Category: Social Control

• The Liquor Re-Education

  The Liquor Re-Education theory held that Prohibition was not primarily about sobriety, morality, or crime reduction, but about testing how quickly a mass population could be conditioned to obey a law that large numbers considered irrational or intrusive. In this reading, the ban on alcohol became a national behavior-modification experiment: an attempt to measure compliance, shame, habit disruption, and the social power of repeated enforcement. The theory took on a more psychological tone in later retellings, especially when linked to Pavlovian conditioning, Progressive reform, and the language of the “noble experiment.” Its core claim was that the real subject of Prohibition was not liquor, but obedience itself.

• The "Free Love" Communalism

  The "Free Love" Communalism theory was a cluster of anti-Bolshevik claims alleging that the Russian Revolution aimed not only to overthrow the old state but to abolish the family by "nationalizing" women and children, legalizing indiscriminate sexual access, and transferring child-rearing to collective institutions. These stories circulated widely in the United States and Europe after 1917, often through hostile press coverage, political hearings, refugee testimony, and anti-radical literature. The rumors drew some of their plausibility from real early Soviet family-law reforms involving civil marriage, easier divorce, equal status for children born outside marriage, and experiments in communal services. However, the more sensational claims about compulsory sexual sharing, "Bureaus of Free Love," and the formal state ownership of women and children became part of the mythology of anti-Bolshevik propaganda rather than established Soviet law.