The Prohibition Era

1. The Temperance MovementBy 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year – three times as much as we drink today – and alcohol abuse (primarily by men) was destroying the lives of many people. This was especially true for women, because they had few legal rights and were completely dependent on their husbands for support. The temperance movement, rooted in America's churches, first urged moderation, then

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encouraged drinkers to help each other to quit drinking altogether, and finally demanded that the government prohibit alcohol outright.

Temperance Group #1: The Women's Christian Temperance Union

After the Civil War, millions of immigrants – mostly from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other European countries – crowded into the nation's growing cities. They worked hard to blend in while retaining own country’s habits and customs. The beer brewing business was very lucrative as German-American businessmen provided the new immigrants with millions of gallons of beer for the saloons. In the 1870s thousands of women began to protest and organize politically for the cause of temperance. Their organization, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), became a force to be reckoned with.

By the late 19th century the WCTU, led by Frances Willard, could claim some significant successes. It had fought for local laws restricting alcohol and created an anti-alcohol educational campaign that reached into nearly every schoolroom in the nation. Its members viewed alcohol as the underlying source of a long list of social ills and found common cause with Progressives trying to ameliorate the living conditions of immigrants crowded into squalid slums, protect the rights of young children working in mills and factories, improve public education, and secure women's rights. But the WCTU's ultimate goal, a prohibition amendment to the constitution, still seemed impossibly out of reach. It would take the emergence of a new organization, the Anti-Saloon League, to get the eighteenth amendment passed.

Temperance Group #2: The Anti-Saloon League

The Anti-Saloon League became the most successful single issue lobbying organization in American history, willing to join with any and all groups that

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shared its only goal: a constitutional amendment that would ban the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol. They united with Democrats and Republicans. They were friends with both the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP. They joined forces with both the International Workers of the World and America's most powerful industrialists including Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew Carnegie – all of whom lent support to the ASL's effective campaign.

America passed the income tax amendment in 1913, which began taxing people’s income for the first time. Now the federal government no longer needed liquor taxes to fund its operations, and the ASL moved into high gear. As anti-German fervor rose to a near frenzy with the American entry into the First World War, ASL propaganda effectively connected beer and brewers with Germans and treason in the public mind. Most politicians dared not go against the ASL. In 1917 the 18th amendment sailed through both houses of Congress; it was ratified by the states in just 13 months.

Americans were about to discover that making Prohibition the law of the land was much easier than enforcing it.

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2. The “Noble Experiment”

"The streets of San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before transporting their contents would become illegal. The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways "with haggard faces and glittering eyes." Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year's Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city's hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharfside saloons. It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of "bottled sunshine" liberated from "cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places." Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrendering to darkness."

--Excerpt from "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent

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When the Prohibition era in the United States began on January 19, 1920, very few people predicted it would not go well. Certainly, previous attempts to outlaw alcohol had been unsuccessful. When a Massachusetts town banned the sale of alcohol in 1844, a tavern owner took charged its customers for the price of seeing a striped pig—the drinks came free with the price of admission, so technically, no one was buying alcohol. When Maine passed a strict prohibition law in 1851, the result was resentment among the city's working class and Irish immigrant population. A deadly riot in Portland in 1855 led to the law's repeal. Now, Prohibition was written into the Constitution and being put into effect nationally. What followed was a whole series of unintended consequences.

Just a few minutes after prohibition went into effect, six masked bandits with pistols emptied two freight cars full of whiskey from a rail yard in Chicago. Another gang stole four casks of grain alcohol from a government warehouse, and still another hijacked a truck carrying whiskey.

These crimes should not have come as a surprise. President Herbert Hoover's 1928 description of Prohibition as "a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose" entered the popular lexicon as "the noble experiment." It was unfortunate for the entire nation that the experiment failed as miserably as it did.

3. Economic Effects of Prohibition

Prohibition's supporters were initially surprised by what did not come to pass during the dry era. When the law went into effect, they expected sales of clothing and household goods to skyrocket. Real estate developers and landlords expected rents to rise as saloons closed and neighborhoods improved. Chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drink companies all expected growth. Theater producers expected new crowds as Americans looked for new ways to entertain themselves without alcohol. None of it came to pass.

