On a brisk morning, February 14th, 1929 the smell of conspiracy filled the crisp air. In the Lincoln Park neighborhood in northern Chicago, seven men had pursued a lure of cut-price whiskey, looking for a quick profit. As the men searched a garage, a group of four men dressed in police uniforms strolled coolly up the street, wielding Thompson machine guns. The men raised their arms and opened fire, bursting rounds into the seven men. This was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, organized by the infamous crime boss Al Capone. This heinous shooting and many others were a result of a strange era in the United States—Prohibition. The prohibition, or banning of sale, production, or distribution, of alcohol in the U.S. was a hectic time, in which a rapid growth of organized crime, alcohol abuse, and terror rose in large cities like Chicago and Manhattan. Prohibition is a very useful subject for modern times, as it showed what the effect of banning substances could do to a society. Prohibition was not a sudden legislative move, but rather was a gradual shift in public opinion that was influenced by outside movements. According to the website History, the origins of Prohibition could first be seen in the revivalism of religion in the 1820s and ’30s. States began enacting their own prohibition laws, and …show more content…
Woodrow Wilson enacted a temporary prohibition to save grain for the troops. That same year, Congress submitted the 18th Amendment, which banned production, distribution, and sale of liquors. This amendment received support of the ¾ of the states within eleven months. Ratified on January 29, 1919, the 18th Amendment didn’t go into effect until a year later. According to the website History, no less than 33 states had already enacted their own prohibition laws by that