The Prohibition Period

 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