The Fuzzy Moral Line Between Drinkers and Bartenders

MARK LAWRENCE SCHRAD thinks Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding vigilante who rampaged through saloons at the beginning of the 20th century, gets a bum rap. While Nation was “easy to mock as a Bible-thumping ‘crank,’ ‘a freak,’ ‘a lunatic,’ or a ‘puritanical killjoy,’” Schrad says, she was actually a courageous and kindly woman devoted to “justice, love, and benevolence.” Her enemy “was not the drink or the drinker, but ‘the man who sells,’” Schrad, a Villanova political scientist, writes in Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition. “This is important.”

I’m not sure that distinction, which underpins Schrad’s broader effort to redeem the reputation of alcohol prohibitionists, is as important as he thinks. I’m not even sure it makes sense. Without drinkers, after all, there would be no brewers, vintners, distillers, liquor merchants, or tavern keepers. In Schrad’s telling, the customer is not king; he