Prohibition came about on the 16th of January 1920and was abolished by 1934, just 14 years later. There were many reasons that this happened.
Prohibition came about on the 16th of January 1920and was abolished by 1934, just 14 years later. There were many reasons that this happened.Prohibition is the banning of a certain substance from a certain area or country. In America the case was alcohol.Just after the war many anti alcohol and saloon parties had enough evidence to accuse alcohol for the problems plaguing the American public. The Anti-Liquor campaign in America dates back since 1750 when leaders of that period made repeated efforts to discourage the excessive use of distilled spirits. Many religious and political leaders were beginning to see drunkenness as a national curse. Abraham Lincoln said of this period that intoxicating liquor was 'used by everybody, repudiated by nobody' and that it came forth in society 'like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay if not the first, the fairest born in every family'. The most powerful organization against the consumption of alcohol beverages is the so-called 'Anti-Saloon League' which was founded in Washington D.C. on December 18, 1895. One of its leaders once said, promoting his organization, 'It has not come [...] simply to build a little local sentiment or to secure the passage of a few laws, or yet to vote the saloons from a few hundred towns. These are mere incidents in its progress. It has come to solve the liquor problem.' The organization's motto was 'The saloon must go' and they knew exactly how this was to be accomplished. The League struggled on without great successes. Americans continued to consume the liquor increasingly until the enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, which turned Prohibition into law. The Eighteenth Amendment was devised by Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League and was presented to Congress on January 16, 1920, by Andrew Volstead, congressman from Minnesota. At midnight of the same day all saloons were closed down throughout the United States, and national prohibition descended upon the earth, climaxing a long campaign to forbid the use of liquor within America's boundaries. The eighteenth amendment was " After one year the manufacture, sale or transporting of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes, the importing and exporting of such liquors is hereby prohibited"A poster urging the motto " The saloon must go".There were other reason why the Anti Saloon League wanted alcohol banned they feared it was:- Crime producing- Food wasting- Youth corrupting- Home wreakingAnother poster degrading the effects and consequences of alcoholAnother party against the consumption of Alcohol was the "Woman's temperance league"They were a party of women who also disagreed with the problems that were alcohol related and campaigned to get the amendment passed. Dr. Dioclesian Lewis is credited with inspiring women to enter the movement en masse, and militantly.
"He fought staunchly for total abstinence, but he ridiculed the dogma that liquor was the source of all crime and violently opposed prohibition; in a book called Prohibition a Failure he predicted that it could never be enforced because it violated personal liberty, the "great vital, pivotal fact of human life. Temperance historians created the legend that his father was a drunkard, and pointed out that his maternal grandfather, a Baptist deacon, was also a distiller.But banning alcohol wasn't that simple. Alcohol was more then just a drink, it was a way of life. People needed it for many reasons.A ...
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"He fought staunchly for total abstinence, but he ridiculed the dogma that liquor was the source of all crime and violently opposed prohibition; in a book called Prohibition a Failure he predicted that it could never be enforced because it violated personal liberty, the "great vital, pivotal fact of human life. Temperance historians created the legend that his father was a drunkard, and pointed out that his maternal grandfather, a Baptist deacon, was also a distiller.But banning alcohol wasn't that simple. Alcohol was more then just a drink, it was a way of life. People needed it for many reasons.A fashion at the South was to take a glass of whiskey, flavoured with mint, soon after waking; and so conducive to health was this nostrum esteemed that no sex, and scarcely any age, were deemed exempt from its application. At eleven o'clock, while mixtures, under various peculiar names-sling, toddy, flip, etc.