One Summer: America, 1927

found, posed a serious threat to health.
    A reasonable question is how all this came to be. The answer resided, to an exceptional degree, in a mousy-looking little man with a neat moustache and pince-nez spectacles named Wayne B. Wheeler. Despite his manifestly unthreatening appearance, Wheeler was for a time the most feared and powerful man in America, and – unless you believe that people should die in agony for having a drink – possibly the most misguidedly evil as well.
     
    Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was born in 1869 and grew up on a farm in eastern Ohio. There one day he was carelessly speared in the leg with a pitchfork by an inebriated farm employee. Though he seems not to have been otherwise directly inconvenienced by insobriety, Wheeler developed an almost evangelical zeal to drive drinking out of American life.
    After qualifying as a lawyer, he became superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League in Ohio and there quickly showed a flair for political manipulation. In 1905 he took on the popular governor of Ohio, a man who had been elected two years earlier by the widest margin in that state’s history and was often mentioned as a future presidential candidate – but who, unfortunately, did not support the ASL’s wish to make Ohio dry. The man in question was Myron T. Herrick, who was about to learn that it never paid to oppose Wayne B. Wheeler. A master propagandist, Wheeler never deviated from a single purpose, which was to drive from office any politician whodidn’t wholeheartedly support Prohibition, and he would use any means necessary to get his way. Often he employed private eyes to dig up dirt on politicians who failed to support him with sufficient enthusiasm, and viewed blackmail as an entirely legitimate means to achieve his desired ends.
    Nothing mattered to him but making America dry. Where other temperance groups involved themselves in all kinds of side issues – tobacco, short skirts, jazz, even post office policy and government ownership of utilities – Wheeler never strayed from his single monotonous message: that drinking was responsible for poverty, broken marriages, lost earnings and all the other evils of modern society.
    By opposing Wheeler’s call for state prohibition, Myron Herrick made himself look out of touch and lacking in compassion. He was overwhelmingly defeated, and never held elective office again. Instead, the rising star of Ohio politics became Herrick’s spectacularly undistinguished lieutenant governor, Warren G. Harding. Across America, politicians quickly learned either to support Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon League or to give up any hope of being re-elected.
    Under ‘Wheelerism’, as the ASL’s strategy became known, much of America was dry long before Prohibition was enacted. By 1917, twenty-seven states were completely dry and several more were preponderantly dry. It was possible to travel across much of the country – from Texas to the Dakotas, from Utah to the eastern seaboard – without passing through a single area where a drink could be had. Only in a few scattered outposts, mostly cities and industrial areas where immigrants congregated in large, thirsty numbers, was it still legally possible to get a drink. These, however, were the places where drinking was most stubbornly ingrained and where the ASL stood little chance of changing local or state laws. But then Wheeler got what was for him a lucky break: the First World War.
     
    When the First World War broke out, most Americans were content for it to remain a distant, European conflict. But then Germany made some tactical blunders that wholly changed sentiment. First, it began bombing civilian targets. We have grown inured to wars that target civilians, but in the 1910s killing innocent people by intent was widely seen as a barbarity. When the Germans began, as a kind of experiment, sending a plane to Paris each afternoon about five o’clock to drop a single bomb on the city, President Woodrow Wilson was so incensed that he sent a personal letter of protest to the German authorities.
    Then, worse, Germany announced that it would target passenger ships at sea. In May 1915, a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania as it sailed in neutral waters off the Irish coast near Kinsale. The ship sank in just eighteen minutes, taking with it 1,200 people. A third of the victims were women and children; 128 of the dead were Americans whose country was not even at war. Outrage was immediate, but Germany