Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

I reached for an Irish whiskey — two fingers, neat, as my uncle used to say in trying to teach me how to drink — just after finishing “Last Call,” Daniel Okrent’s haunting and entertaining book on Prohibition. The drink was necessary, in part, because his gallop through one of the most otherworldly episodes in American history made me shudder at the parallels to this age.

We are about to get a full immersion in that great moralistic experiment from 1919 to 1933, a generator of crime not just vast and organized, but vertically integrated from street thugs to judges. “Prohibition,” the latest story from the history factory of filmmaker Ken Burns, is set to run on PBS stations in October. It was co-directed by Lynn Novick and is a “first cousin” to the book, in Okrent’s words.

The obvious echo will be about drugs. You will hear “if only” in many variants this fall — as in, if only the most popular of illicit substances were brought out of criminal shadows to be legalized and taxed.

But the film and book are much more instructive on the political fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the increasingly unpopular Tea Party.



Burns has made that general comparison. “This is a story about a single-issue campaign that metastasized,” he said, when I first heard him talk about “Prohibition” last year. Initially, I didn’t see it that way. Still, after finishing Okrent’s book during a summer of insanity in Congress, I found his conclusion less of a reach.

Consider how a country with such an appetite for drink could arrive at the point where it would amend the Constitution to outlaw daily private behavior. A hundred years ago, as Okrent notes, average consumption of alcohol per adult was about 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor a year, or 520 12-ounce bottles of beer. (It is less today by about 15 percent.)

Okrent asks the obvious question a modern reader brings when trying to understand this social engineering nightmare: “How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World?”

Prohibition got chiseled into the nation’s governing document after the temperance cause became a grand vehicle for the loosely organized loathing that was widespread at the time, from the Ku Klux Klan to viciously anti-immigrant groups. Those who hated, or distrusted, Roman Catholics, new arrivals from Italy, Greece and other nations long tied to the grape, blacks, the teeming urban mass of the working poor — they made common cause with high-minded liberals and evangelical Protestants. The bigots thought if they could deprive the disenfranchised of drink they would take away their gathering houses and political wards — the neighborhood saloons. The purists thought people would raise their eyes to God, or spend more time at home, when all a working man could look forward to at the end of the day was root beer.

“A mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragettes and xenophobes had legally seized the Constitution, bending it to a new purpose,” writes Okrent, who was the first public editor of The Times.

The battering ram of the prohibitionists was the Anti-Saloon League, which Okrent calls “the mightiest pressure group in the nation’s history.” (A public editor might note that Okrent overuses the word “mighty,” a minor complaint.)

The coalition against drink was hardly a majority. The Anti-Saloon League played an outsized role at the margins, killing off moderates at the primary level, or in legislative deals, and forcing politicians to pledge to their cause.

Sound familiar? Today, virtually every Republican in national office, and a majority of those seeking the presidency, has taken a pledge to an unelected, single-issue advocate named Grover Norquist. His goal is to never allow a net tax increase — under any circumstances — and in the process reduce government to a size where he can “drown it in the bathtub,” in his well-known statement of mortal intentions.

In times of war, category 5 hurricanes or other national emergencies these mind-locked pledge-takers must answer to Norquist before country. “We are your constituents,” an angry voter said to pledge-bound Representative Chris Gibson, Republican of New York, at a town hall meeting last week, “not Grover Norquist.”

So, even though huge majorities support keeping Medicare and Social Security strong, and raising taxes on the very rich in the interest of sustainable government, one single-issue group drives national affairs — to the bafflement of average citizens. This dysfunction was on full display in August when Republicans nearly pushed the government into default by refusing to budge from their fealty to Norquist.

The other parallel from the dry years concerns personal liberties. With the 18th Amendment, the prohibitionists took away the right to make a basic choice. Gov. Rick Perry, now leading the Republican polls for president, has vowed to do the same, promising to amend the Constitution in several ways to take away freedoms. One would prevent gays from ever getting married. Another would outlaw a woman’s right to decide when to end a pregnancy. A third would repeal the 17th Amendment, which gives citizens the right to directly elect their senators.

Could any of this happen? It did, with Prohibition — the urge to dictate the private actions of citizens is a character trait that has never left the American gene pool.