Book Scene: Corporate America and the legacy of Prohibition
By JT Menard, for the Yakima Herald-Republic
May 2, 2018
YAKIMA, Wash. — Few academic historians are able to produce work that bridges the gap between the Ivory Tower and the humble independent bookstore, though some do find popular success. Mary Beard (“S.P.Q.R”), Sven Beckert (“Empire of Cotton”) and Jill Lepore (“The Secret History of Wonder Woman”) are notable scholars whose works have piqued the interest of public audiences.
Add Lisa McGirr to this selective, acclaimed club. Her latest work: “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State” is a well-written read sure to please general readers and professors alike.
The rise of the corporation in the late 19th and early 20th century brought tremendous upheaval to the lives of Americans. Though most Americans today are inured to the trappings of corporate capitalism, turn-of-the- century Americans rebelled against the new status quo in a number of ways.
The Populists famously resisted corporate culture from the countryside, while organizations like the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World fought back in the cities.
Resignation was common, too. Many new industrial workers turned to alcohol to cope with the stress of brutal working conditions and interminable shifts. America’s growing thirst for alcohol became a moral panic, sparking the Temperance movement.
Largely led by women, the prevailing view of the Temperance movement is one that places working-class Americans as struggling to bring some semblance of order and morality to the rapidly changing socio-economic realities thrust upon them by the emergence of corporate America.
The Temperance movement was, of course, successful, and the 18th Amendment brought Prohibition to the United States in 1920 and would remain in effect until 1933.
“The War on Alcohol” goes beyond the working-class search for order, however, and examines the fallout of Prohibition from a variety of new and unique angles.
McGirr shows that enforcement of Prohibition was selectively carried out against immigrant and African-American communities. Discrimination against immigrants was endemic in early 20th century America, and that discrimination carried over to the practices of those communities, which for German and Irish immigrants in particular, included a robust culture of alcohol consumption.
For African-Americans in the South, “colored only” saloons offered a private refuge from white hegemony, which proved troubling to white Southerners. Anti-liquor crusaders cast in particular “colored only” saloons as establishments that menaced society with vice, degeneracy and crime; the overt reason was, of course, moral reform, but a not-so-subtle undercurrent of racism ran through the crusaders’ actions.
The upshot of the Prohibition experiment reverberated through American life far beyond 1933. Prohibition provided precedent for the federal government’s involvement in the creation and enforcement of anti-drug policies. It’s not a stretch to believe that the roots of the Nixon and Reagan administration’s War on Drugs and the swelling of the nation’s prisons with nonviolent drug offenders can be found in the United States’ “noble experiment” with alcohol.
One final unintended consequence of Prohibition is that — if one believes the aforementioned theory that it was an outgrowth of working class Americans’ search for order in the Progressive Era — is that, at least as far as the beer industry is concerned, it ended up giving more power to the very thing the reformers were railing against: corporate America.
More than 5,000 breweries operated in the United States prior to Prohibition. The outlawing of alcohol naturally forced the closure of thousands of these breweries. Only the largest brewers, such as Anheuser-Busch, were able to weather Prohibition. In the years following its repeal, the competition was scant, and a series of corporate mergers in the following decades only further consolidated the beer industry into the hands of a few mega- corporations. This domination lasted until the 1980s, when the passage of new federal and state laws allowed independent breweries to flourish once again.
Overall, “The War on Alcohol” is a breezy, interesting and highly informative read. It finds that satisfying niche between scholarly and popular history. I recommend it to those who enjoy their alcoholic beverages, individuals who work in the industry or anyone who has an interest in history.
• “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State” by Lisa McGirr was published by W.W. Norton in 2016. It retails for $17.95.