Murder, Booze, and Sex: Three Perspectives on the Roaring Twenties

WILLIAM L. BURTON

Ghost: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther. Hamlet: Murther? Ghost: Murther most foul. . . . Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

URDER AND MURDER TRIALS caught and held M the public imagination in twenties America. Crimes and the names of criminals became household words. As one juicy story faded and dimmed in the pop- ular mind, another shouted in the headlines to take its place. The Fatty Arbuckle trial titillated the public fancy with tales of debauchery, sex parties, and riotous living in Hollywood, along with homicide, and the whole busi- ness dragged through three trials before it ended. And that was only the beginning. "Thrill slayers" Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, both spoiled sons of wealthy Chicago families, won the nation's attention and may even have spawned imitators; a nineteen-year-old Los Angeles murderer, when arrested in 1927, asked police if they thought he would get as much publicity as Leopold and Loeb. The Hall-Mills murder trial of 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey, had everything. There were sexual escapades in church, the lurid testimony of the "pig woman," newspaper contests on the guilt or innocence of the defendants, and twelve million words transmitted over news wires made it the

(374) TWENTIES IMAGES 375 biggest story since the invention of printing. On and on the stories went. There was the Snyder-Grey trial, the Parker-Hickman trial, the Rosenbluth trial, and so many others that a standard formula evolved to help reporters tell it all. America's fascination with murder and murder trials was to a large extent engineered by newspapers. Murder was news, and the press stressed the most sensational aspects of murder trials to build circulation. This news- paper coverage reflected as well as stimulated public in- terest, because popular fiction as well as sociology encouraged literate Americans to focus attention on crime. Charlie Chan, Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, and other classic detective characters appeared in the twenties and sold well; the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theo- dore Dreiser contained murders as important elements in their plots. Criminologists like John Cillen added an academic respectability to the general supposition that the country was experiencing a crime wave, and that social conditions were somehow responsible for crime. This preoccupation with crime, both real and fictional, did not occur in a vacuum. The decade began with the nation in the midst of the Creat Red Scare. Governmental hysteria over an illusionary radical menace, when coupled with the extraordinary corruption of the Harding admin- istration, left ordinary folk as well as intellectual hberals with the feeling that government was something to be feared and distrusted. Excesses in the exercise of gov- ernmental authority combined with the criminal misuse of that authority by "establishment" leaders, encouraged in intellectuals a suspicion about the behavior and in- tentions of government. They were prepared to believe the worst about government, to see it as the enemy of the people. Crime was the fault of society, not criminals. It was in this atmosphere that the most extraordinary murder, trial, and subsequent executions of the decade 376 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY occurred. Virtually gone from the public memory today are the murders and trials associated with Fatty Arbuckle and Nathan Leopold. Never to be forgotten are the trial and executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. So familiar is the Sacco-Vanzetti case and its conse- quences that we need only to sketch in its outline here. The two men, both Italian immigrants and both professed anarchists, were arrested in May, 1920, and charged with the robbery and murder of a shoe company paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. In the highly-charged atmosphere of the Red Scare, the men were tried, found guilty, and after seven years of delays, appeals, and in- ternational campaigns aimed at averting the completion of the death sentence, executed on August 22, 1927. When they were first arrested, Sacco and Vanzetti at- tracted little attention; by the time they were executed, they were an international cause celebre. Unlike the other murder trials of the twenties, this one became a standard fixture in history textbooks. It took on the attributes of a moraUty play, complete with villains and saints. Quite typical of American history text- book accounts of Sacco and Vanzetti is that found in Mary Beth Norton's A People and a Nation (2:696): Fear of radicalism, left over from the Red Scare of 1919, fueled these antiforeign sentiments. The most notorious outburst of hys- teria occurred in 1921, when a court convicted Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two immigrant anarchists, of murdering a guard and paymaster during a robbery in Brockton, Massachusetts. But Sacco and Vanzetti's main offenses seem to have been their political beliefs and Italian origins, since evidence failed to prove their involvement in the robbery. Judge Webster Thayer never- theless openly sided with the prosecution, privately calling the defendants "those anarchist bastards." Appeals by protesters failed to win a new trial, and the two Italians, who remained calm and dignified throughout their ordeal, were executed in August 1927. Their deaths chilled those who had looked to the United States as the land that nurtured freedom of belief. TWENTIES IMAGES 377 Implicit or explicit in this account is the assumption that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, that they were tried and electrocuted for their political beliefs and because they were foreigners, that their trial was unfair, and that the deaths of these noble beings tarnished the image of the United States as a land of freedom. It is not surprising that textbook authors, and perhaps most historians today, accept these assumptions. They are the result of a long, determined, and extraordinarily successful campaign that turned Sacco and Vanzetti into symbols, symbols and martyrs for a variety of causes. While the final unsuccessfiil appeal for the two men was still undecided. Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter published in the Atlantic Monthly in January, 1927, a long article in which he criticized the judge, the jury, the whole legal process, and the verdict; it was clear to Frankfurter that the two were innocent, and that their conviction was a miscarriage of justice. From that point on, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti never left the public eye and the fate of the formerly obscure anarchists came to symbolize different things to different people. For Italian-Americans, as well as other immigrant groups, Sacco and Vanzetti's fate symbolized American nativism, and they supported the Massachusetts men as a way to promote their own cause. For the American Federation of Labor and other labor sympathizers, Sacco and Vanzetti symbolized the poor working class slob, oppressed by both capital and the state, and they sup- ported the two as a means of publicizing the cause of the working man. To intellectuals like John Dos Passos and Haywood Broun, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti confirmed a belief that America was a land of prejudice and hatred. For communists, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union, Sacco and Vanzetti symbolized the depravity of a capitalist society and provided a golden opportunity to stir up anti-American feelings around the 378 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY world. And so it went; in their deaths, Sacco and Vanzetti provided to anyone or any group with a grudge against the United States or the "establishment" or with a con- viction that the typical American was a nativist, a splendid symbol and an opportunity for public protest. Perhaps the most effective element in the campaign to canonize the dead men was the work of artist Ben Shahn. Deeply impressed by what he regarded as a tragedy and perversion of justice, Shahn produced what seemed like an endless series of paintings and drawings of the two men and other principals in the case. Shahn, who was the leading social realist painter and muralist of the Depression years, gave to posterity a powerful, graphic image of Sacco and Vanzetti as two gentle and noble human beings, philosophical anarchists whose humility and honesty stand in sharp contrast to the cruelty and malice of Judge Webster Thayer and the prosecutors. The reproduced paintings of Shahn, more than the printed word, convey to the readers of today the assumption that Sacco and Vanzetti were martyrs to their beliefs and victims of American nativism. Maxwell Anderson, the leading social realist playwright of the thirties, created still another indelible image of Sacco and Vanzetti. His Winterset, the most famous play of the decade, burns with the author's sense of indignation at the injustice meted out to the executed men. Within a year, the play became a movie starring Burgess Meredith; that movie, which was Meredith's film debut, still appears on late- night television and keeps the Sacco-Vanzetti legend alive for today's generation. So it was in novels, plays, movies, and a steady flow of graphic art and monographs that the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti remained alive and in the public con- sciousness in the decades after 1927. This myth of mar- tyrdom, however, like most myths, contains elements of internal contradiction and reductionism. TWENTIES IMAGES 379 Nativism, according to the myth, acted like a kind of epidemic disease, infecting almost everyone connected with the case. From the judge and jury at the trial to the appellate court, from the governor of Massachusetts to the U.S. Supreme Court and the majority ofthe Amer- ican people, this malady poisoned the nation's atmosphere and caused the death of the innocents. (Intellectuals, artists, and socialites, of course, had a natural immunity to this disease.) John Dos Passos attributed the miscar- riage of justice to a vague "they," apparently the rich and the powerful whom he assumed dominated society. This muddies the waters. Historically, even going back to the Massachusetts of the late 1840s and the 1850s, it was the rich and the powerful who deplored the outbreak of nativism, and it was the common people so dear to the heart of Dos Passos who rioted in the streets, burned the convents, bashed the foreigners, and displayed na- tivism in its most ugly form. Were intolerance and nar- row-mindedness really the "atmosphere" of the roaring twenties? This is the decade afi:er all of movies that would be X-rated today, of profanity taken for granted on the Broadway stage, of flappers and hip flasks, of a rich and varied literature, of an unprecedented confidence in America and its economic future, of