High and dry: a nation's battling impulses
This nation was founded in the idea of reform, and the reforming impulse is always beating away somewhere in the body politic. It has taken any number of shapes, some noble, some ignoble. Many have been both. A great figure in my youth, the part spent in Minnesota, was Jane Swisshelm (1815-- 84), whose portrait hung in the drawing room of the two elderly sisters who owned the house we shared with them, my parents being the caretakers. These maiden ladies were related to Swisshelm in some way and admired her greatly. She had owned the land upon which the old house stood and had operated her printing presses across the street on the banks of the Mississippi. Outspoken and determined, she had inveighed against slavery, championed women's rights, advanced the cause of prohibition -- and called for the extermination of the Dakota Sioux. As she put it: "A Sioux has as much right to life as a hyena, and he who would spare them is an enemy to his race."
I am prejudiced, I know, but it seems to me that, historically, prohibitionists (by whom I do not mean those who merely abstain) have held more than their share of unfortunate opinions -- beyond blue-nosery, that is. Certainly, that is the case with the characters who move through the pages of Michael A. Lerner's "Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City" (Harvard University, $28.95). Lerner begins with William H. Anderson, one of the officers of the Anti-Saloon League, arriving in New York City in 1914 with the much-publicized intention of achieving the impossible, making the city dry. Lerner presents a clear and fast-paced account of how Anderson, a virtuoso of PR, lobbying, and strategic legislation, did indeed manage to flip New York into the dry camp. This accomplishment was, as Anderson and his gang intended, a crucial step on the road to national prohibition.
But the issue of booze was in some ways subsidiary to larger issues, one being whether the government had the right to legislate morality -- a right that the Progressive movement, still flourishing, tended to grant. And, in truth, the coincidence of the prohibitionist with the Progressive movement furthered the legislative success of the former. Beyond that, at the level of national temper, the 18th Amendment , which established nation wide prohibition, owed its passage, to a significant degree, to its supporters playing upon fears of the city, New York being the most alarming, and to their promoting a fantasy of a pristine American citizenry -- white, Protestant, English-speaking, industrious, and sober -- being enervated by aliens and their degenerate usages.
The entrance of the United States into the world war in 1917 was a godsend to prohibitionists, for, according to Lerner, a backlash against their cynical tactics and clear bigotry had begun to set in. In circumstances with which we are all too familiar, an oppressive measure was transformed into a matter of patriotism. German-American brewers, especially, provided handy demons, and "the un-American, pro-German, crime-producing, food-wasting, youth-corrupting, home-wrecking, treasonable liquor traffic" took on a Teutonic diabolism.
As Lerner shows, in what I call delightful detail, the presumptuousness of Prohibition assured its inevitable failure. It was not advanced through moral persuasion or education but through legislative mandate, which could only seem high-handed and oppressive. Indeed, it acted as a spur to drinking as a form of self-expression and fashionable impudence. Lerner repeats the story of Robert Benchley, who had never taken a drink in his life, calling for a cocktail in a New York speakeasy and saying, "Let's find out what all the fuss is about" -- thus launching a career of disastrous boozing. Moreover, it became increasingly clear that Prohibition was biased against both working-class and immigrant groups -- Irish, Italians, Germans, and East Europeans -- for whom drinking, chiefly wine and beer, was a part of communal identity.
It did not take long for the disastrous effects of Prohibition to become manifest in the shape of corruption, racketeering, gangland violence, loss of legal employment, poisonous alcohol, public drunkenness, rampant flapperism, and disrespect for the law. Lerner traces the movement's steady deterioration, until repeal -- as much as national recovery -- became a deciding issue in the election of 1932. In the meantime, opposition to Prohibition broadened the understanding of American identity to include immigrant groups who argued that Prohibition was a violation of the American freedom to which they were entitled. Beyond that, it shifted the base of the Democratic Party from the South to the urban working class of the North. Lerner's arguments are deft, and his summoning up of character and incident makes "Dry Manhattan" as entertaining to read as it is informative.
Barbara Holland's "The Joy of Drinking" (Bloomsbury, $14.95) begins as something like a child's history of booze, marching through the ages in a wearing, jocular manner. Once we reach our own day, however, the book turns mean, becoming a jeremiad on present attitudes, from the vogue for water to that for gooped-up "martini" concoctions. Rather than celebrating "the joy of drinking," it denounces, with prohibitionist fervor, coffee, video games, the public use of laptops, and the rage for fitness and health. "Wellness," she tells us, "succeeded where the Volstead Act failed." Evidence given of alcohol's bad rap is that the word "hangover" is a relatively recent one, and that the "modern hangover may be attributed partly to our stern morning sobriety" (we no longer take the salubrious morning belt of yesteryear) "and partly to guilt." I don't think so. The malady referred to as the hangover has had, for centuries, a most fitting designation: "crapulence ." The more recent term sounds, in comparison, positively wholesome.
Holland is also incensed by drink snobs, those "connoisseurs and critics, priests of ritual, sniffers and tasters, discerning scholars, scowling thoughtfully into their glass." She complains that "recently a new breed of ale has sprung up, to respectful notice, so elegantly brewed, so complex and nuanced, that it can't be called ale at all, it's 'barley wine.' Its customers are quite, quite different from sweaty old Joe Six-Pack with his canned Budweiser." Well, yes -- but no. Your barley-wine bibber -- and I speak as a former barmaid in England -- has been, for most of the hundred-plus years that the drink has been brewed, the little old lady who sits at the table snugged away in the corner. One day she will be me: there with my book, my pint days behind me, sipping away quietly -- only occasionally roaring, "Turn down that horrible music."
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
