After prohibition was law, they approved the legal poisoning of indus-
trial alcohol, knowing full well that men would die from drinking it.
Excess had this way of turning things into their opposites: an amenity
became a crime; the imposition of controls led to a loss of control; the
churches created gangsters; reformers became reactionaries; purifiers
became poisoners. Excess also made it impossible for the politicians
to fulfill their customary function of compromising opposed interests
and mediating between extremes. That some men may live by principle
is possible only because others live by compromise. Excess destroyed
this nice symbiosis: it converted the politician into a bogus man of
principle, a breed of hypocrite who voted one way while he drank the
other.

To me one of the freshest and most illuminating aspects of Mr.
Sinclair's book is his study of the way in which the movement for
prohibition mobilized popular guilts and fears -- an aspect of the
movement which other historians have hardly done more than touch
upon. Prohibition could be made an outlet for the troubles of every
cramped libido. In an earlier day, anti-Catholicism had served as the
pornography of the puritan: the inhibited mind had wallowed in tales
of errant priests and nuns. During the prohibition movement both
prurience and fear were exploited by those who dwelt on the linkage
of alcohol and sexual excess, or on the fear of insanity and racial
degeneracy, even of the racial self-assertion of the Negro. Mr. Sinclair
has given us a full and instructive exploration of the medical and sexual
mythology of prohibitionism.

But Mr. Sinclair is a humane historian, and he has not written his
book to ridicule or belittle prohibitionists or as an ex parte plea for
the wets. He is far from blind to whatever there was of validity in the
case of the drys. The old-time saloon -- particularly, he believes, in the
rural areas and the small towns -- was often a filthy and repulsive
place. He observes that the wets also responded to the era of excess by
making claims for the benefits of repeal as absurd as the earlier
promises of the drys. And, above all, he is careful to remind us that
alcoholism today is a serious medical and social problem. The dry
lobbies had saddled the country with a vicious and ineffective reform;
Mr. Sinclair concludes that the wet lobbies performed a similar if less
sweeping disservice to the country by insisting upon absolute repeal,
and thus replacing overstrained and ineffective controls with no federal
controls at all. Some readers may quarrel with this and other con-
clusions, but I doubt that informed students of Americana will quarrel
with the judgment that he has given us the definitive study of prohibi-
tion for our generation.

RICHARD HOFSTADTER

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