Back to Blog
Misery street pbs5/3/2023 Prohibition truly began to teeter in 1932, when Democrat Franklin D. Sloan began converting to the wet cause, as did lifelong teetotaler John D. Former drys such as Senator Hugo Black of Alabama and General Motors CEO Alfred P. Suddenly, anti-Prohibition activists had a powerful jobs and taxes argument at their disposal. What’s more, income tax collections had dropped precipitously (along with personal incomes), and the federal government was desperate for revenue, having forfeited an estimated $11 billion in alcohol-related taxes over the course of Prohibition. labor force jobless and people growing increasingly desperate, this seemed absurd. The 18th Amendment, which ushered in Prohibition, had forced an estimated 250,000 alcohol industry employees out of work. The real reason is the economy was doing very well at the time, and people didn’t want to vote for a Catholic, especially in the Southern states.”Īs late as 1930, Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, the so-called “Father of Prohibition,” declared: “There is as much chance of repealing as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”īy that time, though, the Great Depression was in full swing, and the nation’s mood had changed. “The pro-Prohibition people think, ‘Aha, the people have really embraced Prohibition,’” Okrent says. In fact, temperance supporters thought they had won a great victory in the 1928 presidential election when the ostensibly “dry” Herbert Hoover-who called Prohibition “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose”-defeated the “wet” Al Smith. “The very idea of repeal had been beyond the imagination of even the most ardent ‘wet,’” says Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, who points out that a constitutional amendment had never before been overturned. Yet even as Prohibition’s unintended consequences became progressively harder to ignore, nobody anticipated its quick demise. To make matters worse, an ill-advised government program to poison industrial alcohol, with the goal of stopping bootleggers from redistilling it into something drinkable, purportedly led to thousands of deaths. Violence broke out as they competed for territory, culminating in the St. Gangsters like Al Capone grew rich from bootlegging and, as Peck explains, turned bribery of judges, police officers and other officials into a commonplace act. (Her conviction was later overturned.)Ī steep rise in organized crime also garnered the nation’s ire. The courts became backlogged with alcohol-related cases, and newspapers ran wild with stories of prosecutorial excesses, such as a Michigan mother of 10 who was sentenced to life in prison for small-time pedaling of moonshine. Though power brokers drank with impunity, enforcement could be strict for the masses, particularly once the Jones Act of 1929 increased penalties for liquor law infractions. “Everyone thinks that Prohibition is for someone else to obey.” “There’s a lot of hypocrisy,” says Garrett Peck, author of The Prohibition Hangover : Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet. law technically didn’t apply.Īs for the legislative branch, one prominent bootlegger estimated that he supplied two-thirds of Congress with liquor. Harding, for example, stocked the White House with whiskey for his infamous poker nights, while his Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover liked to stop for a drink at the Belgian Embassy-where U.S. (There may have been more than 30,000 in New York City alone.)Įven politicians who supported Prohibition in public continued imbibing it in private. Still, just about anyone who wanted a beer could easily get one at the countless speakeasies that popped up around the country. Barrels of beer emptied into the sewer by authorities during prohibition.Īlcohol consumption and alcohol-related diseases did decrease overall due in large part to the expense of procuring illicit booze.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |