One hundred years ago, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was introduced into the Senate. In case you're not familiar with that one, it says, "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States ... for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited." The measure was ratified by the states two years later, and in 1920 America's "noble experiment" began.
How did Prohibition pass? It took decades of political organizing and lobbying by the "Drys," as anti-alcohol crusaders were known. It also took a lot of fear.
America had always been a drinking nation. The pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock (partially) because the Mayflower was running out of beer. The Founding Fathers were devotees of rum and Madeira.
But when the temperance movement began gathering steam in the latter half of the 19th century, the Drys in groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) looked around their country and decided they didn't like who was drinking. In the South, whites eager to take away the freedoms of Reconstruction argued that African Americans couldn't handle the vote—or a drink. "The grogshop is the Negro's center of power," argued WCTU leader Frances Willard. "Better whiskey and more of it is the rallying cry of great dark-faced mobs."
Willard believed another group couldn't handle alcohol: "the infidel foreign population of our country." She was speaking of the millions of Irish, German and Scandinavian immigrants who arrived mid-century. Soon afterward, Italians and Eastern Europeans joined them. More than 20 million people emigrated to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920. And many of them, once they arrived, wanted a stiff drink. America's brewing industry was built by German families. Italians and others established many of the country's early wineries. Jewish immigrants helped build the liquor industry.
Americans who had been here longer—conservatives and progressives alike—decided that the new arrivals were too foreign to ever adopt American values. They were too exotic, too Catholic, too Jewish. But perhaps they would be less dangerous if they weren't drinking so much.
As we know today, Prohibition did not work out so well. Thankfully, in the years after Repeal, immigrants and their children—people with names like Gallo, Mondavi and Sebastiani—built the foundation of today's thriving wine culture, proving quite capable of embracing the American dream and running with it. Later arrivals like André Tchelistcheff, Konstantin Frank, Abdallah Simon and Ulises Valdez enriched the industry. Workers who toil in the sun to pick grapes today know that someday they might be vineyard owners, or perhaps their children will be. That is the opportunity this country offers that so many others don't.
