WI: No Prohibition?

The prohibition amendment was never the most popular one. It was way too often ignored and unenforced. Would there be much of a change if any in the U.S., in politics specifically?
 
Actually, it was pretty popular, that's why it was put in place in the first place, why some states had Prohibition before the amendment, and why it took decades for the repeal of it in parts.

Politically, without national prohibition, Prohibition as a movement would retain its force much longer. The OTL Prohibition Party would still have some pull (look how fast they died off after Prohibition was passed), especially locally or even statewide. But the biggest thing affected would obviously be US drinking culture--Prohibition is credited with impoverishing the alcohol tastes of Americans.
 
I’m not I can stress just how much damage Prohibition did to the USA. It hugely strengthened organised crime, made a mockery of the law, resulted in massive smuggling and bribery, caused ordinary people to break the law and destroyed America’s reputation as a place that brewed decent beer (my American wife’s comments about Budweiser are totally unprintable). All you have to do to get it voted down is to get the Wet faction actively involved in squashing it. Once they realised that it was a threat then they fought hard, but they hadn’t taken it seriously. Get them to take it seriously from the start and it should get defeated.
 
I’m not I can stress just how much damage Prohibition did to the USA. It hugely strengthened organised crime, made a mockery of the law, resulted in massive smuggling and bribery, caused ordinary people to break the law and destroyed America’s reputation as a place that brewed decent beer (my American wife’s comments about Budweiser are totally unprintable). All you have to do to get it voted down is to get the Wet faction actively involved in squashing it. Once they realised that it was a threat then they fought hard, but they hadn’t taken it seriously. Get them to take it seriously from the start and it should get defeated.

sums it up , and from a world wide position - prevents the rise of the sex in a canoe that passes for US beer
 
Prohibition had a negative impact internationally. The US was a big market for foreign alcohol, and a lot of non-American companies, and a lot of types of alcohol were seriously hurt in the long term.
 
sums it up , and from a world wide position - prevents the rise of the sex in a canoe that passes for US beer

Otherwise known as "Sex on the Beach". And make that most US beer. Actually the guy the owns/runs/whatever Samuel Adams has expressed a great deal of admiration for the large mega brewers Budweiser, Miller et al. What he admires is their ability to turnout an amazingly consistant product. And in the volumes they do. And even Miller and others did produce beers besides their white bread lagers. Pabst had Andecker, Miller had Special Reserve. They may not of been the worlds greatest beers but they were heads and shoulders above the standard lagers. The absolute low point for American beer production was "Billy Beer"
 
Prohibition drastically changed the view of federal government. The progressivism of the 1900s and 1910s died out because of Prohibition. If it wasn't for Prohibition, we might see more federal help to citizens during the Great Depression
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
Otherwise known as "Sex on the Beach". And make that most US beer. Actually the guy the owns/runs/whatever Samuel Adams has expressed a great deal of admiration for the large mega brewers Budweiser, Miller et al. What he admires is their ability to turnout an amazingly consistant product. And in the volumes they do. And even Miller and others did produce beers besides their white bread lagers. Pabst had Andecker, Miller had Special Reserve. They may not of been the worlds greatest beers but they were heads and shoulders above the standard lagers. The absolute low point for American beer production was "Billy Beer"

How about JR Ewing's Private Stock Beer? Or MASH Beer?
 
We once split a can of Billy 12 ways. One ounce of "beer" a piece. Nobody, and I mean nobody drank the whole shot. I think they just tapped Billy's kidneys
 
Prohibition had a negative impact internationally. The US was a big market for foreign alcohol, and a lot of non-American companies, and a lot of types of alcohol were seriously hurt in the long term.

This is true, prohibition shattered the Irish Whiskey industry and its taken decades to recover with the majority of the brands gone. Wonder if those industries and the supporting industries had survived how the Free States economy might have been?
 
