BY KURT BROKAW

“Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” by Daniel Okrent (Scribners 2010)

“The Struggle” Directed by D.W. Griffith (1931) (DVD by Kino-Lorber)

If you’re reading this as a person who no longer drinks, you may have wondered in the course of your recovery why and how this nation could actually have enacted (and enforced) laws prohibiting the sale of liquor and alcoholic beverages for fourteen endless years. Daniel Okrent, a former Time and Life magazine editor and the former public editor of The New York Times, tells all in his mammoth (459 pages) new history of America’s turn-of-the-century drinking years, and how they publicly ended with the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution “banning the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors.” If your anniversary date had been in 1919, your first question might have been “how the hell could this have happened?”

The short answer in a Twitter-length sentence is this: Women wanted their men sober.

And by uniting together and achieving the right to vote, they closed the 14,000 breweries/distilleries and 300,000 saloons producing and selling seven gallons of pure alcohol a year for every man, woman and child. The largest brewers knew this would happen. Adolphus Busch, the founding beer baron, sputtered at “fanatical and misinformed women” as seven western states first adopted Prohibition starting in the 1910s. It was the beginning of the solution to Abraham Lincoln’s observation at age 33 that “we found intoxicating liquors used by everybody, repudiated by nobody…it was the devastator.”

Okrent notes the tireless dedication of strong-willed women like Carrie Nation (who took a hatchet to saloon doors), Susan B. Anthony and Eliza “Mother” Thompson that formed a coalition of influences that initially doomed the drink. These included most women seeking suffrage, Baptist and Methodist ministers, western populists, southern democrats, and even friendly foreign Anglo-Saxon governments that preferred “grape juice diplomacy” and viewed America as a land of drunks.

Another key influence, evident in Theodore Roosevelt’s angry description of the Irish as a “stupid, sodden, vicious lot,” was a backlash against European immigrants filling America’s cities. And when the U.S. went to war against Germany in 1918, the tightly organized Anti-Saloon League lit into the United States Brewers’ Association (most of whose leaders were German-Americans) and condemned their alliances, including the Anhauser-Busch family, which held a million dollars in German war bonds. Okrent credits the Anti-Saloon League for finally making it safe for our country’s political candidates to “vote dry,” forcing Messrs. Pabst, Hamms, Ruppert and other beer tycoons to turn off their taps.

THE LAW WAS WITH THE DRYS, THE LIQUOR WAS WITH THE WETS
The problem with the 18th amendment, as one drinker put it, was that “the drys had their law, and the wets would have their liquor.” Drinking and buying alcohol weren’t prohibited; people could drink in their homes, and did – film star Mary Pickford’s mother, for example, bought out an entire liquor store and relocated it to her basement.
Sacramental wines were okayed for use in churches and synagogues. Home stills emerged. Pharmacies sold 100-proof pints labeled “Unexcelled For Medical Purposes.”

Up in Canada, distillers like the Bronfman brothers, founders of the Seagram’s empire, imported hundreds of thousands of gallons of whiskey from U.S. distilleries, mixed it with raw alcohol and water, stored it in “boozoriums” and eventually shipped it back across the border in trucks, horse-drawn sleighs, ships with foreign registries and even seaplanes. These “rumrunners” dominated the Atlantic seaboard, while out in Chicago, over half of the police force got involved in the underground liquor business. Urban nightclubs with powder rooms quickly replaced the male-only speakeasy of post-frontier times; women, having won equal voting rights, began to exercise equal drinking rights. Ironically, one of the last staunch defenders of Prohibition was the Ku Klux Klan.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, most efforts to enforce Prohibition virtually ceased. Popular support dwindled away. Even though overall drinking declined by 30% during the 1920s, drinking to excess rose sharply along with cirrhosis deaths and alcoholic psychoses. New York City boasted 30,000 speakeasies. Chicago mob boss Al Capone summed it up well: “When I sell liquor it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.”

In the spring of 1933, Prohibition was repealed, with President Franklin Roosevelt declaring that the legalization of beer alone would increase federal tax revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars. Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, took a dimmer view, refusing throughout her husband’s terms in office to serve alcohol at White House dinners. It may not surprise you to learn that her father was an alcoholic.

Two years earlier, the legendary director D.W. Griffith made his last film, “The Struggle,” in a Bronx studio and partly on New York streets. Written by Anita Loos (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) and adapted from a short story by the French author Emile Zola, it’s the first feature-length (93 minutes) American movie about an alcoholic and is worth considering.

Jimmie (Hal Skelly, a Broadway pro of the era) and Florrie (Zita Johann, who would partner Boris Karloff in “The Mummy”) are initially pictured as a pleasant young couple being swept along in the frivolity and open social drinking of the waning years of Prohibition. Florrie’s wary of Jimmie’s drinking and agrees to marry this blue-collar steel worker/supervisor only if he vows abstinence. For a time Jimmie stays sober, sipping sarsaparilla at the bar with a distinctly white-collar crowd he longs to join. The couple’s first-born daughter grows into a little girl in their modest one-bedroom, but one night, mostly on impulse, Jimmie yields to the cajoling of his hard-drinking pals and takes a glass of whiskey. And another and another.

Once Jimmie begins drinking heavily, “The Struggle” picks up interest. He loses his job, wrecks a family celebration, and cashes in his wife’s $4,000 insurance policy to back a blonde schemer’s fake liquor haul. With no job or income to support his family, he stands on the sidewalk outside their building, watching their furniture being hauled out (just as Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick would do 30 years later in “Days of Wine and Roses”). In his empty apartment he has a brief moment of clarity from a sacred music recording played on a neighbor’s radio; it’s his one brush with religion, and it doesn’t take. Soon he’s panhandling pennies while his daughter sells apples on a street corner.

Thanks to his child’s unwavering love and acute loyalty, “The Struggle” has a happy ending – Jimmie quits drinking and is restored to health, to his family and to his job in the steel mill. This was the beginning of Hollywood’s long reliance on the family as the major instigator of recoveries from alcoholism, all the way up to “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” in 1954. “The Struggle” was a commercial failure, probably because it came at a time when America was no longer hiding its bottles or its drinking. American movie audiences, as we’ve seen from Daniel Okrent’s meticulously detailed history, were just beginning to view alcohol once again as a newfound and almost legal friend.

Kurt Brokaw is Associate Teaching Professor at The New School and senior film critic of The Independent (Independent-Magazine.org)