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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 22, No 2 (Spring 2008)
The U.S. Business Press
and Prohibition
Ranjit S. Dighe
Abstract. Claims that national Prohibition owed its passage to the support of business interests are as old as Prohibition itself. The reasoning is
typically that business saw the banning of alcoholic beverages as a means
to a more productive, reliable, docile workforce. Yet little systematic evidence has been brought to bear on the question of whether the business
community did in fact push for prohibition. Toward an answer, this paper
examines the leading business periodicals of the time and their coverage of
the issue, as well as newspaper coverage of local business figures’ and organizations’ stances on local and national prohibition. Preliminary results
indicate that the national business press regarded prohibition as a minor
issue, giving it little space or visible concern compared with other key
reforms of the day. At the level of individual sectors, business attitudes toward prohibition seem to have varied widely. For example, as the national
prohibition movement came to a crescendo in 1916-19, the mining press
was increasingly supportive, while the financial press was mostly derisive.
Overall, the picture that emerges is of a business community that by and
large did not seem to view prohibition as a vital economic question.
Was Prohibition good for business? Certainly numerous contemporaries
thought so. Prohibitionists often bolstered their moral and spiritual appeals
with economic arguments that Prohibition would increase industrial efficiency, and many observers in the 1920s deemed it a key element in the decade’s
prosperity. Although the prohibition movement is more commonly regarded
as a cultural crusade, many of the crusaders were businessmen, some of whose
main motive may have been profits. Other businessmen may have been temperance adherents to begin with, for religious or other reasons, and may have
used their status or influence as businessmen to advance the cause of prohibition. While few scholars give business primary credit for the Eighteenth
Amendment, business almost surely played some role. For example, the AntiSaloon League’s (ASL’s) largest donors were John D. Rockefeller and his son.
Some contemporaries even claimed that business support was indispensable
to the passage of national Prohibition.1 By reviewing the leading business
periodicals of the time, this paper evaluates the extent of business support
for Prohibition. It finds that the business press had mixed attitudes toward
Ranjit S. Dighe is Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New
York College at Oswego.
SHAD (Spring 2008): 228-42
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
229
Prohibition and surprisingly little coverage of it, suggesting that it was not a
pressing concern of business, at least not at the national level.
This paper’s focus on business and Prohibition builds on Wiebe’s (1962)
and Kolko’s (1963) influential scholarship on the political economy of the
Progressive Era, which concludes that the business community spearheaded
the economic legislation of that period, implying that business may have been
behind Prohibition as well. In a later work Kolko (1976) argued that whatever
its cultural roots, Prohibition could never have become national law “until business elements concluded that sobriety among their workers was an essential,
profit-creating goal,” perhaps less for the sake of boosting productivity than
controlling rebelliousness among the workers.2 Rumbarger (1989) extends
this thesis to book length, arguing that American temperance, anti-saloon, and
prohibition movements were consistently led by self-serving business interests. Rumbarger’s arguments are ultimately too overstated and tendentious
to be convincing, as non-business elements of the prohibition movement are
either ignored or dismissed. On the other hand, Krooss’s (1970) landmark
study of business opinion in the 1920s-60s contains scarcely a word on Prohibition, not even on the business-dominated Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA).3 Timberlake (1963) occupies a middle ground; his
case for prohibition as part and parcel of rational Progressive social reform
includes a chapter on economic arguments and business involvement in the
prohibition movement. Clark (1976) echoes much of that discussion.4
Current prohibition researchers typically acknowledge some economic motivations but treat it as a social movement. While the notion of Prohibition as
the last gasp of “the rural-evangelical virus” (in Hofstadter’s [1955] enduring
phrase) has long been out of favor, recent researchers, following the lead of
Gusfield (1963), tend to emphasize cultural and social factors such as class,
religion, and gender. Blocker (1989) says that by the twentieth century the
prohibition movement had strategically divested itself of radical reformism,
as embodied by Frances Willard’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU) and the Prohibition Party, and concentrated its efforts in the ASL’s
single-issue reform campaign. Blocker says this campaign skillfully and
opportunistically used alcohol as a scapegoat for social ills, including such
capitalist concerns as labor antagonisms and a new class of inexperienced and
undisciplined factory workers. Murdoch (1998) reminds readers that the prohibition and woman suffrage movements’ symbiotic relationship continued
into the twentieth century, and she adds that the prohibition crusade fit the progressive temper of the time, including the desire to curb the power of socially
irresponsible businesses. Murdoch says the prohibitionists’ repeated attacks
on the corrupt “liquor interests” were a well-received “act of trust-busting in
this age of trust-busting.” Parsons (2003) implies that the ASL’s single-issue
campaign did not necessarily mean a retreat from Populist-progressive goals,
because prohibitionists had long believed that temperance was the most seminal reform, “an opening wedge” for other vital reforms. By contrast, Morone
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(2003) says the ASL and the post-Willard WCTU made prohibition palatable
to business leaders and conservatives by presenting it as a panacea that made
government action on other social and economic problems unnecessary.5
The idea that Prohibition was a capitalist conspiracy to boost productivity
and profits finds little favor in the current literature but it is clear that many
businessmen were active in the prohibition movement. The examples of prohibitionist luminaries such as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller are well
known, as is dime-store magnate S.S. Kresge’s recruitment of a 14,000-strong
Manufacture and Business Committee for the ASL in 1917-18.6 Gusfield
(1963) states that about two-thirds of WCTU local leaders in five selected
states in 1885 were married to businessmen or professionals. Blocker (1979)
finds that about 25 percent of the Prohibition Party’s gubernatorial candidates,
state chairmen, and national committee members from 1890 to 1910 were
businessmen. Among the ASL’s volunteer officeholders, businessman was
second most common occupation (nearly 20 percent, after clergy). Despite
these numbers and the seeming lack of famous anti-prohibition businessmen
until well after 1920, we still do not know how common, intense, or influential
support for prohibition was among businessmen.
