Gioia Diliberto’s new work of nonfiction, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition (336 pages; University of Chicago Press), is an immersive and meticulously researched examination of the forces behind the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1920, and the contentious, years-long struggle that led to its repeal in 1933.
The four women mentioned in Firebrands’ subtitle were key figures in Prohibition’s passage and its eventual repeal: Ella Boole, who led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for many years; Mabel Walker Willebrandt, assistant U.S. Attorney General, who was responsible for enforcing Prohibition nationally; Texas Guinan, a speakeasy hostess and silent film star; and Pauline Sabin, a Manhattan socialite alarmed by the rise in liquor-related corruption and violent crime, who mobilized thousands of activists through a group she founded in 1929, the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform.
Diliberto’s account of this turbulent period in American history reads like a novel and compellingly illuminates its fascinating and colorful central figures’ motivations, triumphs, and setbacks, as well as the forces arrayed against their conflicting agendas.
Gioia Diliberto and I conducted our interview via email. It has been edited for length and clarity.
ZYZZYVA: You’ve written several books about notable historical figures, all of them women, and Firebrands continues this tradition. How did you discover your four central characters?
Gioia Diliberto: I discovered Mabel Walker Willebrandt first while researching another project. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this attractive young lawyer who was plucked from a law practice in California by President Warren Harding and put in charge of enforcing Prohibition. During the Jazz Age she was the most powerful woman in the U.S. government. She was on the cover of Time magazine in August 1929 during an era when practically the only women who had that honor were tennis stars and opera divas. I wondered if there were other women of achievement who’d made it onto the cover of Time, and I started looking through all of the covers for the years 1920—when women won the vote—to 1933, the end of Prohibition. That’s how I discovered Pauline Sabin. She was on the cover in July 1932, featured for being the leader of the organization [Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform] formed to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.
All of my books, both fiction and nonfiction, have been about women who in their accomplishments, personalities and even their flaws step forward to symbolize the spirit of their times. Mabel and Pauline gave me a chance to write about how women conceived and used power in the immediate aftermath of women winning the vote. They enabled me to look beyond the well-worn stories of gangsters and flappers to explore Prohibition in a new way—as feminist history.
In didn’t take long after discovering Mabel and Pauline to realize that Ella Boole, head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, belonged in this story, too. She was closely allied with Mabel in fighting to keep Prohibition going, and she was locked in a fierce battle with Pauline Sabin to win over the hearts and minds of American women.
Texas Guinan, the flamboyant speakeasy hostess, also fit well in the story as the avatar of rebellion against Prohibition.
Z: There are a number of striking parallels between the politics of today and those that led to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and, subsequently, the Volstead Act, which allowed for Prohibition’s enforcement. For one, when women got the vote in 1920, people assumed they’d vote as a bloc, but that wasn’t and has never been the case. And today, many of us still puzzle over the political and ideological divide among women voters. What has studying the politics of Prohibition (and its eventual repeal) shown you about our country’s political polarity?
GD: It’s fascinating that the country today is divided in ways similar to how it was polarized in the 1920s. Then, as now, the political divisions of Americans could be mapped largely along rural and urban lines. Fear and distrust of immigrants and wealthy elites marked the views of rural, working-class voters in 1920 just as they do now. It took the Depression and the ensuing major realignment of our political parties to unite the country. Let’s hope this time it doesn’t take something as catastrophic as a Depression to pull us together.
Historically, as you note, women have not voted as a bloc. After suffrage, it took a while for women to get in the habit of voting, and at first, women didn’t vote in large numbers. There was no accurate polling in the 1920s. But scholars of voting patterns have found that throughout American history, male and female voters tend to vote in similar ways. (Interestingly, in the 1920s there were indications that women tended to vote as their fathers did, rather than how their husbands voted.)
Prohibition wasn’t strictly a woman’s issue, and neither is abortion today. A majority of Americans, male and female—I believe about 61 percent—support abortion, and yet Congress is in the grip of a fanatical minority who oppose it.
The same was true in the 1920s regarding Prohibition. Most Americans were against it, and yet Congress was dominated by Dry zealots.
What Pauline Sabin showed was that it was possible to mobilize women as a political bloc to overturn a despised law.
Z: I’m curious about whether you began writing this book with strong opinions about your four major characters that you later found yourself reconsidering. For example, Ella Boole’s single-minded focus on working against Prohibition’s repeal had me thinking before I started reading about her that she was a proverbial one-trick pony, but that isn’t true (nor is it true for your other major characters).
GD: Everything is always much more complicated and complex than it seems at first. I always try to keep an open mind and let the research take me where it will. Ella Boole, for example, turned out to be so much more than the pigeon-breasted scold I had imagined she was at the start of my research. First of all, she held very progressive views about women’s and workers’ rights. She was an eloquent speaker and a forceful leader, and though she claimed that God was working through her and the WCTU and she constantly invoked God in her speeches and writings, she acted more like a general than a minister.
I did not have much sense of Texas Guinan going into the project beyond that she was a popular silent film star who became a famous speakeasy hostess. I was surprised to discover how influential she was in the murky demimonde where politics, journalism, crime, and show business intersected. In craving power, she wasn’t much different from Ella, Mabel, and Pauline.
Meantime, the more I learned about Mabel and Pauline, the more fascinating they became.
Z: What are the first steps you take when writing a work of history? Could you explain how a project of this scope takes shape?
