The Volstead Act, also known as the National Prohibition Act, was named after its Minnesota representative, Andrew
J. Volstead. It provided the foundation for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution of the United States. PROHIBITION was the product of a nearly century-long crusade against alcohol. Countless men and women represented the temperance cause, but none more than the Anti-Saloon League’s principal agent, Wayne Wheeler, who supported the amendment, which prohibited the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcoholic beverages.
On December 18, 1917, Congress approved an amendment to prohibit the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol. The act was passed over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The president believed that the act’s definition of intoxicating beverages—any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol—was too strict. Wilson believed in the mission of the amendment, but he had his reservations about placing such a strict definition of alcoholic spirits. He was in favor of a law that allowed for the casual use of weaker wines and ales. His veto proved to be nothing more than a symbolic gesture.
Overriding the president’s veto was the first step toward amending the Constitution. The next step was winning approval in the states. At first it was believed to be a daunting task. But upon further assessment, it was not as difficult a task as once predicted. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, and dozens of other organizations had been developing the local networks necessary to win support in the states. Twenty-five states already had dry laws. Prohibition forces received a boost when Detroit became the first large city to support the amendment. State by state, the amendment was ratified. On January 15, 1919, New Hampshire became the 36th sate to ratify the amendment. One year later, on January 20, 1920, the law took effect.
The Volstead Act provided the federal and state governments with concurrent power to enforce the Prohibition Amendment, but also created a number of problems with enforcement. The states looked to the federal government to provide for the enforcement, while the federal government believed that it was the responsibility of local authorities to enforce the ban on intoxicants. The problem became even more apparent when states and localities began to openly flout the law. As the law became increasingly less popular, few were willing to devote the resources necessary to wage war on liquor traffickers.
In addition to difficulties with enforcement, the unpopular amendment had a number of other challenges that it was forced to overcome. The most apparent was the scale and scope of the venture. The goal of the Volstead Act, national Prohibition, was arguably one of the most aggressive ventures ever attempted by the U. S. government. In the name of social development, the amendment destroyed private property. It devastated entire industries. It allowed the federal government to legislate what the individual could do in his or her own home. In fundamentally altered the relationship between citizens and their government. All of these concepts, often considered to be alien to American law, were justified by the premise that they were necessary to ensure a more moral society. Its proponents believed that it could and would usher in an era of enlightenment. Other factors soon arose to challenge the idea of national Prohibition. Bootlegging and the crimes associated with the sale and delivery of illicit spirits soon seemed to be more of a threat than the alcohol itself. The most salient factor in the repeal of Prohibition, however, was the global economic crisis of the 1930s.
The amendment’s lofty expectations hindered its chances for success. The fact that many of its proponents promised an end to the pain and suffering attributed to drink made it virtually impossible for the amendment to live up to the expectations. As a result, what seemed to be impossible in 1919 took place. This groundbreaking amendment created the opportunity for an even more revolutionary amendment. It opened the door for the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
In February of 1933, Congress proposed the Twenty-first Amendment, better known as the Repeal Amendment, to repeal Prohibition. On December 5, 1933, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment. It put an end to the great social experiment.
—Steve Freund
Vorse, Mary Heaton (1874-1966) labor activist, writer
Writer, journalist, and labor activist Mary Heaton Vorse was born into a prosperous family in New York City in 1874. She originally wanted to become an artist; but after brief stints at art schools in Paris and New York, Vorse chose instead to take up writing. In 1898 Mary Heaton married would-be novelist Albert Vorse, with whom she had two children. The Vorses made their way into the “Bohemian” social world of Greenwich Village. Among such writers as John Reed, Eugene O’Neill, Hutchins Hapgood, Max Eastman, Susan Glaspell, and Neith Boyce, Vorse was exposed to radical political and cultural ideas. Vorse also belonged to Heterodoxy, a circle of feminist activists, including Glaspell, Crystal Eastman, and Ida Rauh, Max Eastman’s wife. Vorse’s home in Provincetown on Cape Cod became a center of cultural and political activity, and the Provincetown Players, made up of much of the Greenwich Village group, began staging productions during summers on the Cape.
After her husband, Albert, died in 1910, Vorse became the sole provider for her family. She began to churn out what she derisively called “lollipops,” that is, short stories and nonfiction articles, for mass circulation magazines, most of them directed at women. While she wrote for a mass audience as her means of living, Vorse’s real passion became political activism and the writing she did in the cause of the peace movement and the working class. She was one of the editors of The Masses, and her articles on child labor, housing, and infant health raised public awareness on issues that were the mainstay of Progressive reform. The Lawrence Strike of 1912 gave Vorse her start as a labor journalist. Seeing, for the first time, the poverty and terrible working conditions of immigrant workers in the textile industry, Vorse saw her goal as supporting the labor movement by telling the stories of workers. It was a commitment she took seriously for more than 40 years and one which shaped both her personal and political lives.
