Answer:
Prohibition, legal prevention of the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States from 1920 to 1933 under the terms of the Eighteenth Amendment. Although the temperance movement, which was widely supported, had succeeded in bringing about this legislation, millions of Americans were willing to drink liquor (distilled spirits) illegally, which gave rise to bootlegging (the illegal production and sale of liquor) and speakeasies (illegal, secretive drinking establishments), both of which were capitalized upon by organized crime. As a result, the Prohibition era also is remembered as a period of gangsterism, characterized by competition and violent turf battles between criminal gangs.
Prohibition
Prohibition
New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach (right) watching agents pour liquor into the sewer following a raid, c. 1920.
New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-123257)
anti-Prohibition protest
anti-Prohibition protest
A protest against Prohibition in New York.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Prohibition
QUICK FACTS
DATE
1920 - 1933
LOCATION
United States
KEY PEOPLE
Texas Guinan
Eliot Ness
RELATED TOPICS
Alcoholic beverage
Eighteenth Amendment
Prohibition
DID YOU KNOW?
The 18th Amendment did not outlaw alcohol consumption.
Winemakers stayed in business by selling "wine bricks" that could be dissolved to make wine.
The Temperance Movement And The Eighteenth Amendment
In the United States an early wave of movements for state and local prohibition arose from the intensive religious revivalism of the 1820s and ’30s, which stimulated movements toward perfectionism in human beings, including temperance and abolitionism. Although an abstinence pledge had been introduced by churches as early as 1800, the earliest temperance organizations seem to have been those founded at Saratoga, New York, in 1808 and in Massachusetts in 1813. The movement spread rapidly under the influence of the churches; by 1833 there were 6,000 local societies in several U.S. states. The precedent for seeking temperance through law was set by a Massachusetts law, passed in 1838 and repealed two years later, which prohibited sales of spirits in less than 15-gallon (55-litre) quantities. The first state prohibition law was passed in Maine in 1846 and ushered in a wave of such state legislation before the American Civil War.
Prohibition Party
Prohibition Party
National Prohibition Convention, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1892.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file number cph 3b07410)
TOP QUESTIONS
What led to Prohibition?
How long did Prohibition last?
What were the effects of Prohibition?
How did people get around Prohibition?
How was Prohibition enforced?
Conceived by Wayne Wheeler, the leader of the Anti-Saloon League, the Eighteenth Amendment passed in both chambers of the U.S. Congress in December 1917 and was ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states in January 1919. Its language called for Congress to pass enforcement legislation, and that was championed by Andrew Volstead, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who engineered passage of the National Prohibition Act (better known as the Volstead Act) over the veto of Pres. Woodrow Wilson.
Bootlegging And Gangsterism
Neither the Volstead Act nor the Eighteenth Amendment was enforced with great success. Indeed, entire illegal economies (bootlegging, speakeasies, and distilling operations) flourished. The earliest bootleggers began smuggling foreign-made commercial liquor into the United States from across the Canadian and Mexican borders and along the seacoasts from ships under foreign registry. Their favourite sources of supply were the Bahamas, Cuba, and the French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, off the southern coast of Newfoundland. A favourite rendezvous of the rum-running ships was a point opposite Atlantic City, New Jersey, just outside the three-mile (five-km) limit beyond which the U.S. government lacked jurisdiction. The bootleggers anchored in that area and discharged their loads into high-powered craft that were built to outrace U.S. Coast Guard cutters.
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That type of smuggling became riskier and more expensive when the U.S. Coast Guard began halting and searching ships at greater distances from the coast and using fast motor launches of its own. Boot
