[Peace-discuss] Follow-up on Rich

[Morton K. Brussel]

I wasn't present when abolition was abolished, so I can't say what the  
mood of the population was at the time. But I heard that there was  
much rejoicing. Was it only the bar owners? Can you quote a  
sociological study to see how people lined up on the question?

In any case, the arguments, difficult for me to follow, seem to be  
making a mountain out of a molehill.  They seem to state that Rich is  
involved in a conspiracy to befuddle the public. If you think his  
analogies are ill conceived, leave it at that, but I believe he is not  
all wrong from what I recall as a boy in the thirties. Maybe that is  
because my (socialist) father sold beer and whiskey in his drugstore  
and enjoyed a shot of whiskey to start dinner occasionally. --mkb


On Mar 16, 2009, at 8:03 PM, David Green wrote:

> 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 Much as Obama repealed the Bush restrictions on abortion and stem- 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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