Here are some facts about Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, according to Prohibition Repeal.
So convinced were they that alcohol was the cause of virtually all crime that, on the eve of Prohibition (1920-1933), some towns actually sold their jails.
During Prohibition, temperance activists hired a scholar to rewrite the Bible by removing all references to alcohol beverage.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) strongly supported Prohibition and its strict enforcement.
Because the temperance movement taught that alcohol was a poison, supporters insisted that school books never mention the contradictory fact that alcohol was commonly prescribed by physicians for medicinal and health purposes.
Prohibitionists often advocated strong measures against those who did not comply with Prohibition. One suggested that the government distribute poisoned alcohol beverages through bootleggers (sellers of illegal alcohol) and acknowledged that several hundred thousand Americans would die as a result, but thought the cost well worth the enforcement of Prohibition.
Others suggested that those who drank should be:
- hung by the tongue beneath an airplane and flown over the country
- exiled to concentration camps in the Aleutian Islands
- excluded from any and all churches
- forbidden to marry
- tortured
- branded
- whipped
- sterilized
- tattooed
- placed in bottle-shaped cages in public squares
- forced to swallow two ounces of caster oil
- executed, as well as their progeny to the fourth generation. v
A major prohibitionist group, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union taught as “scientific fact” that the majority of beer drinkers die from dropsie (edema or swelling).
Prohibition agents routinely broke the law themselves. They shot innocent people and regularly destroyed citizens’ vehicles, homes, businesses, and other valuable property. They even illegally sank a large Canadian ship.
For more information go to ProhibitionRepeal.com