WI No Prohibition in America?

MacCaulay

Banned
:mad::mad: I am so sick of this old saw. It's a myth. There was professional racing across the U.S. in the '20s, from New York to California, with no bootleggers involved. NASCAR was a reaction to crooked promoters as much as anything.


You know...I remember hearing that whole thing from SO far back in my life I kind of always accepted it as fact. Now thinking about it...the tracks and gearheads still would've been there.
Good point. I bow to your superior logic on this point. And seeing how it was the south, they WOULD need something to keep the shysters out.
 
You know...I remember hearing that whole thing from SO far back in my life I kind of always accepted it as fact. Now thinking about it...the tracks and gearheads still would've been there.
Good point. I bow to your superior logic on this point. And seeing how it was the south, they WOULD need something to keep the shysters out.
There's a real mythology built up around it, not helped by Hollywood. (Remember "The Last American Hero"?) And shysters? You have no idea... Very often, the only person to see a dime was the promoter...
 
Reason on US beer history. Did you know we have Jimmy Carter to thank for things not beeing worse.
http://reason.com/news/show/131411.html

The referenced article leaves out a very important point. The legislation signed by President Carter was part of a more sweeping program to encourage production of fuel-oriented alcohol, and it was simply necessary to loosen the licensing procedure for beverage alcohol at the same time.

Prior to 1978, a backyard inventor who tried to produce alcohol fuel would be guilty of violating moonshine laws and that is why only corporations and universities were into fuel alcohol experimentation before that time. Many materials can ferment, but if you use too much wheat, the gulten causes so much foaming that distillation is difficult. Now, without research, you would not know those details. Fuel liberalized beer, and that is why we have so many microbreweries today, with full-flavored beer.
 
It is most certainly true that Prohibition greatly fueled the power of the Mob.

However, it DID have positive effects. Before Prohibition there was an industrial culture of Joe Factory worker getting his pay cheque on Friday, stopping at the bar on the way home and blowing a sizeable chunk of it before he got home, which left his wife and kids in poverty.

Prohibition killed that culture, and gave poor families a needed leg up.

Whether there was any way to fix the one problem without creating a different problem of similar size, well I don't know. Certainly, we should remember that the Temperance movement was genuinely concerned with people's well fair (they weren't JUST middle-class prudes, although some were that too).
 
My most lamented side effect of prohibition was the effect it had on US large denomination currency. One of the reasons these big bills were discontinued was their use by organised crime, so without this factor which thrived during prohibition these big bill may have lasted longer and been a bit more prevelent. Not much I know, but I find the idea of banknotes up in the thousands of dollars really cool.

Just as a matter of interest I think it's a bit unfair to say that without bootlegging the Kennedy's would be comfortable nonentities. Joe was already well on his way when prohibition came in in 1920, he bought control of a bank in 1913 and became the youngest bank president in the US. He held good jobs during the war and legitimately made a lot of money in film finance, real estate and the markets during the 20s and managed to get wrecked in the crash of 29, according to wiki he was worth $4 mill in 29 and $180 mill in 1935. Set against this bootlegging can't have been overly important source of income if his involvement is limited to unsubstantiated rumours. If he made real money from bootlegging then these rumours would have been substantiated for starters.
 
ljofa;1114150 According to wikipedia said:
the general sobriety of the colonists suggests the effectiveness of their system of informal and formal controls in a population that averaged about three and a half gallons (about 13 liters) of absolute alcohol per year per person. That rate was dramatically higher than the present rate of consumption[/I]." Where I doubt the rate of consumption of 20th Century America as opposed to colonial America was quite that high, it could well have meant liver diseases were rather rampant and could therefore lead to greater medical research in these areas being conducted.

That rate of 13 litres of absolute acohol per person isn't that scary if you convert it into 768 bottles of beer or 48 bottles of whisky for the year. That is doable for most of us.
 
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