A People’s History of American Prohibition

Chapter 16 examines the predations of the parasitic Gilded Age “liquor trusts”--akin to the big railroad, steel, and financial trusts--including the United States Brewers’ Association and the Liquor Dealers’ Association, which corrupted law enforcement and government representatives. Unlike these trusts, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) could not buy off politicians, but relied on agitation and publicity—ensuring that constituents were fully informed as to their elected representatives’ voting records on temperance. Progressive prohibitionists made common cause with good-governance “muckrakers” like Pussyfoot Johnson and Upton Sinclair. The chapter turns to the wave of state-level prohibitions, beginning with the Oklahoma’s prohibition statehood in 1907, drawing on the long-standing prohibitionism of Native Americans. From there, the “dry wave” swept the American South, where the liquor traffic was more diffused and less organized, and temperance sentiment was strong among both white and black communities.

Smashing the Liquor Machine

This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you’ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that touched virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. American prohibition was only part of a global phenomenon, which included pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Tomáš Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Temperance wasn’t “American exceptionalism,” but one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Temperance was intrinsically linked to progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights and indigenous rights. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F. E. W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that profited off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States.

The Low-Church Idea of a University

William Rainey Harper, founder of the University of Chicago, was an accomplished biblical scholar who convinced John D. Rockefeller Sr. that Baptists needed a great university. While Harper emphasized Christian character, chapel, community, and Christian dimensions in teaching, he was also an efficiency expert who was later accused, as by Upton Sinclair and Thorsten Veblen, of building a university too much beholden to business interests. Amos Alonzo Stagg saw football as contributing to building character and community. In Harper’s “low-church idea of a university,” America was his parish. Sociology, as represented by Albion Small, was presented as a Christian and democratic moral enterprise and can be seen as a last flowering of moral philosophy. John Dewey, who had abandoned earlier Christian faith, exemplifies how a broadly Christian moral heritage might blend with democratic ideals.

Republic

This chapter is the first of two “foundations” that form the second part of the book. Starting with an analysis of the analogies drawn between Donald Trump and Roman emperors across the mediascape of 2016, it introduces the temporal and political relationship between the Roman and American republics, via the work of Hannah Arendt and Ian Baucom. It then moves backwards through American history, from the twenty-first to the eighteenth centuries, bringing in a wide range of American writers: Ursula Le Guin, John Williams, Upton Sinclair, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Louisa McCord, Mercy Otis Warren, and several others. Keeping the Roman analogy at the heart of its discussions, this chapter ultimately demonstrates the ways in which writers generate networks of coeval connection between ancient past and modern present in order to variously uphold and break down the seemingly contingent political, social, and racial logics of American empire.

The Meat Industry Goes Back to the Jungle

Major outbreaks of the coronavirus among workers in meatpacking plants have brought renewed public scrutiny to a hazardous industry. Working conditions had improved through the mid-twentieth century, after investigations by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair and others early in the century exposed unsafe and unsanitary practices. But benefits and protections for workers have steadily eroded in recent decades, due to the decline of unions and rise of globalized trade and labor sourcing. The backsliding in an industry with a mostly immigrant workforce occurred largely out of the public eye, until the pandemic raised concerns about the food supply.