Alcohol has always been a big part of society. In the 1700's, many people were drinking heavily. Liquor was even consumed in court by Judges and Jurors and was written off as a court expense. Many rural communities used alcohol as currency. Later, the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the prohibition movement. The leaders fighting against the use of alcohol were religious groups and those who wanted to be the elite, those who wanted to stand out above the rest. In 1840, Portland, in Maine, became the first city that decided they would stay "dry." Other cities, about eleven years later, followed Portland's wake.
In and around 1893 the brewing industry was one of the wealthiest industries in North America, and brewers entered the retail business. When brewers began to sell their products of beer and whisky in saloons, many people drank even more. Desperate to keep up with other, rising saloons, saloonkeepers were forced to incorporate illegal vices such as gambling and prostitution to keep people flooding in.
The first step of prohibition, the prohibition leaders believed was to take away the license to do business with liquor traffic. After this, priests believed they could stop people from drinking. It was a battle between the saloonkeepers and political leaders. The leaders won. Soon, saloons started to disappear from the landscape and saloonkeepers were not allowed to encourage people to drink.
So why prohibition? The new scientific "enlightenment" of the nineteenth century published various facts about alcohol, and it was found that the studies showed that excessive drinking could lead to spontaneous combustion, that dirking could often lead to insanity, that grogginess led to neglected children, and the booze drained large amounts of money from people?s pockets. There was nothing much anyone could do at the time to stop the large use of alcohol in the country, until during and after World War I. When the Great War began, liquor showed an impurity in America and Canada, something that retracted from performance at work and greatly lowered soldier's alertness.
So on October 10th, 1919, the 18th amendment was passed in the USA, which was called the Volstead Act, which stated that, "No person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish, or possess any intoxicating liquor." And so prohibition was instated on midnight, January 17th 1920.
Unfortunately, prohibition was only somewhat successful. Prohibition actually allowed many bootleggers and rumrunners to make millions of dollars illegally carrying liquor. Also, the USA and Canadian governments could not cope with the onslaught of people wanting to drink, and so eventually, on December 5, 1933, alcohol was made legal once more.
