Prohibition In The 1920's

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Pages: 6

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in January of 1919, banned all the manufacture, sale or transport of intoxicating liquors. A year after, in 1920 the Volstead Act known as the National Prohibition Act was enacted, making all the beverages “intoxicating” illegal if they contain more than 0.5 percent alcohol. They were several reasons why they did this amendment, such as the contribution of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League. Americans enjoyed a drink, they loved the alcohol, but not all Americans had the same view about alcoholic beverages. For Americans, the Prohibition era’s was difficult “turned millions of law-abiding Americans into law-breakers” people started to get arrested because of drunkenness, went to the hospital for alcoholism, and even people died because of “alcohol”. In this paper, I will discuss three major issues that contributed to the …show more content…
America was far away from dry, people started to move the saloons to their home and made alcohol. The only way people could get alcohol was for medicine and religious reasons, which led people paying doctors or physicians to get prescriptions for whiskey. Even politicians, religious, people, even the own president of the United States drank alcohol. The country population had grown more since millions of immigrants came to the US. The immigrants were workmen, they transform America to the an industrial powerhouse. The Anti-Saloon was really thinking about the immigrants, the concern about that they are not real Americans. As Michael Lerner mentions, “that real Americans don't need saloons, they are better than that”, in a way they blamed them for the alcohol since the increase was caused by the large amounts of immigration from countries that reflected a strong drinking culture such as Britain, Germany, and