Prohibition is an Awful Flop, We Like It

[T]he film is beautifully composed. There are seductive inserts of bottling machinery and a perfect whiskey old fashioned cocktail being made. Some sequences border upon being high quality advertising agency pornography produced for a liquor industry client. There are no laborers ordering Boilermakers in the final cut... Burns knows his real audience, his business partners at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (your tax dollars at work) prefer sophisticated cocktails rather than canned beer and pork rinds.

The documentary praises Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as a feminist heroine while ignoring her bizarre personal lifestyle (cross dressing in masculine attire and conducting numerous lesbian affairs on two continents with her intimates who affectionately called her “Frank”) which marked her as something of a fanatical crackpot. Willard’s organization was not above employing racist arguments to promote prohibition. Negroes were supposedly transformed into bestial brutes by the demon rum. Before the Twenties, the corner saloon was decidedly a male institution that was routinely off limits to women. It was also a political gathering place as many taverns were owned by ward politicians, so the W.C.T.U., headquartered in Evanston, Illinois, aligned itself with the suffragettes.

In faulting Protestant evangelicals and others for supporting Prohibition, the documentary sidesteps the significant role of Progressives in the coalition that secured the passage of the 18th Amendment. Woodrow Wilson opposed prohibition, but his veto was overridden. References to Progressives in the “dry” movement are kept to an absolute minimum. I counted a grand total of two such comments in over five hours. Politically correct orthodoxy demanded no less and Burns did not disappoint his benefactors. After all, the heirs to the Progressive movement want to mandate government healthcare and to outlaw smoking and certain cooking fats.

From what I can gather most historians today do regard Frances Willard as a lesbian, but that has more to do with changing definitions and interpretations than with any precise knowledge of what she did with other women. The flowery language of those days and talk of devotion between women in and of itself may not indicate sexual activity, so the television series was right not to make too much of the current interpretation.

Prohibition was wrong and a mistake. If I'd been alive at the time I hope I wouldn't have been taken in by the prohibitionist cause. But it's too easy to feel superior now because we have knowledge that people at the time didn't possess -- because we know that it wouldn't work. If the television series tried to be evenhanded and didn't turn prohibition advocates into caricatures or grotesques in the way that so much writing about the era does, it's to the filmmakers' credit.

Thanks for the link. Today's tiny Prohibition Party is quite conservative. Except for the whole alcohol thing, there were times when I could almost support them. Curiously, they take very libertarian stands on many important issues (except for the whole alcohol thing).

It's strange now to learn that Los Angeles elected a Prohibition Party candidate to Congress a century ago. The party also elected a governor in Florida, a long-time Democrat who held some rather repellent views on race even for their day. But for a movement to actually succeed in changing the Constitution, it has to have very broad support and attract people with very different views on other issues, and even different political philosophies. Ideas and movements that we've come to regard as mutually exclusive weren't always so sharply opposed as we've come to assume.

Ideas and movements that we've come to regard as mutually exclusive weren't always so sharply opposed as we've come to assume.

This is very, very true. I've actually been doing a little online research since my last post on this topic and was fascinated to learn that much of the agitation for women's suffrage was not from a radical, "freethinking" perspective at all, but for a very different reason: women are more religious and moral than men. Thus if ever given political power (which they had never had before), what was to prevent them from forever banishing alcohol, premarital sex, prostitution, war, and all the other traditional evils that rowdy men (with their brains all jacked up with testosterone) were unwilling to address? This is a far cry from the opinion sometimes given on Free Republic: that women are unthinking, overemotional Commies whose enfranchisement would inevitably reduce America to a political sewer. Many early "feminists" (though I don't think that's really an appropriate label for them) were actually very conservative and moralistic and sought a more moral and religious country (though of course, there had always been those women's rights crusaders who were indeed free-thinking radicals).

Another issue that simply doesn't seem to fit into our current ideological divide in America is the position on free public schools. Nowadays the assumption is that anyone who ever at any time advocated such a thing was a (in the words of an old Johnny Carson "Tonight Show" routine) a "bribe-taking, gay, Communist, peeping tom wife beater." The original public school system was in Puritan "theocratic" Massachusetts and taught religious orthodoxy along with everything else (the act creating it was called "The Old Deluder Act," since it aimed to fight the old deluder Satan with education). American public schools originally taught a certain form of Protestantism as "the American religion" and one of anti-Catholicism's main issues was defense of the public school and opposition to any state money going to Catholic (or as they called it, "religious") institutions. One may challenge the idea of such a school system (and the removal of the primary responsibility for educating children to the parents), but it was in its beginnings hardly a red horror birthed in Hell by the devil and Adam Weishaupt. All that came later because of other reasons. Theoretically, any public school system can be a religious system (though this works better in mono-faith societies, of course).

Conservatives today have come to be total Jeffersonians (if not neo-Confederates), seeing any such Federalist/Whig crusade or position as the start of The Revolution--ironic, considering the Federalists and Whigs were considered the conservatives of their day. I have seen posts on FR hailing the Catholic opposition to public schools as a glorious prophetic insight of what those schools were "inevatibly" to become, even though the parochial school system could be considered the "public education system" of the organized and official Catholic community, and even though the parochial schools are now as full of leftist nonsense as the government schools.

How many contemporary conservatives recall that up until a hundred years ago American Catholics were opposed to prayer and Bible reading in public schools (just like the G-dless ACLU) and in the early nineteenth century the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia created a fire storm by suggesting the Bible be removed from public schools there (not because he was anti-religious, but simply to ensure peace between Protestant and Catholic students).

Let no FReeper interpret this post to mean that your own Zionist Conspirator is some sort of Horace Mann; I am not. In particular, I regard the mandatory nature of education in America as something totalitarian and as something that makes our schools very much like prisons. I merely wish, once again, to show that not every issue throughout American history can be read through the contemporary ideological lens.

Pinging wideawake for his interest.

Religion may be so strong in the US because we don't have state sponsored religious education or an established church. In Europe and in Canada, where religious schools may be state-funded, religious faith is much weaker.

I can't say that Catholics and others who opposed using the schools for Protestant indoctrination in the 19th century foresaw these developments, but it is interesting how things worked out.

It's also interesting that Catholic opposition in the early years of public education didn't drive the Bible out of the public schools -- not for a century -- but led to a more ecumenical use of scripture that Jews and Catholics and Protestants could all live with for some time.

I suppose it may be true that over time Catholic schools have lost much of their distinctiveness and attachment to Catholic teaching, but so did the private schools founded by mainstream Protestants, to say nothing of the universities they established.

The difference is more in the quality of education. Catholic schools and other religious schools provide a quality alternative in areas where public schools are particularly bad.

Even where public schools are "good" students get lost in all the bigness and bureaucracy, and smaller, private or denominational schools may do a better job educating many students.

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