The United States Constitution places numerous restrictions on the powers of the federal government. Yet, in its 235-year history, only two constitutional amendments have explicitly prohibited individuals from engaging in specific activities: owning slaves (13th Amendment) and purchasing alcohol (18th Amendment). In Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, author Daniel Okrent tells the fascinating story of the political and social forces behind the passage of the 18th Amendment and the subsequent struggle to enforce Prohibition through the Volstead Act.
Americans love to drink—and they always have. In fact, nineteenth-century Americans are estimated to have consumed three times as much alcohol as Americans do today, which is really saying something. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the alcoholic beverage industry—breweries, distilleries, and wineries—was the fifth-largest industry in the country. Yet, on January 16, 1920, following a long and seemingly insurmountable political struggle, Americans effectively outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcohol. Okrent himself seems almost incredulous: “How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World?”
The harmful effects of alcohol have troubled Americans for centuries. The first broad-based popular movement against drinking emerged in the 1840s. Known as the Washingtonian Movement, it relied on compelling public speakers—most notably John Bartholomew Gough, a former stage actor and reformed heavy drinker whose name will be familiar to San Francisco residents—and a simple, voluntary pledge of abstinence. Abraham Lincoln admired the movement’s reliance on nothing more than “persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion.” Gough alone is estimated to have delivered more than 10,000 speeches to a cumulative audience of nearly ten million people. All told, more than 500,000 Americans took the pledge to abstain from alcohol.
The next important chapter in the crusade against alcohol opened in 1874 with the founding of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which Frances Willard would later lead to national prominence. The movement marked a significant shift in emphasis. No longer were temperance advocates primarily concerned with saving the sinner (i.e., the alcoholic), but rather with protecting those sinned against (i.e., the suffering wives and children). “The moral crusade was now a practical one as well,” Okrent writes. Under Willard’s leadership, the WCTU embraced an expansive array of progressive causes, ranging from prison reform and women’s suffrage to public education and the abolition of the Electoral College. Okrent argues that this lack of focus ultimately undermined the organization’s strength and effectiveness. Moreover, the WCTU readily embraced dubious claims about alcohol that further eroded its credibility. For example, the organization successfully lobbied school boards across the country to mandate instruction on the dangers of drinking, including such questionable assertions as “the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy.”
The final stage in the march toward Prohibition began with the founding of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) in 1893. “The Anti-Saloon League may not have been the first broad-based American pressure group,” Okrent writes, “but it certainly was the first to develop the tactics and the muscle necessary to rewrite the Constitution.” Indeed, the ASL became the 800-pound gorilla of the Prohibition movement, wielding an extraordinary degree of political influence and earning Okrent’s description as “the mightiest pressure group in the nation’s history.”
What made the ASL so effective? In Okrent’s estimation, it came down to two things: leadership and focus. Although the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell founded the organization, its indispensable leader was Wayne Wheeler, a man once described as “a locomotive in trousers.” (Okrent likens him to Ned Flanders from The Simpsons.) Even H. L. Mencken, a staunch opponent of Wheeler and the ASL, grudgingly acknowledged his political genius, writing upon Wheeler’s death in 1927: “In fifty years the United States has seen no more adept political manipulator.”
Much of the ASL’s success stemmed from its singular focus. Unlike the WCTU, the ASL pursued one political objective to the exclusion of all others: banning alcohol. Wheeler’s organization, formidable as it was, probably never represented more than 10% of the voting public. But those voters were highly motivated, disciplined, and responsive. In close elections across the country, Wheeler and his loyal ASL voters could tip the balance and determine the outcome. Because the ASL freely endorsed candidates from both parties and refused to involve itself in other political issues, it became an extraordinarily powerful political instrument. “No better ally, no worse enemy,” as the saying goes. Over the next twenty-five years, maintaining its laser-like focus on a single issue, the ASL cobbled together an unlikely coalition of political bedfellows that ultimately secured the passage and ratification of the 18th Amendment. It was a remarkable demonstration of how a disciplined minority could successfully manipulate the American political and constitutional process.
