PROHIBITION
Paragraph 1: What it is, How it came about.
Prohibition is considered as a period of time in the 1920’s when alcohol was controlled by the government. Alcohol, at this time in history, was illegal unless for medical or industrial purposes. This government control came about because of the fact that people were drinking too much and “destroying the moral fiber of America.” (Martin 76). Protestant congregations and women’s groups also wished to eliminate the consumption of alcohol. Alcohol has been part of American society since the colonist came over on the Mayflower. At that time, alcohol was safer to drink that the contaminated water or unpasteurized milk, and cheaper than tea or coffee imported from India and Spain. As time went on and technology improved, the need for alcohol diminished greatly. Political leaders at this time were seeing alcohol as a public curse. Abraham Lincoln was quoted as saying “Alcohol . . . used by everybody, repudiated by nobody” (Cashman 68).
Paragraph 2: The Enforcement
Before the turn of the century, alcohol abuse was getting out of control. Employees were forced to pay the many liquor-related accidents that occurred at work. Saloons, outnumbering schools, libraries, hospitals, theaters, parks or churches (ns.headroyce 1), were everywhere and competing for the drinker’s money. These saloons had prostitutes, permitted gambling, sold alcohol to minors, encouraged violence and public drunkenness, and were believed to corrupt the local government into passing laws in favor of them. 1873, the Anti-Saloon League of America (ASL) formed to inform people about the harms of alcohol abuse. These people would march from church to the saloons with bibles and prayer. An onlooker was noted as saying, “These people have a noble cause at heart and the means to accomplish was needs to be done” (Martin 97). At the turn of the century, the ASL, along with similar groups, voted members into Congress with overwhelming support. By 1917, over two-thirds of the members in Congress were ASL-supported. These members passed laws toward nationwide prohibition.
Paragraph 3: The End
In 1919, all 48 states ratified the 18 Constitutional Amendment, outlawing alcohol sales unless for medical or industrial use. For a while, this helped. However, a new generation was just coming of age in America. These young people were considered corrupt by the society outside of their own. The people drank, engaged in multiple love affairs, and openly disobeyed the law.
During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, many saw alcohol as a cause of instability among communities. To counteract the effects of alcohol on American society, The Temperance Movement, Prohibition Party and many others sought to enact anti-liquor laws that would prohibit the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol. On January 19, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment had taken effect and a nationwide ban on alcohol was enacted. This was thought of as a solution to the many problems that America had at the time, but it only made matters worse. The American society had been greatly affected by the Eighteenth Amendment in many negative aspects such as increasing crime and violence, worsening the economy, and much more.
In 1920 following the ratification of the 18th amendment the country became dry. The 18th amendment made it illegal to manufacture, sell, import, or export drinking alcohol. It would stay this way for a little more than a decade, which became known as the prohibition. Prohibition was a way to clean up the cities and improving the conditions of the US. Prohibition was approved because drinking was thought be a drag on the economy and the leading cause for some of the country's problems such as corruption, child abuse, crime, and unemployment. Fourteen years later in 1932 America had changed its mind and it was repealed. So what changed? The American people had changed their minds about the 18th amendment because crime had increased,
Enacting prohibition in a culture so immersed in alcohol as America was not easy. American had long been a nation of strong social drinkers with a strong feeling towards personal freedom. As Okrent remarks, “George Washington had a still on his farm. James Madison downed a pint of whiskey a day”. This was an era when drinking liquor on ships was far safer than the stale scummy water aboard, and it was common fo...
The real reason the Prohibition Act was passed is not because the Legislation had voted for it, but rather the large amount of supporters it had. 33 out of 48 states had already passed the laws within 1920. The direct support was mainly coming from the South, which the number grew from 1820’s to 1840’s. These groups mainly campaigned against the outcome of drinking alcohol. Woman’s groups were behind many temperance movements for they were targets of abuse due to drunken husbands. Many times drinking was blamed upon the economics and the changes it has undergone.
