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Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition
This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you've never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.
When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.
Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitive global history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical American evangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations of the American west.
Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.
When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.
Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitive global history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical American evangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations of the American west.
Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.
725 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2021
29 people are currently reading
2236 people want to read
About the author
Mark Lawrence Schrad
5 books49 followersMark Lawrence Schrad is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Russian politics and history, post-communist democratization, comparative politics, international law, international organizations, and globalization. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA from Georgetown University and undergraduate degrees from the University of Northern Iowa, while also having attended Bryn Mawr College, Moscow State University and Moscow International University.
His first book, "The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave" was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
His second book, "Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy and the Secret History of the Russian State" was released by Oxford University Press in 2014, and has been translated into a half dozen world languages.
His new book, "Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition" is available in July of 2021. Hailed as "one of the best nonfiction books of 2021," and recipient of a Kirkus star for exceptional merit, it uncovers the long hidden history of prohibitionism worldwide, resulting in a fundamental reappraisal of the role of temperance and prohibitionism in American history.
His first book, "The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave" was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.
His second book, "Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy and the Secret History of the Russian State" was released by Oxford University Press in 2014, and has been translated into a half dozen world languages.
His new book, "Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition" is available in July of 2021. Hailed as "one of the best nonfiction books of 2021," and recipient of a Kirkus star for exceptional merit, it uncovers the long hidden history of prohibitionism worldwide, resulting in a fundamental reappraisal of the role of temperance and prohibitionism in American history.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
December 27, 2021
This is my 372nd booze book. I’ve read a plethora of American Prohibition books… including every American book Schrad cited. This book is by far the best. This book made me uncomfortable as it challenged much, if not most, of what I’ve read about Prohibition. Growth is good… and this book is great.
January 17, 2022
A comparatively young scholar, Mark Lawrence Schrad has so far made alcohol prohibition the focus of his academic career. In this hefty volume, the product of research in 17 countries, Schrad argues that prohibition was not the creation of urban-rural, anti-immigrant, anti-minority cultural conflict (pace Richard Hofstadter and Joseph Gusfield), nor was prohibition limited to the United States alone. Rather, Schrad argues that the prohibition movement was both global and progressive, intended to aid oppressed peoples in their fight against greedy capitalists and capitalist-controlled Western governments. (This revisionist thesis is expounded in the preface, the introduction, and the conclusion, chapters that could be read first by those who want to be clear about the book’s theoretical underpinnings right from the beginning). Schrad also emphasizes that prohibitionists were not as much interested in trying to prevent individuals from drinking as they were in trying to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol by predatory liquor traffickers and their governments. And far from intending to be an apologist for social and religious conservatives, Schrad even jokes that he “wrote much of this book with a Manhattan cocktail in hand.”
I'm unsure about how many general readers will engage with this text of nearly six hundred pages, but Schrad certainly writes clearly enough, and he eschews the current shibboleths of academia—though it’s hard to go wrong in contemporary higher education if an author stresses feminism, anti-colonialism, and civil rights activism as an integral part of his thesis.
In the fashion of Barbara Tuchman, Schrad is also able to weave together many of the threads of his book through their connection with a single colorful prohibitionist publicist, William E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson (1862-1945). Likewise, even those readers who are well-grounded in period history will discover fascinating tidbits in virtually every chapter, such as that Carrie Nation drank beer, or that the attempted assassin of Theodore Roosevelt was saloon owner who downed five or six drinks before putting a bullet in TR’s chest, or that a chapter of the WCTU in Istanbul enrolled a hundred Muslim women, or that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, supported Turkish prohibition while simultaneously drinking himself to death.
Like most revisionists, Schrad pushes his thesis awfully hard. But doubtless all future authors of academic works on prohibition will at least have to address his claim that “everything you know about Prohibition is wrong.”
I'm unsure about how many general readers will engage with this text of nearly six hundred pages, but Schrad certainly writes clearly enough, and he eschews the current shibboleths of academia—though it’s hard to go wrong in contemporary higher education if an author stresses feminism, anti-colonialism, and civil rights activism as an integral part of his thesis.
In the fashion of Barbara Tuchman, Schrad is also able to weave together many of the threads of his book through their connection with a single colorful prohibitionist publicist, William E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson (1862-1945). Likewise, even those readers who are well-grounded in period history will discover fascinating tidbits in virtually every chapter, such as that Carrie Nation drank beer, or that the attempted assassin of Theodore Roosevelt was saloon owner who downed five or six drinks before putting a bullet in TR’s chest, or that a chapter of the WCTU in Istanbul enrolled a hundred Muslim women, or that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, supported Turkish prohibition while simultaneously drinking himself to death.
Like most revisionists, Schrad pushes his thesis awfully hard. But doubtless all future authors of academic works on prohibition will at least have to address his claim that “everything you know about Prohibition is wrong.”
February 17, 2022
This was an amazingly well-written book that undoes a lot of the myths surrounding prohibition- namely that it was a movement led by rural white reactionaries and evangelicals. Schrad internationalizes the movement for us and tells of how the industrialized liquor trade was an instrument of colonialism and violence. We know the colonizer came with the Bible and the gun: but I now know there was a wagon full of hard liquor to go with it. I learned about Turkish, South Asian, African, and Irish prohibitionists. Learned about how the Russian prohibition movement was tied to the movement to free the masses from the oppressive rule of Tsars. How in Africa, the Philippines, and among the indigenous population of North America, fighting the trade of alcohol was seen as part and parcel as the movement to fight colonial land grabs and exploitation. And, contrary to the portrait Ken Burns presented in his PBS doc, I learned virtually every late 19th Century and early 20th Century leader of the Black freedom struggle in America also favored prohibition.
The movement was never about punishing the individual drinker- it was about combating an industry responsible for many social ills and exploitation in America and internationally one that was used as an instrument of colonialism and debt slavery. In America, where anyone not consuming alcohol on a regular basis is seen as abnormal, this is a refreshing look.
Thank you for introducing me to the likes of Pussyfoot Johnson!
The movement was never about punishing the individual drinker- it was about combating an industry responsible for many social ills and exploitation in America and internationally one that was used as an instrument of colonialism and debt slavery. In America, where anyone not consuming alcohol on a regular basis is seen as abnormal, this is a refreshing look.
Thank you for introducing me to the likes of Pussyfoot Johnson!
November 14, 2022
Carrie Nation meant well. Booze destroys and the social cost to society is immense. The prohibitionists’ intentions were noble and they wanted to destroy ‘big alcohol’, not drinkers or the drunks. Their intentions led to prohibition no matter their original good intentions, and the proverbial path to perdition is paved with good intentions.
The colonizer will first occupy your lands and then sell your resources back to you on credit and tell you all the time it’s a good deal for you while getting you drunk and dependent on distilled spirits. Alcohol made it all the easier to occupy or destroy the masses while the elites continue to get richer.
There’s no central overriding authority that determines the greater good, there are just exploiters taking advantage of us. The liquor industry is just one of those exploiters and featured prominently in this book told through the eyes of prohibitionist or the greedy eyes of the exploiters.
This book tells the history of prohibition through the prohibitionists’ own words and intentions and that’s a dangerous thing. They meant well, booze kills and makes us stupid and big alcohol really aren’t that much different from the Sackler family who foisted opioids on to an unsuspecting nation. Last week Walgreens and CVS agreed to a paltry fine of 10 billion dollars for their part in the madness. So, what! They’ll still sell the opioids continuing to addict us, but at least we are becoming more aware of the potential problems.