-solicited the appetite at the bar of the common tippling-shop, the offices of professional men and counting rooms dismissed their occupants for a half hour to regale themselves at a neighbour's or a coffee-house with punch, hot or cold, according to the season; and females or valetudinarians, courted an appetite with medicated rum, disguised under the chaste names of "Hexham's Tinctures" or "Stoughton's Elixer." The dinner hours arrived . . . whiskey and water curiously flavoured with apples, or brandy and water, introduced the feast; whiskey or brandy and water helped it through; and whisky or brandy without water secured its safe digestion, not to be used in any more formal manner than for the relief of occasional thirst or for the entertainment of a friend, until the last appeal should be made to them to secure a sound night's sleep. Rum, seasoned with cherries, protected against the cold; rum, made astringent with peach-nuts, concluded the repast at the confectioner's; rum, made nutritious with milk, prepared for the maternal office . . .. No doubt there were numbers who did not use ardent spirits, but it was not because they were not perpetually in their way . . .. The friend who did not testify his welcome, and the employer who did not provide bountifully of them for his help, was held niggardly, and there was no special meeting, not even of the most formal or sacred kind, where it was not thought necessary, to produce them . . ..A hundred and fifty years Boston manufactured and consumed more rum than any other city in America, while in the back country of Massachusetts the thirst for ardent spirits was so great that farmers frequently sold their wheat for rum in the fall and winter, and in the spring and summer travelled forty or fifty miles to get bread. It was often said, that their only care,And their only wish, and only prayer,for the present world, and the world to come,Was a string of eels and a jug of rum.Throughout the country, offices and business establishments closed at eleven o'clock so that everyone could get a drink-Leven O'clock Bitters. In most of the colonies work similarly stopped at four. These practices were observed most any time the people gathered. "When a group of citizens of Schenectady, New York, held a woodcutting bee in 1748 to lay in the local minister's winter supply of fuel, the men who did the sawing and chopping drank five gallons of rum and a half gallon of wine." Mr Daniel Brown quoted that: "Workmen commonly received part of their wages in rum or other ardent spirits, and were given stipulated days off for sprees, or, as most work agreements frankly phrased it, "to get drunk." This all made prohibition impossible to actually work considering drinking played such a huge part in people all over America's lives.At the very same day when the Eighteenth Amendment was enforced people in America began to doubt its success. Yet, they were willing to respect it not only because it was the will of the people, but also because they wanted to get rid off an evil that poisoned the mind of the American people in general. Simultaneously, various criminals finally noticed their chance of getting rich quickly, by bootlegging and trafficking intoxicated liquor from Canada, Mexico and the West Indies. These criminals also opened some places where they could sell their beverages at very high prices.The agents that were trying to stop the importation were paid little and were few and far between so gangsters found it easy to bribe them into allowing them to smuggle alcohol into the U.S.A. A Canadian revenue collector described the Ontario port of Bridgeburg, on the Niagara River near Buffalo, in April 1929: There are twelve boats plying between here and Buffalo, New York, the river at this point being about half a mile wide.... The boats are all loaded and clearance granted about 5 P.M., and they are compelled to leave by 6 P.M. Some of these boats carry from eight hundred to one thousand cases... No effort, as far as we can see, is made by the United States authorities to seize any of the boats, as the United States Customs are always notified by us an hour or two before the boats leave, giving them the names of the boats and the quantity of liquor or ale on board. We have had high customs officials from Buffalo, special agents, and officers connected with the Coast Guard come over to the Canadian side and watch these boats load and pull out. It is a well-known fact that some of these boats land within a few hundred yards of the United States Customs office, and unload without being disturbed.... Our officers who check these boats out were informed by one of the rumrunners that they had no trouble in landing their cargo, as the officers of the dry squad on the American side assisted them.In 1925 Canada and America signed a convention under which customs officers of both countries notified their opposites when a boat cleared with dutiable goods. The rum boats kept coming, and kept bribing customs guards. Then in 1927 the government decided to make a big push at Detroit, and the Customs Service concentrated in that area a hundred picked men of the Border Patrol and more than half of the patrol's boats, while the Prohibition Bureau doubled the number of agents working out of its Detroit headquarters. The campaign was a flat failure. During the year ending March 31, 1928, according to the records of the Ontario Provincial Government, boats carrying 3,388,016 gallons of liquor were legally cleared at Windsor for Detroit. Of this quantity American agents seized only 148,211 gallons... In 1930 the Secretary of the Treasury proposed... that the Army mount guard from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the