The pivotal role of prohibition in the 1920s

¶ … role did prohibtion have in the 1920's.

Prohibition of spirits in the United States was based on a set of moral principles as well as a series of convictions that lowering or eliminating the use of strong alcohol would reduce criminality and, further more, prostitution. Unfortunately, the effect of prohibition was exactly what it aimed against. This research paper will focus on answering the question if prohibition resulted in more criminality or in its reduction, starting from the hypothesis that it decreased consumption of alcohol but increased the leverage and influence of organized crime, thus creating violence than before it was implemented.

The Prohibition movement in the United States goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century which asked for making consumption and producing of alcohol illegal, as well as distribution or buying. The beginning of the twentieth century sees the creation of many of what was called dry laws in various states and in 1917 the Congress provided for Wartime Prohibition. Under the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, the Prohibition Movement gained momentum and the National Prohibition came into being in 1920, lasting more than 13 years until December 1933. The period is marked by violence and the growing of a significant black market of alcohol with a major increase in criminal activities and organized crime networks that covered the entire United States. Although "the inability to restrict the illegal trade and the inevitable accompanying corruption eventually led to widespread public disenchantment" (Miron and Zwiebel, 1991, p. 2) the Congress did not take the necessary measures to stop the widespread dangerous creation of alcohol severally lacking man-power in securing border and internal corruption of the system. The original idea did not seem to have in the future such negative effects, so the Congress pushed even more the Prohibition measures increasing funding from 6.3 million dollars in 1921 to 9,2 million in 1925 and the 13,4 million in 1930.

The main purpose of the supporters of Prohibition and the Congress for that matter was the decrease in criminality resulted from over consumption of alcohol, so the natural conclusion began to be that by eliminating high alcohol products from the market; social and intra-family tensions would lower and dissipate.

The Prohibition movement started on morality basis though, not on the necessity of lowering urban criminality, especially pushed ahead by women. The 1873 Woman's Christian Temperance Union, formed by women with drinking problem husbands, began to promote actively the closing of saloons and bars that not only offered alcohol but also promoted the exploitation of women. Even if the successes of this initiative were lower than expected and focused more on local problems, it created the necessary societal change for the more successful Anti-Saloon League to take place.

The Anti-Saloon League steps to achieving its final goal of liquor consumption and making were closely built with the support of both Democrat and Republican individuals and political figures. They advocated for banning of liquor at local level and then pushed on the basis of successful closing of saloons to the state level. The main rupture in the American nineteenth century society and later on in the twentieth century began to grow shape as the middle class White Protestant communities began to collide with the growing number of poor, lower class immigrant or ethnic/racial communities. The philosophy of saloon had little to do with morality or the lack of it, or even worse, distrust in the values and words of the Church. The saloon, especially in large multicultural cities "provided entertainment, socializing opportunities and a way for the working class to build community" (Peck, 2009, p 10) with local unions and mutual aid societies meeting here to discuss ways to alleviate poverty, housing and working conditions.

The Prohibition supporters and promoters failed to understand that banning successfully something so embedded in American culture was not only difficult but also impossible. Alcohol itself was not the only enemy to fight for the Anti-Saloon League and the rest of the Prohibition promoters. They were fighting with something bigger than that, they were fighting with a social mentality that was related to drinking. The cultural divide between the upper class, and even parts of the middle class, and the lower semi-urbanized combined with immigrants one began to be visible at the end of the nineteenth century. For a large part of Americans, since the early days of the eighteenth century, liquor "was attendant to so many activities of the time that it sometimes seems as if the activities were but an excuse for the booze, a kind of cover story" (Burns, 2004, p 8) This is not to say that a large part of eighteenth and nineteenth century had severe alcoholisms problems, but it is vital for this analysis to understand the cultural and even personal importance of drinking. Taking away alcohol would have meant a severe disruption in the every day life activities of so many Americans, and this is one of the reasons for which the Prohibition had not chance of success since its inception. It was created on the basis of a belief that human mentality and customs can be changed immediately by law in a country that was built on the premises of personal freedom and equality among all.

