Anti-saloon LeagueViews on prohibition enactment, WatchMojo, 2012
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"Drinking alcohol was a big problem in the early 1800s... Drunkenness had damaged home life through violence. Drunken husbands spent food money on liquor. They beat their wives and children. They lost their jobs and pay... By the mid-1890s, the Progressive movement had become a powerful force in society and politics... Their time had come to help change national laws in order to stop the harmful effects of drinking alcohol." - Mark Beyer, Temperance And Prohibition, 2006
"The time for nation-wide movement to outlaw the drink traffic is auspicious... the traffic being the source of so much evil and economic waste and the enemy of so much good has no rightful place in out modern civilization." - Purley A. Baker (Anti-Saloon League), calling for national prohibition, The Sabbath Recorder, 1861.
Alcohol BannedThe 18th Amendment was passed in 1917 - "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."
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Crime EmergesConsuming alcohol had always been a part of the American culture, dating as far back as colonial times. "By barring liquor from the masses, the government unwittingly made it more desirable, more fashionable, and something eager consumers had to get their hands on" (Tori Avey, The Great Gatsby, Prohibition, and Fitzgerald, 2013).
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"The real problem of prohibition enforcement turns on the intensity of the conviction in certain communities not merely that the law is a failure, but that it ought to be a failure." - Walter Lippman, Harper's Monthly Magazine,1928
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“Prohibition tripled the revenues of the most successful racketeers within the first few years… Across the country outlaws learned that bribing the police and delivering whiskey were far more profitable than stickups, bank robberies, or jewel heists” - Rich Horning, Al Capone, 1998
"Many Americans with a taste for liquor were determined to get hold of a drink one way or another. Illegal drinking dens had long flourished in big cities; indeed, the word "speakeasy" probably dates from the late 1880s. But now they bloomed as never before; historians estimate that by 1925, there were as many as 100,000 illegal bars in New York City alone." - The Guardian, 2012
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Cartoon depicts two men, "Georgia" and "Maine," attempting to subvert prohibition by disguising alcohol as "Cold Tea" and "Orange Phosphate."
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“I was born a teetotaler, and I have been a teetotaler all my life… Neither my father nor his father ever tasted a drop of intoxicating liquor. [But Prohibition has brought] an evil even greater than [drinking], namely a nationwide disregard for law.” - John D. Rockefeller, Temperance and Prohibition, 2006.
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Perspective of a bootlegger:
"I have gotten rich, but I have made a lot of people happy. I have never run across a man in my life who refused to take a drink because it was against the law, and I have never met a man who thought I was a crook, just because I am a bootlegger and proud of it." - The New Yorker, 1926. |