Prohibition Era Of American Culture Essay

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The Prohibition Era transformed society and shifted the current American culture. This generation was known for speakeasies, Al Capone, corruption, and the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover called prohibition “the great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far reaching in purpose”. This era of American culture split society into the views of evangelical Protestantism and urban growth. The Prohibition Era created a failed American economy, organized crime, and fatal unregulated liquor sales. The origins of the Prohibition Era began in the 1820s, as evangelicalism swept through America calling for temperance and multiple forms of perfectionist movements. These movements included the abolition of slavery and laws banning the sale of alcohol in less than 15 gallon quantities. At the turn of the century, temperance societies were quite common and women played an active role in temperance movements. Anti-liquor sale movements started to take form, with women leading the fight, as the groups viewed liquor as a destructive force within society. The Anti-Saloon League was soon established, driven by urban growth, and factory owners soon supported prohibition in order to increase efficiency of the workers in the era of industrialism (Prohibition,…show more content…
The demand for alcohol had risen so steep on the black market that the quality of the liquor decreased in order to maintain the demand rate. The unregulated alcohol had significant health consequences, as it was tainted liquor. Enterprising bootleggers produced gallons of “bathtub gin” and moonshine, which contained poison. Most of the liquor being produced contained toxic chemicals, such as quinine, which mixed with other products that generated the tainted liquor (Andrews, 2015). This did not stop Americans from buying and consuming alcohol and as the economy continued to decline, the bootleggers and mobs became
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