INTERWAR CONSERVATISM: From Anti-Prohibtion to Anti-New
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DOUGLAS CRAIG (AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY)
Overview
Prohibition and Anti-Prohibition
National Prohibition – and the growing political movement against it – exercised a very strong influence over the politics of the 1920s and early 1930s. This was because the 18th Amendment represented a dramatic change in the powers and scope of the Federal government.The first and most important point I want to make is about the radicalism of prohibition. It outlawed an entire industry, which was previously completely lawful – and this was extremely unusual in the US. The only parallels in US history are the slave trade and slavery itself. The slave traders got 20 years' notice in the Constitution that their activities would be made unlawful; the slave owners had a Civil War to warn them. The brewers and distillers, on the other hand, got twelve months' notice from the ratification of the 18th Amendment– and no compensation whatsoever. As at 1919, when the Amendment was ratified, the liquor industry employed hundreds of thousands of people and was in the top ten industries by capitalisation in the US.
It was also very radical in the constitutional sense – never before had the US Constitution been amended to enshrine sumptuary law – that is, law proscribing the personal behaviour and consumption of citizens --which had previously been the sole province of state and local law. G.K. Chesterton argued that putting the Eighteenth Amendment into the U.S. Constitution was akin to the British constitution saying that “There shall be a King, a House of Lords, and a House of Commons – and no dogs shall be allowed on Wimbledon Common.” The Supreme Court held the Eighteenth Amendment constitutional in the National Prohibition Cases of 1920.
In addition Prohibition, once implemented, involved the Federal government in historically unusual activities – to monitor and enforce private habits of individuals, often in their own homes. Many hitherto perfectly respectable and law-abiding Americans found themselves – for the first and perhaps the only time in their lives – on the wrong end of the criminal justice system. In 1929, for example, about 75,000 prosecutions for offences against the Volstead Act (the Federal enforcement statute for Prohibition) were undertaken. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of cases linked in the document list below, allowed significant diminutions in civil liberties as a result of litigation arising from aggressive enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment during the first half of the 1920s. All this made many Americans wonder about the benefits of Federal intervention in their everyday lives – a topic I want to come back to later in my paper.
My point about the radicalism of prohibition leads me to those who opposed it during the 1920s and into the 1930s. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) took a leading role in the movement to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. The AAPA incorporated in 1920, and by 1922 it claimed to have 100,000 members. This organization has received critical and sometimes hostile treatment from historians. This began with a book, The Amazing Story of Repeal, by Fletcher Dobyns (himself a rabid prohibitionist) in 1940, in which he argued that the AAPA was a collection of self-interested millionaires who opposed prohibition because they thought that income taxes would be lower without it. Much more recently, David M. Kennedy in his Pulitzer prize winning Freedom From Fear takes a similar view (p.62).
My perspective on the AAPA and its concerns comes from my work on conservative Democrats during the prohibition era (See After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920-1934). I never liked the taxation argument against the anti-prohibitionists for two main reasons. Firstly, federal income tax rates were at their lowest during the 1920s, following Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon’s retrenchment of federal expenditures and tax cuts. Very few Americans were subject to federal income tax at all during this time. The AAPA’s publicity material mentioned taxes only tangentially during the 1920s. It was only during the depression that it began to emphasise the revenue potential of repeal. But in this they were not alone – FDR and the Democrats pushed this argument hard before the 1932 elections as part of their demand for a balanced federal budget.
Secondly, repeal of prohibition only fourteen years after its ratification represented a gigantic shift in public opinion – and required two-thirds majorities in both Houses of Congress and majorities in three-quarters of the states. Given the low incidence of federal taxation, even in the early 1930s, it is difficult to imagine that enough ordinary Americans could have been convinced solely by millionaires worried about their present and future taxes.
There is no doubt that extraordinarily wealthy men – Pierre du Pont, Irenée du Pont and John Raskob – were prominent in the AAPA. The Du Pont brothers and Raskob funded the AAPA after 1926 so generously that it could lobby increasingly effectively to achieve the unprecedented: to undo a Constitutional Amendment. But these men, when they first became interested in prohibition repeal, were not particularly concerned with income taxes. They were much more worried about the radicalism inherent in prohibition – and in particular by the unprecedented federal activism that it embodied. Much more prominent in AAPA publicity were the deleterious effect of prohibition on American life (on families and on communities through increased crime and violence) and the fear of rampant federal interference in citizens’ lives.
