In January 1920, the United States of America criminalised the manufacture, transport and sale of alcohol. Some years later, President Herbert Hoover called Prohibition the “Noble Experiment”. This ‘experiment’ actually provoked an unprecedented explosion in crime and drunkenness. Criminals around the country saw opportunities for exploitation. The Mafia and other criminal organisations took control of the manufacture, transport and sale of alcohol, in the process taking the first steps in the creation of organised crime in the USA - all thanks to the American Government!
TEMPERANCE
The first Americans loved to drink. Records from the 1790s show that they had alcohol with every meal, often finishing the day with a nightcap. In 1830, the average consumption of the equivalent of pure alcohol was 27 litres per person a year. The figure is now nine litres. Alcoholism started to have a serious impact on communities, with violence against women and children. A movement began to grow against alcohol, helped by a strong religious revivalism, and so-called Temperance movements, which blamed alcohol for all the country’s social problems, grew in importance. Evangelical Christians destroyed bars with hatchets, accompanied by hymn-singing supporters. Even the Ku Klux Klan wanted to prohibit alcohol.
When the Prohibition Law was passed, saloons were closed and happy temperance campaigners destroyed barrels and emptied bottles down drains. Meanwhile, ‘Happy Hour’ continued just across the borders in Canada and Mexico.
INDUSTRY DESTROYED
Prohibition immediately destroyed thousands of jobs in the country’s fifth-largest industry. Breweries, distilleries and saloons closed, and waiters and truck drivers started to look for new jobs. The federal government would eventually lose $11 billion in lost taxes, and the law quickly created the biggest black economy in the world. Prohibitionists had expected people to spend their extra money on clothes and education and modern appliances. It didn’t happen. And consumption of alcohol actually increased as people — now thirsty and angry — found ingenious ways to avoid the law.
ORGANISED CRIME
For criminals across the country, Prohibition was the business opportunity of a lifetime! It created a completely new industry, ‘bootlegging’, as it was quickly called: the illegal manufacture, transportation or sale of liquor. Criminal gangs were rapidly created to control the chain of activities necessary for the ‘business’, from hidden distilleries and breweries through storage and transport channels to restaurants, nightclubs and ‘speakeasies’ - the name given to bars selling illegal liquor. In just five years, 50,000 speakeasies opened in New York alone.
AMERICAN MAFIA
The gangs then moved into other illegal activities, such as drugs, gambling, prostitution and extortion. ‘Organised crime’ was born. The American Mafia crime syndicate (‘The Mob’) grew out of the coordinated activities of Italian bootleggers and other gangsters in New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The most famous mob boss was Al Capone, whose wealth had reached $100 million by 1927. Organised crime quickly polluted the American police force and the nation’s political parties – criminal organisations used bribery to control the police and politicians. Gang wars and murders filled the newspapers, and Prohibition filled the prisons.
ALTERNATIVE ALCOHOL
Prohibition also produced some very clever ways of avoiding the law. Millions of bottles of ‘medicinal’ whisky were sold in drugstores on real or forged prescriptions. Religious congregations were permitted to buy alcohol, so more people suddenly went to church! Millions of litres of denatured industrial alcohol was ‘washed’ of noxious chemicals and sold to speakeasies. People made gin at home in the bath. Winemakers sold ‘wine bricks’ that could be dissolved to make wine. The death rate from illegally-produced liquor rose four hundred per cent in the five years after 1920.
WE WANT BEER!
By the 1930s, with the country in the middle of the Great Depression, most people thought that Prohibition was a mistake, even a joke, as well as a restriction on individual freedom — so important to Americans. Some experts said that alcohol consumption had actually increased. Other experts considered that making alcohol legal again would generate valuable jobs and more money in taxes that the Government desperately needed. On December 5, 1933, only nine months after becoming President, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the repeal of Prohibition. Just before repealing the hated law he said: “I think we could all do with a beer.”
DRY COUNTIES
On December 5, 1933, National Prohibition had ended … but local Prohibition continued, and still continues to this day. Some states still have ‘dry’ counties, where the local government forbids the sale of alcohol, or ‘blue law’ counties, which restrict alcohol sales on Sunday. Strangely enough, these dry counties include Moore County in Tennessee, the home of the Jack Daniels distillery. And that other famous American liquor, Jim Beam? Well, Jim Beam’s home is in Kentucky, and most of the state’s 120 counties are, in fact, dry. Prohibition, it seems, is impossible to prohibit.
Today, there are eight-three counties in the United States where the sale of alcohol is completely prohibited. Dry counties are home to approximately 1.7 million Americans, or 0.5 per cent of the U.S. population. In many states with dry counties, laws restricting the sale of alcohol have long preceded national prohibition.