Conclusion—Where Did We Go Wrong?

Abstract

Having finished our history of prohibitionism, Chapter 18 asks: Where did our historical understandings go wrong? The chapter begins with the autumn years of Pussyfoot Johnson during the Great Depression, when prohibitionists had been thoroughly discredited. With the rise of Hayekian neoliberalism after World War II in the United States, any infringement on individual economic rights became understood as a necessary infringement on political rights too—which has made it difficult for contemporary historians to understand prohibitionism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hofstadter and Joseph Gusfield cast prohibition as solely a moral, religious issue, rather than a political or economic one, motivated by equal parts of “Marx, Jefferson and Jesus.” Ultimately, prohibitionism was a transnational normative shift about the inappropriateness of benefiting from addiction and misery of the masses, and an attempt to put the welfare of society ahead of the needs of the state.