In the early days of the Prohibition, the police seized and destroyed the wines 丨图片来自：enobytes
Originally, it was the first time the police had ever seen the wives of the victims of a crime, and the first time the police had ever seen the wives of the victims of a crime, it was the first time the police had ever seen the wives of the victims of a crime, and the first time the police had ever seen the wives of the victims of a crime. Simply put, this is a culture war driven by religious background, progressivism and feminist movement***, in order to solve the high crime rate, domestic violence, immigration conflicts and other social problems.
Puritan Tradition - Unshakeable Moral Absolutes
The fact that a country that espouses democracy and freedom has alcohol prohibition written into its constitution is a mirage from a modern point of view, but when we look at the history of the United States, it becomes a little less difficult to comprehend. Puritanism is the most important source of American culture, at that time, the native-born white Americans, that is, the descendants of the first European immigrants, all grew up with the Puritan culture, and they happened to become the most conservative majority. Under the Puritan tradition of opposing luxury and indulgence and advocating thrift and forbearance, there can be 10,000 reasons for people to oppose drinking: drinking harms the body, drunkenness and trouble, and drunkenness is dangerous to work ...... In the final analysis, alcohol is the root of all evil.
The advent of Prohibition led to a devastating blow to the U.S. alcohol industry 丨图片来自：newsinteractive
Progressivist Movement - Post-Industrial Response
The United States at the end of the 19th century had just ended industrialization, and the social changes were dramatic, and with them came a series of social problems: wealth The unfair distribution of wealth, the significant gap between the rich and the poor, the intensification of labor conflicts, the massive influx of immigrants, wealth domination of power, corruption breeding, material dominated by the traditional morality of the society has been challenged ...... social order in all aspects of the huge disturbances. In the face of this reality, the middle class led the launching of the far-reaching Progressivism movement. To summarize Progressivism in simple terms, it advocated for increased federal regulation of socio-economic activities in order to promote the overall improvement of society. Under the impetus of Progressivism, a great deal of moral, social, and regulatory legislation emerged, and the enactment of Prohibition was one of the major achievements.
Prohibition was once considered a victory for the feminist movement, with women in Boston stomping on the ice used to freeze beer in a restaurant 丨Photo:new-documentary
Feminist movement - a roundabout way of defending the rights of the people
In fact, prohibition was a result of the feminist movement's efforts to save the lives of the people who lived in the country, and it was the first time that a woman was able to do so. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States passed the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave blacks the same voting rights as whites, which meant that the abolitionist movement won a complete victory, and in this powerful reform movement, women played a major role; similarly, feminists also put great efforts into the prohibition of alcohol movement, they emphasized that alcoholism is the main cause of domestic violence, and they advocated the prohibition of alcohol! They emphasized that alcoholism was a major cause of domestic violence and advocated prohibition to change men's behavior, to protect the environment in which children grew up, and to give women equal status with their husbands in the family. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization of its time, brought prohibition to a climax. Of course, the ultimate goal of the feminist movement was to fight for women's equality in political power, which wasn't achieved until the 19th Constitutional Amendment (recognizing women's right to vote) after Prohibition.
The Wave of Xenophobia-A Lingering Sense of National Superiority
With industrialization and urbanization, the United States had surpassed Great Britain as the world's largest economy in the early 19th century, and with it came an influx of immigrants and social tensions brought about by culture shock. Going back to the Puritan culture mentioned earlier, it played an important role in this: it has always been the case that traditional white Americans had an irreplaceable sense of moral superiority as Puritans, inherent in being Anglo-Saxons. As mentioned earlier, the Puritans were against alcoholism, so who were the biggest consumers of alcohol at the time? That's right, blacks, Jews, and foreign immigrants, including Asians, opened up large and small taverns and places of entertainment on the streets of the U.S. These people were generally poorly paid and poorly qualified, and the white Puritans felt that their traditional culture was under siege and saw them as a major source of social problems. For traditional white Americans, the Prohibition movement was an assimilation of values into a foreign culture.