I read a history book once on Japan and WW II, and it told the genesis of the war from Japan’s perspective. When a historian looks at the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor by using the intentions and words of the Japanese, it all makes sense and one starts to identify with the Japanese and how they were right. Of course, as soon as one steps back one realizes the absurdity and the wrongness of the Japanese attacking real human beings and starting a war. A lot of this book makes that mistake for the prohibitionists. In the end, no matter how you sugar-coat the good intentions of Carrie Nation and the prohibitionists it was going to lead to a total ban on alcohol not just heavy regulation on big alcohol, and prohibition would lead to the chaos that ensued.
The book does its best at making the prohibitionists noble progressive reformers and not narrow-minded nuts, as history made them out to be, but regardless no matter their good intentions of stopping the producers from exploiting the masses, in the end it was going to deny the individual the right to partake in drink.
The author points out how the false comic book characterization of prohibitionists was most likely created by Richard Hofstadter, and I suspect the author is right. Hofstadter seems to get everything wrong with his both sides are to blame perspective and his shallow approach to reflecting about society in general with superficial generalities.
In the book ‘The Radical Right the New American Right’ from about 1963 edited by Bell, Hofstadter’s essays stood out in their tone-deafness for their lack of self-awareness for what was really happening in America at that time, and his book ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’, Hofstadter showed his both-siderism tone-deafness also. I appreciate this book in highlighting Hofstadter for his grievous errors concerning the players advocating for prohibition and how he influenced wrongly a whole crop of others who followed him.
While it’s always important to understand history through the intentions of the players, sometimes a better history is told by what actually happened instead of the good intentions hoped for, and this book was too generous in its defense of the players.
The colonizer will first occupy your lands and then sell your resources back to you on credit and tell you all the time it’s a good deal for you while getting you drunk and dependent on distilled spirits. Alcohol made it all the easier to occupy or destroy the masses while the elites continue to get richer.
There’s no central overriding authority that determines the greater good, there are just exploiters taking advantage of us. The liquor industry is just one of those exploiters and featured prominently in this book told through the eyes of prohibitionist or the greedy eyes of the exploiters.
This book tells the history of prohibition through the prohibitionists’ own words and intentions and that’s a dangerous thing. They meant well, booze kills and makes us stupid and big alcohol really aren’t that much different from the Sackler family who foisted opioids on to an unsuspecting nation. Last week Walgreens and CVS agreed to a paltry fine of 10 billion dollars for their part in the madness. So, what! They’ll still sell the opioids continuing to addict us, but at least we are becoming more aware of the potential problems.
I read a history book once on Japan and WW II, and it told the genesis of the war from Japan’s perspective. When a historian looks at the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor by using the intentions and words of the Japanese, it all makes sense and one starts to identify with the Japanese and how they were right. Of course, as soon as one steps back one realizes the absurdity and the wrongness of the Japanese attacking real human beings and starting a war. A lot of this book makes that mistake for the prohibitionists. In the end, no matter how you sugar-coat the good intentions of Carrie Nation and the prohibitionists it was going to lead to a total ban on alcohol not just heavy regulation on big alcohol, and prohibition would lead to the chaos that ensued.
The book does its best at making the prohibitionists noble progressive reformers and not narrow-minded nuts, as history made them out to be, but regardless no matter their good intentions of stopping the producers from exploiting the masses, in the end it was going to deny the individual the right to partake in drink.
The author points out how the false comic book characterization of prohibitionists was most likely created by Richard Hofstadter, and I suspect the author is right. Hofstadter seems to get everything wrong with his both sides are to blame perspective and his shallow approach to reflecting about society in general with superficial generalities.
In the book ‘The Radical Right the New American Right’ from about 1963 edited by Bell, Hofstadter’s essays stood out in their tone-deafness for their lack of self-awareness for what was really happening in America at that time, and his book ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’, Hofstadter showed his both-siderism tone-deafness also. I appreciate this book in highlighting Hofstadter for his grievous errors concerning the players advocating for prohibition and how he influenced wrongly a whole crop of others who followed him.
While it’s always important to understand history through the intentions of the players, sometimes a better history is told by what actually happened instead of the good intentions hoped for, and this book was too generous in its defense of the players.
July 14, 2023
This book had a lot of promise that I'm not sure it lived up to. It was clear from the beginning that Lawrence was going to take a sort of "anti-colonialist" or social justice type look at history, which I'm already suspicious of (not because I disagree, but more because it feels like it's going into the endeavor with an agenda). He claims to have taken inspiration from Howard Zinn, and it definitely shows. However, it was very interesting that he explicitly says that he's looking to tell the global story of prohibition rather than a US-centric view, which I really like.
The book comes off as extremely pro-prohibition, though I'm not sure if Lawrence is actually in favor of prohibitionism or if he's just trying to give an account of how prohibitionists viewed themselves. In many ways, this book boils down to, "Hey, did you know that prohibition was actually largely driven by liberals / progressives?" From my reading of it, Lawrence seems to be indicating that prohibition wasn't actually bad because the people in favor of it were largely not religious conservatives. I think it's fair to try to say that prohibition was not a strictly religious conservative movement - though from my understanding it was a kind of big tent, and considering how many people have been telling compelling "prohibition was religious conservatives forcing temperance on everyone" stories, it seems fair to say that there were also strains of temperance thinking that did not go through the progressive movements. Even if it were the case that prohibition was largely a progressive reform, that doesn't make it a good idea. I don't know if Lawrence explicitly says this, but he certainly implies it. He often brings up a quote "all big ideas go together", usually referring to things like abolition, labor rights and other progressive movements that are seen in good lights today, but I can't help noticing that eugenics is missing from Lawrence's list of progressive movements...
In the book, Lawrence consistently makes the arguments that the prohibitionists were making, but neglects the fact that these arguments were made before we saw the outcome of prohibition. Both alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition seem to be enormous failures, and the argument against them is not, "drugs and alcohol are fine, actually", it's that prohibition is a net harm. I think that Lawrence's general argument here is that the prohibitionists at the time were working against a corrupt alcohol distribution system, and they were trying to break down the unscrupulous producers of alcohol. He also seems to think that saloons were much more exploitative in the past than they are today, and that this changed because of prohibition. I am sympathetic to the view that there were more unsavory saloons in the past, but the idea that prohibition ushered in a new era of bartenders taking your keys when you have too many drinks feels like some post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. By and large US and Western society has been naturally trending towards higher trust, even in the absence of major social movements. It also doesn't seem to me like the temperance activists were really making the case for regulation of the liquor market or anything, they were obviously trying to ban it outright.
To the extent that Lawrence is saying "prohibition wasn't actually all that bad, actually", I can't help but read his repeated insistence that he wrote a lot of this book with a Manhattan in hand as the (to me) unsufferable paternalism so common in technocratic thinking. To be fair to him, his position mainly seems to be that prohibition was a movement to stop alcohol distribution from being so corrupt, and I guess somehow maybe by enacting prohibition (which, by all accounts except Lawrence's, made alcohol distribution so much worse), all that changed and it became much easier to just have one drink. Still, he wasn't saying, "Oh they were wrong about what the solution was but they had identified a real problem", he just tries to rehabilitate them.
As for the idea that this book looks at global perspectives on prohibition, I was somewhat disappointed with the non-US coverage. A lot of it involved basically identifying famous people like Ghandi, Lenin, Tolstoy and (interestingly) Ataturk¹, plus US prohibitionists showing up to help out with the cause. Lawrence's contention seems to be that "make the natives alcoholics, then say that they are consititutionally unfit for self-rule" was part of the United Kingdom's colonialist playbook and played out time and again. He contends that many anti-colonial activists had identified this as a root cause of dysfunction, and wanted to ban alcohol consumption as a foreign malign influence. Many aspects of that seem like a plausible story, though I think you can tell other plausible stories in many cases about the motivations of everyone involved that would change how the participants are seen. I think a lot of the book was focused on this kind of narrative, and I got the impression that I wasn't getting a holistic picture of the moment.
