The Joys of Historical Research

My new book, a historical mystery set in Prohibition era central Illinois, is taking me in many new directions. Since my protagonist, Dr. Earl Snyder Junker, is a physician, I need to know about medical practice in the 1920s. Could my character be a medical examiner as well as a family doctor? What kinds of diseases would he encounter, and what could he offer as treatments before antibiotics?

Fortunately, I have a physician husband (a retired pathologist) who can steer me to the right sort of medical information. Even better, I just signed up for an online course of the history of forensics with Dr. D. P. Lyle, a physician/author who frequently teaches mystery writers:

Dr. D.P. Lyle

Dr. Junker is also an amateur archaeologist during a time when it was still okay for private individuals to dig up burial mounds, before archaeology became an academic discipline. Early arrowhead hunters in Illinois sometimes operated like cowboys, laying claim to sites illegally and shooting at anyone who tried to stop them. Here I have plenty of help from Illinois archaeologists who know the colorful characters and history of digging in the Midwest.

Junker’s wife, Martha, is a German immigrant, so that means investigating anti-immigrant feelings that were rampant between the World Wars. And their nineteen-year-old daughter, Anna, is a nursing student by day and a fun-loving flapper by night. The 1920s was an exciting time for women who had just gained the right to vote and were breaking social taboos left and right: they drank booze and smoked cigarettes in public, wore revealing dresses and short skirts and bobbed their hair short.


But the most fascinating subject is Prohibition and the myriad ways for ordinary people to make and transport illegal liquor. The literature on this subject is vast and often available on the Internet. Two of my favorite discoveries so far: my hometown of Champaign, Illinois, had an underground passage between two major streets so speakeasy patrons could escape excise agents, and there’s a wonderful article on Prohibition in Cincinnati online

Prohibition

Cost of Prohibition

PROHIBITION

“The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent.”

Evangelist Billy Sunday, 1920

Acceptance of Prohibition was mixed from the beginning. Some states openly opposed it right off the start, claiming it encroached on State’s rights, others simply because it would cost too much to enforce.

In the end, 18 states appropriated money to enforce Prohibition. Indiana, Vermont, New York put enforcement in place but repealed it in 1923. Maryland never enacted any laws. Connecticut and Rhode Island never ratified Prohibition. In contrast rural South and West support for prohibition was strong.

Prohibition was one of the most significant social reforms of the early twentieth century—it showed the ambivalence of Progressivism in the way it blended moral reform and the search for efficiency through what they thought was a rational business-dominated organization of society. An alcohol-free society would have better employees, less social problems caused by alcohol, and less welfare problems.

The prohibition movement was a part of the huge cultural split in 1920s America that also involved the separate issues of the Ku Klux Klan and the campaign against evolution, as seen in the Scopes trial (1925). Cosmopolitan Americans and intellectuals looked down on rural and small town people who supported prohibition and those who were anti-evolution. A cultural divide divided American society in a way not too dissimilar to that over issues such as abortion and other Christian right crusades of the 1990s and after. It's possible the roots of the current cultural divisions can be traced from these 1920s sources, of which the dispute over prohibition was an important part.

Prohibition was going to reduce crime and corruption, improve health, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden of prisons and poorhouses.

Seized alcohol was often distributed to law enforcement. Occasionally a public show of destroying a few barrels of whiskey would be made in front of reporters and newsreel cameramen. But most of it ended up on someone’s table or speakeasy. Awareness of this only increased the growing contempt average people had for both the law and the people put in charge of enforcing it.

Between 1500 and 2500 federal field agents – mostly untrained – and 1500 office personnel were put on the job of fighting law breakers. In 1920 the Coast Guard had 26 inshore boats, converted tug boats and 29 cruising cutters. The boats were old and the Coast Guard was held in low esteem. It wasn't until the last years of Prohibition that money was funneled to stopping the flood of illegal booze.

Then the Great Depression took place. Unemployment soared. People began recalling the days that the government used to get huge amounts of money through taxes on liquor. Now the government was spending money trying to enforce unenforceable laws while all the money spent on buying alcohol by the people was going into the pockets of gangsters.

Progressives often supported prohibitions and saw it as improving society by controlling moral behavior through laws. They sincerely believe they can save us from ourselves.

In 1919, a year before Prohibition went into effect, Cleveland had 1,200 legal bars. By 1923, the city had an estimated 3,000 illegal speakeasies, along with 10,000 stills. An estimated 30,000 city residents sold liquor during Prohibition, and another 100,000 made home brew or bathtub gin for themselves and friends. In New York it ranged from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasies.

The fact that cirrhosis was substantially lower on average during Prohibition than before or after might suggest that Prohibition played a substantial role in reducing cirrhosis, but further examination suggests this conclusion is premature. First, there have been substantial fluctuations in cirrhosis outside the Prohibition period, indicating that other factors are important determinants and must be accounted for in analyzing whether Prohibition caused the low level of cirrhosis during Prohibition. Second, there is no obvious jump in cirrhosis upon repeal. This fact does not prove that Prohibition had no effect, since the lags between consumption and cirrhosis mean the effect of increased consumption might not have shown up immediately. Nevertheless, the behavior of cirrhosis after repeal fails to suggest a large positive effect of Prohibition. Third, cirrhosis began declining from its pre-1920 peak by as early as 1908, and it had already attained its lowest level over the sample in 1920, the year in which constitutional Federal Prohibition took effect.

Between 1916 and 1928, the price of whiskey in most places rose by an average of 520 percent.

Token raids on speakeasies by federal agents usually encouraged colorful newspaper stories rather than respect for federal law. In fact, after 1925, more and more citizens seemed to resent the cynicism with which the federal government (whose Founding Fathers had left murders, lynchings, adulteries, and other moral transgressions to the disciplines of the state legislatures) was so inconsistently pursuing an intrusive interest in whatever it was they might be tempted to drink.