In order to understand the effects of prohibition and the role it played in the U.S. socio-economic environment in the 1920s and 1930s, an analysis on whether the 18th Amendment reached its targets is very illustrative. The immediate results of the 1920 regulations seemed positive for the U.S. Government at the time. Yet while months passed, the levels of cirrhosis deaths, alcoholism, psychosis, drunkenness arrests and incidents caused by drunk individuals, began to rise dramatically. The highest of them all is alcoholism, as compared to the period before 1920 and, as Miron and Zwiebel's analysis shows, "alcoholism overstates true consumption during Prohibition due to decreased alcohol quality (…) the consumption of wood or denatured alcohol likely produced more alcoholism deaths for given consumption" (Miron and Zwiebel, 1991 p 5). Statistically, in what regards the immediate effects of alcohol, the Prohibition period failed utterly in creating an environment with a zero tolerance for consumption and distribution. It also created serious health problems as a results of the lack of verified qualitative liquor on the market, as low quality alcohol began to circulate and create health problems to a large number of Americans.

The desirable effects of the Prohibition measures can be separated into four areas: cost, trust, morality and law abiding citizens. As Miron and Zwiebel divide them in a late 1980s analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research, only the first two can be traced as significantly having an effect on the overall consumption. Making a product illegal automatically increases its supply cost as manufacturing and distributing require extra funding for protection and bribery schemes. The second effect, trust, is connected with the consumer's lack of trust in purchasing alcohol that, without a neutral checking might have a poor quality and might have an overrated price. The other two desirable effects that the U.S. Government was aiming for in reducing criminality through elimination of consumption, morality and law abiding citizens proved that the American normal citizens involved in distribution and consumption had little respect for morality or law in general. (Miron and Zwiebel, 1991)

Besides the decrease in criminality activity and decrease in alcohol consumption, as well as far deeper issues of restrictions on individual freedoms for a more moral society, Prohibition was "the rearguard action of a still dominant, overwhelmingly rural, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment" (Behr, 1996, p 3) One of the most significant reasons for the creation of such a ban by what Behr argues to the rural Protestant communities is the massive influx of immigrants that began to populate and even over-populate the urban environment, bringing with them some of the worst habits of European and Asian societies. Looked from a religious-xenophobic point-of-view, Prohibition created even more problems for the creation of better multicultural tools to integrate a poor majority of immigrants. Other points-of-view, although not that influential in the United States in the Prohibition period, are the Marxist analysis and discourse that were becoming a fashion in Europe and Russia. As Behr points out, Marxists view Prohibition as a tools used by Government to deflect attention from the real problems of society which were poverty, housing, exploitation of immigrant and local working class, all in the name of the Industrial Revolution. As the noble goals of the alcohol ban were put on the table, Marxists argued that these were a "plutocratic weapon" to ensure that workers would renounce drinking and work harder. (Behr, 1996) Looking at Prohibition from this point-of-view, the most visible cultural and class shifts took place in New York City. Although other cities were clearly visible in the war with alcohol like Chicago, Detroit or New Orleans, New York was the epicenter of the anti-Prohibition movement. The first breakers of the law were the social disadvantaged classes, like workers and immigrants and began to be a mark of anti-bigotry from the upper classes. Ethnic, racial and class minorities in the city of New York, as well as middle class and organized crime people enjoyed their fight against Prohibition in an amazing number of locals and nightclubs that summed up to more than thirty thousand. While many restaurant closed down in New York, speakeasies spread across the city. More and more of the middle class and the upper class "embraced the cosmopolitan culture and nightlife that flourished under the restrictions of Prohibition" (Lerner, 2007, p. 3) making this the first bottom-up social reaction in the recent history of the United States.

