Abstract
This chapter charts the American experiment with national alcohol Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. It looks at how such an ambitious and absolutist law was adopted in the first place. It then charts the many unintended consequences of the crusade. While Prohibition has largely been understood as a massive public policy failure, I argue that such a perspective has caused us to lose sight of its many lasting consequences. The alcohol prohibition years pressed the American state into distinctive and permanent molds and built the edifice of the twentieth century federal penal state. The chapter ends with a discussion of the lessons one can draw from this public policy effort and its significant and lasting legacies—not least among them the federal government’s crossbreeding penal approach to other illicit narcotics.
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Notes
- 1.
Alcohol prohibition in Iceland and Finland—countries with a combined population at the time less than that of the state of Massachusetts—came closest to the absolutism of the American campaign.
- 2.
The first budget appropriation for the Prohibition Bureau in 1920 was $5 million; by 1930 it was close to $15 million. Enforcement spending was, however, larger overall, since the Coast Guard was mandated to enforce the law. About half of its expenditures during Prohibition went toward liquor law enforcement, estimated at another $13 million. By way of comparison, the initial budget for the newly renamed FBI in 1936 was $800,000.
- 3.
The literature on Protestant religiosity is far too voluminous to cite here. On evangelicalism in the twentieth century, see George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (1982; New York, 2006). On the importance of religious currents to governmental authority, see John Compton, The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (Cambridge, MA. 2014); For one example of these tracts, see Robert G. Ingersoll, “Denunciation of Alcohol” (originally published in Commoner, July 13, 1913) in Selected Articles on Prohibition of the Liquor Traffic compiled by Lamar T. Beman (New York, 1915), pp. 32–33.
- 4.
Drug violators were never far behind liquor law violators as the leading class of federal prisoners; in some years, they surpassed liquor law violators. Despite this variability, Volstead violators and narcotics violators made up the core of the overcrowding problem in prisons.
- 5.
Republican Party Platform, 1932.
- 6.
For a discussion of the United States’ role in the creation of the international drug prohibition regime, see McAllister (2000).
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McGirr, L. (2017). Alcohol Prohibition in the United States, 1920–1933, and Its Legacies. In: Savona, E., Kleiman, M., Calderoni, F. (eds) Dual Markets. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65361-7_13
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