increasing social and geographic mobility, of a rapidly expanding educational establishment, of churches committed to social service. The atmosphere of America in the twenties was a com- plicated mix of intellectual gasses. The focus on intol- erance is thoroughly reductionist, a serious distortion of the reality of America and the American people. Writers like Dos Passos and artists like Shahn present a conflicting message. On the one hand, the villains are the establishment members, the judges and politicians and college presidents who railroaded Sacco and Vanzetti into the chair. On the other hand, there are the ordinary folk, the jury members, the angry citizens whose public 380 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY behavior provide all those anecdotes and pictures that shout "nativism" to the novelists, journalists, and histo- rians. In the swirling intellectual and emotional currents of the day and in the massive, unremitting propaganda campaign that followed 1927, it is difficult to separate the villains and the victims. Other than the actual guilt or innocence of the de- fendants, disagreement over several other questions is part ofthe whole Sacco-Vanzetti story and its meaning, for the 1920s and for today. 1. Were the two men the "good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler" that legend makes them to be? Was their anarchism purely philosophical, in the tradition of Tho- reau? Not at all. The two men were genuine revolution- aries. "Far from being philosophical anarchists," asserts Nunzio Pernicone (536) in his recent analysis of the case, "Sacco and Vanzetti were militant anarcho-communists who believed in the violent overthrow of the existing order." The answer to this question, of course, has noth- ing to do with whether they should have been convicted of murder, but refers only to their image as noble and gentle victims of irrational hatred. 2. Did Bartolomeo Vanzetti really voice those famous and eloquent words in his farewell? Ben Shahn incor- porated part of that farewell message into one of his best- known graphic portrayals, the 1958 serigraph, "Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti": "If it had not been for these things, I might have hve [sic] out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. . . . This is our career and our triumph." Fred Somkin's close examination of the evi- dence suggests that it is virtually impossible to separate Vanzetti's words from those of a friendly newsman, Phil Stong. Again, this question has meaning only in terms of the way we see the men and the climate of the time and the campaign to canonize them. It reminds us, too, of the extreme difficulty of making accurate generaliza- TWENTIES IMAGES 381 tions about a matter when the record is not all that clear and unambiguous. 3. Those "spontaneous workers' protests" in Europe and South America at the time of execution—^were they natural and instinctive reactions of other peoples to an obvious and ugly injustice in America? Not according to Francis Russell, who offers evidence that, far from spon- taneous, the street demonstrations abroad were carefully orchestrated. Such protests tell us nothing about the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Venzetti, but they do point to the symbolic importance of the case. 4. Did the federal government's Bureau of Investiga- tion (the predecessor of the FBI) connive with Massa- chusetts authorities to prosecute the two radicals? No. Recently released files of the Bureau of Investigation show that the Bureau knew nothing of the two men prior to their arrest. 5. Were Sacco and Vanzetti, either one or both, guilty of robbery and murder? The answer to that question may have to be left to metaphysicians rather than historians or lawyers. Seventy years of research and reflection have not produced a clear answer to the question of guilt or innocence. That should elicit some sympathy for the judges, jurors, and public officials of the twenties. August, 1977, was the fiftieth anniversary of the exe- cution of both men. Interest in the case, which had never died away completely, reached something of a climax that month. Two journals of opinion on opposite sides of the political spectrum produced cover stories on the Sacco- Vanzetti case to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the execution. "Sacco and Vanzetti. That Black Day in August, Just Half a Century Ago," bannered the August 20 cover of The Nation. The Nation, long a voice for the political left in America, proclaimed the innocence of the two men at the time of their execution in 1927, and fifty years later 382 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY it continued to proclaim their innocence. A somewhat puzzling line drawing dominates that cover page; it is a human figure, head bowed and hands bound, and clasping with those hands an open book. More symbolism, ap- parently, and this time it suggests that among other things the case involved a censorship of opinion. Inside that cover, former editor Carey McWiUiams reminisced about the case, noted with approval that Massachusetts Cov- ernor Michael Dukakis in July, 1977, issued a procla- mation removing any stigma or disgrace that attached to their names, and recounted the way in which contem- porary political agitators had managed to re-write history and change the image of the past. Elsewhere in the same issue, historian Eric Foner asserted his continued belief that the case was a gross miscarriage of justice, and added to the