These points can be seen by comparing two pieces of anti-prohibition advertising. The first, "Their Security Demands You Vote Repeal," was put out by the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform in 1932. Its theme, that repeal protected families from the ravages of bootleggers, was very similar in tone (if not objective) to the common theme of the 'dries' since the 1840s. The second piece, "Snoopers," reflected the anti-statism and concern for personal liberties that marked AAPA advertising against prohibition. These two themes, and not concern for taxation revenue, were the hallmarks of the antiprohibition movement. Both images come from David E. Kyvig's works: the WONPR image comes from Repealing National Prohibition (frontispiece) and "Snoopers" comes from Law, Alcohol and Order (frontispiece):
Anti-prohibitionists also expressed concern that prohibition was in fact glamourising alcohol and drinking. David Kyvig (Repealing National Prohibition, p.28) reports a survey of 115 movies released in 1930, of which 66% depicted drinking, and in which 43% of heroes and 23% of heroines drank. Imagine today if such a high proportion of Hollywood films depicted cocaine use so prominently!
Amongst the leadership of the AAPA there were also very real, but more private, concerns about the deeper implications of Prohibition. Here the strong DuPont influence came to the fore. The DuPont Company had made literally billions of dollars selling gunpowder – another unpopular product. Would munitions be the next industry to be prohibited without compensation? Was there no limit to the scope of potential Constitutional amendment? Could reformers do whatever they liked with the fundamental blueprint of American federal government? The whole idea of the constitution as originally conceived was to confer limited powers on the central government – but now Washington was going to tell Americans what to drink. What had happened to the local traditions of American statecraft? If individual communities (even States) wanted to ban alcohol, that was their business – but imposing such views on the nation as a whole was a very different matter.
It is worthwhile to go into some detail about these anti-prohibition arguments, because they were very similar to the conservatives' complaints against the New Deal after 1934. But before I get to that I want to make a couple of points about the “success” of Prohibition, because that, too, has bearing on the arguments raised about the perils of federal government intervention that were raised as much against the New Deal as they had been against Prohibition. It is now a commonplace that prohibition was an utter failure. But perhaps we have been a bit harsh. This is a graph generated from data in W.J. Rorabaugh's The Alcoholic Republic showing alcohol consumption in the US between 1710 and 1975:
Rorabaugh's figures are derived from official sources – so they are blank for the prohibition years. The 1910 and1935 figures show that official per capita alcohol consumption dropped from 2.5 gallons to 1.5 gallons – and that it took forty years (or almost two generations) to return to pre-prohibition levels. This strongly suggests that bootlegging during the prohibition years, while significant enough to keep many Americans drinking, were not sufficient to keep national alcohol consumption up to pre-prohibition levels. It is clear that many Americans did obey prohibition – polling in 1930 suggests that about 33-40% of Americans claimed to have drastically reduced their alcohol consumption from their pre-prohibition levels.As a final thought on prohibition, it is worthwhile to consider what might have happened had the Volstead Act not defined an alcoholic beverage as one containing more than 0.5% alcohol. This was a draconian definition. Had the Act been drafted or amended to include 3.5% alcohol, "near beer" would have been legal, and the political groundswell for outright repeal may well have been diverted into a crusade for low-alcohol beverages. As it was, however, the campaign for, and triumph of, repeal provided a rehearsal for the even more significant ideological and political fight against the New Deal.
The Conservative response to the New Deal
Like the anti-prohibitionists, the conservative opponents of the New Deal have generally received very critical treatment from historians. They are usually referred to as selfish reactionaries who failed to see that the Depression had changed everything and who had their own reasons, chiefly concerned with minimizing their taxes and protecting their privileges, for hating FDR. The favourite adjective seems to be “shrill” (see, for example, David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, pp. 62, 214), and the consensus is that the conservatives not only failed to stem the liberal tide of the New Deal, but also permanently discredited themselves in the process FDR himself set the tone for later historiography when he likened conservative critics of the New Deal to an old gentleman who lost his silk hat over a pier. A passer by dived into the sea, rescued the hat and presented it to its owner – who instead of thanking him berated the rescuer for allowing the hat to get wet.I am more sympathetic to the concerns and motivations of FDR’s conservative critics. My interest in the conservative reaction to the New Deal, and in the American Liberty League in particular, arose from the very strong continuities that existed between the anti-prohibitionists of the AAPA, the Democratic Party during the 1920s, and the Liberty League of the 1930s. These continuities were not only personal (in the forms of John J. Raskob, Pierre du Pont, Al Smith and many others) but, more importantly, ideological – in that the AAPA’s arguments against prohibition were repeated almost verbatim in the 1930s against the New Deal. The New Deal represented an unprecedented extension of peacetime authority and influence by the Federal Government; it represented an unAmerican bureaucratization of American society; individual choice and agency were being eroded through paternalistic, high taxing and intrusive government, and the Federal Government had improperly extended its activities well beyond those envisaged and prescribed by the Constitution and 150 years of practice.
