Prohibition: How Racism and Xenophobia Turned America Dry

CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of racial, immigrant and gendered violence, slurs and epithets, outdated language, addiction, violence

When you think of Prohibition, the most common stories told today revolve around women and suffrage. Women who were subjected to the brutality of the working class man, who stopped by a rowdy saloon before coming home and at best, neglecting his family and at worse, completing acts of domestic violence.

These stories are true. Alcohol was the scapegoat to the toxic masculinity and sexism that women faced--and these stories were usually told by white women. 1800's society barely cared about white women and certainly didn't care about any other women. While alcohol caused an array of problems, the actuality was the issue was far more insidious than any substance. Laws at the time gave women virtually no rights. Once she was married, she was her husbands property. At the time, women had almost no rights to divorce, no custodial rights over children and no rights to own property. The 19th amendment hadn't passed yet, until 1919, so women couldn't vote in most states.

This is why Prohibition and Suffrage is often linked. When told in this context, it makes Prohibition almost a glamorize feminist movement, a win for an oppressed underling, hated and disrespected by society.

But Prohibition, like all movements, is far more complex than that.

And like all movements in the United States, one of the most successful driving forces for the cause was xenophobia (hate of immigrants) and racism. These two famous causes tied together Prohibitionists of all political affiliations. Prohibitions who opposed suffrage supported it because xenophobia and racism. White suffragettes were willing to use xenophobia and racism to further push their agenda, almost seamlessly.

Throughout the 1880's, the United States started to see massive changes. Black Americans were theoretically removed from servitude due to the 13th Amendment in 1865. Reconstruction had ignited the racial fears of Americans, mainly in the South but across the country (the "good" North was not in any stretch of the imagination absent racism--and many abolitionists ardently opposed slavery but still supported racism.)

In addition to this, the 1880's saw an influx of Southern European immigrants. These immigrants were very different from the Anglo Saxon normative colonizers the country was designed to support. And now, 100 years after the independence of the United States, the White Anglo Saxon Protestants felt their country that they knowingly and intentionally built just for them was at risk. This is the crux of American xenophobia.

Today, white immigrants are welcomed with open arms, whether Northern or Southern European. Black and brown immigrants from Africa, the Islands, the Middle East, Central America and Latin America are not so well received. Many factors drive these prejudices. Socialism or communism is used as a reason to oppose these immigrants. Sharia Law is used, with a fear of the Muslim religion and "terrorism". Drugs are used, with a fear of cartels and criminals.

This wasn't true in the 1800's. Southern Europeans, such as Ashkenazi Jews, Italians etc. were not welcomed. At the time, Catholicism was the religion of fear--with the Protestant nation claiming it was an assault on the American way of life. Mediterranean culture, Latin languages, non-Protestant beliefs were all non-desirable at the time.

"Their form of Catholicism was also seen as different. All Catholics faced prejudice in America, but in the Mediterranean, faith was blended with other kinds of beliefs, some of them pre-Christian, such as belief in the evil eye, and in good and evil spirits. The Italian Festas — annual public celebrations and parades of the saints — were also glaring novelties at the time."

Irish, also heavily Catholic, were at one time largely discriminated against (but were never slaves--white Americans today try to use anti-Irish sentiments of the past to "justify" why Black Americans need to get over it--and that is never okay.) Nonetheless, 19th Century Irish immigrants faced their own brand of discrimination, mainly due to their Catholic roots.

In the 1890's, New Orleans saw a case of Anti-Italianism involving the death of a Police Chief David Hennessy.  As he died, he allegedly put the blame on the Dagoes, an Anti-Italian slur. Suddenly, the Italian population found themselves at the hands of an angry mob, wanting justice. The population there, specifically Sicilian, was of about 300,000 Italian immigrants. Based on growing animosity towards these Sicilian immigrants, and a widely known feud between two immigrant families, newspapers freely reported that Italians were to blame for this chief's sudden death. Suddenly, hundreds of Italian immigrants were rounded up, even though there was no clear evidence they had anything to do with it, and taken into the jails. Protests began forming around the jail from Anglo Americans, demanding immediate justice. Several were eventually tried for the crime, all of which were not adjudicated guilty.

"The message was clear: If the New Orleans justice system couldn’t punish Italians, the people of New Orleans would have to do so instead. In response, thousands of angry residents gathered near the jail. Impassioned speakers whipped the mob into a frenzy, painting Italian immigrants as criminals who needed to be driven out of the city. Finally, the mob broke into the city’s arsenal, grabbing guns and ammunition. As they ran toward the prison, they shouted, “We want the Dagoes!” "

Known today as the 1891 New Orleans lynching, the eleven defendants were killed extrajudicially by an Anglo mob--and many Sicilian immigrants deflected, abandoning New Orleans. (Some of which came to Tampa, Florida's own Ybor City.)

So wait--what does all this have to do with Prohibition? Well, everything.

Today, we have an understanding of the very racist intentions of the War on Drugs and the Drug Enforcement Agency.  Prohibition was not without anti-Blackness, and although there were Black prohibitionists, there were also white supremacist prohibitions (it was a very complex movement...)

White women and purity was an often discussed intention behind racist and xenophobic laws, especially after the abolition of slavery. Long before abolition, any white woman who was part of the abolition societies was accused of having sexual desires toward Black men--which was considered abhorrent. As such, many anti-abolition minds used the anti-miscegenation mindset as a reason to oppose abolition, for it would surely weaken the pure Anglo bloodline.

When the 13th amendment passed, reconstruction began...and when the federal troops were withdrawn, an uptick in extralegislative and extrajudicial lynchings increased to restore an Anglo white America, or "American values". Popular theories began to emerge, including eugenics. Prohibition was another popular value. The Ku Klux Klan propagandized Black men as "brutes" and insisted that alcohol brought out the beast within him, making him an ardent threat to white women. Racist white women and men, even those who weren't concerned about the women's rights angle, began to support Prohibition for their "safety."

"The Ku Klux Klan’s support of Prohibition gave the organization a way to promote its views and a way to perpetrate state-sanctioned violence against people of color, Catholics and Jews. “The war on alcohol united Progressives and Protestants, federal agents and Klansmen,” writes Kelefa Sanneh for The New Yorker.

The American government created an entire Prohibition Bureau intended to enforce alcohol-free living. However, this bureau selectively targeted groups that were perceived as inherently corrupt, like poor people, immigrants, and African Americans. Remember, the Jazz Age unfolded during Prohibition–plenty of people were drinking plenty of liquor."

Sound like the War on Drugs--because it is very similar. 

In previous work, I have criticized the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony for their willingness to team up and expel racism and xenophobia in their work. Although both died before the beginning of National Prohibition, their work speaks volumes to the anti-Blackness and anti-immigrant notions that built Prohibition. Through the effort of Prohibition, progressives, suffragettes, xenophobes and racists all teamed up--and if you team up with xenophobes and racists, well, then you are one. 

These beliefs were deeply built into temperance, which is the parent movement of the Prohibition movement. James Cannon Jr., a Bishop with the Methodist Church, was also a leader in the temperance movement. In 1909, he took on a leadership role in the Virginia State Anti-Saloon League, the most notable and successful lobby group for Prohibition. And this is what he had to say: “the Italians, the Sicilians, the Poles, and Russian Jews. That kind has given us a stomach ache. We have been unable to assimilate such people in our national life, so we shut the door on them. But Smith says ‘give me that kind of people.’ He wants the kind of dirty people you find today on the sidewalks of New York.”

Mary Hunt, a leader in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, similarly said: " “the enormous increase of immigrant population flooding us from the old world, men and women who have brought to our shores and into our politics old world habits and ideas [favorable to alcohol].’ Her writings made frequent references to this “undesirable immigration” and “these immigrant hordes.”

Alabama Congressman, Richard Hobson, in 1914, had this to say: “Liquor will actually make a brute out of a [black person], causing him to commit unnatural crimes. The effect is the same on the white man, though the white man being further evolved, it takes longer time to reduce him to the same level.”

Racism and xenophobia has not come close to ending. While the immigrant we are trained to hate has changed and the way we communicate and codify anti-Blackness looks different and supposedly more discreet, these two tools exist in every movement we have that intends to preserve "American values", the largest example being the War on Drugs.

Pink Triangle: Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust Deserve to be Remembered

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust was an act of extreme genocide toward Jewish members of German and European society with an intent of perceiving an Aryan culture. While we know in history, Jewish people faced abhorrent violences through death camps, segregation and oppression in Germany and throughout the WWII European land, it is often forgotten or minimized that gay and queer folks (namely men), disabled folks, Black folks, Roma folks and even certain Christian sects like Jehovah's Witness faced horror and death as well. Oppression is never a contest. Where ever it exists, it is abhorrent. Whether it is the mass incarceration and police brutality faced by Black Americans, the killings of transgender Black women, the missing and murder Indigenous women, the Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism throughout the land or the gender pay gap, oppression must be addressed and eradicated at all costs. My saying Black trans women are the most likely to be a victim of a fatal hate crime doesn't negate that I could one day become a victim of a fatal crime. Just as well, Jewish victims were the most likely to be targeted and acknowledging that non-Jewish victims existed and deserve to be acknowledged doesn't change these facts.

I recall being "reemed out" by white Jewish members of a "intersectional feminist" group for declaring that if I had existed and lived in Nazi Germany, it is possible that I, too, would have landed victim in the Holocaust.

Acknowledging other victims doesn't take away from another's victimhood. And to this day, gay victims (pink triangle) of the Holocaust are still misunderstood and unheard about. The individual in the group informed me that non-Jewish gays were not included in these roundups, so I'd have been safe, but that is historically inaccurate. Rest assured, I have no desire to take anyone's place in oppression and the oppression Olympics yield no results that I've seen worthy of writing home about. As such, for this Holocaust Remembrance Day I will center the victims of the Pink Triangle. I can honor these victims, both queer Jews and queer non-Jews who faced victimization within the horrors of the Holocaust and continue to face victimization at the hand of Neo-Nazis today.

And if that makes someone upset, all I can say is "oh well". Hopefully they'll find a Neo-Nazi to take it out on.

