Saints and Sinners: Prohibition would help nation
Now that we have raised our nation’s consciousness about the dangers of smoking, maybe it is time to go to work on another deadly killer in our midst and a destroyer of families.
The culprit is drinking — alcoholic consumption.
We experimented with a solution to the drinking problem in the years from 1920 to 1933. It was called Prohibition — more formally the 18th Amendment to the Constitution.
It was not the country’s first attempt to control drinking.
The unbridled growth of saloons and breweries after the Civil War led to the formation of the National Prohibition Party in 1869 and later to the creation of the Anti-Saloon League, which eventually was successful in enacting national Prohibition.
Did the “Noble Experiment” — as some dubbed Prohibition — fail? It depends on whom you ask. The evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, said in an editorial, “If responsible historians will look at the record and examine the testimony of men and women of high reputation, they can hardly fail to conclude that Prohibition brought significant gains to society as a whole and made life more livable for many American families.”
If Prohibition did fail, as many believe, part of the trouble was that Prohibition laws were hard to enforce. It was illegal, for instance, to sell fermented alcohol, but the Volstead Act — passed by Congress to enforce the 18th Amendment — said nothing about selling grape juice that might ferment after it stayed awhile in the cellar.
And so was born the “wine brick.”
Wine bricks were a grape concentrate in solid form, about the size of a pound of butter. They came in several flavors — sherry, muscatel, claret and others.
The secret was to let the bricks dissolve in a gallon of water, add sugar and shake the mixture every day — and in three weeks you had wine with a 15 percent alcoholic content.
But to put these directions on the package would be illegal under the provisions of the Volstead Law. So the makers of the wine bricks printed a list of instructions which said: “Do not dissolve this brick in a gallon of water, add sugar and shake daily for three weeks. To do this would give you wine with 15 percent alcoholic content.”
Was there less drinking or more during the years of Prohibition? Andrew Sinclair, in his book, “The Era of Excess,” says that beer consumption declined but that wine and “spirits” consumption increased.
“Reasonable home-brewed beer was harder to make than fermented grape juice or a passable gin,” wrote Sinclair. “Moreover, beer was too bulky and dangerous to transport for long distances.”
While bootleggers flourished and grew rich during Prohibition, Sinclair reported that a “sophisticated and economic group of Americans preferred to mix their own poison.”
They bought raw alcohol from the bootlegger or druggist and mixed it in the bathtub with quantities of glycerin and oil of juniper.
“It was this mixture,” wrote Sinclair, “that did much to ruin the digestion of the American middle classes. The mixture was served with quantities of ginger ale to hide the flavor although nothing could disguise the crawling horrors of the aftereffects.”
An economist of the time was quoted as saying, “The savings from alcoholic consumption have served exactly the same purpose as if there had been an increase in earnings and income of $4 billion a year.”
A social worker was reported as saying, “Prohibition certainly has done well by the poor. Tenement house brawls are few. The continual Saturday night drunk and Monday morning headaches are gone.”
Are we ready to try another Noble Experiment? Or, given the country’s growing taste for alcohol, would Prohibition again be doomed to failure?
(George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.)