Before you write the American Liberty League off simply as Neanderthal ingrates, consider the following:
Many of the core leadership group of the Liberty League cut their political teeth not only in the AAPA (in which they were rewarded with resounding political success), but also within the Democratic party between 1928 and 1932 (Al Smith was Presidential nominee in 1928, John Raskob was his Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Jouett Shouse was the tactical organiser of both groups). Far from being resentful and distant plutocrats, the Liberty League leaders had wide and successful political experience behind them, and in the process had been important players in the political culture of the 1920s and early 1930s;
Despite some private misgivings about FDR, and despite their prominence in the “Stop Roosevelt” movement before the 1932 Democratic convention, those conservative Democrats who later constituted the Liberty League gave their strong support to the President and to the early New Deal. In May 1933, for example, John Raskob told a friend that “Never in my whole life have I been so mistaken about a man and his ability as I was about Franklin Roosevelt.” The same applied to Al Smith and Pierre du Pont;
The parting of the ways, half way through 1934, came about not through personal resentment or self-interest, but through a growing realisation that the New Deal was going to make a permanent change in the ways that the Federal government operated within American society. The ex-AAPA leaders were prepared to go along with the Hundred Days of 1933 in the spirit of responding to a national emergency, but they were not prepared to let the New Deal do, on an even bigger scale, that which they had fought so hard against regarding Prohibition;
If the Liberty League can be accused of self-interest, it seems to me that the wellspring of that self-interest was the perception of many of them that their own life stories were American dreams that were now threatened by the New Deal. Many of the prominent Liberty Leaguers like Al Smith and John Raskob were self-made men, who considered their success to have been emblematic of the openness and fairness of American institutions, business and government. With the heavy hand of federal regulation, taxation, and centralism, they feared that the fluidity of American cultural and business life would be replaced by regimentation and bureaucratisation – which would prevent future generations of self-made men such as themselves from prospering.
Between 1934 and 1938 the Liberty League performed an important role in US federal politics as the only effective conservative force operating in Washington. The Republican Party was demoralised and routed after the defeat in 1932, their abject failure in the 1934 Congressional elections and FDR's landslide victory in 1936. The Congressional Conservative Coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans had yet to coalesce. The Liberty League therefore performed an important corrective role in a political context that had seen the temporary suspension of a normal two-party alignment. In August 1934 the American Liberty League employed 50 staff; the Republican National Committee employed 17.
Looking at the American Liberty League also provides some very fruitful perspectives with which to view the New Deal:
It reminds us of the very cautious, conservative nature of FDR’s platform in 1932 – and that the New Deal did NOT spring from Democratic party policy as at July 1932. The Democratic platform was indeed written by many of the same conservative Democrats who would later split from FDR and the New Deal. Its most dramatic feature at the time was not to outline a far-reaching set of remedies for the Depression, but rather to call for the immediate repeal of prohibition. Its economic planks were very moderate, and many of the Liberty Leaguers felt betrayed by FDR’s increasing divergence from the 1932 platform. The 1932 Democratic and Republican platforms are linked to the Document List at the end of this piece;
It reminds us of the rather chaotic nature of FDR’s socio-political thought and deeds and that of the New Deal itself: many of the conservatives’ complaints against the New Deal revolved around its experimental (some said chaotic) nature – that there was no coherent thought or policy behind it, but rather a series of expedient and opportunistic responses to the Depression. In this they were correct – and many have argued that this indeed was the genius of FDR and the New Deal. The Liberty League and other conservatives also made the point, which has been echoed by many historians ever since, that in many ways the New Deal did not work. For the conservatives the New Deal looked like the worst of both worlds – not only did it not work, but it was destroying “traditional” American values and institutions in the process.
The conservatives’ revolt against the New Deal also reminds us of some of the big questions raised by the coming of the welfare state – questions which have never fully gone away. Once the Federal government took direct responsibility for citizens’ welfare, the Liberty League predicted, it would create a welfare state and what we now call “welfare dependency.” That would erode individual initiative and responsibility, and would open the prospect of politicians simply buying votes through extra welfare payments. Newton D. Baker, who as Secretary of War during World War I had seen all he wanted to of big government, put it this way at the end of 1934: "The great danger of relief is that we are coming more and more to regard the State as a legitimate and responsible carrier of all individual, group and class burdens." These concerns long outlived Baker, the 1930s and the New Deal: in the 1990s President Clinton, a proud Democrat, happily signed a welfare reform bill that set rigid time limits on the receipt of welfare payments from the federal government.
And finally it reminds us of how radical the New Deal was. Examination of the conservative reaction against the New Deal makes me more cautious than other historians such as David Kennedy about the argument that Herbert Hoover anticipated much of the New Deal during his presidency. I do wonder at the idea that Hoover was capable, in Kennedy's words, of “the most dramatic, far-reaching economic heterodoxy,” (Freedom from Fear, p.82). There is now no doubt that Hoover was a much more active, adventurous and imaginative President than he had been given credit for until the 1970s. But would Hoover have signed the Social Security Bill, or played games with the price of gold, or signed the National Labor Relations Bill, or undertaken a massive program of direct federal aid to the unemployed? Fortunately we know the answers to these questions, for Hoover lived through the New Deal – and vociferously and consistently attacked it as a dangerous betrayal of American values, institutions and traditions.
