---------- 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 [log in to unmask]