capitalism

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–1865) 401
Prohibition, of course, did not stop drinking in the
United States. Although per capita alcohol consumption did
drop sharply during the early years of Prohibition, by the
latter half of the 1920s, it had rebounded to 60% to 70% of
its pre-Prohibition level and remained steady before and
after repeal. Certainly crime did not decrease. According to
one study, crime in 30 major cities increased 24% between
1920 and 1921. In Philadelphia alone, drunkenness-related
arrests nearly tripled from 20,443 in 1920 to 58,517 in
1925. The national homicide rate climbed from about 7 per
100,000 people in 1919 to nearly 10 per 100,000 by 1933,
and then it dropped sharply after repeal.
Domestic moonshine and industrial alcohol provided
the majority of the alcohol consumed during Prohibition.
Moonshiners would distill neutral grain spirits in hidden
stills and then attempt to mimic the color and flavor of
whiskey or gin with additives called congeners. Industrial
alcohol, denatured by government order to make it undrinkable,
was typically repassed through a still to remove the
poisons, but not always successfully. Thus, between 1925
and 1929, 40 out of every 1 million Americans died from
toxic liquor.
The rest of the booze was smuggled over land or by sea.
Scarcity of alcohol meant it could be sold in the United
States for anywhere between two to five times its purchase
price in Canada, Mexico, or the West Indies. In the early
1920s, vessels formed “rum rows” off the American coast.
After 1924, however, most freelance entrepreneurs—tramp
merchant marines or fishermen seeking an easy profit—
were muscled out by crime syndicates.
Public disenchantment with Prohibition grew throughout
the 1920s and into the next decade. In 1930 and 1931,
polls by the National Economic League found that the top
three concerns of Americans related to Prohibition and its
consequent lawlessness, ahead of issues regarding unemployment
and the economy. Another 1930 poll revealed that
almost 70% of Americans favored repeal or modification of
the Volstead Act. Repeal groups formed, and their memberships
swelled. In January 1931, a majority of the 11 panelists
of the National Commission on Law Observation and
Enforcement, appointed by President Herbert Hoover 2
years earlier to review Prohibition’s effects, favored total
repeal or alteration of the Volstead Act. Yet Hoover, a hardline
dry, instead interpreted the Wickersham Report as an
affirmation of Prohibition and did nothing.
By hitching the administration so closely to the dry
cause, Hoover and the Republicans sealed their doom in the
1932 presidential election. The Democrats made repeal a
part of their platform, whereas the Republicans adopted an
ambiguous “moist” plank that endeared them to no one, further
crippling a president already blamed for mishandling
the economy. Proposed remedies such as alcohol taxes, jobs
relating to alcohol manufacture and service, reopening legal
markets to grain farmers, and eliminating the Bureau of
Prohibition further incited politicians to act for repeal. After
the election, the Democratic majority in both houses passed
the 21st Amendment, with Utah becoming the 36th state to
ratify the amendment on December 5, 1933.
Decades after repeal, both state and federal government
sustain control over the manufacture, sale, and consumption
of alcohol. Eighteen states currently hold partial or
full monopolies on the sale of alcoholic beverages, while
most others have blue laws (often for protectionist purposes)
limiting where and when alcohol may be sold. The
National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which withholds
federal highway funds to states that allow the sale of
alcohol to people under 21 years old, effectively nationalized
what had been a state-level decision. Meanwhile,
private prohibitionist groups continue to agitate for
increasingly strict or arbitrary blood-alcohol limits for drivers
(e.g., at their discretion, police in Washington, D.C.,
may arrest drivers with any amount of alcohol in their systems)
and for legislation criminalizing parents who serve
alcohol to their children at home.
See also Black Markets; Drug Prohibition; Illicit Drugs
Further Readings
JaK
Cashman, Sean Dennis. Prohibition: The Lie of the Land. New York:
Free Press, 1981.
Kerr, K. Austin. Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the
Anti-Saloon League. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985.
Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Miron, Jeffrey A., and Jeffrey Zwiebel. “Alcohol Consumption
during Prohibition.” American Economic Review 81 no. 2 (May
1991): 242–247.
Thornton, Mark. Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure. Washington,
DC: Cato Institute, 1991.
Willing, Joseph K. “The Bootlegger.” The Twenties: Fords,
Flappers, and Fanatics. George E. Mowry, ed. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963.
PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH
(1809–1865)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French writer and an anarchist.
Proudhon is widely considered to be the first author
to describe himself as an anarchist, although many before
him had considered both the possibility and desirability of
structuring a society without the state. Proudhon’s most
important contribution to modern libertarianism is arguably
his influence on Benjamin R. Tucker, the founder of the