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Was prohibition a right wing or left wing political movement?


I say left wing.

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It's really hard to define in such simplistic terms given the radically different nature of American culture and politics at the time. The society as a whole was far more religious than it is now and many political alignments are by today's standards extremely paradoxical.

William Jennings Bryan was both deeply religious, an opponent of evolution (he was basically the prosecution counsel for the Scopes Monkey Trial), a Democrat and a supporter of prohibition, and a populist.

The prohibition movement as a whole was a weird confluence of women's suffrage, Protestant conservatism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. The women's suffrage component was trying to prevent women from being abused by drunk husbands or falling into impure behavior through drunkenness.

This last bit is where it overlapped with Protestant fundamentalism, which had definite anti-Catholic biases, and most recent immigrants of the era were Irish or Italian, Catholic groups with strong cultural histories of alcohol consumption.

This anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant sentiment became also strongly anti-German in WW I, and the German brewers (Busch, Pabst, Hamm, Stroh, Heileman) had become a major economic force with large brewing and saloon operations and influential beyond their German-American constituency. Here they were something of a threat to northern Republican business interests as well.

So you ended up with this weird coalition of women's rights groups, anti-immigrant groups and Protestants who saw eliminating alcohol consumption as a shared goal that would advance all their causes. Eliminate alcohol and women can advance their cause, Protestants get to suppress Catholics (although sacramental wine never was outlawed), and the anti-immigrant crowd (and some cynical businessmen) get to put the Germans, Italians and the Irish in their place.

It's like Hillary Clinton, Pat Robertson and Donald Trump supporting a common cause even though individually they seem opposed to each other.

I'm not sure prohibition can be typed as either left wing or right wing, and more than likely because of its scope and the unique nature of it, is probably best described as neither, as it required so much political support from both sides of the aisle to get passed. And you have to wonder if any of them ever really expected it to be actually enforced or enforced against anyone of means, they were so busy figuring out what their individual angles on it were that I think a lot of them simply didn't understand how disruptive its mass enforcement would end up being.

Possibly one of the strangest eras in American history,

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This is a good post, but I don't think the alliance is as strange as you think.

Is Islamophobia right-wing or left-wing? One could make an argument either way.

America was founded as a nation that split from Protestant England, and Protestant England split from the Roman Catholic Church. Puritans went to America because they thought the Anglican Church was too right-wing, too much like the Catholics.

So keeping out immigrants from countries where they have Kings and Popes, and a macho hard drinking peasant culture that keeps women barefoot and pregnant, I guess it is right-wing because it is classist but left-wing in every other way.

It's almost like the prohibitionists were dead centrist moderates in their day. They were against Jews who they saw as communists, but they also hated traditional right-wing Roman Catholic peasants.

The Southern Democrats walked out on Al Smith, a very conservative Democrat, in 1928 because he was a wet papist.

In WWI, people like Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, and Teddy Roosevelt wanted the Anti-Semitic Autocratic Czar of Russia to be overthrown, but they did not want Russia to become a Bolshevik nation. Same mentality in prohibition days.

But if you look at it, various right-wingers did not get along in the 1920s, based on the Catholic-Protestant split; American Kluxers, Italian Blackshirts, German Brownshirts, and the White Russians were never on the same page. So the end result of the fact that the Catholic Right-Wing and Protestant Right-Wing didn't collaborate was the Soviets beating Nazis in WWII.

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I think the larger problem is that prohibition isn't really a very good fit for any conventional contemporary definitions of left vs. right. It's neither socialist nor capitalist, liberal nor conservative, authoritarian or democratic individually, yet an argument can be made that it fits into all of those political categories, and at the same time.

In some way it's like arguing whether Augustus Caesar was left wing or right wing.

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