• Prohibition in the United States was a measure designed to reduce drinking by eliminating the businesses that manufactured, distributed, and sold alcoholic beverages. • The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States took away license to do business from the brewers, distillers, vintners, and the wholesale and retail sellers of alcoholic beverages. • People smuggled alcohol into the United States and sold and purchased the smuggled alcohol. • So convinced were they that alcohol was the cause of virtually all crime that, on the eve of Prohibition (1920-1933), some towns actually sold their jails. i • During Prohibition, temperance activists hired a scholar to rewrite the Bible by removing all references to alcohol beverage. …show more content…
New York City alone had about thirty thousand (yes, 30,000) speakeasies. And even public leaders flaunted their disregard for the law. They included the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, who owned and operated an illegal still. x • Some desperate and unfortunate people during Prohibition falsely believed that the undrinkable alcohol in antifreeze could be made safe and drinkable by filtering it through a loaf of bread. It couldn't and many were seriously injured or killed as a result. xi • In Los Angeles, a jury that had heard a bootlegging case was itself put on trial after it drank the evidence. The jurors argued in their defense that they had simply been sampling the evidence to determine whether or not it contained alcohol, which they determined it did. However, because they consumed the evidence, the defendant charged with bootlegging had to be acquitted. xii • When the ship, Washington, was launched, a bottle of water rather than Champagne, was ceremoniously broken across its bow. xiii • Prohibition led to a boom in the cruise industry. By taking what were advertised as "cruises to nowhere," people could legally consume alcohol as soon as the ship entered international waters where they would typically cruise in circles.