P.6
Mr.Moore
4/7/17
The Golden Age
During the 1920’s, people were having the time of their lives. Americans were partying and living easy on loans given by banks riding the wave of economic rise following World War 1. Despite the fact that drinking had become illegal at the time due to prohibition, people were finding ways to consume and doing so vigorously. The 1920’s, also know as the Jazz Age, was a period of cultural and stylistic transition that took place in America during the 1920s from which both new styles of music and dance originated. During this time the so called “Progressive Movement” ended, which is shown when President Warren G Harding wins the election by running on the platform of “The Return …show more content…
“After the prohibition, the Mafia moved to other forms of crime such as drug trafficking,illegal gambling, and businesses such as construction and New York’s garment industry ” These groups, able to obtain things such as alcohol which had been made illegal, gained massive public support and lined their pockets with funds from their hidden bars in which they sold bootleg liquor. They were able to turn profits on many of their sales by buying pure alcohol from foreign locations, and diluting it with low grade alcohol or other liquids in small factories they had in the cities. This allowed them to take one or two crates of pure high grade drink and turn it into ten or twenty, and maybe more, bottles of low grade beverage that the common worker at the time could consume a great deal of before being drunk to the point of stopping drinking, this allowed people to spend more money in the Mafia sponsored facilities and gained these groups greater profits. This great deal of wealth allowed them to gain previously unknown power in other spheres, such as government and the police forces, adding even more strength to their organizations and making it extremely hard to take any actions against them, as many government officials and members of the police force could be payed off, or given stipends of the annual profits from the various illegal business´s they helped to shield. This corruption that pervaded the American system coupled with the drunken crimes and actions taken by the people being affected by the amazingly available alcohol and the government-fed strength of the Mafia at the time left a permanent stain on the history of this great nation, during a period which had been focused on making it better and more