Pubdate: Sun, 03 Jan 2016
Source: New York Times Magazine (NY)
Copyright: 2016 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/297
Note: The New York Times Magazine is a section of the Sunday edition 
of the New York Times
Author: James A. Morone
Note: James A. Morone, the author of "Hellfire Nation: The Politics 
of Sin in American History," is the John Hazen White professor at Brown.

BOOTLEG POLITICS

My great-grandfather Vincenzo negotiated Prohibition by fermenting 
two barrels of wine a year. It was perfectly legal, he insisted. 
Vincenzo was lucky to be a New Yorker. In her fine history of 
Prohibition, "The War on Alcohol," Lisa McGirr, a professor of 
history at Harvard, shows us that a poor Italian in Illinois or a 
black man in Virginia might very well have been jailed, shot or 
sentenced to a chain gang.

Chain gangs are a far cry from Prohibition's lore, which imagines 
puritans winning a ban on liquor that America flatly rejected. 
Magazines gleefully published "bartender's guides," directing the 
thirsty to the nearest whiskey. The law spawned crime, shootouts and 
a kind of gangster romance embodied by Jay Gatsby. Worse, drinking 
became hip. Young people -sported flasks and haunted speakeasies. 
Eventually, inevitably, the whole mess -collapsed.

In reality, outlawing alcohol had many supporters and inspired more 
fervor than any reform except abolishing slavery. An extraordinary 
coalition conquered liquor. Women fought for protection from abusive 
husbands. Southern leaders grasped for more control over black lives. 
Progressive reformers attacked the workers' saloons where machine 
politicians swapped favors for votes. Western populists hoped to tame 
the urban Gomorrahs. Methodists funded the Anti-Saloon League, which 
grew so formidable it inspired a new term of political art - the 
interest group. With congressional ratification of the Prohibition 
amendment in 1920, alcoholism plummeted; drinking levels did not 
rebound to pre-Prohibition levels for half a century. The "noble 
experiment," as McGirr shows, reflected a deep heartland yearning to 
protect American health and morals from the rising tide of 
foreigners, cities, social problems and jazz.

McGirr makes two major contributions to the historical record. First, 
she vividly shows how enforcers targeted immigrant and black 
communities. During the 1910s, immigration reached its all-time high 
- - 41 percent of New Yorkers had been born abroad - and, suddenly, 
there were more people in the cities than the countryside. McGirr 
documents Prohibition's nativist spasm by zooming in on Herrin, Ill., 
where labor violence transformed into a war on Italian drinkers. 
Incredibly, national -officials deputized the local Ku Klux Klan, 
which raided homes, rounded up violators and shot resisters. In the 
South, blacks faced impossible fines or hard time. McGirr has less to 
say about the racial tangle of segregation, lynching and Prohibition 
- - still the untold story of the era.

Second, McGirr tells us that Prohibition gave birth to big government 
- - an argument that could have a major impact on how we read American 
political history. The audacious effort to remake drinking habits 
required unprecedented authority: Federal police powers grew, jail 
construction boomed and courts turned to plea -bargaining and parole. 
"The War on Alcohol" might have delved more deeply into the 
judiciary, which, over hundreds of cases, rewrote Fourth Amendment 
law (on search and seizure) and built a legal regime later deployed 
by the war on drugs.

But the newly muscular state, McGirr suggests, inspired heretical 
thoughts: An ambitious government might cast aside its anti-liquor 
campaign and, instead, combat poverty, empower labor or punish 
lynching. Prohibition spurred its victims into politics; they flocked 
to the Democrats when the party turned wet in 1928. Although Herbert 
Hoover doubled down on Prohibition and won in a landslide, the newly 
mobilized opponents were primed for Franklin Roosevelt - and active, 
liberal government - four years later.

How does Prohibition fit into the moralizing urge to discipline the 
poor and powerless? The question, as old as the Salem witch trials 
and as fresh as Black Lives Matter, lies beyond the book's scope. 
However, our present-day nativists would do well to heed McGirr's 
meticulous reconstruction of a time in which oppressed people fought 
back and helped build a coalition that dominated American politics 
for 40 years.

THE WAR ON ALCOHOL

Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

By Lisa McGirr

Illustrated. 330 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom