Prohibition   BACK TO HOME PAGE
 

                                                                                                    At midnight, January 16, 1920, the United States went dry. Breweries, distilleries, and saloons were forced to close their doors.

Led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the dry forces had triumphed by linking Prohibition to a variety of Progressive era social causes. Proponents of Prohibition included many women reformers who were concerned about alcohol's link to wife beating and child abuse and industrialists such as Henry Ford who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor productivity. Advocates of Prohibition argued that outlawing drinking would eliminate corruption, end machine politics, and help Americanize immigrants.

National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain should be made into bread for fighting men and not for liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew."

Unsuccessfully, the brewing industry argued that taxes on liquor were paying more for the war effort than were liberty bonds. Yet even after Prohibition was enacted, many ethnic Americans viewed beer or wine drinking as an integral part of their culture, not as a vice.

The wording of the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture and sale (but not the possession, consumption, or transportation) of "intoxicating liquors."

Enforcing the law proved almost impossible. Smuggling and bootlegging were widespread. Two New York agent, Izzie Einstein and Mo Smith, relied on disguises while staging their raids, once posing as man and wife. But after a raid on New York City's 21, that trapped some of the city's leading citizens, their efforts were halted. In New York, 7,000 arrests for liquor law violations resulted in 17 convictions.  By 1925, half a dozen states, including New York, passed laws banning local police from investigating violations. Prohibition had little support in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

Prohibition did briefly pay some public health dividends. The death rate from alcoholism was cut by 80 percent by 1921 from pre-war levels, while alcohol-related crime dropped markedly. But seven years after Prohibition went into effect, the total deaths from adulterated liquor reached approximately 50,000, and many more cases of blindness and paralysis. According to one story, a potential buyer who sent a liquor sample to a laboratory for analysis was shocked when a chemist replied: "Your horse has diabetes."

Prohibition quickly produced bootleggers, speakeasies, moonshine, bathtub gin, and rum runners smuggling supplies of alcohol across state lines. In 1927, there were an estimated 30,000 illegal speakeasies, twice the number of legal bars before Prohibition. Many people made beer and wine at home. Finding a doctor to sign a prescription for medicinal whiskey, sold at drugstores was relatively easy.

Cleveland had 1,200 legal bars in 1919, a year before Prohibition went into effect. By 1923, the city had an estimated 3,000 illegal speakeasies, along with 10,000 stills. An estimated 30,000 city residents sold liquor during Prohibition and another 100,000 made home brew or bathtub gin for themselves and friends.

Prohibition also fostered corruption and contempt for law and law enforcement among large segments of the population. Harry Daughtery, attorney general under Warren Harding, accepted bribes from bootleggers. George Remus, a Cincinnati bootlegger, had a thousand salesmen on his payroll, many of them police officers. He estimated that half his receipts went as bribes. Al Capone's Chicago organization reportedly took in $60 million in 1927 and had half the city's police on its payroll.

Popular culture glamorized bootleggers like Chicago's Capone, who served as the model for the central characters in such films as Little Caesar and Scarface. In rural areas, moonshiners became folk heroes. The fashion of the flapper, dancing the Charleston in a short skirt, was incomplete without a hip flask.

With a huge consumer market unmet by legitimate, organized crime filled the vacuum left by the closure of the legal alcohol industry. Homicides increased in many cities, party as a result of gang wars but also because of an increase in drunkenness.
 

When the country entered the Great Depression, the jobs and tax revenue that a legal liquor industry would generate looked attractive. During his presidential campaign in 1932, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never hid his fondness for martinis, called for Prohibition's repeal.

The noble experiment ended at 3:32 p.m., December 5, 1933, when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, repealing Prohibition.

Even today, debate about the impact of Prohibition rages. Critics argue that the amendment failed to eliminate drinking, made drinking more popular among the young, spawned organized crime, disrespect for law, and encouraged solitary drinking and led beer drinker to hard liquor and cocktails. (One wit joked that "Prohibition succeeded in replacing good beer with bad gin.") The lesson these critics draw is that it is counterproductive to try to legislative morality.

Their opponents argue alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition, probably by 30 to 50 percent. Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver for men fell from 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 to 10.7 in 1929.

Was Prohibition a "noble experiment" or a misguided effort to use government to shape morality? Even today, the answer is not entirely clear. Alcohol remains a serious cause of death, disability, and domestic abuse. It was not until the 1960s that alcohol consumption levels returned to their pre-Prohibition levels. Today, alcohol is linked each year to more than 23,000 motor vehicle deaths and more than half the nation's homicides and is closely linked to domestic violence.

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