20. Prohibition’s Ethnic Prejudice Roots
The anti-drink movement was launched to fight the alcohol abuse that had been a constant in America for a long time. However, the arrival of new waves of immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly Irish and Germans, ended up linking anti-drink and anti-immigrant sentiments. The new immigrants’ drinking habits differed from those whose American ancestry stretched back for generations. Saloons and bars – establishments where people congregated to drink – had not been common in America before the 1840s. Nor, for that matter, had beer drinking been that big: until then, Americans primarily drank cider or hard liquor. However, the Irish, and especially the Germans, were beer drinkers. Immigrants from those countries brought with them the pub and beer garden culture, which morphed in America into saloons and bars. Those who disliked immigrants soon came to dislike those establishments.
Generally speaking, the movement to ban alcohol was most widespread and accepted amongst those whose ancestors had been in America for generations. They predominated in rural and small-town America, and tended to be traditional and conservative. On the other side, hostility to nascent prohibition was vehement amongst immigrants who began to arrive in ever greater numbers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Waves of new arrivals from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe, infused America with ever greater numbers of people for whom drinking was not just a social activity, but a traditional part of their culture. Their numbers were greatest in America’s burgeoning cities. From that perspective, the fight over prohibition took on a nineteenth and early-twentieth-century aspect of Red vs Blue America.