Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition

Norton Essays in American History

by Norman H. Clark

This book traces the efforts of American society to legislate protective barriers against on of its most public devastations―drunkenness. It shows the profound impact of the prohibition movement on political history before 1916 and analyzes its ambiguous triumph in the 1920s. In doing so, it reveals the relationship between liquor control and the unique moral history of the American family. Here is social history at its best, wiping away the myth and legends of the past.

Genres: History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading history, I rediscovered while racing through this book, is like watching a movie or television show wherein the first scene shown to the audience is the last scene chronologically, and you spend the entire experience trying to puzzle out the way that what you are seeing subsequently will lead to what you saw at the beginning.

Reading Deliver Us from Evil was fascinating because it presented the struggle for and subsequently against Prohibition in the context of thick threads in American society which are still present, with slightly different names, in the modern political debates over abortion, drugs, separation of church and state and multiculturalism. A broad sketch of "Pietist" (WASP) and "Liturgical" (Foreign, Catholic) components of American religious thought was highly informative. It is very interesting to realize that without knowing it one has inherited a variety of social and political biases. The role of women in both Prohibition and Repeal was also very interesting - the argument being made by Clark is that the prerogative taken by early Suffragettes to ban alcohol as a threat to a conservative social order (the family) was part of the social change which led only a few decades later to women embracing alcohol consumption (and therefore Repeal) as symbolic of their new freedoms from the very social circumstances they defended before.

Another reason to read the book is to get a good sense of the degree to which drinking was an actual problem in the pre-Prohbition days, and why, and how, after Prohibition destroyed the greatest excesses of the Saloon days, it was no longer necessary socially, and could be repealed.

This book is so relevant to modern social and political questions that I highly recommend everyone read it or some other equivalent work on the the question of Prohibition.

[Rebecca Dunbar · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent sociological review of the history of the Temperance movement, the Prohibition era and its legacy.