Answering the question of whether business support was crucial to Prohibition’s passage requires first that we establish that business wanted Prohibition to pass and considered its passage a priority deserving of scarce resources. Here, following the example of Kolchin’s (1967) study of business
attitudes toward Radical Reconstruction, the main source material is leading
business periodicals of that time, which offer a promising window into business opinion, as reflected in these papers’ editorial and news coverage. The
study begins in 1913, when Congress passed the Webb-Kenyon Act, denying
interstate-commerce protection to liquor shipments into dry states, and ends
in 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect.
What Was the Business Press?
The most widely circulated business periodicals of the 1910s tended to be regional or trade publications, with notable exceptions including Nation’s Business, the monthly publication of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; System: The
Magazine of Business (as well as its sister publication Factory: The Magazine
of Management) and The Wall Street Journal, still primarily a financial paper.7
Also included were the well-established Bradstreet’s, Commercial and Financial Chronicle, and Dun’s Review, as well as smaller New York-based serials
The Annalist, Commerce and Finance, and The Magazine of Wall Street. The
following trade publications round out the list: Iron Age, Coal Age, Engineering and Mining Journal, the Engineering News-Record, and Electrical World.
Finally, press coverage of leading business figures’ and organizations’ stances
on Prohibition, as reported in three major newspapers (The Washington Post,
The Atlanta Constitution, The Los Angeles Times), was utilized.
Not reviewed but worth at least a brief mention are two publications whose
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
231
prohibitionism was well known. The first is Babson’s Reports, the subscriberonly newsletter published by financial prognosticator Roger W. Babson, who
regularly editorialized on prohibition and even ran for president on the Prohibition Party ticket in 1940. Likewise, the Manufacturers’ Record, a mainstay
of Southern capitalism since its founding in 1882, mirrored the strong support
for prohibition among Southern voters and legislators.
Pre-war Prohibition Efforts
Decades before the drive for national Prohibition began, several states and
countless localities passed laws banning saloons or prohibiting the sale of
liquor altogether. State and local prohibition was enough of a curiosity to
command some early press coverage and editorializing at the national level, as
well as in out-of-state newspapers, but the volume of national press coverage
did not become heavy until World War I.
The only prohibition coverage in these publications in the first decade of the
twentieth century was of local campaigns in Georgia and Washington, D.C.
News stories in The Atlanta Constitution and The Washington Post reveal considerable (but not uniform) resistance to prohibition within the urban business community, consistent with the conventional wisdom that prohibition
commanded far less support in the cosmopolitan cities than elsewhere. As a
statewide prohibition measure moved through Georgia’s capital in 1907, the
chambers of commerce of Savannah and Macon passed resolutions against it,
on the grounds that prohibition would hurt their cities’ commercial interests.
The Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and bankers’ association, while officially
taking no side on the prohibition question, asked that it be delayed for a year
because the cities and state were depending on liquor-related tax revenue for
the coming year and because people in the liquor business needed time to
close out their business. But Georgia businessmen were far from united or
consistent on prohibition. A prohibitionist faction of the Atlanta chamber issued a formal protest of the postponement request. And after the state entered
the prohibition column, which made Atlanta the largest prohibition city in
the world, the Atlanta chamber urged the Prohibition Party to hold its annual
convention there, in view of the business it would bring the city.8
Washington, D.C. businessmen leaned somewhat more strongly against
prohibition at the time. The two Washington business leaders quoted in a
1907 article, “Shall City Be Dry?” answered emphatically in the negative.
