The 14 February 1929, four men, posing as police officers, broke into a Chicago liquor store controlled by George ‘Bugs’ Moran, Al Capone’s main rival. There they killed seven men.
The Valentine’s Day massacre, as that incident became known, was the climax of a series of murders, bombings and kidnappings that shook the city. city and United States.
Gang warfare ruled the streets of Chicago during the prohibition or prohibition years.
Crime bosses, from Al Capone in Chicago to Arnold Rothstein in New York, amassed huge fortunes in the highly profitable illegal liquor trade, with their supply networks softened by payments to judges, politicians and police.
Rebellious men and women frequented the speakeasies and nightclubs that these organized criminals controlled. In this underground world of illegal drinking, new forms of dance and musical genres, notably jazz, were all the rage.
Such stories have gained great importance in popular imagination for nearly a century and have served as the plot for countless Hollywood movies. But the ban did much more than usher in a golden age for organized crime, jazz venues, and homemade gin.
Caused a large increase in the power and reach of the federal government , as well as the mobilization of the right headed by a Ku Klux Klan reborn. It also forged new political allegiances among the ethnic urban working class to the Democratic Party , which would remain for much of the century.
The arrival of many
If the prohibition had enormous and lasting consequences, it had equally long roots, emerging between the temperance campaigns that date back to the 19th century.
But it wasn’t until the turn of the century, and increased anxiety over mass immigration to the United States, that the ban campaign really began to gain momentum. .
About Y 1920.
In the minds of older white Protestant Americans, the hustle and bustle the bars of working class immigrants , so ubiquitous that they seemed almost an extension of city sidewalks, s symbolized n the dangers that immigration represented for the moral character of the nation .
It was in this context of growing nativist anxiety that, in 1914, Congress introduced what would become the transportation, sale and trade of alcoholic beverages.
However, the most important thing is that the amendment did not reach the two-thirds necessary to send it to the states.
It would take the United States to enter a global conflict to push the legislation to the limit.
War without alcohol
World War I unleashed a worldwide wave of liquor control measures , as nations comb Atients sought to ration the cereals and grains used in alcohol, and to combat the abuse of alcohol by its troops.
France banned the sale of absinthe a month after the outbreak of the war. Germany suspended liquor sales in industrial areas. In the UK, the government experimented with restrictions on pub hours. Tsar Nicholas II banned the sale of vodka in retail establishments in Russia.
In the United States, the anti-liquor crusaders exaggerated the success of these measures, declaring that the United States was lagging behind. of Europe in the battle against the ‘King Alcohol’.
Once the United States entered the war in 1917, anti-German hysteria increased support for the cause.
With the big beer companies controlled by German immigrants, the Anti-Saloon League advocated the abolition of the “ treacherous and destructive liquor traffic e homes, anti-American ”as a patriotic duty.
That sense of duty was enough to ensure that the legislation got the additional votes it required. , and the 18 a Amendment was finally approved by Congress in December 1917.
Change of life for all
“For The end is here! ”proclaimed prohibitionist crusader William Anderson when the legislation finally went into effect in January 1920. “Now for a new era of clean thinking and clean living!”
John Kramer, America’s first prohibition commissioner, was equally optimistic: “This law will be obeyed in the cities, big and small, and in the villages, and where it is not obeyed it will be enforced … We will make sure that is not manufactured. It is not sold, given away or transported on the surface of the earth, nor under the earth nor in the air. ”
Although Kramer’s hopes were dashed, the very attempt to enforce the ban pushed the federal government in the direction of surveillance and control , vastly expanding federal authority and indelibly and permanently marking the American state.
The law seca marked the beginning of a new role for the federal government in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Before 1920, outside of wartime, most Americans were with the fed government It was only when they visited the local post office.
Later, it began to touch the daily lives of all citizens, leading to a controversial decade-long debate on the Proper scope and authority of government.
The mammoth Prohibition Office established the nation’s first large-scale federal police force.
Congress also provided more muscle to the Coast Guard, Customs Office and the new Border Patrol, all agencies involved in the enforcement of the ban.
