PROHIBITION

After a nearly one hundred year history in America, the temperance movement culminated in a constitutional amendment, passed in 1919, that mandated national Prohibition. The amendment forbade the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Temperance was a popular reform movement in the nineteenth century when many predominantly Protestant Americans responded to the problems created by drunkenness. Temperance was associated with many other forward-looking reform movements of the 1800s, including women's rights, abolitionism, and education reform.

Saloons were places where men, usually working class and often immigrant men, gathered for fellowship and drink. Saloons were quite numerous, especially in northern cities, and were associated with a host of unsavory habits such as gambling and prostitution. Rallying Americans around the closure of what were depicted as corrupt, ethnic, working-class saloons proved an effective tactic.

Automobiles made it easier for teenagers and college students to escape the restricting confines of their towns and go to neighboring towns where no one knew them, or just to the country to be alone. Americans violated the Volstead Act and consumed alcoholic beverages throughout the US with little shame in doing so, and with little concern about their role in promoting organized crime.

One of the most important and long lasting effects of Prohibition was the creation of the gangster. With stories of Al Capone and his underground alcohol selling, this period has given us the most memorable of villains in the characterization of the gangster.

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