Robert N. Harper, president of the chamber of commerce, said it was futile to
“attempt to force morality by legislation.” He suggested that alcohol-control
measures such as stricter regulation, including high license fees that the lessreputable saloons would be unable to afford, would be preferable. Gen. John
H. Wilson, president of the Washington Board of Trade, echoed Harper’s comments. Of five other businessmen quoted, the two brewers were predictably
against prohibition, as was a merchant, and two others (a real estate dealer and
a grocer) were in favor.9
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Of the business periodicals, only the anti-prohibition Wall Street Journal
(WSJ) covered prohibition at this early stage. The WSJ’s anti-prohibitionism may have owed something to geography but was fully consistent with
the paper’s capitalist ideology and general sympathy for business including
the liquor business. As early as 1904, in a front-page editorial, the WSJ denounced prohibition, calling it “the least practical way to secure temperance
reform.” Another front-page editorial slammed Georgia’s state-level prohibition, for destroying “a thriving business” and idling a considerable amount
of real-estate capital. The editorial even blamed prohibition for Georgia’s
economic depression at that time. The WSJ called the spread of prohibition
“an economic problem of grave importance,” which had wiped out large capital investments and high-paying jobs. The WSJ saw prohibition as a form of
confiscation and hence a dangerous threat to property rights.10
Nineteen-thirteen is generally regarded as the beginning of the great push
for national Prohibition, culminating in Congress’s passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment in December 1917. By 1913, fully half the American population
lived in a prohibition state or locality.11 In 1913, Congress passed the WebbKenyon Act, the first major prohibition law in over two decades, and the ASL
decided to seek a constitutional amendment for prohibition. Alabama Congressman Richmond P. Hobson introduced the first Prohibition amendment
in the House of Representatives a few months later. Newspaper coverage of
prohibition naturally increased, and we would expect the volume of business
agitation for prohibition (however much of it there was to begin with) to have
increased, too. Indeed, from 1914 until the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, the ASL’s Howard Hyde Russell held luncheon meetings with manufacturers and other business and professional men in over 100 cities. Russell
reported that the meetings had been planned by groups of local business leaders and had been successful in raising funds for the prohibition-amendment
drive. At the National Congress on Industrial Safety in 1914, over 700 delegates voted unanimously for a resolution “in favor of eliminating the use of
intoxicants in the industries of this nation.”12 (Some of those delegates may
have broadly interpreted the resolution as a call for prohibition, barring workers’ use of alcohol at all times, whereas others may have interpreted it more
literally as barring drinking and drunkenness on the job.) Clearly some businessmen strongly supported the national Prohibition movement. The question
remains how representative they were of the business community as a whole,
and here again we turn to the business press of the time.
Most often, the business press did not mention state or national prohibition
at all during this period. For example, Nation’s Business regularly announced
referendums and resolutions by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on a number of public-policy issues, from a national budget (pro) to inheritance taxes
(con), but prohibition was not mentioned. System, the business periodical
with by far the largest circulation, avoided all mention of the liquor issue and
of current events in general. Of the publications that did cover prohibition,
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
233
only the Engineering and Mining Journal (for) and the WSJ (against) took a
stand. Even publications like Coal Age and Iron Age, which would eventually
come out for national Prohibition, said little about it before 1917, beyond publishing letters to the editor, most of which were in favor of prohibition. When
they did mention the liquor menace in their own editorials or articles, they
tended to advocate milder reforms much closer to the “alcohol control” policies advocated by the Committee of Fifty, a private research group in the early
twentieth century. The group was not anti-alcohol or pro-prohibition, but it
did view the saloons as corruptible institutions in need of tighter regulation
and healthy alternatives.13 Reports in early 1915 from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, speak sympathetically but meekly of coal companies’ requests to saloon
keepers that they close their doors from 11:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.:
It is not the intention of the coal companies to enter into the prohibition or local
option movement in any way, nor to forbid its employees from drinking. They
feel, however, that it is contrary to the laws of safety to allow an employee to
enter the mines in the morning after he has spent most of the night in a saloon,
with probably a ‘hang over’ or has spent some time in a saloon in the morning on
his way to work and had an opportunity to become intoxicated.14
A similar but more dramatic call for alcohol control came from Commerce
and Finance, a New York-based general-business magazine that began publication in 1912. The paper reprinted a circular from “six well-known and
reputable brewers” warning their colleagues that the state of the saloons was
“disgraceful” and that only drastic self-regulation could stave off national
Prohibition.15
Coverage in the non-business press suggests that prohibition remained unpopular among urban businessmen. Early in the quest for national Prohibition, the chambers of commerce of Portland (Oregon) and Denver conducted
straw polls that found their members opposed state or national prohibition by
margins of at least three to one, and the Washington, D.C. chamber passed a
resolution against a Senate proposal to outlaw liquor in the District. Outgoing D.C. Chamber of Commerce President William F. Gude put it bluntly:
“This is a free country, and if we don’t know how to use liquor properly, we
should learn to do so.” Acting D.C. Board of Trade President Edwin C. Brandenburg concurred, but indicated that many businessmen might come to welcome prohibition if the city’s high-license law failed to curb the excesses of
the liquor traffic. In 1916, as California placed two prohibition amendments
on the ballot, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce voted to oppose the
amendments on the grounds (ironic in hindsight) that they would be fatal to
California’s grape industry.16
On the other hand, as prohibition became a fait accompli in many areas,
many local businessmen pledged their support. The secretary of the Atlanta
chamber of commerce, which had resisted a rapid implementation of prohibition, eagerly responded to a query from an Austin prohibition committee,
reporting to them that the city had enjoyed fabulous prosperity under prohibi-
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tion.17
Wartime Prohibition and The Eighteenth Amendment
Nineteen-seventeen was a whirlwind year for national Prohibition legislation.
