The image of Prohibition got fixed by Richard Hofstadter, who summed it up as a "rural-evangelical virus," "a pinched, parochial substitute for reform." Prohibition has remained exactly that in the popular imagination, like a freak preserved in formaldehyde, useful for editorialists and pundits as a standing lesson against "legislating morality." (Why does it never occur to them that virtually all laws "legislate morality"?) Historians have long since moved on, citing Hofstadter only when they want to make the point of how wrong he was about Prohibition. Nevertheless his and others' visceral reaction has effectively kept the real and more interesting story out of public view.

Perhaps that is for good reason: Prohibition is full of awkward facts, and it would be convenient to pretend that it was purely the product of puritanical rubes who temporarily seized power in a moment of American weakness. In truth, no reform movement had deeper roots in American values. Prohibition was the culmination of a century of agitation which swept over the nation in repeated waves. Its support was wide and deep, including people as thoughtful and diverse as Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Carrie Chapman Catt. If Prohibition was "pinched and parochial," then certainly the same indictment should be applied to other movements that culminated in the progressive era of reform—the movements for industrial safety, electoral reform, world peace, fair labor laws, food regulation, urban planning, good government, and (nearest cousin of all) woman suffrage. Almost invariably the same set of progressive people supported all these, with the hopeful expectation that rational and humane measures could make America a happier place.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Domesticating Drink looks at Prohibition from the interesting angle of male- female relations, and in doing so has to confront awkward facts about women in politics. For Prohibition was very much a progressive women's cause. Murdock makes the fairly obvious point that woman suffrage and Prohibition were close cousins. Both came to fruition through amendments to the Constitution, the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth, ratified within a year of each other. The great majority of suffragists favored prohibition, and the prohibition movement stood steadfastly for woman suffrage. Arguably the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) did more to promote woman suffrage than any other organization, being by far the largest and most active of all women's movements.

Prohibition and suffrage shared an organized enemy in the liquor industry, for the simple reason that those who made a living selling alcoholic drinks were sure that woman voters were against them. Drinking in America was highly gendered, taking place primarily in saloons, where the only women would ordinarily be prostitutes. Alcoholism was a public spectacle—every town had its drunkards—and criminal violence was often linked very closely to the masculine environment of the saloon.

So was political corruption. The political machines bought votes through the saloons. They could always round up men who would vote correctly for the price of a drink, and saloons conveniently often doubled as polling places. Political officials got illicit funds through the saloons, too, because they needed to bribe to stay open on Sundays or to escape police crackdowns. "Politics, masculinity and alcohol were a powerful triumvirate in the early years of the twentieth century," Murdock says.

If men had the saloons, women had the home. Women were the virtuous sex, restricted to the home but also protectors of the home. Women campaigned to get the vote largely on the basis of their claim to bring a superior morality into public life. Frances Willard, inspiring leader of the WCTU, referred to the vote as the "home protection ballot." Women did not enter saloons, they were incorruptible and non-violent, they did not drink.

Except they did. Murdock uses a number of unconventional sources, such as old photographs, cookbooks, and guides to etiquette, to show that alcohol was, in fact, consumed in the home—that women served wine and other alcoholic beverages in the context of formal entertaining, and that they also consumed significant amounts of alcohol through patent medicines: "Many Americans … did not consider women's sociable, moderate consumption 'drinking,' as they understood the term."

Murdock may overstate her case. I wonder whether etiquette books reflected actual mores any more than gourmet magazines today tell the actual state of American diet. Nevertheless she does effectively make the point that alcohol could be seen through a very different set of lenses than that of the saloon—that many American women were at least distantly familiar with a way of drinking in which men and women were joined in the home, without violence and without corruption.

That, however, was never much a part of the debate over Prohibition. Saloons got all the publicity. Prohibitionists knew that outlawing the saloon and the moneyed industry behind it would not end drinking. After all, local and state prohibition laws had been on the books for 70 years before national Prohibition came in; and everybody knew that alcohol continued to be consumed in dry towns and dry states. In fact, Prohibition did not pretend to end all drinking. The law did not forbid consumption, and was quite ambivalent about alcohol made and consumed at home. It was perfectly legal during Prohibition, for example, to make wine at home—so that the demand for wine grapes actually increased in the first years of Prohibition.

Prohibition law aimed at the institutions that corrupted men, luring them away from their families and into patterns of iniquity. Prohibitionists were optimists who believed that once these systematic, money-driven temptations were removed, Americans would gradually realize that drinking was bad for them. It might take a generation, they thought, but surely it would become clear that America was a better place when no one drank.

