According to historian Eric Foner, WWI struck “most progressives as a golden opportunity.” “To them,” Foner argues, “the war offered the possibility of reforming American society along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and expanding social justice.” (CP 43) Did the war succeed in “reforming American society” along the lines outlined by Foner? In your answer, you should draw on events during the war and the immediate post-war period.
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The 1920s weren’t just gin joints and jazz. Anti-immigrant racism was all the
rage.
By Lisa McGirr
Ms. McGirr is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The War on Alcohol:
Prohibition and the Rise of the American State.”
Jan. 16, 2019
On Jan. 16, 1919, Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify the 18th Amendment
to the Constitution, which banned the manufacture, sale, import or
transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Prohibition era had begun.
Prohibition looms large in the national imagination even today as the era of
gangsters and gin joints. Less often do we reflect on what motivated the country
to adopt it and maintain it for 14 years. While the country faced a real problem of
excessive drinking, powerful anti-immigrant hostility is what drove this
monumental act of constitutional overreach.
Today, as we find ourselves in the midst of another fight over immigration, it is
worth revisiting the role that nativism played in driving, and later enforcing,
Prohibition. The consequences of that battle reverberated for decades to come. It
sparked a vast expansion of the repressive capacities of the federal government
and a rise of right-wing extremism, led by a revived Ku Klux Klan. It also forged
a new political coalition that would bring ethnic working-class voters into the
Democratic Party, where they would remain for much of the century.
How Prohibition Fueled the Klan
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Temperance and Prohibition had been popular causes throughout the 19th
century, but supporters didn’t reach a critical mass until the era of mass
immigration at the turn of the century. With more than a million men and women
coming to the United States in 1907 alone, anti-liquor crusaders railed against a
“foreign invasion of undeveloped races.” The boisterous drinking culture of the
ubiquitous working-class saloon, dominated by immigrant men, seemed to make
manifest the dangers mass immigration posed to a white native Protestant
American way of life.
During World War I, the Anti-Saloon League, the self-declared Protestant
Church in action, fanned nativist flames: With the large brewing companies in
the hands of German immigrants, the league declared the abolition of “the un-
American,” “home wrecking, treasonable liquor traffic” the most patriotic act.
Congress concurred, sending the 18th Amendment to the states on Dec. 22, 1917.
Ratification sped through the states in record time, stunning its ecstatic
supporters: “The rain of tears is over. … Hell will be forever for rent,” the
flamboyant evangelical preacher Billy Sunday proclaimed. The Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, the powerful grass-roots female reform
organization at the core of the anti-liquor crusade, raised an American flag at its
campaign headquarters in Evanston, Ill. Church bells rang at many Protestant
churches in celebration of “Uncle Sam’s knockout blow … that set John
Barleycorn and all his cohorts to the mat.”
The utopian hopes of Billy Sunday and his ilk that the 18th Amendment would
turn “our prisons into factories” quickly evaporated. The vast and powerful
federal agencies in charge of policing Prohibition as of January, 1920, along with
state and local enforcement, overcrowded court dockets, changed legal doctrine
and flooded prisons, but they did little to meet Prohibitionists’ almost impossible
ambitions.
Newly hired and poorly trained Prohibition agents, along with local and state
police, targeted violators at the margins, but they lacked the capacity, and at
times the will, to go after powerful crime kingpins. Chicago’s Al Capone, Ohio’s
George Remus, New York’s Arnold Rothstein and Seattle’s Roy Olmstead
amassed large fortunes in the profitable illicit drink trade, oiling their violent
supply rings with payoffs to judges, senators and officers on the beat.
At the same time, a small group of affluent, urban, pace-setting adventurers
rebelled against the law in subterranean night-life spaces, sparking innovative
dance styles and providing new audiences for the experimental sounds of jazz.
Prohibition’s cultural earthquake, centered in the mixed-sex and mix-raced
night-life venues in cities like New York and Chicago, reverberated in smaller
towns and cities through Hollywood movie plots, tabloid newspapers and radio.
It was, according to one New York opponent, a cultural “civil war.” In 1922,
President Warren Harding declared the lack of observance a national scandal.
The men and women who had worked so hard for the law’s passage feared a
vicious conspiracy to discredit and overthrow Prohibition. Anxieties over
immigration, urbanization and the erosion of the cultural dominance of Anglo-
Saxon Protestantism swelled even further in face of a new spirit of self-
expression.