historic symbolism associated with the episode by arguing that the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti helped drive a Utopian vision out of America life. The anniversary year of 1977 also witnessed a triumph of petite bougeois opportunitism, with Sacco-Vanzetti T- shirts offered for sale to true believers. A quite different celebration of the anniversary ap- peared on the political right. Dominating the August 19 cover of the National Review was a cartoon of Sacco and Vanzetti. Each sat strapped in an electric chair; the power cord, not yet plugged in, snaked across the floor in the form of a question mark. A headline, however, answered the question: "Sacco and Vanzetti—The End of the Myth." Inside, the cover story by Francis Russell noted how the USSR capitalized on the case (there is a Soviet destroyer named the Vanzetti, a factory in Russia turns out Sacco-Vanzetti pencils) and summarized the evidence for concluding that the two anarchists were guilty as charged. Since 1921 the political left tends to regard the men as innocent. The political right tends to see them guilty TWENTIES IMAGES 383 as charged. The left sees the case as a symbol of all that was wrong with America in the twenties. The right sees the case as a criminal prosecution, with murderers brought to justice. The politicizing of famous trials, like the Sacco-Vanzetti case, is a familiar phenomenon around the world. From the eighteenth century case of Jean Calas in France (cel- ebrated by Voltaire), through the Dreyfus affair, and on to the present, the political right and left use such cases for their own ends. Historian Roland Stromberg traced the changing sentiments of American writers like John Dos Passos to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and found that their gradual disenchantment with the Soviet Union led to the feeling that they had been cynically used to exploit a partisan purpose. Stromberg concludes that the ma- nipulation of cases like that of Sacco and Vanzetti shows the "poisonous effect of mythology on History" (21). Where does this leave us on the most famous murder trial of the roaring twenties? Before you don that T-shirt, and before you accept the traditional stories about Sacco and Vanzetti as innocent victims of good old American nativism, you should at the least make the conscious decision that you are thereby giving a symbolic inter- pretation to a major facet of American life after World War I. Is that how you see America, and does this case illustrate it accurately? That symbolism, that interpreta- tion, is so damning that one should also review the mas- sive literature on both sides of the controversy. To do anything less is simply to continue the emotional prop- aganda campaign of the Ben Shahns and the Maxwell Andersons, to reflect the angry attitudes of Depression- era critics unhappy with their country. Paul Sann's dog- matic assertion that the Sacco-Vanzetti case "was the trag- edy of the whole United States" (233) is a far too common and emotional interpretation of the episode. We need to think more carefully about the implications of that inter- 384 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY pretation, whatever our beliefs about the guilt or inno- cence of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Symbols abound in our mental image of the twenties. Most of those symbols originate directly or indirectly from Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, one of the most influential and one of the best-selling books in American history. Allen wrote so well, described the twenties so vividly, that his view of Prohibition dominates school and college textbooks, as well as the nation's collective memory. What are the symbols of Prohibition? Allen put two of the most potent and long-lasting sym- bols together in the title of his Prohibition chapter— "Alcohol and Al Capone." Allan described Prohibition as a failure. The country appeared to be literally awash in alcohol. Speakeasies seemingly sprang up in every city and hamlet. Prohibition, far from reducing the con- sumption of alcohol, was portrayed as introducing the country to more than a decade of unparalleled drinking. Hip fiasks, rum runners, stills, various ingenious devices for concealing liquor about the person—all of these things made for colorful reading, and most authors never resist the temptation to follow Allen's lead on this topic. Al Capone is simply the most memorable character in a sort of national morality play, a play in which the villains are gangsters organizing to exploit the country's insatiable appetite for booze, while the good guys, the police and federal agents, are either out-gunned or corrupt. Machine guns chatter, big black cars careen through the streets of Chicago, and the typical American home is the one with the still in the attic or with bathtub gin being made in the spare bathroom. Most Americans today are firmly convinced that, since Prohibition did not stop all drink- ing, it was a failure. TWENTIES IMAGES 385 Many writers cannot restrain themselves and repeat the old saw about Prohibition as the "noble experiment," a phase attributed to Herbert Hoover but one he never used. Indeed, the very use of the word "experiment" in connection with Prohibition tells us something important about common interpretations of the topic. To call it an "experiment" is both to lessen the historic impact of its presumed failure and to separate it from mainstream re- form in American history. Was Prohibition the monumental failure