The Prohibition-era U.S. police force's "search party" 丨图片来自：travsd
1World War I and ethnic hatred - there's no better excuse
Ultimately, the perfect excuse for a sweeping reform is the one you have to have. In 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and officially entered World War I. This provided the perfect time to enact Prohibition: on the one hand, making wine requires food (wine you died a horrible death!) On the other hand, the major American brewers and distilleries were all from Germany, so prohibition was tantamount to patriotism.
The Unstoppable Desire
It's not hard to imagine that people have always been able to get around Prohibition in all sorts of ways, and in fact, it's ironic that some statistics show that alcohol consumption during Prohibition was even far greater than before.
The odd products of Prohibition
There are always loopholes in all decrees, and the Prohibition era was no exception. The Constitution made it illegal to sell alcoholic beverages, but it couldn't prohibit the sale of ingredients for making alcohol.
Near Beer: This is a beer with an alcohol content of just under 0.5%, which is not illegal because the prohibited alcoholic beverages at the time were defined in the Constitution as those with an alcohol content of more than 0.5%. It provides exhaustive instructions to remind buyers of what they "can't do" or they might brew their own high-alcohol beer.
Malt and hops: as the name suggests, breweries can't sell beer any more, and have to turn to selling brewing ingredients, claiming it's for cooking or baking.
"Vine Glo": prevalent in the United States during Prohibition, a concentrated blend of grape juice that promised to self-ferment into wine after thirty days.
"Grape Brick": like Vine Glo, this is a wine ingredient sold in packages of raisins and yeast, often with the caveat that if you accidentally add the stuff to a gallon of water and put it in an airtight jar, beware, it could turn into wine in twenty days!
Vine-Glo was one of the most popular products sold publicly during the Prohibition era 丨Photo:newsoldday
Smuggling and underground trade became a hotbed of gangsterism
The formal market was banned, and as a result, a black market emerged. Smuggling and underground trading became a lucrative business, and many organized crime groups were built on the profits from these illegal businesses. These gangster organizations relied on their growing power to make the bootlegging business bigger and bigger. The most famous Chicago gangster, Al Capone, was a member of the Chicago mob during this period. Al Capone, the most famous Chicago mobster, began his rise to power during this period, reportedly making as much as $5,000 a day in profits from his bootlegging.
The so-called legal wines
Some small-scale production of wine remained legal to ensure that it was used for religious events, but their supply had to be centralized by the government. The result is predictable: few officials can resist the temptation of being close by, and as a result, bootlegging has gradually emerged within the government, and corruption among officials has become increasingly prominent.
And in hospitals, whisky can be prescribed to patients by doctors, and although prescriptions are clearly labeled as illegal for all uses other than medical treatment, there are no specialized departments to regulate them. Many doctors issued prescriptions at will, and the number of "patients" increased dramatically during this period, turning hospitals into places to buy alcohol during the Prohibition period.
Prohibition had to be repealed
Prohibition became more and more ridiculous in its later stages, with more and more people going to hospitals for drinking low-quality moonshine, while the original intention was to reduce crime, but it became an incentive for organized crime, and more and more officials were actively or passively involved in the process of controlling corruption. The various phenomena have made the repeal of Prohibition an urgent matter.
Protests during the Prohibition era 丨图片来自：Today
自相矛盾的宪法
禁止酒的最大矛盾在于违反美国宪法最重要的精神：对公民个人权利和自由的尊重。 During the enforcement of Prohibition, the scale of searches became increasingly difficult to grasp, and by the end of the development, more and more people, even the main group of people who initially advocated for Prohibition, had begun to feel that human rights were greatly threatened during this period.
Unregulated Underground Market Hidden Trouble
Banning formal production instead forced people to choose private breweries and underground distilleries that were unsafe and of poor quality. During this period, the number of patients hospitalized for alcohol poisoning was much higher than in the past. Not only that, the theft of industrial alcohol has continued, resulting in many patients suffering from methanol poisoning. And in workshops producing spirits, serious accidents, such as explosions, often occurred, leading to injuries to workers because of the often serious quality problems with homemade distillation equipment.
Law-abiding or law-breaking, that is the question
On the one hand, organized crime was becoming more and more prevalent as gangs expanded their power, but on the other hand, the inmates who were actually incarcerated were often first-time offenders with clean records. At the time, state prisons were overcrowded, and most of these people were just people who usually had a drinking habit, but were clean and had no prior criminal record. Prohibition actually disrupted the social habits and personal rhythms of many Americans, forcing people to need to make choices before the law.
