Posted on 06/21/2011 4:02:59 PM PDT by AustralianConservative
….But temperance Chicago never created Capone….
To paint Prohibition as a failure is rather simplistic, because it was always a mixed bag. As author Daniel Okrent (no Prohibition lover) explained to Life.com, “People don't realize how much drinking there was in this country before Prohibition. We were awash in booze. In 1830, for example, the per capita consumption of alcohol was three times what it is today -- 90 bottles of booze per year per person over the age of 15. By 1933, drinking was around 70 percent of pre-Prohibition.”
Change isn’t always a straight road. Again, Prohibition was a mixed bag. Jack S. Blocker, Jr, PhD, from the Department of History, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario, explains: “Perhaps the most powerful legacy of National Prohibition is the widely held belief that it did not work. I agree with other historians who have argued that this belief is false: Prohibition did work in lowering per capita consumption. The lowered level of consumption during the quarter century following Repeal, together with the large minority of abstainers, suggests that Prohibition did socialize or maintain a significant portion of the population in temperate or abstemious habits...That is, it was partly successful as a public health innovation. Its political failure is attributable more to a changing context than to characteristics of the innovation itself.”
This is not the message Stossel wants to hear, my guess, but should history be prohibited, to appease libertarian-inspired myths? Another inconvenient truth, noted by Professor Mark H. Moore at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: arrests for public drunkenness “and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.”
(Excerpt) Read more at weekendlibertarian.blogspot.com ...
Maybe not, but it gave us honey fitz and his besotten killer son teddy and allowed him to buy the Presidency for his other drug-addled son, John (who muddled through pretty well until his untimely demise).
And we all have to admit to the comedy gold that was Jerry Rivers opening up the “tomb” to find 3 empty gin bottles.
LOL, good one. I thought I might be fast enough to mention old Joe K., but FReepers are just too quick.
Prohibition may not have created Capone. But instead of being just a street thug and petty criminal, Prohibition allowed Capone to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
.......along with a little help from old family friend Johnny Torrio.
Tend to agree. The best book on Prohibition is Norman H. Clark, “Deliver Us from Evil,” a new look at Prohibition.
This article is crap. Prohibition did create Capone, and a lot of other gangsters as well.
Prohibition was a huge failure and so is the so called "war on drugs" we have going now. After repeal of prohibition gangs were quiet for a short period(by gangs I mean the mafia)teenage gangs were virtually harmless because they lacked real weapons until the mob started running drugs to make up for the money lost after prohibition was repealed. Prohibition costs us many freedoms, among them were some second amendment rights that are down the drain forever. The "war on drugs" is costing us even more freedoms, open warfare on the 4th amendment for starters, swat teams shooting down innocents and breaking down doors without legal warrants(no knock warrants are not mentioned in the constitution, therefore they are illegal).
No amount of spin will ever make Prohibition successful.
I remember talking with my grandfather many years ago who lived through prohibition. He said that everyone still drank, period. Perhaps events related to drinking declined because people who were drinking did not want to call attention to themselves.
Shot down in flames...
So Prohibition with its bribery,widespread citizen disregard for the law, gang warfare, and all was just great because FOR SOME REASON people were drinking less years later?
How does the author isolate all factors to be sure Prohibition was the only ,or even major, reason alcohol consumption decreased?
I’ve been doing some research on my great grandfather and found that he was arrested during a raid on a speakeasy in Detroit in 1916. 2 years before prohibition.
Prohibition didn’t turn people like Capone into thugs but it did turn them into quite wealthy thugs with political power.
So, in 1830 Americans were a bunch of lushes and stayed so until Prohibition. 1830 was soon after the founding of this nation. Hmmm...
Someone once said, "it is not the length of life that is important, but the depth". I'll drink to that.
Hear! Hear! There will always be people who believe they have the right to tell others how to live their lives. Such people are a menace to free society, and should be flogged.
>>The premise that less alcohol consumption is better for people is false.<<
It gives us our best thread posts!
;)
Is it time to hijack the thread into a WOD discussion...?
In Europe alcohol is still treated as a normal part of most peoples' diets and a meal without it uncivilized. Or shall we be like the teetotaling Wahabbis and Taliban? There's sober behavior we can all emulate. /s
If alcohol dehydrates you, then how does that work?
I can take you to the desert and give you all the booze you want, and you will die.
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