AHC: Prohibition in the USA by the late 1850s

elkarlo

Banned
Wasn't temperance an outgrowth of woman's suffrage? Get women to vote earlier, or fight for it, and you may see prohibition occur earlier.
 
You would need an earlier Civil War. The notion that the Federal government could meddle in social policy on that scale is literally inconceivable prior to the ACW.

Maine outlawed alcohol in 1850 OTL. Bills came within a hair's breadth of passing in many other northern states (failed by 1 vote in NY, vetoed by the governor in Connecticut, etc). Very modest changes would suffice to see alcohol illegal in the North. But there was no equivalent movement in the South, and this will be universally understood as a State matter rather than a national one without an example like Reconstruction to pave the way.
 
Alcohol is a very fundamental part of American life, and especially of many segments of the country. I'm thinking of rural regions, especially those people in the Appalachians, who will fight tooth and nail for their right to distill whiskey and assorted alcoholic concoctions. Prohibition of alcohol is very much one of those airy ideas from wide eyed progressives who want to save people from themselves through iron clad legal banishment and punishment. It does not work in the real world. Always be weary of utopians.

You'll have all the same problems of the actual prohibition of alcohol, multiplied many fold as there is much more rural America in this time frame, and much more frontier which is being settled. Inform a miner that he can't have a drink, and inform a frontier town with contaminated water that they can't drink alcohol. Try to settle and maintain new regions without alcohol as an alternative drinking source and as an escape for people in what amount to hell hole yet to be properly settled and civilized. And try, without major national infrastructure and legal infrastructure, to keep an eye on all the States and all their inhabitants to keep them dry. And try, with those conditions, to keep the local legal authorities, which will have to be relied upon, from being corrupted. And not only that, but you will have the blow back populist sentiment of the little men prohibition would be burdening. The masses will not put up with this lightly, and it will be an act of the government unfairly pushing authority on the average person in what will be perceived as a dictatorial fashion.
 
Prior to the establishment of the Income Tax 40%+ of the Federal governments money came from the excise tax on alcohol. So the only way to pass Prohibition is to first come up with a way of funding the Federal government without the tax on alcohol.

The prohibitionists figured that out just before WWI and thats when they got the idea of pushing through an ammendment authorising a Income Tax as part of the deal to get prohibition passed.
 

elkarlo

Banned
You would need an earlier Civil War. The notion that the Federal government could meddle in social policy on that scale is literally inconceivable prior to the ACW.

Maine outlawed alcohol in 1850 OTL. Bills came within a hair's breadth of passing in many other northern states (failed by 1 vote in NY, vetoed by the governor in Connecticut, etc). Very modest changes would suffice to see alcohol illegal in the North. But there was no equivalent movement in the South, and this will be universally understood as a State matter rather than a national one without an example like Reconstruction to pave the way.


But by 1919 alcohol was outloawed in 30 some states by then. The fed govt didn't do much save for make it dejure for all the US.

Even pre ACW, you could still get most states to ban alcohol.

Question, would abolitionists be temprence folk or vice versa given a change in time/circumstances?
 
Challenge: Have Prohibition get passed in the USA by the late 1850s, instead of in 1918.

Dunno about this: regardless of what may have happened in Maine IOTL.....even banning cannabis, in the South(including Texas), by 1870, would be a real challenge. TBH, banning alcohol(a substance with far more investment & value in American culture) in the entire country by 1860.....seems to be pretty much unfeasible, at least with a POD not going back less than about 50 years or so, maybe.

At least with marijuana or opium, you could scare people into making it out to be this substance which could draw you to harder substances(as what happened up North for both of them IOTL), or that it's a favorite partaking of a hated "other"(as what happened in the South and many parts out West with the former IOTL).

But again, the truth is, even with fairly popular organizations like the WCTU, and certain others throwing their weight in favor of its banning, alcohol continued to have a very special place in American culinary culture, especially in the South, and in parts of the Midwest where German and Irish Americans had a fairly sizable presence. TBH, I'm truly of the opinion that national booze prohibition at any point was kind of a historical fluke IOTL and wouldn't have been too hard to butterfly.
 
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