Calls for people to read books that discuss and analyze race, and the development of the carceral system in the United States have bombarded the internet in recent days. This makes sense, as many people have become interested in learning about the history of race and violence in America after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others by the police. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State by Lisa McGirr sometimes gets recommended. McGirr’s book, discusses the development of the modern American police state. Below I’ve provided my review of this work. I argue that McGirr presents too tidy of a story in this work. This, I think, is something to keep in mind while doing “homework” on the history of race, police, white supremacy in America. Often time books tend to present something in a neat bow, “[blank] is the cause of [blank] problem. [Blank] is how we fix it.” These types of arguments rarly hold up under close examination. Easy to comprehend and ingest, they do have a certain pull. If [Blank] caused the problem, than fixing it just means getting rid of [Blank]. No one can solve a problem like structural racism by changing one thing however. When reading, beware of books that do this, they most likely miss a lot of the story. Resist easy and simple narratives.
“It was the quintessential reform of a white Protestant evangelical and largely Anglo-Saxon middle class.”[1] Damning the WASPs with faint praise, Lisa McGirr places them as the head prophets and architects of the modern American state. In The War on Alcohol, McGirr argues that the years of American Prohibition helped generate a “government [that] is heavy on coercion, light on welfare…at once weak but interventionist, underdeveloped yet coercive.”[2] McGirr compiles a convincing case for the importance of Prohibition in the state-development project but places too much analytical weight on this single historical event as the generative force behind the development of American state. McGirr neatly ties up the story of the modern American police state in the fourteen years of Prohibition, separating it as a tidy package from the rest of America’s past. In creating this neat parcel McGirr forces the issue, over-argues her claim, and ultimately produces a work that does not live up to the promise of its thesis.
History is inherently messy. Linear stories, while easy on the ears and fun to listen to, never get at the truth of an event. Every historical event happens simultaneously with a thousand others and is affected by a thousand more that came before it. It is the historian’s job to try to pick through these events, looking for how things changed over time and making connections where they might not be immediately evident. A comparison to a conspiracy theorist’s tack board full of pictures connected by red strings sometimes seems more apt than not. Historians can occasionally gloss over the trickier parts of a narrative in order to make the story move along more smoothly. In The War On Alcohol McGirr occasionally falls into this trap.
McGirr’s examination of the modern carceral state exemplifies her tendency to over-simplify. As McGirr agues, “The U.S. war on alcohol built the foundations of the twentieth-century federal penal state.”[3] This claim removes much needed nuance from American penitential history. As Sarah Haley and others have shown, much of the construction of our current prison system came in the Jim Crow South, specifically through the imprisonment of black women. While Haley released No Mercy Here after The War on Alcohol, a plethora of writing on the police and carceral apparatus of the South during slavery and Jim Crow existed prior to the publication of No Mercy Here. Eliding the carceral apparatus established both under slavery and Jim Crow makes for a less effective argument. McGirr claims that Prohibition built the foundations of the penal state but does not examine the ground that foundation was built on. A fuller discussion of how the carceral system functioned prior to Prohibition would provide the necessary context for examining how the federal penal state developed as it did. Nothing develops in a void. Prohibition expanded the carceral state, but the foundation already existed.
The question remains, “why look specifically at the incarceration of black women under Jim Crow?” McGirr does examine other precedents and antecedents in the development of the modern penal state. Perhaps McGirr simply wanted to focus on the new information she had to present in only a limited amount of space. Space issues aside, the absence of the Jim Crow South remains troubling. Jim Crow was a massive project in state and local power that effected not only the South but all of the United States. This system of segregation wrought changes from the individual up to the federal level that still affect lives today. A historical work that purports to deal with a national question during the period of Jim Crow loses much by not addressing it.
Similarly, the question of state laws during Prohibition significantly troubles McGirr’s argument. Many states developed their own laws to enforce Prohibition in concert with federal laws.[4] McGirr’s argument mostly ignores how these individual state-administered laws were enforced. She focuses instead on the enforcement of the Volstead Act in various locales. McGirr does not discuss questions of how federalism played into the development of the modern U.S., and tensions between the states and the federal government surely played a role during this time. A closer study of how state legislatures, police and executives viewed the increase of state power would be beneficial to this study. McGirr provides clear evidence that individual states dealt with enforcement of Prohibition in a myriad of ways. This suggests that governors and other state agencies had different reactions to the encroachment of federal power onto their territory. In the War on Alcohol, McGirr’s vision for the expansion of state power faces few setbacks on its path to becoming an unstoppable. As she writes, “the expansion of state authority that the war had engendered, however, did not disappear; it merely lurched forward in new directions.”[5] A clearer picture of Prohibition involves looking at how the individual states, actors with a considerable amount of power, dealt with newly emboldened federal officers lurching into their governments.
Near the end of the The War on Alcohol McGirr declares that, “The war on alcohol was over. The expansion of state authority that the war had engendered, however, did not disappear; it merely lurched forward in new directions.”[6] This claim reads as immature. Dry towns still exist in America, and we have stronger liquor laws then much of the rest of the world. Authors such Louis G. Warren have pointed out the problems in declaring certain historical events as endpoints. While McGirr does not argue that the effects of Prohibition ended with the introduction of the 21st Amendment, she does not discuss the many ways that Prohibition still affects our alcohol consumption. By ending her narrative with repeal McGirr removes the possibility of looking at the federal, state, and individual repercussions of re-legalizing alcohol. Repeal did not take hold everywhere in the U.S. and this fact alone calls for examination.
McGirr misses the main chance at commenting on our present situation with regards to the effects of Prohibition. McGirr’s discussion of mass imprisonment, increased government surveillance, and crackdowns on drugs are all relevant for modern readers. Yet McGirr devotes only a few scant paragraphs to exploring these issues, daring only to move the story up to 1997. As she writes, “[B]etween 1980 and 1997, the number of men and women serving sentences in the nation’s increasingly crowded prisons for nonviolent drug offense skyrocketed from fifty thousand to four hundred thousand.”[7] The opioid epidemic in the United States, the fact that the U.S. has the highest prison population in the world, the continued militarization of local police forces, and the development of the private prison system in the U.S., seem like topics that could be discussed more meaningfully in the conclusion. McGirr argues that Prohibition cast a large shadow but she does not spend much time discussing it. This reluctance to tie the Prohibition to more modern questions acts as a way of trapping Prohibition in the past, rendering the effects it has on modern society as unimportant.
McGirr too often wants to tell a polished story of Prohibition in American rather than exploring all the nuances of state development. Rubbing some sandpaper on her narrative to reveal what’s underneath would have allowed for a bolder and more nuanced argument. History is messy; it should never be neat. The publication of this work through a popular press may have led to some of these problems. The tension between publishers seeking an accessible work, an author eager to defend an impressive insight, and the pressure to produce work as fast as possible may have led to some of the issues in this work. The pressures of the academic world can often lead to more material being left on the cutting floor than absolutely necessary.
[1] McGirr, 13. [2] MCGirr, 221 [3] McGirr, 228 [4] McGirr, 70. [5] McGirr, 246 [6] McGirr, 246. [7] McGirr, 251.