Inspired by Boardwalk Empire which I’ve been watching this week…
I was wondering whether there is any evidence that any gangsters (or anyone else who stood to make money off the illegal booze trade), actively supported theVolstead Actbefore it was passed, as they correctly predicted how much money the stood to make off it.
For that matter did ANYONE correctly predict ahead of time time that the Volstead Act would be such a boon for organized crime?
Mostly, the Volstead Act came about because women finally got the vote.
You’d vote for it too, if you thought it might keep your husband from getting drunk and punching you in the face every other week or so.
I’m putting that a little flippantly, but it’s not far from the truth.
Openly supporting the Act? Nah, if gangsters wanted Volstead to pass, they’d have kept quiet about it. Bad publicity for the Act if they spoke up.
Considering the Volstead Act was passed into law in October of 1919, and women were given the right to vote in August on 1920, this is highly unlikely. The Congress that passed the 19th Amendment, as well as most of the state legislatures that approved it, were not elected by women.
The prohibition movement in the US was longstanding by 1919, and by that time was led by the Anti-Saloon League, which got most of its strength in the South and Midwest. The dry movement was not based in Northern urban areas, where organized crime was strongest.
I’m sure some people thought organized crime could benefit, but that wasn’t the main consensus. Organized crime at the time was not all that organized, with competing gangs in each city, and making their money primarily from protection (not so much prostitution; the police were usually making money from that).
Once the Volstead Act was passed, of course, they saw their chance. But it is a mistake to always assume that whoever benefits from something is the instigator of it.
I wasn’t suggesting gangsters were the primary instigators of prohibition. That would not have gone unremarked on all these years.
Its easy to see the cause and affect with the benefit of hindsight, but less so before the fact. I was just wondering (based on the opening scene of Boardwalk Empire, not the most accurate source for historical information it has to be said) whether there is any record of anyone involved in organized crime having seen ahead of time what the results would be and getting on board the political temperance movement.
most business opportunities are “discovered.” few people really have the forsight to say, “hey, we’re going to make truckloads of money from this new act.”
Prohibition was made possible by a highly organized and politically effective “dry” movement. The temperance advocates seem not to have realized that shutting off a major source of government tax revenue and then expecting to see lots of money spent on enforcing Prohibition was unrealistic.
If the organized crime types in existence when Prohibition was being debated realized the potential windfall it offered, they kept their mouths shut about it. A good recent history of Prohibition is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call. He makes an argument for the idea that the end of Prohibition was not brought on by its failure to stop drinking (most people obeyed the law) or the lawlessness that it spawned, but by the Depression. With the economy in the tank, tax revenues from booze and alcohol-related jobs were badly needed and economic needs trumped morality.
I don’t even think there were organized gangs in the modern sense until prohibition made it so profitable. Bit basically I think the posters who blamed it on the dry movement have to be right. And that was largely organized by women. This shows that political power is not entirely dependent on the right to vote, although it certainly helps. What I find hard to understand is why the reaction to the obvious failure of prohibition of alcohol was to repeal the 18th amendment, while the reaction to the just as obvious failure of the “war on drugs” has been to quadruple the prison population, without reducing drug use. After all, by now a clear majority of voting adults must be people who have used drugs in the past. Especially marijuana.
There was prohibition at the state level before the 18th amendment. So the profit opportunities had already been demontrated before prohibition went national.
Also, gangsters were only interested in supporting dry legislation, not dry enforcement. They wanted the laws to make drinks illegal, and therefore expensive, but for the local enforcement to be wet. So, gangsters might push for dry congressmen and senators. But they would definately not support dry sheriffs or mayors.
I’ve read many favorable reviews of that book, but haven’t read it myself. Did you know the author is credited with inventing Rotisserie League baseball?
I recently finished The Poisoner’s Handbook, which largely discusses the prohibition era and thus has some interesting information on prohibition in between the stories of murder by arsenic and such.
One interesting point discussed in the book was the struggle to keep people from drinking, inasmuch as methanol and other alcohols were industrially useful, but the government had to come up with ways to prevent people from redistilling them into a drinkable form. Accidental poisonings from drinking wood alcohol and such were rife during prohibition. So, the government kept coming up with new additives and compounds that were harder and harder to remove from industrial alcohol, and people kept attempting to make them drinkable, frequently ending up blind or dead. There are lots of angry letters and newspaper editorials quoted in the book concerning the disquieting notion that the only way the Feds had figured out to enforce prohibition was to pass a death sentence on anyone who dared to drink. Ain’t no way to treat the citizenry, nossir.
There was also the unintended consequence that, since hard liquor was just about all anyone could get anymore, there were no “casual drinkers” anymore, no way to start soft and find your comfort zone: you downed glasses of cloudy brew of questionable origin or you went home. Apparently, those behind the 18th amendment really thought that the casual drinkers would just give it up and wear little temperance halos instead of going the other way. Not good students of human nature.
I’m a bit of a history buff and I find the 1920s & 1930s fascinating. To address the OP’s question, I’m not aware of any well-known gangsters publicly stating they were against Prohibition. The closest might be Al Capone stating he was merely giving people what they wanted. This famous interview is nicely reinacted in the film “The Untouchables” with Robert DeNiro playing Scarface (who preferred to be called “Snorky” which was slang for a dapper gent back in that era).
There were indeed organized gangs prior to Prohibition, the Plug Uglies and the Five Points gang being two of the more well-known New York groups. Granted, none of these were as imfamous as Capone’s or “Bugs” Moran’s gangs.
The resolution that became the 18th Amendment was actually first proposed during W.W. I on Aug. 1st, 1917 partly as a war measure and was passed on Dec. 17th, 1917 and then sent to the states for their approval. The Volstead Act itself (the enforcement mechanism of the 18th Amendment) was passed on Oct. 28th, 1919.
Al Capone was involved with a few minor New York gangs, most famously the Five Points gang. He took off for Chicago due to a murder rap and worked for Johnny Torrio who was part of Big Jim Colosimo’s organization. Colosimo didn’t want to get into bootlegging and Torrio had him killed and took over. Capone took over after Torrio retired to Italy after surviving an assasination attempt and serving a prison term.
Most of this is in John Kobler’s book “Capone” which was published in 1971.
Bri2k
They believed that states would pass their own dry laws and enforcement would be concurrent with federal law. Which it was in many states. I believe New York was the first state to repeal their state prohibition laws and told the feds “good luck with all that.”
Yeah, I’ve never run across any evidence that organized crime pushed for the Volstead Act. They were ready to smuggle/produce alcohol by the time the law went into effect.
Did any gangster give support/money to prevent its repeal?
I agree that organized crime was mostly a product of prohibition. There were criminal gangs before but they were basically a local phenomena. They only controlled a neighbourhood, not a city. But running alcohol required crime to get organized at a national level. Then once these organizations existed, they were in a position to look for other criminal opportunities.
As far as the ongoing war against drugs, I posted before that it’s the product of a dichotomy among the middle class. You’ve got a bunch of parents who are trying to protect their children and it’s created a massive divide in drug law policy. People want to have gentle rehabilitation programs without any legal consequences in place for their own children. But they want everyone who was involved in getting drugs for their children (including the children of other parents) to face the harshest possible consequences.