Prohibition

Prohibition was our 18th amendment in the 1920’s. The start of all of this began in the 1800’s when there was a huge religious revival, with “perfectionist” movements that called for temperance as well as the abolition of slavery. Maine passed the first state prohibition law in 1846 about 20 years before the Civil War began. By the start of the 1900’s temperance movements were commonly found everywhere and women played a massive role, the reason being is that alcohol was seen as a destructive catalyst for marriages and other things. The main activist group in this era was the ASL ( Anti-Saloon League) Their motto was, “The Saloon Must Go” They even went as far to produce question and answer booklets to come back at anyone who tried to make a point against them and their cause. They even coined one major league baseball player and former alcoholic Billy Sunday. Billy Sunday became a preacher about prohibition due to his alcohol driven past he was the perfect face for progress in the Prohibition movement. In one of his preaching’s he says this, "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent." And all the problems and sad things he talks about are the results of “Alcohol” but that’s not exactly true, and I will elaborate on that later in the paper. Another movement for the prohibition would be the Evangelical Christians; this was a purpose they had long pursued.

Part of these motivated groups would also be the Religious Right or the Conservatives (Which has much changed since then.) they fall under the category of the Religious groups but have a large political part of this era. Seeing as Democrats were against this idea they were widely popular. Eventually the leader of the ASL, Wayne Wheeler and Congress passed the bill in December of 1917. Though Woodrow Wilson vetoed it Andrew Volstead worked his way around it with the Volstead act. Both were not enforced with much success. With the rise of these acts came the rise of a huge underground market and empire, with mobsters, speakeasies, bootleggers, hidden distilleries, and homemade alcohol or moonshine. Bootleggers began smuggling foreign liquor in from all over the world in boats under for registries, but mainly the shipments came from Canada and Mexico. Though