Prohibition Pros And Cons

Great Essays
Many historians since 1933 have pondered the Eighteenth Amendment, better known as prohibition, and the Twenty-first Amendment, better known as the repeal of prohibition. One question that pops into many of the historian’s heads while researching the topic is, “Who or whom is to blame/give credit for for the banning of alcohol in the United States of America?” The answers to this question are varied and abundant with different opinions from researches on the topic. Thomas Fleming has strong viewpoints that oppose the banning of alcohol in the country. Fleming talks about the negatives not having alcohol around will be. Then, we have Andrew Sinclair; Sinclair wrote about the benefits Prohibition brought to the United States when alcohol was banned in 1920. With two different approaches being covered in depth in this paper, the facts from fiction should be able to be sorted out. I myself believe that Fleming’s research and ideas will be the most relatable for me to cover on. All three historians have interesting, logical things to say about Prohibition, though, and comparing the two viewpoints side by side will be eye opening. To touch lightly on Prohibition before getting into the historians takes on it, a little background information is needed. …show more content…
Prohibition is the prevention by law of the manufacture and sale of alcohol. This was put into effect in the United States from 1920-1933. The ban of alcohol was widely unpopular amongst people across the nation. Many people continued to make alcohol illegally and drink and sell it, which caused many to also get sick because of it being unsafe. It’s popular to think of the Roaring 20’s at a time where people snuck around drinking the majority of the time, but the amount of people who drank actually decreased by as much as 70% when the law was still new. There were many pros and cons to the Eighteenth Amendment as Fleming and Sinclair will touch on. Andrew Sinclair was a historian who was a firm believer of the benefits prohibition brought to our country during the dry years when the amendment was in effect. He believed that Prohibition meant so much more than just the illegal consumption of alcohol; to Sinclair, it meant testing religious and social boundaries. He stated, “The evil which the old-fashioned preachers ascribe to the Pope, to Babylon, to atheists, and to the devil, is simply the new urban civilization, with its irresistible scientific and economic and mass power. The Pope, the devil, jazz, the bootleggers, are a mythology which expresses symbolically the impact of a vast and dreaded social change. The change is real enough.... The defense of the Eighteenth Amendment has, therefore, become much more than a mere question of regulating the liquor traffic. It involves a test of strength between social orders, and when that test is concluded, and if, as seems probable, the Amendment breaks down, the fall will bring down with it the dominion of the older civilization. The Eighteenth Amendment is the rock on which the evangelical church militant is founded, and with it are involved a whole way of life and an ancient tradition. The overcoming of the Eighteenth Amendment would mean the emergence of the cities as the dominant force in America, dominant politically and socially as they are already dominant economically.” Sinclair plays with the facts and beliefs that the middle class people other than Protestants were to blame for the wide-spread of drinking for enjoyment. …show more content…
more critical of each other, more self-conscious... harder, drabber in speech. Iced water, ice cream, icy eyes, icy words. Gone the mellowness, generosity, good humor, good nature of life. Enter the will-bound, calculating, material, frigid human machine. Strange that the removal of this thing, supposed to pander to the animal in us, makes one feel less a man and more an animal, above all, an ant…. Although who knows? Ants may drink.” Here, Andrew Sinclair compares humans who are intoxicated to nothing more than an animal. Overall, he has made the claims that prohibition was a positive outcome from the drunkard midwestern, middle-class country folk. He was a Protestant who believed that the banning of alcohol would bring good fortune to the country. They believed that Prohibition would bring

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