Canadian border be closed to all travel except at a few points to be designated by the President."A table showing the increase in alcohol related offences between 1920 - 1925Whiskey was by far the most sought-after drink during prohibition.... bootleg whiskey, gin, brandy, liqueurs, and cordials numbered their victims by the thousands. Other thousands died, then or later, of kidney ailments and other disorders induced by hooch, but for which the bad liquor "No large city escaped the ravages of the gangs, but nowhere else did they attain such power as in Chicago. All the evils of prohibition came to a head in the Illinois metropolis, and were symbolized by the podgy figure of Al Capone, affectionately known as "the big fellow" and "the big shot." Although he was a pander, a dope peddler, a racketeer, a briber, an extortionist, and a savage and merciless murderer, Capone became one of the great popular heroes of his time. Millions of Americans ignored his crimes and admired him for disdaining a law, which was becoming increasingly unpopular letting them bring in alcohol so they could sell it.Capone leaving a court room in 1931Capone reached celebrity status. In Chicago he was rich and powerful. He had bodyguards and was know by everyone. His rival gang leader Bugs Moran and him were in the height of gang wars. Bugs shot one of Capone's friends. Capone got his revenge. Seven leading men in Bugs's gang were murdered in their meeting place in North Clark Street in the St. Valentine's massacre on February 14th. Moran himself arrived at the meeting late, there fore avoiding the shooting.A photo from the sceneSeeing that the Eighteenth Amendment was offering more evil than good, different intellectuals of the period organized themselves into committees in order to repeal the act of prohibition. One such committee that acted even before the introducing the Eighteenth Amendment was Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), which was founded by Captain William H. Stayton on November 12, 1918. This association had some of the most distinguished Americans of that period amongst its members, such as Charles H. Sabin, president of Guaranty Trust Company of New York. His wife Pauline Morton Sabin also founded Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). Both these two associations appealed to president Hoover to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, by stating that the Eighteenth Amendment instead of a promised millennium delivered only bootleggers and racketeers, instead of prosperity it delivered adversity. They used similar methods that the anti- saloon leagues used to ban alcohol in the first place- It backed 'wet' candidates (opponents of prohibition) for political jobs- It advertised it's ideas in newspapers and magazines- It criticised the opposition - in this case the Anti-Saloon League- It produced books, ideas and pamphlets. These blamed prohibition for almost every social problem- from disease to poverty, unemployment to crime.Depression finally broke Prohibition. The wets be laboured the obvious that legalizing liquor would create thousands of much-needed jobs and greatly increase dwindling federal revenues. This helped convince not a few drys. "They held the belief, later shown to be somewhat naive, that what the government didn't have the government couldn't spend." In March 1931 Alfred E. Smith and John J. Raskob tried to get the Democratic National Committee to demand the repeal of the Eighteenth. Franklin D. Roosevelt contended that it was too early to commit. But in 1932, at the Democratic convention, they unanimously adopted a repeal plank. "We favour the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment," it said. The Republican convention didn't call for repeal, but was otherwise the same, calling for submitting a repeal amendment to the states. "What most of the voters seemed to remember, however, was what Roosevelt said when he made his dramatic appearance at the Democratic convention to accept the nomination. "I say to you," he shouted, "that from this date on, the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed!" On April 10, the first state convention was held in Michigan, and the repeal amendment was ratified unanimously. Utah, the thirty-sixth state, voted for ratification by three to two on November 7, and on December 5 the convention made it official. The Twenty-first Amendment then became a part of the Constitution, and the noble experiment was at an end. After the elections of 1932-1933, some Republican Senators gathered and drafted a new Amendment that would repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. This would become the Twenty-First Amendment. In this Amendment, the Senators proposed three things: (a) an end to national prohibition; (b) that the federal government retain the right to protect dry states against the import of liquor; (c) and that Congress should have concurrent power with the states to forbid the return of the saloon. After taking office on March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt requested a special session of the Congress on March 13 to revise the Volstead Act.