When the Solution Is Worse Than the Problem: Prohibition and the Emergence of Organized Crime
Fascinating as gangsters and crime bosses are, their stories are a good way to introduce people to larger systemic challenges facing America and much of the world.
You can thank Master of My Universe for inspiring me to embark on this project with True Crime Friday.
Today we are starting to look at the failed experiment known as Prohibition, the period of time from 1920 to 1933 when it was part of the US Constitution to ban the importation, transportation, manufacture and sale of alcohol. I will be examining what led up to Prohibition, how this led to the rise of what we would recognize as modern-day organized crime (in addition to why) and the consequences we are still feeling today.
What Led Up to Prohibition
An important piece of information that should inform us about the temperance movement is that alcohol consumption was up to three times higher than it is now in the years before Prohibition. Commonly consumed drinks were quite strong as well.Also, women who were victims of domestic violence fueled by drunkenness had little, if any, recourse. Keep in mind that women could vote nationwide only just over a century ago, they could not open bank accounts in their own names until the 1970s, and martial rape was not fully criminalized in all fifty states until the early 1990s.
From America’s beginning, there has always been a contingent who has opposed the consumption of alcohol on religious or otherwise moral grounds. Part of it may have been religious, but the nascent temperance movement did have a solid point about the effect stronger types of alcohol were having on people, especially as it related to violence against women and children.
What is most fascinating about the temperance movement is how diverse the movement and motives were.
It is true that some of the most important backers of Prohibition were vicious groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who associated alcohol with new immigrants and decadent urban life. In fact, the KKK became one of the dominant enforcers of Prohibition in the American South during the peak of its power and popularity. Many industrialists favored Prohibition on their (not entirely wrong) perception that drunkenness was an issue in the workplace. Some other businesspeople, such as tea merchants, thought it would boost their profits.
Undeniably, xenophobia and racism played significant roles in getting Prohibition passed, especially among Whites whose fears of drunken Black men got countless of them murdered.
But people who were genuine social reformers—men and women who fought tirelessly for causes such as labor rights, women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery and racial equality—also pushed Prohibition forward.
One notable proponent of temperance was Frederick Douglass, who connected this particular movement to the struggle for liberation from slavery. He operated under the belief that to keep themselves free, Black people needed to stay sober from a beverage he saw as just another way to enslave Black Americans to White brewers and saloon owners. Douglass was not alone among Black activists and intellectuals of his era regarding temperance.
In fact, the temperance movement saw some of the closest interracial cooperation between Black and White people at the time.
To many of these activists of all colors, the major distilleries and saloons were how we would see Purdue Pharma or drug dealers: predatory capitalists who left misery, poverty and devastation in their wake.
To be fair, there was more than a little bit of truth to their assessments. However, it turns out that the cure of Prohibition, while solving parts of the disease, would lead to even worse problems down the line.
Prohibition and the Rise of Modern Organized Crime
What we would call organized crime was nothing new in the United States by the time Prohibition got rolling.These gangs usually, made up of the especially poor and desperate, specialized in theft and the sale of stolen goods, extortion and vices like gambling. Often, they were used as muscle by corrupt political machines in major cities like New York and Chicago or by rich industrialists on occasion to break up strikes and labor unions (when they weren’t controlling labor unions).
What Prohibition did was teach gangsters how to run large-scale businesses and scale their tactics to match.
The rise of organized crime was compounded by serious systematic corruption in state and local governments all around the country already present. These gangsters were able to get entire police forces on their payroll along with significant numbers of elected officials at the local, state and even federal levels. They bought out judges as well. Although these new gangsters exacerbated the problem of corruption, it was already there when they arrived in force.
Making the dilemma worse was that because many people who supported Prohibition also favored keeping the federal government small, there was never enough resources or personnel to combat the bootleggers and these powerful new crime syndicates. Meanwhile, state and local law enforcement were on the take.
By their very nature, gangsters don’t have access to the legal system to solve disputes. So they turn to violence as a way to expand territory, protect themselves and increase profits. When conflicts happen between gangsters at any level, it is practically inevitable that innocent people get caught in the crossfire. Prohibition was no different. People in the wrong place at the wrong time were killed in significant numbers during Prohibition. The violence of these mob wars played a significant role in undermining Prohibition’s popularity along with the rampant corruption it made worse.
Other rackets, such as extortion, hijacking and theft, remained profitable ventures for gangsters who made fortunes on Prohibition, methods of making money that are anything but victimless crimes.
With all of this corruption and violence, much of the public began flagrantly to disobey the law. Prohibition was clearly unenforceable, various crime syndicates were waging war with no one to stop the violence, and the very people and institutions that were supposed to enforce Prohibition were enjoying booze themselves. As a result, respect for the law declined.
Why respect the law when it proved so impotent?
The end result of Prohibition was an augmentation of corruption in the government and the legal system at all levels, a rise in gangland-style warfare and a general lack of regard for the law. Most serious of all, it gave rise to a type of organized crime that is able to operate at scale, including the modern American Mafia.
Other criminal organizations based in the United States would learn to operate at a similar scale.
Despite in some cases alcohol consumption decreasing along with alcoholism, the associated costs easily exceeded the benefits.
Oh, and the United States government during Prohibition went so far as to poison many of the ingredients that make alcohol.
Yet still, Prohibition was a failure.
Key Lessons
Prohibition on paper could have worked better than it did.Better being the keyword.
If the United States had invested properly in actually enforcing the prohibition of alcohol across the country with state and local governments being able to pull their weight, maybe the scourge of organized crime would not have grown so much.
But the government failed to properly pay for enforcement, and systemic corruption at all levels of government hindered an already doomed enterprise.
This is not the first time weak state capacity and corruption have enabled the rise of organized crime on a massive scale.
The yakuza got a major boost from the devastation World War II brought to Japan, while the Russian Mob got significantly more powerful with the fall of the Soviet Union. Part of the reason drug cartels have gotten so entrenched in Latin America is because the countries in which they operate have serious problems with systematic corruption and weak state capacity.
The Sicilian and Italian Mafia can trace their rise in part to weak state capacity in Southern Italy and Sicily. In place of strong state capacity, groups that would evolve into these organizations instead provided protection—for a price, of course.
Perhaps the biggest lesson is this: Be careful what you criminalize. Enforcing the prohibition of a thing requires a cost. Make sure you have the ability to actually carry out the enforcement.
The cost will stay around for years to come.