Small violators
Federal, state and local law enforcement efforts led to increased incarceration rates.
The number of prisoners in federal facilities tripled from 1920 to 1930 and almost doubled again between 1930 Y 1940. In fact, such was the increase in the number of inmates that, in Texas in 1930, Prison officials refused to accept more inmates until authorities promised new facilities to house them.
But the prisons weren’t crowded like Arnold Rothstein and Al Capone.
Since federal and state officials did not have the resources, or sometimes the will, to go after the powerful crime bosses who ruthlessly capitalized on the alcohol prohibition, they filled their case books targeting small and marginal offenders.
This selective law enforcement was the dark part of what has been erroneously called the “crazy years 20 ”.
In working-class communities, whether in mining camps in rural Illinois or Oklahoma, urban Chicago or new southern cities like Richmond, poor men and women experienced countless raids, home invasions, arrests , fines and imprisonments .
Ormond Montini, an Italian-born steel worker from Pittsburgh, recalled that police raided houses with sledgehammers, breaking the wine produced by many local families.
“They would just come and break down your door. They didn’t need [órdenes de registro]… We didn’t know they required them. ”
“ National scandal ”
Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans, most protected from the draconian arm of the law, could drink to excess in protected spaces operated by organized criminals.
The adventures of this small group of men and women, frequenting mixed race and mixed race venues in cities like New York and Chicago, reverberated in smaller towns and cities through the plots of Hollywood movies, radio, tabloids, and iconic novels like “The Great Gatsby.” by Scott Fitzgerald.
Concerns Upations on immigration, urbanization and the erosion of the cultural dominance of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism that had fueled support for the law were further intensified in the face of this new spirit of self-expression .
With President Warren Harding declaring the lack of observance a national scandal in 1922, the crusaders against liquor demanded stricter enforcement and severe punishment for offenders .
Roy Haynes, federal prohibition commissioner, denounced the “dry rot” and bad influences that had to be “uprooted” by militant citizens in defense of the law.
The anti-liquor crusaders heard their call, forming an army to reinforce the overwhelmed police federal, state and local. The Ohio Anti-Saloon League, for example, distributed blank search warrants to district workers.
Crusades against liquor
Soon, this anti-liquor zeal turned to immigrants, and in increasingly strident tones.
The Union of Christian Women for Temperance Indiana, with little evidence, blamed foreigners for the 75% of violations. On 1923, called for the deportation of non-citizens convicted of violations of the prohibition.
With the multiplication of failures in the application of the law, the anti-liquor crusaders turned to the Ku Klux Klan as a powerful new ally for their mission to dry to the country .
This second incarnation of the Klan, born in 1915, attracted millions to its ranks with its promise of militant action to ensure law enforcement.
The Klan often took hold of evangelical white Protestant communities with its promise to end smugglers and lycanthropes and to “cleanse” the communities.
The whites of this “Cleansing” were, inevitably, those whom they identified as enemies of “Americanism 100% ”: African Americans, Catholics, foreigners and Jews.
In some places, the Klan’s clean-up actions won the support of law enforcement officers under pressure to shut down sources of supply.
When La Grande, Oregon police cracked down against offenders, the Klan reinforced their f ila s and targeted Italian, African American and Mexican neighborhoods .
None other than Roy Haynes authorized the Klan’s anti-liquor raids in County Williamson, a mining community in Illinois.
Emboldened by Haynes’s support, and driven by local Protestant pastors, the Klan confidently predicted that all members of the local Catholic Church would be in jail before “the foundations of a new church were built.”
The raids that followed late in 1923 and early 1924 overwhelmingly addressed the Italian immigrants from Williamson County, who protested the rough treatment, theft, and sown evidence. The Italian consul protested to the State Department for the “terrorization of foreign residents” .
No However, the raids became increasingly reckless, with more than a thousand Klan members storming roads and houses, setting some of them on fire.
Anti-liquor activists had succeeded in securing the crackdown on illicit alcohol consumption they so craved.
But with 20 dead people, the National Guard patrolling the streets and the governor of Illinois declaring martial law, the Klan had clearly crossed the line.
