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AMERICA VOTES AGAINST BOOZE
By Mike Resnick
The only constitutional amendment ever repealed.
There was a lot of drinking going on in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. And after all, why not? We had entered the industrial age, an age of mass-market production and distribution of most products—including liquor, wine, and beer.
But at the same time, there were a lot of people campaigning against “demon rum.” There was Billy Sunday, who used his fame as a baseball player to enhance his career as an evangelist. There were Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League and Carrie Nation and the large and powerful Women’s Temperance Crusade and dozens of others.
At first, the campaign didn’t have much effect. Woodrow Wilson and his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, both ignored the issue in the 1916 presidential election, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans addressed it, even in passing, in their platforms.
But they were merely shutting their eyes to the growing movement to ban all liquor. Indeed, by 1916, some twenty-three states had passed antisaloon legislation. Finally, even Wilson had to pay attention. In 1919, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution: the one banning liquor. It still had to win two-thirds of the states, but when the dust had cleared, forty-six states—all of them except Connecticut and Rhode Island—had voted for the amendment, and the United States officially became a dry country on January 17, 1920.
The immediate results could have been predicted by any science-fiction writer.
First, consumption of alcohol went up, not down. (After all, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages—but not the possession or drinking of them.)
Second, Canada’s liquor manufacturers more than doubled their production and profits.
Third, more than a few people died from the effects of what we now call bathtub gin.
Fourth, the Mafia multiplied its clout and power tenfold, and not just in its headquarters in New York. Al Capone alone made more than $60 million annually, and criminals like Bugs Moran, Machine Gun Kelly, and Lucky Luciano became household names (and, to a certain impressionable element, heroes).
They had a lucrative, blood-soaked run of it. Then, on December 5, 1933, during the first year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term, Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, the only one that negated a prior amendment.
The immediate result? The sale and consumption of alcohol was here to stay, the term speakeasy became a part of the American language, and major brewing companies returned to the United States, never to leave again.
Of course, there was another result. The Mafia wrapped its tentacles around dozens of other businesses, some legitimate, some borderline, most illegal (especially prostitution and gambling), and it gave up none of the power it had accumulated during Prohibition.
It’s all there in the history books in black and white, and in the Hollywood films of the 1930s that glamorized both sides, the criminals and the lawmen. And a guess is that, even today, most people know a lot more about Al Capone than they know about Eliot Ness.
But what if Billy Sunday and Carrie Nation and their ilk had been a little less effective spreading the word, and Prohibition had gone down to defeat?
The most important single change would not be the absence of the Mafia, but a huge diminution of their power. The country was turning against booze just as the Mafia, composed mostly of Italian immigrants, was coalescing, and the liquor business was wide-open territory for a well-managed gang. But this doesn’t mean there weren’t Jewish and Irish and every other kind of gang, and they all knew how to protect their territory. In fact, America wouldn’t see such organized violence until the drug wars of the mid-twentieth century and beyond.
Certain Hollywood actors who specialized in criminal types would have had a harder time making the kind of living they were able to make. Imports like Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, and others would have fared all right once the studios became aware of the Third Reich, but homegrown gangster types like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart would have fared far less well.
Nothing would have prevented the stock-market crash of 1929, but the records show an enormous boost in illegal alcohol consumption from 1929 through 1933, and it would have helped the economy had the tax on all those hundreds of millions of bottles gone to the government.
The defeat of the Eighteenth Amendment would even have affected popular literature. Thorne Smith, a humorous fantasist (or perhaps a fantastic humorist), wrote nine bestsellers. Can anyone imagine a Thorne Smith book in which damn near every character doesn’t drink booze to the exclusion of almost everything else, and act exactly the way you’d expect them to act after consuming all that booze?
By 1940, accountants had doped out exactly how much Prohibition had cost the government. In a much smaller, less vigorous economy than today’s, the government lost $11 billion in tax revenues, and another half billion futilely trying to enforce the damned thing.
So . . . we’d have had a far better economy, the Mafia and other criminal classes would have grown far more slowly, and popular entertainment would not have made heroes out of villains. And one more thing: More than a million jobs would have been saved, which would have been very useful during the first four years of the Depression.
What jobs? I hear you ask.
Anyone who worked for a brewery, for starters. Or a saloon. Or a distillery. And let’s not forget barrel makers, and waiters, and truckers, and truck manufacturers, and the fact that there was no such thing as Social Security, and . . . well, you get the picture. Compared to what actually transpired, that picture gets nicer and nicer the more you look at it.