American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition

By Kenneth D Rose

In 1933 Americans did something they had never done before: they voted to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Eighteenth Amendment, which for 13 years had prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, was nullified by the passage of another amendment, the Twenty-First. Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. One factor that was essential, Kenneth D. Rose here argues, was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal.
Even more remarkable than the appearance of these women on the political scene was the approach they took to the politics of repeal. Intriguingly, the arguments employed by repeal women and by prohibition women were often mirror images of each other, even though the women on the two sides of the issue pursued diametrically opposed political agendas. Rose contends that a distinguishing feature of the women's repeal movement was an argument for home protection, a social feminist ideology that women repealists shared with the prohibitionist women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The book surveys the women's movement to repeal national prohibition and places it within the contexts of women's temperance activity, women's political activity during the 1920s, and the campaign for repeal.
While recent years have seen much-needed attention devoted to the recovery of women's history, conservative women have too often been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or written off as unworthy of scrutiny. With American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition, Kenneth Rose fleshes out a crucial chapter in the history of American women and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9780814769294

Book preview

Thank you for buying this ebook, published by NYU Press.

Sign up for our e-newsletters to receive information about forthcoming books, special discounts, and more!

Sign Up!

About NYU Press

A publisher of original scholarship since its founding in 1916, New York University Press Produces more than 100 new books each year, with a backlist of 3,000 titles in print. Working across the humanities and social sciences, NYU Press has award-winning lists in sociology, law, cultural and American studies, religion, American history, anthropology, politics, criminology, media and communication, literary studies, and psychology.

American Women and the

Repeal of Prohibition

The American Social Experience

S E R I E S

General Editor:

JAMES KIRBY MARTIN

Editors:

PAULA S. FASS, STEVEN H. MINTZ, CARL PRINCE,

JAMES W. REED & PETER N. STEARNS

1. The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in

the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns

JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR

2. Childbearing in American Society: 1650–1850

CATHERINE M. SCHOLTEN

3. The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology,

JOHN M. O’DONNELL

4. New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850

GRAHAM RUSSELL HODGES

5. From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and

the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928

CHRISTINE A. LUNARDINI

6. Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform

of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809

THEODORE J. CRACKEL

7. ‘A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and

Community-Culture among the Gullahs

MARGARET WASHINGTON CREEL

8. A Mixed Multitude: The Struggle for Toleration

in Colonial Pennsylvania

SALLY SCHWARTZ

9. Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900–1986

SUSAN HOUSEHOLDER VAN HORN

10. Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and

Their War for the Union

EARL J. HESS

11. Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing

HENRY L. MINTON

12. Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology,

and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890–1930

PAUL DAVIS CHAPMAN

13. Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860

JOHN C. SPURLOCK

14. Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History

PETER N. STEARNS

15. The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and

Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940–1990

GERALD SORIN

16. War in America to 1775: Before Yankee Doodle

JOHN MORGAN DEDERER

17. An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and

National Culture, 1820–1920

ANNE FARRAR HYDE

18. Frederick Law Olmsted: The Passion of a Public Artist

MELVIN KALFUS

19. Medical Malpractice in Nineteenth-Century America:

Origins and Legacy

KENNETH ALLEN DE VILLE

20. Dancing in Chains: The Youth of William Dean Howells

RODNEY D. OLSEN

21. Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania, 1730–1830

MERRIL D. SMITH

22. In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s

ERIC C. SCHNEIDER

23. Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in

the Mexican War, 1846–1848

JAMES M. MCCAFFREY

24. The Dutch-American Farm

DAVID STEVEN COHEN

25. Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910–1945

STEVEN BIEL

26. The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving

WILLIAM B. WAITS

27. The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of

Male Heterosexuality in Modern America

KEVIN WHITE

28. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling,

Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History

JOHN BURNHAM

29. General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution:

From Redcoat to Rebel

HAL T. SHELTON

30. From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change

in a Southern Community

MICHAEL SHIRLEY

31. The Social Dynamics of Progressive Reform: Atlantic City, 1854–1920

MARTIN PAULSSON

32. America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army

CHARLES PATRICK NEIMEYER

33. American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition

KENNETH D. ROSE

34. Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War

NANCY K. BRISTOW

American Women and

The Repeal of Prohibition

KENNETH D. ROSE

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

Copyright © 1996 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rose, Kenneth D. (Kenneth David), 1946–

American women and the repeal of prohibition / Kenneth D. Rose.

p.   cm.—(The American social experience series; 32)

Includes index.

