What would've changed in the US if Prohibition of Alcohol never happened?

No Prohibition has a implication that morale crusaders & do-gooders were less organized and influential. If that is the case then there is a different social and legal trajectory into the mid 20th Century. If it fails to be enacted simply through a few votes short & assorted parliamentary and political deals then the moralists will be active suppressing 'Immorality' other ways. The revival Klan of 1915-1923 were supporters of Prohibition and the enforcement arm were active against distillers and bootleggers. Lacking national Prohibition some or many of the Klaverns could have been active against the legal alcohol business. Fire bombing low Saloons, distilleries, & interdicting bootleg shipments. Similar to what they tried in the early Prohibition era.

As has been mentioned many times elsewhere, the trajectory of organized crime is very different. The mob, gangs, mafia, syndicates, whatever made themselves rich during prohibition and became powerful enough to finance pumping up narcotics & other businesses that used a similar plan or operating system as bootlegging.

In general US history it avoids or alters a embarrassing failure of the great experiment.

No mob with lots of dirty cash looking for a laundry means Las Vegas stays a quiet desert town.
 
Prohibition severely impoverished American drinking culture. Pisco from Peru and Chile was well known in California before Prohibition. Robertson County, Tennessee, had a massive amount of whiskey distilleries which all were closed during Prohibition (in Tennessee this was earlier than in the rest of the country).

But remember that many states had Prohibition before the US as a whole did, and many states retained it for years after (i.e. Kansas). In Tennessee, corrupt politicians in Memphis and Nashville (where Prohibition was least felt in the state due to local laws) would use alcohol to help buy votes--they'd have the police who confiscated a bunch of bootleg whiskey pass it out in neighbourhoods they wanted their guy to win in during elections. I'd assume this was a somewhat common practice during much of the 20th century in many parts of the country.

Also taxing peoples bad habits & addictions, as with tobacco & alcohol seems more cost effective than aggressive suppression that mostly beats up the users and does little against the people who exploit the situation.

Absolutely. Tobacco taxes have been a key reason why so many people don't smoke, since it's too expensive. And some Prohibitionists also targetted cigarettes as the next vice to be controlled after alcohol was banned.

However, I am wondering how things would be in the Great depression with the dust bowl though... I reckon that would affect the alcohol

In the early years of the Great Depression, grain was literally rotting in silos throughout the Great Plains as people in Appalachia and elsewhere starved. I think that some of that grain going toward beer or whiskey might be good for the economy at the very least, although the Dust Bowl would still occur.
 
No mob with lots of dirty cash looking for a laundry means Las Vegas stays a quiet desert town.
Not quite, the Hoover Dam was built right next door. Cheap electricity and access to water and small casinos are still there. Las Vegas was still going to happen, just a little slower and probably better thought out.
 
Not quite, the Hoover Dam was built right next door. Cheap electricity and access to water and small casinos are still there. Las Vegas was still going to happen, just a little slower and probably better thought out.

Las Vegas got a hefty war time boost from being a stop over for the railroads moving soldiers. Post war the divorce laws led to 'legal tourism' from states with tough separation laws.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Would the FBI be as powerful as it is today without the greater amount of organized crime caused by Prohibition?
 
Would the FBI be as powerful as it is today without the greater amount of organized crime caused by Prohibition?

My understanding is they tended to ignore organized crime, opting instead to hunt down and dramatically kill the bank robbers. So FBI is still on par but would the IRS gain the same law enforcement aspect after successfully jailing gangsters for tax evasion?
 
the fbi ignored organized crime otl because of edna, no prohibition means much different staffing and thus we never have hoover in the fbi
 
On a cultural/cuisine note: there would have been a lot more diversity (and dare I say quality?) in American beer and wine production throughout the mid-20th century. Beer brewing was struck hard by Prohibition, and a lot of smaller breweries making styles of ales, porters, or other varieties went out of business. So we lost not only the legacy of dozens of styles brought over from more than a dozen European cultural traditions, but also dozens if not hundreds of varieties that had been developed in the US since the 1700.

