In this path-breaking book, Lisa McGirr sets out to rewrite the history of Prohibition, transforming it from a widely acknowledged policy failure thought to be a holdover of Victorian moralism to a policy initiative that gave birth to the modern law-and-order state, the federalization of crime control, and the formation of the Democratic political coalition that produced the New Deal. In this effort, she succeeds. As a social history of state growth and political realignment, this book changes our understanding not only of Prohibition, but also of the origins of the coalition of urban ethnic voters that flocked to the Democratic Party in pursuit of a drink.

The War on Alcohol offers a compelling story of the growth of “infrastructural power” developed by sociologist Michael Mann and advocated by William J. Novak as a useful analytic for investigating the expansion of the American state. Infrastructural power refers to the state's ability to “penetrate civil society” to carry out policies like Prohibition.Footnote ¹ The Eighteenth Amendment emerged out of the intersection of the progressive reform wave and the zeal of evangelical Protestants seeking to harness the power of the state, as well as wartime emergency, to save America from its own “bad habits” by shutting down the fifth largest industry in America.Footnote ² Evangelical Protestants were able to achieve their goals due to their highly organized churches and the overrepresentation of rural areas in Congress. The targets of enforcement—urban ethnic neighborhoods that would see their communities ravaged by organized-crime entrepreneurs peddling dangerous and expensive bootlegged liquor and bribing policemen and politicians alike—lacked the political power to resist Prohibition, to prevent criminal infiltration, and to demand honesty from their politicians. These neighborhoods were filled with immigrants, ineligible to vote, and with little motivation to pursue naturalization and the ballot.

The enforcement of the Volstead Act could only be described as selective. Looking at the state level of enforcement (many states had passed their own Prohibition legislation) reveals that enforcement was very uneven: in Virginia, the poor residents—black and white—caught up in enforcement built the state's highways as forced laborers on notorious chain gangs, an example of the carceral state serving the infrastructure modernization goals of the state; in California, Mexican Americans made up a quarter of those charged with violating the state's liquor law in 1924; and law enforcement arrested so many working-class female bootleggers that Congress allocated funds to open the first federal prison for women (92, 98).Footnote ³ The working classes bore the brunt of the selective enforcement of Prohibition laws by local and federal forces. Enforcement of the Prohibition laws empowered vigilante volunteers to police their communities, terrorize their booze-drinking neighbors, and buttress the power of the state's Volstead enforcement apparatus. Groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League blurred the lines between civil society and the state; but the most powerful civil society group to act as “citizen warriors” for the Volstead Army was the Ku Klux Klan, a perfect example of Mann's infrastructural power. In 1923, Klan raiders, five hundred of them fully deputized by the federal government, led a campaign of home invasions and terror in Williamson County, Illinois, that resulted in open warfare between the working-class immigrant miners of Herrin and the Protestant Klansmen, which ultimately led to the disintegration of support for “law enforcement,” an exodus of Italian Americans from the county, and a demand for constitutional safeguards of home and personal liberty.

The book pivots on the 1928 election that pitted Republican Herbert Hoover against Democrat Al Smith. By then, the festering resentments of bearing the costs of Prohibition prompted urban ethnic voters from different communities to come together and create a political coalition with elites in the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). Led by John Raskob and Pierre and Irénée du Pont, who saw the Eighteenth Amendment as a threat to economic liberty and private property, the AAPA coalesced under the umbrella of the Democratic Party to support Smith. These voters—immigrant, African American, working class—formed the base of the New Deal. Historians have typically located the emergence of this coalition in the 1932 election that brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House. But McGirr makes a compelling case that though Smith faced a crushing defeat to Herbert Hoover (40.8 percent to 58.2 percent), the fact that he carried the twelve largest cities signaled that a political realignment was already underway and it was prompted by shared hatred of Prohibition. This abhorrence for Prohibition continued to grow as the Hoover White House, supported by a conservative judiciary, promoted a law-and-order agenda: strengthening the emerging penal state; bolstering the state's invasive powers; developing the surveillance state, border control, and international regulatory regime. Repeal became viable because vigilante enforcement, the growth of organized crime, and widespread disregard for the law convinced most that the law did more harm than good; the Democratic Party was swinging toward repeal; and the economic devastation of the Great Depression provided a context amenable to repeal. But repeal, in McGirr's telling, did not halt the expansion of state power, because after repeal, liquor control through licensing fell to the states that used their liquor control regulation to establish when, where, and how Americans could get a drink. Meanwhile, the white moral entrepreneurs who had supported Prohibition turned their attention to drugs (249).

McGirr seamlessly toggles among the federal, state, and local levels, weaving a comprehensive story. As anyone who has attempted to trace the policies and enforcement between multiple jurisdictions knows, this is a difficult task. She is mapping what Novak calls the “sprawl of the American state.”Footnote ⁴ By looking at how Prohibition was enforced in Virginia, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and elsewhere, under both local and federal laws, by local cops, federal agents, and vigilantes, she shows how Prohibition increased the reach of the state in communities, and into homes. By emphasizing the development of a volunteer citizen army, she joins a growing number of scholars who reject the idea that voluntarism and state power sit in opposition to one another in U.S. history. Rather, volunteerism led to the expansion of American state power and the reach of the state.Footnote ⁵

