Prohibition & 18th Amendment
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Prohibition was instituted with a constitutional amendment--the Eighteenth Amendment--in 1919. This was the first constitutional amendment to have a time-limit on ratification, having a seven-year period for that process. It remains the only amendment to be repealed. To a great extent, Prohibition would be a social experiment that was perceived as a failure. The amendment prevented the transport or sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, and yet traffic in alcohol did not stop and became the basis for the development of an organized criminal empire that would live beyond the repeal of Prohibition itself. Prohibition can be seen as a failed attempt on the part of government to legislate morality. Sociologists, political scientists, and other scholars have argued over the meaning of this failed experiment ever since, and historians have treated the era in different ways according to their particular interests, the aspect of prohibition on which they concentrate, and the information they gather about the era. An analysis of a variety of sources shows how historians may treat the facts of a given event in different ways according to their own inclinations and as they build on the work of earlier writers. In Women and Temperance, Ruth Bordin writes about the development of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s and the course taken by that organization over the next three decades. Bordin's analysis depicts the beginnings of the progressive movement
. . .
and the worst of the new dry world quickly materialized in Michigan. There was defiance of the law on a massive scale. The governor called on the state police to enforce prohibition and requested federal reserves. He declared a state of "limited martial law" in several counties. A shooting war broke out along the Ohio border and many men died for liquor.
Social scientists soon found, however, that the law was very popular in the state and that many of the things promised came to pass as prisons went out of business, productivity increased, taxes decreased, and domestic disharmony was lessened. By the time the national law went into effect, however, law breakers had had two years to perfect methods of manufacture, transportation and retail. Law enforcement in some areas had by then been corrupted. Since Michigan showed both the advantages and the disadvantages of prohibition, the state was chosen by the federal government as a proving ground for prohibition enforcement. The state would be a battleground throughout the 1920s,a nd the result was that in 1933 Michigan was the first state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment repealing Prohibition:
Intemperance, it was discovered, came in more than one odious and destruct
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Eighteenth Amendment, Canada Mexico, Clark Prohibition, Amendment Michigan's, Richard Hofstadter's, Experiment Prohibition, Thomas Coffey, Brown Company, Coast Guard, Volstead Act, era prohibition, eighteenth amendment, law enforcement, repeal prohibition, coast guard, american society, temperance movement, organized crime, york ww norton, prohibition era, prohibition seen, york gp putnam's, repeal prohibition seen, american society prohibition, passage eighteenth amendment,
Approximate Word count = 5112
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Prohibition & 18th Amendment
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