This review has been mostly criticism, but I'll end with giving Lawrence some credit. He mentions that before he wrote this book, he favored the dominant narrative, and came to this alternative history only reluctantly. Despite the fact that I disagree with it, I am happy to hear people working out alternative narratives. Much of what he says here is plausible, though I think his conclusions seem over-broad. It seems worthwhile to weave this into the overall narrative that people tell about the history of prohibition, and I hope to see further expansions on this work, preferably with a more neutral, descriptivist bent.
3 of 5 stars
¹Who was himself a serious alcoholic.
The book comes off as extremely pro-prohibition, though I'm not sure if Lawrence is actually in favor of prohibitionism or if he's just trying to give an account of how prohibitionists viewed themselves. In many ways, this book boils down to, "Hey, did you know that prohibition was actually largely driven by liberals / progressives?" From my reading of it, Lawrence seems to be indicating that prohibition wasn't actually bad because the people in favor of it were largely not religious conservatives. I think it's fair to try to say that prohibition was not a strictly religious conservative movement - though from my understanding it was a kind of big tent, and considering how many people have been telling compelling "prohibition was religious conservatives forcing temperance on everyone" stories, it seems fair to say that there were also strains of temperance thinking that did not go through the progressive movements. Even if it were the case that prohibition was largely a progressive reform, that doesn't make it a good idea. I don't know if Lawrence explicitly says this, but he certainly implies it. He often brings up a quote "all big ideas go together", usually referring to things like abolition, labor rights and other progressive movements that are seen in good lights today, but I can't help noticing that eugenics is missing from Lawrence's list of progressive movements...
In the book, Lawrence consistently makes the arguments that the prohibitionists were making, but neglects the fact that these arguments were made before we saw the outcome of prohibition. Both alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition seem to be enormous failures, and the argument against them is not, "drugs and alcohol are fine, actually", it's that prohibition is a net harm. I think that Lawrence's general argument here is that the prohibitionists at the time were working against a corrupt alcohol distribution system, and they were trying to break down the unscrupulous producers of alcohol. He also seems to think that saloons were much more exploitative in the past than they are today, and that this changed because of prohibition. I am sympathetic to the view that there were more unsavory saloons in the past, but the idea that prohibition ushered in a new era of bartenders taking your keys when you have too many drinks feels like some post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. By and large US and Western society has been naturally trending towards higher trust, even in the absence of major social movements. It also doesn't seem to me like the temperance activists were really making the case for regulation of the liquor market or anything, they were obviously trying to ban it outright.
To the extent that Lawrence is saying "prohibition wasn't actually all that bad, actually", I can't help but read his repeated insistence that he wrote a lot of this book with a Manhattan in hand as the (to me) unsufferable paternalism so common in technocratic thinking. To be fair to him, his position mainly seems to be that prohibition was a movement to stop alcohol distribution from being so corrupt, and I guess somehow maybe by enacting prohibition (which, by all accounts except Lawrence's, made alcohol distribution so much worse), all that changed and it became much easier to just have one drink. Still, he wasn't saying, "Oh they were wrong about what the solution was but they had identified a real problem", he just tries to rehabilitate them.
As for the idea that this book looks at global perspectives on prohibition, I was somewhat disappointed with the non-US coverage. A lot of it involved basically identifying famous people like Ghandi, Lenin, Tolstoy and (interestingly) Ataturk¹, plus US prohibitionists showing up to help out with the cause. Lawrence's contention seems to be that "make the natives alcoholics, then say that they are consititutionally unfit for self-rule" was part of the United Kingdom's colonialist playbook and played out time and again. He contends that many anti-colonial activists had identified this as a root cause of dysfunction, and wanted to ban alcohol consumption as a foreign malign influence. Many aspects of that seem like a plausible story, though I think you can tell other plausible stories in many cases about the motivations of everyone involved that would change how the participants are seen. I think a lot of the book was focused on this kind of narrative, and I got the impression that I wasn't getting a holistic picture of the moment.
This review has been mostly criticism, but I'll end with giving Lawrence some credit. He mentions that before he wrote this book, he favored the dominant narrative, and came to this alternative history only reluctantly. Despite the fact that I disagree with it, I am happy to hear people working out alternative narratives. Much of what he says here is plausible, though I think his conclusions seem over-broad. It seems worthwhile to weave this into the overall narrative that people tell about the history of prohibition, and I hope to see further expansions on this work, preferably with a more neutral, descriptivist bent.
3 of 5 stars
¹Who was himself a serious alcoholic.
February 12, 2022
I learned a lot, not just about prohibition. I did lose steam in the second half.
April 14, 2024
Deep and scholarly, but readable. Compelling and fascinating.
August 14, 2022
Did I not read the book jacket summary before picking this book? I somehow thought it was a book about law enforcement vs. the mob/bootleggers. I was prepared for stories about rum running tunnels and raids on speakeasies and shit. Imagine my surprise when I realized within the first few pages that this is actually "a work of comparative and transnational history" ... of temperance.
Wtf? I almost DNFed, thus proving my status as a borderline alcoholic and libertine. Temperance?! PAH! I only hesitated because the author himself said that he wrote this book with a drink in hand and was no teetotaler or Bible thumper. Well played, author. Of course, I couldn't have stopped anyways, because this was a work assignment, so I kept going, and LIKED IT.
It seems I, like many of my friends and probably most of the alcohol-loving world, have severely misunderstood the temperance movement! See, in ye olden days (and kind of up till now), liquor production and sales were always associated with the state/the patriarchy/the rich/power. In many places, "liquor trafficking was the pillar of the state itself". There were monarchies funded by liquor trade, that held monopolies on it. All this at the expense of the people's welfare and wellbeing. Rich people don't care if the working class drink themselves to death, so long as they keep up production numbers and profits!
This book about temperance is in reality a book about social reform and progress! Schrad repeats over and over again that temperance was about criminalizing liquor rackets and not drinkers. Kind of like modern-day drug rehab efforts? They understood that alcoholism often stemmed from poverty and wasn't just a sign that the poor were more subject to sinning or whatever.
The most heartbreaking chapters were the ones about colonization, both in the United States and abroad. Native Americans called hard liquor "the white man's fire water". We usually think of angry, uptight, middle-aged white women when we think of temperance. But many early prohibitionists were PoC, and very open-minded and progressive, and some of the earliest prohibitionists were Native American tribespeople. They recognized that liquor was part of "the British imperialist playbook", "a demand that perpetrated itself", profit regardless of the damage done. Many of the conflicts that arose in the colonies in the 1700s/1800s happened because settlers were "profiting off the misery of their [Native] neighbors". An even grimmer addition to the already grim settler-colonial narrative!
The temperance movement was a sociological, political, and economic one. It was inclusive in a time when many social reform movements were (surprisingly) not. It worked because of this, and it fell apart once the other reform movements that latched themselves onto it started succeeding at achieving their goals. I liked what I consider this "rewriting" of history. Or reexamination, I guess. I appreciate when credit is given where it's due, and the temperance movement deserves more credit than it gets in the high school history books.
Wtf? I almost DNFed, thus proving my status as a borderline alcoholic and libertine. Temperance?! PAH! I only hesitated because the author himself said that he wrote this book with a drink in hand and was no teetotaler or Bible thumper. Well played, author. Of course, I couldn't have stopped anyways, because this was a work assignment, so I kept going, and LIKED IT.
