Prohibition

11 Key excerpts on "Prohibition"

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  Connecticut Bootlegger Queen Nellie Green

  • Tony Renzoni(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Arcadia Publishing

    (Publisher)

  5 THE Prohibition ACT

  A great social and economic experiment, noble in motive

  —Herbert Hoover, thirty-first president of the United States

  At midnight on Saturday January 17, 1920, the United States went dry. On that day and time, the Prohibition Act took effect, banning the “manufacture, sale, and distribution” of intoxicating liquor. Because of this law, saloons, distilleries and most breweries were forced to close their doors.

  From its onset, the Prohibition era has intrigued Americans in a number of different ways. Some advocated for a national Prohibition law to curb the negative effects of alcohol abuse, believing it had a devastating effect on the family, especially wives and children. Others have felt (and still feel) that the Roaring Twenties was an exciting, glamorous, spirited time that brought about the independent “new woman.” Still others felt that the Prohibition law was unjust and counterproductive—restricting a freedom they loved and enjoyed—and costly on a financial level.

  So, how did we get to this historic and controversial moment in American history? Let’s look back at the circumstances surrounding the Prohibition Act, mainly the temperance movement, the enforcement of the Volstead Act and the repeal of Prohibition.

  Well over one hundred years before the Prohibition Act took effect, organized groups throughout the United States began their pursuit to limit or outlaw the consumption and production of alcoholic beverages. Purportedly, the first temperance group on record in the United States was formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in 1789.

  Last call. Crowds rush to purchase liquor before the Prohibition law took effect. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

  These organizations began to champion the cause for temperance, arguing that alcohol abuse was morally corrupting and destroying families—both personally and economically. This organized effort demanding restrictions on alcohol became known as the temperance movement.

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  Empirical Futures

  Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz

  • George Baca, Aisha Khan, Stephan Palmié, George Baca, Aisha Khan, Stephan Palmié, Stephan Palmi?(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  ABSTINENCE AND POWER

  THE PLACE OF Prohibition IN AMERICAN HISTORY JANE SCHNEIDER /

  This essay accepts the premise that formal colonization is a poor yardstick for imperial reach; that the United States became an industrial-capitalist empire largely (although not exclusively) by other means. And it experiments with an additional idea: that it is instructive to approach the great migrations to the United States from southern and eastern Europe as a variant of colonial conquest whose associated traumas of labor exploitation, cultural repression, and racism touched off struggles of profound historical significance, comparable in a way to the struggles that unfolded in western Europe’sformal colonies.Here I focus on an otherwise difficult to comprehend struggle: the enactment of alcohol Prohibition and the related empowerment of organized crime.

  As we will see, alcohol Prohibition was a pet project of descendants of the first immigrants—Anglo-Saxon Protestants from England—who sought to control the labor, behavior, and entry of subsequent immigrant groups. Leading up to and following World War I, WASP evangelicals, temperance activists, and organizations such as the Anti-Saloon League won legislative majorities at the county, state, and national level favorable to passing quite punitive laws against gambling, prostitution, alcohol, and narcotics. Indeed, no less than a constitutional amendment, the Eighteenth, forbade the manufacture and distribution of all alcoholic beverages. Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was put into effect in 1920 by the Volstead Act, which took the further step of defining as “liquor” anything with more than 5 percent alcohol, thus including beer and wine, unless intended for sacramental, scientific, or mechanical purposes.

  Not repealed until 1933, Prohibition created a bonanza for law-breaking entrepreneurs, many of them immigrants. Among these, a network of Italians, leveraged by connections to Old World organized crime, became notorious gangsters. In effect at least some of America’s “internal colonial subjects” (a concept distinct from “internal colonialism

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  Repealing National Prohibition

  Second Edition

  • Hans P. Krings(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 ADOPTING NATIONAL Prohibition

  The crusade to abolish the use of alcoholic beverages through an amendment to the Constitution hit the United States like a whirlwind in the second decade of the twentieth century. In November 1913 the Anti-Saloon League of America first publicly appealed for a Prohibition amendment. By January 1919, scarcely five years later, Congress had approved and forty-four state legislatures had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, which proclaimed:

  1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

  2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

  3. The article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

  A tremendously significant social reform affecting the lives of millions had suddenly become part of the nation’s rarely altered basic law.

  Proponents of the so-called dry law faced little organized resistance as they marched to their triumph. Only brewers, distillers, and other commercial interests made strenuous efforts to block the reform. Individuals and groups offended by the challenge to their ethnic cultural traditions or by the limitation of their right to choose what to drink objected to the national liquor ban, but they lacked the channels and agents to give their protest focus and strength. New opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment began to form, however, in the midst of the Prohibitionist victory in response to the law itself, the manner of its adoption, and the political assumptions upon which it was based. The reaction against this important constitutional innovation, therefore, can only be understood in light of the circumstances of national Prohibition’s creation.

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  Marijuana Politics

  Uncovering the Troublesome History and Social Costs of Criminalization

  • Robert M. Hardaway(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Social commentators began to note the hypocrisy of politicians who defied the Prohibition laws in private while professing support in public. In more recent decades, U.S. presidents have admitted to using marijuana privately and yet have still publicly supported Prohibition on cannabis.

  Today, criminalization of marijuana use deprives the government of untold billions in tax dollars that are diverted toward nonproductive criminal uses—as they were during Prohibition. Although it is impossible to precisely determine the effects of criminalization of drug use on the economy, the economic loss of billions of dollars—just when government programs such as Social Security and Medicare compete for scarce dollars from a deficit-ridden treasury—is staggering. The 18th Amendment was passed by the one of the largest majorities in American political history and prohibited the production, distribution, and sale of all alcoholic beverages, including wine and beer. In 1917, it was approved by a vote of 65–20 in the U.S. Senate and 246–95 in the House, and the consequent amendment was then ratified by 45 of the 48 states within 25 months (only 36 states were needed for ratification).4 When Prohibition’s enforcing legislation, the Volstead Act, was vetoed by President Woodrow Wilson for technical reasons on October 27, 1919, his veto was overridden by Congress by a vote of 176–5 in the House and 65–20 in the Senate.5

  The Origins of Prohibition

  The American temperance movement can be traced to a widely reported sermon against the sins of drunkenness—or intemperance—delivered by Reverend Increase Mather of New England in 1673. Ministers of such religious denominations as the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregational Church followed this call with their own intemperance sermons. Many church leaders demanded total abstinence from alcohol from all members of their congregations. Because such calls for voluntary abstinence had only limited effect among churchgoers and were widely disregarded by those outside the church, they were soon followed by demands for laws enacted and enforced by the state.

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  Crime and the Rise of Modern America

  A History from 1865–1941

  • Kristofer Allerfeldt(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 In the usual reading of the decade, casual law-breaking went hand in hand with the frenetic partying and reckless speculating—accompanied by the worrying use of credit—followed by even more spending. As if this was not enough, it also had an even darker side. The money to be made from moon-shining, bootlegging and rum running sparked crime on a level never before seen in the US. It spawned characters whose immorality, violence, irreverence and ruthlessness have become legendary in a country already famous for its outlaws and criminals. Considered by many at all levels of American society to be both unenforceable and undesirable, Prohibition has been blamed for blurring even further what was already often a fuzzy distinction between law enforcement and law breaking. Judges and politicians bought booze from known criminals; respectable citizens distilled, bottled and sold “bath tub gin”; police and Prohibition agents took huge bribes; small-time hoodlums gained vast criminal empires and through their huge turnover funded an entire network of illegal ancillary industries and laundering operations ranging from transport firms to hitmen.

  Yet it should be remembered that Prohibition was itself a crusade, and that however flawed and however unsuccessful that crusade appeared in the 1920s, it had deep roots and an impressive pedigree. It had vocal supporters, in influential areas of US society. Prohibition had been a long time coming and it was by no means the only time that America tried to legislate to preserve the morality of its population. Nor was the “Noble Experiment” the last such experiment. Before the Eighteenth Amendment banned the importing, production, sale or distribution of alcohol, public gambling had come under sustained attack, so much so that by 1914, horse racing was only legal in six states. What was more, the Harrison Act of the same year prohibited the recreational use of most commonly used narcotics. While perhaps less dramatic, these Prohibitions outlasted that on alcohol. After the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, Nevada was the only state where most forms of gambling were openly allowed, and the Marijuana Taxation Act of 1937 tried to outlaw cannabis by imposing large fines and lengthy prison sentences on those convicted of possession.