The treasury can't afford it
Banning the entire U.S. alcohol industry means the government loses tax revenue from an industry that, in the same way, costs a lot of money in enforcing the ban, which makes it a no-brainer and a losing proposition.
Economic crisis, giving you a reason to backtrack
Finally, the U.S. came to the Great Depression (1929-1933), a period famous in history. During this time of national misery, it became the only thing that mattered how to enliven the economy and make food affordable for the nation. No one is in the mood to pay attention to the morality of drinking, on the contrary, the abolition of prohibition may be able to provide a little help for the active economy: the production of alcohol can expand the consumption of food, boosting domestic demand, which is precisely for the overproduction of U.S. agriculture to bring a little bit of hope; in the industrial and commercial sector, the circulation of more than one kind of goods may bring more liquidity to the market, in short, all walks of life in all kinds of industries are looking forward to the lifting of the prohibition of alcohol, and some people even jokingly said that alcohol is the only thing that matters to us. In short, all walks of life are looking forward to the lifting of the ban on alcohol, and some people even jokingly said, even if it can give those bankrupt businessmen a little paralysis and comfort. Finally, in 1933, President Roosevelt heeded public opinion and announced the repeal of Prohibition, and so the 18th Constitutional Amendment became the only constitutional amendment in U.S. history to be repealed.
Picture of Prohibition sweeping through California 丨Photo from: lib.unc
Prohibition and the U.S. Wine Industry
It's no secret that Prohibition dealt a terrible blow to the U.S. wine industry, and the wineries generally faced three fates during the Prohibition era: shutting down their businesses, switching to table grapes or other fruits, and breaking the law to produce cheaper wines. Either way, the wineries that carefully grew and produced boutique wines no longer existed. In quantity, from 1919 to 1925 within a few years, the number of wineries in California plummeted from 700 to 100, and wine production in the United States was reduced from 55 million gallons to 35,000,000 gallons; in quality, the vast Prohibition movement transformed U.S. wines from a finely crafted product into fast-moving consumer goods that sought only the effects of alcohol, and this undoubtedly was the demise of the U.S. wine industry.
For us today, it may be hard to imagine that Ohio's wine industry was larger than California's before the Prohibition era, but many vineyards were converted to cash crops by Prohibition, and some were no longer used as agricultural land, making it difficult to recover even if they wanted to, and the scale of the past no longer exists today.
And compared to other alcoholic beverages such as beer and spirits, wine is even more difficult to recover from, and it doesn't happen overnight. We all know that it takes time to cultivate quality grapes, to optimize the soil environment, to find the best varieties for the terroir, and even to wait for the vines to reach a certain age, a process that can take at least three to five years, and sometimes even decades.
Picture of Americans taking wine and beer out of their cellars and auctioning them off after Prohibition was repealed 丨Photo:donsmarylandhistory
And in the early days of Prohibition, when the U.S. was still recovering from the Great Depression, the expensive and delicate wines were not as popular as the low-cost beers that came from the world's most famous brands like Beer and Wine. The recovery of the wine industry lagged behind that of other alcoholic beverages, as expensive and delicate products like wine were less popular than beer and grain alcohol, which were less costly and more effective.
Today, we look back at the rapid growth of the U.S. wine industry over the past few decades and marvel at its energy, but sometimes we can't help but hypothesize about what it would have been like without Prohibition.
The repeal of Prohibition quickly took over the front page of the newspaper 丨Photo:timesbord
Post-prohibition
While Prohibition is a thing of the past in the U.S., the U.S. government has never been able to relax its control over the country's alcohol consumption. While the 21st Amendment to the Constitution proclaimed the repeal of Prohibition, it also gave state governments the power to independently legislate on the distribution of alcohol. Until today, the United States have very strict and detailed regulations on the sale and transportation of alcohol. The "three-tier distribution system" for alcohol and the direct mail sales restriction laws were the direct result of the Prohibition period. In addition, the U.S. is very strict on the issuance of liquor retail licenses, and consumers are required to show valid identification when buying alcohol
.