“Issues like fluoridation or domestic communism or temperance,” he wrote, “may be seen to generate irrational emotions and excessive zeal if we fail to recognize them as symbolic rather than instrumental issues.” As an example of what he termed “expressive politics,” temperance “operates within an arena in which feelings, emotions, and affect are displaced and where action is for the sake of expression rather than for the sake of influencing or controlling the distribution of valued objects” (Gusfield 1963, pp. Nonetheless, Gusfield's work was not primarily directed toward explicating alcohol control as a thing in itself. #WICKED WEED BREWING OMNIPRESENCE FREE#His analy sis established a new standard of inquiry-dispassionate, free from polemical shrillness, and motivated by the desire to explain rather than carp or debunk. He rejected the view of temperance and prohibition as repositories of a Snopes-like aberration and reoriented the terms of discussion. Gusfield treated efforts to curb drinking not as mass hysteria but rather as a middle-class movement designed to defend lost status. Joseph Gusfield's (1963) book, Symbolic Crusade, constituted a fundamental advance beyond the psychohistorical exposé favored by Sinclair. It represented a sophisticated caricature that drew heavily on the stereotypes of earlier critics. 3 Employing both Freudian and neo-Marxist categories, he attempted to reveal the “aggressive prurience” behind the masks of religious zeal he argued that dominant economic interests, anxious to distract the gaze of reformers from the problem of the trusts, helped spread this “rural evangelical virus.” Sinclair's portrayal of Prohibition as a florid outburst of a persistent, lurking paranoia backed by big business substituted indictment for objective examination. In Prohibition: The Era of Excess, Andrew Sinclair (1962) described the prohibitionist movement as a national St. Two books, Prohibition: The Era of Excess and Symbolic Cru sade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, made important contributions to this recovery. As the antiliquor movement disappeared from the nation's political agenda, it also withered as a subject for research and study, not to reappear again until the early 1960s. 2 Repeal institutionalized this propaganda and established an ideological legacy that historians came to inherit long after the battles had ended and the moral climate had cooled. 1ĭuring the 1920s, partisan tracts featured titles like Prohibition Versus Civilization: Analyzing the Dry Psychosis and The Prohibition Mania: A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others (Darrow and Yarros 1927, Barnes 1932). But despite important, recent scholarship, and scientific validation of arguments once ridiculed, claims established by dint of repetition have achieved a kind of incantatory truth and ultimately have been enshrined as pieces of political folk wisdom (Warner and Rossett 1975). The record of efforts to restrict drinking is, of course, far too complicated to warrant such axiomatic disparagement. The lineage of reaction is traced straight from sin-obsessed Puritans, to evangelical extremists and Know-Nothings, to nativists and Klansmen, and most recently to McCarthyites and antiabortionists. Detached and abstracted from their historically specific contexts and presented as a single crusade around which cranks and fanatics have clustered for 150 years, temperance and prohibition have been portrayed as touchstones of bigotry. The record of the 18th Amendment often has been read by libertarians as a morality tale. This “dreadful example” is now so firmly established that it has become a maxim of popular culture, a paradigm of bad social policy, and a ritual invocation of opponents of a variety of sumptuary laws. When will we learn that in a democracy it is for the people to tell the government, not for the government to tell the people, what makes them happy? With the dreadful example of Prohibition before us, it seems nearly unthinkable that we should have done it again: taken some basic human craving and perverted it into a vast system of organized crime and social corruption. The only controls should be those that are imposed to protect the public from bogus or polluted merchandise. In a recent book review about marijuana, Albert Goldman (1979, p.
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