On this day 100 years ago, Prohibition went into effect

[Opel_Justwax]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/17/us/prohibition-100-years-trnd/index.html

On this day 100 years ago, Prohibition went into effect -- banning the production, importation, sale and transportation of alcohol in the US.
It all started with the temperance movement, which encouraged and advocated for abstinence from alcohol. Much of the reasoning was based on ideas of Christian ethics, and many Christian denominations were active in the movement.

We followed prohibition with the disastrous war on drugs.

[lunasun]

1. We just ended marijuana prohibition here in IL 1/1/20

?itok=Quwn2k-a

[First Speaker]

2. I wonder what we'll declare "war" on in the next 100 years...

...something we probably can't imagine right now. I do know one thing: it will be done for the noblest reasons, with the highest motives, and the enthusiastic support of the political establishment. And, of course, it will be a disaster.

[Harker]

3. I'd be up for a war on war. n/t

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. Them's fightin' words!

[NCLefty]

5. As an 80's stoner-teenager, seeing Reagan's "war on drugs" evolve to legality over my lifetime...

is ASTONISHING. :p

[JHB]

6. Remember, it wasn't just "anti-drug", it was anti-immigrant

“They’re fighting over alcohol, but they’re also fighting over immigration and identity in the country,” says Jon Grinspan, a curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who appears in the new two-part Smithsonian Channel documentary miniseries on the era, “Drinks, Crime and Prohibition.”

***

But, as Grinspan says in the documentary, “alcohol is not the central story of Prohibition. There are people who are fighting alcohol, but what they are fighting about is a clash of two civilizations in America.” The enemy is not just alcohol, but European immigrants, the documentary argues. Between 1892 and 1920 almost 12 million immigrants entered the U.S. through Ellis Island.

“Organizing around alcohol is in some ways a politically correct way to go after other immigrants,” Grinspan says in the documentary. “It’s not entirely polite to say, ‘I want to get all of the Catholics out of America.’ But it’s very polite to say, ‘Alcohol is ruining society.’”

***

Indeed, part of the reason Prohibition passed was that it elicited unusual alliances—organized women who would go on to fight for suffrage worked alongside anti-immigrant hate groups as well as industrialists who didn’t like how saloons were causing drunkenness among their workers and becoming centers of power for unions and political parties.

“The idea that suffragists—women’s rights advocates—and the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, are fighting on the same side of this thing,” Grinspan says, “is really unusual.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/bitter-aftertaste-prohibition-american-history-180969266/