The differences between urban and rural America obviously formed the crux of the choice before the Senate in February of 1933 of whether to allow the state legislatures to determine the fate of the 21st Amendment or grant that same responsibility to specially summoned conventions. Rural America had arguably given rise to the Temperance Movement in the first place, many of its most prominent leaders having been raised in and shaped by primarily agrarian environs. Founders and early leaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union like Annie Wittenmyer (1827-1900) and Frances Willard (1839-1898) had come from sparsely populated places like Adams County, Ohio and Churchville, New York, while the famous hatchet-bearing Carrie Nation (1846-1911) was a native of rural Gerard County, Kentucky. The Anti-Saloon League similarly drew most of its leadership from the nation’s many rural hamlets. Its most famous organizer, Wayne Wheeler, was from Brookfield Township, Ohio, while one of its most ardent activists, William E. Johnson (1862-1945) was born in Coventry, New York and spent most of his career as a law officer in places like Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Furthermore, thanks to its deliberate habit of connecting abstinence from alcohol to moral and spiritual wellbeing, the League drew its most enthusiastic support from the many evangelical Christian congregations that dotted the rural South and Midwest. For people like Wheeler, Johnson, and the first president of the League, a lawyer and clergyman named Howard Hyde Russell (1855-1946), the excessive consumption of alcohol was a social ill with profound consequences for the health of the American soul. It was only through abstinence, discipline, and adherence to a specifically Protestant brand of individual morality that the United States might save itself from sinking into a morass of corruption, licentiousness, and criminality, and it was only the pure morals of the nation’s simple country folk – as opposed to the city-dweller who lived cheek-by-jowl with unwashed immigrants and faced temptation on every street corner – that were fit for emulation. An alliance with the resurgent Ku Klux Klan – by way of their shared employment of a fund-raising agency called the Southern Publicity Association – helped to solidify this association and make plain to all and sundry that temperance had become a fundamental political feature of contemporary rural America.
Contemporary urban America, on the other hand, was characterized primarily by the presence of two groups on the opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. On the one hand were the wealthy, either of old-money stock – like the legendary Boston Brahmin, the Astors of New York, or the residents of Philadelphia’s suburban Main Line communities – or members of the post-Industrial Revolution nouveau riche – like the New York-based Rockefellers and Morgans, California’s William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), and the east coast Vanderbilts. These well-heeled urban dwellers in many cases owned a significant portion of the real estate of whichever city they called home, engaged in some amount of philanthropy by building hospitals and libraries, kept summer homes in places like New Haven, Connecticut and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and engaged in state and national politics as a kind of idle pastime. Prohibition, by and large, affected them very little. While many of them were formally members of some mainline sect of American Protestantism, they were generally quite far – in terms of temperament and self-perception – from the rural evangelicals whose horror of vice and self-righteous censoriousness helped drive the American Temperance Movement to the height of its considerable power at the beginning of the 20th century. And when Prohibition was finally enacted nationally by way of the 18th Amendment, the nation’s wealthiest inhabitants simply threw money at the problem. While it remained legal to buy and produce alcohol between the ratification of the amendment in 1919 and its enactment in 1920, they bought up every bottle they could find and created personal stockpiles. And when those stockpiles eventually ran dry, they proceeded to buy from whoever was selling. The markup that resulted from their alcohol having to be either smuggled into the country or manufactured illegally doubtless stung those who were more self-conscious of their finances than others, but this was about the worst that the wealthy urbanite had to deal with.
On the other hand, of course, were the nation’s urban poor. Within this much larger group were included, not only the saloon keepers, brewery and distillery workers, and stevedores whose livelihoods had been directly affected by the cessation of alcohol importation, sales, and manufacturing, but also the innocent victims of many a territorial dispute between Prohibition-fueled criminal organizations and the many millions more who wanted nothing more than a drink to take the edge off after a long day’s work. Of particular note among this cohort were the many immigrant communities that had taken root in urban America beginning in the late 19th century. Whereas, prior to the 1850s, most migrants to the United States came from places like Britain, Germany, and France, the effects of the Great Famine (1845-1849) and the British government’s hands-off response to the same dramatically increased the rate at which Irish Catholics were making the trans-Atlantic crossing over the course of the 1850s and 1860s. Over the next several decades, as steam power became the standard on civilian and well as military vessels, passenger fares began to decrease and it became increasingly possible for economically disadvantaged populations in some of the poorer regions of Europe to likewise migrate to the American republic. In consequence, beginning in the 1880s and extending well into the 20th century, immigration from places like Italy, the Russian Empire, and Greece rose by several orders of magnitude, utterly transforming entire neighborhoods in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago into ethnic enclaves whose demographic profiles diverged significantly from what had been the 19th century American baseline. Indeed, while many of these new arrivals were as pious as their newfound American neighbors, their Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish faiths lent them very different attitudes towards discussions of public morality than the average evangelical Protestant.
