Theyre fighting over alcohol, but theyre also fighting over immigration and identity in the country, says Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History, who appears in the new two-part Smithsonian Channel documentary miniseries on the era, Drinks, Crime and Prohibition.
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But, as Grinspan says in the documentary, alcohol is not the central story of Prohibition. There are people who are fighting alcohol, but what they are fighting about is a clash of two civilizations in America. The enemy is not just alcohol, but European immigrants, the documentary argues. Between 1892 and 1920 almost 12 million immigrants entered the U.S. through Ellis Island.
Organizing around alcohol is in some ways a politically correct way to go after other immigrants, Grinspan says in the documentary. Its not entirely polite to say, I want to get all of the Catholics out of America. But its very polite to say, Alcohol is ruining society.
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Indeed, part of the reason Prohibition passed was that it elicited unusual alliancesorganized women who would go on to fight for suffrage worked alongside anti-immigrant hate groups as well as industrialists who didnt like how saloons were causing drunkenness among their workers and becoming centers of power for unions and political parties.
The idea that suffragistswomens rights advocatesand the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, are fighting on the same side of this thing, Grinspan says, is really unusual.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/bitter-aftertaste-prohibition-american-history-180969266/