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Prohibition History Film Clips
Alderson Prison in lovely West Virginia was not simply the first Federal prison intended for women, but also the very first prison ever built on American shores to house women only; for as you might have read in this 1924 article, thousands of American women were running afoul of the law as a result of Prohibition. During the summer of 1932, Democratic Senator Carter Glass (1858 - 1946) turned heads and dropped jaws on Capitol Hill when he introduced a piece of legislation that was intended to water-down the 18th Amendment. Glass, a devoted enemy of the swizzle stick, proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would continue to outlaw saloons nationally while permitting hootch to flow freely throughout the wet states - and cut off booze in the dry. "Americans on December 5 [1943] will look backwards to a dramatic night 10 years ago - many will be surprised that a whole decade has passed since the nation abandoned Prohibition... In the early '30s, Congressman LaGuardia found authorities siphoning an estimated million dollars a day in graft from bootleggers. Cost of the 'Noble Experiment' to the government hovered around a billion dollars a year. In the last 14 Prohibition years, the public was figured to have spent more than $36,000,000,000 for bootlegging and smuggled liquor!" When "The Noble Experiment" ended in 1933 the United Sates was a far less sober nation than it was thirteen years earlier. Organized crime was stronger than ever before, more Americans were in prison then ever before and more Americans than ever before had developed an unfortunate taste for narcotics. If prohibition was undertaken in order to awaken Americans to the glories of sobriety, it was the opposite that came to pass - Americans had become a people that reveled in drink. The writer who penned this column recognized that with the demise of Prohibition arose a culture that was eagerly buying up
"a flood of utensils, mechanisms, gadgets, devices and general accessories [that celebrated the] noble old art of public drinking..." "What is to be said of an era which produced 'speak-easy frocks' and 'bargain day' in the Federal courts; battalions of snoopers abroad in the land, legal homicides by dry agents, sopping wet public dinners throughout the Republic and 'the man in the green hat' filling the lockers of dry statesmen in the House and Senate office buildings?...What political, sociological and emotional changes the silently resisting mass wrought. We passed from the period when only prohibitionists were regarded by the general public as respectable. We came finally to the time, within twelve years, when the reverse was true."
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