McGirr is at her best when she dons her political history hat. Drawing on her deep knowledge of the New Right and conservative politics, this book provides intriguing glimpses into Prohibition's role in motivating conservative business elites to first reject Prohibition as a power grab by the federal government via the AAPA, and then reject the New Deal's attempt to regulate liquor via the National Recovery Administration as an equally dangerous power grab. Thus, Pierre DuPont, John Raskop, and William Stayton formed the American Liberty League and became a perpetual thorn in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal agenda (247–48). In her consideration of the AAPA, McGirr largely ignores the tax story that provides one backdrop of Prohibition. Taxation on beer and spirits had provided between 25 and 30 percent of federal revenues from 1875 to 1920, and the Eighteenth Amendment would certainly not have passed if the Sixteenth Amendment that gave Congress the power to collect tax on income had not provided a funding stop-gap.Footnote ⁶ In the wartime context of the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, taxation of the wealthy elite skyrocketed beyond 70 percent, over six times the prewar rate of taxation.Footnote ⁷ Hatred of the income tax, itself a form of coercive state power experienced by the elite, prompted DuPont, Raskop, and others to form the AAPA. With repeal, Pierre du Pont wrote to a friend in March 1928, “the revenue of the Government would be increased sufficiently to warrant the abolition of the income tax and corporation tax,” two of his deepest desires.Footnote ⁸ After repeal, Congress passed a liquor revenue tax bill by a vote of 388–5, but the income and corporate tax remained. Taxes for the middle classes did decline, but not so much for du Pont's crowd, which helps to further explain why the prominent members of the AAPA became opponents of the New Deal.Footnote ⁹ Tax revenue could lead to a type of tax addiction. After the repeal of Prohibition, the federal government initially taxed liquor distillation at a rate of a dollar per gallon in 1933; that jumped to three dollars in 1940, and nine dollars (eight times the costs of production) in 1944.Footnote ¹⁰ These high taxes encouraged the continuation of a black market in alcohol, which prompts McGirr to ask how this market was policed after 1933.Footnote ¹¹

McGirr notes that liquor control in the post-Prohibition era targeted “deviant” communities and sustained the American penal state. This is an intriguing point. If the New Deal brought the urban ethnic working class to the center of American politics (or at least the Democratic Party), then in the post-Prohibition moment, the right to have a beer was firmly held as a citizenship right, but only for citizens who lived along certain “white” heteronormative lines. Local state power, established and empowered by local liquor ordinances and local police, closely monitored poor, black, and gay recreational spaces. George Chauncey has shown the ways that New York's State Liquor Authority used its administrative mechanisms to regulate respectable sociability and target gay bars and gay sociability.Footnote ¹² Had McGirr expanded her periodization a bit further beyond the repeal moment, she could have demonstrated how the dramatic increase in federal police powers ultimately led to the permanent expansion of state-level law-and-order alcohol (and drug) control that aided in the emergence of Margot Canaday's straight state and the white supremacist carceral state. It is not a coincidence that the 1967 Detroit Riot was sparked by a brutal police raid of a blind pig in a poor African American neighborhood, or that the Stonewall uprising was a response to sustained police brutality suffered by the LGBT community in New York. Police harassment, justified through liquor control, remained a feature of many communities long after the repeal of Prohibition. This legacy of selective policing and the shoring up of the state carceral systems via federal authorizing is significant (249–50).Footnote ¹³ Here beer-drinking liberalism lay the foundation for Robert Self's breadwinner liberalism.Footnote ¹⁴

I have one final quibble with McGirr's masterful book. She concludes by arguing that the War on Drugs is the “spiritual and policy twin” of the War on Alcohol (250). There are certainly many overlapping themes and connections between the two: selective enforcement that fell more harshly on poor communities of color being the most significant. But I worry that there might be a teleological tendency to read the failures of the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration state back to the birth of Prohibition, but also to see the War on Drugs and the War on Alcohol as too distinct from one another. McGirr was certainly right to focus on the state level of enforcement to uncover the growth of the American penal state. It is at the local level that we can capture the ways that federal law enforcement and policy spurs local action. But the focus on the local also reveals the ways the enforcement of particular laws become entangled in the enforcement of other laws. Prohibition violations turn up drug violations and prostitution violations and so on. Law enforcement became entangled because of the intertwined nature of those bad habits, which the Prohibitionists were trying to eradicate. Proponents of Prohibition never saw the campaign as a single-issue one, even with the narrowed focus of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) to only alcohol. To accept that the “war on alcohol” was only about alcohol is to accept some of the politically expedient rhetoric of the temperance movement. The ASL sought to shut down the saloon because it was the home of a whole host of “bad habits,” including drinking, smoking, consuming drugs, gambling, and prostitution.Footnote ¹⁵ The Progressive Era launched a general War on Vice, beyond just alcohol, and it happened on multiple scales of state building and different registers ranging from municipal tin plate ordinances, to statewide initiative and referenda campaigns, to the federal laws like the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1911, and the Volstead Act of 1919. From the perspective of a War on Vice, we see that the War on Drugs and the War on Alcohol are not so much twins as two sides of the same coin.

The War on Alcohol is incredibly teachable and I would feel comfortable assigning it in both survey and upper-division courses. Its central argument shows the power of the vote to change the political landscape. McGirr transforms the 1928 election and Al Smith's campaign from a historical footnote to a one of the most significant turning points in twentieth-century electoral and political history. She fully integrates Prohibition into the master narrative of American political history. Textbook editors will have to revise their sections on Prohibition, the 1928 campaign, and the New Deal.