I’m watching todays The Daily Show and there’s a segment about the prohibition from 1920-1933. They’re both going on about how stupid it was and how the majority of people were against it, while a majority of politicians were for it. But my question is, was it really ‘stupid’?
What I mean is was it stupid at the time. Now we know it was a bad idea, but hindsight is 20/20. The goal of making people drink less is not a stupid goal.
“The goal of making people drink less is not a stupid goal.”
I agree. Attempting to do that by completely criminalizing alcohol was massively stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the politicians voting for it had a secret stash of booze.
I can forgive them for not seeing the horrible effects it was going to have, but they really should have known it was never going to work.
I don’t think they had the choice. Being a “dry” was next to godliness in most places outside the immigrant-choked cities of the northeast. It was the last gasp of moral do-goodism left over from the Progressive movement, co-opted by evangelical Protestantism.
To my mind, it was the work of a massive and incredibly widespread pressure group. The fact that the 18th (Prohibition) and 19th (suffrage) amendments were, at the time, supported by many of the same segments of society strikes me as a serious case of strange bedfellows.
It did open up some other things that are still being debated today as helpful or harmful, such as weed, to society. But all in all I feel the movement was harmful but not stupid. It removed a route that people used to deal with things, yes some over indulged, but others, on occasion would use it in personal enjoyment, and would enhance their life.
Of course, it was stupid. It increased disrepect for the law and increased the power of the Mob.
Not at all. It was always women who were the primary supporters of abstinence, because the cost to them of drunkenness was so great. In a time when most women were supported by men, a woman whose man was unable to earn a living because of alcohol abuse was in a terrible position. It was much more difficult and stigmatizing to obtain a divorce, and laws generally did not protect women from abuse at the hands of their husbands (or fathers), drunk or sober. Women suffered terribly from the effects of alcohol abuse, as pointed out in much of the pro-Prohibition literature, and the twin solutions to this were getting rid of the alcohol and giving women more power through the vote. They went hand-in-hand.
In hindsight of course, prohibiting alcohol was a poorly thought-out solution with unintended consequences. Women’s suffrage turned out to be a better approach, so much so that we no longer think of alcohol abuse by men as a major women’s issue.
I don’t smoke and feel it doesn’t have much good to offer, but would strongly oppose against a law banning it. I sure you could find plenty of people who would vote that way if given a chance, even on SDMB.
Without hindsight it’s hard to say. I can see why people who said then that alcohol was worth banning and who say the same now about tobacco. Of course now we (should) know that making something popular illegal will encourage a black market. But even then it was people assuming that they could remove something from a second group of people, and the second group would be better off afterwards. They did so without considering the point of view of others, and for that were also wrong.
One of the big arguments against giving women the vote was that they would all vote for Prohibition.
It isn’t really that surprising - who had to deal with the drunken husbands? and never had any of the fun themselves?
If booze is criminal, only criminals will sell booze.
Sure it was stupid, in that it couldn’t possibly work in the real world. Not only that, but it pretty much destroyed the power of the temperance movement - the WCTU, if it even still exists, is a joke today, where once it used to be powerful.
One fascinating thing I learned from a radio show on Prohibition in San Francisco. In SF the cops decided that the best way to handle it was to control the speakeasies themselves. I’m sure they made a bunch of money out of it, but they kept the Mob out, which was a good thing.
States were increasingly giving women the right to vote. The temperance movement was largely “manned” by women. Do the math. Remember, this was a time when the sexes lead very different lives, especially when it came to public drinking. I doubt prohibition would have passed with only men voting.
I can’t decide. I’m really drunk
This. My grandmother always maintained that Prohibition helped countless poor families get out of poverty, because husbands could no longer blow the week’s pay on drink before they even got home. A staggering number of families lived at starvation levels because of that.
Prohibition did have a real effect on drinking in the US–we were one of the hardest-drinking countries in the world before it was instituted, and afterwards it was quite different.
It had some positive effects and some unintended negative consequences. That’s government legislation for you.
It should never have passed the senate. There was no way to enforce it, and the profits in supplying illegal booze were so huge, that it launched a whole generation of criminals.
What I don’t understand: by 1920, the USA was mostly a country of immigrants-people like the Italians, Jews, Germans, Irish, viewed drinking as a natural part of life-they saw nothing wrong or sinful in having a drink.
How a bunch of (mainly scandinavian and english non-drinkers) thought they could force other people to stop drinking is a great mystery to me-it certainly wasn’t smart ofr practicable.
Not really. Instead of casting it in modern left-vs-right terms, think of it in terms of traditionalism vs. Progressivism - the latter full of believers in upturning tradition, centralized power, and the power of “modern” thought to change human immutables. So not only feminism and prohibition, but also socialism, eugenics (without the scientific evidence of modern genetics), and environmentalism.
