Argumentative Essay On Prohibition

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Prohibition, in place from 1920 to 1933, was a nationwide constitutional ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. It was designed to reduce drinking by eliminating the businesses that manufactured, distributed, and sold alcoholic beverages. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was created to take away license to do business from the brewer, distillers, vintners, and the wholesale and retail sellers of alcoholic beverages. Prohibition was a desperate effort and a failed attempt to resist inevitable changes by restricting alcohol as shown through the poor economy, decrease of sales, and criminal behavior. Aroused from the intensive religious revivalisim of the 1820s …show more content…

As well as the League, many women’s organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union supported prohibition. They saw alcohol as a destructive force in families and marriages. These groups began to succeed in enacting local prohibition laws, and eventually the campaign for prohibition became a national effort. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union pledged to end the use of alcohol in the United States, but they achieved less than its reputation suggest. Although it aroused women’s support for Prohibition and opened doors to political opportunities for women, it accomplished little to move the nation toward a ban on alcohol. Prohibition had the opposite outcome of expected sales. Without being able to sell alcohol, restaurants could not make enough money and theaters were shut down. The federal government lost valuable excise tax revenue and spent more than 300 million dollars to enforce the ban on alcohol. A significant increase in criminal activity lead to a spiral of jails and prisons with increasing costs for law enforcement. Alcohol was large part of life in the 1920s. In 1929, the stock market crash seemed to increase the country’s desire for illegal

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