The Anti-saloon league museum is a standing testament of a period long gone. Located within the Westerville Ohio library, it houses important artifacts and memorabilia from the Prohibition era. At the height of its popularity, the league was a national organization which boasted branches across the United States.4. Along with various Christian organizations, the league was able to marshal resources that enabled it to bring the prohibition fight to congress and the senate. Tours and group presentations expose curious visitors to the inner workings of the league. Video footage taken from the height of the organizations power allows onlookers to explore the conditions that led to the ban on alcohol being enforced to such a magnitude. Newspaper clippings detailing speakeasy shutdowns and police confrontations with moonshine runners are hung along the walls of the museum.
The prohibition movement was aimed primarily at closing saloons. Saloons were the brewing companies place in retail business, selling alcohol by the glass. In the early twentieth century, there was one saloon for every one-hundred fifty or two-hundred Americans. This competitiveness forced saloon keepers to find other ways to make money. By the 1920's saloons had become houses of gambling and prostitution, not the innocent, friendly bar we associate the word with today (Why Prohibition?). The prohibition advocates found such establishments offensive, and sought to revoke their licenses.
The intention of making the manufacturing, transportation, and sale of liquor illegal was to improve the lives of all Americans, to protect families, individuals, and society as a whole from the dangerous affects of alcohol abuse (Burns). This caused many faith driven Americans to rethink their morality and the def...
The particular emphasis and theme of this paper will focus on delivering an understanding as to why the eighteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States of America, ratified into law in January 1920, outlawing the manufacture, distribution and sale of intoxicating alcohol, was always predestined to fail. In order to fully understand why this ‘Nobel Experiment’ was doomed from the start, the paper must first look back at the historic connection between the American people and alcohol. In order to set some context as to where alcohol sat in American society, this essay will give a passing glance at figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but more importantly, it will examine the intrinsic connection between alcohol and the wider population. The essay will look at how this sometimes destructive rapport people had with alcohol, turned into the great social experiment, Prohibition. The paper will look at the anxiety held, by mostly protestant American’s, that alcohol was at the heart of all evils in society and how this lead to the emergence of a myriad of different groups like the Washingtonians, the Women’s Temperance movements’ and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and how all of these were over shadowed by the emergence of the Anti-Saloon league. The paper will pay particular attention to how the arrival of the most powerful and influential, single issue lobby group ever to have emerged on the American political stage, painstakingly paved the way for the introduction of the eighteenth amendment. The essay will also looking at the influence the Anti-Saloon league had in drafting the Volstead Act, the law designed to enforce prohibition, and how the subsequent exploitable loopholes turn millions of Ame...
“Prohibition did not achieve its goals. Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve.” On 16th January 1920, one of the most common personal habits and customs of American society came to a halt. The eighteenth amendment was implemented, making all importing, exporting, transporting, selling and manufacturing of intoxicating liquors absolutely prohibited. This law was created in the hope of achieving the reduction of alcohol consumption, which in turn would reduce: crime, poverty, death rates, and improve both the economy, and the quality of life for all Americans. These goals were far from achieved. The prohibition amendment of the 1920's was ineffective because it was unenforceable. Instead, it caused various social problems such as: the explosive growth of organized crime, increased liquor consumption, massive murder rates and corruption among city officials. Prohibition also hurt the economy because the government wasn’t collecting taxes on the multi-billion dollar a year industry.
The beginning of the 19th century marked the ongoing social debate of the ban of alcohol and alcohol consumption. The period following the American Revolution led to many Americans drinking alcohol to excess. However, the Temperance Movement was created to solve this growing problem. Led by a group of Christian women, the movement was created to moderate mens’ drinking habitats thus protecting domestic home life. But by the 1820s the movement started to advocate for the total abstinence of all alcohol; that is to urge people to stop drinking completely. The movement was also influential in passing laws that prohibited the sale of liquor in several states.