While I would normally say that asking whether or not Prohibition was a stupid isn’t a productive question there’s been a lot of good responses in this thread. So maybe it is a productive question. I am currently working on my masters thesis which covers temperance/prohibition in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While I don’t consider myself an expert on the topic I have been doing some considerable research using both primary and secondary sources over the past couple of months. What I’m interested in is racial relations and gender identity in relation to temperance/prohibition.
Temperance: Moral suasion to get people to voluntarily abandon alcohol.
Prohibition: Political force to remove any choice of whether to drink or not.
Anyway, the temperance in the United States can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, to be temperate meant that one simply did not drink hard liquor like rum or whiskey. In the years leading up to the Civil War the interpretation of abstinence came to mean that one refrained from all alcoholic beverages, period. Men dominated the temperance movement though notable women including the Grimké sisters, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth C. Stanton support the temperance cause. The temperance cause is slowly turning into the prohibition cause…Maine becomes the first state to pass a prohibition law in 1851 with a dozen states also passing prohibition laws by 1855. (Maine repealed theirs sometime before the Civil War.)
Prohibition/Temperance pretty much takes a back seat during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Millions of men are exposed to the military culture of drinking, gambling, and whoring it up. It isn’t until the 1870s that prohibition/temperance becomes a major issue again. This time women are very much involved though I don’t think it’s fair to say that they dominated the cause. The problems caused by drinking allows women to speak in public as defenders of domesticity.
When questioning whether or not prohibition was stupid we have to question why anyone worked for it. As others have pointed out drinking was of particular trouble to women. If her husband squandered his pay on alcohol and didn’t leave enough to feed the kids or pay the rent she had little recourse. Drinking, it was felt, destroyed families, caused crime (Arkansas Senator Tillman argued that prohibition would cut down on lynchings because blacks wouldn’t get drunk and rape white women), and killed the drinker. Corruption was rampant as politicians and special interest bought votes with beer and whiskey. Also, saloons weren’t just like modern bars. They were dens of vices ranging from prostitution to drug peddling. I am rather sympathetic to the problems people had with drinking because there were some very real and very serious social problems.
It’s true that the majority did not support the prohibition amendment. The Anti-Saloon League was an umbrella organization with one purpose which was to enact a national prohibition. They ended up controlling a lot of the swing votes which they could use to pressure politicians. So they might control 10% of the voters in one area and whichever candidate promised to be dry would get those votes. It worked very well. Under the leadership Wayne Wheeler the ASL was a coalition that included the WCTU, the Industrial Workers of the World, and even the KKK all working towards the goal of national prohibition. The ASL embraced women’s suffrage but only because it meant more votes for the drys.
So was prohibition stupid? I would say that it wasn’t the best idea in the world but these people honestly believed they’d eliminate poverty, most crime, and many social ills. Unfortunately it didn’t work out that well. It did get a lot of Americans to stop drinking. Alcohol consumption did not raise to its pre-prohibition levels until the late 70s or early 80s.
Odesio
Yes, marijuana prohibition is stupid, for all of the same reasons posted above.
Prohibition made just as much sense as today’s Drug War
Prohibition was, I think, a very bad idea.
But I’ve see n statistics that do suggest that it had one beneficial outcome. Unfortunately, i can’t find it right now online.
Prior to Prohibition, US per capita alcohol consumption was insanely high – there’s plenty of evidence and citation for the high alcohol usage in the colonial era and into the 19th century. After Prohibition, the usage of alcohol was significantly reduced, and stayed that way. People continued to drink, of course, and many drank to excess, but the per capita consumption very significantly decreased. I suspect it would have eventually been reduced, in any case, but Prohibition gave it a sudden and significant decrease.
Not sure it was worth the overall price, though.
I’d like to see the cites, if anyone can come up with them.
It was my understanding that per capita drinking rates were indeed much higher in the early 19th century (I believe Okrent in the Daily Show bit mentioned the 1830s as the peak), but had already declined substantially before the Prohibition movement began.
There’s certainly plenty of anecdotal, if not not statistical, evidence about the wide availability of alcohol during Prohibition.
So even if it were true that overall per capita drinking ten years after Prohibition ended was lower than ten years before it began–that could just be the same trend that would have been active without any legal changes at all.
Also, it was my understanding that drinking by women became much more popular during and after Prohibition.
I come from a moonshine making family, the operation still continues to this day. Why? Because it is in a DRY county. The more restrictive the laws the better for illegal hootch. Prohibition did not slow drinking it just made it a tiny bit harder to get. It might have been beneficial to the drinker as he didn’t have to pay taxes on his booze.