The Beginning of Prohibition
By Daniel Rose, Second Year History
Today marks the one-hundred-and-fifth anniversary of the passing of the Volstead Act, and the beginning of prohibition in the United States.
The temperance movement – the campaign by those who saw alcohol as a moral and religious sin – began in the 1820s and gained momentum throughout the 19th century. At the forefront of the effort were women. With the establishment of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874, prohibition became commonly known as the ‘woman’s crusade’, and it became the first time in US history that women led a politically driven movement.
Feeling blighted by their drunk husbands, alcoholism was framed as a ‘maternal struggle’ for the morally pure mothers of America. Aided by the ‘Second Great Awakening’, the early 19th-Century Protestant revival which had placed mothers at the centre of morality, women expanded their roles in the public sphere, taking action that became increasingly radical as the century progressed. The initial non-violent tactic of holding prayer at saloons had, by the 1900s, progressed to more disruptive techniques, exemplified by the infamous prohibitionist Carrie Nation, who would travel to saloons across the country, committing ‘hatchetisms’ – smashing up the liquor bottles of bars with a hatchet with ‘Death to Rum’ engraved on the handle.
Within this climate, it was the establishment of the anti-saloon league in 1893 that transformed protest into legislation. This group revolutionised pressure politics and redefined what protest groups could hope to achieve. For the first time, the Anti-Saloon League took political protest, and organised it into a ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘departmentalised’ organisation that systematically targeted politicians and political processes to create the ‘first “modern” pressure group’.
By 1920 the temperance movement had become so embedded within American politics that, when the Volstead Act was initially presented and President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, support was so strong that Congress overrode the veto. Individual states then implemented further measures to ensure that the federal government would not curb efforts to prohibit alcohol.
And thus followed the thirteen-year experiment of prohibition. Alcohol consumption, throughout most of the prohibition years, dropped to 60-70% of pre-prohibition levels. Subsequently, rates of deaths from cirrhosis, alcohol-induced psychosis, and public drunkenness decreased.
Yet the experiment was far from a clear success. Speakeasies were everywhere. The prohibition-enforcing police duo of Moe Smith and Izzy Einstein, who rose to fame as the most prolific enforcers of prohibition, once made seventy-one raids in just over twelve hours.
Meanwhile, the illegality of alcohol meant that gangsters took over the market. Previous small-time criminals like Al Capone became household names as they rose to notoriety, and appalling violence broke out. This culminated in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre when seven gangsters were executed in the streets of Chicago. Gangsters thrived where prohibition was most enforced, as a recent study found that homicide rates increased by 30-60% in counties with stricter prohibitive measures.
Prohibition ultimately failed to solve the social ills of alcoholism, and the promise of its repeal won Franklin D. Roosevelt one of the largest landslide victories ever in the 1932 presidential election. By replacing the pain of alcohol with new avenues of violent social unrest and suffering, a new black market was created that persists to the present day, serving as a reminder that drugs cannot be defeated by a call to arms and recourse to punishment. As the effects of the failed war on drugs linger with us today, perhaps reflection on the drug wars of the past can remind us that such endeavours rarely come without unintended, and disastrous, side effects.
Edited by Ben Bryant