Review of *The War on Alcohol*

The past year has provided multiple opportunities for American citizens to get involved in local law enforcement. Oregonians this past November, for example, could tip off authorities about large parties and businesses that were out of compliance with regulations implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus. In Texas, the possibilities for citizen law enforcement are even more pronounced: the state’s recent anti-abortion law provides a monetary reward of up to $10,000 to those who can prove in court that a clinic or person violated the controversial law. Such developments raise questions about the relationship between the citizen and the state as well as the kind of impact such enforcement will have on various communities throughout the country. Lisa McGirr in The War on Alcohol explores these questions by examining federal and community policing during the Prohibition Era, showing how Prohibition enforcement played an important part in shaping the penal state in America and considerably changing the lives of ordinary Americans on the local level. In the process she makes a convincing case for Prohibition’s critical role in the development of modern America.

McGirr’s over-arching argument is that Prohibition enforcement provided the mold for the modern American penal state. The effort to restrict alcohol sales resulted in “streamlined federal criminal record keeping, professionalized prison administration, new prison growth, and expanded muscular federal policing” (xx). In these respects and more, Prohibition enforcement resembled the federal effort to wage war on drugs in the late twentieth century. Stemming from this main argument are two other recurring and important points made by McGirr. First, McGirr examines the backgrounds of various Prohibition advocates and organizations, finding that the “citizen enforcers” of Prohibition were predominantly conservative white Protestants. McGirr presents this group as a precursor to the modern Christian Right. Second, the war on alcohol galvanized the white ethnic working-class and African American communities of urban America, who then mustered behind Democratic Party platforms promising an end to Prohibition, which disproportionately affected these groups of people. McGirr makes a compelling case for each argument using various sources including Prohibition propaganda, newspaper articles, non-government organization records, and federal enforcement agency records.

McGirr’s organization is chronological and her prose is accessible. The first chapter explores how the Prohibition movement emerged from the earlier Temperance movement by providing a portrait of the Protestant clergy and middle-class women who formed its support base. Here McGirr posits that the Prohibition movement’s campaign to acquire federal backing of prohibition was a radical departure from the temperance movement’s former strategy of relying on local state government law to regulate alcohol consumption. Protestant moral zeal, the wave of progressive reform, and the expansion of federal authority during WWI mobilization each paved the way for increased federal enforcement.

Chapters two and three focus on the immediate effects prohibition had on the alcohol business and ethnic working-class communities. As the sale of alcohol became illegal, individuals turned to bootlegging while others, predominantly ethnic minorities, protested by using the political process in an attempt to repeal Prohibition. Chapter three holds obvious relevance to the war on drugs. Examining court cases and individual criminal investigations, it shows the selective nature of Prohibition enforcement as federal investigators systematically targeted smaller stakeholders in the trade, who tended to be working-class ethnic minorities. Prohibition expanded the surveillance arm of the police at the federal, state, and local level, leading to increased incarceration rates among poorer communities that did not have the financial means to bribe their way out of legal trouble (as members of affluent society could, the focus of chapter four).

Chapter five is an important chapter that drives home McGirr’s argument that Prohibition enforcers were the early twentieth-century’s version of the Christian Right. Perceived threats to Americanism brought by immigrants, urban black Americans, and Catholics animated prohibitionists. McGirr finds examples of various groups including women in the Christian Temperance Union, clergy within the Anti-Saloon league, and the Ku Klux Klan who enforced and supported Prohibition in various degrees. These individuals shared many things in common, one of which was their use of coercion and disciplinary action to shape America into a Christian nation with proper morals (139-140). McGirr’s discussion of grassroots Prohibition politics reveals how Prohibition in part paved the way for the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan in America during the 1920s. The Klan sold itself as an upholder of law and order to the public and sometimes collaborated with local Protestant ministers, making sure that Catholic and immigrant violators of prohibition would not wreak havoc on American society through unregulated alcohol consumption and illegal activities.

The agency of working-class ethnic minorities is not forgotten in this narrative. Chapter six explores how urban working-class voters hit hardest by prohibition law and a small group of wealthy capitalists who wanted to stem government power formed a political coalition to back Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign, which ran on an anti-Prohibition platform. Although the Democrats lost with Smith, McGirr argues the election signaled the beginning of a new political era where “Democrats became the party newly epitomized by its urban ethnic working-class voting base” (187). The final two chapters focus on the muscular expansion of federal authority as a response to exaggerated fears about national crime and the downfall of Prohibition during the New Deal era.

An achievement of McGirr’s work is its consideration of the systemic consequences of Prohibition in various lower and working-class communities, showing, for instance, the devastating impact on Chicago immigrant communities brought by organized crime networks (56-58). Residents lacked the power and resources to prevent criminal operations while other poor individuals participated in illegal activities as a source of income despite the risks involved. What is more, affluent whites who frequented urban areas such as Harlem for nighttime leisure provided a potential consumer base for the illicit drug trade (114). These developments made it increasingly easier for Americans to associate immigrants and the urban poor with criminality. For many citizen enforcers, Prohibition provided an opportunity to control supposedly corrupt ethnic minorities and improve the social order.

McGirr also applies gender analysis throughout the work to reveal that women’s experiences with Prohibition enforcement varied according to their roles and social positions. Women who joined the ranks of the Temperance and Prohibition movements, for example, did so with the conviction that regulations on drink protected women from violent husbands and offered economic security by discouraging men from spending their earned profits on alcohol (9-10). On the other hand, women who participated in the illicit trade did so in varying capacities. McGirr takes readers through urban night spots bustling with alcohol-related leisure activities where affluent women engaged in social drinking and watched cabaret shows while working class women served as hostesses and “cigarette girls.” McGirr notes that the liberation associated with the sexual permissiveness in these locations applied more so to men than women and especially less so for working class women whose exploitation often made underground leisure activities possible (107-109). In keeping an eye toward gender, McGirr again highlights how national Prohibition disproportionately impacted women, especially those of the lower classes.

There are a few questions pertaining to McGirr’s contentions about religion that are not fully explored. Nighttime resistance to Prohibition, which McGirr calls “cultural counterrebellion,” is described as part of a “vigorous intellectual rebellion against the coercive projects of evangelical Protestantism” (118-119). Although this interpretation makes for a compelling argument, McGirr leaves this reviewer wanting a deeper exploration of the cultural rebellion against religious authority. Who were the urbane intellectuals and writers (outside H. L. Mencken, who is briefly mentioned) who partnered with prominent individuals such as Felix Frankfurter and Roger Baldwin (both are also briefly referenced) to oppose the enforcement of Protestant morality, and what kinds of arguments did they expound? To what extent did nightclub patrons and intellectual subversives understand themselves to be united against a common enemy in evangelical Protestantism, and did they clearly connect the coercive projects of evangelicalism such as the Scopes Trial and Prohibition enforcement as being one and the same?

The above questions do not take away from the accomplishment and value of this book. McGirr’s The War on Alcohol is a work anyone interested in the 1920s and Prohibition must read. It utilizes gender, race, and social analysis to better understand how men and women, poor and affluent, debated the place of alcohol in American society. It is a well-researched work of history that manages to capture the operation of a national movement on the local level, highlighting the activities of individual antiliquor crusaders and organizations as well as the experiences of ethnic minorities impacted most by Prohibition enforcement. McGirr successfully argues that the Prohibition years ushered in a new era of federal power and surveillance over American citizens. This study of Prohibition will keep readers pondering the present-day consequences of federal policies for ordinary citizens and communities in America.