GD: I start out by reading everything I can find about my characters and the era I’m writing about. Reading begets more reading. I’m always discovering new sources and doing more research and reading until completing the final draft of the book.
Very early on, I researched the descendants of Mabel Walker Willebrandt and Pauline Sabin. (Ella Boole and Texas Guinan do not have any living direct descendants.) I was extraordinarily lucky to be able to interview Pauline’s granddaughters, whom she raised. They brought the past and Pauline’s story extremely close to me. Through them, I could reach out and touch the Jazz Age. Also, one of these granddaughters had Pauline’s scrapbooks, which contained newspaper clippings from around the nation that provided me with crucial details I otherwise never would have discovered.
After my initial reading, I turned to the archives. Pauline’s papers are at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mabel’s papers are collected at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; and Ella’s papers are at the Frances Willard House in Evanston, Illinois. An unpublished memoir by Texas Guinan’s publicist and copies of her newspaper columns and other clippings about her are housed at the Billy Rose Library for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.
I started work on this book in 2018. When the pandemic hit, the archives closed before I had a chance to finish my research. I put Firebrands aside, wrote a novel, Coco at the Ritz, which came out in 2021, and ghostwrote a memoir by a figure from the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon. When the archives reopened in 2021, I resumed my research.
Z: To return to Ella Boole, did she fear other hard-won amendments—for example, the Fifteenth and Nineteenth (the former granting the vote to Black men and the latter to women)—might be overturned if the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed? As you note, Boole was a strong supporter of rights for women, but obviously had a serious blind spot when it came to Prohibition. In your research, was there ever a moment where you saw Boole doubting her mission to keep the sale and consumption of alcohol from achieving legal status again?
GD: Ella herself wasn’t fearful that the Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments would be repealed; some of her supporters, however, fomented fears in the Black community that the so-called Reconstruction amendments, which were passed in the wake of the Civil War, would be threatened by repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. These were the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment defining American citizenship as a federal protected right, and the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchising Black men. If you repealed one amendment, Dry zealots claimed, it would open the floodgates to repealing other amendments. There was absolutely no evidence of this danger. No one was calling for the repeal of the Reconstruction amendments.
Ella never wavered in her passionate commitment to Prohibition. After Repeal in 1933, she became head of the World WCTU and worked in vain to ban liquor across the globe. Meantime, she never gave up hope that Prohibition would one day be restored in America.
Z: One of the most compelling subjects you write about in Firebrands is how frequently segregated the work of white and Black women was in both the pro- and anti-Prohibition camps, which reminded me of what I’ve read about racial tensions in the 1960s and 1970s women’s movement. Pauline Sabin and Ella Boole did try to work across the aisle but at times were thwarted by less tolerant racial attitudes in their constituencies. Who were some of the notable Black women who worked for Repeal?
GD: Few of Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform’s membership records survive. The organization’s Delaware branch, however, has some information that gives a picture of the Black women who supported Repeal. As you’d expect, they tended to be educated and politically progressive. The Black clergy stood staunchly in favor of Prohibition, but some Black female activists, though churchgoers themselves, rejected the clergy’s position and supported Repeal.
Two of the most prominent Black women in Delaware, Pauline A. Young and her aunt Alice Dunbar Nelson, were perhaps typical of the fiercely independent Black women who joined WONPR. Young and Dunbar were educators who had connections among the nation’s Black elites. When Black dignitaries such as W.E.B. DuBois and writer James Weldon Johnson, who were barred from local hotels, traveled through Delaware, they stayed at Dunbar’s home, where Young and her mother also lived. These men reinforced in Dunbar and Young the courage and determination to stand up for their rights. Both women were involved with the NAACP and worked to register Black voters in Delaware long before they joined WONPR.
Z: You write that before President Hoover’s refusal to take a stand on Repeal, Pauline Sabin was understandably concerned about bootleg-related crimes, the binge-drinking Prohibition inadvertently led to, and the proliferation of speakeasies. Would you explain just how much of a Herculean feat it was to bring about Repeal? Had any amendment to the U.S. Constitution ever before been repealed?
GD: It’s extremely difficult to repeal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and it had never been done before Prohibition. Rescinding an amendment requires two-thirds of the House and the Senate, followed by ratification in three-fourths of the states, an outcome about as likely as “a hummingbird to fly to Mars with the Washington monument tied to its tail,” in the words of Texas Senator Morris Sheppard.
Before WONPR, several other anti-Prohibition organizations had risen and fallen, convinced that Repeal was impossible. Pauline Sabin refused to be deterred by even the most daunting difficulties and roadblocks. She was the first person to come along who was able to exploit America’s immense discontent with Prohibition and organize a grassroots Repeal movement. She did it by mobilizing the nation’s women. Her wealth and the wealth of her friends (and their husbands) largely paid for WONPR. Somehow, these half-percenters managed to hold on to their money after the 1929 crash, and WONPR never had trouble paying for its extravagant publicity juggernaut.
Meantime, the WCTU was losing members who, thanks to the Depression, could no longer afford the one-dollar yearly dues. (WONPR did not require membership dues.) There’s no doubt that after the 1929 crash, the deepening Depression helped the Repeal cause. After all, the reopening of the nation’s breweries created jobs, and the return of alcohol and beer sales and liquor taxes helped fill the nation’s depleted coffers.
Christine Sneed’s most recent books are Direct Sunlight and Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos. She’s also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, among other honors. She teaches for Northwestern University and Stanford University Continuing Studies.