Some experts have argued that the federal apparatus of enforcement was never sufficient to police such a far-reaching piece of legislation over a country as vast as the US. But historian Lisa McGirr, in her recently published book The War on Alcohol , says it was not the efficiency of enforcement that was at fault. But, she argues, enforcement had an in-built class bias: the war was waged primarily against the poor, the working class, immigrant communities, the marginalised.
That assault was most systematic in the mid-west and the south, where the Ku Klux Klan were active in pursuing bootleggers and backsliders. Just as the Volstead Act represented a rearguard action by old, militant Protestant, white America, so its enforcement was conditioned by the values and social biases of the groups that had backed it.
Complete prohibition was always going to be desperately difficult to enforce, but this patchy, politically motivated, socially divisive application of the act made it increasingly unpopular.
An unenforceable or corruptly enforced law is a bad law, and the Volstead Act was eventually discredited. It decimated the legitimate beer, spirits and fledgling wine industry in the US, but Americans who wanted to drink carried on drinking as alcohol flowed in from neighbouring countries. Estimated consumption in the s dropped to half its previous level — a long way short of the teetotalism that temperance campaigners, who believed that alcohol consumption would somehow become a historical anomaly, believed was possible.
As well as boosting organised crime and political corruption, prohibition made life worse for many hardened drinkers. The trend away from spirits towards beer was reversed during prohibition, because bootleggers made greater profits by smuggling spirits.
And there was less remedial help available for alcoholics because heavy drinking was seen as a moral failing rather than a disease.
Alcoholics Anonymous was not formed until , two years after repeal, by which time it was possible to separate social drinking from habitual drinking, drinking for leisure from drinking for life. Prohibition ultimately failed because at least half the adult population wanted to carry on drinking, policing of the Volstead Act was riddled with contradictions, biases and corruption, and the lack of a specific ban on consumption hopelessly muddied the legal waters.
In truth, while there was a desire to curb the anti-social effects and moral degradation of drinking, and to strike against the forces perceived as threatening the social and political status quo, there was no national will to stop the act of drinking itself. The law staggered on for 13 years — testament to the strength of the forces of old America — but growing disillusionment and the coming of the Great Depression, which meant the government urgently needed the return of liquor taxes, ensured its demise.
It is now seen as something of a footnote in US history — a bizarre episode between the first world war and the Depression — but because it encapsulates a clash between two visions of America, it deserves to be far more than that. Under the terms of the act, prohibition began on 17 January The 18th Amendment and Volstead Act were more easily passed than enforced. The private possession or consumption of alcohol itself was not itself illegal and, as many Americans continued to demand alcoholic beverages, criminals stepped in to meet the demand by illegitimate means.
Enforcement of the legislation thus proved enormously difficult for local police forces and the federal Bureau of Prohibition, or Prohibition Unit.
The bureau numbered at around 3, agents, who had to police the coastal frontier and land borders with Canada and Mexico to prevent smuggling, as well as investigate the illegal internal production and transportation of alcohol in the country as a whole.
Often poorly paid federal agents and police were susceptible to corruption, as were some judges and politicians. In Chicago, it was claimed that half the police force was in the pay of gangsters and, in New York, 7, arrests under the prohibition laws produced only 17 convictions. A number of states and cities simply forbade local police forces from investigating breaches of the Volstead Act, and enforcers of the law were often unpopular with the public.
Some agents did, however, become famous for their pursuit of bootleggers and other criminals: Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith in New York made almost 5, arrests between and , and were known for their use of disguises. Crime offered a gangsters quick route to success, wealth, and status, and prohibition presented them with a golden opportunity. Rather than being a fairly small-scale, localised affair, crime became increasingly national and organised, incorporating business people and politicians in new criminal syndicates and combinations that manufactured, imported and transported illegal bootleg alcohol sold in speakeasies.
Competition and rivalry between rival gangs led to widespread violence: between and alone there were reported to be more than gangland murders across the US. The Chicago Crime Commission claimed that there were gangland killings in the Chicago area between and , but historians have suggested this was exaggerated.
Capone was born in to Italian immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York, but moved to Chicago around to work with John Torrio, the leader of organised crime in the city. In , Capone took control of the Torrio operation and quickly rose to fame because of his ostentatious lifestyle and the acts of violence carried out under his name.
