Herbert Hoover Essay -- History

Herbert HooverHerbert Hoover c solelyed it a noble experiment. organise crime found it to be the opportunity of a lifetime. Millions of Americans denounced it as an on represent of their rights. For nearly 14 yearsfrom Jan. 29, 1920, until Dec. 5, 1933--the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal in the United States. The 18th, or Prohibition, Amendment to the constitution was passed by Congress and submitted to the states in 1917. By Jan. 29, 1919, it had been ratified. Enforcement legislation entitled the National Prohibition Act (or more popularly, the Volstead act, afterward Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota) was passed on Oct. 28, 1919, over President Woodrow Wilsons veto. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States not only prohibitedthe manufacture, sale, or transportation of heady liquors, but their importation and exportation also. It was adopted after a nationally crusade by temperance groups, notably the Wo mens Christian somberness Union, or WCTU. The amendment was enforced and defined by Congress in the Volstead Act. champion result of the amendment was that the production and sale of alcoholic beverages became the province of organized crime. Americans did not stop drinking, and their demands for liquor were met by wide-scale smuggling and bootlegging, much of which was controlled by such(prenominal) gangs as that led by Al Capone in Chicago. The era of obstruction ended in 1933 when the 18th Amendment was repealed by the twenty-first Amendment. The stage was set for more than a decade of combat between the wets and the drysthose determined to contain drinking and those determined to enforce the law. In retrospect, the period has been called the Roaring mid-twenties and the Jazz Age. New music appeared along with unexampled dances, a new feminism, and a general relaxation of standards after the rigorous years of beingness War I. The new mood was in complete contrast to the l esson earnestness of m some(prenominal) Americans who were determined to remain the ideal Victorians. Organized efforts to bourne the use of alcoholic beverages began in the United States during the 1820s. A by-product of the sacred revivalism sweeping the nation, Prohibition soon became part of the whole social remediate movement that preceded the Civil War. The earliest reformers called for moderation, not total abstinence, but as ... ...bition did not achieve its goals. Instead, it added many problems to those that it intended to solve. It came along in a social period where it was just simply unrealistic to have any success. The only beneficiaries to that of Prohibition were bootleggers, crime bosses, and the forces of big government in all of its corrupt forms. Though it failed to improve health, welfare, or America as a whole, the experiment with prohibition affords some valuable lessons. With this learning experience as part of the past, America should be able to confront its modern remnants in all of their assorted varieties. Bibliography Coffey, Thomas M. The Long Thirst Prohibition in America, 1920-1933 New York W. W. Norton & Co., 1975. Krout, J. A. The Origins of Prohibition, New York City Russell & Russell, 1996. Lee, Henry. How Dry We Were, Enlewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice Hall, 1963. Rorabaugh, W. J. The wet Republic- An American Tradition, New York Oxford University Press, 1979. Turner, George Kibbe. The City of Chicago, A Study of Great Immoralities, McClures Magazine, April 1927 (vol. 28). Warburton, Clark. The Results of Prohibition, Auburn Press, 1996.