{"id":34126,"date":"2016-01-18T02:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T07:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34126"},"modified":"2016-01-16T10:37:47","modified_gmt":"2016-01-16T15:37:47","slug":"prohibition-in-its-essence-was-a-deeply-progressive-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/18\/prohibition-in-its-essence-was-a-deeply-progressive-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"“Prohibition, in its essence, was a deeply progressive movement”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph Bottum<\/a> reviews Lisa McGirr\u2019s The War on Alcohol<\/em>:<\/p>\n

We all know the story: At the beginning of the 20th century, a handful of killjoys, prudes, and pinch-faced puritans began to campaign against liquor. And in 1920, against all odds, they managed to sneak through a law that banned alcohol in the United States. Thirteen years, it took, before we managed to rid ourselves of the absurd regulation, as the corrupting money of gangsters and the intransigence of true-believers \u2014 the famous pro-regulation combination of Bootleggers and Baptists<\/a> \u2014 colluded to keep the nation in loony land.<\/p>\n

At last, however, we did return to sanity. The forces of right-thinking liberalism in America finally shook off the influence of its nativist bigots and pleasure-hating schoolmarms, and Prohibition was overturned in 1933 to great celebration \u2014 celebration so great, so overwhelming, that never again have the conservative know-nothings and religious troglodytes succeeded in forcing the nation to take such an enormous step backward.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a great story, both a cautionary tale in its beginning and uplifting proof of liberation in its conclusion. The only trouble is that it\u2019s completely wrong. Is there another American story, another account of a major American era, that has been so completely hijacked and turned against its actual history?<\/p>\n

The truth is that Prohibition, in its essence, was a deeply progressive movement. Thus, for example, the forces of women\u2019s liberation backed Prohibition \u2014 and the suffragettes were backed in turn by the Temperance Union, whose support (in the certainty that women would vote to outlaw liquor) helped gain women the vote. The goo-goos, the good-government types, similarly aided Prohibition, seeking to purge the rows of rowdy saloons that cluttered the major cities of America \u2014 and they enlisted the help of the Prohibitionists to create a national income tax, ending the federal government\u2019s dependence on liquor taxes.<\/p>\n

The health fanatics, the social-service providers in the churches and city governments, the Protestant elite of the Social Gospel movement: Prohibition was supported by majorities in all the social groups who today would be faithful allies of the left. Combine that with rural Protestants, who saw the big cities as dens of Satan, and nativists, who saw drunkenness as an Irish sin, and Prohibition was a moral juggernaut rolling through the nation \u2014 as unfathomable as it was unstoppable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joseph Bottum reviews Lisa McGirr\u2019s The War on Alcohol: We all know the story: At the beginning of the 20th century, a handful of killjoys, prudes, and pinch-faced puritans began to campaign against liquor. And in 1920, against all odds, they managed to sneak through a law that banned alcohol in the United States. Thirteen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,9,10,53,13],"tags":[104,424,1020,199],"class_list":["post-34126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-law","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-booze","tag-morality","tag-progressives","tag-prohibition"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Sq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34127,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34126\/revisions\/34127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}