Fascinating, but to add a little balance to the mourning over Prohibition -- there was a reason to derail all those distillers. This was a major feminist issue -- which is why Prohibition went into effect about the same time women got the vote. Susan B. Anthony was a Prohibitionist long before she became a Suffragist.
In the 1800s, there were no women’s shelters, and women didn’t control money or, generally speaking, have jobs, which meant women had no options other than just taking it when the menfolk came home staggering drunk. And before Prohibition, drunkenness was a problem of, well, staggering proportions. Some estimate that 50 percent or more of the male population was alcoholic, and even the non-alcoholics drank heavily—often (as noted in the article below) within a few points of lethal amounts of alcohol on a regular basis. And while a fair number of women drank, most women just bore the brunt of the abuse—or penury—that often went with male alcoholism.
As for the Puritans, on whom most people blame Prohibition, aside from having lived 300 years too early to have been involved, they were actually pretty heavy drinkers. Most Puritans were making hard cider in vast quantities, and they enjoyed gin. They didn’t approve of drunkenness, but they certainly had no problem with drinking. So we can’t pin this on them.
Just be glad that, as far as feminist causes go, we kept the vote but got rid of Prohibition. (But thank goodness we’re not consuming alcohol at the rate Americans were in the 1830s.)
Here are some quotes and some sites where you can confirm this information.
http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/sba/third.htmlSusan B. Anthony's first involvement in the world of reform was in the temperance movement. This was one of the first expressions of original feminism in the United States and it dealt with the abuses of women and children who suffered from alcoholic husbands.
http://www.librarycompany.org/ArdentSpirits/temperance-women.htmlWomen were active in the temperance movement from the early 19th century and became its driving force in the 1870s. Women often made up significant portions of temperance organizations and formed all-female organizations as well. Because women lacked financial autonomy, the problem of male drunkenness was their problem. The temperance cause was an arena in which women could resist vulnerability to their husbands and lack of political and economic freedoms. Many important suffragists got their start in the temperance movement.
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/Al-Am/Alcohol-Consumption.htmlBy the 1750s Americans were drinking heavily. Much of the rum was imported, and the rest was distilled in the seaports from molasses brought from the West Indies. Although available data is rough, by 1750 the colonists may have consumed more than 6 gallons of alcohol per adult per year, nearly triple the 2.2 gallons drunk in 1998. From the 1790s through the 1820s, whiskey use soared. Heralded as the national beverage, whiskey made getting drunk a patriotic gesture and an act of American pride.
Around 1800 settlement of the Middle West began, and that region's hot summers and excellent soil produced bumper corn crops. The result was a corn glut, which increased when Europe stopped buying American grain after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. Desperate western farmers turned their corn into whiskey in order to afford the shipping costs of sending it to the East for sale. Whiskey became both cheaper and more plentiful. By the 1820s
whiskey was five cents a fifth, cheaper than rum, wine, beer, milk, tea, or coffee. It was often safer to drink than water, too.
At the consumption peak, around 1830, Americans drank about seven gallons of alcohol per adult per year.
This rate of use is among the highest ever recorded in any society and is close to the human body's physiological maximum capacity for intake of alcohol.Adult white men drank the most, consuming perhaps as much as five-sixths of the liquor at an average rate of a half pint a day, but women also drank, often at home and sometimes for real or imagined health problems. Temperance leaders found it hard to defend limited use because no one agreed how much alcohol was safe. They also found that attacking whiskey while exempting wine did not work, because the poor would not give up cheap whiskey while the wealthy continued to drink expensive wine.
So yes, Prohibition was inconvenient and caused a few businesses to fail, but it may have saved the country. It certainly saved a lot of women.
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