And now they were about to garner a strong national reaction.
New supporters for the Democrats
Prominent attorney Clarence Darrow denounced the reign of “Tyranny and despotism” , and a “psychology of hatred and bitterness” emanating from religious fanatics obsessed with the enforcement of the liquor law.
The controversy led to the Bureau of Prohibition in 1924, and again in 1927, to instruct their agents to reject the support of any armed citizen in their raids against liquor, including the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan’s reign of terror was one of the most devastating consequences of the ban .
But immigrants also suffered the criminalization of their cherished cultural rituals and leisure habits.
They lamented the violence that illegal supply networks brought to their communities and the targeted enforcement that disproportionately targeted poor offenders.
In 1928, Irish Catholic Al Smith mobilized this seething ho stility in his run for the presidency. At the top of the Democratic Party list, Smith raised the banner of the opposition’s ban and championed pluralism and tolerance.
Although Herbert Hoover beat Smith easily, with the Republicans attacking the twin evils of “rum and Romanism,” the ethnic and urban working-class voters that Smith brought into the Democratic Party for the first time stayed there , forging an important part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal Coalition.
Alarming disobedience
March 4, 1929, a few weeks after the Valentine’s Day massacre, Herbert Hoover stood on the Capitol before a large crowd to celebrate his inauguration.
The new president wasted no time in identifying the nation’s first critical issue as the “failure of our criminal justice system.”
The “most evil danger of all two of these dangers ”that the nation faces, he affirmed, was“ contempt and disobedience to the law. ”
Disobedience, the growth of organized crime and the abuses of the application of the law, all consequences of the ban, were nothing less than challenges to the legitimacy of the US state.
Hoover’s speech was a turning point.
Never before in the history of the United States has a president identified crime as an issue of national concern in a Inaugural speech.
He took advantage of the national obsession with crime to wage war against him, building the building of the federal penal state.
Among a series of initiatives, he established the first national commission against large-scale crime, launched a prison growth campaign, expanded the FBI, and created the Federal Office of Narcotics.
Despite all his success in bringing the fight to crime, Ho over lost the incredibly ambitious war on alcohol.
As the Great Depression tightened their grip on the country, Democrats attacked the president for overspending on the enforcement of the law and intensified the campaign for the repeal.
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president on this same platform. Backed by the ethnic industrial workers brought into the party by Al Smith, and the promise of new jobs and income generated by legalizing an entire industry, FDR overwhelmingly won.
A toast to the end
Americans didn’t have to wait long for the new president to keep his promises.
Within nine days of taking office, Roosevelt was sending a bill proposing the relegalization of alcohol to Congress. The bill officially became law on April 7, 1933.
Some 13 years after William Anderson hailed “a new era of clean thinking and living,” Americans could drink alcohol again without fear of being harassed by authorities, beaten by the Klan, or thrown behind bars.
The night before, an ornate truck, escorted by a police detachment, stopped at the White House to deliver two boxes s for the newest beer in town: “President Roosevelt, the first real beer is yours.”
Crowds braved the midnight rain to cheer at the gates.
No reverse
The war on alcohol was over, but the expansion of state authority had started up couldn’t be undone so easily.
The 18 The Amendment had supercharged federal power. In doing so, he created new possibilities for the uses of such power.
Faced with the unprecedented challenges posed by the Great Depression, many Americans recalled the burly activism of the Prohibition era and wanted to apply it to other societal issues.
Of all these problems, perhaps none has had a more lasting impact on American society than his drug addiction .
In order to had established the basic building of a remarkably resilient global drug control regime, one that learned from the mistakes of the prohibition era.
But with the lessons learned there have been mistakes.
On 2020, hundreds of thousands of Americans languish behind bars for non-violent drug violations, possibly the result of the prohibitionist attitude and zeal for criminalization that emerged a century earlier.
The era of prohibition may have ended almost 90 years, but still is alive in the streets, and in prisons, America today .
Lisa McGirr is a history teacher at the Harvard University. His books include “ The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State “.
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