VIDEOTAPE LECTURE #17 OUTLINE
[00:00] Bars, Tone, and Countdown
[02:00] Intro
[07:00] Weary of reforms, morality, war
[05:00] A decade of conflicts
[05:30] Popularization of Freud
[07:20] Puritanism: "The fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy."
[08:30] A conservative or liberal decade?
[12:50] Story of National Prohibition

• 18th Amendment (1919)
• Volstead Act (1919)
• 21st Amendment (1933)

[20:30] Henry Ford on "international Jewish bankers"
[23:20] The "Melting Pot" bubbles
[25:00] religious differences
[27:17] 1928 election
[29:00] Al Smith
[31:50] Prohibition
[34:50] Anti-alcohol propaganda
[36:40] Eugenics
[38:45] Women's Christian Temperance Union
[43:00] Anti-Saloon League
[49:00] Why Prohibition?
[50:00] WWI's aid to cause of Prohibition
[53:00] Results of Prohibition
[55:00] Prohibition in Milwaukee

Some questions to keep in mind:

1. Was there a dominant culture in 1920s American society? Give specific examples to prove your point.
2. Compare and contrast the techniques and goals of the temperance movement to those of suffragists and other Progressive feminists.
3. What were the fundamental differences between the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union? What did these two groups have in common?
4. The prohibition movement was about more than getting Americans to stop drinking. What other social issues were linked to this movement? What socio-economic group had the most interest in seeing Prohibition succeed? Why?

Prohibition in a Nutshell

The 18th Amendment to the Constitution--passed by Congress in 1917, and ratified by 3/4 of states by 1919--prohibited the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages within the boundaries of the United States.

The Volstead Act of 1919, also known as the National ProhibitionEnforcement Act, gave the Eighteenth Amendment some teeth. It clearly defined an alcoholic beverage as one with an alcoholic content greater than 0.5 percent.

The 21st Amendment, which was passed in 1933, repealed the 18th Amendment. In order to get around the traditional process of ratification by the state legislatures--many of which were expected to vote "dry"--Congress instead called for ratifying conventions in each state. At the completion of delegates' voting, the national count in favor of repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment was 73%.

The Decline and Fall of the Anglo-Saxon Class

Before we discuss the decline of the Anglo-Saxon class as the most influential group in American society, let us define exactly who is meant by the term "Anglo-Saxon class."

1. Americans descended from the early European settlers. This included the English (as the name Anglo-Saxon would imply) as well as long-settled families of Irish and German stock.
2. Held positions of respectability and responsibility in their communities.
3. Small-town dwellers
4. Educated
5. Protestant
6. Republican
7. As a group, they wanted less government involvement in the economy.

The Anglo-Saxon class tried to maintain its grip on American society in the following ways:

1. Immigration restriction. In a surge of nativism, legislation was passed by Presidents Harding (1921) and Coolidge (1924) that severely restricted immigration to the US.
2. Anti-Semitism. Some of the most virulent anti-Semitic attacks came from car maker Henry Ford in his newspaper "The Dearborn Independent." Ford once stated:

   "I know who makes wars. The international Jewish bankers arrange them so they can make money out of them."

3. Resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, feeling threatened not only by Blacks but also by Jews and Catholics.
4. Economy. According to the book The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Adolph Burley and Gardner Means, by 1930, 200 of the nation's largest non-financial corporations controlled between 45-53% of the nation's wealth. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment controlled manufacturing, railroads, and public utilities. This was the managerial class, maintaining a very exclusive membership in its social clubs, colleges, and areas of residence.

The Melting Pot Bubbles

But under the thin veneer of control maintained by the Anglo-Saxon class, great demographic shifts were underway that would soon have significant repercussions. There was a population explosion, the results of which were first foreseen in the Dillingham Commission Report in 1910-11.

1. The birth rates of immigrants and poor native-born Americans exceeded those of the "old stock."
2. By 1911, two of every three American schoolchildren had parents who were immigrants.
3. Most of these new Americans were massed in states with the most electoral votes.
4. Republicans were not attentive to the needs of this growing group of working-class, urban, first-generation Americans. Traditionally, the Republican Party had found its base of support among Protestants in rural areas and small towns. But American cities were growing rapidly, with the most significant gains among the Catholic and Jewish populations from Southern and Eastern Europe.

So the Republican Party found itself on the wrong side of the birth rate and of religious and social differences.

The Election of 1928

The presidential election of 1928 was one of the most significant in American history. It brought to light the effect of these great demographic changes.

