One Summer: America, 1927

made matters infinitely worse by declaring – almost unbelievably – a national holiday to celebrate the slaughter. Dr Bernhard Dernburg, head of the German Red Cross in the United States, said that those aboard the Lusitania got no more than they deserved. He was expelled from America and was lucky to get away with his life.
    Others did not fare so well. A German man in St Louis, who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country, was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag and lynched. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a ‘patriotic murder’. German businesses were boycotted or had bricks hurled through their windows. People with German names frequently decided for safety’s sake to change them to something less obviously Teutonic. One such was Albert Schneider, who became better known the following decade as the murder victim Albert Snyder. Restaurants stopped serving German food or gave it non-German names; sauerkraut famously became ‘liberty cabbage’. Some communitiesmade it illegal to play music by German composers. Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: ‘There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.’
    It escaped no one’s attention that American breweries were nearly all owned by men of German extraction and presumed German sympathies. Temperance advocates seized on this to make beer-drinking seem an all but treasonous act. ‘We are fighting three enemies – Germany, Austria and Drink,’ asserted Kellogg’s, the cornflakes company, in a patriotic ad that ran just after America joined the war. In point of fact, the claim had substance. The National German–American Alliance, an organization largely funded by the breweries, turned out not only to have lobbied against Prohibition, but also, and more deviously, on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm. It was not a combination that won it many friends.
    The rise in anti-German sentiment gave a huge boost to the temperance movement. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the production and consumption of alcohol, swept towards ratification, guided expertly through one state legislature after another by a freshly energized ASL. On 16 January 1919, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, giving the three-quarters majority necessary for the law to be enacted and to go into effect one year later.
    Though the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition a legal reality by outlawing intoxicating drinks, it didn’t define how it would work or even indicate what was or was not an intoxicant. That required an additional piece of legislation, known as the Volstead Act, to deal with the details. The act was named after Andrew J. Volstead, a Minnesotan like Lindbergh, whose principal distinguishing feature was a spectacular moustache that hung from his upper lip like a bearskin rug. Though a non-drinker himself,Volstead was no zealot and would never have sought a national ban on alcohol. His name became attached to the legislation simply because he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and therefore required to draft it. Although Volstead’s name rang through the decade, he himself was thrown out by the electorate at the next election, and he returned to his home town of Granite Falls, Minnesota, where he quietly practised law and listed his principal hobby as reading the Congressional Record. Wayne Wheeler always claimed that he really designed and wrote the legislation, an assertion heatedly disputed by Volstead, though why either would want credit for the act is a reasonable question because it proved to be a strikingly ill-constructed bill.
    The Volstead Act was introduced to Congress on 19 May 1919. Its intentions, stated succinctly in a preamble, didn’t seem too alarming: ‘To prohibit intoxicating beverages, and to regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of high-proof spirits for other than beverage purposes, and to insure an ample supply of alcohol and promote its use in scientific research and in the development of fuel, dye and other lawful industries.’ The phrasing may have been a little ungainly, but the sentiment didn’t seem too