Well sure, but the one implication of this is you see evolution from those and thus, likely no or at minimum a weaker/later modern craft beer fad. Not a beer drinker myself, but it'd be a butterfly to consider for OTL.
 
Without prohibition, I wonder if there would have been an earlier crackdown on drunk driving and driving while intoxicated.
 
Without prohibition, I wonder if there would have been an earlier crackdown on drunk driving and driving while intoxicated.

Maybe, but I clearly remember cans of beer between the knees of so many drivers circa 1960. When cup holders first appeared, the kind with the hook to hang on the window or ashtray a beer can was the common cargo for those. A ashtray full of butts, and the kids rolling around unsecured in the back seat. Those were the days.

My parents were more straight laced than that, but they'd still be prosecuted now for some of their acceptable child rearing practices in 1962.
 
Can I disagree slightly with "hundreds" of beer brands? It was more like thousands of small companies; at peak, before Prohibition, the U.S. had over 4000.

And it's not limited to organized crime, which is going to be much, much poorer. Maybe not so much less organized, since the pressure to avoid internicine warfare was still there, & Lucania (better known as "Charlie Lucky") isn't dead, but it could take a decade or more longer than OTL before that comes to pass. Without Mafia, efforts against national crime are going to focus more on the likes of Dillinger, well into the '50s; does this mean, perhaps, the Hell's Angels attract the attention of RFK (if he's still AG?) or Kefauver? It also seems likely Teamster corruption is less. Possibly (probably?) less in entertainment, too. Very likely Vegas never becomes a Mob playground, & maybe never more than a shanty town, without Mob $$. (So Reno, & the "Nevada divorce", is the #1 attraction. Maybe Tahoe?)

The other big, obvious effect is gun control. The 1934 law, passed because of gangsters, wouldn't happen, which means Tommy guns would be available over the counter well into the '50s (& maybe until the '68 law). Without gangsters making headlines, there's a lot less pressure to regulate guns.

OTOH, without alcohol prohibition, does prohibition of marijuana & other drugs gain traction? Anslinger was a fanatic for banning grass, & there was enough racism in the U.S., & in policy against it, to make that credible. Does that turn out to have the "war on drugs" effects, 50yr early?:eek::eek: Combine that with a system of legalized slavery, of targetting blacks with petty offences...:eek::eek: Do you end up with a million, or two million, blacks in effective slavery by 1950?:eek::eek::eek: Or sooner?:eek::eek:
 
Last edited:
Without the need to keep all the extra cops/related paperwork people employed because of prohibition no federal drug efforts on the scale of OTL. Drug laws likely evolve on a similar trajectory to OTL -- decades of repression followed by liberalization in recent years in some areas. The difference is it'd be more localized with much less federal involvement of it.
 
There's one oddball effect: soda pop sales are probably a lot lower. They were offered as mixes, to help conceal alcoholic drinks; that doesn't happen without Prohibition. So, too, the popularity of rum & Coke or 7&7, today, is a lot less.

Something else: many black musicians have their careers crimped. Speakeasies frequently used blacks, which exposed them to white audiences; this wouldn't happen.
Organized crime becomes a thing because of WWII-era rationing.
No, it didn't. Prohibition was enormously profitable. It made Capone. It made the Five Families, in particular Lucania. It may have made Dragna, & through him & Lansky, Vegas. (It was L.A. mobsters who went there first.)

No Prohibition also has another significant, even major, cultural effect: enormously less police & political corruption. LAPD isn't the rotten apple of OTL. Chicago isn't the Mafia playground of OTL. And that has cultural butterflies, not least "Godfather" & "City of Angels" & "L.A. Confidential" & "Murder, My Sweet" (from Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely; & probably the Easy Rawlins stories, too).
 
Last edited:
Oh I'd love for someone to write this TL, as it would be a mostly positive one, in my view. As someone who himself is often guilty of writing "worse world" scenarios, wouldn't it be fun to imagine a world where things flat out got better because this silly law did not get written. The only drawback, without the idea being shown to be a total and complete sham, activists would still be yearning for it and we might have dry counties and etc. and some states flirting with the notion because it is not fully discredited. Either way, I'd like to take a peek into this curious world.
 
Top