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Fallacies of the Prohibition Movement
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13150 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
2,829 Words |
| Author
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Burton W. Folsom
Burton W. Folsom, Jr., is professor of history at Murray State
University in Murray, Kentucky. He is the author of
Entrepreneurs versus the State. |
Prohibition is a remarkably misunderstood reform movement. It was long believed that the crusade to ban alcoholic beverages was led by various religious bigots who somehow managed to impose their will on the rest of the country. Sometimes Prohibition is also depicted as a movement which emerged from nowhere to take possession of American society through the Eighteenth Amendment. Fortunately historical research in the last twenty years has clarified the impact and effect of Prohibition. This article looks at the reality of Prohibition, especially on the Great Plains of the United States and Canada. These include the American states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas; and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. I intend to look at Prohibition through several widespread misperceptions that continue to be associated with it.
Fallacy No. 1: Prohibition was only an American Experiment. Many features of the Prohibition movement did originate in the United States, but it was amazingly international in scope. Prohibition movements existed in countries from Brazil to India, and in countries as remote as Bechuanaland and Uruguay. Prohibition was a worldwide reform movement and became law in most of Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States. Many of America's temperance organizations, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, spread to Canada and made the movement much more than an American experiment.
The Prohibition movements in Canada and America, especially on the Great Plains, mutually reinforced each other. Canadian and American newspapers would rally their rank-and-filers by exchanging news of the success of Prohibition in both countries. Western Canadians were especially anxious to use rosy figures on prosperity and crime from Kansas and North Dakota, the first two Great Plains states to adopt Prohibition. Speakers, too, went back and forth between countries to exhort the faithful. Nellie McClung, one of Canada's leading Prohibitionists and suffragists, spoke in America as well as in Manitoba and Alberta. On the other side, American lawyer Clarence Darrow, sponsored by a bartenders' union, ventured into Manitoba to argue against Prohibition. Finally, from 1900 to 1920, many of the more than one million Americans who migrated to the Canadian West helped tie the Canadian and Americans Prohibition movements together.
Fallacy No. 2: Prohibition came suddenly, almost by surprise, in the aftermath of World War I. This is absolutely false. America had temperance organizations in the 1700s and a Prohibition movement during the 1840s and 1850s. In fact,
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