In 1912, Vorse met and married radical journalist Joseph O’Brien. The couple had a child together, but O’Brien died three years later. Vorse spent most of the rest of her life as an engaged and committed journalist, with many friendships but few intimate ones. The causes of her time absorbed most of her energies. Engaged in the peace movement, she joined the Women’s Peace Party. During World War I, she worked as a war correspondent in Europe and later toured the continent for refugee and children’s war relief. Vorse organized workers in the shirt industry briefly in the 1920s and reported major strikes, including the Steel Strike of 1919, the Gastonia Strike in 1929, and Harlan County mine strike in 1932. Vorse also contributed to the fledgling labor news service, the Federated Press.
Constantly on the move, Vorse spent the tumultuous years of the 1930s covering the lives of ordinary workers and labor conflicts. The vibrant labor press of the next two decades gave her a growing audience of working-class and union readers. In her work for the Federated Press and in mainstream journals, Vorse captured the demand for social justice in the Great Depression, the hopelessness of the unemployed, the buoyant revival of unionism during the economic crisis, and the shock of the Memorial Day massacre during the Little Steel strike in Chicago, where she herself was injured. Vorse further documented the rise of industrial unionism in automobile, rubber, and steel in the rousing account Labor’s New Millions. The book focused in particular on the role of women, families, and communities in helping to build a new labor movement. Vorse continued to cover the labor movement for mainstream journals and the labor press throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
During her lifetime, Mary Heaton Vorse published 18 books and more than 400 articles; she pioneered in writing about working-class lives, whether native-born or immigrant, for a mass national audience through her investigative journalism, documentary accounts, and fiction, and she stirred public support for the struggles of ordinary workers for more than 40 years. She died in 1966.
See also journalism; labor and labor movement; radical and labor press.
Further reading: Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Insurgent (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Mary Heaton Vorse, Footnote to Folly (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935).
Wald, Lillian (1867-1940) public health activist, social reformer
Lillian Wald, an important social reformer of the 20th century, was born in 1867 in Cincinnati, Ohio. After attending elite schools, she enrolled at the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses. Graduating in 1891, she then took classes at medical school while working as a nurse in New York City. Wald pioneered in the practice of home nursing to the poor. It was in this capacity that she gained firsthand experience with the city’s poor tenement residents.
In 1893, Lillian Wald and a colleague moved to New York City’s Lower East Side to be closer to the residents for whom they were caring. By 1895, with the philanthropic support of Jacob H. Schiff, Wald established a larger settlement, the Nurse’s Settlement. Known as the Henry Street Settlement, it expanded its services to include educational training and youth clubs. Wald’s brainchild developed into a prominent social service agency in New York City. She introduced the city to a public school nursing program. In 1909, she also persuaded the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to provide nursing services as a benefit to its industrial policyholders.
Wald’s accomplishments were not limited to New York City. Her nursing experience in New York City provided her with the background to establish a new profession, PUBLIC HEALTH nursing. In 1912, she became the first president of the National Organization for Public Health. Through her social service activity, Wald, along with other Progressive Era women, contributed to the development of the SOCIAL WORK profession.
A contemporary of Jane Addams, Wald was active in the pacifist movement and in progressive politics for the Democrats. Like other progressive women, her political activity often revolved around advocacy for the poor and for children. In large measure because of Wald’s initiatives, in 1912 Congress established the U. S. Children’s Bureau, a division of the Labor Department designed to oversee child labor issues. Labor struggles drew Wald into the National Women’s Trade Union League, which was a group of reform-minded upper - and middle-class women. They initially made a name for themselves in the SHIRTWAIST MAKERS Strike of 1909, where they lent their moral, legal, and financial support to thousands of working-class garment workers. Wald also participated in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Wald ran the Henry Street Settlement House until 1933, when her poor health forced her into retirement. She died in Connecticut in 1940. Wald exemplified many threads of Progressive Era activism. She never married and drew her emotional support from the women around her. She became an advocate for women’s new professions and became active in women’s causes. Wald is remembered for helping to professionalize, and thus to some extent legitimize, the predominantly female fields of nursing and social work.
Further reading: Doris Groshen Daniels, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald, Progressive Reformer (New York: Feminist Press, 1995).
—Natalie Atkin
World History
