I | INTRODUCTION |
Prohibition, legal ban on the manufacture and sale of
intoxicating drink; by extension, the term also denotes those periods in history
when such bans have been in force, as well as the political and social movements
advocating them. Such movements (also called temperance movements) have occurred
whenever significant numbers of people have believed that the consumption of
alcoholic beverages presented a serious threat to the integrity of their most
vital institutions, especially the institution of the family. Drunkenness is
considered an evil in most of the world’s major religious traditions, and Islam
has for centuries forbidden even the moderate use of fermented drink. In the
West, however, efforts to ban the consumption of alcohol have been a relatively
recent phenomenon. Their origin can be traced to the apparently rapid spread of
the technology of distillation and of alcohol abuse in 18th-century Europe,
which alarmed those concerned with public health and morals.
II | THE EARLY PROHIBITION MOVEMENT IN THE U.S. |
In England and the American colonies,
governments after 1750 made repeated and futile efforts to discourage the
excessive use of distilled spirits. In the mid-19th century Abraham Lincoln said
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.” By the 1820s people in the
United States were drinking, on the average, 27 liters (7 gallons) of pure
alcohol per person each year, and many religious and political leaders were
beginning to see drunkenness as a national curse.
Many people believed a close relationship
existed between drunkenness and the rising incidence of crime, poverty, and
violence, concluding that the only way to protect society from this threat was
to abolish the “drunkard-making business.” The first state prohibition law,
passed in Maine in 1851, prohibited the manufacture and sale of “spiritous or
intoxicating liquors” not intended for medical or mechanical purposes, and 13 of
the 31 states had such laws by 1855. By that time the annual per capita
consumption of absolute alcohol had fallen to about 8 liters (about 2
gallons).
The political crisis that preceded the
American Civil War distracted attention from Prohibition. Many of the early
state laws were modified, repealed, or ignored, and for years few restraints
were placed on manufacturing or selling anything alcoholic. The population
increased rapidly after the Civil War, and soon there were more than 100,000
saloons in the country (about 1 for every 400 men, women, and children in 1870);
these saloons became increasingly competitive for the drinkers’ wages. Thus,
many of them permitted gambling, prostitution, sales to minors, public
drunkenness, and violence.
III | THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE |
In reaction to this, the extraordinary
“Women’s War” broke out across the nation in 1873. Thousands of women marched
from church meetings to saloons, where with prayer and song they demanded—with
transitory results—that saloonkeepers give up their businesses. By 1900,
millions of men and women were beginning to share this hostility toward the
saloon and to regard it as the most dangerous social institution then
threatening the family. The Anti-Saloon League of America (ASL), organized in
Ohio, effectively marshaled such people into political action. State chapters of
the ASL endorsed candidates for public office and demanded of their state
governments that the people be allowed to vote yes or no on the question of
continuing to license the saloons.
By 1916, no less than 23 of the 48 states had
adopted antisaloon laws, which in those states closed the saloons and prohibited
the manufacture of any alcoholic beverages. Even more significant, the national
elections of that year returned a U.S. Congress in which the ASL-supported dry
members (those who supported Prohibition) outnumbered the wet members (those who
were against Prohibition) by more than two to one. On December 22, 1917, with
majorities well in excess of the two-thirds requirement, Congress submitted to
the states the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited “the
manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” By January 1919
ratification was complete, with 80 percent of the members of 46 state
legislatures recorded in approval.
IV | PROHIBITION IN OTHER COUNTRIES |
At this point in history, most Protestant
nations had come to regard drinking as a social evil, and the Prohibition
movement was being accelerated by the circumstances of World War I. While
rallying British workers to increase their productivity in support of the war
effort, Prime Minister David Lloyd George stated that “we are fighting Germany,
Austria, and drink; and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly
foes is drink.” Soon the British government limited the sale of alcoholic drink
to a few early evening hours. In Scotland, the citizens of towns and villages
had the right (local option) to vote out drinking establishments after 1920. In
Sweden, where the movement had been strong since the 1830s, the government
abolished both the profit motive and the competition from the liquor traffic
after 1922 by nationalizing it. An even harsher measure there restricted sales
to 1 liter (about 1 qt) per family per week. In Norway, voters outlawed the sale
of drinks with an alcoholic content of more than 12 percent by referendum in
1919. That same year the Finnish government banned the sale of any drink of more
than 2 percent alcohol. Canada was then dry in all provinces.