I read a fascinating internet article on Prohibition a few years ago which of course I didn't bookmark and can't find now. This is a particularly myth encrusted episode of US history. I will try to summarize the article using points that can be easily verified using Google searches, but there is still a risk of too many heads exploding over this.

1. Prohibition was not particularly popular when it started. The initial strategy of the prohibitionists was to use initiative and referenda to get states to establish prohibition laws. This failed. The public kept voting down prohibition ballot proposals.

2. The constitutional amendment was actually a clever end run over the fact that prohibition was unpopular. Remember, to pass a constitutional amendment you need a supermajority in Congress and to get three fourths of the state legislatures. The public is actually not involved at all, except obviously for electing members of Congress and the state legislatures. But remember the US is not exactly a democracy and was even less so at the time. Legislative districts didn't have equal populations, the franchise was restricted, elections were stolen openly, and this was the period when a political party (the Socialists) was shut down by the police and when Congress blocked the constitutionally mandated re-apportionment of state delegations. So it was perfectly possible to ram an unpopular unconstitutional amendment down the public's throats! The article claims that is what happened.

3. The tactics used to sell prohibition were not on the up-and-up anyway, many supporters assumed that it would just apply to hard liquor, not to beer.

4. The enabling federal legislation went much farther than required by the amendment or on what supporters envisaged, and was more draconian than the rules in other countries where alcohol was prohibited. You couldn't create alchohol solely for export, no exceptions were allowed, it applied to even weak and small quantities of alcohol, etc. The enabling legislation, the Volstead Act, was thorough impractical and unenforceable.

5. Because of # 2 to # 5, many police departments simply refused to enforce the relevant legislation. Remember, police was still an entirely local responsibility. It wasn't that it is easy for people to evade laws, in many localities the local government and local government had no intention of enforcing the law. Eventually in alot of cities you didn't even have "speakeasies", liquor was sold pretty openly.

6. Because local police weren't enforcing the laws, you got a big expansion of federal police power, eg agencies such as the FBI.

7. Prohibition actually grew to be fairly popular as people got used to it. In 1928 there was a presidential election that directly pitted a "dry" candidate, Hoover, against a "wet" candidate, Smtih. Hoover crushed Smith in the voting results, and dries had firm federal legislative majorities throughout the 1920s. The reason the amendment and the Volstead Act were repealed is that the "wet" minority made up an important constituency of the Democratic Party, and when the Democrats swept into power in 1932 due to the Great Depression, repeal of prohibition was almost literally the first thing they did, to reward their base voters.

8. Prohibition meant literally shutting down entire industries and throwing people out of work, something that is often forgotten. The only place where you say anti-free market measures on this scale at the time was in the Soviet Union. Its also no coincidence that the repeal came at the bottom of the Great Depression, the economic crisis was so bad that the country couldn't afford to have entire industries shut down like that, let alone the money poured down the drain with enforcement.

9.. Repeal didn't turn back the clock to the status quo ante legally, which you can see by just reading the text of the two relevant amendments. Regulation of alcohol at the federal and state level was still considerably different (more restrictive) in 1934 as opposed to 1916. And around the same time as prohibition lots of other drugs were banned and remain banned to this day. The big increase in police powers, especially federal police powers, is also still there.

10. Prohibition reduced consumption of alcohol in the US, and the effects lasted for at least decades past the repeal. It also killed the saloon culture of the nineteenth century, which was a key objective of the prohibition. The idea that nice middle class people have a few drinks at the end of the day at home, each day,and don't go to bars is pretty much a prohibition derived idea. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in the 1930s, and again this wasn't a coincidence.

I will pretty much leave things at there, but the big myth is the idea that Prohibition was some sort of failure. The prohibitionists accomplished most of their objectives. Granted, stopping people from drinking alcohol completely is not possible, Muslims in Muslim countries that have complete bans on alcohol for example drink, they just are careful not to do it in public. But banning public alcohol consumption and public drinking culture is very achievable, and what re-emerged after the repeal of prohibition was very different from American drinking culture in the 19th century. Though variants of the idea were tried pretty much everywhere, American drinking culture is still noticeably different than in the rest of the world. And prohibition brought with it a big expansion of police power.
 
