Facts about Prohibition

When browsing Nathan Miller’s recent New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America, I came across the following nuggets:

1. Prohibition was originally a popular policy.

See this link for more background:

Temperance was not, as is sometimes thought, the campaign of rural backwaters; rather, temperance was on the cutting edge of social reform and was closely allied with the antislavery and women’s rights movements. Always very popular, temperance remained the largest enduring middle-class movement of the nineteenth century (‘Leaven 1978, 1984; Tyrell 1979; Gusfield 1986; Rumbarger 1989; Blocker 1989).

2. At first Prohibition advocates did not think enforcement would be very costly. The Anti-Saloon League estimated a sum of $5 million a year, Congress provided slightly more than this to hire 1500 agents.

3. A major setback came when a federal judge rule that physicians could prescribe whiskey for medicinal purposes. By the end of Prohibition, there were 10 million such prescriptions each year.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed