so this pet peeve has been brewing for a long time but i really hate how most historical programming talks about the prohibition movement and the repeal of prohibition.
like the tldr most americans are familiar with is that some controlling moralizing buzzkills stepped all over everybody's freedom and everyone was really happy when the 21st amendment repealed prohibition the end.
prohibition basically was a total failure as a policy and almost everyone who drank before, kept drinking throughout american prohibition. and while i do agree that criminalization of drugs is overall a bad idea-- i mean this is a whole topic of study but briefly: because humans have always taken mood altering substances and will always do so and criminalizing it just strengthens organized crime and its associated abuses and death toll -- key motivations behind the prohibition movement are usually extremely glossed over when america looks back at prohibition.
like it was an extremely christian movement, so there was certain elements motivated by simply trying to make america more "godly" and foisting christian hegemony on people. but it's extremely important to all discussions about prohibition that before it was law, prohibition and teetotalism was very closely tied to racial and gender justice movements of the late end of the 1800s.
like just lets take a moment to imagine the damage groups of drunk white men could do in a time when 1) "mob justice" in america is significantly more common than it is now 2) women can't vote let alone get granted divorces for reasons like spousal abuse and are mostly completely financially dependent on husbands and fathers 3) the voting rights of black men exist technically, but are lets say, intermittently protected by systems of law and 4) alcoholism is treated, at most, by incarceration, fines, or occasional confinement to asylums, but typically not at all.
like ultimately prohibition was misguided and did not achieve what they aimed for. but it was an attempt to implement reforms that would make life less violent and financially stressed for legally vulnerable groups of people.
i don't want a re-vindication of the prohibition movement saying actually it was woke. because it wasn't--it was a mixed bag. but conspicuously absent from almost all public programming about prohibition is the framing of a significantly more legally unequal world. all i want is acknowledgement is that the topic is slightly more complex than drinking is fun! what were those busybody reformists thinking?
i have to bring up your subsequent points @plavoptice:
- "Thank you for this. There was a story I remember of a woman whose husband died of alcoholism and in her rage and grief she would take an axe to beer kegs. And people thought it was hilarious to watch her go like no guys this woman needs therapy!! And maybe she has a point about the lack of treatment for alcoholism!"
yeah so idk if there's some specific other woman you're thinking of, but the most famous woman who did this is Carry Nation. and she actually inspired, like, gangs of women to bust up liquor barrels.
Carry Nation was an extremely christian, extremely evangelist type and she did not start this crusade because of a dead husband. In fact her husband divorced her because she started doing this. (found an interesting article to verify here.) of course its not to say that losing family and financial ruin to drinking wasn't the reason many others became prohibitionist. that was very common.
- "The 19th century was also when people would get people drunk, round them up, and drag them to the polls to vote for their preferred candidate, wasn’t it? Anyway yes to the angry white mob violence thing"
yeah i heard of this a lot in my many many political history classes and it was called cooping. its often presented as like a farcical old tyme, past people were so crazy haha thing. but like tarring and feathering, sounds actually fucking cruel and horrifying and like attempted murder.
a lot of 1800s cons relied on getting people dangerously fall down drunk and signing things they should not have been held accountable for, and were also like, never prosecuted or anything because hey you got drunk.
i think people of the past, with a much more limited understanding of health and biology and, like, social psychology, have a lot more leeway in thinking of alcohol as "the demon drink."