National Prohibition Of Alcohol example essay topic

Prohibition Was A Failure! Alcohol is illegal! "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 corncrib's. Men will walk upright now; women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent" (Thorton 9). The Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution went into effect on January 16, 1920, with three-fourths vote from congress (Boorstin 994).

The National Prohibition of Alcohol was adopted to solve social problems, reduce the crime rate, stop corruption and minimize the tax burden created by prisons. Some immediate results of the amendment included organized crime and the corruption of public officials. As time went on, the stock market crashed, the Great Depression began, and people no longer viewed Prohibition as a question of moral values and standards, but as economics. Because of the economic repercussions that our country endured during the thirteen years of Prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment was finally repealed. (Thorton 1). In the beginning of Prohibition, many small-time bar owners and middlemen created bootlegging services that provided illegal alcohol.

Most of these people never gained a great deal of income from it, but with the rough economic times of the 1920's, particularly in the later part of the decade, any extra source of funds was another way to provide for one's family. Despite the minimal success of these men, there was the occasional exception who made millions of dollars on illegal and legal distribution. Al Capone is possibly the most famous example of all American mobsters. He was raised in Brooklyn and acquired the knowledge of petty crime at a young age. His underground mob scene arose after his move to Chicago, where he worked his way and eventually became the strongest underground mobster in the area. When the Prohibition started, Capone's gang began running underground bootleg services all over the city of Chicago in abandoned office buildings, bars, and nightclubs.

By the end of the 1920's, Capone's illegal alcoholic deliveries were making him more than $20 million a year. Because of all this fame and fortune, Capone started gaining underground political power as well as an extensive underground crime organization. Capone had agreements with Mayor Bill Thompson of Chicago, that he would run and direct the politics, police, and federal enforcement agencies of Chicago County. Throughout all of the liquor traffic, murder, and burglary, the only charge the police ever caught him for was tax evasion. He served eleven years in prison and died soon after his release of syphilis. Yet another bootlegger profiting from Prohibition was a young German, George Remus.

Remus was a small convenience store owner from Chicago when Prohibition started. He began by illegally selling gallons of liquor to select customers. As word spread, and the demand for alcohol grew, the number of "select" customers rapidly grew into a large clientele. Remus soon earned enough profits to branch out and open a number of stores with an unlimited supply of alcohol.

A revision was soon passed which permitted the sale of alcohol for medicinal purposes. Remus soon acquired stores nationwide concentrating in Cincinnati, Ohio (Behr 176). Since he was making such large sums of money, Remus took drastic measures. He began to hire all law enforcement agents, such as local policemen and bureaucrats, and by 1921, almost the entire Cincinnati police force was on his payroll, generating over a $25 million income per year. Remus's reign of terror soon ended after he was convicted of murdering his wife, and died in jail (Hintz 122).

The Prohibition became a primary source for corruption. Anyone from major politicians to the cops on the streets were taking bribes from bootleggers and crime bosses. The Bureau of Prohibition soon had to reorganize in order to reduce this corruption (Thorton 13). The organized crime and bootleg "rings" started a movement that would not be relinquished. Political leaders began to realize that the alcohol was no harder to come by than before the Prohibition and that all this did was put money in the pockets of mobsters such as Al Capone and ambitious businessmen like George Remus. Prohibition had many economic repercussions on the United States.

The closing of many brewing factories increased the already growing unemployment pool. A contemporary humorist Will Rogers stated, "We were so afraid the poor people might drink, but now we fixed it so they can't eat". In this statement, Rogers is basically illustrating the tremendous failure of the Prohibition (Behr 266). The government had lost all of its taxes paid by companies involved with the sale of alcohol. Virtually everyone in the United States at the time was a moderate drinker. If even a hundred million people bought a bottle of gin a week, that is a lot of money that would bring in and help out the economy, but that was taken away (Boorstin 850).

These people still found their gin, but on the black market. The money that alcohol was making was going into the pocket of the likes of George Remus and Al Capone, instead of balancing the budget. As congress was realizing the mass failure of Prohibition, people were demanding change. While some wanted a simple revision of the Eighteenth Amendment, others wanted a complete repeal.

At first, a revision was made to legalize and reinstate the full-time manufacturing and selling of beer. However, people were still not satisfied, and in turn, the Twenty-First Amendment was passed in 1933. The amendment stated the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, and that the transportation or importation into any state for delivery of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the law, is prohibited (Boorstin 996). The repeal of the eighteenth amendment of the Constitution of the United States and the instating of the twenty-first amendment was an economic improvement that needed to be made at such times of depression and unemployment. New factories were built creating many stable jobs for many unemployed citizens.

The country profited greatly from the domestic sales as well as the exportation of the liquors. Alcohol is something that is originally a part of the "manifest destiny" that this country was based on. It is as customary as fancy clothes. At any gatherings of officials, clergymen, wealthy people, poor people, and middle-class people, there will almost always be some sort of alcoholic beverage consumption. Whether it is the wealthy sipping Dom Perignon, or the poorer people gulping cheap beer, it is simply an accepted part of American culture (Kerr 171). The Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution was, in fact, repealed because of the great rise on organized crime and bootlegging that had taken place in the thirteen years of Prohibition.

"The most telling sign of the relationship between serious crimes and Prohibition, was the dramatic reversal in the rates for robbery, burglary, murder, and assault after the repeal" (Thorton 12). As in any society, in the 1920's or 1990's, when an accepted privilege is made illegal, people will still want to participate. In the 1960's marijuana was by many standards illegal, but since then the laws on it have been enforced much stronger, and yet, the amount of people who still smoke marijuana today is not too far different. From 1920-1928, the first years of the Prohibition, roughly 50,000 people died of alcohol poisoning which proves how easy it was to attain. Thanks to Al Capone and George Remus, 25 million gallons of alcohol were sold illegally each year of the Prohibition, and 30 million gallons of alcohol were sold legally for "medicinal purposes" each year during the Prohibition. Alcohol is something that has been generally accepted in society.

From the Roman Emperors indulging in wine, to the businessman who has a drink at the end of the day, alcohol, as a social function, is accepted. To attempt to remove alcohol from society would be repeating the mistake of Prohibition. Prohibition was a failure; it failed to improve the crime rate in America, as well as the economy. It failed to empty prisons, reduce taxes, and solve social problems. Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve and the only things that flourished from it were bootleggers and crime bosses (Thorton 14). Had the Prohibition not been repealed, the economy would have created an even bigger deficit, because without the profits of the liquor industry, the country was losing millions of dollars annually.

By today's society, the organized crime loops would " ve grown so large that they would probably have greater power within the federal government. The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States was necessary for the sanctity of the country.

Bibliography

Behr, Edward. Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America. New York: Arcade, 1996.
Boorstin, Daniel, Kelley, Brooks Mather. A History of the United States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.
Hintz, Martin. Farewell, John Barleycorn: Prohibition in the US. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Kerr, Austin. Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985.
Thorton, Mark. 'Alcohol Prohibition Was A Failure. ' Policy Analysis. Cato Institute. 17 July 1991.
24 July 2000 web 157.