perceived by most Americans? Recent scholarship suggests that, in some respects, it was a qualified success. First, there is general agreement that the images of flaming youth and well-dressed businessmen bellying up to the bar in speakeasies do not illustrate the experiences of most Americans. "The prohibition experiment, as the evidence stands today," flatly asserts J.C. Burnham, "can be more easily considered a success than a failure" (52). Prohibition was accompanied by changes in drinking pat- terns, but there is little doubt among scholars today that it did reduce the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Most of the supporters of the eighteenth amendment expected it to reduce drinking, not end all alcohol abuse. Neither the eighteenth amendment nor the National Pro- hibition Act (the Volstead Act) made drinking illegal. Those who condemn Prohibition, however, argue that its social costs outweighed any social benefits. Even if one concedes that booze consumption declined, especially among the targeted population (the workers), did not the heavy burden of gangsterism, disrespect for the law, and the corruption of police and politicians as well as the jury system, make the price too high for a limited drop in drinking? The question itself is a reminder that success or failure of Prohibition should be considered in the per- spective of multiple causation and complex motivation. Supporters of Prohibition sought, not a single goal, but 386 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY many goals. Temperance advocates drew inspiration from many different motives. Alcoholism and drunkenness were major problems of long standing in America. It was a real evil, both personal and social, that reformers fought. The booze itself was bad enough, in terms of lives destroyed and families wrecked. More was involved. The saloon was more than the innocent club for the ethnic worker; it was all too often a part of political corruption. Those concerned with the political corruption blamed on Prohibition in the twenties must be prepared to consider the corruption of the political process by brewers, distillers, and saloon keepers, before being too critical of the corrupting influ- ence of the 18th amendment and the Volstead Act. For too long we have been influenced by the cartoon figure of the long-nosed Puritan who so sarcastically represented the prohibitionist, and the image of the ax-wielding Carrie Nation. We have forgotten the genuine anguish and suf- fering behind the determined foes of John Barleycorn. Forgotten, too, are the economic costs of alcohol abuse, the loss of wages and production that concerned em- ployers, the costs related to treating the human wreckage left by such abuse. When evaluating Prohibition, then, we must consider its objectives and its achievements. Employers, aware of the growing danger of more sophisticated machinery in the work place, and knowing the costs of alcohol-induced absenteeism, wanted a more sober work force. They got one. Pohtical reformers, worried about the pernicious influence of the saloon and the "liquor interest" on the political process, sought to reduce alcohol's corrupting pressures. They did. Social workers and middle-class leaders, worried about the destructive influence of alcohol on families, especially working-class families, tried to re- duce the dangers of the saloon and the economic and health costs of alcohol. They did. And in the early years TWENTIES IMAGES 387 of Prohibition, when serious enforcement efforts were still being made, liquor was scarce and expensive; it was after those early years that enforcement became the farce we remember today. Arrests for drunkenness declined. Al- cohol-related diseases, especially cirrhosis of the liver, showed some reduction. Despite the lurid publicity given to the Al Capones, there was no crime wave in the twenties; that image was largely the work of enterprising journalists. Prohibition brought very real and tangible benefits to weigh against its costs. In America's collective memory, the Repeal of Prohi- bition was simply a recognition by the people that the moral crusade was a failure. The more perceptive among us recall a second factor, the influence of the Depression and the hope that Repeal would bring tax benefits to a desperate government. Largely forgotten, except among professional historians, is a third major factor—the hard work of such organizations as the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Well financed and led with great skill, these organizations provided much of the impetus for Repeal. All too common the last few years in America has been the facile if not fatuous argument that the "failure" of Prohibition proves that laws against drug abuse are doomed to failure. A questionable analogy is transmor- grified into a law of history. Whatever one thinks about the viability of today's drug laws, it is an abuse of history to suggest that the record of Prohibition proves that drug laws cannot succeed. Popular accounts of Prohibition tend to stress the bi- zarre and the sensational aspects of the experience. In- fluenced by Allen's Only Yesterday, subsequent generations found it easier to accept a simplistic tradition than keep up with the latest scholarship on the subject. Current research undermines conventional wisdom. 388 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY When it comes to Prohibition, booze in the Roaring Twenties, the word of wisdom is (to paraphrase Lewis Carroll): Beware the shibboleth!

