National prohibition became possible in 1920 after the required number of state legislatures passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In the belief that it would shield families, women, and children from the evils of alcohol misuse, many women, particularly members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, were instrumental in bringing about national Prohibition in the United States. The average adult white American guy consumes roughly a half pint of whiskey per day around 1820. When discussing the events that led to the beginning of the temperance movement and subsequently, Prohibition in the United States, historian W. J. Rorabaugh writes:
Following the American Revolution, whiskey drinking increased, drawing attention. The first people to notice the spike were doctors. Increasing numbers of patients were experiencing delirium tremens, delirium tremens dreams, and psychoses, and the new drinking pattern was for one person to consume large amounts of alcohol in binges that concluded with the drinker passing out. Doctors who had first cautioned against the excessive consumption of whiskey and other distilled beverages during the Revolution, such Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a former senior medical of the Continental Army, were frightened. Experts realized that in order to maintain the same level of euphoric satisfaction from drinking over time, users would need to gradually increase their alcohol consumption. That path led to ongoing intoxication or what would eventually be called alcoholism. Although students at medical schools are given cautions, the majority of doctors in the early 1800s considered alcohol to be a significant medicine. Opium that had been dissolved in alcohol was called laudanum, and doctors particularly liked it. The use of laudanum reduced anxiety and mysteriously eliminated the need to drink. Laudanum was used by pediatric nurses to calm infants. Rush believed the problem extended beyond health. He wrote several pamphlets and newspaper articles that were critical of distilled alcohol. An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors (1784), his best-known work, was published in at least twenty-one editions and had sold 170,000 copies by the year 1850. The Philadelphia doctor contended that democracy would be corrupted and finally destroyed if voters were drunken sots. Drunkenness made for terrible electors, and a republic required an electorate capable of sound political judgment. Rush and others were concerned about the negative effects that distilled alcohol had on crime, poverty, and domestic violence. A lot of violent crimes, including murder, have been committed while intoxicated. The jobless or unemployable drinker left his family behind, sometimes leaving the wife and kids to starve while the husband and father went out and got drunk. Alcohol consumption was frequently linked to prostitution and gambling, which resulted in financial ruin and sexually transmitted illnesses. Drunkenness was also a factor in wife and child abuse. Many Americans believed that until drunken impulses were subdued, the United States could not be a prosperous republic.
National Prohibition supporters claimed that outlawing alcoholic drinks would drastically improve or even solve many social issues, including secondary poverty, domestic violence, drunkenness, and other social ills like crime and mental disease.
The effects of prohibition
There is conflicting evidence in the academic literature about the effects of prohibition, with some authors adamant that the widely held belief that it failed is untrue. Alcohol consumption, cirrhosis mortality rates, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, public intoxication arrests, and absenteeism rates all decreased as a result of prohibition.
During the Prohibition era, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union built a temperance fountain at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Regarding the impacts of prohibition, Mark H. Moore, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said:
During Prohibition, there was a significant fall in alcohol use. Men died from cirrhosis at a rate of 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Alcoholic psychosis admissions decreased from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 per 100,000 in 1928. Between 1916 and 1922, arrests for public intoxication and disorderly behaviour decreased by 50%. The best estimates indicate that alcohol consumption decreased by 30% to 50% throughout the population as a whole.
In particular, "rates for liver cirrhosis plummeted by 50% early in Prohibition and quickly rebounded following Repeal in 1933." According to Moore's research, organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition and contrary to common belief, "violent crime did not expand considerably during Prohibition." "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly unfavorable to drinking, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect," the historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. claimed. Additionally, "many folks elected to respect Prohibition after it became the law of the nation." Absenteeism rates dropped from 10% to 3% during the Prohibition era. Ford Motor Company reported that "absenteeism decreased from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918" in Michigan.
In 1925, journalist H. L. Mencken argued that the contrary was true:
At least one good thing has come out of Prohibition's five years: all of the Prohibitionists' favorite defenses have been thoroughly refuted. None of the significant benefits and usufructs that were expected to accompany the ratification of the 18th Amendment have materialized. In fact, there is greater intoxication in the Republic. Crime has increased rather than decreased. Insanity is increasing, not decreasing. Government spending is increasing, not decreasing. Respect for the law has declined rather than grown.
Since drinking "produced half the business" for institutions supported by tax dollars, such as courts, jails, hospitals, almshouses, and insane asylums, some supporters of Prohibition, like Charles Stelzle, who wrote Why Prohibition! (1918), believed that prohibition would eventually lead to reductions in taxes. In actuality, domestic violence caused by alcohol was on the decline even before the Eighteenth Amendment was passed. Reformers were "dismayed to learn that child neglect and violence against children actually rose throughout the Prohibition era" when Prohibition was imposed.
