Prohibition and Crime
1. According to those who supported prohibition, what
was prohibition supposed to accomplish?
2. What problems did prohibition create for the United
States?
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3. In the last paragraph of this article, we read that “wets
held prohibition responsible for organized crime and
pledged that with repeal, the immorality of the country . . .
will be a thing of the past.” How was this idea just as naive
as the expectations of the “drys”?
4. Why did prohibition fail?
Many Americans greeted the advent of prohibition in January 1920 with unwarranted
optimism. Prohibitionists had long promised that, given a chance, they would eradicate pauperism
and improve the condition of the working class. They had also predicted a sudden reduction in crime
since “90 percent of the adult criminals are whiskey-made.” Closing the saloons, many believed,
would improve the nation’s physical health and strengthen its moral fiber as well, for drys were
always saying that liquor “influences the passions” and “decreases the power of control, thus making
the resisting of temptation especially difficult.” On the day the Eighteenth Amendment took effect,
the evangelist Billy Sunday conducted a mock funeral service for John Barleycorn in Norfolk, Virginia.
He prophesied: “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons in to factories and
our jails into storehouses. . . . Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children will laugh.
Hell will be forever for rent.”
Prohibition, however, proved more attractive to some that to others, and the distinction often
followed religious, ethnic, and geographic lines. Typically, prohibitionists were likely to be Baptists or
Methodists rather that Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, or Episcopalians; old-stock Americans rather that
first- or second-generation immigrants. They were more likely to live in small towns, and in the
South or Midwest, than New York, Boston, or Chicago. Undaunted by accusation that they were
narrow-minded fanatics striving to enforce conformity to their moral code, prohibitionists saw
themselves as allowing a “pure stream of country sentiment and township morals to flush out the
cesspools of cities and so save civilization from pollution.” At the heart of the struggle between wets
and drys were contrasting cultural styles.
The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January 1919 and ultimately approved by every state
except Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, contained several glaring loopholes. It did not
forbid the consumption of intoxicating beverages but only their sale, manufacture, and distribution.
As a result, those who could afford to store up an adequate supply were not terribly inconvenienced.
Out of deference to property rights, liquor dealers were permitted a full year’s grace in which to wind
up their business affairs. The amendment also failed to define the world “intoxicating” or to provide
any means of enforcement. The Volstead Act (1920) attempted to remedy these deficiencies: it
arbitrarily defined “intoxicating” any beverage with one half of 1 percent alcohol content, and it
provided rudimentary enforcement machinery.
Yet the task of enforcement proved truly Herculean, particularly in those communities where a
majority saw no moral virtue in temperance. There seemed an endless number of ways to evade the
law. People smuggled whiskey across the Canadian and Mexican borders, made denatured industrial
alcohol palatable by adding chemical ingredients, prepared their own “moonshine” at home in onegallon stills, falsified druggists’ prescriptions, stole liquor reserved for legitimate medicinal and
religious purposes in government warehouses, and pumped alcohol back into “near-beer” to give it
more of a kick. Those administering the law encountered many difficulties. The Prohibition Bureau,
understaffed and underpaid, was the target of a series of attempted briberies. Some evidently
succeeded, for one of every twelve agents was dismissed for corrupt behavior, and presumably others
were never caught.
For all its inadequacies, the law almost certainly cut down on alcoholic consumption. But
people who wanted to continue drinking, and those for whom liquor filled an important psychological
need, managed to get around the law. Moreover, the attempt to enforce a moral code to which many
did not adhere led to widespread hypocrisy and disrespect for the law. This received formal
recognition when the Supreme Court ruled the government could request income-tax returns from
bootleggers. The Court found no reason “why the fact that a business is unlawful should exempt it
from paying the tax that if lawful it would have to pay.” The memoirs of a leading prohibition agent
also testified to the laxity of enforcement. She related how long it took to buy a drink on arriving in
different cities: Chicago-21 minutes; Atlanta-17 minutes; Pittsburgh-11 minutes. In New Orleans it
took but 35 seconds. The agent asked a cab driver where he could find a drink; the driver, offering
him a bottle, replied, “Right here.”
Prohibition was associated not only with a cavalier attitude toward the law but also with a more
sinister phenomenon: the rise of organized crime. Criminal gangs had existed in the past, but in the
1920s they evidently became larger, wealthier, and more ostentatious. Gangland weddings--and
funerals--became occasions for lavish displays of wealth and influence. The 1924 funeral of Chicago
gunman Dion O’Banion included twenty-six truckloads of flowers, an eight-foot heart of American
beauty roses, and ten thousand mourners among whom were several prominent politicians. Gangs
also became increasingly efficient and mobile as a result of the availability of submachine guns and
automobiles. And they grew somewhat more highly centralized, dividing territory in an effort to
reduce internecine warfare. Although criminals made money through control of prostitution,
gambling, and racketeering, bootleg liquor provided a chief source of revenue.
As organized crime blossomed, new theories arose to account for it. Sociologists at the
University of Chicago, for example, argued that criminal behavior did not result form mental or
biological inferiority, but represented a logical response to the environment. The gangster, growing
up in a climate of lawlessness and graft, was simply a product of his surroundings. In his study of
crime in Chicago, John Landesco noted that the gangster developed a self-image that legitimized his
behavior. He viewed himself as doing what everyone else in America was doing--seeking wealth and
power--but being more open about it. He thought of himself as satisfying a public demand for liquor
and other illicit, but essentially harmless, pleasures. He perceived himself as a community benefactor
who lent a helping hand to the poor. Indeed, Frank Uale was known as “the Robin Hood of
Brooklyn,” and the “godfather of 1000 children.” A remark attributed to Al Capone summed up much
of this rationale: “They call Capone a bootlegger. Yes. It’s bootleg while it’s on the trucks, but when
your host at the club, in the locker room, or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a silver platter, it’s
hospitality.”
By the end of the decade, opponents of prohibition had successfully turned the tables on its
advocates. Once the drys had promised that prohibition would reduce crime; now the wets held
prohibition responsible for organized crime and pledged that with repeal, “the immorality of the
country, racketeering and bootlegging, will be a thing of the past.” Formerly the drys had claimed that
prohibition would eliminate poverty; now the wets asserted that the liquor industry could provide
needed jobs and revenue to a nation beginning to experience mass poverty in the Great Depression.
Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Yet it failed less because it triggered a crime wave or weakened the
economy than because it attempted the impossible: to regulate moral behavior in the absence of a
genuine consensus that the proscribed behavior was, in any real sense, immoral.