Claiming all he was doing was meeting a demand, he talked of business efficiency and the elimination of competition to justify violence. Weiss was shot and killed in In Capone moved to Florida from where he continued to run his Chicago operation. There were hundreds of gangland killings in Chicago in the s. Although not directly involved, it was assumed that Capone was responsible.
It was hoped that Prohibition would eliminate corrupting influences in society; instead, Prohibition itself became a major source of corruption. Everyone from major politicians to the cop on the beat took bribes from bootleggers, moonshiners, crime bosses, and owners of speakeasies.
The Bureau of Prohibition was particularly susceptible and had to be reorganized to reduce corruption. Public corruption through the purchase of official protection for this illegal traffic is widespread and notorious.
The courts are cluttered with prohibition cases to an extent which seriously affects the entire administration of justice. Prohibition not only created the Bureau of Prohibition, it gave rise to a dramatic increase in the size and power of other government agencies as well. Personnel of the Coast Guard increased percent during the s, and its budget increased more than percent between and Prohibition, which failed to improve health and virtue in America, can afford some invaluable lessons.
Repeal of Prohibition dramatically reduced crime, including organized crime, and corruption. Jobs were created, and new voluntary efforts, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which was begun in , succeeded in helping alcoholics.
Those lessons can be applied to the current crisis in drug prohibition and the problems of drug abuse. Second, the lessons of Prohibition should be used to curb the urge to prohibit. Finally, Prohibition provides a general lesson that society can no more be successfully engineered in the United States than in the Soviet Union. Prohibition was supposed to be an economic and moral bonanza.
Prisons and poorhouses were to be emptied, taxes cut, and social problems eliminated. Productivity was to skyrocket and absenteeism disappear. That utopian outlook was shattered by the stock market crash of Prohibition did not improve productivity or reduce absenteeism. In summary, Prohibition did not achieve its goals.
Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve and supplanted other ways of addressing problems. The only beneficiaries of Prohibition were bootleggers, crime bosses, and the forces of big government.
The federal bureaucracies charged with reducing access to purportedly harmful substances will resort to almost any means to achieve their goal. That figure is very misleading. It should also be noted that prohibition of tobacco products was attempted at the state level during the s and was a miserable failure. For further insight into the character of bureaucrats, see the sympathetic interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan in the Saturday Evening Post , September For a recent estimate of consumption of alcohol during Prohibition that concurs with earlier estimates, see Jeffrey A.
Warburton, pp. Warburton, p. It should be remembered that illegal sources of alcohol were just organizing in —21 and that large inventories could still be relied on during those early years. Football fans are normally beer drinkers.
However, they typically become brandy, bourbon, and rum smugglers at football games. It is easier to smuggle any given quantity of alcohol in the form of more potent beverages.
His support for Prohibition may have blinded him to the importance of the change in relative prices. According to Fisher, people were drinking less but getting drunker. Oliver reported in on several studies that showed that consumption of opiates and other nar cotics increased dramatically when the price of alcohol rose or when prohibitions were enforced.
The use of narcotics was also common among the membership of total abstinence societies. Wayne H. Norton, R. Bartez, T. Dwyer, and S. San Francisco: Wine Institute, ; cited in Ford, p. The War Prohibition Act did not become effective until July 1, It should also be noted that death due to alcoholism and cirrhosis is thought to be the result of a long, cumulative process; therefore, the decrease in death rates must, in part, be at tributed to factors at work before the wartime restrictions on alcohol and Prohibition.
It may be more appropriate in some cases to say that the problems are with the consumers rather than with the goods themselves. Knopf, , pp. Timberlake notes that such correlations were a key element in turning social science away from the concept of free will and toward acceptance of environmental determinism. The 30 cities examined had a total population of more than 10 million. A closer examination of the cities studied indicates that the greatest increases in crime occurred in those that were previously wet; the only cities to experience a decline in arrests were already dry when Prohibition was enacted.
The additional resources greatly expanded the enforcement of Prohibition. The annual number of liquor seizures by Customs doubled between and Chicago: Henry Regnery, , p.
Live Now. The Iron Law of Prohibition According to its proponents, all the proposed benefits of Prohibition depended on, or were a function of, reducing the quantity of alcohol consumed. Prohibition Was Criminal At the beginning of Prohibition, the Reverend Billy Sunday stirred audiences with this optimistic prediction:.
Prohibition Caused Corruption It was hoped that Prohibition would eliminate corrupting influences in society; instead, Prohibition itself became a major source of corruption. Download the Policy Analysis. About the Author. Mark Thornton is the O. Page Contents.
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