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Unlock This CourseIn 1920 the USA made it illegal to make, sell or transport alcohol. This policy was called Prohibition. It lasted until 1933. Many Americans, especially Protestants in small towns and the countryside, thought drink caused poverty, violence and broken families. They blamed the saloons, the bars where men often spent their wages.
Campaigners such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union pressed for a ban for years. The First World War helped them. Grain was needed for food, and many brewers had German names, which made them unpopular. Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, which was ratified in January 1919 and came into force in January 1920.
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The Volstead Act did not ban drinking itself, only making, selling and transporting drink. Doctors could still prescribe alcohol as medicine, and churches could use wine. Millions of people wanted a drink, so a huge illegal trade appeared.
Thousands of speakeasies opened in the cities. Customers often needed a password or a knock to get in. Women were welcome as well as men, and many speakeasies had jazz music. Cocktails became popular partly because they hid the taste of poor-quality drink.
Bootleggers smuggled drink in from Canada and the Caribbean, often by ship, with small boats collecting it off the coast. Others made their own, called moonshine, in hidden stills. Some people copied the labels of real brands.
The government never had enough agents to stop this. Only a few thousand federal agents were asked to police thousands of miles of coast and border and thousands of speakeasies.
Bootlegging was very profitable, and criminal gangs took control of it. Gangs fought each other for territory, often with guns. The best-known gangster was Al Capone of Chicago. By the later 1920s he led the biggest gang there. He ran speakeasies, breweries and smuggling routes.
Capone liked to say he was a businessman giving the public what it wanted. His gang was also violent. On 14 February 1929 seven men from a rival gang were shot dead in the St Valentine's Day Massacre. Capone was never convicted of the killings. In 1931 he was jailed for not paying income tax.
Gangs made so much money that they could pay bribes. Police officers, judges and politicians in some cities were paid to look the other way. Some Prohibition agents took bribes too. This made the law harder to enforce and made many people lose respect for the police and the courts.
Prohibition did not fail on every count. Drinking fell at first. But by the early 1930s many Americans wanted it gone. In 1929 Pauline Sabin founded a women's group to campaign against it. After the Depression began, people argued that legal brewing would create jobs and bring in tax. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition in December 1933.
This is a Paper 2 Section A (c) question. Use Extract C, Sources A and B and your own knowledge. Give evidence that supports the view and evidence that challenges it, then reach a judgement.
Source A: From an address by Herbert Hoover accepting the Republican nomination for President, Stanford, California, 11 August 1928.
"Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. It must be worked out constructively." ... grave abuses have occurred ... Crime and disobedience of law cannot be permitted to break down the Constitution and laws of the United States.
Source B: From the report of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the Wickersham Commission), January 1931.
It is evident that, taking the country as a whole, people of wealth, businessmen and professional men, and their families ... are drinking in large numbers in quite frank disregard of the declared policy of the National Prohibition Act. ... after a brief period in the first years of the amendment there has been a steady increase in drinking.
Extract C (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history book)
Prohibition failed because it handed a vast business to criminals. Bootleggers such as Al Capone grew rich on illegal drink, bribed police and politicians, and fought gang wars in the streets. The gangsters made the law impossible to enforce, and so they brought Prohibition down.
Study Extract C. Extract C suggests that gangsters were the main reason why Prohibition failed. How far do you agree with this interpretation? Use Extract C, Sources A and B and your own knowledge to explain your answer. [16 marks]
Extract C says gangsters made Prohibition impossible to enforce, and there is strong support for this. Source A, from Hoover in 1928, admits that 'grave abuses have occurred' and warns that 'crime and disobedience of law' threatened the Constitution. Own knowledge fits: Al Capone ran speakeasies, breweries and smuggling routes in Chicago, and the St Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 left seven men dead. Extract C is also right about corruption. Gangs bribed police, judges and politicians in some cities, and some Prohibition agents took bribes too, so the law was weakest where the gangs were strongest.
The gangsters also grew only because the drink trade was illegal. Bootleggers smuggled alcohol from Canada and the Caribbean and ran stills, while speakeasies sold it in the cities. A few thousand federal agents could not police thousands of miles of coast and border. Without this profit, gangs like Capone's could not have become so powerful.
However, Extract C overstates the case. Source B, a government report of January 1931, says that wealthy people, businessmen and professionals were drinking 'in large numbers in quite frank disregard' of the law, and that drinking had risen steadily after a brief fall. This suggests gangsters had a market only because millions of ordinary Americans wanted drink. Source B is an official investigation, so it is more reliable than a politician's campaign speech, although Hoover was writing in 1928 as a candidate who wanted to be seen backing the law.
Own knowledge adds other reasons. Many Americans did not accept the law, and breaking it became normal in many homes and speakeasies. In 1929 Pauline Sabin founded a women's group to campaign for repeal, and after the Depression began people argued that legal brewing would bring jobs and tax. Prohibition ended in December 1933 through the Twenty-first Amendment, so the decision came from public opinion and politics, not from gangsters.
Overall, I only partly agree. Gangsters and corruption were a major reason enforcement failed, and they gave Prohibition a terrible reputation. But judged by what actually decided its fate, Prohibition failed mainly because so many ordinary people refused to obey it. Gangsters were a result of that demand as much as a cause of failure.
What lifts this to the top level: it tests Extract C's claim against both sources, compares how reliable they are, adds precise own knowledge, and judges using a stated criterion, what actually decided Prohibition's fate.
When Extract C names one reason as 'the' reason, test it: find evidence for it, then find a rival reason and use a source to back that up.