Prohibition Dbq

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Prohibition: Why Did America Change Its Mind? Prohibition had almost put America behind the rest of the large world powers. Prohibition had made manufacturing, transporting, and selling alcoholic beverages illegal.Alcoholic beverages were defined as intoxicating if they had at least one percent of alcohol by the Volstead Act. America was in shambles after the country had gone dry. By becoming toxin free America thought it would be able to clean up the cities and people in them. America had changed its mind about Prohibition 14 years later because the law was too strict, it helped with the war effort, and America was steering back towards racism. Inherently, Prohibition was a terrible idea because the law and its enforcers were too strict. Authority was given to people to uphold the amendment. These people abused their power. Once they took away the civilians alcohol, they would just use it themselves. “The very men who made the Prohibition law are violating it….How can you have the heart to prosecute a bootlegger, send a man to jail for six months or a year for selling a pint or a quart of whiskey, when you know for a fact that the men who make the laws...are themselves patronizing bootleggers?”(Willebrandt). Document D is referring to the hypocrisy involved in the law. Even …show more content…

World War One had ended in 1918 just before the start of Prohibition in 1919. Document E states that “If the liquor now sold by bootleggers was legally sold, regulated, and taxed, the (tax) income would pay the interest on the entire local and national (debt) and leave more than $200,000,000 for...urgently needed purposes”(Gordon). This shows that Prohibition took jobs and alcohol taxes away that would have helped pay the war costs. Document B is a graph that shows that murder rates were higher during Prohibition than during World War One. This is because veterans from the war did not alcohol to numb the from memories of the

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