In March Congress passed the Reed “Bone Dry” Act, which tightened the
Webb-Kenyon Act’s restrictions on interstate shipments of liquor into dry areas. The next month, Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas introduced the Prohibition amendment. Congress passed a limited wartime prohibition in August. Finally, in mid-December, Congress passed the Prohibition amendment,
sending it to the states for ratification. Many more businessmen lent public
support to the cause of Prohibition in 1917, including several hundred who
signed the “Memorial for National Prohibition, With the Names of One Thousand Signers,” submitted to Congress in April. The signatures were collected
by Yale University economist Irving Fisher and ex-Massachusetts Governor
Eugene N. Foss, at the time the president of the B.F. Sturtevant manufacturing
company of Boston. The businessmen who signed the memorial were mostly
manufacturers and bankers, with a remarkably large number from the iron and
steel industry and in the upstream sectors of coke production and coal mining.
Fittingly, the editor of Iron Age was one of the signers. Other signers included
Roger W. Babson and editors or executives of several other business periodicals: American Carpenter and Builder, Building Age, Commercial Bulletin
(Boston), Electrical Record, Machinery, Manufacturers’ Record, Metallurgical and Chemical Engineering, National Builder, Safety Engineering, Steam,
Telephony, Textiles, Underwriter’s Review, and Woodworker.18
By this time it was hard for the business press to ignore the Prohibition issue. Virtually all of the publications reviewed here gave the issue some coverage, and many of them took an editorial position on it for the first time. Once
again, however, the top Main Street business publications, Nation’s Business
and System, ignored Prohibition. The absence of Prohibition coverage in System’s sister publication Factory is also notable. Although Factory generally
did not cover political or controversial issues, it did run numerous articles on
ways to increase labor efficiency at one’s workplace. If the magazine’s writers believed the common argument that prohibition would boost productivity,
they did not share that belief with their readers.
Prohibition also escaped mention in the more dryly factual Dun’s Review in
1917. This absence seems telling. Although the magazine did very little editorializing, it regularly commented on events that moved the stock and other
markets, and despite several big events in Prohibition history in 1917, there
was no mention of them as having affected the markets. Even the December
29 issue, published seven days after the Prohibition amendment passed Congress, did not mention it. In fact, the week’s “spectacular rise in stocks” was
attributed not to Prohibition but to the announcement of government control
of the railroads.
Support for Prohibition seems to have been strongest in the coal-coke-
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
235
iron-steel nexus, so we should expect the business press in these industries to
have been particularly prohibitionist. In these sectors the most direct support
came from the Engineering and Mining Journal, which reminded its readers
in April 1917 that it had long endorsed prohibition “as a beneficial measure
on economic grounds, if no other.” In the face of calls for immediate wartime
prohibition, the paper noted that “there is a strong movement in that direction
and great pressure is being exerted. We have been urged to advocate it.” (The
journal was skeptical that immediate wartime prohibition could work but endorsed a more gradual prohibition.) While those passive-voice constructions
do not reveal the source of such pressure, various news items in that journal
and others (including the ever-wet WSJ) indicate that mine operators tended to
favor prohibitions in their districts and to be pleased with the results. So it is
reasonable to conclude that mine operators were pushing for national Prohibition in some way.19
Other outlets in the steel-and-mining chain were much slower to take up the
cause of Prohibition. Iron Age, despite its editor’s signature on the April 1917
petition, curiously gave the issue almost no coverage that year and did not take
a stand on it until July 1918, when it endorsed wartime prohibition. Coal Age
ran no editorials on Prohibition in 1917, but it published several articles, short
items, and letters, almost all of which were favorable to Prohibition. Even
late in the year, its agenda was surprisingly modest and local, as it cited a need
for greater efficiency among mine workers and noted a growing demand for
the federal government to restrict the number of saloons in the coal districts
or to reserve alcohol licenses for hotels only. By this time, however, national
Prohibition was on the table and alcohol-control alternatives were not, and
the paper reported that coal mine operators favored a special session of the
Pennsylvania legislature to ratify the Prohibition amendment, even though
their goal was supposedly just to have “a check placed on the saloons.” The
magazine noted that the legislature had rejected prohibition at its last session
and would likely do the same at a new one, which suggests that the coal and
coke industry was either not pushing hard for prohibition or had less political
muscle in Pennsylvania than one might suspect. Indeed, Pennsylvania was
one of the wettest states in the Union and did not ratify the Eighteenth Amendment until forty-four other states had already done so.20
Of the remaining five journals, all but one either opposed Prohibition or
leaned against it. Perhaps this result is not surprising considering that all of
them were based in New York City. The prohibitionist exception was Commerce and Finance. Associate Editor Paul J. Banker, who authored nearly all
of the paper’s coverage of prohibition until his departure from the paper, typically couched his arguments in economic terms. He recognized the libertarian
arguments against Prohibition and conceded that there were many responsible
drinkers, but said that overall “the use of intoxicants is a national waste” and
that prohibition was good for national efficiency. Another article claimed that
prohibition had led to tremendous productivity gains in Russian agriculture.
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The paper became decidedly less prohibitionist after Banker left in August
1917 to join the war effort. His last editorial praised the Prohibition amendment at length, while calling for compensation of liquor industrialists.21 One
wonders if the eventual failure to compensate the liquor interests provoked a
backlash against Prohibition among some businessmen.
