Prohibition

Noble Achievement or Failed Experiment?

Jacob Rukin
Lincoln Hall Middle School, Lincolnwood

Prior to the Michael Jordan era, the most recognizable person associated with Chicago was Al Capone. Capone ran an organized crime empire in Chicago, which made millions of dollars, killed rival gang members, corrupted politicians, and bribed policemen. Capone owed much of his enormous success to the upright, decent, moral people who gave us the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution: Prohibition.

The prohibition movement began in the late 1800s. Both the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition Party were formed to try to make alcohol illegal. They associated alcohol with many problems, including rowdiness and irresponsible social behavior. The organizations figured that if liquor could not be sold, they could convince Americans to give up drinking, without being challenged by the alcohol industry, which was certainly interested in persuading more Americans to drink. The saloons would disappear, and saloonkeepers no longer would be allowed to encourage people, including children, to drink alcohol. Pro-prohibition organizations, taking advantage of the patriotic feelings created by World War I, stepped up their pressure on Congress.

Congress passed a resolution calling for a prohibition amendment and sent it to the state legislatures for ratification in late 1917. Finally, in early 1919, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to rat-

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A crowd gathered in Chicago's Loop to celebrate the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

ify the amendment. The law was designed to reduce drinking by eliminating the businesses that manufactured, distributed, and sold alcoholic beverages.

Alphonse Capone was born January 17, 1899 in Brooklyn, New York. Capone grew up in a rough neighborhood and was a member of two "kid gangs," the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty Thieves Juniors. He quit school in the sixth grade at age fourteen, and became part of the Five Points gang in Manhattan. Later, he worked for gangster Frankie Yale at the Harvard Inn in Brooklyn, as a bouncer and bartender. After he hospitalized a rival gang member in 1919, Yale sent him to Chicago to work for Johnny Torrio.

Until Prohibition, organized crime consisted mostly of gambling and vice. Torrio realized that supplying liquor during Prohibition would be a huge moneymaker, and make their other sources of income seem minor in comparison. The government had eliminated all competition in an industry that produced a product in demand, and left the demand to be filled by gangsters. Soon Capone was helping Torrio manage his bootlegging business. By mid-1922, Capone ranked as Torrio's number-two man and eventually became a full partner in the saloons, gambling houses, and brothels. When Torrio was shot by rival gang members and decided to leave Chicago, Capone inherited the business, and became boss.

A sizeable portion of the population disagreed with Prohibition. There was widespread contempt for the law, and many people broke it. Mayor La Guardia of New York City said, "It would take a police force of 250,000 to enforce the Prohibition Act, and another 200,000 to police the police." In Texas, just months after Prohibition began, a still was found on the farm of Senator Morris Sheppard, who approved of the Eighteenth Amendment that brought about Prohibition. The demand for alcohol was enormous, but the Eighteenth Amendment had ended the supply. This situation enabled organized crime, and gangsters like Al Capone to make tremendous amounts of money. Without competition from people already in the liquor business, they could charge whatever they wanted for a drink. Between 1925 and 1930, Capone controlled the speakeasies, bookie joints, gambling houses, brothels, nightclubs, distilleries, and breweries in Chicago that brought in a combined annual income of a hundred million dollars. By 1930 he controlled all ten thousand speakeasies in Chicago.

Throughout the 1920s, there was an intense

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debate about whether Prohibition was a noble achievement or a failed experiment. Supporters agreed with Mrs. Henry Peabody, of the Woman's National Committee for Law Enforcement, who told a Senate committee, "We are convinced that we have a good law—a righteous law—written into the Constitution of the United States—that it does not in any way affect the personal liberty of well doers-those loyal to the highest interests of the country and the great majority of the people."

Bootlegging was a lucrative business for many during Prohibition, including the bootlegger pictured here.

Responding to arguments that Prohibition limited a person's freedom of choice, clergyman John Haynes Holmes said in a 1924 New York City debate, "We all agree, do we not, that the liberty of the individual must bow in a complex society to the safety and happiness of all of us together?" Holmes continued, "Liquor is dangerous to public safety because it creates poverty, it cultivates crime, it establishes social conditions generally which are a burden to society."

In that 1924 debate, opponents of Prohibition were represented by the famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, who argued, "Every human being ought to be left to follow his own inclinations and his own emotions, unless he clearly interfered with the rest to an extent that was so injurious that it would manifest to most anybody else." He also said, "If the doctrine should prevail that when 60 percent (estimated) of the people of a country believe that certain conduct should be a criminal offense and for that conduct they must send the other 40 percent to jail, then liberty is dead and freedom is gone. They will first destroy the 40 percent, and then turn and destroy each other."

As a practical matter, opponents argued that any law a great portion of the population does not agree with and chooses to ignore is not only useless, but diminishes respect for all laws. Supporters of Prohibition claimed that banning alcohol would enhance public safety, but this promise disappeared as criminal gangs battled in the streets for control of illegal alcohol distribution.

In 1933 Congress proposed the repeal of Prohibition, which was the Twenty-first Amendment. On December 5, 1933, Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the repeal. Prohibition had ended.

The lessons of the prohibition era are often referred to in the debate over current drug laws. Supporters of existing laws believe that drug use harms not only the individual, but substance abusers also harm their families, friends, employers, and society as a whole. People who believe drugs should be decriminalized say that recreational drugs cannot be eliminated while the demand for them exists. They believe that current drug laws primarily benefit the modern day "Al Capones" who make money from supplying the illegal drugs. —[From American History, Prohibition in America, <http://americanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa072100bhtm?terms= prohibition>; Chicago Historical Society, Al Capone <http://www.chicagohs.org/history/capone/cpnl .html>; Richard M. Evans, How Prohibition was Ended <http://www.tfy.drugsense.org/endprohb.htm>; Problems in American History; Why Prohibition? <http://www.cohums.ohio-state.edu/history/projects/prohibition/whyprohibition.htm>; Paul Sann, The Lawless Decade; Robert J. Schoenberg, Mr. Capone; Women's National Committee for Law Enforcement, < http://www.cohums.ohio-state.-edu/history/projects/prohibition/drywmn.htm>.]

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