George Garvin Brown, of Brown-Forman, which today owns Jack Daniel’s, Woodford Reserve, and other whiskeys.
In 1910, a distiller named George Garvin Brown wrote a book titled, The Holy Bible Repudiates “Prohibition.” The book, if you can call it that, is a rather tedious accounting of every moment the bible mentions wine or strong drink with some contemporary commentary. In his preface, he writes, “We are living in a day of conventionality, when man’s convenience or vanity undertakes to set up standards of morality that are not found in the word of God.” He argues for temperance but not prohibition, suggesting that extremism or absolutism was the moral scourge of the day rather than intemperance.
The frontispiece of George G. Brown’s work of persuasion.
Prohibition emerged from a very similar cultural moment to our present one, almost exactly 100 years later. A global pandemic had destabilized communities, authoritarian regimes have created a polarized political environment on an international stage, and domestic politics was rife with black or white issues meant to force moderates into more extreme positions. And runway capitalism in the roaring ‘20s created an economy that benefitted only the very wealthy, leaving everyday people further from prosperity and getting restless for social change. Temperance advocates were demanding total prohibition, even if it would take a constitutional amendment to get it.
The moderates lost, and Prohibition went into effect in 1920. At the same time, a World War erupted, followed by a period of widening economic disparity and eventually the Great Depression. Desperate for revenue and confronted with organized crime and flagrant flouting of prohibition, the federal government repealed Prohibition with the support of states and the 21st amendment. It would take years and another World War for the domestic whiskey industry to recover, and by the 1950s, alcohol in America looked very different than it had on the eve of Prohibition.
We are currently in a moment of contraction in beverage alcohol. There are several theories, but it’s generally perceived to be a correction following pandemic excesses. Other theories abound: the younger generations aren’t picking up alcohol. The older generation is aging out, or is on Ozempic, or is distracted by cannabis. There is too much choice. There is too little interest.
Another theory: in a time ruled by zealots, alcohol is an easy target for zealous voices. Drink moderates passions in civil societies—and we are not in civil times.
Regardless of its origin, a neo-temperance movement is on the rise. The NY Times, as an example, has stoked this debate here, here, and here. Even the outgoing surgeon general was prepared to make the warnings on alcohol labels more severe. Many drinkers were chagrined that some minor health benefit to drinking, long promoted, was apparently false. Alcohol may not be good for the body, and in an era of performative wellness, drinking is passe.
Most of the new awareness around the deleterious health effects of alcohol stem from a World Health Organization report that suggests that there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption. That’s pretty stark language, but many will remember the same body rendered the same judgment on red and processed meats (bacon, ham, lunchmeat) a few years earlier, lumping it in with asbestos and tobacco. And surely alcohol is bad, but so is sugar and processed foods….how is one to understand the risks? Would alcohol go the way of cigarettes? There are as many articles yearning for clarity as there are promulgating risk factors.
What we all want to know, and what science can’t really give us, is not the news that alcohol is bad, but what is the relative harm? To french fries, to soda, to tobacco, to bacon, to marijuana or any number of other minor vices? The World Health Organization is silent. Science may not be able to say. Science may never be able to say.
One could argue alcohol has been a part of socializing since, at least Biblical times (as George Garvin Brown pointed out). But tobacco use in various forms has been around at least as long and is on a path to virtual extinction over health concerns. Will the contraction of the current moment find equilibrium or will it travel a path to obscurity? It’s hard to imagine alcohol being banned again, but once smoking became disallowed in public, it was not a long journey to marginalization.
A Gallup poll recently found that the number of adult Americans who have had a drink in the last year is at a 90-year low, at 54%. It’s the morning after, following a Covid bender, when many found the pleasures of drinking a substitute for the socialization they missed.
History repeats itself, though the echoes with the 1917 Spanish Flu pandemic, the roaring 1920s, and temperance ring especially foreboding, knowing that a worldwide depression and a bitter World War followed. Are we doomed?
Prohibition advocates in the 1920s destroying barrels of booze.
Let me bring up one significant factor that is different in the current moment from the one 100 years ago. The most interesting thing I’ve read lately is this transcript of a conversation between Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and Alice Evans, a demographic researcher at Kings College in London. The article, provocatively titled How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart, argues that we are headed for a global fertility collapse that loosely tracks with the adoption of smartphones around the world. The thesis is that we are, as a people, becoming less social, coupling less, and by extension, not having children in starkly reduced rates—and there is a strong correlation with smartphone adoption.
If Gen Z is drinking less, what are they doing instead? If the answer is looking at phones instead of going out, who cares? But rates of social isolation, anxiety, and depression are surging, hubs for community are shrinking or closing, restaurants still struggle to find an audience comparable to prepandemic rates that may never come. We are socializing less, alcohol or no.
Might the public health concerns of temperance be greater than the risks to individual health from alcohol consumption? I would argue the harms of alcohol may be real and we are starting to have good science on it. But alcohol has been around since the dawn of time and we tend to see alcohol consumption flourish in periods of artistic and economic development as it makes pathways for trade and exchange of ideas. Temperance is associated with isolation and religiosity— not with bursts of culture.
And yet we are entering a new era in how we interact and socialize. Smartphones are only 15 years old. I would guess there’s a public health crisis or some kind of cultural revolution waiting in the wings, not yet understood, far more impactful than the quotidian concerns of booze. It might be short sighted to fixate on a small vice that actually helps to mitigate a much larger public health concern of isolation and radicalization brought on by changes in technology. It’s not a coincidence that anti-alcohol sentiment and cataclysmic political clashes have happened in other parts of history. Are we bound for one now? Is it wrong?
I’m not here to answer that. But I’ll get ahead of my own question and make a modest suggestion. I charge you to go out, socialize, and confront each other in the flesh. And I suggest whiskey as a part of that socialization, in moderation. I like a social world, with a little minor vice, lowered inhibitions, and a feeling of warmth toward strangers. I’m sticking with booze. It’s a choice that we enjoy today because Prohibition failed. It failed 100 years ago as a movement. I’m not so sure this time around, but I hope for humanity it does.
We have waged this war before, and lost.
