PROHIBITION

Prohibition and the Churches

Even as the Depression that followed the stock-market crash of 1929 deepened to unprecedented lows, Americans were preoccupied with the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. That amendment, which had been ratified in 1919, was the result of long, dedicated effort by reformers, many of them active in Protestant evangelical groups. The Women's Christian Temperance Union reflected the links between the effort to dry up America and the Protestant churches. The Anti-Saloon League, with strong ties to the Methodist Church, called itself the Protestant church in action.

Taking Sides

National Prohibition was controversial from the beginning, with soldiers returning from World War I protesting that they had been kept from voting on the issue by failure of the states to provide adequate machinery for absentee voting. Within a short period the "wets," critics of the amendment and the Volstead Act, its enabling legislation, raised challenges about this constitutional effort to legislate morality and behavior. The "dry" forces found dubious allies, including corrupt politicians and bootleggers who profited from the traffic in homemade and imported liquor. Perhaps a more shady ally was the revived Ku Klux Klan, which supported small-town Protestant values in the face of changes brought about by industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. In addition to fighting bootleggers and rumrunners, however, the Klan also targeted blacks, Jews, and Roman Catholics and served as a leading nativist force in the nation during the first half of the 1920s.

Prohibition and Politics

Prohibition quickly moved back into politics. While the Republican Party, with its large Protestant support, remained in the dry camp, the Democratic Party, with its combination of dry Protestant southerners and wet urban Roman Catholics, split sharply over the issue. In 1924 the Democrats met in New York City, a center of illicit liquor, and split over the question of the Ku Klux Klan; they suffered a humiliating defeat in that year's presidential election.

A Divisive Issue

In 1928 the question of Prohibition was even more divisive, and the wet forces intensified their organizational efforts. Herbert Hoover, the Republican nominee, called Prohibition "an experiment noble in purpose" and promised a review of the government's support for it. The Democrats nominated a wet, Alfred E. Smith, the Roman Catholic governor of New York. The Republicans, favored by a decade of peace and prosperity, seemed invincible that year, but alcohol and religion both became election issues with the Smith nomination. The Anti-Saloon League, now dominated by Bishop James A. Cannon Jr., head of the Temperance and Social Service Commission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, helped split the upper South from the Democratic lower South for the first time in the twentieth century. The link between liquor and the Roman Catholic Church was too strong for traditional white southern Protestants to maintain their old loyalty to the party of their fathers, The upper south voted for Prohibition and against Roman Catholicism in the 1928 election.

Enforcing Prohibition

The question of Prohibition would not go away. In 1929 President Herbert Hoover appointed a commission to review the enforcement and effectiveness of prohibition. The Wickersham Commission split sharply over the effectiveness of Prohibition but nevertheless gave general support for the idea, and President Hoover provided more money for enforcing the Volstead Act. Few proponents or opponents doubted that Prohibition was here to stay.

Challenges to Prohibition

The wet forces were strengthened by the creation in 1929 of the Women's Organization for Prohibition Reform, which challenged the assumption that all women supported prohibition. Perhaps equally telling was the defection from absolute Prohibition by drys such as the Rev. Dr. Clarence True Wilson of the Northern Methodist Church, who announced that he would not oppose light wines and beer as a way to control bootlegging as long as saloons were banned. In 1932 Rev. Charles Stezle of the Presbyterian Church, a longtime dry proponent, came out for repeal, arguing that Prohibition did not work and was worse than the alternative.

Problems with Prohibition

Prohibition collapsed because of the economic issues of the Depression of the 1930s, but other factors played a part. In the early years of the decade Bishop Cannon became embroiled in a series of scandals, ranging from the revelation that he had been gambling on the stock market to his sudden marriage to his secretary shortly after his wife's death to charges that he had misspent campaign money in the election of 1928. While he escaped conviction for his activities, he helped discredit both Prohibition and evangelical Protestantism in the eyes of many. When Billy Sunday returned to Detroit for a revival in 1932, he was no longer able to whip up the enthusiastic support for Prohibition that he had in his last revival there. The issue no longer attracted deep interest with the general public.

Repeal

Even so, when the political parties met in their presidential conventions in 1932 and capitalism in the United States seemed on its last legs, the key issue for both parties, as the famous journalist H. L. Mencken reported, was their stand on liquor. The Democrats, despite reservations from dry southern delegates, nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt and pledged to overturn the Eighteenth Amendment. When Herbert Hoover accepted his party's nomination, he too joined the chorus for repeal. Effectively, the "noble experiment," as President Hoover's remark was usually misquoted, was over. As soon as the election results were in, plans to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment were put into action. When the Congress met in special session in March 1933 to enact the first hundred days of New Deal legislation, one of its first acts was to revise the Volstead Act to allow the manufacture and sale of beer. The beer parades of 1933 echoed the funerals for John Barleycorn that signaled the ratification of the Prohibition amendment fourteen years earlier. The repeal amendment swept through state ratification, and in December 1933 the Twenty-first Amendment was declared ratified. Once again the states were able to decide the alcohol question for themselves.

Last Efforts

While they had lost the conflict, many Protestants and their organizations were unwilling to give up the struggle. They turned again to local communities to try to limit alcohol sales and consumption. In many states they formed umbrella groups, with names such as Christian Action or Christian Social Response, to coordinate their efforts, sometimes to great effect. Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist, remarked of his native Oklahoma that the people there would vote dry as long as they were sober enough to stagger to the polls. But the national war over alcohol was over for now.