I thought of this the other day, but for a specific example of an alcohol directly influenced by the Prohibition movement, look no further than Tennessee whiskey. At one point, Robertson County, basically in the middle of nowhere a century ago and to this day not really near anything in particular (it isn't affected by Nashville's urban sprawl), produced massive quantities of whiskey with tons of distilleries. State prohibition in TN closed down every single distillery in Robertson County, and national Prohibition made sure they wouldn't come back. Sure, it's more of a local issue, but these were whiskey distilleries that were outcompeting Jack Daniels in their heyday. Tennessee whiskey could be far more diverse without a strong enough Prohibition movement to ban it. Jack Daniels is probably Tennessee's most famous export (more than country music even), so what if there were far, far more brands, selection, etc.? It is doable--it isn't like Robertson County was the sole place exporting tons of whiskey. Even with consolidation of brands and such, you could have a far bigger market of Tennessee whiskey than exists now.

Maybe I'm overstating things, but since I literally grew up next to Robertson County, I figure it's an interesting claim to fame it should've had (alongside the Bell Witch, of course).

5. Because of # 2 to # 5, many police departments simply refused to enforce the relevant legislation. Remember, police was still an entirely local responsibility. It wasn't that it is easy for people to evade laws, in many localities the local government and local government had no intention of enforcing the law. Eventually in alot of cities you didn't even have "speakeasies", liquor was sold pretty openly.

Lots of local corruption was financed by that sort of stuff, so political machines will need another source of income to replace that. I know in Tennessee they'd probably just help the local gamblers more than they did (where the cops just wink at people who are blatantly breaking the law on gambling).
 
A couple of years ago, on a trip to visit family in MT, I went on a tour of 'Butte underground', of which two of the attractions were local speakeasies that had survived all the way to the present. One was a tiny place hooked up to a barber shop that you had to enter through a secret door in a closet. The other one was pretty swanky, being the former lobby of one of the finest hotels in Butte, and had a lot of room. Interestingly, the Feds shut down the latter one in 1928 or so, and padlocked the only door into it... and it stayed locked away until 2008 IIRC, when new owners of the hotel decided to do what no one had done in the previous 80 years and cut the padlock off. They found the speakeasy virtually intact from the day it had been locked up...
 
I believe that the problems with Prohibition lay more in the Volstead Act used to enforce it which set the alcohol level to be prohibited to an extremely low value - much lower than even many supporters of Prohibition expected.
 
One thing is that by most accounts, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at least in the US, public drunkenness was common to an extent that people today would find unbelievable. A major impetus to the various temperance and prohibitionist movements was that employers wanted workers to show up on time and sober. This was not a given before prohibition. Contrary to the story about prohibition creating disrespect for the law, people have enough reverence for the law that making alcohol illegal really did change a lot of behavior and attitudes towards drinking. In fact, drug use started creeping upwards again, in the late twentieth century, when people started being suspicious of government and laws for other reasons.

World War I and the Great Depression also had major influences on prohibition. During World War I there was a more pressing need than usual to have workers show up for their shifts in munitions plants sober. The UK imposed all sorts of restrictions on alcohol consumption at the same time, for the same reason, as did Russia. Once the Great Depression started, the problems with just shutting down a major industry became more obvious. And World War I, or Wilson's campaigning on a platform of staying out of the war, and then entering the war a few days after being sworn into office for his second term, created an era of dominance for the Republican Party, which had a prohibitionist wing, which ended with the Great Depression.

That said, I agree with vizzer that the Amendment without the Volstead Act or with different enabling legislation would have been much more viable, both because the Volstead Act was a pretty massive bait and switch on the prohibition supporters, and because where restrictions on alcohol have been done successfully, they come with various carefully crafted exemptions.
 
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