Anti-Prohibition Protest

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Anti-Prohibition Protest

Photograph

By: Anonymous

Date: c. 1925

Source: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.

About the Photographer: This photograph is part of the collection of the Corbis Corporation, headquartered in Seattle, with a worldwide archive of over 70 million images. The identity of the photographer is not known.

INTRODUCTION

In the early twentieth century, America's foremost political issue involved liquor and temperance. Alcohol had played a significant part in the life of America ever since the first settlers landed on its eastern seaboard more than 300 years earlier. But, the country had also, for more than a century, harbored the most powerful and militant temperance movement in the world. For a hundred years, these two diametrically opposed camps—America's drinkers and its temperance advocates—had traded blows in a phoney war before a series of stunning political reversals in the 1910s placed the momentum firmly in the hands of the dry camp. "Dry" was the name given to the coalition of religious, temperance, and prohibition organizations, while the pro-alcohol camp was known as the 'wets.' During this time, most states implemented legislation that prohibited alcohol and the Anti-Saloon League became the most powerful lobbying organization in the country, with its influence pervading every level of Washington politics.

In August 1917, the dry movement's overwhelming political strength achieved the ultimate success. The U.S. Senate passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution by a vote of sixty-five to twenty. The amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation, and importation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes. The U.S. House of Representatives subsequently passed it as well and it was sent to the individual American states for ratification. The ratification votes were almost a formality, since thirty-three states already had prohibited liquor within their borders. Mississippi became the first state to ratify national prohibition on January 8, 1918, and, on January 14, 1919, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment. Two days later, the U.S. Secretary of State announced that the amendment had been ratified by the required number of states, and would go into effect across the United States one year from that day.

PRIMARY SOURCE

ANTI-PROHIBITION PROTEST

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

Organized crime became a major feature of the American landscape during the prohibition era. An unintended effect of the constitutional prohibition on alcohol was to push the sale of liquor underground. Alcohol consumption was hardly impacted, while gangsters such as Johnny Torrio and Al Capone accumulated fortunes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, the consumption of alcohol became the largest collective act of civil disobedience ever witnessed in America.

During prohibition every sector of American society broke the law. The law impacted all social classes and communities, and for visitors too, prohibition was a tremendous irritation. Winston Churchill, a regular visitor to America throughout the dry years, complained bitterly about having to obtain a medical prescription to satisfy his appetite for brandy. Similarly, King George V was distinctly unimpressed, allegedly describing prohibition as an 'outrage.' The gangsters grabbed all the headlines, but the real story was the masses disobeying the law on a scale America had never previously known. For most of America's prohibition era, alcohol consumption was the most significant form of protest.

Before the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, the liquor lobby had been almost as powerful as the dry movement, and far richer. Prohibition decimated its ranks and the forced closure of legally operating breweries and distilleries cut off its funding. As a result, the wet movement lacked a coordinated or powerful voice during the early years of the prohibition era.

However, by the mid-1920s, it was obvious to even casual observers that prohibition was not working. Newspapers published reports of prohibition violations virtually every day. Gangsters were taking hold of America's cities, and increasing levels of violence accompanied bootlegging and liquor smuggling. Scores of Americans were poisoned every week by drinking moonshine. And, in the midst of all this turmoil, prohibition had very little impact on improving the fabric of American society, as it had been intended to do.

Whatever the defects of prohibition, the dry movement could always assume the moral high ground. One of the reasons the Eighteenth Amendment had been passed in the first place was the negative social effect of the typical American saloon. Instead, the wet movement began using fiscal arguments and pointing to the benefits that liquor duties brought to the American economy. Even among those sympathetic to prohibition, many were not necessarily willing to pay higher taxes in order to compensate for the budget deficit caused by the loss of liquor duty revenues.

These arguments became more persuasive as America was plunged into economic depression following the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Leaders of business, including fifteen of the twenty-eight directors of General Motors, the Dupont family, and Newcomb Carlton, president of Western Union (significantly, an organization that had once backed the drys), began to promote the economic benefits of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment. Economic strife dealt a fatal blow to the dry movement. As during the Civil War, before which many states had prohibition statutes in place, questions of whether a man could take a drink seemed irrelevant when the American people were afflicted by daily disasters. At a time when federal tax revenues were dropping, the prospect of repealing prohibition offered a double benefit to the treasury—the significant amounts being spent on the futile effort to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment could be eliminated and enormous sums of revenue could be collected by taxing liquor.

Republican President Herbert Hoover was predominantly dry in conviction, and there was little indication that he would ever be swayed into the opposing camp. For another year America drifted uncertainly on, with prohibition legislation still undermined by the gangsters and the economy in dire straits. Then, at the 1932 Democratic Convention, an outright commitment to repeal from a high level politician was finally adopted. When the presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appeared on stage to accept his nomination, he told the hall—to shouts of approval— "From this day on, the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed!"

Within months Roosevelt was in the White House, and just days after his arrival he set about destroying the Eighteenth Amendment. Dramatic cuts were made to the Prohibition Bureau and Congress modified the Volstead Act (the primary prohibition legislation) to permit the sale and manufacture of beer. Within a little over a month, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution authorizing the submission of a repeal amendment (the Twenty-first Amendment) to state conventions. On April 10, 1933, Michigan became the first state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, and, on November 7, 1933, Utah became the thirty-sixth and deciding state to adopt it. Four weeks later, the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, became part of the U.S. Constitution.