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  Politics, Police and Crime in New York During Prohibition

  Gotham and the Age of Recklessness, 1920–1933

  • Francesco Landolfi(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Before the Eighteenth Amendment (1913–1919)

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003265009-4

  The law comes from Washington

  From the early stages of the Prohibition Party, US politicians wondered if the moral issue of temperance could really be solved by the political agenda of the Republican Party (Prohibitionists’ allies) without damaging the national economy. According to one of the founders of the Prohibition Party, James Black, in the 1870s it would have lost an annual turnover of about $1.5 billion with the ban of alcohol.1 Over the decades, Prohibition advocates were relegated to a clear minority status compared to the “prevailing sentiment” of the majority of the American people, who did not worry too much about the social problems concerning alcoholism and the saloons’ uncontrolled spread. These places were considered as part of the “American traditions, American ideas and ideals, American laws, customs and theories of government”2 that nobody should have removed.3 The American “dry” soul tried to make addicted people sober, so as to restore the country to a more civil life. Moreover, the argument went, the money saved from buying alcohol would increase bank accounts by $1 billion.4

  This kind of “doomed” citizen was described by Jack London in his novel John Barleycorn:

  When good fortune comes, they drink. When they have no fortune they drink to the hope of good fortune. If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink. If their love-making be crowned with success, they are so happy they needs must drink. If they be jilted, they drink for the contrary reason. … When they are sober they want to drink; and when they have drunk they want to drink more.5

  However, in other countries such as France and Great Britain alcohol consumption was never considered as a social disease. Actually, wine and beer were seen as positive products of civil progress, even though in the early twentieth century, these two European nations had a per capita annual consumption of alcoholic beverages higher than the United States. Great Britain was first in rank (160 quarts), then France (147 quarts) and far apart the United States (38 quarts) followed.6 Even in Italy, the use of wine was long included in family habits without sudden increases of crime or misery occurring. For instance, the US Consul in Florence, Jerome A. Quay, told the President of the Manufacturers and Producers Association of California, Andrea Sbarboro, in 1914 that “Replying to your enquiry relating to the prevalence of drunkenness in Florence, I can say that I have seen but two or three intoxicated men during my four year residence here.”7 Further, according to the President of the American Statistical Association, John Koren, the per capita statistical data during the five-year period 1906–1910 for whiskey, beer and wine consumption seemed to portray Americans as sober (84.13 quarts per capita annually), unlike the English (231.45 quarts), French (224.48 quarts), Italians (131.23 quarts) or Germans (117.03 quarts).8

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  What Prohibition Has Done to America

  • Fabian Franklin(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  A law punishing drunkenness, which is a public nuisance, comes under the head I have been speaking of; a law forbidding a man to drink for fear that he may become a drunkard does not. And in fact the Prohibitionists themselves instinctively recognize the difference, and avoid, so far as they can, offending the sense of liberty by so direct an attack upon it. It is safe to say that if the Eighteenth Amendment had undertaken to make the _drinking_ of liquor a crime, instead of the _manufacture and sale_ of it, it could not have been passed or come anywhere near being passed. There is hardly a Senator or a Representative that would not have recoiled from a proposal so palpably offensive to the instinct of liberty. Yet precisely this is the real object of the Eighteenth Amendment; its purpose and, if enforced, its practical effect is to make it permanently a crime against the national government for an American to drink a glass of beer or wine. The legislators, State and national, who enacted it knew this perfectly well; yet if the thing had been put into the Amendment in so many words, hardly a man of them would have cast his vote for it. The phenomenon is not so strange, or so novel, as it might seem; it has a standard prototype in the history of Rome. The Roman people had a rooted aversion and hostility to kings; and no Caesar would ever have thought of calling himself _rex_. But _imperator_ went down quite smoothly, and did just as well.

