A legacy of failure
If there was one domestic event that, over all others, marked the American twentieth century it was the “great experiment,” Prohibition. From the effective date of the 18th Amendment in January of 1920 to its repeal in December of 1933, we tested the proposition that through government enforcement under the Volstead Act, we could prohibit the sale and consumption of products that most people wanted to buy and drink. What were the results?
Well, consider Detroit alone. After World War I, the Canadian version of prohibition expired and those Canadian companies holding charters from the federal government in Ottawa could again legally manufacture the full range of intoxicants, just as the United States imposed Prohibition. Canadian breweries and distilleries were quickly in full time operation and the flow of beer, wine, and spirits across the Detroit River soon became a torrent.
In all, fully eighty percent of all the liquor that moved into the United States during Prohibition coursed through the narrow neck of the Windsor-Detroit funnel. And there were 25,000 illegal saloons in Detroit, including scores of “school pigs” that sold whiskey only to young children. Little Harry’s, Pinkies, and the other Detroit speakeasies did a roaring business, day in and day out. There were no holidays in that line of work.
But were the Roaring Twenties just a decade-long holiday, an isolated departure from common sense and prudent governance? Consider at least three aspects of Prohibition’s legacy.
First, Prohibition was one of the main, if not the main, reasons for the rise of organized crime in this country. Whether you consider that activity to be an alien conspiracy—the Sicilian Mafia theory—or or a homegrown phenomenon—widespread crime had been a feature of American life long before the waves of southern and eastern European immigration reached our shores at the end of the nineteenth century—or a mixture of both, Prohibition made the wholesale and successful violation of the law a very big and very profitable business.
Second, and insidiously, Prohibition engrained in our culture that idea that laws need be obeyed selectively or sometimes not at all. If gangsters and gun molls, flappers and factory workers, teenagers and truck drivers, jazz singers and jail birds could so easily and openly flout the Volstead Act, then it was a small step for many of the rest of the greatest generation to conclude that the law itself was a puny thing, to be ignored with only minimal consequences.
Third, when mixed with the pervasive public corruption that Prohibition accelerated, this quickly led—even as FDR and his New Deal hugely expanded the growth of government—to a persistent skepticism about the ability of government to positively affect human behavior, a skepticism passed down from generation to generation.
Prohibition was meant to permanently alter the character of American society . . . and it did so, but in ways its proponents never anticipated. Few, if any, foresaw the debacle that Prohibition became, with its bumbling enforcement, its public corruption, and its contribution to the rise of organized crime and to the prevailing and persistent cynicism about our institutions of government.
But they should have. David Brooks points out that bad policy can decimate the social fabric. That is was what Prohibition did, for a whole generation and a whole century. Its legacy is with us still, one of those traditions that endures even as we ignore it. And, as we see the evidence of governmental malfunction all around us, we should take care that our next great experiment in social engineering is also not a huge and enduring failure.
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