There were three men came out of the West,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn must die.

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sewn, they’ve harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn was dead.

A forgotten man

At the time of his death in 1927, Wayne Wheeler, the legislative superintendant of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), wielded the kind of power that today’s “Washington insiders” can only dream about. In its obituary, the Milwaukee Journal wrote that his “conquest is the most notable thing of our times.” The Baltimore Evening Sun added that “nothing is more certain than that when the next history of this age is examined by dispassionate men, Wheeler will be considered one of its most extraordinary figures.”

You’ve probably never heard of Wayne Wheeler—I hadn’t, until I read Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent.

According to Okrent, the Evening Sun was “absolutely right” and “completely wrong” at the same time. Wheeler was arguably the most powerful and influential figure Americans under the age of 100 have never heard of. His sway over Congress was absolute – even H.L. Mencken, who despised Wheeler and everything he stood for, wrote that “in fifty years, the United States [had] seen no more adept a political manipulator.”

Yet by 1931, the ASL’s Washington office had had to cancel its newspaper subscription for lack of funds; by 1933 his life’s work was completely undone; and within a few decades Wheeler was completely forgotten.

Wheeler’s “conquest”

Prohibition, Wheeler’s “conquest,” is a kind of unmentionable in evangelical Christian circles: it never figures in lists of Christian contributions to the common weal such as the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage and the campaign against child labor. Yet, by any reasonable measure, the 18^th Amendment and the legislation that implemented it, the Volstead Act, mark the high water mark of evangelical Christian cultural and political influence.

The discrete silence isn’t hard to understand: Okrent nails it when he says that “in almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure.” Even when it “succeeded,” reducing the amount Americans drank, it did so at a terrible cost: it fostered “a culture of bribery, blackmail and official corruption.” (The disregard for law during Prohibition prompted the Boston Herald to stage a contest to find a new term of opprobrium for people who continued to drink despite the law. The winning entry: “scofflaw.”)

Then there was the personal toll: while our image of Prohibition is the flapper and the speakeasy, a better image might be that of the “bloated bodies of hijacked rumrunners washing up the beach of Martha’s Vineyard, their eyes gouged out and their faces scoured by acid.” Or perhaps it’s the “deaths by poison” or from “unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles.”

No wonder it’s an unmentionable. But ignoring history doesn’t change it – it simply makes it impossible to learn anything from it. And there are lessons to be learned from Wheeler’s “conquest.”

Lessons from history

Prohibition may have been a complete failure but it was a response to a real and pressing problem: For the first 140-plus years of its existence, the United States had a drinking problem. In 1839, English novelist Frederick Mayyrat wrote “I am sure that Americans can fix nothing without a drink.” They drank when they met and when they parted. They drank when they were hot and when they were cold; they drank early in the morning and late at night. In sum, “they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop in the grave.”

To say that Americans drank like fish would be unfair to fish: by 1830, the average American adult drank an average of 1.7 bottles of 80-proof liquor a week. When you recall that many Americans, especially women, didn’t drink or drank moderately, the number of Americans who spent a considerable part of the day “juicy,” “thawed,” or any of the 226 other euphemisms for “drunk” Benjamin Franklin compiled in the Pennsylvania Gazette, was, as Okrent puts it, literally “staggering.” As one Harvard professor told Thomas Jefferson, the United States was on its way to becoming a “nation of sots.”

The first evangelical response to what Abraham Lincoln called the “devastator,” was the temperance movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Its tactic was persuasion: tell men about the evils of alcohol and get them to pledge abstinence. The best known of these “persuaders,” John Bartholomew Gough, was estimated to have delivered ten thousand speeches to more than nine million people over a thirty-four year period. (His career was sandwiched around a six-day bender in Manhattan. Plus ça change . . .)

The problem was that, although persuasion changed many lives, many others fell back into old habits, and that backsliding was blamed on what Phineas Taylor Barnum – yes, that P.T. Barnum – called the “seductive toils” of the “tempter,” i.e., the availability of alcohol. Thus, in Barnum’s words, the “watchword was Prohibition,” always with a capital “P.”

Concern about backsliding alone wasn’t enough to prompt a change from persuasion to compulsion. More than anything, Okrent tells us, the idea of Prohibition was driven by anxieties over the demographic and social changes in late nineteenth and early-twentieth century America.

