Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America by Edward Behr Page B

of the war). The measure did not, however, extend to either beer or wine, and the ASL, in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, made its disappointment clear — adding, with surprising arrogance, that “It will be our purpose to urge the passage of the legislation prohibiting the waste of foodstuffs in the manufacture of beer and wines at the earliest date.” This in turn provoked an angry editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer: “for brazen effrontery, unmitigated gall, superegoism, transcendent authority, supreme impudence, commend us to the legislative committee of the Prohibition lobby. . . . Here we have the President of the United States under orders to an officious and offensive lobby.”
    Wheeler was delighted by attacks of this type, and pressed on. He wrote Newton D. Baker, Wilson’s secretary of war, reminding him that 65 percent of the country was already dry.
I hope you will use the weight of your influence to protect the boys in the army from the ruinous effect of liquor during the war. . . . Theparents and friends of the boys from these places especially are vitally interested in having a safe environment for them at a time when they are homesick and lonesome in the training camps. Why would it not be a good thing to establish the mobilization camps in the dry states? Several measures have already been taken in Congress to prevent the sale of liquor in or near the training camps and also the sale of liquor to persons in uniform. A bill has been introduced also to prohibit anyone from using grain in making the liquor during the war. I am sure that the people of the nation would sustain you in any effort you may make along the lines of protecting the soldiers and the resources of our nation in this hour of peril.
    He even tried, but without success, to “protect the soldiers from the evils of the liquor traffic in France.” In a further letter to Baker, he urged him “inasmuch as this government cannot prohibit the sale of liquor to the soldiers in France as they do in this country” to promulgate an Army order to that effect, reminding him that “this has already been done with reference to spirituous liquors.” But the Army proved uncooperative, the Navy even more so. The monitoring vigilance of the ASL was such that it quickly reacted to an anti-Prohibition remark made in England by a senior U.S. Navy admiral, who had publicly referred to England’s “traditions of personal liberty, where I know I could get a drink of any kind I wanted if I came to England fifty years from now.” There were limits to Baker’s docility, as far as the ASL was concerned: he told Wheeler that “the department is not responsible for the individual utterances of the men in the Navy.”
    Wheeler had discovered a rich propaganda lode and was intent on exploiting it to fullest advantage. During the war, the Prohibition cause advanced hand-in-hand with the growing wave of anti-German sentiment, and largely because of the ASL propaganda machine, anti-German hysteria did not come to an end with the Armistice but persisted in one form or another until the very end of Prohibition. In 1923, five years after the end of the war, an ASL-inspired Senate Judiciary Committee would begin hearings on “brewing and liquor interests and German and Bolshevik propaganda.” It prefigured McCarthyism in action: nothing in its findings justified its title, for the only evidence Senate investigators could produce was that most breweries had contributed to various German-American associations throughout the country. There was absolutely no evidence theyhad financed anti-American propaganda in wartime, and the very idea that the overwhelmingly Protestant, conservative German-American brewery-owning families might be Bolshevik dupes or stalking-horses was so ridiculous that the subject was not even brought up during the proceedings.
    The ASL’s finest hour, in the pre-Prohibition period, came with the Worldwide Prohibition Congress, held in