Prohibitionism

THE PROHIBITION movement works to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. In the United States, the movement was responsible for the actual prohibition of alcohol by constitutional amendment from 1919 to 1933. Although Prohibition was repealed by a second constitutional amendment in the latter year, the prohibition movement has never completely ceased, and the Prohibition Party continues to field candidates for president and vice president.

The movement drew its impetus from the 19th-century liberation movements, which also included abolitionism and women's suffrage. Many people, especially women, were active in all three causes. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in 1874 and continues to exist. Originally, the WCTU crusaded for temperance rather than prohibition. The WCTU defines temperance as moderation in all things healthful and total abstinence from all things harmful. Those who choose total abstinence are called teetotalers because when they signed the WCTU pledge, a large “T” was placed next to their name on the roster. The WCTU pledge, which people can still take today, is as follows:

Alcohol consumption was very different before the Industrial Revolution. Before fresh, pure water was readily available, alcoholic beverages were consumed in its stead, meaning that most people were heavy drinkers by today's standards. As pure water became more prominent in everyday consumption (to the point that it is piped into every home), alcohol took on less of a role in everyday consumption and became more of an end in itself for the people who continued to drink it regularly. This was contrary to the Puritan ideals upon which colonial America was based. Although the colonists, including the Puritans themselves, drank a great deal, drunkenness was greatly frowned upon. As other beverages (besides water, also milk and modern commercial concoctions such as soft drinks) supplanted the need for daily consumption of alcohol, the argument went, alcohol was superfluous and destructive to the American way of life, because its use was by that time heavily connected with drunkenness.

The venues of drinking had also changed. One thinks of the taverns of England transplanted to colonial America. Michie Tavern, near Charlottesville, Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe imbibed, still stands. It was a monument for the “drys,” showing the stark difference between colonial American drinking places and practices, where Alexis de Tocqueville might have observed Americans drinking in moderation and discussing the great issues of the new republic, and contemporary saloons, which were dens of vice, iniquity, drunkenness, and lawlessness. The Anti-Saloon League, in fact, had to use no exaggeration or hyperbole to attract members, because all of its members were aware of the problems of saloons created across America and in their own communities.

Twenty-six states had prohibition either through their state constitutions or by statute or referendum. Maine had been dry as early as 1858. North Dakota and Oklahoma had been dry since their respective admissions to the United States in 1889 and 1907. The problem with state-level prohibition or county-level prohibition (which still exists in many rural counties) is that it creates a traffic, if not in illegal sales and importation, at least in individual consumers traveling to “wet” states or counties to purchase or consume; it is practically a mandate to drink and drive. This was a major argument in favor of national Prohibition.

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