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Instead, the unintended consequences were a decline in amusement and entertainment industries across the board. Restaurants failed because they could no longer make a profit without legal liquor sales. Theater revenues declined. Few of the other economic benefits that had been predicted came to pass. On the whole, Prohibition was bad for the economy. Breweries, distilleries and saloons closed, and as a result, thousands of jobs were eliminated. Thousands more jobs in related industries were eliminated, such as barrel makers, truckers, and waiters.

The economic consequences of Prohibition didn't stop there. One of the most profound effects of Prohibition was on government tax revenues. Before Prohibition, many states relied heavily on excise taxes in liquor sales to fund their budgets. In New York, almost 75% of the state's revenue was derived from liquor taxes. With Prohibition in effect, that money was immediately lost. At the national level, Prohibition cost the federal government a total of $11 billion in lost tax revenue, while costing over $300 million to enforce. The most lasting consequence was that many states and the federal government would come to rely on income tax revenue to fund their budgets going forward.

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4. The Problems of Enforcing Prohibition

Prohibition led to many more unintended consequences because of the “cat and mouse” nature of Prohibition enforcement. While the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating beverages, it did not specifically outlaw the possession or consumption of alcohol in the United States. Congress fixed this by passing the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. This federal law provided for the enforcement of Prohibition, but it also left enough loopholes that it opened the door to many schemers who wanted to evade the law.

Cartoon A

One of the legal exceptions to the Prohibition law was that pharmacists were allowed to dispense whiskey by prescription for any number of ailments, ranging from anxiety to influenza. Bootleggers quickly discovered that running a pharmacy was a perfect front for their trade. As a result, the number of registered pharmacists in New York State tripled during the Prohibition era.

Because Americans were also allowed to have wine for religious reasons, enrollments rose at churches and synagogues, and cities saw a large

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increase in the number of self-professed rabbis who could obtain wine for their congregations.

The law was unclear when it came to Americans making wine at home. The American grape industry began selling kits of juice concentrate with warnings not to leave them sitting too long or else they could ferment and turn into wine. Home stills were technically illegal, but Americans found they could purchase them at many hardware stores, while instructions for distilling could be found in public libraries in pamphlets issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The law that was meant to stop Americans from drinking was instead turning many of them into experts on how to make it.

The trade in unregulated alcohol had serious consequences for public health. As the trade in illegal alcohol became more lucrative, the quality of alcohol on the black market declined. Since illegal goods cannot be regulated by the

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government, the quality and safety of bootlegged alcohol varied greatly. On average, 1000 Americans died every year during the Prohibition from the effects of drinking tainted liquor.

Cartoon B

5. Conclusion: The Greatest Consequence

Prohibition’s effects on law enforcement were also negative. The sums of money being exchanged during the dry era proved a corrupting influence in both the Federal Bureau of Prohibition and at the state and local level. Police officers and Prohibition agents alike were frequently bribed. Some even went into bootlegging themselves. Many stayed honest, but enough gave in to temptation that the stereotype of the corrupt Prohibition agent undermined public trust in law enforcement for the duration of the era.

The growth of the illegal liquor trade under Prohibition made criminals of millions of Americans. Gangsters like Al Capone became rich and powerful from the business of selling illegal alcohol. As the decade progressed, court

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rooms and jails overflowed, and the legal system failed to keep up. Many defendants in prohibition cases waited over a year to be brought to trial. As the backlog of cases increased, the judicial system turned to the "plea bargain" to clear hundreds of cases at a time, making it a common practice in American courts for the first time.

The greatest unintended consequence of Prohibition however, was the plainest to see. For over a decade, the law that was meant to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance and excess. The solution the United States had devised to address the problem of alcohol abuse had instead made the problem even worse. The statistics of the period make it very clear that in many parts of the United States more people were drinking, and people were drinking more.

Prohibition failed to achieve what it set out to do, and its unintended consequences were far worse than its few benefits. The ultimate lesson is two-fold. Firstly, watch out for solutions that end up worse than the problems they set out to solve, and secondly, remember that the Constitution is no place for experiments, noble or otherwise.

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