Guest Post from Gioia Diliberto, author of Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition

 A radical social/political movement has taken over the government. Privately, many legislators and officials acknowledge that the movement is deeply flawed, even mad in some respects. They know the country is headed for serious trouble if it remains in power, but they are too weak and craven to stand up for what is right.

Today’s America? No, America in 1929. After almost a decade of Prohibition, the nation was a hot mess. Congress was in the grip of a fanatical minority that had pushed the ban on alcohol into law, yet many congressmen and senators were drunks. The level of hypocrisy was stunning. What’s more, the law didn’t work—people still drank, including more women than ever. Meanwhile, homicides plagued the cities as gangsters battled over the illegal liquor trade. And taxes climbed because the government had lost huge revenues from the booze business, a crisis soon to be deepened by the Depression.

Still, a fatalistic attitude dominated public opinion. The 18^th amendment had embedded Prohibition in the U.S. Constitution, effective January 1920. The necessary votes for Repeal—two thirds of the House and the Senate, followed by ratification in three-fourths of the states—seemed about as likely as “a hummingbird flying to Mars with the Washington monument tied to its tail,” in the words of the parched Texas Senator Morris Sheppard who had authored the law.

Then, almost out of the blue, an inspiring leader stepped forward with a clear plan of action to stop the madness. She was Pauline Morton Sabin, a wealthy Republican New Yorker, who started a women’s organization that led directly to Repeal in 1933. She did it with will, hard work, scrupulous organization, and a large fortune that enabled her to fund an aggressive publicity juggernaut. She blitzed the nation with speeches, rallies, parades, pamphlets, radio spots, and even skywriting planes that trailed her message to VOTE REPEAL high above the earth as if God himself supported it.

 Charismatic, beautiful, and prominently connected in the corridors of power, Sabin epitomized the American aristocracy. Yet she knew how to speak to people from all walks of life and ethnicities and of all ages.  She was a compelling truth teller who broke through the lies and indifference that clouded public opinion. It was almost as if someone had finally shouted, “The Emperor Has No Clothes!” and the illusion that Prohibition could never be ended, completely deflated.

Sabin was a centrist whose message appealed to logic and cut across party lines. In Prohibition’s early years, she had supported a liquor ban because she thought it would set a good example for her teenage sons. But as the Jazz Age progressed, with its accompaniment of gangster violence and a moribund economy, she became convinced that the 18^th amendment had to go. In 1928, she campaigned vigorously for the Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover, who’d privately promised her that he’d do something about Prohibition, if elected. Like many callow politicians, though, he worried about the vigorous Dry constituency and equivocated in his public statements.  Hoover won in a landslide, but he reneged on his promise to Sabin and failed to take action.

This was the match strike that led Sabin to start the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, known as WONPR.  Modeling the organization’s structure on the Red Cross, the first thing Sabin did was identify the top women activists in every state of the nation and enlist them to form local chapters who reported to a national advisory committee. Soon WONPR had more than a million members, all of whom were fed up with Prohibition’s calamitous fallout. Their activism represented a tidal turnaround for the nation’s women, who’d been the chief zealots in the drive to ban liquor. As one newspaper headline of the day announced: “Women Who Doomed Rum Now Cheer Repeal—Mass Phenomenon Amazes All.”

Sabin aggressively lobbied politicians and trained a group of recruiters to sign up women across America. She kept close tabs on WONPR’s local chapters, and whenever a new one formed, she or one of her deputies would travel to speak at the opening meeting. The organization remined strenuously nonpartisan. In some chapters, two WONPR leaders would be chosen—one Democrat and one Republican to recruit women from both parties. In other places, special organizations were established for particular ethnic groups, including Greeks, Russians, Romanians, Ukrainians, and Poles.

Sabin was able to attract and hold a large constituency by stressing ideas that were common to all. In her speeches and writings, she emphasized that the most serious threat to women and children was not liquor, but Prohibition, thus turning Dry arguments from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) on their head. Sabin often spoke about “true temperance” based on each individual’s decision not to drink to excess, as opposed to temperance forced on people by a ridiculous law that many loathed.

Until Sabin, no one had had the vision to mobilize Americans for repeal, even though polling—still a nascent art—and other measures showed that Americans overwhelmingly wanted to dump Prohibition. That it took a woman to revolt against the fanatic Drys is perhaps no coincidence. When it came to cleaning up corruption women were “always the wielders of the soap,” as noted by Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the assistant attorney general and the most powerful woman in the government at the time.

The observation holds true in today’s messy America. Two of the most vivid examples of profiles in courage are women: Former Republican representative Liz Cheney, who bucked her GOP colleagues by voting for Donald Trump’s second impeachment, and Danielle Sassoon, the former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who resigned rather than drop as ordered the criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Addams.

Sabin gave American women a new common goal after winning the right to vote with the 19^th amendment, which became law several months after Prohibition took effect. She challenged her supporters, whom the press dubbed the “Sabines,” to act on their commitment to WONPR by taking on leadership roles of their own. She held frequent workshops to train members in the art of speaking, lobbying and writing pamphlets that expressed an urgency for change.

Ultimately, though, WONPR owed its success to Sabin’s strong, unfailing leadership. Her speeches galvanized the crowds of working girls and housewives who flocked to hear her in town halls and village squares, who heard her on the radio and saw her in newsreels at movie theaters.

Her enemies, in particular Ella Boole, head of the WCTU, which believed Prohibition was “God’s will,” and those bone-dry men of the Anti-Saloon League, distrusted her wealth, her polish, and, perhaps most of all, her beauty—the dreamy golden looks that dazzled three husbands and five presidents from Warren Harding to Harry Truman. The press adored her. Almost a century after she opened her crusade, she stands as a shining lesson from history—someone who confronted a catastrophic movement and with sound organization and inspired words brought it down.

Who will stop America’s madness today? If there’s a Pauline Sabin waiting in the wings, please step forward.

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Gioia Diliberto is the author of Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition in addition to four biographies, among them Diane von Furstenberg: A Life Unwrapped, Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, and A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams, as well as three novels and a play. As a journalist, Diliberto has contributed to many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair. She also teaches writing and has taught at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and DePaul and Northwestern Universities. She lives with her husband in Woodbury, Connecticut.

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