No "noble experiment".

How does one avoid the 'noble experiment' itself? By 1915ish, it was almost inevitable that national Prohibition was going to come about. Perhaps no WWI? IIRC, anti-German hysteria allowed the drys a lot of what they needed to go after the brewers, who happened to be mostly German. If there is no WWI or America doesn't enter the war, it's likely that it remains a contentious issue at the state and local level, but probably won't get far at the federal level.

Which likely means that even today we'd still have 'wet' and 'dry' states, barring a Supreme Court decision on the matter. Still, the potential butterflies are interesting. A weaker 'Bureau of Investigation' that might not end up being headed by a certain J. Edgar Hoover, a different American auto scene (slower cars?), less interstate regulatory apparatuses and law enforcement? What might this have on other restrictive drug laws?
 
oddly you make American beer better and kill the control of Budweiser, Coor's, and Miller on the American beer market, so American Beer is likely more localized and darker/better more like the microbrewery movement we've been seeing lately "big" breweries would be like Sam Adams size (and taste)

Why would it have this effect? Because you not like Inbev or SABMiller? You ever tried large numbers of small brewery beer outside of the pententious yuppie market labels? You ever tried a beer like Genesee, Iron City or Yuengling? Small doesn't automatically mean better.

What makes beers good is just the recipe, it doesn't matter the size of the brewery that makes it. Large brewers make the socalled mirco-brewery beers all the time. For years Sam Adam (you know SAdams is really a regional Saint Louis German beer sold until the 1950s.) was made in SAMiller breweries. Even before prohibition the German/Czech lager type beer had driven most English Ale types out of the market. How would that trend change because there are more German run breweries making lagers in business?

Sure Prohibition sped up the process of large national brands but those the big name US brewers would have gain control of the national market sooner or later anyways. They were better business men and offered a product the people wanted. After Prohibition about 800 breweries restarted beer production, that's not a small number. And still by 1960 there were 3 or 4 national brands.
 
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Sure Prohibition sped up the process of large national brands but those the big name US brewers would have gain control of the national market sooner or later anyways. They were better business men and offered a product the people wanted. After Prohibition about 800 breweries restarted beer production, that's not a small number. And still by 1960 there were 3 or 4 national brands.

I have to go with this. After all, there are numerous examples of American products that dwindled from a huge multitude of local brands down to a small handful of national brands during the twentieth century, but very few of them went through any form of prohibition.
 
While today we focus on the negatives of Prohibition - the rise of organized crime, etc., one should remember that it actually succeeded at the original task it was designed for.

Pre-prohibition, there was a whole culture of factory workers, for instance, who would get their pay at the end of the week, stop off at a pub with their buddies and drink half of it, leaving their families destitute. Prohibition broke that cycle, which is a very good thing.

I do suspect that the downsides out-weigh the upsides here, but it was NOT (simply) a moral and puritanical project by do-gooders.
 
Did it, what about the speakeasys and the like? Wouldn't the same people who pissed away their pay at the pub just piss it away at a speakeasy or other illegal means?
 

Cook

Banned
It needs to be pointed out that there was a rise in organised crime in the 1920s in countries that did not have prohibition, just as there was in the United States. The decade saw a rapid increase in disposable income that resulted in increased demand for alcohol (legal and illegal), drugs (Opiates and Cocaine), gambling and prostitution, organised crime just moved in on highly profitable industries.
 
How does one avoid the 'noble experiment' itself? By 1915ish, it was almost inevitable that national Prohibition was going to come about.

Well, if Wiki can be believed the 18th Amendment got through the HoR by only 282-128, so a change of only nine votes would have defeated it - and that was in Dec 1917, when the country was ablaze with anti-German hydrophobia, and bans were being imposed on the use of foodstuffs to manufacture liquor. Take that mood away, and it very likely fails.

What you might still get, of course, is something akin to the 21A, affirming the constitutionality of all State prohibition laws.
 
While today we focus on the negatives of Prohibition - the rise of organized crime, etc., one should remember that it actually succeeded at the original task it was designed for.

Pre-prohibition, there was a whole culture of factory workers, for instance, who would get their pay at the end of the week, stop off at a pub with their buddies and drink half of it, leaving their families destitute. Prohibition broke that cycle, which is a very good thing.

I do suspect that the downsides out-weigh the upsides here, but it was NOT (simply) a moral and puritanical project by do-gooders.


IT HAS????:confused:
 

Thande

Donor
People seem to be ignoring that Prohibition was not just an American thing, it was also a movement in many European countries and Canada and was successfully implemented in several of them (temporarily).
 
People seem to be ignoring that Prohibition was not just an American thing, it was also a movement in many European countries and Canada and was successfully implemented in several of them (temporarily).

"Temperance" reform was also present within other ideologies than those of American progressives; the anarchists in the Spanish civil war being an example.
 
The rise of organised crime is one important thing to bear in mind here. A more important by-product is that prohibition eroded the rule of a law more than a smidge - people knew that drinking alcohol was against the law, but did it anyway.
 
In the north, the Saloon and to a lesser extent the beer garden would remain fixtures of community (and I dare say political) life.
 
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