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"THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT"

Cultural Conflict

The Eighteenth Amendment, outlawing the sale of liquor, was the culmination of the campaigns of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union to dry up the United States. Forty-six states ratified the amendment, which went into effect in January 1920. The fight for Prohibition was a cultural conflict between white, native, Protestant Americans and new immigrants, as well as a conflict between women and men. Mainstream Protestants associated the saloon with the working-class and immigrant cultures they wished to bring in line with their own values. Women fought for Prohibition to protect their homes and families, recognizing that drunken husbands used up a family's income on liquor and often physically or sexually abused their wives and children.

A Fool's Errand

Resistance to Prohibition had been fierce: 1919 New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Edward I. Edwards pledged to "make New Jersey as wet as the Atlantic Ocean." While Prohibition curbed alcohol consumption in the 1920s, strict enforcement was clearly, as one historian has said, "a fool's errand." If people wished to drink, they could easily find liquor, especially in the cities. Enforcement was estimated as 95 percent effective in rural, conservative Kansas but only 5 percent effective in urban, liberal New York. In January 1920 portable stills went on sale at hardware stores for six dollars. Speakeasies opened almost as soon as saloons closed, and these new settings ironically made drinking more genteel and sophisticated. Speakeasies provided opportunities for "new women" to smoke, order cocktails, enjoy conversation, and mix with men. Flappers were conspicuously present at the fancier speakeasies, although there was no overall increase in women's drinking in the 1920s. Since liquor became more expensive with Prohibition, an appearance at a speakeasy identified middle- and upper-class young women with fashionable and chic society, rather than with the lower-class drunks rightly or wrongly associated with the neighborhood saloon.