The United States of America has has had some amazing victories
since its beginning. The equation is balanced by the number of
terrible mistakes and failures that have happened along the way too.
Possibly the biggest of America’s big mistakes was National
Prohibition, the time when the transport and sale of alcoholic
beverages was banned.
Alcohol had always been a contentious issue in American society.
A nation founded by Puritan pilgrims could never have an easy time
squaring their beliefs with a constitution founded on the principles
of individual freedom and limited government. By the early years of
the 19th century, a sector of the American public had
become heavy drinkers of liquor. Immigrant populations would later
bring wine and beer. Out of this tension between drunks and
teetotalers grew activist organizations like the Women’s Christian
Temperance Movement and the American Temperance Society. Emblamatic
of this mentality was a vigilante fighter, a hamfisted giant
joykiller of a woman named Carrie Nation who became legendary for
ransacking saloons, browbeating the patrons and bartenders while
destroying their stock of liquor with a hatchet.
The Temperance Movement coalesced around a strange mixture of
special interest groups who all had their own agendas. At the
forefront was the Women’s Suffragette Movement; feminism and
temperance were closely linked from the start since many women saw
alcohol as the root cause of domestic violence. The Suffragettes also
blamed poverty on drinking because all too many times they saw their
husbands’ wages get drunk up as they bought bottle after bottle of
liquor rather than paying for food or clothes for their kids. When
the Civil War ended and the slaves were freed, they believed the time
was ripe to bring a new fight to American legislature; womens’
right to vote and prohibition went hand in hand to the ballot box.
The Ku Klux Klan took up support for the Suffragette Movement; they
cared little about women’s right to vote but they saw an ally in
the fight against drunkenness in the band of feminist activists. The
KKK were primarily concerned with keeping alcohol out of the hands of
African-American people who they claimed were unruly and dangerous
because of their drinking habits. Nativist bigotry and anti-immigrant
sentiment played a role in the Temperance Movement too. Newly arrived
German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish citizens were known for their love
of beer and wine; racist Americans claimed that alcohol was
anti-American, a foreign custom, and its elimination would halt the
flow of migrants. Anti-immigration propaganda of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries could easily be substituted for
the ugly language used by right wing xenophobes in our own time. The
leaders of big corporations hated alcohol as well; they claimed that
workers who drank at night worked more slowly and less productively
during the day. They also claimed that drinking workers called in
sick more often and got injured on the job frequently. These ideas
have since been disproven. But the glue that held all these groups
together was Protestant and Evangelical Christianity. The dour, dull,
and overly serious religious coalition constituted the largest group
of Prohibitionists ever. Aside from the narrow-minded, pious
Americans, the Temperance crowd was overwhelmingly rural. They were
also a minority population with a loud and vocal group of political
activists trying to shove their unwanted agenda down the throats of
America.
As the Temperance Movement heated up, the anti-alcohol crowd
became known as the Drys while the fun-loving boozers became known as
the Wets.
Despite the unpopularity of their cause, the Temperance
activists got their voices heard by the government. In 1919, Congress
ratified the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, also
known as the Volstead act, and President Woodrow Wilson signed it
into law. Americans had one year to prepare because the Volstead act
would go into effect in 1920. The 18th Amendment was vague
and toothless; it allowed possession of small amounts of alcohol for
private consumption as well as the use of medicinal liquor and
sacramental wines for religious rites. The amendment did not provide
extra funding for law enforcement nor was there a national committee
set up to tackle the problem so the burden of upholding the new law
was passed down to police at the local level.
The Volstead Act represented Murphy’s Law to a tee; everything
that could go wrong did go wrong. Immediately, rich people began
buying up the stocks of liquor stores and storing the bottles in
their cellars. Membership in the Catholic church began to rise and a
record number of men became rabbis for the sake of having access to
wine. Fake pharmacies began to sprout up with the intention of
selling medicinal liquor; some of them stocked their shelves with
items they never intended to sell since the sale of their medicines
provided them with the profits they craved. Since home brewing small
amounts of wine did not get banned, the sale of grapes went up but
over the course of years, other agricultural products like wheat and
barley went down, causing many farmers to go bankrupt. Semi-sold
grape juice packets called wine blocks became popular; each
package contained instructions on how not to put the blocks in water
and leave them in a closet for two months to avoid the unwanted
outcome of accidentally making wine. People began drinking industrial
alcohol so the government started forcing factories to poison it
during production but amateur kitchen-chemists easily taught
themselves how to extract the poison in order to turn it into a
drink. The social stigma against women getting drunk subsided as more
and more females took to it as an act of rebellion.
Crime became worse as the Prohibition laws became less and less
enforceable. Petty criminals joined the police force because the
taking of bribes and protection money from the underground alcohol
industry became more lucrative than robberies, muggings, and theft.
Trafficking of liquor across the Canadian border increased steadily
since the long stretch of land that separates the two countries was
too large to police. Boats with bars dropped anchor off the American
shores just outside the national boundaries to avoid being seized by
the U.S. Coast Guard; motor boats took patrons out to these private
yachts at night for bouts of libations and debauchery. Most
notoriously, the Prohibition Era made the underworld of organized
crime gangs more powerful and more profitable. Al Capone, in Cicero,
on the outskirts of Chicago, became the most famous mob boss while
bootleggers in the north and moonshiners in the south flourished and
their illegal business opportunities made them love Prohibition as
much as the drys. Along with the rise of mafia-style groups
manufacturing bathtub gin and terrible tasting beer came increased
levels of gang violence, murder, extortion, racketeering and
everything else. Drinking in speakeasies, hidden away in back alleys
and secret locations, became common. In the end, the number of
alcohol drinkers was roughly the same under Prohibition as it was
before Prohibition.
On top of it all, the banning of liquor, beer, and wine led to a
loss of government tax revenue. The unpopular personal income tax was
instituted to offset the loss but it was never enough to cover public
expenses. Economic historians say that the loss of tax money from
alcohol led to the Depression; higher amounts of money in the
government budget could have saved the economy. Instead the market
crashed and many Americans lived through a decade of poverty. Luckily
for them, the ban on booze ended at about the same time so even if
they were poor, at least they could drink legally to help ease the
pains of poverty.
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign promises was to repeal
the 18th Amendment. After getting elected president, that
is what he did. In 1933, the 21st Amendment passed
successfully through Congress, ending the ban on alcohol and
Roosevelt signed it into law. One of America’s long national
nightmares had ended but it would not be the last.
Meanwhile, the organized crime gangs that profited so much from
Prohibition sought new ways of making large amounts of easy money.
Trafficking in narcotics became their next big project and soon a
national cartel called The Syndicate was born.
A recent poll showed that approximately 20% of Americans still
believe alcohol should be illegal. Most of them are conservative,
rural, and religious. Some people will never learn. America has
always been a country where small but vocal activist groups have
tried to force their unwanted creeds on a nation that is promised
freedom of choice. It makes one wonder if America will ever be saved
from the Americans.
Reference
Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
Scribner, New York: 2010.
