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Prohibition of alcohol in the United States ended more than 60 years ago, yet the lessons of "the noble experiment" between 1919 and 1933 are still invoked today as part of contemporary policy. Whether the subject be tobacco restriction, marijuana legalization or heroin use, conventional wisdom has it that drug prohibition of any kind is not a possibility, and the experience of alcohol prohibition in the United States so long ago is frequently marshalled in support of this generalization in the popular media in ways that would be tedious and pedantic to document here.
Historians of temperance and prohibition greet this modem view with a sense of frustration and failure. Their work over the past 25 years seems to have been ignored in contemporary debates. These seem caught in the time warp of pre-1960s historiography. Prior to the 1960s, the historical profession's view of the temperance movement was of funny and marginal people who sought fanatically to reshape people's morals and failed. The result was greater crime, more drinking, widespread flouting of prohibition laws and, inevitably, repeal. The pillorying of the anti-drink crusade from journalist H. L. Menken through to historians Richard Hofstadter and Andrew Sinclair was merciless.1 Hastily pushing through prohibition as part of a war-time euphoria, Americans quickly repented of their recklessness. At its best, this view conceded that prohibitionists were a defensive group of old-stock Americans who suffered severe status anxiety and sought with spectacular failure to reassert social control over urban America and the tide of drinking among immigrant groups. Sinclair, to be sure, was concerned to point out the polarization of opinion in the 1920s, and labelled both supporters and opponents of prohibition as fanatics who could not compromise.2 However, his brief for mediation over the liquor conflict in his rather hasty discussion of repeal had little impact. The Era of Excess conveyed through its vivid prose the prohibitionists' special folly, and gave a lasting name to the consequences of prohibition. The absence of an authoritative, book-length synthesis to replace this work has helped to perpetuate its influence.
During the 1960s and 1970s, a more sympathetic appraisal of the movement appeared in specialist literature. Links were noted with other reform movements that still meet with approval, such as abolition of...