The New York-based commercial and financial press otherwise generally
opposed Prohibition. The WSJ led the charge, denouncing a wartime-prohibition amendment to an espionage bill as “calculated to kill some hundred
millions of tax-paying capital in the brewing industry.” Of another proposed
wartime-prohibition amendment, the Journal said “it is a fraud upon the public purse and patience, that such a piece of pharisaical humbug should be
allowed to consume the public time.” Frequently the Journal rested its case
on libertarian grounds, often quoting a British statesman’s line that he “would
sooner see a people free than a people sober.” Yet a news article on the eve of
wartime prohibition briefly suggested that manufacturers passively supported
wartime prohibition, believing that it would solve labor problems and increase
efficiency.22
The Annalist, a weekly business publication of the anti-Prohibition New
York Times, covered the issue sparsely; it did not even mention the 1917 Bone
Dry Act or the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment by Congress, although
it did run several articles on prohibition and liquor regulation in France and
Britain.23 It ran just one editorial of its own on Prohibition, in which it took
a somewhat equivocal stance: “We have a secret admiration for prohibition
– rather than for the prohibitionists – but we are very doubtful of the wisdom
of doing away at one stroke with all the alcoholic beverages that the country
has been accustomed to.” The editorial expressed relief that the wartime prohibition in a food-control bill exempted beer, speculating that beer prohibition
would be costly relative to the amount of resources it would free up for food
production. Anti-Prohibitionists tended to get the last word in The Annalist’s
regular run of op-eds, rebuttals, and letters. One week the paper ran a fullpage op-ed in favor of Prohibition and the following week ran a rebuttal by the
secretary of the Brewers Association. Likewise, an op-ed against compensating the liquor interests touched off a longer exchange that included a diatribe
titled “Applying Lynch Law to Property Rights.” The paper also ran an antiwartime prohibition article that was almost entirely from a long statement by
the head of a liquor dealers association.24 On balance, The Annalist seems to
have tilted toward the wets in its editorial decisions about what to publish on
prohibition.
Similarly, Bradstreet’s reported the basic news on Prohibition from a perspective that was nominally neutral but tended to lean against Prohibition.
There were no editorials on the issue, but articles tended to present it in a negative light. In reporting on the defeat of an early wartime prohibition bill, the
paper cited at face value the opposing arguments (lost tax revenue, destruction of a large industry, use of some brewing grain as feed for cattle). The pro
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
237
arguments were presented less favorably, and the motives of the bill’s backers
were questioned, as the bill was termed “a partial prohibition in the guise of
conservation.” In a relatively long article on the wartime prohibition debate,
the paper repeatedly noted the negative effect on government revenues.25
More decidedly anti-Prohibition was the arch-conservative Commercial
and Financial Chronicle. An editorial against the Lever food control bill
took a harsh stand against its wartime-prohibition provision. After Congress
passed the Prohibition amendment, the Chronicle denounced it, not for its
own sake but because it might open the door for even worse constitutional
amendments later on.26
After Congressional passage of the Prohibition amendment in 1917, state
after state ratified the amendment with lightning speed. Approval from the
necessary three-fourths of the states was secured within thirteen months. In
the meantime Congress, as if impatient for Prohibition to begin, passed the
sweeping Wartime Prohibition Act in November 1918, ten days after the armistice, to extend the earlier wartime ban on the production of spirits to beer and
wine as well, effective May 1919, and to ban the sale of all alcoholic beverages, effective July 1919. In September 1919, Congress passed the Volstead
Act, which spelled out the enforcement of constitutional Prohibition. Even
some Prohibition supporters were surprised by the Act’s low threshold (0.5%)
for the alcohol content that qualified a beverage as intoxicating and therefore
illegal. All of these events, as well as the realization that liquor industrialists
would not be compensated for their lost business, gave the business press
much to write about.
While Prohibition was still invisible in the general-interest monthlies Nation’s Business, System, and Factory, a surge in prohibitionist sentiment was
evident in the coal-coke-iron-steel industries in 1918. Iron Age said in April
that many industrial managers had been active in state campaigns for prohibition. The influential National Coal Association declared in favor of a broader
wartime prohibition in July, as did coal and coke operators in the vital coke
region of Connellsville, Pennsylvania and Iron Age itself, rather belatedly.
