Prohibition
Question F
Some of sources A to J do not suggest an inevitable failure of Prohibition where as some of them you cannot use as evidence because they were published after or during Prohibition. I think that sources A, B, E, I and J all suggest that Prohibition was inevitably going to fail where as sources C, D, F, G and H all do not suggest that inevitably Prohibition was going to fail.
Source A is a historian talking about Prohibition in 1973. It says firstly about the causes of Prohibition, which make it seem that Prohibition was not going to fail. By saying things like ‘The bad influence of saloons’ and ‘Most important of all was the moral fervour inspired by the War to Make The World Safe for Democracy’’ make it sound that this article would have been strongly for the introduction of Prohibition. However in the second paragraph he uses hindsight to try and prove that it would have been inevitable with lines such as ‘For no earlier law had gone against the daily customs, habits and desires of so many Americans.’ Therefore I believe that this source suggests that the failure or Prohibition was inevitable. Source B is a historian talking about Prohibition in 1979. The first paragraph is about the causes and events of Prohibition so, as with Source A, this paragraph is saying that Prohibition was not going to fail. Quotations such as ‘…great evils of the times – alcoholism’ make this article sound like it would have been for the introduction of the Prohibition law meaning that they could not have thought that it was going to fail. The second paragraph yet again talks about the results as if they were destined to happen. When Al Capone says ‘all I do is supply a public demand’ it links into Source A’s last line of ‘For no earlier law had gone against the daily customs, habits and desires of so many Americans.’ And says that people were always going to want alcohol and so the failure of Prohibition was unavoidable. Source E Is John D. Rockefeller Jr speaking in 1932 about Prohibition. Rockefeller started off supporting Prohibition so from that and the fact that he financed the Anti-Saloon League then he must of thought that the failure of Prohibition was not a certainty. Unfortunately as he later says he had to change his mind because he saw that Prohibition failed and that ‘…drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of law breakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has greatly lessened and crime has increased to a level never seen before.’ This shows that with the benefit of hindsight he has seen that Prohibition was destined to fail. Source I and J are both interlinked because they both are about the bribery and corruption during the time of Prohibition. The reason I feel that these two sources are supporting the view that the failure of Prohibition was inevitable is because if the public were going to still want alcohol, as stated in sources A and B, then the people still selling the alcohol are going to obviously do anything they can to avoid getting caught. If the people above the policemen, e.g. Prohibition Agents, are still wanting the alcohol like everyone else, then they will be bribed in order to get drink for themselves.
