II.

The Early Prohibition Movement in the United States

In England and the American colonies, governments after 1750 made repeated and futile efforts to discourage the excessive use of distilled spirits. By the 1820s people in the United States were drinking, on the average, 27 litres (7 gallons) of pure alcohol per person each year, and many religious and political leaders were beginning to see drunkenness as a national curse. Abraham Lincoln said of this period that intoxicating liquor was “used by everybody, repudiated by nobody” and that it came forth in society “like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay if not the first, the fairest born in every family”.

Many people believed a close relationship existed between drunkenness and the rising incidence of crime, poverty, and violence, concluding that the only way to protect society from this threat was to abolish the “drunkard-making business”. The first state prohibition law, passed in Maine in 1851, prohibited the manufacture and sale of “spirituous or intoxicating liquors” not intended for medical or mechanical purposes, and 13 of the 31 states had such laws by 1855. By that time the annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol had fallen to about 4 litres (about 1 gal).

The political crisis that preceded the American Civil War distracted attention from Prohibition. Many of the early state laws were modified, repealed, or ignored, and for years few restraints were placed on manufacturing or selling anything alcoholic. The population increased rapidly after the Civil War, and soon there were more than 100,000 saloons in the country (about 1 for every 400 men, women, and children in 1870); these saloons became increasingly competitive for the drinkers' wages. Thus, many of them permitted gambling, prostitution, sale to minors, public drunkenness, and violence.