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 c h a p t e r 5 5 Despised Merchandise american jewish liquor entrepreneurs and their critics Marni Davis In  Isaac Wolfe Bernheim published his memoir, recounting his journey from Jewish immigrant rags to Kentucky bourbon riches. He arrived in the United States at the age of eighteen with a few dollars in his pocket, and by forty he was one of the wealthiest men in Louisville—an internationally renowned whiskey distiller, as well as a local civic leader and an important figure in national Jewish organizations. Life in the liquor industry had served Bernheim spectacularly well. Yet he’d come to rue his choice of livelihood. “If I had to choose my occupation over again,” he mused, “I should prefer to engage in some other line of trade, but we are all creatures of circumstance.”1 Bernheim’s ambivalence toward the liquor business in  should come as no surprise: his industry was currently under siege. After decades of struggle and marginal political relevance, the national movement to remove alcohol from the American consumer marketplace had gained adherents by the millions and supporters in powerful places. A wave of statewide total prohibition laws was sweeping through the South; between  and  six states had passed “dry” legislation intended to ban beverage alcohol within their borders, and several more seemed to be headed in the same direction. Ever-greater numbers were swayed by prohibitionist claims that liquor entrepreneurs constituted a powerful and devious political cabal. The epithet that antialcohol reformers had long hurled at the trade, “the liquor evil,” besmirched elite distillers of up-market liquor as well as proprietors of rough and dingy whiskey saloons. The “anti-liquor craze,” as Bernheim called it, showed no signs of abating anytime soon, and the growing “hysteria” had “left a costly scar on our business.”2  mar ni davis Another development, one that he didn’t mention in his autobiography, likely added to Bernheim’s unease: the emergence of an anti-Semitic strain within the antialcohol movement. As the battle over alcohol commerce intensified at the turn of the century, prohibitionists voiced suspicion of Jewish alcohol entrepreneurs in particular, claiming Jewish “domination” and “mastery ” of the American liquor business. McClure’s Magazine suggested that the prospect of Jewish control over alcohol commerce posed a singular menace to American culture, calling readers’ attention to “the acute and often unscrupulous Jewish type of mind which has taken charge of the wholesale liquor trade in this country.” Journalists and politicians sympathetic to the prohibition movement declared that “Jews who were directly or indirectly interested in the liquor traffic” sought to obstruct anti-alcohol legislation, which suggested that Jews undermined the democratic process and the well-being of the communities they lived in for the sake of their own enrichment.3 Though terms like “mastery” and “domination” overstated the point, it was undoubtedly true that Jewish immigrants and their descendents had gravitated toward the liquor business all over the country. In Bernheim’s Louisville, for instance, where Jews accounted for no more than  percent of the city’s population , between  and  percent of local liquor entrepreneurs were Jewish; they were prevalent rather than dominant, but still, without question, a visible presence . In many other centers of American liquor production and distribution, Jews found the liquor trade to be a similarly attractive and reliable economic niche: according to national trade journal Bonfort’s Wine and Liquor Circular, Jewish entrepreneurs owned five of the fifteen biggest whiskey-rectifying businesses in late nineteenth-century Cincinnati.4 Even in locales where alcohol remained small relative to other industries, Jews were frequently a conspicuous group within it. Furthermore, for reasons as rooted in their politics and their cultural practices as in their entrepreneurial interests, American Jews consistently aligned with the “antis” (as in “antiprohibition”) or the “wets” (as opposed to the “drys”). They maintained their principles, and their presence in the alcohol trade, as the prohibition movement gained force. The ideological divide revealed by American debates over prohibition went far beyond mere disagreements over drinking itself. When Americans argued about alcohol commerce, they were voicing their attitudes toward capitalism and the competing demands of individual rights and the public good in a freemarket society. Was the alcohol industry to be valued as a force for economic dynamism and growth? Was its presence in American cities and its popularity among immigrant groups a benign symptom of cultural diversity? Did the rights of individual drinkers, no matter how deleterious their habit, outweigh communal responsibility...

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