The 1920s Consensus on Prohibition . . . How Wilson Persecuted the Hutterites  . . . American Indian Warriors

Perhaps history can teach us, after all. Here are some fascinating stories that surfaced in the past few weeks. My paragraphs will give you highlights and I encourage you to read the originals.

‘Follow the Consensus’

Looking back, most of us see the American prohibition era (1920–1933) as a giant, foolhardy mistake. It destroyed businesses, turned average citizens into criminals, built a mafia of corruption, and more. How could it have happened?

In an essay full of surprises, Jeffrey Tucker of AIER helps explain this mystery. It turns out that in the 1920s there was a powerful social consensus in favor of prohibition, promoted and backed by economists and physicians. To challenge it was unseemly at best.

Tucker’s interest in U. S. Prohibition was piqued by reading some writing by a contemporary who opposed prohibition,  James Gillis, a Catholic priest widely known through his radio broadcasts.

“What surprised me,” says Tucker, “was the defensiveness of his comments. He had to assure his listeners that he was personally for temperance, that alcohol was indeed demon rum, that it’s true that this nasty stuff had caused terrible things to happen to the country. Still, he said, outright bans are too costly.”

Delving deeper, Tucker found that economists were almost unanimously in favor of Prohibition at the time. A mathematical economist,  Irving Fisher, much admired today, “made a decisive difference in convincing Congress and the public that a complete ban was the right way.” But Fisher was not alone. In 1927 he tried to get a roundtable discussion about prohibition but he couldn’t find any economist willing to argue against it!

It seems that economists and others, looking around them and seeing broken families, homelessness, crime and idleness, decided that the cause must be alcohol. Tucker sums up the science behind prohibition:

“There was poverty, crime, fatherless households, illiteracy, political alienation, social immobility, city squalor, and so on. You can look carefully at the data to find that in all these cases, there is a common element of alcohol. It only stands to reason that eliminating this factor would be the single greatest contribution to eliminating the pathologies.“

The obvious “correlation but not necessarily causation” applies here, but no one seems to have recognized that.

“What finally broke Prohibition was not the replacement of one scientific orthodoxy for another but the noncompliance on the part of most of the population,” Tucker concludes.

Woodrow Wilson Went after Hutterites 

“Woodrow Wilson was the most repressive, anti-liberty president to ever occupy the White House,” writes Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Reed lists many offenses (such as resegregating the federal government’s bureaucracy and creating a propaganda machine to win public support for entering World War I, and more).

And then there was his treatment of the Hutterites. These were communes of religious people whose ancestors had fled persecution in Germany. They had settled in Montana and the Dakotas. Among their tenets was opposition to war.

But Wilson forced them to become soldiers. Reed writes:

“At induction centers where young men reported for military duty, Hutterite men were pressured both physically and psychologically. This passage from [John A.] Hostetler’s book will leave you wondering how such a travesty could ever occur in the land of the free and the home of the brave:

At Camp Funston some of the men were brutally handled in the guardhouse. They were bayoneted, beaten, and tortured by various forms of water “cure.” Jakob S. Waldner, who retains an extensive diary of his experiences in the camp, was thrown fully clothed into a cold shower for twenty minutes for refusing a work order. After such cold showers, the men were often thrown out of a window and dragged along the ground by their hair and feet by soldiers who were waiting outside. Their beards were disfigured to make them appear ridiculous.” [1]

Back home, their families were mistreated because of their pacifism, which included their unwillingness to support the war by buying Liberty bonds—and of course their German ancestry, which is ironic since they had fled persecution there. While their young men were suffering in the military, at home  “their sheep and cattle were seized and sold at auction to purchase the [Liberty ] bonds their rightful owners would not buy.” Eventually, most of the Hutterites fled to Canada.

Not only did Woodrow Wilson fail to protect these people, he tried to suppress news about the worst atrocities (four Hutterites were hanged). He urged that a businessman who wrote about the worst atrocities be charged with treason.

‘Sitting Bull and the Wrath of Achilles’

We spend a lot of time these days justifiably lamenting the treatment that Europeans and frontier Americans gave the natives they found on the North American continent. But Glenn Arbery, president of Wyoming Catholic College, offers a fresh perspective on the Indian wars.

He compares them to the wars of antiquity, beginning with the Greeks:

“The great figures—Red Cloud, Cochise, Quanah Parker, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse—bear with them much of the same heroic aura as Achilleus, Agamemnon, Nestor, or Hektor. They came out of the same kinds of cultures, in which courage was everything and boys were brought up almost from infancy learning the arts of war. Military experts who saw the American Indians fight said that they were the finest soldiers in the world.”

And the American conquests resemble Roman conquests:

“As with the Romans, the movement of settlers into the American West obviously involved the displacement of the previous inhabitants by whatever means offered themselves. Naturally, the displaced people felt the injustice (often overtly  corrupt) and  reacted violently.”

“So it has always been, and not just in America,” writes Arbery.

[1] John A. Hostetler, Hutterite Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974, 1997), 127.

“Prohibition” photograph from hublera is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.