The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

Abstract

Lisa McGirr has penned a history of a topic that most historians have neglected or consigned to the picaresque. Standard narratives treat the Eighteenth Amendment—the prohibition amendment—as a quixotic and mercifully brief episode of state repression. But McGirr's reinterpretation no longer allows scholars to give the story short shrift. A longtime student of American politics whose first book pioneered a community history of American conservatives, McGirr leaps to the national level, offering a kaleidoscopic social, cultural, and political tale of the “dry” years. The War on Alcohol tugs prohibition from the margins of U.S. history to the center, making a convincing case that the 1919 Volstead Act played a vital role in shaping the long history of the twentieth century. McGirr recovers the “dry decade” as a pivotal moment in American state building. While standard narratives emphasize liberal periods of social welfare construction and economic regulation, the new state apparatus of the 1920s fostered conservative repression. Like other scholars of conservative state building surrounding war, religious conservatism, and labor repression, McGirr unearths a panoply of coercive new laws and administrative functions. The Volstead Act inspired the creation of the entirely new Prohibition Bureau, “four times the size” of the also recently formed Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation) (p. 208). The legislation expanded the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Coast Guard, and state and local police forces. It also produced strict mandatory-sentencing laws, the imposition and collection of millions of dollars in fines, and the expansion of federal criminal courts.