At the broadest level, Okrent characterizes the battle over Prohibition as a struggle between “native-born Protestants against everyone else.” At the heart of the movement were evangelical Christians, particularly Methodists and Baptists, whose nationwide network of churches formed what Okrent calls the ASL’s “capillary system.” Building on this extensive religious infrastructure, Wheeler and the ASL skillfully harnessed anti-alcohol sentiment among five distinct constituencies: progressives, racists, suffragists, populists and socialists, and nativists. Together, these disparate groups formed an unlikely but formidable political coalition united by a single cause.
Prohibition was a “fellow traveler” of other progressive reforms of the era, including women’s suffrage, tariff reduction, the federal income tax, and the direct election of senators, to name just a few. These movements frequently supported and reinforced one another. Wheeler skillfully co-opted a number of eastern urban progressives, many of whom were so-called “wet drys”—individuals who personally enjoyed drinking but nevertheless supported efforts to restrict or eliminate alcohol consumption. Moreover, the path to Prohibition may well have been paved by the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax. Passed by Congress in 1909 and ratified in 1913, the amendment provided a critical alternative source of federal revenue. At the dawn of the twentieth century, excise taxes on alcohol accounted for roughly 30% of federal revenues. Without the income tax amendment, Prohibition might well have been fiscally impossible.
More disturbingly, Wheeler actively collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan to build support for Prohibition across the Deep South. A common racist trope of the era held that Black Americans were particularly susceptible to the corrupting effects of alcohol. Most inflammatory was the specter of drunken Black men sexually assaulting innocent white women, a deeply racist fear that Prohibition advocates readily exploited. The fact that a Jewish-owned St. Louis distillery marketed a gin called “Black Cock Vigor Gin” throughout the South, featuring a nude white woman on its label, only added fuel to the fire. By appealing to these racial prejudices, Wheeler secured a dependable bloc of Southern Democratic votes in the political battle for Prohibition.
Wheeler’s most widespread constituency, however, may well have been women. As Okrent notes, “The rise of the suffrage movement was a direct consequence of the widespread Prohibition sentiment.” Many of America’s leading suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, got their political start in the temperance movement. Indeed, Okrent describes the alliance between Prohibition and women’s suffrage as “inevitable.” So closely intertwined were the two causes that the ASL made its only significant departure from its single-issue discipline in 1916, when it formally endorsed women’s suffrage. Curiously, however, Okrent never fully explores the role women voters played in Prohibition’s subsequent fortunes. The 19th Amendment, of course, followed the 18th, but by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, millions of newly enfranchised women had entered the electorate. Presumably, their votes initially strengthened the dry cause, yet Okrent offers little insight into how this enormous expansion of the electorate influenced either the enforcement of Prohibition or its eventual repeal. It is a curious omission in an otherwise compelling political history.
Finally, Wheeler unabashedly exploited the stereotypical associations between immigrant communities and their preferred alcoholic beverages—whether Irish whiskey, Italian wine, or German beer. By portraying Prohibition as a weapon in the struggle against mass immigration, the ASL attracted nativists and xenophobes of every stripe. Wheeler never missed an opportunity to turn political circumstances to his advantage, and none proved more consequential than the First World War. By the late nineteenth century, beer had eclipsed other alcoholic beverages in popularity across the United States, and German-American brewers bearing names like Pabst, Miller, Coors, and Busch dominated the industry. Moreover, these brewers owned or exerted considerable influence over thousands of saloons nationwide, the principal targets of the ASL’s righteous wrath. When the United States entered the war against Germany in 1917, the resulting wave of anti-German sentiment gave the Prohibition movement the final political push it needed to overcome the remaining obstacles to constitutional ratification.
The Founding Fathers did not make it easy to amend the Constitution. A proposed amendment must secure a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress before being ratified by three-quarters of the states (36 of the 48 states in 1919). Yet Prohibition did not merely clear these formidable hurdles; it sailed through them. In 1917, the 18th Amendment passed the Senate by a vote of 65 to 20, with remarkably similar levels of support from Republicans (29–8) and Democrats (36–12). The House followed with an equally decisive vote of 282 to 128, again with nearly identical partisan divisions: Republicans (141–64) and Democrats (137–62). Even more astonishing was the speed of ratification. It took just 394 days for the requisite 36 state legislatures to approve the amendment, less than half the time it had taken 11 states to ratify the Bill of Rights. For a constitutional change of such sweeping consequence, the speed and breadth of its political support were extraordinary.
According to Okrent, the failure to enforce the 18th Amendment effectively was the product of both incompetence and willful neglect. To begin with, few of those at the highest levels of government were enthusiastic supporters of Prohibition. Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were tepid advocates at best. Meanwhile, Andrew Mellon, the powerful Treasury secretary who served under all three presidents and bore ultimate responsibility for enforcing the Volstead Act, was openly hostile to Prohibition, regarding it as “extreme, impractical, and essentially unenforceable.” Two key officials charged with carrying out enforcement were Roy Haynes, the political appointee who headed the 1,500-agent Prohibition Bureau and whom Okrent portrays as almost comically inept, and Mabel Willebrandt, the young, talented, but hopelessly overworked federal prosecutor responsible for Prohibition cases. As Okrent observes, “the disconnect between the laws and the means to enforce them approached the surreal.” The Republican administrations of the 1920s were notoriously tight-fisted when it came to government spending, and Prohibition enforcement proved no exception. Meanwhile, only 18 states bothered to appropriate any funds for enforcement at all. In other words, when Prohibition took effect in 1920, its success rested largely on collective wishful thinking rather than any serious commitment of resources. Needless to say, things did not go well.
There were three gaping loopholes in the legal framework of Prohibition. The first concerned the production of alcohol for personal consumption. The lawmakers who drafted the legislation had envisioned small-scale apple farmers setting aside a barrel of cider after the harvest to ferment for their own use. What they got instead was hundreds of thousands of Americans making wine at home. California’s grape growers, initially and understandably alarmed by the prospect of Prohibition, soon watched demand for their grapes (and the prices they commanded) skyrocket. As Okrent notes, total American wine consumption, including imported, domestically produced, and homemade varieties, stood at roughly 70 million gallons in 1917. By 1925, that figure had soared to 150 million gallons, virtually all of it homemade. Prohibition, it seemed, had inadvertently created a booming new market for the very industry it was intended to suppress.
The second loophole exempted alcoholic beverages prescribed for medicinal purposes. At the time, Americans were already being inundated with an assortment of alcohol-laden patent medicines and dubious health remedies. Why lawmakers chose to preserve this exemption is not entirely clear, but drugstores across the country ultimately profited even more handsomely than California’s grape growers. As Okrent observes, “The cash flow from few enterprises gushed with quite the velocity that Prohibition brought to the drugstore business.” Consider Charles Walgreen, the Chicago-based drugstore entrepreneur who operated just nine locations in 1916. During the 1920s, he would open an astonishing 525 additional stores.
Finally, there were exemptions for religious purposes. The most familiar example was sacramental wine used in Catholic communion, which had been the original focus of the exemption. In practice, however, the provision was also exploited through purported Jewish congregations. Under the law, a rabbi could submit a list of congregants, obtain legally prescribed quantities of wine on their behalf, and assume responsibility for its distribution. The opportunities for abuse were considerable. At Congregation Talmud Torah in Los Angeles, membership reportedly surged from 180 to more than 1,000 in the month following the onset of Prohibition. In another particularly colorful example, Okrent recounts the establishment of a new Jewish congregation led by a rabbi named Frank Houlihan.
