Through the Spyglass: Hibition
No one likes being told what to do.
Even if you’re being told something that would genuinely be helpful, just being told to do it can often make you not want to do it. Good advice quickly turns into nagging if the person delivering the advice delivers it poorly, or you’re not ready to hear it.
Deep down, you might even know what they’re saying is correct, but it doesn’t matter. You’re going to push back on positive change because it’s still change, and changing is uncomfortable.
But what if the advice isn’t suggesting you change; it’s suggesting you take a hold of yourself and your faculties. Not that you change who you are, but you take control of who you are instead.
What if the suggestion is: you need to drink less, maybe even entirely?
In the 19th century, alcoholism was at an all-time high. U.S. citizens were drinking 5 to 7 gallons of pure alcohol per person per year. That is an astronomical amount of booze being consumed by your friends, family members, neighbors, etc.
If you are an advocate of self-determination, you would likely find yourself defending a person’s right to self-determination from the most likely culprit to interfere with it: government or private entities.
But would you not find yourself, upon taking a step back, advocating that people regain their self-determination from the bottle as well?
It is clear that one’s ability to pursue self-determination is entirely dependent on their freedom. How free are they to pursue their interests? Their aspirations? Their dreams?
If the government is not actively kneecapping your attempts to live free, and if a private company isn’t keeping you from your freedom, but you are addicted to the bottle, are you truly free?
Alcohol is a serious problem and alcoholism permeates many peoples lives. There are few who do not know someone suffering from alcoholism.
Organizations sprang up to address such problems, such as the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, having members pledge to abstain from distilled liquor (through not necessarily beer or wine) when alcoholism was at an all-time high. The ATS started as a voluntary temperance pledge organization; a pledge to take control of yourself and hold yourself together through maintaining your sobriety.
It was completely voluntary, and evidently welcomed, as over a million had taken the pledge within ten years.
Further, sticking with the 19th century, the role women played in the home was very different than what we see today. Many could not work, and many were at the whim of their husbands.
So if their husband was a slave to the bottle, one of the most impacted people from the alcohol is the one who likely wasn’t even partaking in said drinking.
You, a believer in self-determination, can see that women’s self-determination was already at a limit, but now alcohol’s impact on the men in the United States is robbing women of their self-determination as well, further worsening the lives of wives/sisters/daughters, etc.
Someone should sound the alarms about that. If only someone could tackle all these issues at once.
Someone like Frances Willard.
Frances Willard was born near Rochester, New York in 1839. A teacher by trade, Willard began her career working for various women’s colleges, including becoming the first Dean of Women at Illinois’s Northwestern University before she’d resign her role and begin focusing on what she would be remembered for: the women’s temperance movement.
While not the first, Frances Willard was the second and longest reigning President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Before Willard, the WCTU was a single-issue, anti-alcohol organization. Under Willard, the WCTU focused on connecting the relationship between temperance and women’s suffrage.
Their philosophy became “Do Everything,” in which their goals would focus on policies from a variety of issues (education, women’s rights, public health, etc.). The idea of “Home Protection,” connecting temperance and women’s suffrage and making them inseparable to the goals of the WCTU, was appealing to many women across the states.
In essence, their goals of a “sober and pure” world was an earnest self-determination movement. Women’s suffrage as a self-determination movement is apparent enough, but tying sobriety to self-determination is genuinely inspired. They are inseparable, as how can one be free if they are controlled by their demons? How can those around and dependent on you be free when they live in fear of your intoxicated state?
Of course, they did have the wrong final conclusion on how to solve that problem.
Frances Willard was far from perfect (Ida B. Wells sends her regards), nor was the WCTU itself. Willard’s inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to condemn lynching in a timely manner and the WCTU’s willingness to uphold racial segregation for white southerners remain a stain on her legacy and cannot be ignored for brevity.
Perfection not substantiated, she had still done something unmistakably clever for women’s suffrage and made an undoubtedly important observation.
In the beginning, the WCTU was non-partisan. Their work was focused on raising awareness on and seeking to eliminate the evils of alcohol consumption, largely stemming from “Dry” Protestant ethics, but come the 1884 elections, that would officially change.