Prohibition originated in the nineteenth century but fully gained recognition in the twentieth century. The Prohibition was originally known as the Temperance Movement. In the 1820s and 1830s, a wave of religious revivalism developed in the United States, leading to increased calls for temperance, as well as other reform movements such as the abolition of slavery (“Prohibition”). These reforms were often led by middle class women. The abolition of slavery became a more important topic of debate until after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, temperance societies were a common thing throughout the communities in the United States (“Prohibition”). Women advocated the unity of the family, and they believed alcohol prevented such a thing. Drunken husbands only brought about negativity to the home, and women could not support that behavior. Suffragists, in their pursuit for voting rights, also sought to eliminate alcohol from the home. Small-scale legislation had been passed in several states, but no national laws had been enacted. On January 29, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified by Congress; it banned t...
On January 16, 1919 America changed forever the Amendment declared it illegal to manufacture, transport, and sell alcoholic beverages in the United States. More than two-thirds of the Senate, two-thirds of the House of Representatives, and three-fourths of the state legislature now has approved the change. Prohibition was ruled illegal because drinking is most of America’s serious problems like child abuse, crime, unemployment, and workers safety. People would come to work with a hangover or was really drunk, and some of the workers where probably so drunk that they were absent for work. Then fourteen years later the Amendment was repealed, it was almost as if Americans changed their mind on Prohibition.
Prohibition, which was also known as The Noble Experiment, lasted in America from 1920 until 1933. There are quite a few results of this experiment: innocent people suffered; organized crime grew into an empire; the police, courts, and politicians became increasingly corrupt; disrespect for the law grew; and the per capita consumption of the prohibited substance—alcohol—increased dramatically, year by year. These results increased each of the thirteen years of this Noble Experiment, and they never returned to the levels that existed before 1920. Prohibition did not happen instantly, it settled on the country gradually, community by community, town by town, and eventually state by state for almost a century. The onset of National Prohibition in 1920 was merely the final blow. The first of the laws, such as the one in Virginia in 1619, through New Hampshire's law of 1719 were against drunkenness, not against drinking. The first law that limited liquor sales was implemented because of the religious beliefs of citizens. This particular law was passed in New York in 1697; it ordered that all public drinking establishments be closed on Sunday because, on the Lord's day, people should be worshiping the Bible not the bottle. In 1735, the religious had a prohibition law enacted for the entire state of Georgia. The law was a complete failure and was abandoned in 1742. For the most part, however, during the 1700s and early 1800s, those opposing liquor on religious grounds used sermons and persuasion rather than politics and laws to make their point. These persuasive efforts were known as the Temperance Movement, and its goal was to get everyone to voluntarily temper use of spirits. Maine went completely dry in 1851 and, by 1855, so had New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York Alabama passed a Prohibition law in 1907 which became effective on January 1, 1909. Also in Alabama, the publishing of liquor advertisements and the circulation of other materials containing alcohol and liquor advertisements were prohibited in 1915. By 1920, thirty-three states encompassing 63% of the country had already voted themselves dry (Cherrington 344).
The introduction of prohibition in 1919 created numerous opinions and issues in American society. Prohibition has been a long-standing issue in America, with groups promoting it since the late eighteenth century. The movement grew tremendously during the nineteenth century. When the United States entered World War 1 in 1914, there was a shortage of grain due to the long demands to feed the soldiers. Since grain is one of the major components in alcohol, the temperance movement now had the war to fuel their fight. Thus, the war played a large part in the introduction of Prohibition. During the net five years many states enacted their own prohibition laws, and finally, on December 16,1919, Amendment 18 went into effect. It states that, “…the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors…. For beverage purpose is hereby prohibited.”(Constitution)
Although the temperance movement was concerned with the habitual drunk, its primary goal was total abstinence and the elimination of liquor. With the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, the well-organized and powerful political organizations, utilizing no holds barred political tactics, successfully accomplished their goal. Prohibition became the law of the land on January 16, 1920; the manufacturing, importation, and sale of alcohol was no longer legal in the United States. Through prohibition, America embarked on what became labeled “the Nobel Experiment.” However, instead of having social redeeming values as ordained, prohibition had the opposite effect of its intended purpose, becoming a catastrophic failure.