Prohibition Historian Quotes

Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited.

tailgating is a local tradition that both predates Lambeau Field and dovetails seamlessly with another beloved Green Bay pastime: drinking. Even Prohibition couldn’t slow the town’s taps. “There were speakeasies all over,” says the historian. “I was told once that one of the reasons the mob never moved in here was because it was so wide open. They couldn’t get a foothold. It was just generally accepted that Green Bay wasn’t going to obey the Eighteenth Amendment.

Mindful of appearances beyond their borders, for the time being at least, the Nazis wondered how the United States had managed to turn its racial hierarchy into rigid law yet retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage. They noticed that in the United States, when it came to these racial prohibitions, “public opinion accepted them as natural,” wrote the historian Claudia Koonz.

America led the way in legalizing and promoting coerced eugenic sterilizations,” historian Angela Franks writes.11 Progressives had their first success in 1907 when Indiana passed a law requiring sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” Over the next thirty years, twenty-six other states passed similar laws. In the early 1930s, when the Nazis came to power, American states were sterilizing 2,000 to 4,000 people a year. In all, around 65,000 people were sterilized against their will as a consequence of progressive eugenic legislation in the United States. Around the same time, progressives persuaded states across the country to pass marriage restriction laws that prohibited whites and blacks from intermarrying.

and beyond. Some of this evolution toward more secular, bureaucratic schooling followed necessarily from the Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school prayer and religious instruction in the 1960s. Regardless of whether you believe children should have prayer or study religion in school, the removal of those activities had the unintended consequence of removing existential questions about how the individual fits into the bigger, cosmic picture; about our life’s purpose. The moral hollowing of schooling is also attributable to the erosion of secondary education’s previously secure place and purpose in preparing kids for steady jobs right after graduation. Education historian Paula Fass traces the drift toward the “warehousing” of our young to schools’ loss of their tangible, culminating purpose—to prepare the emerging generation for conclusive entry into adult productivity. Instead, “going to high school became a stop-over during the teen years, with very little to offer beyond academic selection for those who would go on to college . . .” When a diploma was no longer a predictable ticket to a full-time, middle-class job and a set of expectations about adulthood, high schools began to fray. Peer culture metastasized to fill the vacuum of purpose. Instead of learning how to behave from their teachers, who no longer really saw their jobs as moral instruction and instilling wisdom acquired through age and experience, kids were learning how to behave from other kids, with predictable results. Fifth, the protest era of the 1960s saw an atypical amount of conflict about what America means, about whether our experiment in self-governance was really all that special. Some of the struggles—chiefly civil rights—were essential to America’s finally living up to the Declaration of Independence’s vision of universal,

In the South, where most people in the subordinate caste were long consigned, black children and white children studied from separate sets of textbooks. In Florida, the books for black children and white children could not even be stored together. African-Americans were prohibited from using white water fountains and had to drink from horse troughs in the southern swelter before the era of separate fountains. In southern jails, the bedsheets for the black prisoners were kept separate from the bedsheets for the white prisoners. All private and public human activities were segregated from birth to death, from hospital wards to railroad platforms to ambulances, hearses, and cemeteries. In stores, black people were prohibited from trying on clothing, shoes, hats, or gloves, assuming they were permitted in the store at all. If a black person happened to die in a public hospital, “the body will be placed in a corner of the ‘dead house’ away from the white corpses,” wrote the historian Bertram Doyle in 1937.

But the real strength and energy of the Quakers comes from neither prohibitions nor theology but from “the centering of life on the realities of inward intercourse with God.” Quakerism is supremely committed to the individual’s own experience. “No other religious community so deliberately and emphatically bases its individual and corporate life upon the supreme fact of the soul’s immediate contact with God,” says a modern Quaker historian.

Does the Master Represent Jesus? It seems that a first-century reader would be hard-pressed to think that the master in the parable represents Jesus, when the description of the master so clearly points to a different direction.9 The parable describes the master as a power-hungry, despised, and exploitive man who takes what he did not deposit, reaps what he did not sow, and promotes violating the biblical prohibition of charging interest. Moreover, the master explicitly agrees that this is an accurate description of himself, perhaps because for him (and among his peers) successfully exploiting opportunities to maximize one’s profits is considered to be a badge of honor.10 And indeed, this sort of behavior and oppression was commonplace in first-century Palestine for many people who were living under the thumb of absentee landholders and foreign rule. This is why the Jews were longing for a savior. Moreover, the story of the parable would have sounded painfully familiar to them. Commentators note that elements of this parable are strikingly similar to the history of the ruling family in that region as described by the historian Josephus (writing in the first century). After Herod the Great died in 4 BCE his then 19-year-old son Archelaus (brother to Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee) went to Rome to confirm his kingship of Judea (as specified in his father’s will). Archelaus was followed by a delegation of 50 people protesting his appointment. He received the kingship, and went on to kill about 3,000 Pharisees who opposed his rule.11

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy. The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions.