It seems I, like many of my friends and probably most of the alcohol-loving world, have severely misunderstood the temperance movement! See, in ye olden days (and kind of up till now), liquor production and sales were always associated with the state/the patriarchy/the rich/power. In many places, "liquor trafficking was the pillar of the state itself". There were monarchies funded by liquor trade, that held monopolies on it. All this at the expense of the people's welfare and wellbeing. Rich people don't care if the working class drink themselves to death, so long as they keep up production numbers and profits!
This book about temperance is in reality a book about social reform and progress! Schrad repeats over and over again that temperance was about criminalizing liquor rackets and not drinkers. Kind of like modern-day drug rehab efforts? They understood that alcoholism often stemmed from poverty and wasn't just a sign that the poor were more subject to sinning or whatever.
The most heartbreaking chapters were the ones about colonization, both in the United States and abroad. Native Americans called hard liquor "the white man's fire water". We usually think of angry, uptight, middle-aged white women when we think of temperance. But many early prohibitionists were PoC, and very open-minded and progressive, and some of the earliest prohibitionists were Native American tribespeople. They recognized that liquor was part of "the British imperialist playbook", "a demand that perpetrated itself", profit regardless of the damage done. Many of the conflicts that arose in the colonies in the 1700s/1800s happened because settlers were "profiting off the misery of their [Native] neighbors". An even grimmer addition to the already grim settler-colonial narrative!
The temperance movement was a sociological, political, and economic one. It was inclusive in a time when many social reform movements were (surprisingly) not. It worked because of this, and it fell apart once the other reform movements that latched themselves onto it started succeeding at achieving their goals. I liked what I consider this "rewriting" of history. Or reexamination, I guess. I appreciate when credit is given where it's due, and the temperance movement deserves more credit than it gets in the high school history books.
August 24, 2025
The Prohibition movement was led by rural, white, religious fundamentalists wanting to control urban America. At least that's the conventional wisdom.
"Smashing the Liquor Machine" is revisionist history at its finest. It provides a new interpretation that undermines the accepted version about alcohol prohibition and the 18th Amendment. Mark Lawrence Schrad calls Prohibition "that most misunderstood chapter in U.S. history.” It turns out that even the name "prohibition" is misleading.
When we hear that something is prohibited, we understand that its possession and use is illegal, as with cocaine. During Prohibition, however, alcohol was not illegal to possess or to consume under federal law.
Elliot Ness and his Untouchables were not busting people for drinking or for carrying a flask. What was forbidden was the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol, a drug with intoxicating and addicting qualities.
“Prohibition was not about the stuff in the bottle, but about the predatory capitalism of the liquor traffic,” Schrad writes. The Anti-Saloon League was not called the Anti-Liquor or Anti-Drinker League.
The term "alcohol prohibition" was almost never used during the Progressive Era. It wasn't until the 1970s that it came into common usage. Meanwhile, the term "liquor traffic," which once was common, is rarely heard today.
Another common misunderstanding is that the temperance movement was a conservative or reactionary attempt by rural, white Bible thumpers to control the behavior of immigrants and minorities.
The fact is that the Progressive movement was a reaction to the emergence of giant trusts that lacked regulation and harmed the public good. Progressives sought to rein in the shortcomings of unregulated capitalism, "of which the liquor traffic was the most insidious example."
Why "insidious"? The 80/20 rule applies to many human activities including alcohol consumption. It means that 20 percent of drinkers consume about 80 percent of alcohol. A 2023 analysis by Bernstein estimates that one-fifth of imbibers consume 90% of the alcohol. That subset of imbibers consists of bingers, problem drinkers and alcoholics. Liquor industry profits depend upon that 20 percent for between four-fifths to nine-tenths of its sales. In other words, addiction is profitable. Without drunknness and addiction, Big Alcohol would be but a shadow of itself. Refusing to serve inebriated patrons, known drunkards or minors subverts the bottom line.
That's why temperance advocates saw liquor trafficking as exploitation by profiting from insobrierty and addiction and the resulting harm to society.
This powerful Progressive movement enacted four Constitutional amendments: 16 (income tax), 17 (direct election of senators), 18 (Prohibition), and 19 (women's suffrage). "Prohibition was not some aberration from Progressivism; prohibtion was progressivism,"Schrad writes.
Leading progressives favored all four reforms and more. Those who favored women's suffrage, the right to unionize, taxing the rich, shutting down alcohol trafficking and regulating trusts were hardly reactionaries. "All great reforms go together," said Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist who also strongly embraced temperance. "I am a temperance man because I am an anti-slavery man," he said.
Douglass was just one of the leaders challenging the status quo who also favored closing saloons as well women's suffrage and other reforms. Others included William Lloyd Garrison, Francis Willard, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Wendell Phillips,1 Teddy Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan. Not a conservative in the bunch!
History looks kindly upon abolitionists and suffragists, but not upon prohibitionists, "even though they are the exact same people."
The Women's Christian Temperance Union was racially integrated, a rarity at the time. Temperance and women's suffrage and were the twin causes of the WCTU's agenda. "All of these great causes go together," said suffragist pioneer Lucretia Mott. "That the modern women's movement in the United States was firmly rooted in temperance has always been clear," Schrad writes.
The founder of the WCTU was Frances Willard from Evanston, Illinois, whose parents had been conductors on the Underground Railroad. The WCTU's declaration of principles included not only women's suffrage but a living wage, an eight-hour workday, and women's equality before the law. Willard's approach to social reform was "do everything" rather than to be a single-issue group. For 1874, it was a radical agenda.
The temperance movement was multi-racial and multi-ethnic. It wasn't only mainline Protestant churches supporting reform. Black churches embraced prohibition. Native Americans had long been strong supporters of curbing the liquor trade in their territory.
Female political activism was no rightwing tradition. On the contrary, conservatives opposed women's activism. The opponents of the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League were the liquor industry and their conservative allies defending the status quo that denied womem the vote. Ironically, historians in the 1950s and 60s mixed up who were the reactionaries and the reformers.
Why did a decisive majority of Americans, in which moralizing evangelicals were only a small part, eventually favor shutting saloons? Because they could see the harm caused by selling to alcoholics and problem drinkers.
They had seen scientific research in the early 1900s suggesting that drinking was bad for health. They could see the accidents and violent crime attendant to heavy drinking as well as the gambling, prostitution, and corruption found in many saloons. They agreed with TR that "when the liquor men are allowed to do as they wish, they are sure to debauch, not only the body social, but the body politic also."
A recent American experience with exploitative drug marketing involved the opiod epidemic "in which predatory pharmaceutical companies reaped obscene profits from the misery of their addicted customers." It was conservative champions of free enterprise who resisted stricter regulations of Big Pharma -- just as with the liquor industry. It is not reactionary, however, to fight against companies that profit from false marketing of a drug that leads to widespread addiction and death.
With the opiod epidemic, Americans recognized that "the unfortunate addicts aren't the villains; they're the victims." For some reason, we don't apply that same recognition to alcoholics.
Speaking of addiction and death, illegal liquor sales to Native Americans devastated their society. That's why prominent leaders such as Blackhawk and Little Turtle repeatedly begged for a ban on marketing in Indian territories and for strict
enforcement of the ban. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson supported those bans.
The first American prohibitionists were native Americans, not white nativists. Although whites illegally sold or traded alcohol in the territories, natives were blamed for being drunken derelicts. Their drunkenness was used to justify their explusion.