While Willard had made earlier attempts to step into politics, including briefly forming her own “Home Protection Party” in 1881, it was officially the 1884 Presidential election when she would throw the WCTU’s support behind the Prohibition Party, which her Home Protection Party merged with in 1882.
The Prohibition Party actually predates the WCTU by nearly half a decade. It was September 1st, 1869 when the Prohibition Party officially came together as a political party dedicated to supporting legislative alcohol prohibition; a to-be-proven-faulty remedy to a genuine problem.
One will have to put themselves in the context of the United States of America at the time. The Civil War had only ended five years prior. Slavery, an evil that people said was an unbreakable and “peculiar” institution of the South, was abolished.
Many folks must have thought “If one evil could be banished by law, certainly this other evil could, too.”
But no one likes being told what to do.
It is at this point the story must pause to state the obvious: the United States Pirate Party is not in support of a governmental ban on alcohol.
Nor would we ever support such a measure.
In fact, one could venture to guess that most Pirates would support laws closer to the drug decriminalization of Portugal.
Those battling alcohol addiction (or addiction of any kind) need assistance in quitting, not a government mandate. Many need to be treated, not to be criminalized.
What the Pirate Party is, however, is a party that advocates for self-determination and free and open society. Pirates calling for the outlawing of alcohol would be beyond bizarre. Grog and rum are essentially inseparable images from the whole Pirate persona. We celebrate our freedom and ability to do so.
But a Pirate can recognize and respect an individual’s personal decision to maintain their sobriety and hold themselves together.
When looking at the word “prohibition,” it is easy to see the word “prohibit” in clear etymological terms. But etymologically speaking, why not break that down further?
“Pro-” often either means “in front of/before,” “forward,” “on behalf of/in favor of,” “instead proportion to/according to” or “instead of/in place of”.
In “prohibition,” the word stems from “pro-” the meaning “in front of” and the Latin “hibēre” meaning “to hold,” so “to hold in front of,” ie. to block.
“Hibition” never did find its way into the English language as a word on its own. Which is a shame, because I think it explains the temperance movement far better than “banning alcohol” ever could.
If one is to understand “-hibition” as meaning “to hold,” then why wouldn’t “Hibition” as a stand alone word mean something like “holding (yourself together).”
Ie, to take control of yourself and maintain control of your faculties is “Hibition.”
That is, dear reader, a form of self-determination.
In a way, that makes the Prohibition Party not simply one of temperance, but a party that is Pro-Hibition. A health-and-wellness party. A party advocating for self-determination from the bottle and drugs.
Which makes what they are famous for all the more unfortunate.
You see, the banning of slavery was an act of liberation. You could use the law to free individuals from the shackles of slavery and people would be better off for it.
However, slavery was a power structure, not a product. The evils of alcohol cannot simply be legislated away.
More moderate members of the Prohibition Party understood this. Many were Pro-Hibition advocates (as they’d be retroactively deemed by the U.S. Pirate Party’s Captain 150 years later), others simply wanted hard liquor banned while keeping beer and wine in the spirit of the original ATS pledge.
But a third group, a later arrival to the temperance movement, would be the final push towards the realization that it wouldn’t work: the Anti-Saloon League.
Stripped of all the things that made temperance a movement of self-determination, led by Wayne Wheeler, the Anti-Saloon League was a single-issue proto-lobbyist group, trailblazing many tactics such as targeting politicians not pro-alcohol ban and utilizing public campaigns against said politicians.
Aggressive, powerful and feared by many in D.C., and far more extreme than folks like Willard before him, Wayne Wheeler led the final charge to ban alcohol. He was instrumental in getting the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act passed.
Again, abolitionists felt that they had defeated a great evil with the passing of the 13th Amendment; and for the most part, they absolutely had. Folks in the temperance movement must have thought the same; but for the most part, they absolutely had not.
Moderate Prohibition Party members and temperance leaders could perhaps see the inevitable consequences. Freeing slaves is an act of providing self-determination, while banning alcohol is the government mandating what you can and cannot do.
After the rise of organized crime, the criminalization of a vice and the lack of enforcement on the alcohol ban itself, enough was enough.
It took nearly 15 years for the United States to change course and say “We made a mistake,” but they did come to that conclusion. The 18th amendment was repealed by the 21st amendment.
