Pubdate: Thu, 31 Dec 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Jennifer Schuessler

THROWING A COLD SPLASH ON PROHIBITION NOSTALGIA

America has been awash in Prohibition-era nostalgia of late, with 
speakeasy-style bars, artisanal moonshine and "bootlegger balls" 
proliferating from New York to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Los Angeles, 
where revelers in period dress will pack that city's 1930s Union 
Station to ring in the New Year.

But in her new book, "The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of 
the American State" (W. W. Norton), the historian Lisa McGirr tells 
anything but a nostalgic story. The 18th Amendment, she argues, 
didn't just give rise to vibrant night life and colorful, 
Hollywood-ready characters, like Isidor Einstein, New York's 
celebrated "Prohibition Agent No. 1." More enduringly, and 
tragically, it also radically expanded the federal government's role 
in law enforcement, with consequences that can be seen in the crowded 
prisons of today.

In The New York Times Book Review, James A. Morone writes that the 
book "could have a major impact on how we read American political 
history." In a recent email interview, Ms. McGirr, a professor at 
Harvard, discussed Prohibition's political legacy, the surprising 
enforcement role of the Ku Klux Klan and the character from her story 
she'd most like to have a drink with. Below are excerpts from the conversation.

Q. The popular image of Prohibition is one of flappers, speakeasies 
and gangsters. What's wrong with that picture?

A. Prohibition has been largely mined for its sensationalist 
entertainment value. Many chronicles have emphasized Prohibition's 
vast inadequacies, and in some ways it was laughable. The government 
came nowhere near to eradicating the liquor traffic. But the very 
attempt had enormous and lasting consequences.

Q. You argue that Prohibition gave rise to today's "penal state." How 
did that happen?

A. By birthing a new national obsession with crime, Prohibition - and 
the violence that came with it - pushed the federal government in the 
direction of policing and surveillance. This was the moment that saw 
the first national crime commission, the birth of the Uniform Crime 
Reports, an expanded prison system and the establishment of the 
Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The F.B.I. also won expanded authority.

Q. You write that the '20s roared only for a small slice of the 
population. What about everyone else?

A. Enforcement may have looked lighthearted in New York, especially 
for the middle class, who drank in protected speakeasies. But it was 
anything but a laughing matter for poor men and women in places like 
Virginia, North Carolina and Texas. Corruption up and down the 
enforcement chain smoothed the operation of large-scale criminal 
suppliers, but marginal violators, and those groups already 
identified with criminality, were not as lucky. They ended up filling 
police logs, jails and increasingly crowded federal and state prisons.

Q. You describe how the Ku Klux Klan helped enforce Prohibition in 
places like Williamson County, Ill., where federal authorities 
deputized its members to conduct sometimes deadly raids on 
distilleries, bars and private homes - taking particular aim at 
Italian immigrants. What made the Klan such an ally in the war on alcohol?

A. The Klan sold itself to white Protestant evangelicals as a law 
enforcement organization, winning droves of recruits with its promise 
to clamp down on bootlegging. There were plenty of Klansmen who 
imbibed, but that did not stop them from leveraging the law to target 
the drinking of the presumed enemies of white Protestant nationalism: 
immigrants, Catholics and African-Americans.

Q. It's often thought that these groups moved decisively to the 
Democratic Party in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency 
in a landslide. But you argue that the breakthrough came in 1928, 
when Al Smith was the Democratic nominee. How important was 
Prohibition to that shift?

A. Before 1928, urban ethnic working-class political loyalties were 
divided between the Republican and the Democratic parties. Many 
recent immigrants had not yet built firm loyalties and were 
nonvoters. That changed when Al Smith ran for president, under the 
banner of opposition to Prohibition. The urban ethnic working class 
shifted heavily to the Democratic Party as a result. These men and 
women labeled Prohibition the tyranny of the Billy Sundays [Sunday 
was a prominent evangelical minister and Prohibition advocate] and 
identified it as an attack on their leisure and on Catholic 
religiosity. They also resented being classed as criminals. F.D.R. 
built on this new voting base, forging the New Deal coalition that 
lasted for much of the 20th century.

Q.What Prohibition-era character would you most like to have a near beer with?

A. A tough call, but it would probably be Clarence Darrow - though I 
am sure he would have refused to touch the much-hated near beer and 
gone in for some harder bootleg liquor. Darrow had opposed 
Prohibition before the amendment's passage, and he became one of its 
most vocal opponents as it unfolded. He decried the violence and 
intolerance of men and women intent on enforcing the Volstead Act 
[the 1919 law carrying out Prohibition] and said essentially that 
they spawned an orgy of excessive zealotry and in some places 
outright terror. Given the story I uncovered in Williamson County, I 
think he was right.

Q. You draw a very straight line from the war on alcohol to the 
continuing war on drugs. Do you see room politically for that 
campaign to be repudiated as completely as Prohibition was?

A. Historians are not terribly good at predicting the future. Still, 
the consensus on the war on drugs is finally beginning to fracture, 
as it did for Prohibition over 75 years ago. Calls are ever louder 
for ending counterproductive penal approaches. I hope we embrace a 
turn toward a new New Deal for those who have borne the brunt of the 
drug war's selective and often discriminatory enforcement.

Q. Is there any positive legacy of Prohibition that we might raise a 
glass to this New Year's Eve?

A. Absolutely. I would raise a toast to the new mixed world of night 
life leisure that Prohibition spawned. Before that, public drinking 
was associated with the boisterous working-class male world of the 
saloon. Women who entered risked identification as prostitutes. 
Prohibition's new semi-secretive world of leisure helped bring wider 
groups of women into these spaces, where they have remained ever since.

Correction: January 1, 2016

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday in which the 
historian Lisa McGirr was interviewed about her new book, "The War on 
Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State," 
misidentified, in some editions, the state in which Cedar Rapids is 
located in citing cities where there are Prohibition-themed events or 
bars. It is in Iowa, not Michigan.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom