Prohibition: What Really Happened?

Prohibition didn't come to America overnight.

More than a century of struggle went into the fight to make the nation dry. Finally, an indignant populace, tired of the evils of the liquor trade and the crime producing neighborhood saloon, decided to throw off the chains of legal alcohol and accept national prohibition.

Despite the long period of travail in bringing prohibition to America and the rich source of history this period provides, most Americans today know little about the prohibition era. They are likely to think of it as an experiment that lasted only a few years, during which drinking was heavier than ever and gangsterism was the order of the day.

Opponents of prohibition have long claimed that the Eighteenth Amendment was voted in while a million American soldiers were in Europe during the First World War.

The charge is ridiculous. After the turn of the century a great tide of prohibition rolled in and covered the land. By 1917, thirty-three states had adopted state-wide prohibition. National prohibition began on January 17, 1920, and it was adopted with such enthusiasm and by such a great margin that all of the votes of the men overseas could not have changed the outcome.
In September, 1923, Felix Frankfurter, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, set the record straight on this charge in the annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science:

It is sheer caricature to convey the impression that the 18th Amendment came like a thief in the night. Prohibition was the culmination of fifty years of continuous effort; nor did the movement lack alert, persistent, and powerful opposition. If the process by which this amendment came into the Constitution is open to question, one hardly dare contemplate the moral justification of some of the other Amendments to the Constitution itself. 1

Liquor propagandists have done their work well.


Ask most people what happened during prohibition, and they will tell you the following:

1. It was a time of heavy drinking, heavier than when alcohol was legal. 
2. It was a time when crime was rampant and gangsters ruled the cities, a time of political corruption. 
3. It was a time of economic depression.

But what really happened during this time?

Prohibition had been adopted to reduce the public's use of alcohol, and in this it was successful. The consumption of alcohol during prohibition, especially at its beginning, dropped drastically. Among working people, alcohol use was cut approximately in half.

Drunkenness was almost nonexistent.

While there are no records to show the amount of illegal alcohol that was consumed during prohibition, researchers have been able to determine the general amount of drinking in that period by studying illness and social problems associated with beverage alcohol.

For example, the percentage of deaths in the United States caused by cirrhosis of the liver for the years 1900 through 1917 was 13.11 percent. From 1920 through 1932 (all prohibition years), this rate dropped to 7.27 percent. After prohibition ended, this figure began to rise, and by 1965 it had reached 12.5 percent.2

In the 1970s, incidence of this dreaded disease exceeded the pre-prohibition rate.3

Deaths from Bright's disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis dropped dramatically during prohibition, and admissions to mental hospitals for alcoholic psychoses fell to their lowest point in history. Writing in the Journal of Social History, J. C. Burnham explained:

Undoubtedly, the most convincing evidence of the success of prohibition is to be found in the mental hospital admission rates. There is no question of a sudden change in physicians' diagnoses, and the people who had to deal with alcohol-related mental diseases were obviously impressed by what they saw. After reviewing recent hospital admission rates for alcoholic psychoses, James V. May, one of the most imminent American psychiatrists, wrote in 1922: "With the advent of prohibition the alcoholic psychoses as far as this country is concerned have become a matter of little more than historical interest. The admission rate in New York state hospitals for 1920 was only 1.9 percent [as compared with 10percent in 1909-1912]." For many years articles on alcoholism literally disappeared from American medical Literature.4

Connecticut was one of the states that voted against the Eighteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, the people of Connecticut benefited from prohibition when it became a national law. In his book The Law of the Land and Our Moral Frontier, Prof. Henry W. Farnam of Yale University lists the following effects of prohibition in Connecticut:

• Prisoners in Connecticut jails charged with drunkenness fell from 7,314 in 1917 to 943 in 1920.
• Arrests for assault and breach of peace declined to less than one third.
• Jail commitments for vagrancy practically vanished.
• Commitments for alcohol insanity in 1920 were less than one third the numbers of 1917.
• Death from alcoholism and cirrhosis in 1920 was less than one half the 1917 rate.
• Accidental deaths in 1917 were 10.7 per 10,000; in 1920 it was 7.3.
• Automobile death rate fell by 40 percent.
• Death rate from tuberculosis dropped from 15.3 per 10,000 to 9.6 in 1921.
• Death from pneumonia, to which alcoholics are particularly liable, fell by over 50 percent.5

Alcohol's unmistakable trail of destruction was nearly absent during prohibition. Research reveals that legends about increased drinking during prohibition have no basis in fact. Norman H. Clark concludes:

There are today few reasons to believe that these legends, even those so recently embellished, are more than an easy and sentimental hyperbole, crafted by men whose assumptions about a democratic society had been deeply offended... To suppose, further, that the Volstead Act (Prohibition) caused Americans to drink more rather than less is to defy an impressive body of statistics as well as common sense. The common sense is that a substantial number of people wanted to stop both their own and other people's drinking, and that the saloons where most people had done their drinking were closed. There is no reason to suppose that the speakeasy, given its illicit connotations, more lurid even than those of the saloon, ever, in any quantifiable way, replaced the saloon. In fact, there is every reason to suppose that most Americans outside the larger cities never knew a bootlegger, never saw a speakeasy, and would not have known where to look for one.6

Why, then, did the rumors arise, and why do the legends continue?

When liquor became illegal and expensive, only the affluent could afford it. Drinking then became a status symbol. And while the well-to-do had used little alcohol previous to prohibition, patronizing bootleggers became "the thing to do." So while the drinking habits of the masses were reduced considerably during prohibition, many affluent people began to drink more heavily. Since these people were far more visible to journalists and other people-watchers, the legend was born and has been perpetuated.7

Perhaps the most convincing proof of prohibition's success is to be found in a comparison of the use of alcohol before and after prohibition. Government reports show that in 1914 the per-capita use of alcoholic beverages was 22.80 gallons. In 1934, the first year after repeal, the amount was 8.96 gallons. In a sense, the nation had been weaned away from its drinking habits during the nearly fourteen years of prohibition.

It took many years of promotion by the liquor industry to bring drinking in America up to pre-prohibition levels. Beer production did not reach that point until 1943, nearly ten years after the end of prohibition.8

Today, per-capita use surpasses even that of the pre-prohibition era, standing at nearly ten gallons above the level that raised the ire of Americans to the point of bringing about national prohibition.

Did prohibition create a crime wave in the land?

Absolutely not.

In 1922, Charles W. Elliott, president of Harvard University and a lifelong proponent of prohibition wrote the following to the Massachusetts legislature:

Evidence has accumulated on every hand that prohibition has promoted public health, public happiness, and industrial efficiency. This evidence comes from manufacturers, physicians, nurses of all sorts (school, factory, hospital), and from social workers of many races and religions, laboring daily in a great variety of fields. Testimony also demonstrates beyond a doubt that prohibition is actually sapping the terrible forces of disease, poverty, crime, and vice; in spite of imperfect enforcement. It has eliminated the chief causes of crime, poverty, and misery among our people.9

Did not the well-known gangs of the prohibition era capitalize on the fact that booze was illegal and make millions?

Yes, they did. But the gangs of that period were not born during prohibition. Most existed before the enactment of prohibition, and many had made the local saloons their places of operation. Gambling and prostitution were their big money-makers, and this was true even during prohibition. Although a great deal of smuggling and illegal selling of beverage alcohol did take place, the huge payoffs to police and politicians that were necessary for the gangs to continue their illegal business cut heavily into their profits.

There were a number of gangland killings because of infringement of territory or other rivalries. Probably the best known of these tragedies is the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago. Bugs Moran sent six men to Detroit with three trucks to bring back 150 cases of illegal booze that had been smuggled out of Canada.

When the liquor runners returned to Chicago on February 14, 1929, they made their way to a garage on LaSalle Street, as they had been instructed to do.

When they pulled into the garage, a police car pulled in behind them with machine guns firing. When the encounter was over, all of Bugs Moran's men were dead, and the trucks had been driven away by the police officers, who were not police officers at all but members of Al Capone's gang.

Newspapers across the nation played up this gangland ambush, labeling it the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and blaming the prohibition law for the killings.

Journalists romanticized each gangster encounter and with the increase in communications that took place during the 1920s it is not surprising that the public became convinced that a national crime wave was under way.

Actually, far more people die violent deaths today as a result of alcohol use than were victims of violence during prohibition.

In her book Alcohol and Your Health, Louise Burgess explains what the so-called prohibition crime wave meant to the average American:

Crime increased among the underworld-due to the gangster's own private war over huge booty made possible by the illegal trade. The general public may have lived the war vicariously, in the press and through radio, but remained almost entirely unharmed. Gang leaders, in fact , were wary of upsetting the status quo. Enforcement officers, federal and local, thus could more easily look the other way. Also, as one bootlegger said: "It just don't make no sense to rough up our customers." 10

While there seems to have been an increase in crime toward the end of the prohibition era, an examination of what happened after repeal makes it clear that prohibition was not the cause. In 1935, the director of federal prisons announced that the prison population had increased by twenty-five percent in the first year of repeal. He said:

...the increase in liquor crimes...and practically all kinds of crime, have carried us beyond the estimates; the relief we were expecting to get through the repeal of prohibition did not materialize.11

The repeal of prohibition did not reduce crime, and the years since then have seen a continual increase in violence and illegal activities. Although prohibition may not be the answer to America's crime problem, it is certain that we cannot drink our way to domestic tranquility.

Was the Great Depression brought on by prohibition?

The uninformed think so.

The truth is that prohibition introduced America to unparalleled prosperity, which continued for nearly a decade. The real story of economic progress during prohibition is seldom told.

Those working for national prohibition had predicted that the millions of dollars being spent on booze would be turned to better uses. They envisioned better home life, an increase in industrial output, and rising living standards. And they were right.

In his book The Amazing Story of Repeal, Fletcher Dobyns writes:

The economic aspect of prohibition was made the subject of exhaustive investigation by many men who were honest, competent, and disinterested. They found that prohibition brought about a great decrease in the amount of liquor consumed, increased the dependability and efficiency of labor, reduced industrial accidents and losses; that the loss to the farmers was more than offset by the increased sale of milk, bread, vegetables, meat, and other farm products; that the closing of the saloons had increased the value of adjacent real estate; that it greatly increased the power of the people to purchase necessary and useful articles and stimulated every line of legitimate industry; and that it increased the national wealth and promoted the prosperity of all classes not directly or indirectly interested in the liquor business.12

Prohibition plugged the hole in the nation's pocketbook. Wages that had been supporting liquor producers were used to purchase manufactured goods. Samuel Crowther, an economist of that era, explained the impact on the nation's economy when money was used to purchase merchandise rather than beverage alcohol. He wrote:

We shall entirely disregard, for the moment, any possible effects of the liquor on [the purchaser] and think of it only as a way of spending money. But a purchaser of liquor sets in motion a very small chain of purchasing, while, if the family of the man has that twenty dollars to spend, they will put it out into goods which require a deal of labor and start many chains of purchasing. Or the same effect will be had if they save part of the money... 

There is an absolute unanimity of opinion that the wage earners are spending more on their families than they ever did and that the standards of living are constantly growing higher.

...Prohibition, it appears from the letters which I have received, has definitely switched the spending of wages for drink to the spending of wages for goods. These letters in themselves present a really remarkable record-and it is an unprejudiced, first-hand record having to do only with the effects of spending on prosperity. All of the writers are in a position to know what they are talking about...

The answers from everywhere in the country are the same-the working men are spending little or nothing for drink and a great deal on their families.... 

By the rerouting of at least two-thirds of the money which formerly went for drink into the buying of useful goods, a higher level of general living has been established in this country. The higher level has brought higher wages and still higher levels of living. 

We have as a nation been infinitely more prosperous since prohibition than ever before. We are definitely going forward . It would seem that prohibition is fundamental to our prosperity-that it is the greatest blow which has ever struck poverty.13

Leaders in all areas of life-many of whom had opposed prohibition-spoke out in its favor, including industrialists, social workers, labor leaders, doctors , and journalists.

But the people spoke the loudest. In 1928 they elected the driest Congress in history.

Why, then, was prohibition finally repealed?

Three factors brought about the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment:

1. The efforts of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). 
2. The problem of enforcement. 
3. The Great Depression. 

In his book Booze, Bucks, Bamboozle, and You! Ross J. McClennan writes:

The "masses" brought prohibition to the nation but a small group of millionaires were the initial organizers of a concerted effort to destroy the law of the land which had been approved by the voters.14

McClennan is referring to the AAPA, an organization born in April of 1919. The group's goal was to make prohibition inoperative. Revealing the tactics of the organization, McClennan writes:

The personal contributions of this group of millionaires was only a small part of the support they threw behind the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Through their interlocking directorates they controlled over forty billion dollars of invested funds. With this power structure at their command they could determine the policy of a great many powerful newspapers and magazines. By determining the editorial policy of newspapers and magazines the AAPA could brainwash the readers of such publications. And this they did.15

What was the reason for the persistent push by AAPA members? For many, it was the hope that tax revenues from the sale of alcohol would eliminate the need for income tax as a means of financing the federal government. We all know that didn't work.

Enforcement of prohibition was a serious problem. To know this one needs only to examine newspaper accounts and arrest records of the prohibition era. The enforcement of a dry law by wet politicians and police departments carries with it inherent difficulties.

Al Capone complained that his payoffs to politicians and policemen totaled approximately $30 million a year. Estimates of amounts of money changing hands illegally to keep the booze flowing on a nationwide scale are extremely high. That should not surprise us, given the nature of man.

After a decade of prosperity under prohibition, the Roaring Twenties came to an end with a collapse of the stock market in October of 1929. To this day, most Americans associate the Great Depression with prohibition. Prohibition did not bring on the depression and in fact may have postponed it, but the depression's environment of panic allowed prohibition's opponents to capitalize on the ills of the nation and the people's distress and bring about repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Author Dobyns begins his chapter on the depression as follows:

We come now to the most dishonest and shameless phase of the entire wet propaganda-its capitalization of the depression.16

Dobyns is justified in making his strong statement. Propaganda laid the cause of the depression at prohibition's door. But nothing could have been further from the truth.

Thomas Nixon Carver, professor of political economics at Harvard University, answered the charges, saying:

The depression is world-wide. The countries which do not have prohibition are worse off than we are. Some of them are practically bankrupt. They owe us money which they cannot repay. England went off the gold standard. Wages are now paid in a depreciated currency.... This was probably necessary in order to save British industries from wholesale bankruptcy. It was not prohibition that put Great Britain in such a position. If prohibition produced the depression in this country, it worked as a very slow poison. Wartime restrictions on the liquor traffic were adopted in 1918 as economic measures. Liquor was prohibited to soldiers and sailors. Wartime prohibition came in 1919, practically without opposition. The Eighteenth Amendment became operative in January 1920. For 10 years this country enjoyed unexampled prosperity under prohibition. We were able to lend billions of dollars to other countries after the war was over. This helped them to rehabilitate their industries and set their men to work. In spite of that they now claim that they were unable to pay us back. In other words, they plead bankruptcy. We may have to accept that plea and forgive their debts. That would put us in the position of a rich creditor forgiving a poor debtor. Yet every one of those countries is spending enough on drink to more than pay what they owe us. It was not prohibition that put them in such a position. It was not prohibition that makes them such poor 'customers for what we have to sell. It does not seem that prohibition in this country could cause a world depression.17

Prohibition did not cause the depression, and repeal did not end it. After repeal, the depression became more serious. The production of booze did not bring about the promised miraculous economic recovery. Relief was years away.

On December 6, 1933, prohibition ended. And the drinking levels of Americans, which had been substantially reduced during fourteen dry years, began to rise again, bringing a trail of misery, crime, and death that continues to this day.

What lessons were learned from the prohibition experience?

At least the following:

1. Public indignation against evil can produce results. 
2. A decrease in alcohol use on a nationwide scale is achievable. 
3. When the use of beverage alcohol is decreased, the result is a higher quality of life for all.

Today, with alcohol use in America an epidemic, nearly all solutions to the problem center on treatment for alcoholics. But this does little to prevent others from becoming afflicted. No plague has ever been stayed by only treating the sick. Prevention is necessary.

What can be done to stem the rising tide of alcohol use in America?

In periods of revival, solutions to such problems have risen from the churches. What is the present spiritual climate in the land? Is there hope for a new awakening that will empty the taverns and fill the places of worship?

Do Christians always agree on the booze question?

Should they?

What does the Bible say about beverage alcohol?

"Alcohol Beloved Enemy" Jack Van Impe, Chapter 8 - Prohibition: What Really Happened? also found in news letters, pt.1 May 19th, 2008 and pt.2 May 26th, 2008.

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Proverbs20:1, Proverbs 23:29-35, Luke 1:15, Daniel 1:8, Ephesians 5:18, Habakkuk 2:15-16, Roman's 14:21, Luke 12:45-46, 1 Thessalonians 5: 7-8

John 10:10 "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

Gleason Archer; "If we really care about the souls of men, and if we are really in business for Christ, rather than for ourselves, then there seems to be no alternative to total abstinence-not as a matter of legalism, but rather as a matter of love?"

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1. Ross J. McLennan, Booze , Bucks, Bamboozle & You (Oklahoma City: Sane Press, 1978), p. 133.
2. Louise Bailey Burgess, Alcohol and Your Health (Los Angeles: Charles Pub., 1973), p. 152.
3. McLennan, Booze, p. 125.
4. J. C. Burnham, "New Perspectives on the Prohibition 'Experiment' of the 19208," Journal ofSocial History, 2 (1968), p. 60.
5. As quoted in McLennan, Booze, pp. 142-143.
6. Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us From Evil (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), pp. 145-146.
7. Burnham, "New Perspectives on the Prohibition 'Experiment' of the 1920s," p. 63.
8. McLennan, Booze, pp. 118-120.
9. Burgess, Your Health, p. 152.
10. Ibid., p. 153.
11. Deets Pickett, Then and Now (Columbus, Oh.: School and College Service, 1952), p. 68.
12. Fletcher Dobyns, The Amazing Story of Repeal (Chicago and New York: Willett, Clark & Co., 1940), p. 381.
13. Ibid., pp. 387-388.
14. McLennan, Booze, p. 134.
15. Ibid., pp. 134-135.
16. Dobyns, Repeal, p. 375.
17. Ibid., p. 390.