Beyond the three major loopholes in the law, bootlegging grew to almost epic proportions. In the last full year before Prohibition, the federal government collected nearly $500 million in liquor taxes (roughly $7 billion in today’s dollars). With the stroke of a pen, that enormous market was effectively handed over to the criminal underworld. By 1926, annual sales of bootleg liquor were estimated at $3.6 billion, twice the entire federal budget. Armadas of rumrunners anchored just beyond the three-mile limit of American territorial waters, offering an astonishing variety of alcoholic beverages to boaters from New York, Boston, and other coastal cities. Meanwhile, Sam Bronfman, the future owner of Seagram’s and soon to become one of Canada’s wealthiest men, built a sophisticated smuggling operation that funneled liquor overland into Detroit and Chicago. And in cities across the country, Al Capone and other gangsters waged bloody turf wars for control of the thousands of speakeasies and the lucrative networks supplying them with illegal alcohol. Prohibition had not eliminated the liquor trade; it had merely transformed it into an extraordinarily profitable criminal enterprise.
The demise of Prohibition was every bit as swift, improbable, and unexpected as its rise. By the late 1920s, Prohibition was clearly failing to achieve its intended objectives, and public frustration was mounting. Yet the 1928 elections produced what Okrent calls “the driest Congress ever,” with Prohibition supporters commanding overwhelming majorities in both the Senate (80–16) and the House (329–106). The situation in state governments was even more lopsided: 43 of the nation’s 48 governors were dry. Moreover, no constitutional amendment had ever been repealed. Despite its manifest shortcomings, Prohibition appeared politically unassailable as the Great Depression began. In 1930, Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, one of the principal architects of the 18th Amendment, confidently declared: “There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.” At the time, few Americans had reason to doubt him.
If the First World War tipped the political balance in favor of Prohibition, the Great Depression may well have tipped it back. During the first three years of the Depression, federal income tax receipts plunged by 60 percent. Americans desperately needed jobs, and the federal government desperately needed revenue. Meanwhile, the Anti-Saloon League, once “the most powerful pressure group the nation had ever known,” according to Okrent, had been severely weakened by the sudden death of Wayne Wheeler in 1927. By the early 1930s, the once-mighty ASL was on life support. Prominent Prohibition supporters, including John D. Rockefeller Jr., Alfred P. Sloan, and Harvey Firestone, began openly defecting to the cause of repeal. Seemingly overnight, the national political mood shifted. In 1933, the Senate voted 63–23 in favor of repeal. Remarkably, of the 22 senators who had voted for the 18th Amendment sixteen years earlier and still held their seats, an astonishing 17 (77 percent!) reversed their positions. Just two days later, the House voted 289–121 to repeal Prohibition after a mere forty minutes of debate. The fiscal benefits were immediate: in the first year following repeal, the federal government collected $260 million in alcohol taxes, nearly nine percent of total federal revenue. What had once seemed an unassailable constitutional achievement had unraveled with astonishing speed.
For nearly fourteen years, the United States prohibited the commercial production, distribution, and sale of alcohol. Contrary to popular perception, Prohibition did significantly reduce alcohol consumption, at least initially. Okrent estimates that drinking declined by as much as 70 percent during the first years of Prohibition. By the time of repeal in 1933, however, consumption had rebounded considerably, although it remained roughly 30 percent below pre-Prohibition levels. Even after repeal, Americans did not return to the pre-Prohibition peak of 2.6 gallons of pure alcohol per adult annually until four decades later in 1873. More recently, that figure has fallen to approximately 2.2 gallons. Whatever its many failures, Prohibition appears to have left a lasting imprint on American drinking habits.
There are many lessons to be drawn from Last Call. First, almost nothing is politically impossible. Both the 18th and 21st Amendments seemed inconceivable until, suddenly, they became law. Second, progressive causes are not necessarily on the right side of history. In an era when some progressive school boards have sought to eliminate advanced mathematics classes in the name of racial equity, it is worth remembering that today’s fashionable reforms are not necessarily tomorrow’s enduring achievements. Finally, political interest groups armed with strong leadership, disciplined organization, and a maniacal focus on a single issue can wield enough influence to literally rewrite the Constitution. I find that prospect both inspiring and terrifying.
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