With Prohibition newly enshrined in the Constitution, anti-liquor crusaders
demanded better, stricter enforcement and harsh punishment for violators. Roy
Haynes, the federal Prohibition commissioner, blasted the “dry rot” and evil
influences that had to be “torn out” by citizens militant in the law’s defense. A
volunteer enforcement army coalesced. The Anti-Saloon League and the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union forged two of its phalanxes, adopting an
increasingly shrill tone toward immigrants. Compliance among this “great
problem” class required coercion, with “officers of the law” acting as
“schoolmasters.” The W.C.T.U. in 1923 called for the deportation of noncitizens
convicted of Prohibition violations. Despite evidence that foreigners were less
likely than native-born Americans to violate the law, anti-liquor crusaders
marshaled alternative facts: “Seventy-five percent of liquor law violators are
foreigners,” the Indiana W.C.T.U falsely claimed.
Anti-liquor crusaders found a powerful new ally in the so-called
second Ku Klux Klan.
As enforcement failures multiplied, anti-liquor crusaders found a powerful new
ally in the so-called second Ku Klux Klan. Established in 1915 by William
Simmons in Atlanta, the organization snowballed after 1920 in the Midwest and
West. Its savvy promoters, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, former
fund-raisers for the Anti-Saloon League, drew in a bumper crop of new recruits
with their anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, white supremacist message.
Other forms of postwar social conflict aided the growth of the Klan, but nothing
did more than the 18th Amendment to turn it into a dynamic social movement.
The Klan and its female affiliate, the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, recruited
heavily from the nation’s white Protestant Prohibition organizations, promising
militant action to ensure the law’s enforcement. Not surprisingly, the Klan
targeted the drinking of those they identified as enemies of “100 percent
Americanism” — Catholics, foreigners and African-Americans — and often
gained a foothold in white Protestant evangelical communities with its promise
to put bootleggers and moonshiners out of business. If officers of the law could
not or would not do their duty, the Klan vowed to step in, often with the support
of the local government.
The actions of the citizen Prohibition army in Williamson County, Ill., a
hardscrabble rural mining region 300 miles south of Chicago, provides a striking
example. The head of the Williamson County board of supervisors and a local
Klan leader, Sam Stearns, and a Methodist pastor and Klan ally named Philip
Glotfelty, along with members of the local Ministerial Association, had high
hopes that Prohibition would usher in a new moral tenor in their community.
Before Prohibition, the region’s largely native white Protestant miners might
stop for a whiskey after a hard day’s work in the ramshackle bars that dotted the
county, ignoring their pastors’ warnings against the “devil’s drink.” In
Prohibition’s wake, drinking continued in new roadhouses and moonshine joints.
Two rival criminal rings, the Birger and Shelton gangs, set up shop to supply the
thriving black-market trade.
Glotfelty and Stearns, backed by the county’s leading businessmen and
Protestant pastors, mounted a law and order crusade. They held public meetings
to raise the alarm. Italian and French immigrants, largely Catholic, had been
drawn to Williamson County by opportunities to work in the coal industry, and
Glotfelty blamed the men “imported from across the sea” for bootlegging. He
confidently predicted that all members of the local Catholic church would be in
jail before “the foundations of the new church were built.”
Glotfelty’s words resonated among the region’s native white Protestant miners,
whose tenuous hold on economic security was increasingly eroding. A strike to
protest wage cuts had ended in open class warfare in 1922. Williamson County’s
moral leaders focused native Protestant miners’ grievances on another threat:
the immigrants who competed for mining jobs. The local Klan ranks swelled with
the promise to “clean up” the community.
Representing the Klan, Stearns traveled to Washington to plead for support for
its local anti-liquor crusade. Commissioner Haynes agreed to supply federal
agents to lead the raids if Stearns could provide the foot soldiers. On Dec. 22,
1923, the first raid, in the town of Herrin, got underway. Some 500 citizen
volunteers deputized by Haynes’s agents stormed scores of roadhouses and
homes. A second raid two weeks later overwhelmingly targeted Italian
immigrants, who protested rough treatment, theft and planted evidence.
The Italian vice-consul in Springfield, Ill., denounced the “terrorization of foreign
residents of Herrin” to the State Department. National Guard troops were called
in to stem the chaos and violence. Eventually, the federal government ended its
authorization for the volunteer army, refusing “reinforcements from the Ku Klux
Klan or any other volunteer organization.”
