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"Prohibition was never really about alcohol," he said. "It was about trying to define who was American." Alcohol consumption was common among Irish, Italian, Catholic and Jewish cultures, said Lerner.
The Prohibition era was the period from 1920 to 1933 when the United States prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. [1] The alcohol industry was curtailed by a succession of state legislatures, and Prohibition was formally introduced nationwide under the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on January 16, 1919.
In fact, alcohol consumption and the incidence of alcohol-related domestic violence were decreasing before the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted. Following the imposition of Prohibition, reformers "were dismayed to find that child neglect and violence against children actually increased during the Prohibition era." [12]
Founded in 1893 in Saratoga, New York, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) started in 1906 a campaign to ban the sale of alcohol at the state level. Their speeches, advertisements, and public demonstrations claimed that prohibition of alcohol would eliminate poverty and ameliorate social problems such as immoral sexual behavior and violence.
The amendment banned production, sale and transportation of liquor; but consumption was allowed. One year after ratification, on January 17, 1920, Prohibition began.
Lack of funding due to losing out on much tax revenue from alcohol manufacturers did not help the mounting problem. [7] Desperate for solutions, the government took to more extreme measures. Whether directly or indirectly, the government began to increase the toxicity of industrial alcohol used to make illegal alcoholic beverages to discourage ...
The ratification of the 21 st amendment to the US constitution ended a nearly 14-year nationwide ban on the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol that is widely considered to have been a ...
Temperance proponents saw the alcohol problem as the most crucial problem of Western civilization. [44]: 21 Alcoholism was seen to cause secondary poverty, [68] and all types of social problems: alcohol was the enemy of everything good that modernity and science had to offer.