ABSTRACT
Literally hundreds of books and documentaries have detailed the American experience with alcohol prohibition and most proffer at least some causal explanation. Yet, three generations of scholars have ultimately explained the outcome of prohibition with a simplistic “if temperance, then prohibition” logic. The conventional wisdom is that prohibition was a “wrongheaded social policy waged by puritanical zealots of a bygone Victorian era,” whose efforts to legislate morality posed a “threat to individual freedoms.” Historians of prohibition in other countries tend also to appropriate the same temperance-activist-as-villain ethos, whether applicable or not. Historians and social scientists have repeatedly made these types of generalizations by formulating their understandings about prohibition solely from the single case of the United States. To better understand prohibition, we need to scrutinize this America-centric received wisdom. We need to separate temperance as moral suasion focused on the individual drinker, from prohibition as legal diktat against the drink seller. We need to stop assuming that the anti-liquor forces were villainous enemies of liberty and entertain the possibility that their motivations were entirely in line with a different understanding of freedom: promoting the rights of the individual not to be exploited by the state or “liquor trust” and left in squalor. Viewed in this light, the prohibitionist view of freedom as addressing inequality is entirely consistent with that of the other progressive transnational movements of the day, such as abolitionism, suffragism, anti-imperialism, and socialism.