The attack waged by the academic and intellectual elites against Benny Morris was extremely severe, in part because he violated the academy’s silent complicity regarding the horrors committed by the Zionist army in 1948. “There was nothing new in the historical details that he [Morris] revealed,” says Baruch Kimmerling. “It was well known to all historians who studied the history of modern Israel and the Middle East and not only to historians. [They] knew exactly what happened to the Arabs of Palestine and how most of them were expelled and how and why most of them were prohibited from returning.

Finally, the last point that I want to make – and this is really the bottom line and the most important – is that even if we concede that the professional historian, as a member of 'The Guild', must act under the constraint of methodological naturalism (that is to say, under the methodological constraint that you can only infer natural causes for natural events), the question remains: why should we be under any such constraint? Why can't I, as a philosopher or just a human being, judge that the best explanation of the facts is a miraculous explanation? Indeed, why can't the historian in his off-hours, so to speak, make this inference? Wouldn't it be a tragedy if we were prevented from knowing the truth about reality simply because of a methodological constraint? That would seem insane. So apart from some good reason for thinking that inference to a supernatural explanation is somehow irrational, I don't see any reason why we, when we are not acting as professional historians, should be prohibited from making a supernatural inference and being constrained by some sort of mere methodological restriction.

Historians believe that the women that led the prohibition movement did so because of what alcohol had done to their men. You cannot declare war on loss; cannot declare war on grief [her first husband] died a week before their daughter was born (of alcohol poisoning). And for weeks, for years afterwards she walked into bars all across Kansas, armed with a hatchet and just started breaking shit, and I'm not saying that's okay. I'm just saying, I've seen a mirror before. I'm saying I loved a man for years calling him the bandage only to realize he's the wound. I'm saying I get it. I dare any woman to spend half a century sitting at an ever emptying dinner table without picking up an axe

It’s tempting to turn Clarke into a caricature or intellectual straw man: an easy grab in an attempt to show the ridiculous sexism inherent in Victorian ideology. Nevertheless, his theories became pervasive in American thought and defined expectations about access to wilderness for generations. Multiple outdoor organizations prohibited female membership, for example, including the influential hiking group the White Mountain Club. The club’s founder, John M. Gould, was a bank clerk and amateur Civil War historian. In his How to Camp Out, first published in 1877, Gould advised young men to view their expeditions as regimental exercises: hikes were best considered “marches”; male camping pals were instructed to form “companies” with clear duties and timetables. Most marches, he warned, would be too difficult for ladies, particularly if routes included loose rocks or tangles of low-growing trees. And because women ought not stray far from home, sites where they might camp must be chosen accordingly. Any overnight locations should be such that stoves could be delivered to make women more comfortable, along with discarded doors that women could stand upon while dressing. Sleeping outside was out of the question during any kind of precipitation; instead, schoolhouses or sawmills should be located as shelter.

Huyck proved to be an outstanding administrator and, despite his lack of experience, quickly achieved one of the board’s top priorities. By ensuring that the teachers, curriculum, and classroom offerings met the necessary educational standards, he earned official accreditation for the school, a certification that made it eligible for federal and state financial aid.9 Along with his academic duties, he made time to coach the school’s poultry-judging team, which—as the local press proudly noted—“won over six other teams from high schools in larger towns in a recent contest.”10 At the annual meeting of the Michigan State Teachers’ Association in November 1923, Emory was chosen as a delegate to the general assembly and helped draft a resolution calling for the strict enforcement of the Volstead Act—formally known as the National Prohibition Act—“not only to prevent production and consumption of alcoholic liquors, but also to teach the children respect for the law.”11 He was also a member of both the Masons, “the most prestigious fraternal organization in Bath’s highly Protestant community,”12 and the Stockman Grange, at whose annual meeting in January 1924 he served as toastmaster and delivered a well-received talk on “The Bean Plant and Its Relation to Life.”13 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man with his military training, Huyck was something of a disciplinarian, demanding strict standards of conduct from both the pupils and staff. “At day’s end,” writes one historian, “students were required to march from the building to the tune of martial music played on the piano. During the day, students tiptoed in the halls.” When a pair of high-spirited teenaged girls “greeted their barely older teachers with a jaunty ‘Well, hello gals,’” they were immediately sent to the superintendent, who imposed a “penalty [of] individual conferences with those teachers and apologies to them.”14