Contents: Introduction—American women and the prohibition

movement—Women’s politics, home protection, and the morality of

prohibition in the 1920s—Women and the repeal issue: three

visions—The campaign—Nonpartisanship, national politics, and

the momentum for repeal—Aftermath and conclusion.

ISBN 0-8147-7464-4

1. Prohibition—United States—History. 2. Women in politics—

United States—History. 3. Women in social reform—United States—

History. I. Title. II. Series.

HV5089.R67      1996

363.4’1—dc20              95–4396

                                             CIP

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents, who would have loved to see the completion of this; to Bob Burke, who started me on the right road; and to Jeanne Lawrence, for sustaining me through this project and so much more.

EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT

SECTION 1 After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof, for beverage purposes, is hereby prohibited.

SECTION 2 The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

SECTION 3 This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided by the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission thereof to the States by the Congress.

TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT (1933)

SECTION 1 The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

SECTION 2 The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

SECTION 3 This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of submission thereof to the States by the Congress.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1.   American Women and the Prohibition Movement

2.   Women’s Politics, Home Protection, and the Morality of Prohibition in the 1920s

3.   Women and the Repeal Issue: Three Visions

4.   The Campaign

5.   Nonpartisanship, National Politics, and the Momentum for Repeal

6.   Aftermath and Conclusion

Notes

Index

Illustrations

All illustrations appear as an insert following p. 122.

1. The Bad Husband

2. The Fruits of Temperance

3. The Drunkard’s Progress

4. Frances Willard: American Woman and Her Political Peers

5. King Alcohol

6. The Overshadowing Curse

7. WCTU President Ella Boole

8. Two Birds—One Stone

9. Bootleg War Terrorizes Wilshire

10. Agent Violence in San Francisco

11. Protecting the Eighteenth Amendment with the Nineteenth

12. Lucy Peabody

13. Louise Gross

14. Pauline Sabin

15. The Glamor Gap

16. The WONPR National Leadership

17. The WONPR National Leadership

18. Mary T. Norton

19. Florence Prag Kahn

20. Pauline Sabin and Her Sons

21. WONPR Leaflet

22. WONPR Leaflet

23. Prohibition Failed!

24. Their Security Demands You Vote Repeal

25. Woman’s Holy War

26. Pauline Sabin and the WONPR Endorse Roosevelt

27. Mabel Walker Willebrandt

Acknowledgments

No scholarly effort could succeed without considerable institutional support. I would like to thank the Hagley Museum and Library for a Grant-in-Aid Fellowship and for putting the considerable resources of their library at my disposal. Thanks also to the efforts of the staff at the Library of Congress, who were almost always able to locate the most obscure references, and to the staff at the New York Public Library. The history department at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed their faith in me during my graduate school days through a number of fellowships and teaching assistantships, and I greatly appreciate it. A special note of thanks goes out to Barbara Bernstein, resident angel at the UCLA history department, whose dedication to her job and personal interest in the welfare of her graduate students made life a lot easier for me, and for countless others.

This project began at the University of Washington, where I learned the basics of history (and prohibition) under the patient tutelage and guidance of Robert Burke. I was fortunate to have had Bob Burke as a mentor and am fortunate to continue to count him as a friend. At UCLA Stan Coben very generously took me on as a student when I first arrived and has provided me with much valuable scholarly advice and encouragement. Ellen Dubois, who directed my dissertaion, introduced me to women’s history, and her insights and comments made my dissertation a better work than it would have been otherwise. While we sometimes disagreed over interpretations, Ellen was always broad-minded enough to acknowledge that history can encompass many points of view and to encourage me to find my own. Thanks also to Debra Silverman and Mary Yeager for serving on my committee and giving generously of their time. A special thanks to Martha Banta, who has continued her many kindnesses toward me despite my distance from Los Angeles. I also much appreciate the efforts of two great guys—Jim Fisher and Michael Allen—for their tireless work on my behalf.

In Washington, D.C., I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kim Hoagland for her kindness in putting me up for months at a time at the Hotel Hoagland. I am also indebted to Gray Fitzsimons for finding employment for me (and for serving as my tennis partner for twelve years or so). To the colleagues I served with at the Historic American Engineering Record and the Historic American Buildings Survey, thank you for your companionship and intellectual stimulation.