What this would seem to amount to, by and large, is a fairly straightforward binary. The rural population of the United States, circa 1933, had both deeply influenced and been deeply influenced by the grassroots social and political movement that gave rise to the 18th Amendment and its resulting prohibitory regime. The most prominent temperance activists of the 19th and 20th centuries had come primarily from the rural hamlets and small county towns of the American South and Midwest and carried with them into their work a sense of moral urgency and righteous purpose deeply colored by the evangelical churches which had historically helped bind these isolated communities together. The addition of modern lobbying and publicity techniques – thanks to private agencies like the aforementioned Southern Publicity Association – helped to harness these same pietistic attitudes for the purpose of achieving a series of well-defined political goals, the culmination of which was national prohibition. The urban population of this same era, by contrast, held somewhat more ambivalent attitudes. The wealthy, as a rule, were neither pious enough nor poor enough to have been all that strongly affected by either the initial campaign for Prohibition or its practical implications. Indeed, the worst that most of them could say for the concept was that it had cost them a little more than they would have otherwise spent on alcohol. The urban poor, meanwhile, had significant reason to find fault with the whole temperance crusade. Not only had many of them lost their jobs as a result of the 18th Amendment’s nationwide ban on the importation, sale, and manufacture of intoxicating beverages, but those that belonged to the nation’s Catholic population in particular – being primarily Irish, Italian, or Eastern European – tended to be uncomfortable with the idea of government defining moral behavior and held wine to be an essential component of one of their holiest sacraments.
Bearing all of this in mind, if the Senators who had assembled for the final meeting of the 72nd Congress in February of 1933 had decided to submit their draft amendment to the constitution repealing Prohibition to the customary ratification mechanism, this would necessarily have amounted to asking the part of the country that had given birth to the Temperance Movement in the first place to voluntarily dismantle that same cohort’s crowning achievement. Thanks to chronic malapportionment, rural voters held much greater sway than their urban counterparts in the various state legislatures, the result of which was that rural interests tended to dominate state politics. And contemporary rural voters still tended towards the pietistic, parochial, and moralizing attitudes which had, less than a generation earlier, ushered the 18th Amendment from approval by Congress to ratification by the states in a little more than a year. To ask the state legislatures to approve of a draft proposal for repealing the 18th Amendment would accordingly have been as good as consigning it to failure. This, of course, is what certain members of Congress would most definitely have preferred. If, like Senator Sheppard, they could not defeat the proposed amendment during the regular course of debate, they might at least ensure its rejection by essentially the same group of state lawmakers that had originally enacted Prohibition just over a decade prior.
If, on the other hand, this same group of Senators opted to submit their repeal proposal to special conventions in each of the states, the mass of urban voters who would otherwise have been shut out of the ratification process might finally have the chance to make their voices heard. Granted, it was only a chance. Congress opted not to provide specific instructions to the states as to the exact mechanism by which the aforesaid conventions were to be summoned. Certain state governments, in consequence, may have opted to elect convention delegates on the basis of existing county or district boundaries. In light of the fact that the legislative malapportionment discussed above was more often than not the product of wide population disparities between certain counties or districts within a given state – be they intentional or otherwise – this would likely have resulted in a body possessed of the same general character as the legislature it was meant to replace. Then again, summoning a convention by such complex means would almost certainly have taken as much time and energy as holding a normal legislative election, the prospect of which many voters would doubtless have disapproved. Simply allowing the “yea” and “nay” sides to organize slates of delegates and then holding a statewide vote to determine which of them would meet in convention would have inarguably taken less time. Not only that, but the resulting convention would hardly need to meet for more than a single day. Having been elected, en bloc, to vote a certain way, the assembled delegates need only call the roll, record the votes, and then adjourn in perpetuity.
