Last call: the rise and fall of prohibition by Daniel Okrent

Author:Daniel Okrent [Daniel Okrent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Histoire
ISBN: 9780743277020
Published: 2010-05-11T17:59:38+00:00

Chapter 16

“Escaped on Payment of Money”

I

N AN ATTEMPT to memorize poetry,” Irving Fisher wrote in 1926, “Professor Vogt of the University of Christiania found that on days when he drank one and one-half to three glasses of beer it took him 18 per cent longer to learn the lines.” To an extreme dry like Fisher—which is to say, to an extreme dry who also happened to be one of America’s foremost economists—this was a “fact” to fall in love with. Fisher wasn’t going to miss the chance to attribute the strength of the U.S. economy to computations made by Professor Vogt during his attempt to master the Odyssey, in Norwegian, while a little bit in the tank. He had made a similar calculation in 1919, when he extrapolated from a study showing, he said, that “two to four glasses of beer will reduce the output of typesetters by 8 per cent.” From this he determined that withholding those beers from those typesetters, and from everyone else in the American labor force, “will add to the national output of the U.S. between 7½ to 15 billion dollars’ worth of product, every year.”

Fisher loved to express complexities with numbers, but computation wasn’t his only work for the dry cause. He was the drys’ leading expert on virtually any subject, before virtually any audience.* He declared himself dedicated to “the abolition of war, disease, degeneracy, and instability of money,” and considered alcoholic beverages a contributor to each of these plagues. He gave speeches, testified before Congress, and wrote advertisements, pamphlets, and books about the virtues of the dry laws; in 1928 one of the latter, Prohibition at Its Worst, was turned into a movie with the counterintuitive title (for modern viewers) Deliverance. In the years after ratification, Fisher seemed to find evidence for the wonders of Prohibition behind every statistic he encountered—for instance, the discovery, in 1924, that arrests in New York City for the use of “foul language” had dropped 20 percent since pre-Volstead levels. He was not inclined to consider other causes—like, possibly, a wider acceptance of profanity in the Jazz Age city—when he could grab a number and pronounce it evidence. When Fisher determined that a single drink reduced efficiency by 2 percent, he said that this translated to more than a billion dollars of GNP. Dartmouth professor Herman Feldman, bemused by the unlikely exactitude of Fisher’s calculations, said a 2 percent loss in efficiency could instead be the result of “a mere depressing thought.”

Fisher was not alone in his attempts to measure the effects of Prohibition with numbers of dubious precision and indeterminate relevance. From Washington came the pronouncements of Prohibition Commissioner Roy Haynes, as jolly as ever: five times as many new houses were built in 1922 as in the last entirely wet year; three thousand people were joining churches every day; in some cities drunkenness among women was down 80 percent. Other dry boosters credited Prohibition for empty prison cells, longer life expectancy, and increased savings rates,

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