Introduction

In a recent book review about marijuana, Albert Goldman (1979, p. 250) wrote:

The only controls should be those that are imposed to protect the public from bogus or polluted merchandise. With the dreadful example of Prohibition before us, it seems nearly unthinkable that we should have done it again: taken some basic human craving and perverted it into a vast system of organized crime and social corruption. When will we learn that in a democracy it is for the people to tell the government, not for the government to tell the people, what makes them happy?

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This “dreadful example” is now so firmly established that it has become a maxim of popular culture, a paradigm of bad social policy, and a ritual invocation of opponents of a variety of sumptuary laws. The record of the 18th Amendment often has been read by libertarians as a morality tale. Detached and abstracted from their historically specific contexts and presented as a single crusade around which cranks and fanatics have clustered for 150 years, temperance and prohibition have been portrayed as touchstones of bigotry. The lineage of reaction is traced straight from sin-obsessed Puritans, to evangelical extremists and Know-Nothings, to nativists and Klansmen, and most recently to McCarthyites and antiabortionists.

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The record of efforts to restrict drinking is, of course, far too complicated to warrant such axiomatic disparagement. But despite important, recent scholarship, and scientific validation of arguments once ridiculed, claims established by dint of repetition have achieved a kind of incantatory truth and ultimately have been enshrined as pieces of political folk wisdom (Warner and Rossett 1975).1

During the 1920s, partisan tracts featured titles like Prohibition Versus Civilization: Analyzing the Dry Psychosis and The Prohibition Mania: A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others (Darrow and Yarros 1927, Barnes 1932).2 Repeal institutionalized this propaganda and established an ideological legacy that historians came to inherit long after the battles had ended and the moral climate had cooled. As the antiliquor movement disappeared from the nation’s political agenda, it also withered as a subject for research and study, not to reappear again until the early 1960s. Two books, Prohibition: The Era of Excess and Symbolic Cru sade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, made important contributions to this recovery.

In Prohibition: The Era of Excess, Andrew Sinclair (1962) described the prohibitionist movement as a national St. Vitus’s Dance.3 Employing both Freudian and neo-Marxist categories, he attempted to reveal the “aggressive prurience” behind the masks of religious zeal; he argued that dominant economic interests, anxious to distract the gaze of reformers from the problem of the trusts, helped spread this “rural evangelical virus.” Sinclair’s portrayal of Prohibition as a florid outburst of a persistent, lurking paranoia backed by big business substituted indictment for objective examination. It represented a sophisticated caricature that drew heavily on the stereotypes of earlier critics.

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Joseph Gusfield’s (1963) book, Symbolic Crusade, constituted a fundamental advance beyond the psychohistorical exposé favored by Sinclair. Gusfield treated efforts to curb drinking not as mass hysteria but rather as a middle-class movement designed to defend lost status. He rejected the view of temperance and prohibition as repositories of a Snopes-like aberration and reoriented the terms of discussion. His analy sis established a new standard of inquiry—dispassionate, free from polemical shrillness, and motivated by the desire to explain rather than carp or debunk. Nonetheless, Gusfield’s work was not primarily directed toward explicating alcohol control as a thing in itself. “Issues like fluoridation or domestic communism or temperance,” he wrote, “may be seen to generate irrational emotions and excessive zeal if we fail to recognize them as symbolic rather than instrumental issues.” As an example of what he termed “expressive politics,” temperance “operates within an arena in which feelings, emotions, and affect are displaced and where action is for the sake of expression rather than for the sake of influencing or controlling the distribution of valued objects” (Gusfield 1963, pp. 11, 23).

Gusfield’s approach provided a store of subtle insights, but its conceptual richness tended to overwhelm other investigative strategies. The explicit, self-identified concerns around which people in the antiliquor movement mobilized, the particular regulatory techniques that were experimented with, and the nature of their impact are all areas that, to a large extent, have lain historically fallow. The emphasis on the “expressive” and on rationalization, projection, and displacement as key analytic tools has had the effect of distracting attention from the actual content of the movement and shifting the level of discourse from the literal to the figurative.

Gusfield’s influence is a mark of the power of his formulations. But the struggles that people waged in the past to regulate or proscribe alcohol do not necessarily have to be treated as a nexus of symptoms. Without denying the continued usefulness of Gusfield’s concept of expressive politics, it is necessary also to recognize the worth of complementary models of investigation. If, as Room (1974, p. 11) suggests, “Our chief aim is to open up the range of frameworks within which the prevention of alcohol problems is discussed,” and if accomplishing this requires that we better understand how the governing images evolved around that which we orient our current strategies of remediation, then we must attempt to understand the antiliquor movement, both as a symbolic crusade and as a massive, sustained organizing effort with a highly developed set of tactics and coherent, tangible goals.

Any attempt to discover a “usable past” in the history of American temperance and prohibition requires first that investigators abandon contemptuous reductionism and disenthrall themselves from lurid myths; this process has been largely accomplished, and scholars like Gusfield deserve respect and appreciation for breaking ground. Those, however, who seek to develop improved policy instruments around alcohol use and abuse must be creative scavengers willing to approach prior efforts both as cultural artifacts and as a body of experience capable of yielding valuable clues to the possibilities of regulation today. Through examination of how consumption patterns have changed and the basis for computing the social costs of drinking and through identification of various tactics of control, their original settings, and the reasons for their relative success or failure, the historian can develop a perspective that elucidates the policy choices to be debated.

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