Crystal Fulton was kind enough to share with me her excellent master’s thesis on the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, and the comments of my readers, including Jack Blocker, Robert Burke, Nancy Cott, Jim Fisher, Gray Fitzsimons, Roger Green, and others unknown, have been of invaluable service to me in honing my manuscript. I have not always followed the advice of my readers, however, so any deficiency in the manuscript is entirely my doing, and not theirs. My editor at New York University Press, Niko Pfund, has always been prompt, efficient, and encouraging—attributes that are not always in abundant supply in the publishing business. A special word of thanks goes out to Dale Steiner at California State University, Chico, for his kindness and generosity to two strangers new in town. Finally, thank you, Jeanne Lawrence, for your patience, encouragement, and devotion.

Abbreviations

American Women and

the Repeal of Prohibition

Introduction

On 5 December 1933 an event occurred that was unprecedented in American history: an amendment to the U.S. Constitution was repealed. The Eighteenth (prohibition) Amendment was nullified by the enactment of another amendment, the Twenty-First; the method used to pass this amendment—the convening of state constitutional conventions—had not been used since the original ratification of the Constitution. More important than its status as a political landmark, however, was the dramatic reversal in public sentiments that the repeal of prohibition represented. Indeed, passage of the prohibition amendment and of the amendment that repealed prohibition took approximately the same time (about a year) and enjoyed the same approval percentage (over 70 percent).

Many factors helped create this remarkable turn of events. Contributing significantly to the sentiment for repeal was the deepening of the Depression, which enhanced the popularity of the argument that repeal would mean more money in the form of taxes for state and federal governments (and more jobs for Americans in alcohol-related industries). The inability of the dry coalition, composed chiefly of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), and evangelical Protestant churches, to fashion an effective defense of prohibition was also an important factor. The media, too, played a role in prohibition’s decline, alternately plying the public with titillating accounts of bootleggers, flappers, and speakeasies, and horrifying it with stories of gangster violence and law enforcement inefficiency and corruption. And although politics frequently brings together odd assortments of individuals, prohibition repeal attracted an especially disparate constituency. The repeal coalition included American intellectuals, who viewed prohibition as an infringement upon personal liberty; businessmen, who seized upon repeal (and the prospect of a renewal of taxes on liquor) as a way of reducing their own tax burden; and labor leaders, who welcomed the chance to be rid of a law that they had long considered to be biased against workers.

All of these elements were important in contributing to the decline in support for prohibition, but the one factor that was essential—I would argue decisive—in obtaining the repeal of prohibition was the presence of a large number of well-organized women promoting repeal. Even more significant than the fact of organized women’s support for repeal was who these women were and how they expressed their support for prohibition repeal. Some women had always been outspoken in their opposition to prohibition, and through such early women’s repeal groups as the Molly Pitcher Club they had argued that prohibition was sumptuary legislation, that drinking was not a criminal act, and that government had no business involving itself in what should be a strictly personal realm. Yet relatively few American women found these arguments compelling, and women’s prohibition repeal organizations languished during most of the decade of the 1920s with only a small national following.

Not until the creation of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) in 1929 would a women’s prohibition repeal organization begin to have a significant impact on American politics. Drawing its national leadership from the elite of society and its membership from all economic strata, the WONPR succeeded where other women’s prohibition repeal groups failed because it deemphasized the personal liberty argument and instead stressed that prohibition represented a moral wrong that threatened the American home. The WONPR claimed that prohibition had nurtured a criminal class, created a crime wave, corrupted public officials, made drinking fashionable, engendered a contempt for the rule of law, and set back the progress of true temperance. All of these developments, WONPR women insisted, threatened their homes and the welfare of their children. The use of this home protectionist line to argue for the repeal of what many temperance women still referred to as the home protection law created an uproar among organized women and prompted a public (and political) reevaluation of the WCTU claim that normal women would always support prohibition.

Intriguingly, even though women on the two sides of the prohibition issue had diametrically opposed political agendas, the arguments employed by prohibition women and by repeal women were often mirror images of each other. Far from being a moribund relic of the nineteenth century, the domestic philosophy of home protection dominated the rhetoric and iconography of women who involved themselves in this debate. And even though woman had become man’s political equal by the 1920s, large numbers of women during this era continued to cleave to women’s organizations to make their political presence felt—just as they had done during the nineteenth century—and continued to believe in the antebellum notion that women wielded a decisive moral authority on issues dealing with home and family.