But overall Iron Age was either tepid or muted in its support for prohibition in
1918, declining to weigh in on the Prohibition amendment before state legislatures and offering little to suggest that it or its readers viewed prohibition as a
tonic for productivity or profits. For example, a short article about the closing
of saloons in a factory town to stem the spread of influenza noted a division
of opinion among coke operators as to whether the liquor restrictions would
be beneficial. Another article said the introduction of an employee lunchroom
at Commonwealth Steel had raised labor productivity partly by providing an
alternative to the saloon but primarily by providing an alternative to “the inadequate lunch-pail.”27
A similar stance, more “temperate” than “dry,” was evident in the ever-cautious Coal Age. Despite running anti-drink propaganda cartoons and numerous prohibitionist letters to the editor, the journal stopped short of endorsing
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Prohibition. In a signed editorial the paper repeated its modest plea that the
saloons close their doors between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m., hinting at support for
national Prohibition as a last resort if the liquor industry did not regulate itself. The West Virginia Panhandle Coal Operators’ Association, in endorsing wartime prohibition in July 1918, noted the industry had previously but
vainly sought more limited federal action in the form of a five-mile dry zone
around coal mines (considered a pressing need in West Virginia, a dry state
surrounded by four wet states).28
With the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1919, Iron
Age felt bold enough to give it an unqualified endorsement and said that it had
come about “not so much as the result of agitation from a moral standpoint, as
from economic necessity.” Moreover:
The prohibition movement of recent years, unlike that of an earlier period, was
centered in the South and in the great industries of the North. In the South, the
people, in order to overcome the terrible effects of drunkenness among colored
workingmen, were willing to forget their advocacy of States’ rights and vote for
prohibition. It was found that the negroes working in the mines, furnaces and
shops of the South worked so much better without intoxicating liquors that one
Southern state after another voted for prohibition and the lesson taught by the
experience of the South had important effect in the North.29
The claim about Southern prohibition echoed an earlier editorial in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, which said the motivation was explicitly
economic, again to raise the efficiency of “negro labor.” Although claims
like this were common at the time, they were not necessarily true. Woodward
(1951) cites a 1912 study that found the variation in local anti-saloon laws in
the South to have little connection with race, as well a 1928 study that found
support for prohibition in Southern states to be correlated most strongly with
the percentage of native-born, rural Baptists and Methodists in the population.30
“Nearly all manufacturers are glad the saloon is doomed,” Iron Age proclaimed a month after ratification.31 That claim is almost certainly correct:
even opponents and skeptics of Prohibition typically favored replacing the
saloon with other systems of liquor sales and regulation, as there was nearuniversal agreement that the unregulated saloon was a menace. But evidence
that “the great industries of the North” made Prohibition happen is hard to
come by, even in earlier issues of Iron Age itself. By the time the Northern
business leaders mentioned in Iron Age and Coal Age had jumped on the Prohibition bandwagon, the parade was nearly over. Possibly a review of local
business periodicals, as well as coverage of business groups in local newspapers, would uncover more significant business support for Prohibition. It
is plausible that many national business periodicals regarded the issue as political dynamite, such that any stand on Prohibition would alienate numerous
readers. While this paper’s focus on the national business press may be fitting
for a study of business support of national Prohibition, future research should
include local papers.
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
239
On the other hand, New York-based business periodicals like the WSJ and
the Commercial and Financial Chronicle were more than just New York City
papers and seemed unworried about reader reaction to their anti-Prohibitionist
stance. Moreover, these papers were disinclined to believe that most businessmen favored Prohibition. Upon ratification, a front-page WSJ editorial
blasted the amendment as the product of “the most flagrant system of lobbying
and terrorism by a small minority.” Prohibition would be totally unenforceable, “unless the minority of our people are to keep the majority in jail and
provide for their support,” and therefore would breed contempt for law. The
editorial did not contain any explicit economic arguments, but a news story
estimated massive losses in federal, state, and municipal revenues, as well as
to the incomes of those engaged in the liquor business. Bradstreet’s did not
editorialize on Prohibition at this time but provided extensive news coverage (about 20 entries on Prohibition in 1918-19), often with a tone of impatience or borderline disgust with the drys and with considerable attention to
the resulting losses to brewers, distillers, and all who did business with them
(e.g., bankers), as well as reduced tax revenues. As ratification sped its way
through the states, even Commerce and Finance was no longer prohibitionist
but highly skeptical, speculating that Prohibition would likely “make for the
intemperate use of bad whiskey rather than the temperate use of good wines
and beers” and citing upper-bound estimates of reduced tax revenues. The
paper also acknowledged that while the coal operators had endorsed prohibition, “the shipping men are divided.”32
Conclusion
The paper that inspired this one, Kolchin’s “The Business Press and Reconstruction” (1967), overturned decades of conventional wisdom by finding
Northern business periodicals to have been generally opposed to Radical Reconstruction, contrary to the popular thesis that Northern business interests
had welcomed or even orchestrated it so as to achieve long-held goals as high
tariffs and hard money. This paper has utilized the business press of the early
decades of the twentieth century toward assessing a similar thesis, namely
the claim that business interests were responsible for the Eighteenth Amendment. Although articles and editorials in business papers cannot be expected
to reveal the extent of business lobbying for Prohibition, they can tell us much
about whether business would have wanted to lobby for it in the first place.
What we see is, first and foremost, simply not much coverage of Prohibition,
even in business magazines that devoted ample space to current events and
political opinions. Few business periodicals were openly prohibitionist, and
those that were, notably in iron and mining, typically announced their support
very late in the game. Many periodicals, notably most of the New York-based
financial and commercial press, were opposed to Prohibition. If the business
press accurately reflected the business community, then that community was
clearly divided, likely along the same geographical, religious, and cultural
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lines as the American public, which may explain why this divisive issue received so little national business press coverage. This is not to deny that
there was an important faction of prohibitionist business activists, such as S.S.
Kresge and other members of the ASL’s Manufacture and Business Committee, but it does suggest that they were a minority and that their motivations
may have been non-pecuniary. To borrow Kerr’s (1985) phrase, it does not
appear that business was ever “organized for Prohibition.”
