Ninety years since the abolition of Prohibition, an American paradox on alcohol

The idea of ​​a country totally “dry” ended 90 years ago in USA When the paradoxes of Dry Law outweighed the purposes that led to the implementation between 1920 and 1933 of a jurisdiction that prohibited the sale of alcohol.

The 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, effective January 17, 1920, declared illegal “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” and it was the result of the efforts of the so-called temperance movement that, since the beginning of the 19th century, supported restrictions on its consumption.

The promoters of Prohibition, among whom were still existing organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) or the Prohibition Party, hoped that the “noble experiment” -as they called the law- would reduce social problems such as domestic violence and crime.

This is what the director of Public Relations of WCTU, Bunny Galladora, points out to EFE, who considers that “Alcohol is a destroyer of families and marriages”since “Some men, when they drink, mistreat women and children and spend their income on drink instead of food and other necessities.”

“Prohibitionist policies on alcohol made it possible to regulate its commercial traffic and, in this way, control the negative effects that said product has on the public in favor of their well-being.”adds the national secretary of the Prohibition Party, Jonathan Makeley.

But, after 13 years of contradictions in which alcohol consumption did not stop, on December 5, 1933 the Senate ratified – under the presidency of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt – the 21st Amendment to the Constitution that repealed Prohibition.

The drinking did not stop and smuggling increased

Between 1920 and 1933, the theory was never fully translated into practice and in the supposed dry years mafias and smugglers proliferated, controlling networks of distilleries and ‘speakeasies’the speakeasies that illegally sold alcoholic beverages during the period the law was in effect.

“The ban was the best thing that ever happened to the mafia in the United States”says prohibition expert and Director of Education at the Las Vegas (Nevada) Mob Museum, Claire White, since “They had a product that was only available on the black market and that was more attractive than anything they had sold before.”

These closed-door bars characterized the cities of the time and you can still find cocktail bars that, inspired by that time, play with access codes and secrecy, as is the case of Off the Record in Washington DC, located in the basement of the Hay-Adams Hotel, a few meters from the White House.

“In reality, it was never illegal for Americans to drink alcohol, but to buy it,” White points out. Thus “People who wanted to drink continued doing so, taking advantage of legal loopholes and their consumption barely decreased.”

Legal loopholes that translate into names as popular as Al Capone and Bugs Moran, gangsters who got rich from the business provided by Prohibition and who coexisted with other liquor merchants at a more local level, such as Robert Downham in Alexandria (Virginia). , whose career is collected in the Lee Fendall House museum.

The house where Downham lived in those years – and which now houses the museum – is rumored to have been an important ‘speakeasy’, since its owner, while pretending to be a haberdasher, continued with the distribution of whiskey, as explained to EFE by the Lee Fendall House CEO Shawn Eyer.

“Before prohibition, alcohol sales were the 40% of the tax revenues of the United States Government and that figure did not stop in Alexandria or in most parts of the country,” he adds.

The legacy of prohibition

Ten years after a century since the end of Prohibition, alcohol continues to be a controversial issue in the United States, as well as heterogeneous, since the laws that regulate it depend on each state.

Furthermore, state measures such as the elimination of ‘happy hours’the veto on the purchase of said substance on Sundays or in supermarkets and the limitation of its sale only if the percentage of alcohol in the product is low allow us to say that some areas of the country remain semi-dry.

In any case, the precedent of Prohibition, the current restrictions and the fact that the legal drinking age in the US is 21 – higher than in other nations where drinking is legal – have not prevented the 79.8% of men and 76.9% of women in the United States over the age of 12 consume alcohol, according to the Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism published this year.