  In addition to its being a regulation of individual conduct in a matter which is in its nature the individual's own concern, Prohibition differs in another essential respect from those restrictions upon liberty which form a legitimate and necessary part of the operation of civil government. To put a governmental ban upon all alcoholic drinks is to forbid the _use_ of a thing in order to prevent its _abuse_. A Of course there are fanatics who declare--and believe--that _all_ indulgence in alcoholic drink, however moderate, is abuse; but to justify Prohibition on that ground would be to accept a doctrine even more dangerous to liberty. It is bad enough to justify the proscription of an innocent indulgence on the ground that there is danger of its being carried beyond the point of innocence; but it is far worse to forbid it on the ground that, however innocent and beneficial a moderate indulgence may seem to millions of people, it is not regarded as good for them by others. The only thing that lends dignity to the Prohibition cause is the undeniable fact that drunkenness is the source of a vast amount of evil and wretchedness; the position of those who declare that all objections must be waived in the presence of this paramount consideration is respectable, though in my judgment utterly wrong. But any man who justifies Prohibition on the ground that drinking is an evil, no matter how temperate, is either a man of narrow and stupid mind or is utterly blind to the value of human liberty. The ardent old-time Prohibitionist--the man who thinks, however mistakenly, that the abolition of intoxicating drinks means the salvation of mankind--counts the impairment of liberty as a small matter in comparison with his world-saving reform; this is a position from which one cannot withhold a certain measure of sympathy and respect. But to justify the sacrifice of liberty on the ground that the man who is deprived of it will be somewhat better off without it is to assume a position that is at once contemptible and in the highest degree dangerous. Contemptible, because it argues a total failure to understand what liberty means to mankind; dangerous, because there is no limit to the monstrosities of legislation which may flow from the acceptance of such a view. Esau _sold_ his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage which he wanted; these people would rob us of our birthright and by way of compensation thrust upon us a mess of pottage for which we have no desire.

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  Aftermath

  The Unintended Consequences of Public Policies

  • Thomas E. Hall(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cato Institute

    (Publisher)

  Home production and consumption would have been legal, as would purchasing liquor in Canada and bringing it into the United States for personal consumption or as a gift. Compare that version with the one that received the required two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate in 1917 and became Section 1 of the Eighteenth Amendment: After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. Unlike the 1914 version, this amendment (which superseded all state and local laws governing alcohol) could be interpreted as a blanket Prohibition against producing alcoholic beverages. According to Kobler, the ASL was behind this change (1973, 210). Senator Sheppard was later quoted in the newspapers as saying he never intended to make it illegal for people to produce alcohol for their own consumption. Section 2 of the amendment specifies that the states would assist the federal government in enforcing the law “by appropriate legislation,” which referred to the enforcement law that was needed for the amendment to have any impact. In other words, alcohol was prohibited, but what would be the penalty for violating the law? A slap on the wrist or the electric chair? Or something in between? That had yet to be decided. Section 3 contained the time deadline clause for ratification by the states. To the shock of the pro-alcohol forces, it took just 13 months for the necessary 36 states to ratify the amendment. 10 Ratification occurred on January 14, 1919. Two days later, the U.S. secretary of state announced that the constitutional process was complete and that Prohibition would take effect one year later

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  Prohibition in the Upper Peninsula

  Booze & Bootleggers on the Border

  • Russell M. Magnaghi(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  PROHIBITION , A REALITY

  OR, HOW TO COPE

  Banning liquor through the Eighteenth Amendment had the effect of making it more desirable. Old drinkers were not to be denied, and new drinkers found a new thrill possessing and partaking of illegal spirits. Lawabiding citizens were now lawbreakers when they bought and held a bottle of liquor or entered a speakeasy. The public was not to be denied.

  The immediate effect of the start of state Prohibition on May 1, 1918, was the closure of hundreds of saloons throughout the Upper Peninsula. For many owners, this was a jolt into reality—they were out of business. Some decided that it was time to retire. Others did not know where to turn now that their livelihoods were gone. For the immediate future, some of them opened soft drink parlors, lunch counters and billiard and pool establishments.

  Across the UP, newspapers provide insights as to how these saloonkeepers dealt with the new era. In the copper country, the Calumet News provides some local examples: twenty-six-year bartender veteran A. Turcotte opened a pool hall, Antonio Giuglio followed with a billiard parlor, Charles McCann established a refreshment shop and John M. Foley opened a lunchroom. Martin Yaunch Sr. was nearing retirement after forty years in the saloon business, but his sons, Martin and William, turned the saloon room in the Haas Brewing Company’s building into a billiard hall. One of the finest hotels in the UP, the Douglass House in Houghton, kept its bar open as a lounging room where refreshments were available.

  Seeing that these soft drinking shops would become social centers, much as the saloons had been, communities licensed them. As time passed and problems arose, additions were made to the ordinances so that soft drink shops could not have screens or curtains on the windows, and they were forbidden to tolerate lewdness or immorality of any kind, including drunkenness, disorder, gambling, profanity and obscenity. Provisions were also made to keep high school kids from entering the pool parlors. Other former saloonkeepers waited because the sale of soft drinks and near beer would not come close to the profits made in the saloon trade.

