A brief political analysis of the 18th Amendment

While most people only have the general knowledge that prohibition outlawed the sale of alcohol, an over whelming majority of Americans have no idea of the political reasons behind prohibition. Just as a majority of Americans remain woefully ignorant why the United States supports a repressive Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, while at the same time being antogonistic towards the less repressive regime of Iran, most Americans do not know the political factors behind prohibition.Many people would be surprised to learn that while supporters of prohibition came from a wide spectrum, some notable political supporters of prohibition included the Ku Klux Klan and supporters of the women’s suffrage movement.

The KKK, which had always been anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish, during the late 1910s, saw the Jewish owners of some of the German breweries, as well as the newly arriving immigrants from eastern Europe as a threat. In order to diminish their emerging political power, the KKK in the south supported prohibition as a means to eliminate some of the social gathering places like saloons in the major urban cities where the immigrants were gathering after work. Along with their fundemental racist stance towards blacks, many KKK members were afraid of a black man holding a ballot in one hand and a bottle in the other.

Further aiding the prohibition movement in America was a growing anti-German movement as a result of the start of World War I in 1914. A speech by John Strange, a politician from Michigan, typified how the looming war with Germany helped the supporters of prohibition, when he said that some of America's greatest enemies were “ Pabst, Shultz, and Miller.”

In the book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, the author explains how the two leading social and political trends of the era, such as the suffrage (women's right to vote) and the fore mentioned anti-immigration movement of the KKK, helped shape and pass the 18th Amendment. In addition to the suffrage movement, another notable factor that helped institute prohibition was the passing of the 16th amendment in 1913, which instituted a federal income tax.

Although the modern Joe Six Pack voter has no idea how the federal income tax amendment in 1913 helped the prohibition movement, like most things in American politics, the answer is to follow the money.

Going back as far as the 1790s during the whiskey rebellion and then later with the Beer Tax during Civil War, the federal government obtained a great deal of its revenue from the excise tax on alcohol.. During some periods of the 1800s, revenue from the excise tax on alcohol contributed as much as 50 percent of all the federal tax revenue. This made the federal government very dependant on the excise tax attached to alcohol. However, with the passage of the 16th amendment, the federal government became less dependant on alcohol excise taxes.

Women supported prohibition because women in the 19th and early 20th century had almost no political or property rights. As Mr. Okrent explains in his book, as the saloon culture of the 1800s developed, women often had to deal with the violence and sexual diseases the men would bring home with them from the saloons and brothels. With brothels attached to the saloons, many women often contracted “syphilis of the innocent” from their husbands. Upset at their husbands drinking away all their family’s money, fearful of getting beat up or their children suffering the same drunken violence, women were quick to support the prohibition of alcohol.

Methodists and Baptists were the only religious sects that aggressively pushed for the prohibition of alcohol. So it is no surprise that the only two states never to ratify the 18th Amendment were the two states with the highest populations of Catholics; Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Guess that may explain why George W. Bush, grandson of Prescott Bush the republican senator from Connecticut at the time of Prohibition obtained a fondness for alcohol.