V | NATIONAL PROHIBITION IN THE U.S |
To enforce the 18th Amendment, Congress passed
the National Prohibition Act, usually called the Volstead Act because
Congressman Andrew Volstead of Minnesota introduced it in 1919. This law defined
the prohibited “intoxicating liquors” as those with an alcoholic content of more
than 0.5 percent, although it made concessions for liquors sold for medicinal,
sacramental, and industrial purposes, and for fruit or grape beverages prepared
for personal use in homes. Because the Congress and the state legislatures,
however, were reluctant to appropriate enough money for more than token
enforcement—and because the opportunities for disregarding the law through
smuggling, distilling, fermenting, and brewing were legion—Prohibition always
represented more of an ideal than a reality. On this basis the Prohibition era
began at midnight on January 16, 1920.
A | The Effects of Prohibition |
The era inspired an extensive body of
colorful literature, most of it alleging that the period was one of moral decay
and social disorder precisely because of “Volsteadism,” which came to mean the
intolerable searches, seizures, and shootings by police who, with their token
enforcement, seemed to threaten intrusion into the private lives of
law-respecting persons. It also alleged that Prohibition distorted the role of
alcohol in American life, causing people to drink more rather than less; that it
promoted disrespect for the law; that it generated a wave of organized criminal
activity, during which the bootlegger (one who sold liquor illegally), the
“speakeasy” (an illegal saloon), and the gangster became popular institutions;
and that the profits available to criminals from illegal alcohol corrupted
almost every level of government. Historians, however, believe that in the
beginning of the era, and at least until the middle of the decade, most
Americans respected the law, hoped that it would endure, and regarded its
passage as directly responsible for the reduced incidence of public drunkenness
and of alcohol-related crime, imprisonments, and hospitalizations. Statistics
show that Prohibition reduced the annual per capita consumption from 9.8 liters
(2.6 gallons) of absolute alcohol during the period before state laws were
effective (1906-1910) to 3.7 liters (0.97 gallons) after Prohibition (1934).
Moreover, no striking statistical evidence of a crime wave during the 1920s
exists, although the crime rate did rise.
B | Movement Toward Repeal |
In the late 1920s, however, more and more
Americans found the idea of repeal increasingly attractive. The reasons for this
were numerous and complex, the government’s failure to enforce the law being
only one of them. Most Americans were happy that the old-time saloon had been
abolished, but they felt that a new society was emerging in the 1920s—a
primarily urban and industrial society of great geographic and social mobility
and great ethnic and religious diversities, in which the protection of the
family from alcohol was perhaps less socially urgent than the expansion and
protection of individual freedom.
This disillusionment with Prohibition
occurred in every country that had earlier attempted it. In Canada, the dry laws
of 1919 were soon repealed because of economic pressures, not the least of which
were the opportunities to sell liquor to citizens of the dry U.S. Provincial
laws after repeal did, however, provide for government-owned stores and for
local option. In Norway, a referendum in 1926 abolished the earlier restriction,
but strict regulation of the times and places liquor could be sold preserved a
tight rein on drunkenness. Sweden held to state monopoly and severe rationing.
Finland repealed its prohibition law by referendum in 1932.
VI | THE END OF PROHIBITION |
In the U.S., a major shift in public opinion
occurred during the early years of the Great Depression, when opponents could
argue persuasively that Prohibition deprived people of jobs and governments of
revenue and generally contributed to economic stagnation. The actual political
campaign for repeal was largely the work of the Association Against the
Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), a nonpartisan organization of wealthy and
influential citizens in all states who were “wet” in principle and who feared
that through Prohibition the federal government might permanently compromise the
tradition of individual freedom. Like the ASL, the AAPA actively endorsed and
opposed candidates for state and federal offices. Its goal was that Congress
should submit to the states the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which would
repeal the 18th, and submit it in such a way as to circumvent the various state
legislatures in which, it feared, dry legislators from rural districts, in
opposition to majority sentiment, might present a serious challenge to
ratification. To avoid this, Congress—for the first time since the Constitution
itself was ratified and for much the same reason—called for ratifying
conventions in each of the states: Delegates would be elected by the people for
the specific purpose of voting yes or no regarding the question of the 21st
Amendment. The elections for convention delegates in 1933 produced a repeal vote
running almost 73 percent. In a remarkably coordinated effort by the states and
the Congress, ratification was complete in December of that year.
Following repeal, liquor control again became
a state rather than a federal problem. The annual per capita consumption of
absolute alcohol in the country rose after the repeal from 4.5 liters (1.2
gallons) in 1935 to 10.2 liters (2.7 gallons) in 1975, but most states still
retain restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol.
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