[150 years ago this week, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded at a national convention in Cleveland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of key temperance histories, leading up to a weekend post on that 1874 convention!]
On three
great scholarly books that can help us analyze an incredibly multi-faceted
historical period and its many legacies.
1)
Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise
of the American State (2015): Yesterday I argued that the
Anti-Saloon League’s successful pressure politics were instrumental in finally
achieving the movement’s longstanding goal of nationwide Prohibition. That was
absolutely a factor, but it’s also far from a coincidence that the 18th
Amendment passed Congress in 1917 (the same year as the
Espionage Act) and was ratified in 1919 (the same year that the post-WWI Palmer
Raids began). As McGirr argues convincingly, World War I specifically
and many wartime contexts more broadly were crucial to turning Prohibition from
a movement priority into a nationwide policy—and while that particular policy
ended with the
amendment’s repeal in 1933, many of those wartime contexts have endured
in the 90 years since.
2)
Stephen Moore’s Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of
Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland
(2014):
Another crucial legacy of the Prohibition era was the creation of—and yes, I
mean that precisely; not just newfound attention to, but in many ways the
creation of—the U.S.-Canadian border as a space
for law enforcement concerns and activity. My paternal grandfather and his
parents moved across that border and into New Hampshire in the mid-1910s with
no hassle or legal attention of any kind; but just a few years later, that
would have been impossible, and as Moore argues Prohibition enforcement was the
reason why. While the U.S.-Mexico border was not as much of a Prohibition focal
point, it’s no coincidence that it was likewise during the
1920s that that border became genuinely patrolled. The end of
Prohibition was only the start of U.S. border patrols, of course.
3)
Marni Davis’ Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age
of Prohibition (2012): I wrote a bit in yesterday’s post
about the interconnections between white supremacy, race, and Prohibition,
especially in the alliance between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan.
The 1920s Klan focused equally on anti-Black and anti-immigrant domestic
terrorisms, of course; and as Davis’ book traces powerfully, so too was
Prohibition driven by anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic
narratives. I’ve argued for many years in many different settings that the
1920s represented a nadir of American racism, xenophobia, and exclusion—and
yes, I’m well aware that this is a very competitive contest; but the more I
learn, the more convinced I am that this was indeed a stunning low point—and
it’s crucially important that we include Prohibition in our understanding of
those elements of 1920s America.
WCTU post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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