"My mother went to a co-educational church-related college in the Midwest," recalls historian Paul A. Carter. "Snapshots and a portrait of her from the twenties show a strikingly attractive, high-spirited woman, but she was hardly a 'flapper' as that era is ordinarily employed" (ix).Yet the flapper, and what Frederick Lewis Allen called the "revolution in manners and morals," together make up one of the most enduring images of the roaring twenties. American women in the twenties are regularly imagined as figures in John Held cartoons. Held's woman was a skinny figure, body contorted in the throes of the latest dance craze, lips holding a dangling cigarette, with short skirt and short hair. The flapper defied convention, and her morals made her no better than she ought to be. This was the emancipated woman, the liberated woman, the woman whose new life style seemed to make a revolutionary departure from the past. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald peopled his novels and short stories with these creatures. To a considerable degree, the flapper is a fairy tale character. A John Held cartoon or magazine cover quite often appears today in magazines and book illustrations. Along with it, one frequently finds a photograph of women at a bathing beach, or in a night club, where both their clothing and demeanor betray a zest for life and a de- termination to defy society's expectations about what is the appropriate role for women. Words and phrases like "flaming youth," "Freud," "shocking behavior," and "freedom" make up the vocabulary used to discuss women in this era. As recently as the mid-1960s a renowned TWENTIES IMAGES 389 American historian could pubhsh a volume on the twen- ties entitled The Twenties: Fords, Flappers

Of all the thousands of murder trials, and of all the many executions in the United States in the twenties, only one trial and the two executions that followed it are common household words and common textbook fodder. Sacco and Vanzetti are symbols, their trial an example of what, in the perspective of history, is a common enough phenomenon. Symbolic trials figure prominently in history. Perhaps the closest parallel to Sacco and Van- zetti is the matter of Alger Hiss. No signed confession by Hiss would convince today's true believer that Hiss is guilty. The guilt, says the Hiss advocate, is society's. Hiss the symbol is the victim of official conspiracy. Never mind that historians, very properly, are innately suspi- cious of conspiracy explanations. It can be amusing and instructive to compare the individual historian's approach to conspiracy in, say, the famous Smith Act trials or the McCarthy Era accusations, with the easy acceptance of a conspiratorial explanation of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, or the Hiss case, or that of Rosenbergs. Other countries, too, have their symbolic trials, and their role is parallel to those in our own history. Who today cares or even thinks about the guilt or innocence of the defendant in that other famous symbolic trial of the twenties, that of John Scopes? The Scopes case reminds us that sometimes the symbolic trial is planned from the beginning, and is TWENTIES IMAGES 393 not a product of political activism after a trial begins. The Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann trial stand as warnings of the dangerous consequences of this use of the judicial process. "The chief practical use of history," asserted Lord Bryce, "is to deliver us from plausible historical analo- gies." The Munich analogy helped take us into Vietnam. The Vietnam analogy dominates much thinking about Central America as the 20th century nears its end. All such analogies ultimately rest upon a given interpretation of the meaning of the event used as the historical model, and none proves anything. Prohibition, or rather its sym- bolic meaning to the individual, provides a model for many analogies. These range from demands that drug laws be altered because Prohibition proves they cannot work, to more generalized theses that Prohibition proves that efforts to legislate morality are doomed to failure. Prohibition proves none of these things, even if we accept the vulgar interpretation of its record. If one must draw a lesson of history from Prohibition, the safer one is the reinforcement it provides to our understanding of mul- tiple causation and complex motivation, and of the prob- ability of awkward and unforeseen consequences fiowing from this kind of public policy. (Repeal brought its own set of problems, but that is another question!) Sex in the roaring twenties leads us to another kind of conclusion. Already noted above is the example it ofifers of our proclivity to read the present in the past; a study of the history of sex in the twenties is more illuminating than what passes for the usual chronicle of flappers and sexual rebels. Both Paul Carter and Estelle B. Freedman give us another important understanding to take away from this particular symbol of 1920s history. There is too much of a tendency, especially among polemical users of history, to write about the American woman. At this moment we do not have either enough studies of indi- 394 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY vidual women or of women in ethnic, religious, racial, and economic groups to identify patterns. History should engender a healthy skepticism in its students. Far from being dead, the past is daily used to manipulate our feelings about ourselves and our society. The treatment of murder, booze, and sex in the roaring twenties warrants more skepticism from both the writers and the consumers of history.

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Shikes, Ralph E, The Indignant Eye. Boston; Beacon Press, 1969, Somkin, Fred, "How Vanzetti Said Goodbye," Journal of American History 68(September 1981), 298-312, Stromberg, Roland N, "The Liberal Bias in Studies of Causes Cdlibres." Continuity (1987), 1-21, Young, William, and David E, Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Amherst; University of Massachusetts Press, 1985,