The first nightclubs flourished in the United States in the mad 1920s and Americans, weary of the War from which they had just emerged, crowded into the beer halls where alcohol flowed freely. The conservative federal government of Woodrow Wilson tried to stem the phenomenon by voting for prohibition. Which, in fact of reducing alcoholism, leads to the creation of thousands of clandestine bars across the country, and the lightning rise of organized crime.
Alcohol prohibited since 1846 in Maine
It was at the beginning of the 19th century that a reform movement emerged in the United States committed to the fight once morest alcoholism and for “temperance”, which became particularly active in the 1840s. strive to fight once morest this scourge, which in 1836 would reach no less than 500,000 people, and would be one of the major factors of disorder and poverty.
Soon, the temperance movement won over the governments, and the northern states imposed prohibition in cascade: Maine in 1846, Vermont, Rhode Island and Minnesota in 1852, then Michigan the following year, Connecticut in 1854 and eight other states in 1855. In 1916, the prohibition of alcohol was already part of the legislation of 26 states out of 49, and in January 1919, the 18th amendment to the Constitution, supplemented the following year by the Volstead Act, generalized prohibition of alcohol throughout the Union. The manufacture, purchase and consumption of beverages with an alcohol content of more than half a degree is now illegal – even including cider and beer.
Puritanism and the Roaring Twenties
The period of growth and carelessness of the Roaring Twenties, during the American Roaring Twenties, hardly lends itself to abstinence, and divides the country in two. A part of America, conservative and still and always attached to the puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers, reconnected with the Ku Klux Klan which experienced its Golden Age in 1924-1925, making the fight for prohibition one of its irons. spear. It also pushes the cinema towards self-censorship, which will lead in 1930 to the promulgation of the Hays code. Facing her, a more progressive America, eager for celebration and pleasure in this golden decade, which we find in the cult novel by Francis S. Fitzgerald, Gatsby the magnificent.
Under these conditions, the federal government struggled to enforce the prohibition. Smuggling developed as soon as legislation came into force, driven by bootleggers who set up a lucrative black market. Because if the poor rural populations are reduced to distilling their brandies in their clandestine stills, the urban bourgeoisie crowds into the speakeasies, new generation saloons, more discreet, difficult to access and reserved for a wealthy clientele.
The triumph of Al Capone
For the “incorruptible” of the FBI, it is then difficult to fight once morest smuggling dominated by gangs: the mafia networks quickly seized this lucrative market, and now control the traffic of alcohol, drugs, prostitution and money games. The most famous bootlegger is undoubtedly Al Capone, son of poor Italian immigrants from Brooklyn, who experienced a meteoric rise in Chicago in the early 1920s. he built an empire of clandestine gambling dens and brothels which made him immensely rich: in 1927, the federal prosecutor’s office in Chicago estimated the turnover of Capone’s organization at 105 million dollars.
The pinnacle of gangsterism, the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place on February 14, 1929, when Al Capone had six members of a rival gang massacred. Organized crime loses the support of popular opinion at the same time, and Al Capone ends up falling under the yoke of justice in 1931, for… tax evasion. As for prohibition, “noble experience”according to the expression of the American president Herbert Hoover, ends in 1933 with the XXIth amendment, which repeals the XVIIIth.
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