[Peace-discuss] Follow-up on Rich

[C. G. Estabrook]

Again, I think David's got it quite right.  And however finally ineffectual, 
Prohibition was a class-conscious reform movement -- drink *was* the curse of 
the working class.  --CGE


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 /Much as Obama repealed the Bush restrictions on abortion and stem-cell 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