Issue 07
High Sobriety
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Library of Congress
Illustration By Matthew Goldman
“Teaching people to drink responsibly is like trying to teach a pig to eat with a spoon. It’s a good idea, but it’s very difficult.” Gene Amondson is a modern-day prohibitionist. The 62-year-old Vashon Island, Washington, minister would like to see beverage alcohol made illegal again. He continues: “I’d rather have a hundred Al Capone sin every city selling illegal whiskey in every city than have it in every supermarket and on every television set. Prohibition wasn’t perfect, but what was good then was that we didn’t have $100 billion in advertising trying to make alcohol look like a friend of the family.”
In the early 1960s, Gene Amondson went to an old-time Methodist seminary in Kentucky, where he learned of the life and work of Billy Sunday, to whom Amondson refers as“the most popular baseball player of all time – the fastest man in the National League, and the best paid until Babe Ruth.” Sunday was a career.248 hitter over a decade spent mostly with the Chicago Cubs and Pittsburgh Pirates.
His play wouldn’t earn him a ticket to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but that didn’t stop Sunday from becoming famous: he was a twos port man, the second sport being preaching, and his sermon of choice railed against the evils of alcohol. Billy Sunday was so effective, Amondson says, that the liquor industry pooled together a million dollars to offer him, on the condition that he ceased preaching. Sunday didn’t take the offer, and today Amondson carries on the Sunday legacy, traveling the U.S. And reciting Sunday’s prohibitionist sermons.
Interview a preacher and you’ll get a sermon. Gene Amondson is an excitable man, reciting five minutes of Billy Sunday’s prohibition sermon in 30 seconds. Like an M.C. Taking out the phony rappers, he closes with his favorite Billy Sunday quote, one aimed at “wet” religious figures: “There’s gonna be so many preachers in hell that they’re gonna have to hang their feet out the window.” Amondson sees the tide turning against alcohol today, as do most of the key players in today’s Prohibition movement. After describing how pervasive cigarettes were just a few decades ago, Amondson muses, “I have a feeling that in a few years, if people want a glass of wine at dinner they’ll have to put the tablecloth over their heads and hide.”
Prohibition in the U.S. Didn’t arrive quickly. When the alcohol banning Volstead Act pass ed in 1919, and the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol on a Constitutional level) took effect in 1920, they were the result of decades of pressure from a number of socially concerned groups. The temperance movement, which urged responsible drinking, dates to before the Revolutionary War, but it became organized with groups like the Good Templars in the 1840safter a surge in domestic whiskey production. When it came to getting results, however, there was no group better than the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. They had the Temperance name, but seeing that moderation didn’t seem to work, they urged nothing less than vows of total abstinence. In December of 1873, women of Hillsboro, Ohio, began the Woman’s Crusade, moving as a group from saloon to saloon and closing the institutions that served alcohol. With U.S. Membership as high as 1.5 million in its heyday, the WCTU today is headed by the no-nonsense Knightstown, Indiana, resident and WCTU World President Sarah Ward.
At the time of the Crusade and the organization of the WCTU, Ward explains, “We didn’t have the Internet and didn’t have much of telephone, yet within three months the Crusade had driven liquor out of 250 cities and towns.” The campaign took place at a time when women couldn’t vote and their presence in saloons was severely frowned upon. Saloons, at the time, were where nearly every political decision-making meeting was held. With no welfare or food stamps and very little in the way of social services—and with a woman obtaining either a divorce or a job a near impossibility—a husband who drank away his pay check in the late 1800s was an even greater liability than it is today. In many ways, the WCTU of the 1870swasan especially forward-thinking bunch. By 1876, they were actively talking about the dangers of using tobacco. Today’s Humane Society, Traveler’s Aid, and kindergarten are legacies of WCTU activism. As Sarah Ward puts it, “Anything that they saw as needing a change in society, they just latched onto it.”
The primary concern of the WCTU, of course, was alcohol, and with the 18th Amendment the Prohibitionists got their wish. Having campaigned on the promise that Prohibition would result in a nation with fewer social problems, better health and hygiene, a decrease in crime and corruption, and an empty prison system, what followed was a disappointment. People still had a taste for alcohol, and now only organized crime could provide it. Al Capone was the most famous of the bootleggers, who made drinking in the 1920s as simple a process as buying a bag of weed is today. Capone had grown up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and had been a member of the Brooklyn Rippers, Forty Thieves, and Five Points gangs before his move to Chicago, where by the end of the 192 0she was reputed to have made $100 million a year. Bootleggers like Capone lived a glamorous life, dressed well, and drove fancy cars, and fast: in fact, NASCAR is a direct outgrowth of the tricked-out stock cars that the bootleggers drove. Brewers such as Budweiser had to stop making beer, but saw their sales of brewer’s yeast skyrocket, especially when they included explicit instructions of a process that under no circumstances should the buyer follow, lest they end up with—gasp!—beer. The quantity of alcohol consumed did drop during Prohibition, but not wildly, and the people who did stay on as drinkers in the 1920sare widely credited with having introduced binge drinking into our national culture. By the end of Prohibition, the U.S. Was sunk in the Great Depress ion and clearly was hankering for a stiff drink. President Herbert Hoover, having presided over the stock market crash of 1929 and the Depress ion years that followed, lost the 1932 election to the “wet” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Prohibition ended the next year under FDR’s watch.
