Prohibition

Amy Crandall

Professor Soll

Archives Paper

23 February 2016

Prohibition

        During Prohibition, the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages were restricted or illegal. Prohibition was supposed to lower crime and corruption, reduce social problems, lower taxes needed to support prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. Instead, alcohol became more dangerous to consume; organized crime blossomed; courts and prisons systems became overloaded; and endemic corruption of police and public officials occurred. With the knowledge that I had before I visited the archives I felt as though prohibition was a downfall in our nation’s history. With this being my background I was interested in learning about the other side of the scale, the reasons that people felt as though prohibition was a positive move for our country. I was surprised by how much I found from government to ordinary citizens, arguments were made for prohibition being a both positive and negative. In my research I explored four primary documents, three of which laid out the positive view of prohibition and one the explored the negative.

 Josie Washburn published an article called “Drink and the Underworld” where she connected all the evil that girls went through during her time to alcohol. Washburn was also trying to establish herself as a member of the women’s suffrage movement and it was clear that she also felt truly passionate about the prohibition. During this time period woman were also trying to make themselves independent from men. Washburn said that a woman wouldn’t drink unless a man forced her too. She took this idea that all young people think that drinking is a sport and twisted it to saying that if women had suffrage then alcohol would not be a problem. Woman have the ability to separate themselves from the drink where as men can’t do that. When a man drinks he drinks to get drunk where a woman goes to have one drink to unwind from her day. She claimed what so many thought at the time: no one truly needed alcohol to function. Alcohol was an evil and as soon as someone took their first drink they were headed down a dangerous road where no one could truly stop. I feel as though this article is a good way to look at the prohibition from an ordinary citizen’s point of view and not a government official. When students study the prohibition they hear about the governments reasoning but to hear a woman say that she truly believes that alcohol is the drink from the underworld holds new meaning. This article helped me to understand that it was not just government who were looking to ban alcohol, but citizens as well. However, I also feel Washburn also just published the article to simultaneously bash men as well as give her opinion on alcohol. 

        Though Washburn held no political power, people who did have the same views of the prohibition as she did, which lead to the construction of the Constitution of the Anti-Saloon League of America. This was created by the group of government officials who were working on getting rid of liquor traffic. By creating written documents this also gave people official jobs so now legal actions were taken place for the banning of alcohol. The prohibition could have been seen as a positive because it opened a lot more jobs in the government. Also this proved to the citizens of America that the prohibition act was here to stay.

In Wisconsin the Anti-Saloon League published an article that stated all the positives that the prohibition was doing for the state. Long before Wisconsin became America's Dairy land, Wisconsin was a beer state. Brewing began in Wisconsin in the 1830s, and by the 1890s, nearly every community had at least one operating brewery. Breweries were as much a part of Wisconsin communities as churches and schools. They supplied steady employment to workers, bought grain from local farmers who in turn often fed brewery by-products to their livestock, and they frequently sponsored community festivals, youth groups, and sports teams. However, this all stopped once the prohibition came to Wisconsin. When the Anti-Saloon League published this article, it was meant to assure that residents of Wisconsin that the prohibition is actually working. However, the Wisconsin Division of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment took this article and published one of their own, which they called “Falsehoods and Facts.” In this article the Wisconsin Division took every argument the Anti-Saloon published and stated debunked them of sorts and gave different facts. This article seemed to be one of the most compelling documents that personally I read. The stating of the bigger picture facts really put the prohibition into perspective. For example when the Anti-Saloon claimed that they are getting rid of the money waste that people spent on alcohol, the Division brought up the fact that now people were now wasting the money on paying for bootleggers, or even now people were paying higher prices for the drinks now that they were illegal.