December 1st 2008
The Lies They Teach – #16 And #17
H
ere we go, with two more chapters of Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) – which C-SM hopes will lead to you purchasing a copy of the book for yourself and any college-age kids in your acquaintance – and two more lies liberal history profs are teaching to pollute the minds of the next generation.
Lie #16 – Prohibition Was Unpopular From The Beginning And Failed In All Its Objectives
Prohibition … offered another example of reforming zeal channeled into a drive for moral righteousness and conformity . … The Anti-Saloon League [mobilized] Protestant churches behind its single-minded battle to elect “dry” candidates. – George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History
My grandmother was an prohibitionist and a staunchly conservative Methodist, and I thought it positively odd that my great aunt and uncle would lower their kitchen shade so grandmother wouldn’t look across the alley and see them drinking a beer with their Sunday night sausage and sauerkraut.
Be that as it may, prohibition is now offered up as a precursor to the moral battlegrounds of today – first abortion and drugs, now gay marriage – as history profs have hayseed hicks and ignorant fundamentalists battling the enlightened forces of coolness. It’s also used as an immigration lesson, with prohibition seen as the white majority forcing its will on the (then-white) immigrant populations (those drinking Irish and Italians!). And ultimately, prohibition serves as the foundation of teaching that “you cannot legislate morality.”
Temperance, in fact, was a longstanding thread leading up to prohibition. Abraham Lincoln ran on a “temperance” platform and most states had restrictions on alcohol before prohibition. Why? Because alcohol had become a huge social problem. Prohibition helped quell it, as arrests for public drunkenness and incidents of hospitalization for alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver declined during Prohibition.
Saloons – which often offered up prostitution in addition to booze – were thought by many doctors to be the source of syphilis outbreaks and the Mann Act was passed to stop white slavery that was thriving in the saloons.
So drinking wasn’t just a nice passive pastime; it was a big social problem (as it remains today), leading to wide support for Prohibition not only among conservative Protestants, but among much of America, both urban and rural, lower class and upper.
To Schweikart’s view, Prohibition failed primarily because sufficient enforcement was never funded, and because the media turned against it, followed by … sound familiar? … the intellectual elite in NY and DC. And finally, it was the desire for those lucrative liquor tax revenues during the Depression that ended the social experiment.
I’m not a fan of heavy-handed government policies like Prohibition, but I am a fan of having them taught in the proper context and not misused. If historians used Prohibition as a lesson about America’s strong and ongoing moral fiber, and against over-reaching regulation, that would be fine with me.
#17 – Sacco And Vanzetti Were Innocent And Wrongly Executed
The excesses of the fundamentalists, the xenophones, the Klan, the red-baiters, and the prohibitionists disturbed American intellectuals profoundly. … Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists and Italian immigrants. Their trial was a travesty. Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, American Destiny.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti may be lost in the mist of time to most readers, so the easiest way to put them into perspective is to consider that the anarchists of the early 20th century were akin to the terrorists of our time. Their act of violence – killing a guard and paymaster in the midst of a robbery – was just another of anarchist actions against America: They had assassinated President William McKinley, had nearly killed a Carnegie Steel exec in his office. They shot people, made bombs, and blew things up, all in the name of bringing down all government.
From the 20s until they were replaced by the Rosenburgs in the 40s, Sacco and Vanzetti were the cause clebre of the American left. Future SCOTUS Felix Frankfuter wrote a book calling for a new trial, socialist author Upton Sinclair took up their cause, and as recently as 1977, then-Governor Michael Dukakis of MA called S&V innocent, saying “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.” Says Schweikart of that proclamation:
Unfortunately for Dukakis, a firearms panel would meet only a few years later and virtually reattach the disgrace to the names of the two murderers.
But long before recent forensic tests put this issue to rest, a fair jury did the same based on overwhelming evidence that the Left would have you ignore. Nine eyewitnesses ID’d Sacco as being at the scene; four ID’d Vanzetti. Both defendants were caught in lies on the witness stand. Alibi witnesses proved not to be credible.
As recently as 1985, liberals have published books coughing up “new evidence” to show S&V were good guys put down by an evil system. But the evidence against this view is overwhelming: Forensic tests have proved Sacco’s revolver fired the shot that killed one of the victims, that defense arguments that bullets were switched are specious, that Sacco was a participant, and separate from these tests, that Vanzetti also was guilty. This has long been proven to such an extent that even Upton Sinclair admitted as much, saying he was “completely naive about the Sacco-Venzetti case, having accepted the defense propaganda completely.”
But some Leftist profs continue to profess their innocence, and they can no longer be called merely naive.
The Lies They Teach: #13 – #15
The Lies They Teach #11 And #12
The Lies They Teach: #9 And #10
The Lies They Teach – #8
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3
