How Prohibition gave birth to bad policing, the modern prison system, and right wing politics

I spoke with McGirr about her research recently. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Uneven, unfair enforcement of Prohibition laws

By and large the stories that we have about Prohibition have emphasized failure. Endless flows of bootleg gin and speak-easies, the flouting of the law. [It’s true] that there was flawed enforcement, there was selective enforcement, but there was very, very real enforcement.

And once you start to look both at the national level but also at the state level [you see that] policing took on a role in enforcing the law in particular against groups that were already identified with criminality: poor people, immigrants, African Americans.

I was trying to get beyond a familiar cast of characters and the familiar group of folks that we know [in order] to look at what the law meant for ordinary men and women. One way is to look at enforcement—at policing records and state enforcement records.

There’s evidence at that ground level, looking at evidence of individuals who were policed and targeted; there’s court records, there are also simply prison statistics and numbers, where you can see in places like North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas that you have an escalation in rising prison numbers during the Prohibition era.

You see a real first spike in prison growth both at the federal and the state level, largely [because of] prohibition enforcement and the collateral violence and crime it sparked.

What it was like for people living with these new laws

Let me first talk about how life changed for urban, ethnic immigrant workers in a place like Chicago. This is a place that is widely considered a largely wet town and wide open in terms of enforcement, where you think of enforcement as kind of a joke. But there were huge ramifications of the law, nonetheless, in these immigrant ethnic communities.

First, the law was very much seen, and rightly so, as a sort of direct attack on the cultural values of these communities. Drinking had been part of the rhythms of daily life. So [the law] was seen as a form of hostility by these groups. There’s this feeling like “Wow. Our whole way of life is under attack.” But second, along with that there are the realities of how life changes on the ground.

So one is you have the shuttering of saloons. The open ways of drinking that had forged communities in these spaces are pretty much gone.

I did a lot of work in settlement house records to trace the way neighborhoods changed. The way drinking became increasingly hidden, moved indoors, moved into homes, moved into shuttered spaces with whitewashed windows to hide what’s going on inside. Drink continued, but in different ways, in hidden ways.

Drink was far more expensive. So it was also kind of a budgetary concern for working-class folks. But of course there was new violence in their neighborhoods because police encouraged drink suppliers to move into new areas where they would be less seen.

And that’s usually in poor communities that didn’t have power to keep them out. And so there are new levels of violence in these neighborhoods as well. You look at men and women who were trying to work with these communities in settlement houses, you see them talking very much about these terrible ramifications of the law in their communities.

These are very real grievances. They’re not grievances that have been widely understood, because nobody really tried to look at and get at the lived experiences of these men and women under the law during this period. 

The level of citizen enforcement was surprising

Prohibition forced federal and state governments into an increased role of policing and surveillance. But of course even though it was a radically ambitious law and it was a qualitatively new thing, the law was so ambitious there was no way to rein in the kind of violations that were taking place.

And of course that led to a crisis of law observance. By 1923, Warren Harding declared this crisis to be a national scandal. As a result, all of the men and women [in the temperance movement] that had fought so hard, and for so many years to achieve what they saw as a great triumph, were deeply concerned about this lack of observance.

This is a period, coming out of WWI, where the repercussions of the war had led to all sorts of radical labor insurgency, and there was a new militance in African American communities; the war had led to changes in gender roles.

So many of these Protestant evangelical men and women were already anxious over a whole host of other social changes that had occurred coming out of the war.

When Prohibition passed, violations of the law basically came to represent in a very concrete form all of the anxieties over the other social changes.

The organizations that had been fighting for years to pass the 18th Amendment—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which was one of the largest women’s organizations in the country and the Anti-Saloon League, which called itself Protestant Church in Action Against the Saloon—after 1920, they didn’t just disappear or go back home!

Well, some did, but many saw that their task was to see that this law, which is part of the Constitution, is actually enforced. So they began to campaign for law enforcement.

Enter the KKK

Right. So the resurgence of the Klan spiked [to] between 2–5 million [total] members between about 1920 and 1925. And it is no coincidence that that spark, that snowball effect of the Klan spiraled in the wake of the Volstead Act.

In going across these different communities and looking at how the Klan recruited, what were some of the central concerns around which it was able to build its chapters, I saw it was often around the issue of the lack of observance of Prohibition, the issue of bootlegging, of cleaning up communities. [But] they weren’t just concerned about drink.

This issue was used instrumentally as a mandate to target those groups they already saw as enemies of white Protestant nationalism: immigrants, Catholics, and African Americans.

And Prohibition provided a means for them to justify what became in a way kind of an enforcement activity. Either by backing local police or stepping in where local police would not act, to enforce the law, but selectively.

So they would essentially raid homes, target immigrant Catholics, raid for wine or sources of liquor.