Martin Meenagh blog

  President Woodrow Wilson famously went to bed on the night of the 1916 presidential vote believing that he had lost, as did the New York Times , which had declared the race for his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. The newspaper did this in part because, on early returns, Wilson had lost the entire North bar New Hampshire and Ohio. A (prematurely identified) tide was seen to be running against re-election. For two days, until Southern, Western, and Midwestern votes were declared, it still seemed likely that the next president would be Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate. State and local elections also suggested, as Thomas Knock has noted, that the Socialist vote was reasonably strong, which, given the reunification of the Republican party after the split between Roosevelt and Taft in 1912, suggested that Wilson could lose states such as California and North Dakota. It is in fact reasonably well established that Wilson was not suffering from an excess of false humilit...

  Prohibition in the United States was a product of two wars and protestant social reform. It had a substantial latent underside of anti-Irish, anti-German, and anti-Catholic support. Characterising it in such a way places it alongside campaigns against Mormon polygamy, prostitution, and immigration between the Civil War and the First World War. It has been viewed as seperable from the movement for female suffrage, which arose at mostly the same time and the coalition of support for which broadly overlapped with prohibition. The great historian Richard Hofstadter, in fact, called it a ‘ludicrous parody’ of social reform in 1955. Such an outlook also allows for the limited federal prohibition regulations of 1918 in the Wartime Prohibition Act to be seen as opening the door to a ‘constitutional blunder’ in 1919, when Nebraska ratified the prohibition amendment, leaving New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nevada isolated. A standard narrative has develope...