Prohibition marked the 1920s and 1930s in ways that were not seen by the makers of this law. It had profound effects of issues like work relations and wage policies, xenophobia and living conditions of immigrants, organized crime as well as popular culture. While regulations were set and enforced, a significant number of ordinary people began to change their attitudes towards society, morality and law. Buying, consuming and even producing alcohol began to grow on many Americans and a way of living and later on even created one of the most inaccurate images of American history as it was looked upon as a romantic and adventurous period. Especially in the youth, drinking became the thing to do as to "bootleg was to strike a blow against tyranny [it] became glamorous, chic, even heroic" (Peck, 2009, p 13)

Popular depictions like the "roaring twenties" come in disagreement with the cultural, class and rural-urban conflict that characterized and modeled the identity of the United States further on. Especially in large cities like Detroit or Chicago, and most in New York city, Prohibition failed utterly. The city of New York represented in that period the cultural, financial and social centre of the country and the results of the ban of alcohol had to be positive here as they would be instrumental for the Prohibition movement to close down the deal in the entire United States. An unforeseen mistake in creating such a law, that meant changing decades and even centuries of mentality, was the widespread importance of alcohol as a habit. The measures taken during the 1920s and 1930s around drinking created not only anti-measures of illegal character but also a change in the multicultural societies of the big cities. Prohibition "influenced almost every aspect of daily life, from employment opportunities to law enforcement, and from real estate trends to race relations (…) fostered new forms of urban culture, redefined leisure and amusement in the city and promoted corruption and crime" (Peck, 2009, p 4).

Crimes and criminal activity prospered in the 1920s and 1930s and were becoming more and more influential in local city administrations especially due to the increased corruption in the police, local administration and beyond at government levels, in some cases. As Mark Thornton reminds "bribes were paid to police and elected officials and came in the form of either money or votes" (Thornton, 2007, p. 54). Having at their disposal one of the most important commodities of the time -- liquor, made the organized crime networks even more powerful than before.

The possibility to sell with a triple price a product and monopoly over that product offered the urban Mafia the necessary financial resources to increase their leverage on citizens and officials into making the law by breaking it. Alongside with drinking, or at its expense, organized crime received a huge income from prostitution, gambling and saloons, extortion and blackmail. Another negative effect on economy that the prohibition had was for many of the saloonkeepers that, in order to stay in business had to "disobey the liquor laws and to ally himself with vice and crime in order to survive" (Timberlake, 1963, p 110) the Prohibition period created one of the most flourishing period for corruption because liquor, and its array of illegalities, could corrupt all individuals, from the poor worker, the saloonkeeper all the way to the political elite of a state and, of a country. It failed in its goals of lowering criminality caused by liquor consumption and increased criminality based on especially the phenomena it was trying to eliminate. The reports of the beginning of the 1930s showed exactly this: "the present regime of corruption in connection with the liquor traffic is operating in a new and larger field and is more extensive" (Thornton, 2007, p 134).

One of the most significant pivotal roles that the Prohibition period had in the market, in general, was the creation of cartels and drugs related organized crime networks that began to flourish in this period. Many of the rules and organizational patterns of conduct were born in the Prohibition period as gangsters like Al Capone and Dutch Schultz created internal laws for their organizations. If a contractor did not fulfill his terms of the deal or if it betrayed the organization the consequences were severe for him, his family or his business. On the basis of the smuggler industry created during the Prohibition period, one of the most important trade mechanism at regional and international level resulted: illicit trade in drugs, affecting not only buyers due to negative health effects, but also nations producing such products like heroine, hashish, marijuana or opium. (Traver and Gaylord, 1992) the black market that appeared as a result of alcohol illicit trade had, therefore, opened the way for other types of illegal trade. With an economy heading towards the Great Depression of the 1930s, the alcohol black market and its consequences, put even more pressure on the formal economy.

Corruption characterized Prohibition since the beginning when the little that was done to enforce the law was proven insufficient. Even President Harding had to admit that "there are conditions relating to enforcement which savor of nation-wide scandal. It is the most demoralizing factor of our public life" (Okrent, 2010, p. 137). The spread of corruption and easy money became popular outside the criminal world, especially in the medicinal liquor. One very good example is that of the Wathen brothers of Louisville that reorganized from whisky producers to the American Medicinal Spirits Company gathering more than fifty additional brands under their umbrella. Others like the Brown-Forman Company or David Schulte had similar operations in providing drug store with fine bourbon under the name of medicinal liquor.