prohibition definition us history

prohibition definition us history

The Prohibition Era in U.S. History: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Prohibition

The usufruct policy allows some or all persons to use, turn, or obtain an economic rent deriving from a certain good. In this case, liquor. Prohibition against liquor in the United States was both a legal and moral issue. The words prohibition and illegal are still widely used to express the wishes of the library profession. The issue of legal and moral prohibitions has many concerns for the effective operation of lending libraries. Furthermore, the means which were used to achieve total prohibition were also unique for the United States. Given the strength and determination of this group and the relatively wide acceptance of the ideal of total abstinence, the means of prohibition and the movement thereto may have differed in some respects from the other prohibition. It is a unique episode in both word and deed of attempts to prohibit a supposedly harmful and demoralizing exercise based upon competent scientific evidence on the injurious effects of the material concerned.

The 18th amendment was a unique move. Unlike prohibition laws in some areas and certain sections of the United States previous to 1917, this law had national constitutional basis, and total prohibition became effective through a ratification veto by which less than three-fourths of the states have. In English-speaking countries, prohibition is distinguishable from the usufruct system in that the policy of prohibition is to make a thing illegal for all or practically all persons and therefore not capable of being capitalized.

In 1917, the United States as a nation passed a comprehensive law once again prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and distribution of intoxicating liquors. This prohibition, or dry era, was designed to reduce the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Although no previous law of such severity had been enacted at the national level, prohibition had a long history in the 19th and into the 20th centuries as part of the temperance movement in the United States. Today, the prohibition era is a subject of great interest and controversy.

2. Causes and Context of Prohibition

The saloon was an old social institution, thousands of years of historical development which today is popularly held to be an outgrowth of industrialization and the Civil War. As such, anti-saloon and women’s temperance societies went into action quickly, only two years after the conclusion of the War, reflecting middle-class concern about the drunkenness, riotous male behavior, and loss of funds supposed to have been available for building schools, roads, and houses. Such outcries, besides indicting the “degenerate” lower-class saloon keeper, had as points of reference the small saloons available for all those members of downtrodden working-class groups associated with the “rabble”. A consciousness of values and allegiance to values, however, were clouded for a time by the seemingly miraculous industrial expansion at the beginning of the 1870s. These miracles were sufficient for businesses to postpone the change. Muslims, along with waves of Southern and Eastern Europeans or Slavs and Latins, came into the country and the people in charge were never again to be of pure, native American stock. At the same time, the Civil War came to be seen as an object lesson in solid political, economic, and industrial reform. This caused an obsession with progress and brought forth a revitalized enthusiasm that would lead the waves of reform: women’s rights, land reform, free education, church and state separation – all of which created wagons for the prohibition horse to hitch to. Newspapers and magazines covered on time the corruption in both political parties and the national guarantee of protection for distilleries, breweries, and saloons. Such evidences as regional incompatibility only added fire to the furnace, and certain areas of the country saw the writing on the wall for stricter legislation against the liquor trade. While most liberals and reformers, led by Progressives, were poised directly upon the receiving end of tumultuous grain surpluses and land values that reached far up into the sky, social and economic justice issues were quickly obscured and replaced in the moral field as drinkers witnessed two decades of smooth sailing.

The rapid transformation of the United States into an urban, industrial state was accompanied by divorce, higher education, the rise of a new social elite, a decline in the influence of the simple, thrifty Puritan ethic, and lucrative business opportunities associated with the alcohol industry itself. With industrialization, new problems were brought to the surface – poor housing, lack of proper sewage facilities, child labor, slums, and foreign immigration across the country’s porous borders. Alcohol became the symbol of these problems, the scapegoat upon which reformers of every stripe pinned society’s ills. As a result, the success of the Prohibitionists cannot be attributed entirely to the precepts of a sound campaign, shrewd political planning or well-dispersed propaganda, sound advice from campaign managers, or effective opposition in the form of intra-party strife. The repeal, in fact, was accomplished through a remarkable culmination of economic and social circumstances that were unshaped by the Prohibitionists themselves. The social and political history of the time profoundly affected both the movement’s success and failure.

3. Impact of Prohibition on Society and Culture

Huge amounts of money were devoted to enforcement; criminals grew stronger and richer as both they and the authorities turned their backs on the law, and it is highly doubtful if alcohol consumption was actually lessened in any way. Indeed, so many violent deaths occurred in America between 1919 and 1933 because of Prohibition that the failure of the Noble Experiment was easily predictable. It would take opium dens and heroin on the streets to show the Prohibitionists just how successful they had been, but by the time that lessons were learned about man’s antisocial behavior and were assimilated, the damage had already been done. Once relaxed, prohibition enforcement would no longer be a matter for local police, but a federal crime, one operated by federal police, spies, and informers who were in business to trap rum-runners.

I will demonstrate, in this chapter, how the social, economic, and political impact of state-sponsored attempts to outlaw alcohol consumption was to radically change the way it viewed its citizenry. Prohibition was to be the cause of many things, both good and bad, that were to occur in the 1920s and 1930s. Nothing in United States history has ever changed the way Americans thought about themselves and their country as suddenly or as dramatically as did Prohibition; the very nature of the country was radically altered either for the good or the bad.

4. Key Figures and Organizations in the Prohibition Movement

“He is the best chairman of the best lobby in Washington. People hate him, but talk about a statesman, he is it… We are not through yet, but our stockholders are in a position to declare a watermelon soon to their stock equal to about 200 percent of its present no par value on the book. It was through management that I got it there… He uses the power just exactly like James Mellon, the president of the United Steel Company, and has them out in the anteroom in his private office, laughing, eating out of his hand.”

Wayne Wheeler (1869-1927): The individual most crucial for the ASL’s success was Wheeler, the League’s general counsel and chief strategist. A hunchbacked, humorless, and entirely determined Ohio lawyer with firsthand experience of the bad effects of drink – his life had been knocked into a very different path by his father’s drinking – Wheeler reported to Pierce Butler, the Constitution’s greatest champion on the Supreme Court, that:

The Anti-Saloon League (ASL): By far the longest-lived and best-organized temperance association, the ASL was a loosely federated association of state organizations that shared a commitment to “county uniting” American Protestantism and American patriotism – that is, using the sale of liquor in times of war as a symbol of the disloyalty of alcohol producers and drinkers. As one would expect of an association based on a shared cultural and religious heritage, the ASL was an intensely moralistic organization. The Victorian manner of its leaders moderated the language of their denunciations of the “whiskey men.”

5. Repeal of Prohibition and Legacy

To offset the loss of federal revenues from taxes on alcoholic beverages, corporate taxes too were an answer. But the federal bureaucracy continues to grow and there is no lack of pronouncements that measures exist to save the world; taxes on alcoholic beverages were the most efficient means of obtaining the funds. Measures of state control replaced Prohibition. The minimum age permitted purchasing the strong drink at the time had a harmful effect on the body was 21.

Prohibition was eventually repealed. Hoover was repudiated at the polls by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led his party back to power, and his slogan became “A new day had dawned for wine and beer.” Congress cooperated to accomplish the 18th Amendment’s repeal by passing the necessary 21st Amendment. Similar leadership on the national level during the 1920s might have prevented the tragedy of Prohibition by promoting such a course earlier. It certainly seemed to be a course to be followed when in distress the country had looked to a leader in the presidential election in November 1932 to bring it back to a policy slow but just to usher in a more reasonable era.