In the first years of Prohibition, it really seemed they might be right. Prohibition came in without any real protest or debate. Even those who were doubtful thought they would give it a chance. The first reports were glowing. Social workers in many cities reported that life in the mean streets was better. Children were getting more food, women were less abused, men less likely to be injured on the job, violence less endemic. Crime dropped; arrests for public drunkenness plummeted.

Later, however, serious problems in enforcement developed. A significant minority continued to drink, and bootleggers found it profitable to provide for them. The Treasury Department's Prohibition Bureau, staffed by poorly paid political appointees, proved to be corrupt and inefficient. Cities like New York made very little effort to help.

At that point, Prohibition supporters had a choice. They could have modified the law, perhaps by making the sale of beer and wine for home consumption legal while continuing to outlaw hard liquor and public drinking. They were, in fact, implored to take this course by moderates. But to prohibitionist leaders, it was not merely the saloon that was evil; alcohol was evil. Leading reformers wanted to do away with drink entirely. As resistance to Prohibition law grew, these drys insisted on enforcement of the laws— greater penalties for lawbreakers, and absolute loyalty to the law on the part of all politicians. The Anti-Saloon League, which had practically invented the political lobby, had a grip on Congress. Year by year Congress grew more dry, not less, and Herbert Hoover's huge electoral majority in 1928 was credited largely to his support for Prohibition. Until the very end, Prohibition looked unassailable, even though everyone agreed that enforcement was very poor.

The drys' unwillingness to consider compromise set the stage for what was perhaps the most dramatic reversal ever in American politics. A hugely popular amendment, adopted with virtually no controversy, became the most reviled and ridiculed movement in our history. Hofstadter was wrong to refer it to a "rural-evangelical virus," but he spoke for the re- action of his time. The end of Prohibition corresponded to a huge transformation in American thinking.

Murdock makes the case that Prohibition marked the end of Victorian womanhood—both its final triumph and its demise: "Because Prohibition removed the most notorious public drinkers and drinking spaces from the collective consciousness, drinking could now be glamorized."

Speakeasies replaced the saloon, but they were not the same male bastions. Young women—flappers—went to speakeasies. Dancing and music became closely aligned with drinking, as never had been the case in hard-drinking, foot-on-the-rail saloons. And middle-class people brought alcohol into their homes, hosting "cocktail parties." In short the role of alcohol was redefined, so that drinking became a social ritual men and women shared. After Prohibition, drinking became much more domestic—most alcohol today is consumed at home—and abuse much less public.

In some sense, then, Prohibition succeeded—thus Murdock's title, Domesticating Drink. Drinking would never be the same, and "woman" would never be the same. Along with the saloon, says Murdock, the "image of women as a virtuous and unified voting bloc" disappeared. The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform rose up, leading the charge to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. (Note the changed noun: women rather than woman. Not since Prohibition have we been able to speak of woman as if a single body.)

Murdock's study makes a compelling case for Prohibition as a pivotal event in American life, rather than a brief detour out of the mainstream. Other historians have offered Prohibition as an example of reform politics, and as a case of a political pressure group, the Anti-Saloon League, perfecting the very modern skill of single-issue lobbying. I would add another element, that of the church.

Temperance reform was not always religious in character—the Washingtonians were quite secular—but by the time national Prohibition came it was seen as the cause of the committed church. The famous best-selling book In His Steps, from which comes the phrase "What Would Jesus Do?," is symptomatic of those times in presenting the campaign against alcohol as the highest calling of the Christian. The Anti-Saloon League referred to itself as the "church in action," drawing support particularly from Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists. Surely the historic split of the Protestant church between orthodox and liberal, the rise of otherworldly fundamentalism and the retreat of evangelicals from political and social engagement, is closely linked to the massive disappointment of Prohibition.

Seen in this light, Prohibition deserves our attention precisely because it failed. It embodied the best hopes of American Christian reformers, who believed that "one nation, under God" might move steadily to-ward heaven. Instead America took a turn toward other aspirations, in which liberty was unhinged from virtue—sometimes becoming the antithesis of virtue. Christians lost standing. Woman became women—a grouping of individuals. Remnants of an older Christian republic remain, but really, the failure of Prohibition ushered us into the modern era.

Tim Stafford is the author most recently of Stamp of Glory (Thomas Nelson), a novel.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.