But the citizen army was not easily deterred. Stearns gleefully declared, “We’ve
got the bootleggers on the run now, but we want to give them their hats, so they
can keep on running.” Over the following months several more raids, each
increasingly reckless, targeted Williamson County’s immigrants. On Feb. 2, 1924,
S. Glenn Young, a former Prohibition agent who had been recruited by the Klan,
led more than 1,000 men in raids against roadhouses and homes, setting fire to
some of them. This time the county’s French immigrant community joined the
Italian immigrants pleading for help from their consul. With Klan and anti-Klan
forces battling in the streets, the Illinois governor declared martial law.
The orgy of violence resulted in 14 deaths, but it also eroded Klan support among
the public. Klan candidates had swept into office in Herrin in 1924, but one year
later they lost power. The newly elected mayor promised to bar Klan supporters
from parading in masks. But before the collapse of its power, the local Klan had
partially accomplished its goals: More than 50 roadhouses and illicit drink
spaces had been shut, and many of Williamson County’s immigrants heeded the
Klan’s call to leave the county. Of the 11,000 foreign born and their children in
1920 in Williamson County, only 8,174 remained a decade later.
The mobilization of Prohibition’s citizen’s enforcement army in Williamson
County was replicated on smaller scales in many towns and cities. From Orange
County, Calif., to Birmingham, Ala., the Klan buttressed local police in anti-liquor
raids, targeting groups they perceived as enemies of “100 percent Americanism.”
That campaign of terror was one of the law’s most devastating consequences.
But immigrants and their children also despised the criminalization of their
cultural rituals and leisure habits, the violence that illegal supply rings brought
to their neighborhoods and the selective enforcement that disproportionally
targeted poor violators. One Chicago immigrant leader summed up the
passionate sentiments of many, blasting Prohibition as the “most vicious and
tyrannical piece of legislation enacted anywhere in the world.”
Al Smith, running for president in 1928, attracted large numbers
of urban, white ethnic voters to the Democratic Party for the first
time with his anti-Prohibition message.
The battles over Prohibition erupted in the 1928 presidential election. The Irish
Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, ran for president on the Democratic
ticket opposing the law and championing tolerance. Smith attracted large
numbers of urban, white ethnic voters to the party for the first time, along with a
small segment of African-Americans. Though Herbert Hoover won handily, the
ethnic, urban, industrial working class Smith brought to the party stayed there,
forging an important part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. One of
Roosevelt’s first acts in office was to sign the beer bill, re-legalizing the industry
in March of 1933, pending the repeal of national Prohibition.
Roosevelt adopted creative solutions to the Great Depression, building on the
new federal authority and resources won during the war on alcohol. Prohibition,
as elite conservative critics had rightly feared, cracked the door open toward
other forms of regulation. Not only did Prohibition forge the edifice of the federal
penal state, but growing numbers of Americans looked to the federal
government for solutions to social and economic problems.
One Roosevelt supporter summed up this logic when he called for a four-day
week at a six-day wage when he wrote to the presidential candidate: “the
Eighteenth Amendment made it possible for the government to take over
enforcement of Prohibition. Surely, capable leaders could soon get another
amendment to the Constitution passed that would empower Congress to shorten
the work day for all labor throughout the nation.”
Prohibition had lasted less than 15 years, but its legacies outlasted its repeal and
achieved almost the opposite intended by its most ardent supporters. Hoping to
make liquor less desirable by shutting saloons, the anti-liquor crusaders ushered
in the mixed-sex, alcohol-laced, night-life leisure Americans have known ever
since. The ban did not end crime and corruption, as the crusaders claimed it
would, but drove it to higher levels, leading to a new and permanent role for the
federal government in crime control.
And Prohibition’s titanic overreach led to the enfranchisement of new immigrant
groups under the banner flag of Prohibition opposition. The era’s heightened
nativism had not cowed Americans immigrants, their children or their allies.
Instead they reached out for a fuller place in national political life to forge a more
pluralist, tolerant, equitable country. The tyranny of Billy Sunday and his ilk
proved short-lived.
Lisa McGirr is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the
Rise of the American State.”
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Correction: Jan. 16, 2019
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a prominent gangster in
New York during Prohibition. It was Arnold Rothstein, not Arthur Rothstein. It
also misstated the name of a group that advocated for Prohibition. It was the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, not the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union.
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