The Roaring 20s: Prohibition

Prohibition

America 1920: The 18th Amendment has just been passed prohibiting & illegalising the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. But why? here are the main reasons that prohibition was introduced in the first place:

• Moral: many people felt it was inappropriate and wrong for Americans to enjoy alcohol while their troops were at war.
• National feeling- This means that when America entered the war many people were against alcohol-especially with the fact that many breweries were of German origin and America was at war with Germany!- and many organisations such as The Anti-Saloon League believed it was 'damaging American society'.
• Religious- The consumption of alcohol for enjoyment was against God's will (apart from ceremonial wine....)
• Saving resources: the production of alcohol uses important grains (eg. Barely) and thus a ban would boost supplies for trade and consumption.

BUT overall historians see prohibition as a failure, here are the over-riding failures:

• The size of America's coastline made it almost impossible the prohibition agents to stop bootleggingers smuggling- especially coupled with the limited number of…