by Sylviane Thouret (level C1)
Prohibition Period
In 1920, the manufacture,
transport and sale of alcohol were banned in the United States. But organized
crime soon seized control of a lucrative black market. This legislation lasted
13 years and had disastrous effects, including a rampant increase in crime and
political corruption.
At the same time, other
Scandinavian and Protestant countries (Norway, Finland, Sweden, certain parts
of Denmark, etc.) adopted measures restricting alcohol consumption.
Why such legislation?
To understand how the
United States was able to indulge in such an experiment, we need to go back to
a time when many Americans were rejecting the changes their country was
undergoing, intensified by the First World War. Wave after wave of immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe, many with revolutionary ideas, settled in the
major cities of the east coast, such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia,
while tens of thousands of blacks from the south settled in the industrial
centers of Midwestern States, such as Chicago and Detroit (Michigan), which had
experienced strong economic growth thanks to the arms industry. This avalanche
made small rural towns in the interior wary of the large urban centers on the
outskirts, where foreigners were associated with delinquency and political
radicalism.
The saloon culture led to
the rejection of the most militant Reform Protestantism. Saloons, bars and
taverns served as social clubs for immigrant workers. In these places, they
could get hot food, receive their mail, telephone or store their valuables. They
could also hold political meetings, and in many of them they gambled,
negotiated for the services of prostitutes and so on.
In 1920, two amendments
to the Constitution became law, having been ratified by a majority of States:
the eighteenth, which prohibited the distillation and marketing of alcohol; and
the nineteenth, which granted women the right to vote. Both were victories for
organized feminism, which had been demanding suffrage since the 1860s. The
activism of the women's rights movement had also insisted on the suppression of
alcoholic beverages, because they were a regular cause of assaults by drunken
men on their wives and children, as well as one of the causes of the endemic
poverty of the working classes, when wages were spent on drink instead of
promoting the well-being of the family. As early as the 1870s, the Women's
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had organized a major campaign to ban
alcohol, supporting the initiative taken in 1869 by the Prohibitionist Party.
In the 1890s, this
agitation was effectively reinforced by a highly organized pressure group: the
Anti-Saloon League. The number of prohibitionists grew, as did their political
influence, to the point of reaching the White House. President Benjamin Harrison
(1889-1893) and his wife Lucy were teetotalers (from T-total, or
Temperance-total), and they served no alcohol in the presidential residence. A
minority of Catholics, immigrant and urban voters opposed the ban on the sale
of alcohol, and the Democrats who represented them in the North were accused of
belonging to the Rum, Romanism and Rebellion party.
In 1920, Prohibition led
to the radical abolition of all types of alcohol. The new constitutional norm
became a geopolitical problem, as the United States was surrounded by suppliers
of strong drinks.
The consequences
Setting up a network to
supply smuggled drinks required a few strong, trustworthy men, an initial
investment and weapons that had been sold off, taken from stocks of old war
material. The activity of the gangs was initially limited local aeras, but soon
rivalries for control of the territory began to emerge.
Fighting between gangs
paved the way for crime to be seen as a business. This is what, around 1929,
the press called The Syndicate: organized crime, which replaced what had
previously been known as The Mob, criminal activity.
The abundance of money in
the hands of gangsters enabled them to corrupt at every level, from lawmen to
the highest authorities. (The Ministry of the Economy, which was initially
responsible for combatting alcohol trafficking, had to sack 706 of its agents
and indict 257 of them).
Public opinion,
particularly in the big cities, regarded prohibition as a stupidity imposed on
city-dwellers educated by peasants with backward religious beliefs. The word
scofflaw - from scoff, "mockery", and law, "law" - dates
from this period and refers to those who make fun of laws and regulations.
Abrogation of the law
Rising crime rates,
official corruption, black markets... The Prohibition Act was a fiasco. But it
wasn't until 1933 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) as
President that it was repealed.
There were two very
different reasons for ending Prohibition:
- Financial
arguments: Roosevelt deplored the loss of revenue for the federal
government (loss of taxation on alcohol, a very important source of revenue for
the federal government through indirect taxes) and after the Great Depression
of 1929, money was needed to create and fund social programs.
- Political
arguments: change in morality in the country, the movement behind the ban
on the sale of alcohol was called into question by the crisis of '29, its
vision of society had failed