Schrad notes that history laments the "unquenchable thirst" of Native Americans while ignoring the "insatiable greed of white traders, acting in clear defiance of the law." The most prominent trader was John Jacob Astor who became the richest man in America trading whiskey for furs.
The goal of the movement to ban saloons was not to punish drinkers. It was to help those who were exploited by liquor dealers whose profits depend on addiction, drunkeness, misery and poverty. It is not drinking that's the sin, said evangelical leader Walter Rauschenbush; it's the insatiable greed of capitalism.
To better understand the American temperance movement, Schrad puts it in the context of the movement in large parts of the world. He describes how colonizers, including the US in the Philippines, brought distilled liquor and saloons to cultures such as South Africa and India that had never before encountered rum and brandy. "Modern empires were distinctively capitalist creations, founded, shaped and driven by the profit motive... Distilled liquor was the engine that fueled white colonial exploitation and conquest." "Indeed, colonialism in Africa. Asia, and North America was achieved with bottles as much as bullets."
As addiction spread, "the colonizers laid the blame for this horrid state of affairs not on themselves, but on the victims: pointing to the 'insatiable' demand for this heretofore unknown liquor, usually wrapped in some self-serving justification about free markets and capitalist trade."
The harmful effects on the colonial society elicited powerful temperance movements. Gandhi called the white colonizer's liquor trade an "enemy of mankind," a "curse of civilization," and "one of the most greatly felt evils of the British rule." Schrad describes temperance as "a native struggle for sovereignty against a white, colonial liquor traffic."
In the early 20th century, more than a dozen countries prohibited liquor traffic, most during WWI. They include India, Norway, Russia, and Turkey. "There weren't a whole lot of conservative, Bible-thumping Protestant evangelicals in imperial Russa, or secular Turkey or communist Hungary, but each experimented with prohibition, just like the United States."
Sweden found a way other than prohibition to curb the alcohol problem. It adopted the Gothenburg system, named after a city where the policy began.
The profit motive was removed when city leaders created a private company to have a monopoly on selling alcohol. The target was the profit motive, not the booze itself. Led by prominent citizens, the company's purpose was to reduce overconsumption and to promote the common good. Investors received a maximum 5% profit, and the rest of the profits funded civic needs. Without the usual corporate mandate to maximize profits, the Gothenburg system did not engage in aggressive marketing or in serving intoxicated customers. Once the system spread around the country, consumption was eventually cut in half.
After the repeal of prohibition in the US, a number of states emulated the Gothenburg system by setting up state-run monopolies to sell distilled spirits and, in some cases, beer and wine as well. There are still 17 "control states." There are far fewer liquor outlets in control states than in states where the private sector sells alcoholic beverages. There also tends to be less consumption and less serving of minors or of intoxicated persons.
"How have we gotten history so wrong for so long?" asks Schrad. He attributes it to historian Richard Hofstader and sociologist Joseph Gusfield. They wrote books in 1955 and 1963, respectively, that profoundly shaped the prohibition narrative. They described prohibition as a cultural clash between rural white Protestants and urban immigrants, with a relatively privileged class asserting its authority.
As Schrad points out, however, temperance was supported by exploited communities speaking out against the liquor traffic. It included women, blacks and native Americans. Meanwhile, the liquor traffic was the province of powerful white Christians.
In sum, the target of Prohibition was the liquor industry, not the individual drinker. Possession of small amounts of alcohol was not criminalized. Temperance leaders were not rural, nativist Bible-thumping killjoys. They were abolitionists, suffragists, liberal Christians, opponents of child labor, and trust busters who also wanted to protect the public from the untoward effects of the liquor traffic. Readers of this book will never embrace the false narrative about prohibition again. -30-
"Smashing the Liquor Machine" is revisionist history at its finest. It provides a new interpretation that undermines the accepted version about alcohol prohibition and the 18th Amendment. Mark Lawrence Schrad calls Prohibition "that most misunderstood chapter in U.S. history.” It turns out that even the name "prohibition" is misleading.
When we hear that something is prohibited, we understand that its possession and use is illegal, as with cocaine. During Prohibition, however, alcohol was not illegal to possess or to consume under federal law.
Elliot Ness and his Untouchables were not busting people for drinking or for carrying a flask. What was forbidden was the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcohol, a drug with intoxicating and addicting qualities.
“Prohibition was not about the stuff in the bottle, but about the predatory capitalism of the liquor traffic,” Schrad writes. The Anti-Saloon League was not called the Anti-Liquor or Anti-Drinker League.
The term "alcohol prohibition" was almost never used during the Progressive Era. It wasn't until the 1970s that it came into common usage. Meanwhile, the term "liquor traffic," which once was common, is rarely heard today.
Another common misunderstanding is that the temperance movement was a conservative or reactionary attempt by rural, white Bible thumpers to control the behavior of immigrants and minorities.
The fact is that the Progressive movement was a reaction to the emergence of giant trusts that lacked regulation and harmed the public good. Progressives sought to rein in the shortcomings of unregulated capitalism, "of which the liquor traffic was the most insidious example."
Why "insidious"? The 80/20 rule applies to many human activities including alcohol consumption. It means that 20 percent of drinkers consume about 80 percent of alcohol. A 2023 analysis by Bernstein estimates that one-fifth of imbibers consume 90% of the alcohol. That subset of imbibers consists of bingers, problem drinkers and alcoholics. Liquor industry profits depend upon that 20 percent for between four-fifths to nine-tenths of its sales. In other words, addiction is profitable. Without drunknness and addiction, Big Alcohol would be but a shadow of itself. Refusing to serve inebriated patrons, known drunkards or minors subverts the bottom line.
That's why temperance advocates saw liquor trafficking as exploitation by profiting from insobrierty and addiction and the resulting harm to society.
This powerful Progressive movement enacted four Constitutional amendments: 16 (income tax), 17 (direct election of senators), 18 (Prohibition), and 19 (women's suffrage). "Prohibition was not some aberration from Progressivism; prohibtion was progressivism,"Schrad writes.
Leading progressives favored all four reforms and more. Those who favored women's suffrage, the right to unionize, taxing the rich, shutting down alcohol trafficking and regulating trusts were hardly reactionaries. "All great reforms go together," said Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist who also strongly embraced temperance. "I am a temperance man because I am an anti-slavery man," he said.
Douglass was just one of the leaders challenging the status quo who also favored closing saloons as well women's suffrage and other reforms. Others included William Lloyd Garrison, Francis Willard, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Wendell Phillips,1 Teddy Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan. Not a conservative in the bunch!
History looks kindly upon abolitionists and suffragists, but not upon prohibitionists, "even though they are the exact same people."
The Women's Christian Temperance Union was racially integrated, a rarity at the time. Temperance and women's suffrage and were the twin causes of the WCTU's agenda. "All of these great causes go together," said suffragist pioneer Lucretia Mott. "That the modern women's movement in the United States was firmly rooted in temperance has always been clear," Schrad writes.
The founder of the WCTU was Frances Willard from Evanston, Illinois, whose parents had been conductors on the Underground Railroad. The WCTU's declaration of principles included not only women's suffrage but a living wage, an eight-hour workday, and women's equality before the law. Willard's approach to social reform was "do everything" rather than to be a single-issue group. For 1874, it was a radical agenda.
The temperance movement was multi-racial and multi-ethnic. It wasn't only mainline Protestant churches supporting reform. Black churches embraced prohibition. Native Americans had long been strong supporters of curbing the liquor trade in their territory.
Female political activism was no rightwing tradition. On the contrary, conservatives opposed women's activism. The opponents of the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League were the liquor industry and their conservative allies defending the status quo that denied womem the vote. Ironically, historians in the 1950s and 60s mixed up who were the reactionaries and the reformers.
Why did a decisive majority of Americans, in which moralizing evangelicals were only a small part, eventually favor shutting saloons? Because they could see the harm caused by selling to alcoholics and problem drinkers.
They had seen scientific research in the early 1900s suggesting that drinking was bad for health. They could see the accidents and violent crime attendant to heavy drinking as well as the gambling, prostitution, and corruption found in many saloons. They agreed with TR that "when the liquor men are allowed to do as they wish, they are sure to debauch, not only the body social, but the body politic also."
A recent American experience with exploitative drug marketing involved the opiod epidemic "in which predatory pharmaceutical companies reaped obscene profits from the misery of their addicted customers." It was conservative champions of free enterprise who resisted stricter regulations of Big Pharma -- just as with the liquor industry. It is not reactionary, however, to fight against companies that profit from false marketing of a drug that leads to widespread addiction and death.
With the opiod epidemic, Americans recognized that "the unfortunate addicts aren't the villains; they're the victims." For some reason, we don't apply that same recognition to alcoholics.
Speaking of addiction and death, illegal liquor sales to Native Americans devastated their society. That's why prominent leaders such as Blackhawk and Little Turtle repeatedly begged for a ban on marketing in Indian territories and for strict
enforcement of the ban. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson supported those bans.
The first American prohibitionists were native Americans, not white nativists. Although whites illegally sold or traded alcohol in the territories, natives were blamed for being drunken derelicts. Their drunkenness was used to justify their explusion.
Schrad notes that history laments the "unquenchable thirst" of Native Americans while ignoring the "insatiable greed of white traders, acting in clear defiance of the law." The most prominent trader was John Jacob Astor who became the richest man in America trading whiskey for furs.
The goal of the movement to ban saloons was not to punish drinkers. It was to help those who were exploited by liquor dealers whose profits depend on addiction, drunkeness, misery and poverty. It is not drinking that's the sin, said evangelical leader Walter Rauschenbush; it's the insatiable greed of capitalism.
To better understand the American temperance movement, Schrad puts it in the context of the movement in large parts of the world. He describes how colonizers, including the US in the Philippines, brought distilled liquor and saloons to cultures such as South Africa and India that had never before encountered rum and brandy. "Modern empires were distinctively capitalist creations, founded, shaped and driven by the profit motive... Distilled liquor was the engine that fueled white colonial exploitation and conquest." "Indeed, colonialism in Africa. Asia, and North America was achieved with bottles as much as bullets."
As addiction spread, "the colonizers laid the blame for this horrid state of affairs not on themselves, but on the victims: pointing to the 'insatiable' demand for this heretofore unknown liquor, usually wrapped in some self-serving justification about free markets and capitalist trade."
The harmful effects on the colonial society elicited powerful temperance movements. Gandhi called the white colonizer's liquor trade an "enemy of mankind," a "curse of civilization," and "one of the most greatly felt evils of the British rule." Schrad describes temperance as "a native struggle for sovereignty against a white, colonial liquor traffic."
In the early 20th century, more than a dozen countries prohibited liquor traffic, most during WWI. They include India, Norway, Russia, and Turkey. "There weren't a whole lot of conservative, Bible-thumping Protestant evangelicals in imperial Russa, or secular Turkey or communist Hungary, but each experimented with prohibition, just like the United States."
Sweden found a way other than prohibition to curb the alcohol problem. It adopted the Gothenburg system, named after a city where the policy began.
The profit motive was removed when city leaders created a private company to have a monopoly on selling alcohol. The target was the profit motive, not the booze itself. Led by prominent citizens, the company's purpose was to reduce overconsumption and to promote the common good. Investors received a maximum 5% profit, and the rest of the profits funded civic needs. Without the usual corporate mandate to maximize profits, the Gothenburg system did not engage in aggressive marketing or in serving intoxicated customers. Once the system spread around the country, consumption was eventually cut in half.
After the repeal of prohibition in the US, a number of states emulated the Gothenburg system by setting up state-run monopolies to sell distilled spirits and, in some cases, beer and wine as well. There are still 17 "control states." There are far fewer liquor outlets in control states than in states where the private sector sells alcoholic beverages. There also tends to be less consumption and less serving of minors or of intoxicated persons.
"How have we gotten history so wrong for so long?" asks Schrad. He attributes it to historian Richard Hofstader and sociologist Joseph Gusfield. They wrote books in 1955 and 1963, respectively, that profoundly shaped the prohibition narrative. They described prohibition as a cultural clash between rural white Protestants and urban immigrants, with a relatively privileged class asserting its authority.
As Schrad points out, however, temperance was supported by exploited communities speaking out against the liquor traffic. It included women, blacks and native Americans. Meanwhile, the liquor traffic was the province of powerful white Christians.
In sum, the target of Prohibition was the liquor industry, not the individual drinker. Possession of small amounts of alcohol was not criminalized. Temperance leaders were not rural, nativist Bible-thumping killjoys. They were abolitionists, suffragists, liberal Christians, opponents of child labor, and trust busters who also wanted to protect the public from the untoward effects of the liquor traffic. Readers of this book will never embrace the false narrative about prohibition again. -30-
April 3, 2022
Smashing the Liquor Machine is a brilliant study of the progressive roots of the temperance movement worldwide, as well as the grassroots support of Prohibition in the United States. Mark Lawrence Schrad strongly challenges the assumption that temperance was inherently a conservative phenomenon, instead looking to a whole host of progressives like Mahatma Ghandi, Vladimir Lenin, Frederick Douglass, Hjalmar Branting, and more for the roots of the movement.
Throughout the book, Schrad makes the assertion that alcohol trusts (via what he terms "alco-imperialism) endeavored to keep the poor, working man and minorities across the globe enslaved to liquor instead of fighting for independence from vice and subjugation. Naturally, Schrad couches this all in 21st century, woke, identity politics, which can be a tad annoying at times, but I believe the crux of his argument is correct.
There are several interesting parts in this book, from profiling "Pussyfoot" Johnson, to an in-depth explanation of the Swedish Gothenburg System, to how liquor played a large part in the Russian Revolution, but by far the most fascinating part of this book is its conclusion. The author points out that while in the 21st century, we are incapable of disassociating economic rights and personal rights (i.e. the right to purchase alcohol versus the right to consume it), these two things were very different at the beginning of the 20th century. Schrad makes the parallel between the liquor trusts of the 20th century and Big Pharma today for a better understanding of how millions have been subjugated and killed by a motive for profit.
All-in-all, this is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. I'd highly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in world history and the temperance movement.
Throughout the book, Schrad makes the assertion that alcohol trusts (via what he terms "alco-imperialism) endeavored to keep the poor, working man and minorities across the globe enslaved to liquor instead of fighting for independence from vice and subjugation. Naturally, Schrad couches this all in 21st century, woke, identity politics, which can be a tad annoying at times, but I believe the crux of his argument is correct.
There are several interesting parts in this book, from profiling "Pussyfoot" Johnson, to an in-depth explanation of the Swedish Gothenburg System, to how liquor played a large part in the Russian Revolution, but by far the most fascinating part of this book is its conclusion. The author points out that while in the 21st century, we are incapable of disassociating economic rights and personal rights (i.e. the right to purchase alcohol versus the right to consume it), these two things were very different at the beginning of the 20th century. Schrad makes the parallel between the liquor trusts of the 20th century and Big Pharma today for a better understanding of how millions have been subjugated and killed by a motive for profit.