State University of New York College at Oswego
[email protected]
Endnotes
This paper has benefited greatly from the insights of the editors and two referees. Participants in
the Fourth International Alcohol and Drug History Conference, the 2007 conferences of the Canadian Economic Association and the Economic and Business Historical Society, and economics
department seminars at Dalhousie University and the State University of New York at Oswego
also provided helpful comments. I also wish to thank the staff at the Library of Congress and
Cornell University’s Library Annex. Apologies for the title to Peter Kolchin, “The Business Press
and Reconstruction,” Journal of Southern History 33 (1967): 183-96.
1. Ranjit S. Dighe, “Reversal of Fortune: The Rockefellers and the Decline of Business Support for Prohibition,” Essays in Economic and Business History 24 (2006): 69-88; Harry Emerson
Fosdick, “Dr. Fosdick on the Prohibition Question,” The Church Monthly, (October 1928), 265.
2. Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New
York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976), 32.
3. John J. Rumbarger, Power, Profits, and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing
of America, 1800-1930 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); Herman E. Krooss, Executive Opinion:
What Business Leaders Said and Thought 1920s-1960s (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970). The role
of business interests, most notably the du Pont-led AAPA, in bringing about the repeal of Prohibition is another story. The definitive works here are David E. Kyvig’s Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) and Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the
Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). Robert Burk, The Corporate State
and the Broker State: The du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925-1940 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990) provides further insight into the du Pont-AAPA campaign. See
also Ranjit S. Dighe, “Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of an Anti-Prohibition Activist,” unpublished manuscript, 2007.
4. James H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1963); Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us From Evil: An Interpretation of American
Prohibition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).
5. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books,
1955), 290; Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance
Movement (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1963); Jack S. Blocker, Jr., American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 107-10, 116-17; Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 38, 159-60; Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood
Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 15; James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics
of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 290, 308.
6. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade, 81; Jack S. Blocker, Jr., “The Modernity of Prohibitionists: An
Analysis of Leadership Structure and Background,” in Alcohol, Reform and Society: The Liquor
Issue in Social Context, ed. Jack S. Blocker, Jr. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 153, 155;
Dighe: The U.S. Business Press and Prohibition
241
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), Series D 199, D 202; Ranjit S.
Dighe, “Reversal of Fortune: The Rockefellers and the Decline of Business Support for Prohibition,” Essays in Economic and Business History 24 (2006): 69-88; Timberlake, Prohibition and
the Progressive Movement, 79-80; K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of
the Anti-Saloon League (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 154.
To identify the leading business periodicals of the time I consulted three sources: N.W. Ayer
& Son’s American Newspaper Annual (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer & Son, various years), which
lists virtually every American periodical, including circulation figures, and secondarily a Library
Journal list of the “Most Useful Business Magazines” (September 1, 1932, 726) and William
Fisher, ed., Business Journals of the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) for further information. None of these sources is ideal. The circulation figures in Ayer & Son are sometimes missing, often imprecise, and probably biased upward as they tended to be self-reported
(as noted by Rebecca Edwards and Sarah DeFeo, “Journals and Newspapers in the Campaign,”
http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/journals.html; accessed January 15, 2008). The Library Journal
list, based on votes from 24 large libraries, offers useful perspective but is obviously about 15
years later than would be ideal for this study. Fisher’s edited volume has excellent detail on some
periodicals from this period but covers only those that are still in business 70 years later.
I initially selected publications which were ranked by the Library Journal and which also
had a reported circulation of at least 15,000 in 1913, 1923, and 1933 (the endpoint of the larger study that begat this paper): System (which spun off into Business Week, which tied for the
Journal’s highest ranking); The Magazine of Wall Street (ranked sixth); the Engineering NewsRecord (twelfth); and Electrical World (twentieth). I supplemented the sample with several other
periodicals, including the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, which tied for first place but
reported no circulation figures for any of those years. Nation’s Business ranked fourth and had
high circulation numbers in 1923 and 1933, but did not report one for 1913, perhaps because it
had just begun (along with the Chamber itself). The Wall Street Journal (established in 1889 and
unranked, probably because it was a daily newspaper, not a magazine) reported a circulation of
12,000 in 1913 (and four times that in 1933); Iron Age, established in 1855, also had about 12,000
readers in 1913 and was ranked fifteenth. Not far behind were New York City weeklies The Annalist (established 1911, had 10,000 readers in 1923, ranked eighth by the Library Journal) and
Bradstreet’s (established 1879, had 7,500 readers in 1913, ranked twentieth).
Additional periodicals reviewed for this study, based mainly on the Ayer & Son figures (and,
in the last case, reputation) were Coal Age, Commerce and Finance, Engineering and Mining
Journal, Factory: The Magazine of Management, and Dun’s Review: A Journal of Finance and
Trade.
8. “Chamber of Commerce to Meet,” The Atlanta Constitution, July 5, 1907, 5; “Against State
Prohibition,” Ibid., July 9, 1907, 10; “Chamber Backs City’s Bankers,” Ibid., July 19, 1907, 7;
“Board Action Not Endorsed,” Ibid., July 20, 1907, 8; “Pope Will Bid for Convention,” Ibid.,
November 14, 1907, 7.
