SMASHING THE LIQUOR MACHINE

A wide-ranging, thoroughly revisionist history of the effort to ban alcohol from the public sphere across the globe.

“Both in the United States and around the world,” writes Villanova political science professor Schrad, “the true target of prohibitionism—the liquor traffic—was overwhelmingly the purview of powerful, white, self-identified Christians.” These purveyors of liquor found opponents in men and women who viewed the matter differently: Enslaving people to the addiction of alcohol helped the ruling class maintain control, subjugated colonial and marginalized peoples, and otherwise served the interests of both the wealthy minority and the state. Proclaimed Carrie Nation, tellingly, as she smashed the mirrors and glassware in saloon after saloon, “You wouldn’t give me the vote, so I had to use a rock!” Yet, as Schrad observes, Nation wasn’t above a glass of beer, even as a certain prohibitionist named V.I. Lenin, who denounced the imperial monopoly on liquor as the prop of a feeble and failing state, liked to quaff a brew himself from time to time. The author clearly and engagingly shows how the enemy wasn’t alcohol as such, but instead “the exploitative selling of addictive substances.” Activists, he writes, argued that propping up “moneyed elites upon the misery and addiction of society was no longer appropriate.” In this comprehensive, wholly convincing study, Schrad examines a number of famous prohibitionists, including Tolstoy, Gandhi, William Jennings Bryan, and even Theodore Roosevelt, the last of whom tempered his temperance leanings with the view that prohibition should be a local rather than federal affair. The author also links the prohibition movement to abolitionism, civil rights activism, anti-colonialism, and feminism, and he attributes the view of that movement as a collection of party poopers to our changing views of liberty, which have devolved to a kind of me-first, you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do ethic as opposed to the notion of entire peoples living without chains.

Readers won’t look at temperance the same way once they take Schrad’s inventive and persuasive thesis into account.