With the Senate voting in favor of the repeal proposal by a margin of 63-23 and the House following suit to the tune of 289-121, it would seem obvious that most of the assembled members of the 72nd Congress were indeed in favor of eliminating Prohibition as an instrument of national policy. It would also seem obvious, in consequence, why this same group of lawmakers ultimately settled upon allowing state conventions to ratify the proposal rather than letting the state legislatures have their say. The former method, to put it simply, was far more likely to result in success. So what, then, did the states do? How did they respond to this unprecedented directive on the part of Congress? Well, most of them, unsurprisingly, saw the light of reason. Of the thirty-seven states that opted to hold conventions in 1933, almost all of them did so on the basis of a simple statewide vote. The reason for this, beyond basic efficiency, likely had a fair bit to do with the essential calculus of political survival. Most of the state assemblies, to be sure, were grossly malapportioned in favor of rural over urban voters, thereby seeming to limit the extent to which dissatisfied urbanites in a given state could conceivably punish state lawmakers who determined to minimize the former’s influence within the aforementioned special conventions. Their ability of urban residents of the states to “vote the bums out,” as it were, was inherently quite limited. That being said, there were – and are – more ways for disgruntled voters to make their frustrations known than by directly attacking the source of the same.
Circa 1933, recall, the United States of America was in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis for which the administration of President Herbert Hoover in particular, and the Republican Party in general, had absorbed the lion’s share of the blame. Granted, neither Hoover nor his cabinet were directly responsible for creating the financially precarious conditions which had then tumbled into recession in the fall of 1929. But the president’s actions – or lack thereof – in the months and years that followed the aforementioned stock market collapse certainly hadn’t done very much to shore up the nation’s flagging economic prospects. Indeed, in more ways than one, they had made the situation worse. The American public had already demonstrated the degree to which it made the connection between the nation’s economic woes and the Republican Party by cutting the latter’s Senate majority to a single seat during the 1930 mid-term elections while also shifting the majority in the House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic control. As the nation’s financial outlook continued to deteriorate thereafter, a similar outcome looked set to occur by way of the Election of 1932. The Republicans, in short, were in for another shellacking at the polls, and it behooved every member of the relevant party organization then serving in government to decided for themselves how best to respond. They could either go down with the ship, like Reed Smoot, Morris Sheppard, or Herbert Hoover himself, defending to the last the unpopular positions that the American people had come to identify with the causes of their ongoing misery. Or, determined to fight another day, they could go the way of John Blaine, Arthur Vandenberg (1884-1951), or William Borah (1865-1940), all three of them Republican Senators who made a point of distancing themselves from the increasingly unpopular Hoover Administration by supporting public relief programs up to and including the repeal of Prohibition. There was no guarantee, of course, that the voters would respond to the latter position by declining to vote the relevant legislator out of office. But as obstinance was a far likelier guarantee of defeat at the polls, more than a few Republicans opted for the better part of valor.
By the latter half of the winter of 1932/33, of course, the die had already largely been cast. The Election of 1932 had indeed been a blowout for the Democrats, resulting in supermajorities in both houses of Congress and the first Democrat elected to the White House since 1916. But while it might seem as though the nation’s various Republican state legislators should have been relatively insulated from this dramatic turnover by the effects of the aforementioned malapportionment – placing their fates, as it did, in the hands of pro-temperance rural voters – these same individuals in fact had ample reason to want to appear responsive to the national mood. So thoroughly had the Great Depression upended the nation’s previously established political calculus that even the misdrawing of electoral boundaries could no longer guarantee political success. Clearly, it was not enough to simply isolate a state’s urban population in a handful of districts in order to sideline the Democratic vote. For the Democrats to have won as commandingly as they had in 1932, millions of people who had previously voted Republican would need to have changed their preference. What this meant, in states traditionally controlled by the Republican Party, was that otherwise “safe” Republican electoral districts were now potentially vulnerable. It might have been possible to staunch the bleeding if the vulnerable Republicans in question made a point of endorsing a popular Democratic priority, of course, like the rapid repeal of Prohibition. Even in states traditionally controlled by the Democrats, this same basic arithmetic applied. If members of the officially pro-repeal Democratic Party outwardly attempted to engineer the relevant conventions so as to make the defeat of repeal more likely, local Wets could be counted on to rally public support during the next round of primaries.