No one likes being told what to do.
Neither did the WCTU nor Prohibition Party die after the 21st amendment, and the Prohibition Party remains the oldest minor party in the United States today, no longer advocating for governmental bans on vices.
Their roles in history are important, if not for the reasons they had hoped.
However, Prohibition Party’s place in the minor party echelon today is also important. The United States needs a party that promotes health and wellness. It’s imperative to have a party focused on the betterment of our fellow people.
We need a party who is Pro-Hibition.
We also need fewer Anti-Saloon Leagues. We need to remember them as zealots of a noble cause who took something good to its very extreme and bastardized it.
This is an issue not-unique to the temperance movement.
Wayne Wheeler was not a bad man. When he was young, he was stabbed with a pitchfork by an intoxicated farmhand and it shaped his anti-alcohol stance for the rest of his life. But if your response is “we must force its banning by the legislator’s pen and the threat of the barrel of a gun,” then you have come to the wrong conclusion.
Over 200 years removed from the temperance movement’s beginning and with the failures of outlawing alcohol now easily traceable, there are lessons to be learned from how to and how to not go about changing society.
Temperance, at its best and least coercive, is a form of self-determination. The WCTU had genuinely noble intentions having fought for the women’s suffrage alongside temperance, locking them together as inseparable causes. That should be recognized and celebrated.
The misguided belief you can have it go away via amendment, the way the abolitionists did a generation before, is a lesson learned, but not a reason to throw away the original idea of temperance as self-determination all together.
As of time of writing, the youth of the United States are drinking less than generations prior. In a way, the temperance movement is finding their successes naturally and without legislative arm wringing.
Which is, perhaps, how it was always meant to be.
The Prohibition Party has been around continuously since the late 19th century and is still kicking today. A past that haunts them, an era synonymous with failure, crime and paternalistic governmental overreach, never let it destroy them. Lessons learned, strategies adapted, platforms updates and the fight continues.
That kind of resilience, whether you agree with them personally or not, should be commended.
Minor parties in the United States face an uphill battle for ballot access and recognition, but to stick around and maintain that fight is another battle entirely. Many do not survive pressures and eras of stagnation.
In the United States, there are minor parties that advocate for things like libertarian governance, ecosocialism, transhumanism, legalization of marijuana, etc.
Each and every minor party in this country plays an important role and fills in an important niche. The Prohibition Party’s role as one focused our countrymen’s Hibition is essential.
If there wasn’t a need to have this niche filled, the whole “Make America Healthy Again” campaign from 2024 might have fallen on deaf ears.
But it didn’t. It resonated with a number of voters from both sides of the aisle.
If the two-party system is to ever be defeated, we need as many parties fighting for their causes and against the duopoly as possible. Not every cause is noble and not every party is one to hold in high regard, but the modern Prohibition Party is not one you should write off.
You don’t need to join the Prohibition Party.
You can think the government outlawing of alcohol was stupid, which it absolutely was. You can think the current War on Drugs has done more harm than good and must end, which it absolutely has and should.
None of that means a party like the Prohibition Party, the only party holding onto a lost idea of self-determination, has no place in modern day politics.
In a healthy democracy, we need the Prohibition Party just as much as we need the Legal Marijuana Now Party.
Compromise is a dirty word in the 21st century under the two party system. Compromise in our two-party system has often looks more like concessions than halfway points. Causes get thrown to the wayside as disposable; bargaining chips and false promises by both sides.
In a healthy democracy, more diversity of thought, more to shop around in the market place of ideas would be a good thing. We would appreciate having parties with issues they are unwilling to compromise on, allowing for certain issues to be addressed and stay in the public sphere.
You would appreciate folks pointing out something is harming you and those around you and raising the alarm bells on it. You would feel grateful there’s someone out there making sure the government isn’t trying to poison you via lack of regulation or actual health hazards.
But you’d feel less grateful if that same party was trying to force you to live a healthier lifestyle by coercion, because that is a bastardization of self-determination.
And no one likes being told what to do.
I am a Pirate. I am a Wet Catholic. I am an advocate of self-determination. I am going to celebrate 4/20, because I have the freedom to choose to do so.
I am also Pro-Hibition.