1. Although foreign immigration had been restricted, the internal migration of native-born Americans was unbounded. Between 1920 and 1930, 6.5 million Americans moved from rural to urban areas, just where the majority of electoral votes were massed.
2. The Republican stranglehold on national politics was finally broken.
3. The election of 1928 put in opposition two representatives of this dichotomy:

   Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) was a representative of the Anglo-Saxon class, born into an Iowa Quaker family. Supporting business and Prohibition, Hoover was the Republican candidate for President in 1928. His campaign slogan promised

   "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage."

   Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944) was Hoover's Democratic opponent. His background and character were worlds away from that of the genteel Hoover. Born into a lower-class, Catholic family, Smith grew up in the New York City tenements known as Hell's Kitchen. He was a self-made man whose success came from the so-called "dirty profession" of politics. Smith was identified with big-city political machines, and as an avowed "wet," he called for the repeal of Prohibition.

   Prohibition and religion--namely Smith's Catholicism--dominated the campaign. In the end, Hoover won by a large margin, although Democrats carried the nation's twelve largest cities. Before Al Smith ran for president, even East Coast cities had been largely Republican. Smith's base of support in urban America demonstrated that a major political shift was still to come in the 1930s.

Prohibition

Prohibition was not a new phenomenon in the 1920s, as there had been various anti-alcohol campaigns throughout American history, including attempts to outlaw alcohol in colonial America. The Maine Law of 1851 prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors within the state of Maine. By 1855, thirteen of the thirty-one states had such laws.

During the Civil War, the federal government prohibited alcoholic beverages in the Union Army. This ruling, in part, was brought about by wartime rationing: available grain had to go to feed the troops, not to the production of liquor.

As often happens in the United States, leaders of this social movement sought scientific evidence to back up their views. For example, the Scientific Temperance Journal was founded in the post-Civil War years. Schoolchildren's textbooks depicted human organs degenerating from an overabundance of drink. In the 1870s the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) promoted the use of public education for the cause of temperance. They succeeded in getting their propaganda in textbooks and by 1902 every state and territory except Arizona had a law requiring temperance instruction in the schools. The prohibitionists also used eugenics--the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding--for their cause. They argued that immigrants were inferior due to the fact that their children had been drinking since a young age.

The WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League

Two organizations helped to foster prohibition sentiment throughout the United States: the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League.

The WCTU fought not only for the cause of prohibition, but represented most progressive reform groups of the day. Under the leadership of notable reformer Frances Willard--national president of the union from 1879-1898--the WCTU took up the causes of suffrage, an 8-hour work day, prison reform, and the Social Gospel. This made temperance attractive to numerous reformers. Progressives, for example, viewed Prohibition as a way to attack the bosses of urban political machines, whose headquarters were often located in saloons.

In contrast to the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1896, had as its only goal the legal prohibition of alcoholic beverages. The Anti-Saloon League developed modern lobbying techniques that were hugely successful. For example, the League printed and disseminated anti-drinking brochures, went to church members for support, and lobbied both lawmakers and businessmen. At the turn of the century, only Maine, Iowa and Kansas had prohibition laws. But the Anti-Saloon League was so persuasive in its lobbying that 28 states had prohibition laws by 1918, before national prohibition went into effect.

By and large, Prohibition represented the desires of the Anglo-Saxon establishment. The typical prohibitionist was:

• Rural or small-town dweller
• Middle Class
• Anglo-Saxon
• Evangelical Protestant
• Anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Jew, anti-Catholic.

Prohibitionists had various reasons for running this campaign against alcohol. Most believed that drinking liquor was immoral. Others wanted to take away the power of the urban political machines. Still others used the movement as a springboard for their personal political ambitions.

World War One and Prohibition

The entry of America into WWI greatly aided the cause of prohibition.

• War time hysteria against all things foreign linked prohibition to patriotism. In their propaganda, prohibitionists characterized the liquor industry as foreign-controlled, pointing out that many breweries were run by German-Americans.
• Centralization of government power. During WWI, the federal government took over railroads and factories, passed a conscription act, and curtailed liberty and free speech. As an outgrowth of this, the government was viewed as the upholder of Americans' moral codes, including their drinking habits. Individual freedoms were limited for the sake of higher social responsibilities.

Results of Prohibition

Enforcement of the Volstead Act was impossible, as average Americans tried every way possible to break the law. Organized crime and smuggling rings grew, as did home-brewing of alcohol. The Anglo-Saxon establishment had tried to impose its own moral codes on the rest of the nation. Although it had achieved legal control, its social control declined throughout the decade.

The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 marked the end of an experiment in social engineering. By the end of the 1920s, another grand experiment--this one promising wealth for all--had also failed. The story of the growing economic prosperity of the 1920s that ended with the infamous stock market crash of 1929 is a fascinating and extraordinarily important part of our story. So important, in fact, that after we down a couple of cool, frosty ones, we'll take it up in Lecture 18: "The Crash and the Great Depression."

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