Prohibition Movement in California

Although a "wet" state alcoholically speaking, California joined the stampede to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution--and then enthusiastically ignored its prohibitions (Lavender 371).

Certain Californians had pursued prohibition as a political goal for some time, and there had been votes on the issue from 1913 to the time of the Eighteenth Amendment. After that, Californians

not only continued to consume alcohol as did much of the country, but factions regretted Prohibition because of the damage it did to the budding wine business in the state. Many of the histories of the period emphasize the way prohibition movements developed in California and how the affected voting in the era from 1910 to 1920.

Prohibition was created with a constitutional amendment--the Eighteenth Amendment--in 1919, and this came after more than a century of agitation by temperance groups over the social costs of alcoholism. The efforts actually began in an earlier era when saloons were associated with debauchery and degradation. The passage of the national act also came after

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ericans moved to California from the East and Midwest. By the time national prohibition was about to become a reality, a state-wide majority in California voted for prohibition, a move only narrowly averted by the landslide wet vote from San Francisco. Ostrander states that two distinct societies developed in California, one north and one south of the Tehachapi Mountains. The vision was into a cosmopolitan, Catholic north and a native American, protestant south. Los Angeles would be the center of the temperance movement in the state, while San Francisco and environs would lead the opposite side (Ostrander v). Ostrander's history of the movement in California is extensive and analyzes the early years, the role of women in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Anti-Saloon league played a major role beginning in 1898 and continuing until the "dry campaigns" after 1913. The League began operations in California in 1898, after which the League stated that it guided the movement to victory in a steady way. Ostrander finds that the league helped but that its claims to be responsible for victory are suspect. Instead, Ostrander finds that the real point of victory came in 1910 with the electoral victory of the Progressiv
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Approximate Word count = 2592
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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