Free Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America by Edward Behr

perfectly innocent social gatherings involving singing, dancing, and recitations took place. In short, the saloon was, except for the free lunch, not much different from the average English pub — except that until local “dry” restrictions started taking their toll, saloons were open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. This was because the saloon keepers were under considerable pressure from the brewery owners, eager to maximize their profits and recuperate their loans. Saloon keepers were also heavily taxed: just before Prohibition was introduced, they paid a yearly $1,000 fee.
    The war for Prohibition was also a struggle for racial purity.
In the North-West, local legislators knew they were moving from a frontier to an industrial society, with the construction of the Pacific Highway, the growth of the railroads. They were determined that the laborers should not be a prey to the “hell on wheels” that accompanied the workers elsewhere. . . . the feeling was strong that workers must be protected from the saloon keepers. 2
    William Newell, Governor of Washington Territory (it only became a state in 1889) denounced “the fearful destruction of propertyand happiness which [liquor] occasions in its march of desolation, disease and death. . . . The vice, degeneration and crime which it engenders . . . with no redeeming influence for the good, may well cause it to be a subject of the greatest solicitude to our race.” One of the many nineteenth-century Temperance movements that prospered from the Civil War days, the International Order of the Grand Templars, also tirelessly equated Prohibition with family morality. Its message, published in the Seattle Mirror , 3 was also a call to war: “The temperance war! It is coming! It is here! The issue involves the sanctity of the home, the chastity of youth, the moral and political purity of voters.”
    Class lines were increasingly drawn up. In 1890, an editorial in a Prohibitionist paper asked: “Where else shall we look but to the farmer to counteract the venality and corruption of the slums of our cities’ population, that seems to be so rapidly increasing by the aggregation of alien voters, anarchists and saloon influences?” It was all part of that constantly recurring element in American social and political life: the “politics of virtue.” But as various states, under pressure from increasingly assertive dry groups and opportunistic politicians, began to introduce their own local laws, the battle remained fairly even-handed.
    In the small town of Everett, in Washington State, where there were forty saloons, the churches energetically campaigned for local prohibition in a 1910 election, though not all religious groups were dry. Some Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews were in favor of “good” saloons, and raised the issue of personal liberty and choice. The local Labor Journal , a militant unionist newspaper, argued that the dramatically lower life expectancy of working men (60 percent that of the rich) was due not to drink but to the disastrous consequences of low wages and working conditions generally. “Wets and drys boycotted each other’s businesses. There were street brawls, a frenzy of meetings, parades, prayers.” 4 In the event, Everett voted dry, but a subsequent state-level vote rejected Prohibition entirely.
    Thanks to men such as Newell, the Alcohol Education Act (AEA), passed in Seattle in 1885-86, taught the evils of drink as a mandatory course in all schools. “The AEA was the compost heap that brought the Volstead Act into being after three generations of indoctrination.” But, as Norman Clark points out, “unlike the Indians, the manual laborers who built the railroads had a common culture andpotential political clout.” The short-lived Progressive party — which included among its “populists” beer-drinking first-generation German immigrants, whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics, and wine-drinking Italians — was powerful enough as