Why were non-Jewish gay victims targeted? The theory was even Aryan gays were a threat to the Aryan nation because they would not be able to reproduce, thus threatening the growth of the "pure white bloodline." This theory still exists among Neo-Nazi groups. (And no, the existence of gay Neo-Nazis and white gay Nazi apologists doesn't change that fact.)

Below are some articles about the Pink Triangle and snippets of interest in relation to each article. These articles center specifically gay victims of the Holocaust, which could be Jewish or non-Jewish. It's important to know that other victims existed by virtue of who they were, as referenced above, but they won't be centered in the snippets, they may be referenced in the articles:

The Faces of Auschwitz: Non-Jewish Victims
"Under the Weimar government, centuries-old prohibitions against homosexuality had been overlooked, but this tolerance ended violently when the SA (Storm Troopers) began raiding gay bars in 1933. Homosexual intent became just cause for prosecution. The Nazis arrested German and Austrian male homosexuals—there was no systematic persecution of lesbians—and interned them in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear special yellow armbands and later pink triangles." -Yad Vesham

Jewish Virtual Library
"Because Hitler’s plan for a great Master Race had no room for any homosexuals, many males from all nations, including Germany, were persecuted, tortured and executed. Hitler even searched his own men and found suspected homosexuals that were sent to concentration camps wearing their SS uniforms and medals. The homosexual inmates were forced to wear pink triangles on their clothes so they could be easily recognized and further humiliated inside the camps. Between 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals died in concentration camps during the Holocaust."-Holocaust Forgotten, Yad Vesham

Pink Triangles and Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals
"Even before it was built, Phillips says, USHMM made a conscious decision to remember all the victims of the Holocaust, a category that includes non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, the disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and homosexuals in addition to Jews."

"In the eyes of the Nazis, homosexuality weakened the Aryan race, in part because gay men did not contribute to the effort to increase the Aryan birthrate, having "physically withdrawn their 'generative power' from society," reads another panel. They "feared [homosexuality] as an 'infection' that could become an 'epidemic,' particularly among the nation's vulnerable youth." One Nazi diagram, for example, showed the "contagion" moving from one individual to another 28 people by means of "seduction."

"During the Nazi regime, Phillips says, roughly 100,000 men were arrested under section 175, and roughly half of those received prison sentences after appearing in court. Some men were institutionalized in mental hospitals and some, "perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion."

Between 5,000 and 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps, which fell outside the legal system. There, they were made to don pink triangles to identify them as homosexuals. In German camps, where there were few Jews (most Jews were sent to camps in the eastern territories), gay men were at the bottom of the camp hierarchy and other prisoners feared association with them."

"Because homosexuality continued to be criminalized after the war in Germany and elsewhere and even when and where it was not considered criminal, stigma persisted, very few gay victims of Nazi persecution came forward to tell their stories. "That's a large reason why," says Phillips, "we know very little about the gay survivors." -Stav Ziv

The Pink Triangle
"WHEN I WENT to high school in the 1960s in New York City, history classes did not teach us that the Nazis persecuted gays. In fact, I remember being taught that the Nazis were homosexuals. I also remember seeing a U.S. government propaganda film, produced with the facilities of Hollywood during World War II and shown to American moviegoers, that included a description of the Nazis as homosexuals."

"THE EXHIBIT OPENS with a history of section 175 of the criminal code, imposed in 1871, that criminalized homosexual relations by men. (It was never illegal to be a lesbian). After World War I, many gay Germans gravitated to Berlin, where there was a prodigious underground gay community and culture. The most prominent figure of that time was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexologist who was founder of the Institute of Sexual Science. The notorious Nazi book-burning of 1933 was started with Hirschfeld’s library and institute."

"The Nazis were concerned with the decreasing German birthrate as well as what they considered un-Aryan behavior of homosexuals. They also believed that while men might not be able to change their behavior, lesbians could still be forced to produce children for the Reich. "

" As the Nazis expanded their territory across Europe and Africa, they did not expand the persecution of gays outside ‘Greater Germany.’ As far as the Nazis were concerned if non-Aryans were homosexual, that meant less procreation for “inferior races.”

" While lesbians were not persecuted per se, they were forced into the closet in order to survive. There is only one known case of a lesbian sent to a concentration camp, and she was a madam in a prostitution ring, so was given the black triangle of the habitual criminal."

"AFTER THE WAR, the Allies repealed many laws promulgated by the Nazis. However, they left the Nazi version of Section 175 on the books in West Germany. So little is known about those persecuted, and so little ephemera exists, primarily because gays were still considered criminals. Some with the pink triangle were not released in 1945 and had to serve the remaining years of their sentence in prison. Most remained closeted for the rest of their lives and never told about their persecution by the Nazis.

AFTER THE WAR, the Allies repealed many laws promulgated by the Nazis. However, they left the Nazi version of Section 175 on the books in West Germany. So little is known about those persecuted, and so little ephemera exists, primarily because gays were still considered criminals. Some with the pink triangle were not released in 1945 and had to serve the remaining years of their sentence in prison. Most remained closeted for the rest of their lives and never told about their persecution by the Nazis."-Jeffrey Kassel