All-in-all, this is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. I'd highly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in world history and the temperance movement.
October 5, 2023
Wow! Consider my mind completely changed about the prohibition movement. I expected to enjoy this book, but not to rate it five stars. It's just prohibition, right?
Wrong. This book convinced me that most of us have a huge, gaping hole in our understanding of pre-WW2 civil rights movements. In large part it achieves this by using the words of prohibitionists themselves, such as Frederick Douglass, Tolstoy, and Gandhi. You could even argue that Thomas Jefferson was a limited prohibitionist; he put into effect a prohibition of the sale of liquor to the American Indians in certain areas in an effort to keep a promise made to that effect to the Indians. Most civil rights movements of that era included prohibitionist elements, or at least were in league with the prohibitionists of their time.
The key to truly understanding prohibition is to understand what they were fighting against: the unscrupulous liquor sellers of their day. The saloons of the day would have thought the idea of limiting someone's alcohol consumption or making sure he got home safely laughable—they were there for profit in a free market, were they not? They also routinely sold watered-down and/or adulterated drink, which is why the profit margin on selling liquor was so high. One of the victories of prohibitionists was to bring liquor under the purview of the food regulation laws. In selling to native peoples they were even more unscrupulous. It was common practice to get Indians drunk while negotiating treaties or trading with them. This "alco-imperialism" extended to other parts of the globe under colonial rule.
In fact, while prohibition is usually shown as a mostly American movement which we tried to foist upon others, this book clearly shows it to be an international movement. And no wonder, when the governments of the world powers in the early 1900s relied upon liquor for often more than 20% of their national budget. In czarist Russia, the sale of liquor was seen as so crucial to the economy that if a grassroots anti-saloon movement rose up in any given town, law enforcement or even troops were called in to force drink upon the "traitors".
In such a world, the distinction between fighting against the sale of liquor (what they did) and fighting against the possession or consumption of liquor (which the major thought leaders did not advocate; federal law did not prohibit alcohol, just the sale of it) was not academic or hair-splitting. Our misunderstanding of the subject is made to seem extremely obvious by something the author pointed out toward the end of the book:
Google has digitized a huge amount of books and publications going back into the past. Researchers can use this to search for words or phrases and see how often they are used in certain periods. While phrasing dealing with liquor traffic (used in a similar way as we use "drug traffic" today) was off the charts during the time when it was one of the main civil rights movements, today it is barely there, replaced by "alcohol prohibition" phrasing. Alcohol prohibition is almost never mentioned in the years before the prohibition amendment, because it was understood by both proponents and opponents that possession or consumption of alcohol was not the point—liquor trafficking was.
People argue that prohibition caused crime and corruption, but crime and corruption was already part and parcel of the liquor traffic. Where limited laws were put into place, the liquor corporations simply greased the right palms. One story that illustrates the frustration and injustice of them times is when some people tried to bring to bring a certain person who was selling to the Indians to justice in a court; they were given the runaround and fought for a year or more (I forget the exact time frame) only to "win" and have the convicted criminal fined $1.
Incredibly interesting book that deserves to be read.
Wrong. This book convinced me that most of us have a huge, gaping hole in our understanding of pre-WW2 civil rights movements. In large part it achieves this by using the words of prohibitionists themselves, such as Frederick Douglass, Tolstoy, and Gandhi. You could even argue that Thomas Jefferson was a limited prohibitionist; he put into effect a prohibition of the sale of liquor to the American Indians in certain areas in an effort to keep a promise made to that effect to the Indians. Most civil rights movements of that era included prohibitionist elements, or at least were in league with the prohibitionists of their time.
The key to truly understanding prohibition is to understand what they were fighting against: the unscrupulous liquor sellers of their day. The saloons of the day would have thought the idea of limiting someone's alcohol consumption or making sure he got home safely laughable—they were there for profit in a free market, were they not? They also routinely sold watered-down and/or adulterated drink, which is why the profit margin on selling liquor was so high. One of the victories of prohibitionists was to bring liquor under the purview of the food regulation laws. In selling to native peoples they were even more unscrupulous. It was common practice to get Indians drunk while negotiating treaties or trading with them. This "alco-imperialism" extended to other parts of the globe under colonial rule.
In fact, while prohibition is usually shown as a mostly American movement which we tried to foist upon others, this book clearly shows it to be an international movement. And no wonder, when the governments of the world powers in the early 1900s relied upon liquor for often more than 20% of their national budget. In czarist Russia, the sale of liquor was seen as so crucial to the economy that if a grassroots anti-saloon movement rose up in any given town, law enforcement or even troops were called in to force drink upon the "traitors".
In such a world, the distinction between fighting against the sale of liquor (what they did) and fighting against the possession or consumption of liquor (which the major thought leaders did not advocate; federal law did not prohibit alcohol, just the sale of it) was not academic or hair-splitting. Our misunderstanding of the subject is made to seem extremely obvious by something the author pointed out toward the end of the book:
Google has digitized a huge amount of books and publications going back into the past. Researchers can use this to search for words or phrases and see how often they are used in certain periods. While phrasing dealing with liquor traffic (used in a similar way as we use "drug traffic" today) was off the charts during the time when it was one of the main civil rights movements, today it is barely there, replaced by "alcohol prohibition" phrasing. Alcohol prohibition is almost never mentioned in the years before the prohibition amendment, because it was understood by both proponents and opponents that possession or consumption of alcohol was not the point—liquor trafficking was.
People argue that prohibition caused crime and corruption, but crime and corruption was already part and parcel of the liquor traffic. Where limited laws were put into place, the liquor corporations simply greased the right palms. One story that illustrates the frustration and injustice of them times is when some people tried to bring to bring a certain person who was selling to the Indians to justice in a court; they were given the runaround and fought for a year or more (I forget the exact time frame) only to "win" and have the convicted criminal fined $1.
Incredibly interesting book that deserves to be read.
October 28, 2024
Simply one of the best books I have ever read.
Let us start with what doesn't work. First, the book gets some things wrong, in a way that makes some details suspect. It says that the name "Manhattan" is derived from "The place where we became intoxicated," but this seems to be generally considered a mistranslation (https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/h...). The book has a strong ideological goal, which raises the frequent question of whether it isn't bending historical facts to its own purposes. And while it posits itself against what it portrays as the common and mainstream historiography of prohibition-- that it was an attempt by conservative, religious, xenophobic, white Americans to impose their values on others-- it never really gives that version of history a fair hearing. The book is also 560 pages long and sometimes repeats itself, sometimes literally-- at least in a couple of places the same passage or event is repeated basically verbatim.
But these barely detract from the book, which is precisely what a history book should be. It gives a huge and wide variety of historical anecdotes, often entertainingly written, including in the very first chapter on Carrie A Nation. These historical narratives serve a central purpose, which is to convince the reader of an essential idea: that prohibition, far from an imposition of conservative American elites, was born out of a global push against alcohol, typically championed by minorities and marginalized populations against oppressive powers. The author brings examples from India, Botswana, Russia, Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire, among others, to show that to hugely diverse and different populations, the issue of alcohol was considered a burning one, and they wrestled with the question of how to keep alcohol at bay. The author then looks at the US and notes that prohibition was championed by abolitionists, Native Americans and women, not coincidentally but rather as part of a progressive movement that tried to change life for marginalized populations for the better.
