¶ … Prohibition Was Bound to Fail
As the culmination of the century-long temperance campaign in the United States by religious preachers, women's temperance advocates, abolitionists, and later industrial leaders, the Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1919, outlawing the sale, production, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. While at the early stage of Prohibition, the new policy seemed to work and was not opposed by many, Prohibition's popularity began to dwindle later. Many Americans, labor unions, advocates of civil liberties, and industrial leaders fearing demoralization of workers began to oppose Prohibition, campaigning for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. The idea then was picked up by Democratic Party leading to the passing of the Twenty-First Amendment which effectively lifted the ban on alcohol. There were many reasons why the Prohibition failed. It may be argued that it was bound to fail from the very beginning. The major reason for the failure of Prohibition was that the temperance ideology behind it was never based on realistic understanding of America's social problems. At the heart of the temperance campaigns was utopian moralism and fantasy. Prohibitionists believed the ban on hard alcohol would solve America's economic and social problems. By promising an easy fix to these problems, prohibitionists were able to be successful temporarily -- to the point of convincing the Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment in their favor -- but as soon as it became clear to the majority that Prohibition was not the solution to society's problems (in many regards, it made things worse than before the Prohibition), repealing of the Eighteenth Amendment became a matter of time.
The anti-alcohol movement began to develop in the early nineteenth century. Physicians, ministers, and business owners concerned about widespread drunkenness among servants and workers began to advocate total abstinence from alcohol. They were known as temperance movement. Temperance became an integral part of women's and anti-slavery movements. Supporters of temperance believed that the alcohol use was at the heart of all social ills. Drinking was often associated with the loss of moralism, as something loved by undesirable immigrants, or even as a devilish behavior. "From the very beginning, temperance ideology contained a powerful strand of ideology," as Harry Levine and Craig Reinarman argue. "It held that alcohol was the major cause of nearly all social problems: unemployment, poverty, business failure, slums, insanity, crime, and violence (especially against women and children). For the very real social and economic problems of industrializing America, the temperance movement offered universal abstinence as the panacea."
These anti-alcohol campaigners held on to this belief well until the onset of the twentieth century when their ideology began to be picked up by a greater strand of the society.
In a book published in 1918 and titled Why Prohibition!, Reverent Charles Stelzle, a passionate Presbyterian prohibitionist, argued, in the words of David Kyvig, that drinking "lowered industrial productivity and therefore reduced wages paid to workers; it shortened life and therefore increased the cost of insurance; it took money from other bills and therefore forced storekeepers to raise their prices in compensation; and it produced half of the business for police courts, jails, hospitals, almshouses, and insane asylums and therefore increased taxes to support these institutions."
In short, it would have been hard to point at an economic or social ill that prohibitionists did not somehow associate with alcohol. These ideas nevertheless became prominent, even among secular scholars. A writer for American Journal of Sociology, described alcohol as "the mother of felony" and argued that alcohol was at the heart of crime, laziness, degeneracy. Liquor, the writer argued, was scientifically proven to cloud the reason, enfeeble the will, aroused the appetites, while inflaming the passions and releasing the "primitive beast from the artificial restraint of social discipline."
In the twentieth century, prohibitionists began to pursue a legal battle and call for a national prohibition. They argued that their ideology was consistent with the spirit of the Constitution. A new organization called the Anti-Saloon League began to pursue such courses. The League hired lawyers, organized propaganda campaigns, raised funds, and began to lobby the Congress. The organized used its resources to support candidates who were willing to argue for the prohibition of liquor in the country. Individual states began to adopt "dry laws," prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol on a state level. The League in 1913 officially declared that the prohibition must be enshrined in the Constitution.
Their campaign was supported and financed by powerful corporations who thought that the worker morale was being destroyed by alcohol drunkenness. Prohibitionist campaigns...
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