The best-known of these is, of course, massive immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe. The huge influx of what Madison Grant called “Alpines” and “Mediterraneans” coincided with a shift from farms and small towns to big cities. Adding to small town and rural white protestant anxieties was their association of alcohol with immigrant groups: beer with Germans, hard liquor with Jews, and wine with Italians. By the late-nineteenth century, America’s love affair with John Barleycorn had come to be seen as part of a larger immigrant assault on American civilization, the clear historical record to the contrary notwithstanding. (Does it ever “withstand” in matters like these?)

In the South, support for prohibition got a huge boost from perennial white fears over white women being violated – a classic example of what Freud meant by “projection,” given that the evidence, including the DNA of many African-Americans, clearly demonstrates that virtually all of the interracial sexual predation ran in the opposite direction – by blacks under the influence of cheap booze.

The other major contributor to the Prohibition cause was an unlikely coalition of progressives and their erstwhile adversaries, industrial tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. The latter were motivated by the effects of alcohol on productivity – although Rockefeller’s support of Prohibition primarily grew out of his religious convictions – and the former supported Prohibition as part of a larger effort to modernize and rationalize American society.

None of this would have mattered without someone who could translate support for Prohibition into legislative success and that’s where Wayne Wheeler and the ASL figure in the story. Unlike earlier prohibitionists like Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Wheeler and the ASL went after alcohol with what would later be called a “laser-like focus.”

For Wheeler, an issue was only worth supporting if it brought Prohibition closer to reality. Thus, he worked to secure passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, because the movement needed to replace the approximately forty percent of federal revenue that would be lost after Prohibition was enacted; getting women the right to vote was a priority because he (rightly) expected that women voters would be more supportive of Prohibition than their male counterparts.

When it came to everything else, Wheeler and the ASL were silent. He understood that their power, and the key to their success, lay in being able to deliver a block of 10-20 percent of the electorate in close races. What mattered wasn’t Democratic versus Republican but “wet” versus “dry.”

The other thing that mattered was timing: Wheeler knew that if Prohibition didn’t happen by 1920, it wasn’t going to happen at all. The 1920 census and the legislative re-apportionment that would follow would shift the balance of power from the rural and small-town “dry” parts of the country to “wet” urban centers.

And that’s what happened: between 1913, when Wheeler assumed effective control of the ASL, and 1920, he and his allies transformed the way the federal government was funded; doubled the franchise; and outlawed America’s (with apologies to baseball) true national pastime. What’s more, they did it the hard way: via constitutional amendment, which required getting two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states on board.

Yet, less than fourteen years later, Prohibition was repealed and their cause was discredited, the stuff of jokes and remonstrations. Why?

A scofflaw nation

Most obviously, America was, in Okrent’s words, a “thirsty nation.” While many Americans didn’t drink or, at most, drank only occasionally, those who liked to drink weren’t going to stop just because the ASL and company had gotten control of the political process. What’s more, these “scofflaws,” like the majority of Americans by that time, lived in cities where support for Prohibition was minimal-to-non-existent.

No one could have, or at least should have, been surprised when supply found a way to hook up with this demand, especially in a country with 11,000 miles of coastline and 6,000 miles of land borders. Add “wet,” and often corrupt, local officials and enforcement of Prohibition, even under the best of circumstances, would have been next-to-impossible.

And the 1920s were far from the best of circumstances: none of the three notionally “dry” Republican presidents during Prohibition put any real effort into its enforcement. Harding brought $1800 worth of booze to the White House with him; Calvin Coolidge never saw a domestic policy initiative, especially a federal one, that he cared to spend money on; and Herbert Hoover had bigger problems to deal with.

That left enforcement in the hands of state and local officials and “wet” states, most notably New York, declined to enforce the Volstead Act. Even those who tried to enforce it couldn’t overcome the combination of demand, ill-gotten wealth, and corruption.

Collapse of Prohibition

The response to this disregard for the law was the Jones Act, and related state laws, whose draconian provisions made Prohibition even more unpopular. Michigan enacted a precursor to the “three strikes” laws of the 1980s and 1990s. When one of its first victims turned out to be a widow sentenced to life in prison for selling a few bottles of booze, the public’s misgivings hardened into opposition to the law.

Despite the growing opposition to Prohibition, Okrent’s account of its demise brings to mind the sudden collapse of the Soviet empire. Even Prohibition’s most-committed opponents assumed that it would take decades to repeal the 18^th Amendment, a reasonable assumption considering that all that was required to preserve the constitutional status quo was the vote of 33 senators representing 5 percent of the population.

Yet, six months after Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration, Utah (!) became the 36^th state to ratify the 21^st amendment. In hindsight, Prohibition, like the Soviet empire, was much less robust than it appeared to both its supporters and its opponents. It was the product of a particular historical moment – a transitional period between what America had been and what it would become. To employ an analogy from another beloved American vice, Wheeler and company drew an inside straight but unlike the fortunate card player, they couldn’t leave the table – they had to continue playing and then the odds caught up with them, in spectacular fashion.

Okrent—wisely, in my opinion—lets the reader make the connections between the early 20th century and the early 21st. An obvious, but flawed, analogy is our drug laws. While there are many similarities, most notably attempts to circumvent the law by claiming a “medicinal” purpose for the banned substance, an even bigger difference between Wheeler’s world and ours remains: recreational drug use, including marijuana, has never insinuated itself into American culture the way that alcohol use did and has.

While roughly 40 percent of Americans admit to having smoked marijuana at least once, only about 5 million – about 2-3 percent of American adults – smoke it on a weekly basis, compared to the 60 percent of Americans drink on a regular basis and the 41 percent who eat fast food at least once a week.

Speaking of fast food, in some ways, a more apt modern analogy is the attempt to force Americans to change the way they eat. Like their Prohibition-era counterparts, today’s food crusaders are willing to use the coercive power of government to get people to stop consuming stuff they like. Similarly, while some – I’m not sure about how much – of the effort is motivated by concern for other people’s well-being, it’s undeniable that some of it is motivated by disdain and even contempt for the kind, i.e., class, of people who eat the “wrong” things.

Shaping how we think

The more important lessons to be learned from Okrent’s account aren’t analogies to our time but the ways Prohibition shaped the ways Americans think. The phrase “you can’t legislate morality” may not have originated during Prohibition but it was Prohibition that elevated it into a principal that most Americans ascribe to.

That idea may seem nonsensical – after all, no one supports repealing laws after theft, murder and sexual assault – but Prohibition made Americans wary of regulating personal conduct that didn’t directly and tangibly affect other people. Thus, “you can’t regulate morality” didn’t work for defenders of Jim Crow because its institutions and practices clearly affected African-Americans. (Even then, Jim Crow’s demise was the result of the law, pursuant to the direct challenge of Dr. King and countless courageous African-Americans, leading Americans where they preferred not to go.)

In contrast, efforts to contain or mitigate the impact of the Sexual Revolution have failed because Americans are convinced that what a person does in the privacy of his or her own home is, with very narrow exceptions, no one’s business but their own.

Another legacy of Prohibition is suspicion of the motives behind moral reforms. The city dwellers, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and African-Americans who were on the receiving end of Prohibition saw it as an attack on them, a logical inference given that many of Prohibition’s most committed supporters wore sheets and hoods on weekends – the Prohibition era coincided with the apogee of the revived Ku Klux Klan.

Even those supporters not affiliated with the Klan, when they were not subverting the Constitution’s reapportionment requirement altogether, were urging that the millions of immigrants living in American cities not be counted when it came to determining congressional representation.

This sordid history is part of the reason why calls for—to cite a random example—the restoration of American honor are deemed to be exclusionary, a means of identifying and marginalizing the “other.” Current appeals to national renewal might indeed be free from such a taint – if so, such freedom would be virtually unprecedented.

Finally (I know), the story of Prohibition is further proof—not that any such proof is required—of the wisdom and genius of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa Theologica, (I-II q.96 a.2, for those keeping score at home) Thomas writes that “Human law is framed for the multitude of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Therefore human laws do not forbid all vices from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are injurious to others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained.”

A little knowledge of Thomas could have prevented a lot of grief. He would have warned them that “[laying] upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous” runs the risk of their “[breaking] out into yet greater evils.”

Then again, a movement that, in Okrent’s words, ran the “ecumenical gamut” from “Baptist to Methodist,” wasn’t likely to take counsel from the Angelic Doctor. The result was “greater evils,” some of which are still being felt today, even if we insist on not knowing their source.

For more insight to this topic, get the book, Kingdom Come: The Local Church as Catalyst for Social Change, by Malcolm Duncan, from our online store. Or read the articles, “The Dynamics of Cultural Change, Parts 1 and 2” by William Edgar.