The history is entertaining and insightful, and there is much to be learned in its own right; the argument persuasive and thought-provoking; and the writing is excellent and flowing. Above all, there is a fascinating and crucially important question hovering over this book: how did a social and political issue that dominated progressive thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries completely disappear from our lives, unlike almost any other major social movement from that period (such as those relating to gender, race and colonialism). Alcohol remains extremely socially damaging today, yet not only is there no serious movement to curb its impact, one barely hears of people identifying as "dry" or abstainers from alcohol, whereas one can find people abstaining from innumerable other items and vices. So this history is very much alive today, or at least dormant-- and this book can change the way you look at the issue.
How many books can claim even a couple of these qualities?
Let us start with what doesn't work. First, the book gets some things wrong, in a way that makes some details suspect. It says that the name "Manhattan" is derived from "The place where we became intoxicated," but this seems to be generally considered a mistranslation (https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/h...). The book has a strong ideological goal, which raises the frequent question of whether it isn't bending historical facts to its own purposes. And while it posits itself against what it portrays as the common and mainstream historiography of prohibition-- that it was an attempt by conservative, religious, xenophobic, white Americans to impose their values on others-- it never really gives that version of history a fair hearing. The book is also 560 pages long and sometimes repeats itself, sometimes literally-- at least in a couple of places the same passage or event is repeated basically verbatim.
But these barely detract from the book, which is precisely what a history book should be. It gives a huge and wide variety of historical anecdotes, often entertainingly written, including in the very first chapter on Carrie A Nation. These historical narratives serve a central purpose, which is to convince the reader of an essential idea: that prohibition, far from an imposition of conservative American elites, was born out of a global push against alcohol, typically championed by minorities and marginalized populations against oppressive powers. The author brings examples from India, Botswana, Russia, Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire, among others, to show that to hugely diverse and different populations, the issue of alcohol was considered a burning one, and they wrestled with the question of how to keep alcohol at bay. The author then looks at the US and notes that prohibition was championed by abolitionists, Native Americans and women, not coincidentally but rather as part of a progressive movement that tried to change life for marginalized populations for the better.
The history is entertaining and insightful, and there is much to be learned in its own right; the argument persuasive and thought-provoking; and the writing is excellent and flowing. Above all, there is a fascinating and crucially important question hovering over this book: how did a social and political issue that dominated progressive thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries completely disappear from our lives, unlike almost any other major social movement from that period (such as those relating to gender, race and colonialism). Alcohol remains extremely socially damaging today, yet not only is there no serious movement to curb its impact, one barely hears of people identifying as "dry" or abstainers from alcohol, whereas one can find people abstaining from innumerable other items and vices. So this history is very much alive today, or at least dormant-- and this book can change the way you look at the issue.
How many books can claim even a couple of these qualities?
January 29, 2024
Early contender for my book of the year; revisionist history at its finest. I knew nearly nothing about Prohibition before this, but would've told the common story of reactionary evangelicals against the progressive politics of their era. Schrad flips the narrative, exploring the prohibitionist ideas of many progressives like Frederick Douglass, Leo Tolstoy, and Mahatma Gandhi. American prohibition was a small part of a worldwide movement against the ways powerful people use intoxicating substances to subdue and exploit other people, especially workers and native populations. The laws and movements fought against the drink seller, rarely the drinker themselves, and temperance movements were a way to fight back against colonists, corrupt political machines, and authoritarian leaders.
The chapters on each nation were often similar, so I skipped a few and didn't feel bad. Schrad editorializes with a couple comparisons to modern-day anti-opioid movements and explanations on how this false prohibition-as-reactionary narrative developed through changing views about the nature of liberty, but most of the book pulls from a wide range of primary sources and had a good pace. I did most of my listening to the audiobook while driving from Arizona to Idaho.
The chapters on each nation were often similar, so I skipped a few and didn't feel bad. Schrad editorializes with a couple comparisons to modern-day anti-opioid movements and explanations on how this false prohibition-as-reactionary narrative developed through changing views about the nature of liberty, but most of the book pulls from a wide range of primary sources and had a good pace. I did most of my listening to the audiobook while driving from Arizona to Idaho.
June 21, 2022
While it took me several months to go through this book, including switching to the audiobook 1/2 through, I very thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Immediately, I was drawn into this book because my preconceptions were challenged from the go. And it made me want to learn more! Starting with the Russian temperance movement was a perfect way to start this journey.
I’m a feminist activist. I remember thinking three years ago about how I was ready to start challenging the presence of alcohol (beer, wine) at a fundraising party I was helping to organize. The idea of linking “temperance” and women’s rights felt right together. But it wasn’t until I read started this book that I know understand the long links between these historic movements. And, as I learned in this book, so many more movements. (The party did in fact have beer & wine).
Also, as the author pointed out in the introduction,
I felt comfortable having my own adult beverage while reading through this book. It’s not about the individual drinker, but rather the liquor traffic.
Immediately, I was drawn into this book because my preconceptions were challenged from the go. And it made me want to learn more! Starting with the Russian temperance movement was a perfect way to start this journey.
I’m a feminist activist. I remember thinking three years ago about how I was ready to start challenging the presence of alcohol (beer, wine) at a fundraising party I was helping to organize. The idea of linking “temperance” and women’s rights felt right together. But it wasn’t until I read started this book that I know understand the long links between these historic movements. And, as I learned in this book, so many more movements. (The party did in fact have beer & wine).
Also, as the author pointed out in the introduction,
I felt comfortable having my own adult beverage while reading through this book. It’s not about the individual drinker, but rather the liquor traffic.
October 27, 2024
In this paradigm-shifting historical account, Schrad boldly challenges our conventional understanding of Prohibition as merely a puritanical Christian movement. Instead, he reveals a fascinating global narrative where progressive reformers, anti-colonialists, and social justice advocates fought against the predatory alcohol industry and its exploitation of vulnerable populations. While the book's thorough research and global perspective are impressive, offering revelatory insights into how temperance movements intersected with women's rights, anti-imperialism, and indigenous sovereignty, it occasionally gets bogged down in academic minutiae. At times, the author's contemporary political framing feels heavy-handed, threatening to overshadow the already compelling historical narrative. Despite these drawbacks, this meticulously researched work succeeds in transforming our understanding of prohibition movements, though readers should be prepared for a dense, detailed academic journey rather than a breezy historical overview. Perfect for serious history buffs who enjoy having their preconceptions challenged, but casual readers might find it overwhelming.
April 10, 2025
FASCINATING!! this one was a freaking haul.... very long and dense, but so approachable and well written. i learned so much about prohibition, progressivism, and alcohol's role in colonialism that id never even HEARD of before. also made me reflect on the political climate of today, and how even when things feel really hard, in fact they are much better than they have been in the past! and those days were overcome, and so will these. very glad i read this
January 11, 2023
This really turned all I thought I knew about Prohibition on its head. To begin with I really thought it was just an American movement and I was proven wrong. It was very thought provoking to consider these movements as part of an anticolonial or anti racist struggle. The global perspective was very helpful. I would consider this required reading for anybody interested in prohibition.
November 21, 2023
Not a bad overview of prohibition and its history (mostly in America IMO). The most interesting bits--the "GLOBAL" part mentioned, you know, on the COVER--was like given lip service at the end then poof we're done now, like a short P.S. at the end of a long letter, or at least that's my experience. I did learn some interesting things, though I couldn't tell you what they were now. Ta-da.
March 10, 2025
Massive amounts of (fairly depressing) detail makes it seem like a slog at times, but I can't point to anything that he should have left out. He also has a habit of repeating himself, so perhaps the light hand of an editor would have helped. Still, worth it, though. I hope his ideas find lots of purchase in the historical community, since he corrects a lot of misconceptions.
June 28, 2023
The beginning was a little 'dry'--The second half was well worth the time.
April 4, 2025
Loooong - but well-written and fascinating.
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