'The WONPR claimed that prohibition had nurtured a criminal class, created a "crime wave," corrupted public officials, made drinking fashionable, engendered a contempt for rule of law, and set back the progress of "true temperance,"' says Kenneth D. Rose, a professor of history at California State University. A "prohibition crime wave was anchored in the impressionistic rather than the factual," according to Rose. He claims:
Prohibition opponents like to say that the Great Experiment had produced a criminal element that had sent off a "crime tsunami" in a helpless America. For instance, Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer of the WONPR argued in 1932 that prohibition was to blame for "the terrible crime wave, which had been building up to unprecedented height." However, it is unlikely that prohibition can be blamed for creating crime, and even if selling illicit alcohol proved to be profitable, it was only an extra source of money for the more common criminal enterprises of prostitution, loan-sharking, gambling, and racketeering. Despite being widely accepted throughout the 1920s, the idea of the prohibition-induced crime wave cannot be verified with any degree of precision due to the inadequate quality of local police agencies' data.
Prohibitionists claimed that tougher enforcement would make the law more effective. David E. Kyvig contends that rather than saving money, the government ended up spending more money as a result of greater attempts to enforce Prohibition. The Great Depression brought forth a particularly noticeable increase in the economic burden of Prohibition. Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) and Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), two organizations that opposed Prohibition, estimate that the untaxed liquor industry cost the federal government $861 million in lost tax revenue and that Prohibition enforcement cost $40 million annually. The AAPA also published a booklet in which it claimed that from 1920 to 1931, federal liquor tax income was lost by $11 billion and Prohibition enforcement costs $310 million. This absence of possible support during a time of economic hardship became an important aspect of the repeal effort.
constituted opposition
Someday, why not Now? Judge, September 2, 1922
Support for Prohibition fell off among citizens and politicians throughout this time. A lifetime abstainer of alcohol who had donated between $350,000 and $700,000 to the Anti-Saloon League, John D. Rockefeller Jr., declared his support for repeal due to the numerous issues he thought Prohibition had brought about. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment was led by influential figures like the du Pont brothers, whose name made its goals quite evident.
Contrary to expectations, a sizable number of women joined the repeal effort, confounding the notion that newly enrolled female voters would automatically cast their ballots in unison. As many "had come to the bitter conclusion that the destructiveness of alcohol was now represented in Prohibition itself," they played a crucial role in the drive to repeal. The Nineteenth Amendment supporting women's suffrage had been ratified by then, increasing women's political influence. [20] Pauline Sabin, an activist, believed that repeal would save families from the Prohibition-related corruption, violent crime, and illegal drinking. Sabin established the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) on May 28, 1929, drawing a large number of former Prohibitionists into its ranks. The membership of the WONPR was expected to exceed 1.5 million by the time repeal was eventually approved in 1933. Sabin was initially one of the numerous women who backed the Eighteenth Amendment. But now she thought of Prohibition as hazardous and hypocritical. She was concerned about the emergence of organized crime that grew out of bootlegging because she saw "the seeming fall of moderate drinking."
Sabin was also concerned that American youngsters would stop respecting the rule of law after seeing brazen contempt for the law. Last but not least, Sabin and the WONPR adopted a libertarian viewpoint that opposed federal intervention in a private affair like drinking. But with time, the WONPR changed its position, highlighting the "moral wrongs that plagued the American household" as a result of the Prohibition era's corruption. A political posture focusing on maternalism and home protection was adopted by a women's group during the early 20th century because it was more popular and preferred than personal liberty arguments, which in the end received little attention.
Initially, women from the higher classes made up the majority of the WONPR. But by the time the 21st Amendment was adopted, they had middle-class and working-class members. After a brief startup phase, membership dues were sufficient to cover the organization's expenses. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had fewer female members by 1931 than did the WONPR, which had branches in 41 states by 1932.
The WONPR backed repeal on the grounds of "genuine" temperance, asserting that prohibition "reversed a tendency toward moderation and restraint in the use of intoxicating beverages." The WONPR adopted the WCTU's advocacy strategies even though their aims were in direct antagonism to one another. Door-to-door canvassing, urging politicians at all levels to include repeal in their party platforms, creating petitions, giving speeches and radio appearances, distributing persuasive literature, and holding chapter meetings were among activities they engaged in. The WONPR occasionally collaborated with other anti-prohibition organizations. The United Repeal Council was established in 1932 by the AAPA, Voluntary Committee of Lawyers, The Crusaders, American Hotel Organization, and WONPR. At the 1932 Republican and Democratic national conventions, the United Repeal Council advocated for the inclusion of repeal in each party's presidential campaign. In the end, the Republicans persisted in supporting Prohibition. The WONPR, which was initially founded as a neutral group, backed Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic cause.
Both the number of groups supporting repeal and its popularity grew.
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