Woodrow Wilson was a great US president and he wasn't to blame for the misguided Prohibition experiment

Wilson was the first American president to have a vision of America leading a world community of nations. As the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1919, he keeps company with two other American presidents who have secured this much coveted distinction: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Barack Obama in 2009.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28 1856 in the Presbyterian manse in Staunton, Virginia. Thomas Woodrow was the name of his maternal grandfather, the Rev Dr Thomas Woodrow. He was called Tommy as a boy but in his 20s the future president reinvented himself as Woodrow and never again used his first given name.

James Wilson, his grandfather, emigrated to Philadelphia from Dergalt, near Strabane, in 1807. James Wilson, a printer by trade, married Annie Adams another Ulster immigrant. She is reputed to have come from nearby Sion Mills.

They had 10 children, the youngest of whom, Joseph Ruggles, was born in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1822. The Rev Dr Joseph Ruggles Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s father, was a Presbyterian minister of indomitable character and theological distinction, who left an indelible impression upon his son’s character.

Woodrow Wilson visited Belfast but not his Ulster-Scots ancestral home in north Tyrone in 1889. But for a letter found amongst his personal papers, written on August 20 from the White Horse Inn, Drogheda, we would know nothing of this visit.

The White Horse Inn in Drogheda has since been renamed the Westcourt Hotel and in early May the hotel opened Woodrow’s Snug Bar Eatery in honour of its famous late-19th century guest.

The Eatery notes that Woodrow Wilson’s ‘administration’ presided over the introduction of Prohibition and tentatively hints that he inconsistently loved Scotch.

Admittedly, in 1917, after the United States entered the First World War, Wilson instituted a temporary wartime Prohibition to save grain for producing food but Wilson was not responsible for the Prohibition era which was ushered in by the Volstead Act.

Wilson actually vetoed the Volstead Act, which prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages (but not curiously its consumption), in October 1919 but his veto was overridden by Congress. (Wilson’s many detractors have come up with enough things to criticise Wilson for without unfairly attacking him for something for which he was not responsible.)

Temperance advocates, spearheaded by pietistic religious denominations, especially the Methodists, had succeeded over many decades in popularising the naïve and simplistic view that alcohol was the root cause of poverty, crime and violence in the United States and Prohibition was the answer.

As late as 1928 President Herbert Hoover claimed that Prohibition was ‘a great social and economic experiment, noble and far-reaching in purpose’. However as early as 1867, in response to the mid-19th-century clamour for prohibition, Mark Twain had opined that Prohibition ‘drove drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and [did] not cure it or even diminish it’.

By 1928 it should have been obvious that the ’noble experiment’ had been a dismal failure and Mark Twain had been right in his assessment a century earlier. (When the mayor of Berlin visited New York City in 1929, he tellingly asked the mayor of New York when Prohibition was to come into effect.)

Most Americans who consumed alcohol before Prohibition continued to do so after its introduction because Prohibition was virtually unenforceable.

For the rich, there were ‘speakeasies’, private clubs, requiring a password to secure entry, to which the local police obligingly turned a blind eye. For the poor, there was ‘bathtub gin’. Pharmacists wrote prescriptions for the use of alcohol for medicinal purposes. More people must have taken communion than ever before – because the legal production of communion wine increased by hundreds of thousands of gallons.

Organised crime flourished through acquiring a stranglehold on the smuggling and distribution of illegal alcohol or ‘bootlegging’. This was the heyday of Al Capone in Chicago where organised crime trebled.

Far from restoring public morality, Prohibition encouraged flouting of the law by otherwise lawful citizens. Corruption mushroomed as organised crime spent millions buying the acquiescence of government officials – from local police officers on the beat to senators, judges, mayors and governors on the criminal payroll.

The closure of breweries, distilleries and saloons led to the disappearance of thousands of jobs, and in turn thousands more jobs were eliminated for barrel makers, truckers, waiters, and other related trades.

Before Prohibition, many states relied heavily on excise taxes in liquor sales to fund their budgets. In New York, almost 75% of the state's revenue was derived from liquor taxes. Prohibition wiped out that revenue stream. At the national level, Prohibition cost the federal government a total of $11 billion in lost tax revenue, while costing over $300 million to enforce.

The greatest unintended consequence of Prohibition was that it fostered intemperance and excess. Far from addressing the problem of alcohol abuse, Prohibition only made the problem worse.

Prohibition had a devastating impact on the Irish whiskey industry and resulted in the closure of many distilleries. The period marked the beginning of an industry-wide consolidation that would continue until the 1970s.

Hitherto Irish whiskey had dominated the American market but was displaced by Scotch – largely (although not entirely) because of Prohibition.

Exports of Scotch whisky to Canada, the then British West Indies and the French Atlantic islands of St Pierre and Miquelon simply sky-rocketed and then ingeniously found their way into the United States.

Irish whiskey has never regained its dominant position and the premium whisky market in the United States remains firmly the preserve of Scotch.

‍Next year will mark the centenary of Woodrow Wilson’s death. Fresh evaluations of this Ulster-Scot and his presidency may be confidently predicted.