To What extent was Prohibtion doomed to fail from its inception?

Authors Avatar

Sarah Crook

Candidate Number- 1043

Centre Number- 61211

To What Extent Was Prohibition Doomed to Fail From its Inception?

By the 16th January 1920 the policy of National Prohibition, which banned the production, export, import, transportation and sale of alcohol came into effect and applied to all parts of the USA, with only Rhode Island, New Jersey and Connecticut rejecting it.  

“Prohibition began as a temporary wartime measure to protect the morals of soldiers and to save grain.  The Selective Service Act forbade the sale of liquor to men in uniform and in August 1917, the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act forbade the use of foodstuffs to distill liquor.  Prohibition was destined, however, to become a permanent way of life.”

Prohibition as it became known, was first introduced, however, as part of the 18th Amendment to the constitution, in December 1917.  This gave state governments the power to choose to introduce prohibition within their state; prohibition gradually became popular across the USA and by this time 26 states were dry and more than half of the population lived in an area of effective prohibition. The 18th Amendment was followed up by the Volstead Act of 1919 which classified all drinks containing 0.5% alcohol as liquor and appointed penalties to be given in cases of someone breaking the prohibition laws. By the time of the Volstead Act three quarters of the states of the US had accepted prohibition.

The first Prohibition Commissioner, John F. Kramer was confident the policy would prove to be successful, he stated, “The law will be obeyed in cities, large and small, and in villages, and where it is not obeyed, it will be enforced…. The law says that liquor to be used as a beverage must not be manufactured. We shall see that it is not manufactured. Nor sold, nor given away, nor hauled in anything on the surface of the earth or under the earth or in the air.”

However as we were to later find out, although alcohol consumption was halved during the dry years, as a whole Prohibition was a failure, if the comment made by John F. Kramer were true how did the failure come about?  This essay will look into the reasons as to why prohibition failed, and whether there ever was a chance it was going to succeed or was it doomed to fail right from the start? It will also look at what happened to America as a result of the failure of prohibition.

To understand why prohibition failed we need to start at the beginning at look at why prohibition was introduced in the first place.

Originally prohibition was a focus of life in small rural American towns, “it was a crusade against liquor inspired by the misery, poverty, depravity and violence that alcohol was perceived to produce”

Other groups of people began to get involved; these included the Anti-Saloon League, who wanted a total ban of all alcohol, this group consisted of middle class, protestant, church going citizens, and the Women’s Christian Temperance

Movement.  These groups and many like these drew up reasons as to why prohibition should be introduced. In order to sustain their anti alcohol campaign they used practical, moral and religious arguments.

These are explained by John Traynor, “Practical- A ban on the production of alcohol would conserve supplies of important grain such as barley. The efficiency of both industrial workers and the armed forces would be enhanced by a ban on liquor.  Moral- it was wrong for Americans to continue to enjoy the consumption of alcohol while some

of its young men were making the supreme sacrifice on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Religious- The consumption of alcohol went against God’s will.”

Medical science of the time gave the temperance movement strength. Before 1860 alcohol was thought to be medically good, it was used as a stimulant and for warming by manual workers and often given by doctors as medicine. However, “Medical experimentation soon revealed that alcohol was a depressant which clouded judgment and impaired physical performance. Habitual and excessive use, researchers discovered, turned alcohol into a poison which destroyed the liver, damaged unborn children and caused insanity.”    The discovery of this information gave the factory workers and employers an incentive to join the temperance movement; they would not want something such as alcohol to hinder their production and profit.

Join now!

Evidence that business men thought in this way can be seen through the actions of John D. Rockefeller, “he believed that the nation’s workers would be more productive if beer and liquor could be withheld from them. Rockefeller poured at least $350, 000 into the Anti-Saloon League before 1920.”

Many of the reasons put forward for supporting prohibition by the temperance supporters relied very heavily on the working class male.  For example the women who were saying that alcohol caused domestic violence used only examples of working class men, also the business men claiming prohibition would increase the productivity ...

This is a preview of the whole essay