[Peace-discuss] Follow-up on Rich

[David Green]

To belabor the issue, here is an excerpt from Frank Rich's column from yesterday that exemplifies its tendentiousness:

Once again, both the president and the country are following New Deal-era precedent. In the 1920s boom, the reigning moral crusade was Prohibition, and it packed so much political muscle that F.D.R. didn’t oppose it. The Anti-Saloon League was the Moral Majority of its day, the vanguard of a powerful fundamentalist movement that pushed anti-evolution legislation as vehemently as it did its war on booze. (The Scopes “monkey trial” was in 1925.) But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market. Roosevelt shrewdly came down on the side of “the wets” in his presidential campaign, leaving Hoover to drown with “the dries.”
Much as Obama repealed the Bush restrictions on abortion and stem-cell research shortly after pushing through his stimulus package, so F.D.R. jump-started the repeal of Prohibition by asking Congress to legalize beer and wine just days after his March 1933 inauguration and declaration of a bank holiday. As Michael A. Lerner writes in his fascinating 2007 book “Dry Manhattan,” Roosevelt’s stance reassured many Americans that they would have a president “who not only cared about their economic well-being” but who also understood their desire to be liberated from “the intrusion of the state into their private lives.” Having lost plenty in the Depression, the public did not want to surrender any more freedoms to the noisy minority that had shut down the nation’s saloons.
 
In fact, the temperance movement in the late 19th century was integrally related to the admirable rural populist movement and the midwestern women's suffrage movement, especially regarding the Women's Christian Temperance Union. It wasn't just Carrie Nation with her axe, as we learned in school; see Frances Willard. And when Prohibition was passed after World War I, it was with the support of many who identified as Progressives among other respectable, non-fundamentalist Christian folk, identified with urban "good government" and inclined to not think favorably of immigrant drinking culture. It was also spurred by anti-German sentiments fomented during the war that were shared by the respectable classes who, I guess, identified beer with treason when produced by German-Americans. For Rich to characterize Prohibition in terms of the Anti-Saloon League and the Moral Majority is polemical at best. And to identify the "intrusion of the state into their
 private lives" with Christian fundamentalism is dishonest. It ignores the political repression, most identified with the Palmer Raids after WWI, Sacco & Vaznetti, etc., of the era that brought us the F.B.I., which I believe is still with us.  This "intrusion" was obviously not ended by FDR along with the end of Prohibition. For Rich to identify Prohibition with a "noisy minority" is a distraction from the minority, noisy or otherwise, that Roosevelt continued to represent as best he could, while addressing the Great Depression.
 
The cartoonish liberal version of history that Rich successfully foists on liberal NYT readers is every bit as apocryphal as creationism, wouldn't be taken seriously by a monkey, to its credit.


      
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