December 3, 2007
Dry Manhattan Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:50 PM EST Michael A. Lerner’s Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, a well researched and delightfully readable study of Prohibition in New York City, has considerable relevance to today’s culture wars. Lerner begins by explaining that he limited his investigation into the effect of the Eighteen Amendment to New York City, because to the rest of the world, New York was America. It was also seen as a vortex of sin, and the Anti-Saloon League, under the local leadership of the single-minded, politically savvy, bigoted, and psychologically intemperate William Anderson, saw drying out the city as both a coup and a first step in spreading temperance around the globe. Anderson and his allies exploited both the Progressive Movement and World War I to push through Prohibition. The fact that many brewers were of German descent made the effort to outlaw beer seem patriotic, and drys argued that a sober soldier was a better soldier, though returning doughboys were outraged to find that the nation they had fought for had gone dry. Those men and women who did support temperance were often strange bedfellows—Norwegian church-goers and African-American labor leaders, tea merchants and women suffragists. What little support there was for the dry movement, however, dried up as soon as New Yorkers realized how drastically their personal liberty had been curtailed. The book is full of fascinating tidbits about the city under Prohibition. The closing of many cabarets and nightclubs was no surprise, but some hotels also failed, and even the great Ziegfeld had to shut down one of his shows. More unexpected was the effect on movie theaters. Certain that without spirits to raise their spirits people would have to find other means of escape, theater owners had predicted record audiences and revenues, but movie attendance plummeted. Lerner posits that the lack of liquor depressed everyone so completely that they had no taste for any entertainment at all. The book tracks other quirky side effects. In the first few months, both arrests and hospitalizations for inebriation went down, but soon the drunk and the poisoned were crowding emergency rooms, and the cost of law enforcement skyrocketed, while the police turned to criminal activity with unprecedented zeal and imagination. New Yorkers from every walk of life were resourceful in finding ways around the Eighteenth Amendment. Whether city dwellers were more ingenious is open to debate, but there is a priceless scene in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in which the eponymous protagonist sets out to get some bootleg hooch for a dinner party that demonstrates that the rest of the nation was not so cavalier about flouting the law. New York differed from the rest of the country in another way. The dry movement tended to be Nativist. New York teamed with immigrants and Catholics and Jews. Lerner points out that for all its deleterious effects, the neighborhood saloon was often a community center for new Americans. An excellent example of this was John McSorley, who nether drank nor smoked and ran his legendary ale house with a strict hand. New Yorkers put up a tough and inventive battle against Prohibition, and two of the individuals who led the struggle to repeal it, Al Smith and the formerly dry socialite Pauline Sabin, were locals. But though Prohibition took on a special flair and force in the city, the experience was national and has relevance for us as a nation today. Lerner points out that never before had an amendment been passed to limit rather than protect personal freedom. No wonder that the Eighteenth was imposed from above by special interests rather than demanded by grass-roots groups. Current proponents of an amendment to restrict personal rights, such as marriage, should take note. Prohibition was not only a dismal failure while it was in force. It unified those who had previously had little interest in the issue, incited lawlessness, and, after a little more than a decade, was repealed with glee.
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