---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 09:56:57 -0500
From: "Ballard Campbell, H-SHGAPE" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: H-Net Gilded Age and Progressive Era List <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reply: Lerner on ethnicity after WWI and prohibition

Subj:   H-ETHNIC: Wet Americans [Lerner]


I also have been following the conversation on Americanization and the
post-World War I era with interest. I'd like to pick up on what Richard
Jensen posted on Friday about the importance of Prohibition in the
Americanization of ethnic groups. (I don't want to call it assimilation
either, because I don't think that's quite what it was.)

In my dissertation, Dry Manhattan: Class, Culture and Politics in
Prohibition-Era New York City, 1919-1933 (New York University: 1999), I argue
that Prohibition was a key political concern for ethnic New Yorkers and
recent immigrants. It was foisted on them as a means of turning them into
"Americans" by reforming their social habits, but in effect Prohibition
actually encouraged ethnic groups to invent and express a different sense of
Americanism through the ways in which they opposed Prohibition and
Prohibitionists. They were stung by the anti-ethnic, anti-Catholic and
anti-Semitic attacks of Prohibitionists, but rather than retreating into
traditional ethnic identities, they reacted by declaring that their
opposition to Prohibition was a truer expression of Americanism than the
bigotry expressed by groups like the Anti-Saloon League. Throughout my
research, I found numerous examples of ethnic New Yorkers appropriating
things like Revolutionary War iconography and patriotic imagery in order to
attack Prohibition and Prohibitionists in a way that did not leave them open
to attack for being un-American.

This trend towards "ethnic Americanism" in opposition to Prohibition
ultimately found a champion in Al Smith in 1928, which is why I think the
1928 election was so important in reshaping the American political landscape.
Smith may have been clobbered at the polls, but his candidacy and the
prominence of Prohibition as an issue in the election opened up a place for
ethnic Americans in national politics, a place that let them be ethnic and
American at the same time. Smith's opposition to Prohibition gave many ethnic
voters cause to believe there were national political issues they could get
involved with and do something about, and a national political party in which
they could feel at home. Prohibition and Smith were two of the main reasons
large numbers of ethnic voters voted for the first time in 1928, or moved
away from socialist or more radical parties and into the Democratic fold.

Again, just adding my two cents.

Michael A. Lerner, Ph.D.
Historian / Research Fellow
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
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