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

by Lisa McGirr

Overview

“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review

Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House.

This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny.

The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393353525
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/29/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	404,748
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lisa McGirr is Professor of History at Harvard University, where she specializes in the history of the twentieth-century United States. Her research and teaching interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus on collective action, state building, reform movements, and politics. Her most recent book, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, won acclaim for excavating the significant but neglected state-building legacies of national Prohibition. Her award-winning first book, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, investigated the social and regional basis of grassroots conservative politics in the post–World War II United States. She teaches a wide variety of courses on the history of the United States in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Preface xiii

1 The Making of a Radical Reform 3

2 Bootleg, Moonshine, and Home Brew 39

3 Selective Enforcement 67

4 Gestures of Daring, Signs of Revolt 103

5 Citizen Warriors 121

6 New Political Loyalties 157

7 Building the Penal State 189

8 Repeal 231

Acknowledgments 257

Abbreviations Used in Notes 261

Notes 263

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

"In this remarkable book, Lisa McGirr transforms our understanding of Prohibition and its legacy. Moving beyond familiar tales of speakeasies and gangland violence, she shows how this episode contributed to the expansion of the authority of the modern American state and the origins of mass imprisonment. No history could be more timely."

Eric Foner

"McGirr’s book pivots from being a very good, tightly focused history of Prohibition to a great history of broader American politics, one that connects to contemporary issues in a profound way."

Chicago Tribune - Bill Savage

"In [McGirr’s] view, Prohibition was not a farce but a tragedy, and one that has made a substantial contribution to our current miseries. Nearly a century later . . . the legacy of Prohibition can be seen in our prisons, teeming with people convicted of violating neo-Prohibitionary drug laws. Many at the time viewed Prohibition as an outrage, and, in McGirr’s view, we are missing its true meaning if we are not outraged, too—and ready to resist its equally oppressive descendants."

The New Yorker - Kelefa Sanneh

"In her revelatory new book, Lisa McGirr moves Prohibition from the gin-soaked edges of the Roaring Twenties to the heart of the American state."

Kevin Boyle

"McGirr’s important new book . . . leaves us with a Prohibition that looks less like an anomaly than an eerily prescient rehearsal for the current national war on drugs."

Wall Street Journal - John Fabian Witt

"This is not just the best book ever written about the era of Prohibition; it is a landmark history of modern America. With splendid insight and illuminating details, Lisa McGirr demonstrates that the war on alcohol was the health of the state."

Michael Kazin

In her fine history of Prohibition…McGirr makes two major contributions to the historical record. First, she vividly shows how enforcers targeted immigrant and black communities…Second, McGirr tells us that Prohibition gave birth to big government—an argument that could have a major impact on how we read American political history…Our present-day nativists would do well to heed McGirr's meticulous reconstruction of a time in which oppressed people fought back and helped build a coalition that dominated American politics for 40 years.

The New York Times Book Review - James A. Morone

08/17/2015
The Hollywood narrative of Prohibition as a time of gangsters spraying bullets from machine guns is blown wide open in McGirr’s ambitious history of the 14-year period in early 20th-century America and its repercussions for social mores, public policy, and the criminal justice system. Using personal papers as well as records of state and federal commissions on enforcement, McGirr (Suburban Warriors), a professor of history at Harvard, delves into the details of the often uneasy alliances between Protestant temperance advocates, who fought for the Volstead Act and ratification of the 18th Amendment, and Klansmen, who helped enforce liquor laws on the local level. McGirr touches on oft-glamorized tales of bootlegging gangsters and speakeasies, instead choosing to focus on the stories of everyday victims of enforcement based on racial, religious, and class discrimination. This occurred in tandem with the racial integration of Southern bootleggers and speakeasy patrons. Both sobering and enlightening, McGirr’s work gives Prohibition and its consequences a much-needed reexamination that provides insights relevant to today’s War on Drugs. Photos. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] fascinating account of Prohibition and its consequences, written with verve, depth, and imagination."

Ira Katznelson

"McGirr’s book, fascinating and deeply researched, offers a startlingly fresh argument for why so many of our current problems—from the war on drugs to mass incarceration—grow out of Prohibition. Anyone who wants to understand the 1920s, 1930s, and 2000s should read this book."

Jonathan Alter

"Lisa McGirr has given us an admirably fresh look at a supposedly shopworn subject. She convincingly demonstrates that the Prohibition era deserves to be taken seriously as the nursery of many stubbornly persistent practices, including a moralizing, meddlesome state that targets its punitive powers on the least-advantaged citizens."

David M. Kennedy

★ 10/01/2015
McGirr (history, Harvard Univ., Suburban Warriors) takes a fresh and fascinating look at Prohibition, arguing that it should not be viewed as a failed experiment, but as one of the defining political and social movements of the 20th century. The author skims over familiar stories about the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Al Capone, and the rise of speakeasies, and focuses instead on the heavy-handed enforcement of the law, especially its effects on immigrant and minority communities. The fight to ban alcohol led to raids on private homes, a growing prison population, and an emphasis on punishment over rehabilitation. McGirr draws a direct line from Prohibition to the current war on drugs, demonstrating that the 1920s saw a vast and lasting expansion of the federal role in law enforcement. The era also had significant political consequences, mobilizing working-class immigrants to join the anti-Prohibition Democratic party and bringing African Americans into the party for the first time since the end of the Civil War, leading to a coalition that would elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. VERDICT McGirr's new perspective on Prohibition is recommended for all readers interested in American history.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

★ 2015-07-25
The surprising ways in which a failed social experiment helped shape modern America. In this splendid social and political history, McGirr (History/Harvard Univ.; Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 2001, etc.) offers a vivid account of Prohibition (1920-1933) and its "significant but largely unacknowledged" long-term effects on the United States. Writing with authority and admirable economy, the author traces the decadelong effort to discipline the leisure of urban immigrants, led by Protestant clergyman driven by "a powerful animosity toward working-class drinking in the saloon." With support from temperance groups and businessmen ("Until booze is banished we can never have really efficient workmen," said one manufacturer), the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages not only gave rise to the familiar Prohibition story of bootlegging, violence, and speak-easies but also had diverse, wide-ranging consequences that resonate to this day. Drawing on archival research, McGirr shows most importantly how the war on alcohol greatly expanded the role of the federal government, especially with regard to policing and surveillance. Prohibition awakened the nation's religious right, spurred the electoral realignment that resulted in the New Deal, and served as a "cultural accelerant" that began with the emergence of urban nightlife and drinking by women and youths and spread "ideals of self-fulfillment, pleasure, and liberation" across the country. These and other perceptive insights are contained in a bright, taut narrative that covers everything from the growing popularity of jazz to the selective enforcement of Prohibition in places from Chicago to Virginia to the tenor of everyday American life in these years. McGirr's discussions of the class aspects of the "dry" crusade will leave many feeling that booze—and the supposed criminality of the saloon—was the least of the problems. An important book that warrants a place at the forefront of Prohibition histories. General readers will love it, and scholars will find much to ponder.

Kirkus Reviews