When the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933 with the pass age of the 21st, the WCTU was on the wane, though it has maintained its presence ever since, as Ward explains. “Our main thrust today has shifted away from legislation to education. We believe that if people have the facts they will make the right decisions.” Those right decisions, they hope, might include joining the WCTU, which today numbers 5,000 people in 35 states and 20,000 people worldwide. Part of joining the WCTU is the Pledge, which Sarah Ward took as an eighth-grader in Indiana. It goes: “That I may give my best service to home and country, I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink,sell, or give alcoholic liquors while I live. From other drugs and tobacco I’ll abstain, and never take God’s name in vain.”
Despite the recent surge in evangelical Christianity in the U.S., Ward says that the Prohibition movement hasn’t benefited; in fact, quite the opposite: “One of the things that has hurt us is the rise in churches that don’t take a stand against alcohol because they have too many of their own members drinking.” Nor does Ward find the various groups combating drunk driving to be useful allies. “We can’t really work with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and SADD (Students Against Drunk Driving), because we feel they don’t go far enough. Our feeling is that if you never take the first drink, you’ll never become an alcoholic.”
An ally who does go far enough is Earl Dodge, who for nearly 50 years has been the face of the Prohibition Party, the oldest third party in America. Dodge is a political memorabilia dealer born in Malden, Massachusetts, and now based in the evangelical Christian stronghold of Lakewood, Colorado, just outside Denver. “My mother says that I was vaccinated with a telegraph needle,so if I run on, just let me know,” Dodge begins. His voice is calming and amiable, his demeanor happily avuncular, and he’s never had a drink of alcohol in his life.
“I grew up in a Republican family,” Dodge says, “and in 1952, I was 19 when the election came. I lived in Weston, Massachusetts, and I organized a Senator Taft from Ohio campaign for President. When Eisenhower was nominated, the networks took the names off their platforms and took them to the street and people couldn’t tell the difference. I had heard of the Prohibition Party, and there was a gentleman in Melrose, Massachusetts, running for Governor on the Prohibition Party ticket. When I went to meet him, I found it wasn’t a one-issue party, and I agreed with much of their platform. I also liked that they opened and closed each of their meetings with prayer. Asa young man in the Tremont Temple youth group, I would go to the rescue miss ion in Boston’s South End. Homeless and unfortunate people were there from widely diverse background s—I remember an ex-priest and a lawyer—but alcohol was the constant.” Dodge decided never to drink. By the late 1950s, he was a Prohibition Party leader. Not that leadership of the Prohibition Party meant command of a vast group. “We are very small, and get very few votes,” Dodge admits.
Like a great many people working for social change, Earl Dodge keeps a day job. In his case, it’s the buying and selling of political memorabilia, especially campaign buttons. Dodge’s own political hero, and subject of a special collection, is Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts/ Vermont native who became the 30th President of the United States,serving (in the Prohibition years, of course) from 1923-1929. Earl Dodge happily relates that he and Coolidge are distant cousins, and he admiringly speaks of Coolidge’s reserved New England nature, which earned him the moniker “Silent Cal” while in office.
Earl Dodge respects that Calvin Coolidge observed the laws of Prohibition even though he could have flouted them, as did President Hoover, who despite supporting Prohibition served alcohol at the White House. Dodge doesn’t see the 18th Amendment returning any time soon, but he’s optimistic that one day in the near future a new form of Prohibition will take shape in the U.S., one driven by health concerns. “Prohibition was a slow evolution of 80 years—though since I ’m a creationist I hate to use the word ‘evolution’ !—and I believe we are heading in a similar direction, though with a different impetus. In the last 20 years, I have seen a very slow, but picking up steam, move to Prohibition. I think that impetus is causing things like warning labels and high drinking ages, cracking down on D WI, and these are align that people are feeling that alcohol is a major health hazard. When I was a child, most people smoked, even devout religious people. I believe that if we have a Prohibition again, it will not be an amendment, but a health issue. The Food and Drug Administration will eventually take charge of it.”
In the same 1950syearsthat Earl Dodge was developing his political pass ion, young Jim Hedges, then a resident of Iowa City, Iowa, was also becoming involved in the Prohibition Party. Like Dodge, Hedges had to keep a day job through his adult life. In his case, it was playing tuba in a Marine band in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. He played tuba in 1963 at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, a day he remembers as an especially long and footsore one.
Hedges, who today resides in rural Pennsylvania, describes himself as“the liberal wing of the Prohibition Party. I’d like people to think we’re asocial reform party. I hate to think that we’re a family-friendly party, bringing up images of Pat Robertson, but rather for health and things that we think will improve society, not a Christian/ Taliban type of imposing religion on people. We have trouble appealing to young people, I don’t know why. But we’d like to hear from people. They don’t have to agree with us100 percent, they just have to be interested in social reform.”
Today, after a lengthy and unresolved management conflict, Amondson and Hedges find themselves on the opposite side from Dodge in a contentious split in the Prohibition Party that has nothing to do with party platform but rather with management of party finances– a war chest somewhere in the area of $100,000. Asa result of the rift, both Earl Dodge and Gene Amondson ran for president on the party ticket in 2004. We’ll be watching for the Prohibition Party in 2008.