Andrew John Volstead was born on October 31, 1860, near Kenyon, Goodhue County, Minnesota. He was one of four children of John Einersten and Dorothea Mathea (Lillo) Wraalstad or Vraalstad.
His Norwegian parents, who had been market gardeners near Oslo, immigrated to Minnesota in 1854 and took up farming, in which they prospered.
Education
After a public school education, Andrew attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, before entering the Decorah (Iowa) Institute.
His parents intended him for the Lutheran ministry, but after graduating in 1881 he taught school and read law in a Decorah firm.
Career
Admitted to the Minnesota bar in 1884, Volstead practiced in Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, and in Grantsburg, Burnett County, Wisconsin, before settling in 1886 in Granite Falls, Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota. Volstead immediately entered politics as a Republican, becoming county attorney (1887-1893, 1895 - 1903), a member and later president of the Granite Falls board of education, city attorney, and mayor (1900 - 1902).
In 1902, Volstead won election to Congress from Minnesota's 7th District for the first of ten terms. In 1913, he joined the House Judiciary Committee as its ranking Republican. In 1919, shortly after passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, Volstead became chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
By 1920, Volstead faced opposition in his home district from organized labor, wets, and in particular the Farmer-Labor movement. A Lutheran minister, Ole J. Kvale, running first as a Farmer-Laborite and then as an Independent, combined these diverse elements to challenge Volstead in 1920 and, aided by low farm prices, defeated him two years later. Spurning as unethical lucrative offers to write and lecture on prohibition, Volstead served from 1924 to 1931, as legal advisor to the Northwest Prohibition Enforcement District, with headquarters in St. Paul, and then returned to the practice of law in Granite Falls.
A semi-invalid in his last years, he died of a coronary occlusion in Granite Falls and was buried in the local cemetery.
Achievements
Views
Volstead championed the homesteader and energetically guarded the interests of western Minnesota wheat farmers, strenuously opposing, for example, tariff reciprocity for Canadian wheat. He opposed big cities, big business, and big labor, and his belief in competition and his hatred of monopolies led him to support such early progressive legislation as the railroad regulatory laws; indeed, he thought they did not go far enough.
He also opposed most of the domestic programs of the Wilson administration. He believed that the Underwood Tariff (1913) discriminated against the farmer; that the Federal Reserve Act (1913) benefited large city banks; and that the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914) legalized holding companies and exempted labor from practically every federal law. Nevertheless, he vigorously supported the administration's wartime measures during World War I.
Although himself a teetotaler and a consistent supporter of prohibition, he had, up to this time, never made a prohibition speech. Working alone, Volstead drafted a bill to enforce prohibition. He staunchly maintained that his bill differed materially from an earlier measure drawn up by Wayne B. Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League and that it was less drastic than the Wheeler bill or either the Ohio or New York statutes.
While permitting the sale of alcohol for industrial, medicinal, and sacramental purposes, the Volstead Act passed in 1919 over Wilson's veto outlawed any beverage containing more than one-half of one percent of alcohol (allowing near beer), provided for concurrent state and federal power over prohibition (so as not to set aside more drastic state laws), included a search-and-seizure clause, and provided for injunctions against and the padlocking of establishments selling alcoholic beverages.
Although a convinced prohibitionist, he was chagrined that the Volstead Act obscured his other legislative contributions. He was particularly proud of his authorship of the Capper-Volstead Cooperative Marketing Act (1922), which enabled farmers to organize marketing and bargaining cooperatives and exempted them from the antitrust laws. Volstead also supported woman's suffrage, backed a federal anti-lynch law, and favored extending workmen's compensation laws to longshoremen.
Personality
Thin and with a bushy moustache, a chewer of plug tobacco, Volstead was for much of his career an unobtrusive, taciturn, and kindly congressional back bencher.
For most Americans, Volstead personified prohibition, and he was reluctantly thrust into the limelight as a hero of the drys and the recipient of gibes, bitterness, and abuse from the wets.
Connections
Volstead met his future wife, a Scottish-born teacher, Helen Mary Osler ("Nellie") Gilruth (1868 - 1918), in Granite Falls. He married her on August 6, 1894. Their only child, Laura Ellen, was born in 1895.