and not in a good mood. I am incredibly jealous of those who can and do enjoy drinking red wine, because it appears to me to be the most enjoyable buzz that alcohol can deliver. Therefore, I am forced to turn to other solutions, with bourbon being a particular favourite.
Some 15 years ago, I met a woman who is originally from Kentucky, but lives halfway around the world these days (she will be reading this series as she is a subscriber here already). Upon our first meeting, she chastised me for drinking Jack Daniel’s, insisting that I try Maker’s Mark bourbon instead. “Jack Daniel’s is a whiskey, not a bourbon. Bourbon can only come from Kentucky, and Jack is from Tennessee”, she explained. I took her up on her offer to try Maker’s Mark, and it has been a friend of mine ever since. In fact, I bought a bottle of it earlier today in anticipation for tomorrow’s festivities. I enjoy bourbon. I enjoy it neat. No mix, no ice, just straight up.
Both of my grandfathers each had one brother who had trouble with the bottle. My maternal grandfather’s brother managed to go sober at a young age and lived into his 80s, so his alcoholism wasn’t a beast that could not be contained. My paternal grandfather had several brothers, and his one brother was an alcoholic with a crippling addiction, dying of cirrhosis of the liver in his 60s. Check out his colourized pic (his eyes should be blue):
(A serious guy!)
Of all my cousins expected to be there tomorrow night, two have alcoholic parents (one has a father who is an alcoholic, and another has a mother who likes to drink far too much, and these two are brother and sister, with both their parents having been alcoholics). My one cousin drinks responsibly, and my other cousin has always been a teetotaler, as his mother’s alcoholism has always severely embarrassed him. No families are perfect, and those with very large extended families like myself are the perfect example.
In the Western World, alcohol and festivities naturally go together. Jesus did turn water into wine at that one wedding, didn’t he? The idea of a dry celebration is such an anachronism to us these days, but even now you will from time to time find celebratory events that eschew alcohol or other intoxicants, usually to make a point that they are not needed for a celebration. These exceptions only serve to prove the rule, and that rule is that we modern westerners do love our alcohol.
A World without Alcohol
Statistically speaking, there are some of you reading this that are alcoholics and have managed to enter sobriety (one day at a time!). Statistically speaking, there are some of you for whom alcohol isn’t interesting at all. For the former, alcohol can be life-threatening and no celebration is worth tempting fate. For the latter, partying (or even blowing off some steam) requires no alcohol whatsoever.
What about the rest of you? What about those of you who look forward to that Friday (or Thursday) night drink with friends and/or co-workers? What about those of you who like to pour yourselves a glass of scotch when you get home? And what about those of you who love to crack open a cold one on a hot summer afternoon? What is your first reaction when you think of a world where the manufacturing and sale of alcohol is forbidden? How does it make you feel when one of life’s great pleasures is denied to you in the name of the “greater good”?
“I can handle my intake of alcohol, so why should I be denied the right to do so even if others cannot?” is the immediate reply that I would offer up if confronted with this question. And it’s this very question that is the central one when it comes to the subject of this book: Prohibition. The “common good” decided to take on “the individual’s right to choose”, with the field of battle being alcohol. In the end, individual liberty won out….but to reduce this subject to such a simplistic dualism would be both unfair, and more importantly, ahistorical.
To me, the more important question is: How did the United States of America, a country founded on the primacy of individual rights, ever adopt Prohibition as the law of the land? Daniel Okrent’s book will guide us through this question, and will hopefully help us not only understand exactly how the USA found itself in this position, but also teach us lessons about today’s America as well. One theme to keep in mind is the constant tug-of-war between Puritanism and Libertinism that has coloured much of America’s history. Puritanism cannot be entirely blamed for Prohibition, but it did have an outsized role in successfully agitating for its adoption.
The Roaring Twenties
As I mentioned in the introductory entry to this book club, I find the first, second, and third decades of 20th century America to be endlessly fascinating, and for too many reasons to list here. I would like to focus on the Prohibition Era itself in this series, but I would be doing you a disservice by ignoring all the events, movements, and characters that led up to the passing of the 18th Amendment in January of 1919, (and the adoption of the Volstead Act in October of that same year) that ushered in Prohibition on January 20, 1920. We MUST look at the history and try to understand it, so that we can grasp why the USA found itself dry on that day. By not doing so, it would be the equivalent of starting to watch a movie halfway through.
On the other hand, a straight chronological telling of the story of Prohibition would not be the best way to tell the tale. After all, the third decade of the 20th century in the USA were described as “roaring”, DESPITE the fact that the manufacture and sale of alcohol for drinking was against the law. ‘Roaring’ implies loudness, celebration, progress, and so much more. How could a decade (and three extra years) roar if sober? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
“The most expensive orgy in history”, is how F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of that most 1920s book of all, The Great Gatsby, described that decade. The USA entered the 1920s as a creditor nation, having saved the UK’s bacon (and France’s as well), by entering the war on the side of the Triple Entente, dealing a final blow to the war efforts of the Kaiser. Unlike the belligerents across the pond, the Americans did not lose an entire generation of young men, many of whom would have formed the future elites of France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Russia, Austria, Hungary, and so on. The USA entered the war very late, and came away unscathed, losing very little blood, gaining quite a lot of treasure, and proving to itself that the absence of the squabbles of the Old World made America the land of the future.
This condition saw America not just rise in global standing and power, but also speed up its own economic, social, and cultural development during the following decade. An economic boom (that eventually went bust in 1929) did take place:
The ’20s were “a prosperity decade, no question about that,” says Dighe. Gross national product ballooned by 40 percent between 1922 and 1929. The Second Industrial Revolution—most notably electricity and the advent of the assembly line—led to a manufacturing boom. Cars could be put together in 93 minutes instead of half a day, and by the close of the decade, one-fifth of Americans owned an automobile, which they could use for leisure activities like traveling. The popularization of personal credit also enabled middle-class Americans to buy consumer goods in droves. The government, too, under the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, shared this spirit of wholehearted materialism, boosting corporations and otherwise taking a light touch to policy that corresponded with the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the time.
This was the era of Jazz, of Silent Film and Silent Film Stars…..of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The decade of flappers, of mobsters and speakeasies, of Babe Ruth, and of so, so many inventions:
automobiles with combustible engines
hair dryers
band-aids
bulldozers
liquid-fueled rockers
bread slicers
car radios
electric shavers
shortwave transmitters
Tommy guns
traffic signals
frozen food
instant cameras
……and many, many more!
The 1920s was the first full decade in US history where more Americans lived in urban settings than in rural ones. It was also the decade where the country decided that it had absorbed enough new immigrant populations, closing the door in 1924, and keeping it shut for the most part until 1965.
Prohibition was applauded by its supporters early on in that decade as just another form of progress to go along with that being made in technology, economics, politics, culture, and society. Idealistic? No doubt, as the “progress” of Prohibition was shown in time to be very regressive, and in many ways, counter to the spirit of the era.