Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Prohibition
- Why was it
introduced?
- Women's
Christian
Temperance
Union (WCTU)
- Threat to family life
due to expenses for
drinking it and
domestic violence
- Responsible
for acts of
violence
- Managed
to force
Kansas
- Carrie
Nation
(1890s)
- Anti-Saloon
League
- Leader Wayne
Wheeler
- By outbreak of WW1
many mid-western and
western states were 'dry'
- Founded in Ohio in 1893
- WW1
- Uses up valuable grain that
needed to be used in the war effort
- Drinking unpatriotic
- Many brewers were
German origin e.g.
Budweiser
- Immigration
- Drinking had links
to foreigners that
the WASPs
disliked
- E.g. Irish and Italian
- Seen as a victory
for 'nativists' over
immigrants
- Volstead Act
- Successes
- Altered American
drinking habits
- Boom in the sale of
firearms,
motorboats and
cars
- For Organised
Crime
- Boost to American
soft drink companies
- Output increased
from 113 million to
182 million
- Failures
- Ignored
- Harding had
drinks delivered to
the White House
- Thousands of illegal
drinking places
(speakeasies) appeared
- Split the
Democratic Party
- Drys from
Rural South
and West
- Wets from
North and East
- Association against the Prohibition Amendment
claimed prohibition encouraged crime
- Availability of Alcohol
- Still available in
Mexico and
Canada
- Hard to enforce with
thousands of miles of
land borders
- Treasury department had
3,000 prohibition agents
paid $2,500 a year
- Easily bribed
- Illegal distilleries meant
the USA could still make
its own alcohol
- Chicago was the ideal centre
for the distribution of booze
- Organised Crime
- Widened the
division between
the rich and poor
- Poor relied on self help, brewing
their own or distilling moonshine
(homemade alcohol) secretly at home
- Rich went to
speakeasies or
private clubs
- Failed because it
attempted to force one
moral view on all
Americans
- Reduced
respect for the
law
- Organised Crime
- Prohibition handed criminals the
opportunity to control a huge
multi-million dollar industry
- Bribed officers
of the law
- Chicago and
Al Capone