No political issue in the 1920s served to define the decade so memorably, nor divided Americans so bitterly, as that of Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, taking effect in January 1920, banned the production, sale and transport of alcohol for consumption in the United States; the Volstead Act of 1919 (passed over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson) set up the legal framework for enforcing the ban. Northeastern Republicans tended to be “drys” on the question of Prohibition, while their Democratic counterparts were “wets.” In this rather singular instance, despite their traditional rock-ribbed Republicanism, Hamilton students’ sympathies were with the Democratic opposition. Elliot R. Fisk ’21 pasted a headline in one of the first pages of his college scrapbook about the debate over Prohibition: “Hill Advocates Repeal of Volstead Dry Law,” the “Hill” in question apparently some local politician. Fisk’s comment, penciled in below, ironic and to the point, read, “I’ll say the hill does.”
Not only were Hamilton students opposed to the new policy; they proved quite willing to subvert the law. Fisk, for instance, pasted into his scrapbook such memorabilia as a wine cork and a label from a cognac bottle. Prohibition challenged the ingenuity of Hamilton students while encouraging their entrepreneurial instincts. For once, Hamilton’s remote location in the North Country had its advantages: The Canadian border, beyond which alcohol could be legally purchased, was not that far away. Robert E. Turner ’22 was expelled in his senior year for bootlegging and indicted by a federal grand jury. (Adding piquancy to this sad story was the fact that Turner’s mother was president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union chapter in his hometown of Seattle, Wash.)
Another innovation in College life in the 1920s, this more welcome, was represented by the automobile, a contraption only rarely seen on campus before World War I. The Hamilton faculty ruled in 1924 that seniors (but no other students) would be allowed to bring cars to campus, which reinforced their status in the College’s social hierarchy. Fraternities were more important than ever — not only did they give all the good parties, but they also provided their members the possibility of hitching a ride from or even borrowing a senior brother’s car.
One consequence of the new availability of automobiles was to make Hell Week, the annual occasion for the hazing of fraternity initiates, even more hellish than before. In the 1920s and 1930s it became a common practice for fraternity brothers to drive blindfolded freshmen miles into the countryside in the dead of winter and deposit them at the roadside, to find their own way back to campus. (Hell Week would be abolished, at least officially, by decree of President Frederick Carlos Ferry in 1937.)
A less hellish consequence of the advent of the automobile age was its impact on the courting customs of Hamilton’s students. For one thing, cars brought a much wider selection of eligible females within visiting distance. The days of Hamilton boys strolling down to the village to serenade the young ladies at local female seminaries drew to a close. In the 1920s Wells College, 70 miles to the west on Cayuga Lake, became known as Hamilton’s “sister school,” because of all the road trips that had that campus for a destination. Skidmore, the women’s college in Saratoga Springs, 100 miles to the east, was also popular with Hamilton men. The more ambitious might drive as far as Vassar or Smith. And then, of course, were the new opportunities for non-chaperoned contact provided by the automobile. “It’s all right for girls to go auto riding,” the Royal Gaboon, the College humor magazine, smirked in 1925, “if they don’t go too far.”
Excerpted from On the Hill: A Bicentennial History of Hamilton College by Maurice Isserman, the Publius Virgilius Professor of American History, published in conjunction with the College’s Bicentennial.
