Whatever You Believe About History Is Likely Wrong

Among those who opposed the nonstop flow of liquor in the U.S. were all four of the presidents on Mount Rushmore. Unsplash photo by Ronda Darby.

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(OPINION) When I was a kid, my dad taught high school history.

He taught other subjects, too, most of which I ignored, especially Latin. But from early on, so young I could barely read, I’d pull down Dad’s history textbooks from their shelves and look at the pictures endlessly. I’d make him explain the stories that went with the reproductions of dramatic old paintings the books contained.

As my reading improved, I began reading the textbooks for myself.

Now, 60-odd years later, I still read history more than anything else, including religion. For me it was love at first sight when it came to studying the past, and it’s remained love ever since.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that probably anything you assume you know about a given historic period, war or world leader is wrong.

Many of us seem to have these received narratives — from elementary school or high school or some movie we saw — that run through our heads. Sure, we know that Alamo story. We know about Gettysburg. We know who FDR was.

Then you start to dig into the subject and you find you hardly know anything at all. The larger truth is always more complicated and colorful than anything Miz Snodgrass taught you in 10th grade.

History is unruly. It doesn’t fit our preconceptions. Supposed heroes turn out to have been scoundrels, and vice versa.

I was reminded of this recently when somebody emailed me Mark Lawrence Schrad’s essay “Freedom from liquor,” which discusses the well-known “facts” about Prohibition that aren’t facts at all.

Schrad is a professor of political science at Villanova University and the author of “Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition.”

Prohibition was the infamous period from 1920 to 1933 when the 18th Amendment and subsequent Volstead Act prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquor.

Or, as you’ve probably heard, it was the age of insanity, when a bunch of sanctimonious busybodies briefly cast the country into chaos, thirst and violence by trying to ban liquor … and fun itself.

But there’s a big problem with that trope: as Schrad establishes, hardly any of the conventional wisdom is true.

In my case, he’s preaching to the choir. In 1994, I wrote a column about the almost complete mischaracterization of Prohibition. I later rewrote that column into a short chapter for my 1999 book “Back-Porch Faith.”

Where to start?

First, Prohibition didn’t outlaw drinking. It was intended to curtail liquor trafficking. That’s a big distinction, Schrad says.

“Liquor is just the stuff in the bottle,” he writes, “but trafficking is about profit and predation; like human trafficking, diamond trafficking or the traffic in narcotics and opioids.”

Prohibition aimed to curb big-time manufacturers and distributors, who’d come to be seen as ruthless merchants willing to addict a whole nation for their own profit.

Early America had a debilitating problem with alcohol, much as contemporary America does with opioids—only worse, if possible. The country was drowning in booze.

As I wrote in the 1990s, old-time “Baptist churches frequently paid their ministers in jugs of liquor.
 … Syndicated columnist George Will has said that in earlier days: ‘Americans commonly drank whiskey at breakfast and on through the day. Laborers digging the Erie Canal were given a quart of Monongahela whiskey a day, issued in eight 4-ounce portions beginning at 6 a.m.’


“Cities and farms alike were rife with workers too soused to perform their
duties. Families were abandoned by alcoholic men.” 


Among those who opposed — without great success — this nonstop flow of liquor were all four of the presidents on Mount Rushmore, Schrad says.

Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave and abolitionist, “became the most outspoken temperance orator of his day,” Schrad adds. Douglass linked the temperance movement with abolition and women’s suffrage, saying “all great reforms go together.”

Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, regarded as the inspiration for the temperance movement, was a progressive firebrand and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the abolitionist classic, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” (Lincoln greeted Stowe in 1862 as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”)

In short, temperance and its child Prohibition weren’t the products of a few Bible-waving, throat-clutching busybodies but of the greatest reformers of their era, who were trying to address a social cataclysm. They thought a healthy republic couldn’t function if most of its citizens were continually pickled.

Super majorities of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate voted for the 18th Amendment. Forty-six of 48 states ratified it.

And the best-kept secret of Prohibition is that it mostly worked. Alcoholism dropped. Drying-out
 hospitals, common before World War I, disappeared.

Overall, alcohol consumption fell by one-third to one-half. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, neither did Prohibition result in documentable increases in organized crime.

I’m certainly not advocating a return to Prohibition. Neither is Schrad.

The point is that we’d do well to reexamine the stories we tell ourselves about our history. Conventional knowledge sometimes contains little knowledge at all. The truth is often complicated, yet the truth matters if we hope to understand who we are and where we’re going.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He’s the author of four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.