The debate between prohibition women and repeal women would be bitter and divisive, and occasionally ugly and personal. Repeal women would intrude on turf that prohibition women had always considered their own and would employ the techniques that dry women themselves had perfected. The polling of political representatives, the mass mailings, the congressional testimonies, the home visits—all of these tactics would be used successfully by repeal women in an approach to politics that was virtually a carbon copy of the pioneering efforts of the WCTU. Ironically, as we shall see, the bitterness that developed between prohibition women and repeal women had its origins not in the clash between radically opposed worldviews, nor in fundamentally different approaches to politics, but in the tension that is created when world views and political strategies are similar, yet political goals are very different. It is this juxtaposition, played out against the historical centrality of the liquor issue to women, that makes the women’s debate on the repeal issue so fascinating and so revealing of the way concepts of gender and morality are sometimes expressed in the political arena.

But while prohibition women and repeal women shared, for the most part, a common domestic philosophy, there were important differences between the two groups. The class composition of the WCTU leadership slipped steadily downward during the 1920s, and many of the middle-and upper-middle-class women who, in a different generation, might have joined the WCTU were now finding their way into the WONPR. And while it is true that both the WCTU and the WONPR favored a moral approach to the issue of repeal, the morality of the WCTU was deeply religious, whereas the moral system of the WONPR was strictly secular.

The presence of prohibition repeal women also signaled a new realism in feminine politics that acknowledged that legislation could not eliminate temptation and that virtue could not be compelled. Prohibition had been just such an attempt, and its failure forced many women to reappraise the value of attempting to totally eradicate alcohol from society; instead, they began to look back to the antebellum definition of temperance as the temperate use of alcohol. In addition, the split among women on the prohibition issue put to rest, for the moment, any notions that still lingered after the Equal Rights Amendment turmoil that a women’s bloc was a political reality.

Repeal Women and the Dearth of Conservative History

Before examining the historiography specific to repeal women, we should briefly look at a broader problem: the general reluctance of historians to make full-length studies of conservative groups. The discussion is relevant here, as both the WCTU and the WONPR, despite their different political goals, fit into the territory that historians have demarcated as conservative. In a recent American Historical Review forum on American conservatism, Alan Brinkley observed that although

historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of many once-obscure areas of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas. That has no doubt been a result in part of a basic lack of sympathy for the Right among most scholars. But it is a result, too, of the powerful, if not always fully recognized, progressive assumptions embedded in most of the leading paradigms with which historians approach their work.¹

In his response to Brinkley, Leo P. Ribuffo argues that the chief historiographical ‘problem of American conservatism’ is not the absence of good scholarship but the profession’s failure (in the current locution) to ‘mainstream’ the copious good scholarship that already exists. The Right holds a historiographical place comparable to that allocated to industrial workers, African Americans, and women two decades ago.² Ribuffo agrees with Brinkley, however, that there is a progressive paradigm at work in the profession and that not only are groups celebrated when they play a ‘progressive’ role, but they also tend to disappear when they don’t.³

In the field of women’s history, the dominance of the progressive paradigm (and the tendency of individual women or groups of women to disappear when they fall outside of progressive parameters) has been especially striking. We have any number of books and articles on woman suffrage activities, but few indeed on women’s antisuffrage activities. Likewise, the progressive period of the WCTU has been the subject of some excellent historical works, but there is virtually nothing on the conservative WCTU of the 1920s. We have a biography of the interesting, but relatively obscure, Molly Dewson, but nothing on Pauline Sabin, who had a much greater impact on her society, but who was also more conservative than Dewson.

Women’s history is a relatively new field of study, and like other historical fields of recent vintage (labor history, African-American history, etc.) its origins were part scholarly endeavor and part political movement. Thus, even more than in most historical fields, the practitioners of women’s history have often been as interested in discovering role models as in discovering subjects that illuminate history. There is nothing wrong with this, and for the scholar it is undeniably helpful to have some fondness for a subject with which he or she is going to have to spend a great many years. As I found out, however, allegedly conservative women are as interesting and as diverse as their progressive counterparts, and even a single conservative idea can have a wide variety of interpretations. Indeed, there are as many shadings and meanings under the rubric of conservative as there are under progressive, and the subject of this study—the role of American women in the repeal of prohibition—is a good case in point. Here, at the center of the debate, we have two so-called conservative women’s groups, each employing political tactics and a style of organization that originated in the nineteenth century, each espousing the venerable home protection ideology—and each with a political goal totally opposed to the other.

