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Prohibition In The Early 1900s

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The ban on alcohol in the early 1900s sounded great when it was first brought up, but would end up being a very bad decision. The prohibition not only affected the people of the United States but also its economy. It also made people break the law more often with crimes like bootlegging and selling alcohol illegally. I will be talking about the timeline of how prohibition began and ended and how it affected the United States government. The prohibition affected the society of the United States in many ways.
At the beginning of the 1900s the government began to blame many issues of alcohol. They thought that alcohol was the reason for a increase in domestic violence and for so many divorces. Another issue the government saw was alcoholism. People were drinking to get drunk and this resulted in many people breaking the law and losing jobs. The government thought at the time that the only way to limit this was to ban all alcoholic beverages in the United …show more content…

Obvious things that were affected was businesses that were built on alcoholic beverages. Things like breweries, pubs, and bars all went out of business very quickly because of this new amendment. This made people lose their jobs and businesses and caused many people to plunge into poverty. This turned out to be one of the factors that lead to the great depression in the 1930s. Also a new kind of crime was discovered called bootlegging. This was when people made beer and other alcoholic drinks, and sold them to people for lots of money illegally. The most famous bootlegger of all time was a gangster called Al Capone. He ran many alcohol rings throughout the mid atlantic including central Pennsylvania. He was later caught and arrested by government officials in 1931 but it wasn't for just bootlegging. The main crime was him not paying his income taxes. (Al Capone Biography). This is how the prohibition affected the United States while it was a

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