ABSTRACT
Socially conservative Protestants blamed low-paid immigrants for replacing native-born Protestants in the industrial workforce and identified them with such ills as drunkenness and prostitution. President Theodore Roosevelt fretted that America was committing “racial suicide.” Catholics and Jews, whose mental inferiority was an article of faith in small-town America, were reproducing at a higher rate than Protestants. Social and economic conservatives’ triumph was less than total. Prohibition did not reduce urban crime. Before Prohibition, New York City had 8,000 saloons. After Prohibition, the number of illegal saloons, or “speakeasies,” in New York rose to 32,000. Democrats had been largely irrelevant to national politics since the 1896 presidential election when southern and western Protestants alienated eastern Irish and German Catholics. Calls for Prohibition, Catholic immigration restriction, and currency inflation which would have helped farmers pay off their debts with worthless money while destroying the value of urban workers’ paychecks did not go over well in the Industrial Heartland.