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  Prohibition's Greatest Myths

  The Distilled Truth about America's Anti-Alcohol Crusade

  • Michael Lewis, Richard Hamm, Michael Lewis, Richard Hamm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • LSU Press

    (Publisher)

  MYTH 3 THE Prohibition AMENDMENT AND SUPPORTING LAWS SOUGHT TO BAN INDIVIDUAL DRINKING LISA M. F. ANDERSEN

  It was 1917, and Senator Thomas Hardwick, a Georgia Democrat, issued a challenge to his colleagues. No friend of

  Prohibition himself, his patience tried after listening to senator after senator pontificate on how the so-called Prohibition amendment would end drunken debauchery, Hardwick finally rose to point out a problem: the amendment’s text did not make alcohol consumption illegal. Was this simply an oversight? If

  the amendment were to include a ban not only on the “manufacture, sale, importation, exportation, and transportation” but also on the consumption of alcohol, he noted, then “ that is complete Prohibition, practical Prohibition.” Anything less than such a clear statement of the amendment’s aims would be “utterly and totally insincere and uncandid,” and Hardwick therefore proposed that consumption immediately be added to the list. 1

  Hardwick’s ostensibly helpful suggestion was what contemporaries called a “joker amendment,” one designed not to increase candor about the amendment’s purpose but instead to sink the Prohibition amendment before it was launched. His colleagues were not amused by this showboating. Yet the confusion Hardwick

  pretended

  to feel is now rampant among modern Americans. Libertarians, for example, assume that the Eighteenth Amendment must have been about banning consumption when they use persistent Prohibition Era drunkenness as evidence that it is futile to legislate against human desires. Liberal reformers likewise assume that the Eighteenth Amendment was primarily an anti-consumption vehicle when they contend that Prohibition’s overscrutiny of

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  The Rise And Fall Of Prohibition

  • Charles Hanson Towne(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Otbebookpublishing

    (Publisher)

  “The United States ‘easily holds first place in the manufacture of statutory law,’ declared Mr. Emery in his speech. ‘A single Congress,’ he added, ‘usually receives some 20,000 bills. Many of the States consider not less than 1000. During the year 1921, 42 legislatures were in session. Judging from past years, Congress and the States annually enact an average of 14,000 statutes. The State and National legislation of a single year recently required more than 40,000 pages of official print.’

  “Certainly, it is time for a Congress on limitation of legislation.”

  The same paper has this to say, editorially, on “The Achilles Heel of Prohibition”:

  “National Prohibition has not been long on trial. The final effect of the fundamental change in our Constitution involved in the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment has not been, and cannot be, yet determined. All the evidence which we have seen, however, tends to show that the nation is better off materially and physically under Prohibition than under the system which permitted the sale of intoxicating beverages. Benefits to be derived from the elimination of the drink traffic did not wait upon our National experiment for demonstration. They have been obvious for centuries in the experience of peoples from whom alcohol has been barred by religious authority. There remains, however, a very serious problem confronting the defenders and advocates of national Prohibition. It is the problem of maintaining the respect for law and order and that mental habit of ready acceptance of legal enactments which is one of the strongest bulwarks of applied democracy.

  “We do not doubt for a minute that the majority of the people of the United States are in favor of national Prohibition. Even in great cities where the liquor interests have had their stronghold we suspect that the number of men and women who would vote for national Prohibition, were it put to the popular test, is much larger than the ‘wets’ are willing to admit. We say this in order that this editorial may not be considered as an argument for the repeal of Prohibition amendment by those who are working for such ends upon premises which we regard as distinctly unsound.

  “To say that there is a majority in favor of the amendment does not imply that there is not a large and active minority in favor of its repeal. The greatest problem confronting advocates of national Prohibition lies in the fact that this large minority has not accepted the amendment with that good faith and willing spirit which we have grown to look upon as characteristic of the spirit of the losers in our political controversies. There have been great changes in our government prior to the enactment of the Prohibition Amendment, but almost invariably these changes, once effected, have been acquiesced in by their most ardent opponents. We are not speaking of individual violators, but of the public attitude towards the law.

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