Crime And Booze During The Great Depression

During the Depression, at a time when many Americans might have wanted to drown their sorrows in drink, alcohol was banned in the United States. Prohibition was hailed as a great experiment at the time , but in fact it was a disaster. Millions of Americans became criminals simply because they continued to buy beer, wine or whisky.

The National Prohibition Act, known after its congressional sponsor as the Volstead Act, had become law in January 1920. It banned the manufacture, transportation, sale and consumption of alcohol. Its unintended consequence was the temporary creation of a vast illegal network of liquor smuggling, serving thousands of ’speakeasies’ - illegal drinking places.

The drive for prohibition had been cooordinated by the Anti-Saloon League. It originated in the religious and ethical beliefs of the Protestant churches but also in the prejudices of ‘ old stock’ Americans in the Middle West and the South against the cities and their German, Irish and Italian inhabitants. These newer immigrants were seen by the Anglo Saxon Protestants as drinkers prone to immorality and crime.

In fact it was prohibition itself that triggered a national crime wave. Attempts to legislate morality offered new opportunities in the evasion of the law: what is forbidden may become more desirable. And so it proved.

There were twice as many illegal bars in New York as there had been legal ones before the Volstead Act. Bootleggers smuggled liquor into the United States across the Canadian and Mexican borders, from the Bahamas and from ships anchored outside territorial waters.

In most major cities rival criminal gangs fought over the huge profits being made from the illegal drink trade and from the prostitution and gambling associated with it. The income bought cars and machine guns, increasingly used in self defense and to eliminate rivals. And it also bought people too: police forces were corrupted, and political influence brought the gangsters immunity from the law. In Chicago between 1927 and 1931 there were 227 gang murders - and not one conviction.

Chicago was called by one of its aldermen ‘ the only completely corrupt city in America’. One of the first gang bosses was murdered: his successor was shot by his bodyguard and his empire of illegal breweries, distilleries, truck fleets and speakeasies was eventually taken over by the most notorious gang leader of all, Al Capone. He drove around Chicago in an armored Cadillac: both feared and admired, he was said to have ordered some 400 murders.

A commission reported in 1931 that prohibition was unenforceable. Although organized crime continued to flourish, the stream of money that had flowed into the coffers of the criminals slowed to a trickle as the Depression advanced. Prohibition was repealed in December 1933 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He himself observed; “I think this would be a good time for beer”