I also discovered that these women could be personable, intelligent, and have thoughts worthy of consideration. Other historians are discovering the same thing about conservative women. Kathleen Blee, in her work on the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), found her subjects frequently quite engaging and was surprised that she shared the assumptions and opinions of my informants on a number of topics (excluding, of course, race, religion and most political topics).⁴ Hopefully, Blee’s work will inspire others to study women and women’s organizations that fall outside the dominant political orientation of the historical profession. It seems clear that in order to understand the roles that women have played in our society, we must devote to conservative women, no less than to other women, our time and our scholarly efforts. And rather than allowing our own political agendas to color our responses to these women, we must at the minimum give their ideas a respectful hearing. This includes acknowledging their intelligence and humanity and at least making an attempt to view the world as they viewed it.

Despite the very visible role that women assumed in the prohibition repeal movement, historians have had difficulty accurately assessing the nature and quality of women’s contributions to prohibition repeal. Indeed, most have been content to repeat the accusations leveled against repeal women by drys during the repeal campaign itself. For instance, the class critique—that repeal women knew nothing and cared nothing about the poor and the conditions of the community because they were only interested in their own economic and social interests—was employed repeatedly by the WCTU during the repeal campaign. This unfounded assertion was subsequently adopted by a number of historians, some of whom took the argument even further to propose that it was the big money men of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) who manipulated the repeal movement to further their own economic and political agendas, and that in the process they turned groups such as the WONPR into mere puppet organizations. Others have acknowledged women’s success in the repeal campaign but have dismissed that success as only a by-product of the supposed fashionable cachet of prohibition repeal. Still others have overlooked the continuing importance of a conservative home protectionist orientation for women, arguing instead that woman suffrage and women’s new political alignments superseded their loyalty to a domestic philosophy.⁵

A careful examination of repeal women and their activities, however, reveals quite a different picture. The crucial missing ingredient from most discussions of repeal women is any engagement with the paramount moral aspects of prohibition and repeal. Much of the dialogue during the repeal debate centered on the morality of prohibition, a question that had a special resonance among women. It had been women, after all, who had so often been the victims of intemperance in the past, and women who had been the dominant moral force behind the prohibition movement. The movement to repeal prohibition raised these moral concerns once again and called into question the morality of prohibition itself. Also missing from the assessments of most historians is an acknowledgment of the importance of the WONPR as a women’s organization, much less a willingness to entertain the notion that the influence of women’s repeal organizations may have exceeded that of male groups. In the concerns they repeatedly express about morality in the home, in their devotion to a gender-based political independence, in their large numbers, and in their political impact, these women and their opponents combined to make prohibition repeal the most important women’s issue between the ERA controversy of the early 1920s and the era of the New Deal.⁶

Like the Equal Rights Amendment, prohibition repeal raised questions that for women moved it beyond the realm of everyday party politics. To understand why this was so, it is necessary first to examine the central importance of temperance and prohibition to generations of American women and the way in which, over the course of a hundred years, women gathered to themselves a moral authority, not only on questions of alcohol use but also on a wide range of other social issues. This study will undertake such an examination, which will enable us to gain some appreciation of why the activities of repeal women in the late 1920s and early 1930s produced the social disorientation—and political impact—that they did. Both national woman suffrage and national prohibition were implemented in 1920, and we will briefly review the political experiences of newly enfranchised women, as well as the efficacy and politics of prohibition, during the decade of the 1920s. In addition, we will examine the lives of three female leaders who approached prohibition repeal from very different perspectives and analyze the ways in which these perspectives were played out in the political arena. The tactics and countertactics of the campaign to repeal prohibition will receive our attention, as will the issue of women’s partisanship during the campaign. Prohibition repeal was the most contentious issue at the national political conventions in 1932; the influence of repeal on these conventions and the evidence of a growing public sentiment against prohibition will be described. We will also take a look at the subsequent careers of women who were active in the repeal campaign and observe how these later activities reflect on the repeal issue. While the prohibition era has passed, the liquor issue has not, and we will end our discussion by examining ways in which the alcohol question is evolving in our contemporary society and by speculating on what