9. “Shall City Be Dry? Views of Prominent Washingtonians on Prohibition,” Washington Post,
November 7, 1907, 2.
10. “Impure Liquors,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 1904, 1; “Governor Smith’s Campaign,” Ibid., May 18, 1908, 1; “Prohibition and Property Rights,” Ibid., March 2, 1909, 1.
11. Kerr, Organized for Prohibition, 138.
12. Rumbarger, Power, Profits, and Prohibition, 149, 179.
13. Harry Gene Levine, “The Committee of Fifty and the Origins of Alcohol Control,” Journal
of Drug Issues 13 (1983): 95-116.
14. “Coal and Coke News,” Coal Age, January 23, 1915, 180.
15. “Bad Days for the Brewers,” Commerce and Finance, January 13, 1915, 29-30.
16. “Portland Damper on Prohibition,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1914, 2; “Denver Business
Against ‘Drys,’” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1914, 1; “Oppose ‘Dry’ District,” Washington Post,
January 13, 1915, 1; “Prominent Business Men Resent Thrusting Prohibition on District Without
Consent of the People,” Washington Post, January 14, 1915, 2; “Stands Opposed to Prohibition,”
Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1916, 12.
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Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 22, No 2 (Spring 2008)
17. “Atlanta’s Growth Under Prohibition Shown by Cooper,” Atlanta Constitution, December
17, 1916, 9.
18. “Memorial for National Prohibition,” Box 34, Folder 4, Papers of Richmond P. Hobson,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
19. “Prohibition of Alcohol,” Engineering and Mining Journal, April 28, 1917, 765.
20. “Coal and Coke News,” Coal Age, December 8, 1917, 992; “Coal and Coke News,” Coal
Age, December 29, 1917, 1115.
21. “‘Bone-Dry’ Legislation,” Commerce and Finance, February 28, 1917, 217-18; N.M. Rodkinson, “The Economic Future of Russia,” Ibid., March 21, 1917, 293; “Constitutional Prohibition,” Ibid., August 22, 1917, 837.
22. “Prohibition in War Time,” Wall Street Journal, May 17, 1917, 1; “No More Cakes and
Ale?” Ibid., June 30, 1917, 1; “Some Elementary Psychology,” Ibid., June 11, 1917, 1; “Steel
Employers Expect Labor from Rubber Works,” Ibid., July 30, 1917, 6.
23. “Beer to Escape the Ban,” Annalist, July 2, 1917, 3; “Mars Forcing the War on Alcohol,”
Ibid., February 26, 1917, 302.
24. M.H. Hunter, “Seen and Unseen in the Liquor Trade,” Annalist, May 21, 1917, 686; Hugh
F. Fox, “Is Alcohol a Necessary Luxury?” Ibid., May 28, 1917, 722; John H. Ashworth, “Shall
Liquor Industry Be Compensated?” Ibid., June 18, 1917, 816; Henry C. Maine, “Applying Lynch
Law to Property Rights,” Ibid., July 9, 1917, 39; “Says Prohibition Fails as Grain Saver,” Ibid.,
October 8, 1917, 480.
25. “Prohibition for the War Defeated,” Bradstreet’s May 19, 1917, 320; “Prohibition in the
Food Administration Bill,” Bradstreet’s, June 30, 1917, 418.
26. “The Food Control Bill,” Commercial and Financial Chronicle, June 30, 1917, 259293; “The Prohibition Amendment,” Commercial and Financial Chronicle, December 22, 1917,
2397.
27. “Alcohol and Loss of Time at a New York Blast Furnace,” Iron Age, April 17, 1918, 1000;
“Prohibition Declared Necessary,” Ibid., July 18, 1918, 162; “Coke Operators Demand Prohibition,” Ibid., July 25, 1918, 247; “Prohibition and Coke Output,” Ibid., October 17, 1918, 953;
“Feeding Employees at a Steel Plant,” Ibid., November 7, 1918, 1136.
28. R. Dawson Hall, “Intemperance Hampers Production,” Coal Age, August 15, 1918; “Prohibition and Labor in West Virginia,” Ibid., July 25, 1918, 181.
29. “Prohibition and Industry,” Iron Age, January 23, 1919, 261.
30. “The Prohibition Amendment,” Commercial and Financial Chronicle, December 22, 1917,
2397; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1951), 390. The studies cited by Woodward were in Leonard S. Blakey, The
Sale of Liquor in the South (New York: Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and
Public Law, 1912) and Peter Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of The Anti-Saloon League
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1928).
31. “Opposition to Prohibition,” Iron Age, February 13, 1919, 444.
32. “Legislation Gone Silly,” WSJ, January 17, 1919, 1; “Prohibition Becomes Part of Federal
Constitution,” Ibid., January 17, 1919, 2; Stephen Bell, “Prohibition-The Mean and the Extreme,”
Commerce and Finance, May 8, 1918, 501; “Editorial Incidence and Reflection,” Ibid., September 11, 1918, 988; “Editorial Incidence and Reflection,” Ibid., July 17, 1918, 778.