Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth About America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade ed. by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm

Abstract

Reviewed by: Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth About America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade ed. by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm Caryn E. Neumann Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth About America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade. Edited by Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 179. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7038-0.) The standard narrative of Prohibition is widely known. Prohibition, spear-headed by religious conservatives, came about primarily because of World War I. The Eighteenth Amendment sought to ban individual drinking but instead resulted in increased alcohol consumption. Prohibition changed little about American drinking habits while fueling organized crime. Its failure led to the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal in 1933. This uniquely American experiment involved debates that are similar to those surrounding marijuana legalization. But according to essays by some of the most prominent scholars of Prohibition, the claims made in the preceding sentences are myths. Michael Lewis and Richard F. Hamm germinated this book after hearing alcohol scholars at a conference “bemoaning the gap between what scholars know about Prohibition and what much of the public believes about it” (p. vii). The contributors range from historians to political scientists to sociologists. All of the essays are strong, but Garrett Peck’s discussion of American drinking habits is one of the livelier ones. I learned from Peck, a Washington, D.C., [End Page 175] tour guide, that December 5, Repeal Day, is now also known in some quarters as “Cinco de Drinko” (p. 133). Despite what promotions at today’s bars would have us believe, alcohol consumption decreased during Prohibition, as Lewis notes in his essay. H. Paul Thompson Jr. differentiates between temperance advocates and prohibitionists. By the 1830s, temperance had become abstinence from all intoxicating beverages. Many activists believed that only personal religious transformation would lead to abstinence, while others argued that the best reform came by reaching the conscience through moral suasion. Some temperance reformers supported prohibition, and their numbers increased after state and local prohibition defeats in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia during the 1880s persuaded many that moral and legal suasion had to go “hand in hand” (p. 12). Prohibitionists, in contrast, kept a narrower focus on the law, and dominated after 1900. In his essay, Hamm points out that while Prohibition helped organized crime expand, it also drove an expansion of crime fighting. The federal police force grew, coordination between investigators of crimes and prosecutors became routine, and the age of mass incarceration began. Joe L. Coker argues that crediting religious conservatives for Prohibition misses the diversity of its supporters, a group that included both fundamentalists and Progressives. Thomas R. Pegram argues that it was the coming of the Great Depression, rather than general dissatisfaction with a dry United States, that led to repeal. Ann-Marie E. Szymanski explains that Prohibition did not come about because of a “sudden burst of patriotic fervor” after World War I. Instead, she argues, it was the product of “a lengthy process” at the local, county, and state levels. Szymanski shows that “in the South, with its well-developed local option laws,” activists focused on “achieving statewide measures that established prohibition in the rural areas” (p. 55). In his contribution, Mark Lawrence Schrad surveys prohibition in eleven countries, including Russia, which became the first to go dry in 1915. The ban became a contributing factor in Czar Nicholas II’s fall from power, as wealthy distillers monopolized the few railroads to ship vodka out of the country, leaving soldiers on the German front without necessary supplies. And in the collection’s final essay, Bob L. Beach argues that the debate over marijuana legalization is only superficially the same as the push to repeal Prohibition since the drug does not have the same role in U.S. society as alcohol did during the Progressive era. None of the authors pay much attention to popular culture despite its role in creating the myths that they dispel. The citations tend to be more typical of conference papers than scholarly essays. Lewis misses John Burnham’s pioneering work on decreased alcohol consumption. Overall, however, Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled...