How Did Prohibition Affect The People In The Great Gatsby

The American people and the main characters in The Great Gatsby were impacted positively with the 1920s trends of automobiles and music. Prohibition negatively impacted their lives and the Americans living during that decade. Automobiles were recently developed in the 1920s and were an advanced concept that citizens have never perceived before. New genres of music emerged from others that preceded them and permitted expression. Prohibition provoked more organized crime than ever before. The 20s trends created a unique environment for the characters to establish a life in. Automobility was the just beginning of the trends that would later come and would diversify the lives of many. Henry Ford monopolized the automobile industry by distributing

When alcohol was made illegal, that is when the growth of organized crime had increased. Bootlegging was already established across the nation since there were twenty-six states that had made alcohol illegal before the United States as a whole could, “Thus, when alcohol was made illegal, there was already a rudimentary infrastructure for its illicit importation, distribution, and sales” (Climent). Bootleggers were able to easily attain produced alcohol and sell it to speakeasies all over the country, “The major organized crime rings then set to work creating interstate and even international distribution networks to access illegally produced alcohol, smuggle it into the country, and sell the product to speakeasies(illegal bars) and other customers” (Climent). It was exceedingly arduous to enforce Prohibition to Americans since it was so readily available, “In the end the law proved impossible to enforce and in fact led to the rise of organized crime and a huge increase in alcohol abuse among Americans” (Farshtey 7). In The Great Gatsby, alcohol could be soon moving around on trays and ingested by the guests at his luxurious and ostentatious parties. He observes the guests at his parties instead of being involved in drinking excessively, “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people” (Fitzgerald 77). Prohibition caused the crime rates to escalate, but that did not prevent the citizens from alcohol