Not every Democratic voter was fervently in support of repeal, it bears noting, a fact which the results of the various state convention elections make clear. While, of the aforementioned states that opted to hold ratification conventions in 1933, a significant number voted overwhelmingly in favor of the pro-repeal slates on offer – including such varied jurisdictions as New York (88.7%), Florida (80.14%), Missouri (76.24%), and Washington (70.18%) – some voted for repeal by much slimmer margins – Arkansas (59.47%), Alabama (58.67%), and Idaho (58.02%) for example – and Democratic strongholds South Carolina (47.99) and North Carolina (29.05%) voted decisively against. Evidently, though the Democrats as a party had coalesced around a pro-repeal policy position in 1932, Democratic voters in North and South Carolina alike were of the opinion that Prohibition had not yet had its day. These deviations from the norm notwithstanding, however, Prohibition was ultimately repealed. Every other state convention, when finally summoned into existence, voted as was expected to ratify the proposed amendment. Indeed, not only was the final result very nearly unanimous, by it was arrived at with a degree of speed that had never before been seen. The first approval came on April 10th at the behest of the State of Michigan. By July 10th, three months later, the tally had risen to ten states. By October 10th, six months later, it rested at twenty-six. And on December 5th, less than eight months after Michigan had sent things in motion, Utah became the thirty-sixth and last state required to ratify the relevant proposal. Less than twenty minutes later – the events of the Utah convention were being broadcast nationally – Acting Secretary of State William Phillips (1878-1968) certified the 21st Amendment as having been adopted. The 18th Amendment was thereby repealed and Prohibition consigned to the dustbin of history.
As to whether the 21st Amendment was either popular or institutional, the answer would seem to be that it was very much the former. Just as the original draft of the 18th Amendment had been approved by the Senate in response to a national pressure campaign years in the making – the thrust of which was that favoring temperance would provide access to valuable political resources – the proposal whose ratification resulted in the repeal of Prohibition was guided through that same body by a group of legislators who had cause to believe that their support would effectively purchase for them their continued political survival. There were, of course, in both instances, people who acted out of conscience. Many of the Senators who voted in favor of Prohibition in 1917 doubtless did so out of a sincere desire to protect the essential moral character of the American republic from the corrosive influence of freely available intoxicating beverages. And there were surely more than a few Senators in attendance in 1933 who likewise voted in favor of repeal because they felt, out of a sense of purest conviction, that it was not the place of government to police the private behavior of the American people. In either case, however, it would be unforgivably myopic to discount the influence that was being exerted upon the conversation at hand by the many and varied constituents to which all of these lawmakers were ultimately beholden.
Indeed, it may have been the case that many of the Senators who ended up supporting Prohibition in the first place did so precisely because they had been sent to Congress for that express purpose. Morris Sheppard springs to mind as just such an individual. The American Temperance Movement spent years – nay, decades – lobbying not only for prohibitory laws and constitutional amendments in the states, but also on electing like-minded individuals – like Sheppard – to Congress. An amendment to the United States Constitution was always their ultimate goal, and achieving that goal required the placement of known allies in the right positions. The 21st Amendment was not the product of the same kind of long-running grassroots campaign, to be sure. Far from being decades in the making, it progressed from proposal to reality in a remarkably short amount of time. But it was still, undeniably, the result of popular agitation. Not only had the various state appendages of the Democratic Party sent an overwhelming majority of pro-repeal delegates to its national convention in June of 1932 – resulting in the selection of an outwardly pro-repeal candidate for president – but the American people then proceeded, in November of that same year, to elect a pro-repeal Democrat to the White House by a significant margin of victory. In both cases, in order to ensure that a specific policy which they favored was ultimately enacted, the American people discharged their electoral responsibilities in an especially judicious fashion.
To be sure, more issues than just Prohibition were litigated during the relevant race for president. The American economy was presently in shambles and the two major party nominees harbored markedly different attitudes as to how the national government ought to respond. But Prohibition was definitely one of the issues under discussion, and perhaps even among the most important. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, along with the simultaneous defeat of as many as one hundred anti-repeal members of Congress, could thus fairly be characterized as a kind of public referendum on the issue of national Prohibition. And while a number of particularly ardent Drys declined to rethink their position and accepted the disapprobation of their constituents, many others who had previously voted in favor of Prohibition publicly reversed themselves – like the aforementioned Senators Vandenberg and Borah – and came out in favor of repeal. Few of them, to be sure, would have admitted to changing their tune simply as a means of political self-preservation. But as concerned as elected officials are often forced to become by the circumstances of their occupation with public opinion and perception, it would seem next to impossible to believe that self-preservation wasn’t a primary motivating factor for many of them all the same. The 17th Amendment, of course, is what set this dynamic in place. By giving the American people nearly direct control over their representation in the Senate, it changed the character of Congress as a whole and forever altered the kinds of constitutional amendments that that same body would go on to consider and approve.
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