However, these gains for the cause of Christian liberty were by no means decisive. Although the influence of Catholicism had increased, it was by no means dominant. To this day, no Roman Catholic could be nominated for President by either of the two major parties. The Roman Catholic, the most numerous of the three Catholic communions, had not even the power which its members might otherwise have given it, because its Italian and Slavic members counted for little in the politics of the country as a whole. The Latins had an especially small foothold in public life. Beer and wine were still mainly thought of in connection with “foreign elements” in the population. The native-born drank whisky, and used the word “rum” as a generic term to designate both distilled and fermented liquors! Between them, the Protestant sects accounted for an overwhelming majority of the population, and their innate Puritanism in morals was unchanged. Their theologies were less insisted upon; most educated Protestants were abandoning the arduous labour of definition, and the fervour which had formerly gone into Protestant theological discussion was now beginning to be dissipated in vague humanitarianism. In part this Protestant energy (formerly employed upon the theology now fading from the human mind) was ready to be used for the enforcement of taboo.
Chesterton’s analysis of corresponding conditions in the British Isles is pertinent here. He remarks that “... it is a singular fact that although extreme Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilization, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilized part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays.... All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and makes an evil silence in the streets.”
“By the middle of the nineteenth century—this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilized mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was ‘seen’ going into a bank.... The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one ... it is defended with sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply tested ... if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo....”[42]
By the close of the century a new and increasingly powerful ally, industrialism, was coming to the help of American Puritanism in its opposition to traditional Christian liberty. After 1865 America began to concentrate her energies on building factories and railroads. For three hundred years there had been no universal religious organization binding all men together in a common morality. In such a society, the appearance of machine industry aggravated the evils of unlimited competition between individuals and classes. These evils, it should be repeated, were the direct result of the sixteenth century moral change, that is the breakdown of universal religious authority and the consequent weakening of moral solidarity between men. Machine industry neither created the evils of unrestricted competition nor essentially changed their character. But it did aggravate them enormously because it increased the size of the industrial unit and thereby reduced to a vanishing point the personal contact between owners and wage earners. Owner and industrial wage earner tended to look upon one another less and less as fellow beings, engaged for mutual benefit in common tasks, more and more as abstract commodities—if not as definitely hostile forces, “capital” and “labour.” Wage earners organized themselves into unions which were ultimately to develop great powers of economic obstruction, but, so far, no faculty for constructive reform of industry. Owners meanwhile cast about how they might make of “labour” a more effective instrument for their own enrichment.
It is but fair to say that the “captains of industry” were not altogether cold-blooded in the matter. They had conceived a horrible affection for the new and vast forces under their control, and in this they were imitated by their numerous admirers among people whom a European would call middle class. Such people not only permitted the mechanizing of life, they actively encouraged it. Consequently, as Henry Adams put it: “The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions, or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whisky or drugs, without breaking his neck.”[43] That the worship of the new mechanical energies was ruining the nerves of wealthy and middle-class Americans and imperilling society as a whole was an idea only just beginning to dawn. Almost all educated people consented to the inhuman process and called it fine names like “progress” and “efficiency.”
Meanwhile, despite Henry Adams and his “typical American man,” the wage earner who constituted the great majority of the industrial communities did not take kindly to the perpetual speeding-up process. From time to time he took refuge from his monotonous machine tending in heavy drinking of hard liquor after a fashion unknown to the Catholic peasant societies of Europe, and this habit of his annoyed the captains of industry and infuriated the Puritans.
The solution adopted would have amazed our ancestors. We can only hope that, if record is preserved, it will scandalize our descendants. Instead of striving to restore a state of things in which normal men might be left in peace to get their living and enjoy the social pleasures natural to man, it seemed simpler and more desirable to the leaders of our time to attempt to destroy the social pleasure. As in the sixteenth century, the “business community,” to whom the chief end of man was to make money, joined hands with the fanatic to whom amusement was sinful.
Two other lesser factors came in, as if accidentally, and helped the Prohibition cause.
The first of these accidents was a shift of political power in the South. Until about 1890 the “quality,” i.e., people who had a tradition of wealth and social ascendancy, dominated Southern politics. “Politics” were “qualities,” so the saying went. Then came a change; the small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers gained control. The quality in the South are usually “Episcopalian,” and anything but Puritanical. The “plain people” are nearly all “hardshell” Baptists or “shoutin’” Methodists. Neither of these sects are Calvinists like the original Puritans, but both are aggressively Puritan in their discipline. The Baptists are the indirect successors of the Anabaptists, the “extreme left” in the sixteenth century religious struggle. The Methodists began as a schism from the Church of England and, as we have seen, were the first Christians to preach total abstinence instead of temperance in drink. As a substitute for drink, and for the other forms of social pleasure condemned by their discipline, they find an outlet in their orgiastic worship. Hence the epithet “shoutin’.” Of all Christian sects, these two are among those furthest from tradition. The proportion of college-bred or otherwise cultivated men and women in either denomination is small. Even their ministers are usually uneducated. On the other hand, these preachers are industrious, zealous, and devoted, so that they wield great influence. Naturally, with such ministers, the mental effort required for ethical definition is not to be found and taboo luxuriates. “Drink” to these people means whisky in rowdy dives. In the first decade of the twentieth century the Southern States under their new masters began to go Prohibition.
Southerners, anxious to avoid the reproach of intolerance, will sometimes say that the desire to keep liquor from the negroes was the chief motive for Prohibition. Liquor, they will say, inflamed the negro’s passions and predisposed him to attempt rape upon white women. On the other hand, the presence of negroes had nothing to do with the situation described in the last paragraph, and such an authority as William Garrott Brown, himself a Southerner, has recorded his opinion that the race question had little to do with Southern Prohibition.