Iowa author presents history of prohibition in Iowa
Oct. 27—OSKALOOSA — An Iowan author brought a piece of eastern Iowa history home to Mahaska County Wednesday night.
Author Linda McCann, of Shell Rock, Iowa, has written 40 books on local histories across Iowa. Her topics have spanned lost histories of Iowa counties, work done in Iowa by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a history of Japanese Prisoners of War in Iowa during World War II, and more. On Wednesday night, at a special event hosted by the Nelson Pioneer Farm, McCann presented her work on the history of prohibition in eastern Iowa, Mahaska County in particular.
"Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933," McCann told her audience. "This was a constitutional amendment that said it was really illegal to make, manufacture, sell or transport liquor."
McCann said that, while most famous prohibition stories did not take place in Iowa, it's important to remember that the amendment had all the same effects here, including bootlegging, gun fights and even murder.
"Everything that happened everywhere else happened here. We just didn't make movies about it," McCann said.
McCann explained that, with prohibition came the need to define what was an alcoholic beverage, which is where the current definition of .5% alcohol comes from. Several loopholes were made in the amendment, McCann said, since prohibition was highly controversial, and many people fought against it. The first exception was liquor prescribed by a doctor for medicinal purposes, though McCann told a story about a doctor who had his license revoked for being too glib with his prescriptions — one of many.
Other exceptions included alcoholic beverages used for religious purposes, such as communion wine for a Catholic mass. Bishops were therefore allowed to purchase wine, and so were rabbis, since alcoholic beverages were also used in Jewish religious ceremonies.
McCann told stories of people who would hide liquor bottles in secret compartments of family gravestones, people who would come up with multiple-family schemes to produce and sell moonshine and law enforcement that looked the other way.
McCann presented an article from the prohibition era that quoted the then-Dubuque County Sheriff saying "The reason we did not enforce prohibition was these were our neighbors. These were our friends. They might be our relatives, and they were doing what they had to do to support their families."
"I think a lot more people did it than we probably know," said McCann, who holds that moonshiners were mostly harmless through the first years of prohibition until 1925, when the mob, looking to capitalize on Iowa's plentiful corn for whiskey-making, entered Iowa and turned moonshining into a mob business.
"I really think it would have stayed pretty innocent and harmless until the mob got involved," McCann said. Until then, McCann's research has led her to conclude that throughout the first years of prohibition, moonshining in Iowa was about farmers providing for their families during a very controversial time.
Channing Rucks can be reached at crucks@oskyherald.com.
