Positive And Negative Effects Of The Great Depression Essay

By 1925 there were at least 3200 speakeasies and stores who sold liquor in order to get some extra income in New York. The smuggling of alcohol was a very good business that involved money. Some of the direct distilling and home brewing were secretly installed in garages, tenements, and warehouses. With the fear of being hijacked, the bootleggers hired gunmen to protect the goods; so illegal gun market was a side effect of the Prohibition that brought big amounts of money. The illegal alcohol and gun market brought gangs to everywhere, these gangs fought constantly to maintain the territory and respect. Chicago and New York where the cities where the Mafia gain more power, gang wars and assassination became an everyday thing. On May 11th, Jim Colosimo was the first of the Chicago mafia bosses to be assassinated.

There is much debate as to what caused the Great Depression. There was certainly the short-term trigger of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, but there are also long-term causes that manifested itself during the 1920’s. Whether it is the shift from coal to electricity that negatively affected those invested with the old technology, or a shift more to trucks and cars to transport goods instead of railroads, or perhaps that farmers were losing their farms because over over-investment during the late 1910’s, many factors can be identified as a cause. But we can also look at the consumer as one of the root causes, as well. Consumer behavior contributed heavily to causing both the stock market crash and the Great Depression.

This paper discusses one of the most significant events of the 1920s and 1930s that still affects life to this day, the prohibition. Throughout the modern American, who may be interested in the prohibition and why organized crime was so powerful, discover just that as well as why the prohibition was implemented, who had the most influence, how people viewed one another at the time, and the factors that lead to the prohibitions lack of success. It was a time of struggle between law enforcement, organized crime and the citizens caught in-between. Overall the main question the collective research intends to answer is “who held all the power, the police, organized crime, or the citizens and how did that shape the prohibition?” The answer to the question will be discovered through research and facts. Topics such as motivations behind the prohibition, police efficacy, citizen involvement, organized crime, the morals of America, and multiple views on the prohibition will be covered in hopes to fully understand what the prohibition was and the roles specific groups had in the outcome.

The Prohibition Era of the 1920’s was an infamous time for the United States. However, despite the roar and boom or the twenties, prohibition did little to benefit Americans or the country itself. The ban of the make, transportation, and sale of alcohol only caused an increase in crime and decrease in public health and safety with practically no economic benefit.

The Great Depression was a period in time where millions of Canadians had suffered from hunger, unemployment, homelessness and an economic downfall. The horror of the Great Depression took place in 1929-1939 and had lasted for a decade affecting millions of people worldwide. However, Canada had been impacted the most. The lasting horror of the Great Depression resulted in disastrous impacts on the economy. This was due to the Stock Market Crash, the construction of useless relief camps to open job opportunities for men, and the lack of raw materials which affected the lives of many farmers.

Prohibition was an icon of the Roaring Twenties. Proponents of temperance had, for centuries prior, advocated for a federal law against alcohol, and, with the passing of the 18th amendment in 1920, they reached their goal. What advocates saw as a foolproof way to clean up society ended up backfiring and turning the nation towards more than a decade of illegal and immoral behavior that should have been foreseeable. Prohibition was an immense failure because of the unpredicted disobedience that arose and the detrimental effects of this disobedience on society.

On January 17, 1920, the 18th Amendment to the constitution of the United States of America took effect. The 18th Amendment had been ratified a year earlier, banning “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”(Okrent, 1) within the United States and its territories. This new decade is called the Prohibition. The prohibition is the era of bizarre and engaging images of speakeasies, intoxicated flappers dancing the Charleston, bootleggers, and mobsters protecting illegal trades. Daniel Okrent seeks to explain the build up to the era, passage of the 18th Amendment, the public 's activities in the age of Prohibition, the ultimate repeal of the law by the 21st Amendment, and the final outcomes.

In the “perfect” society the government thought it would create, people would find other ways to spend their money and find other things to do. Unfortleny the total opposite happened, restaurants went out of business because they couldn’t serve alcohol. There was also a decline in entertainment and amusement as well. From a lot of businesses closing down people started losing their jobs. Although the 18th amendment banned the sell and manufacturing of alcohol, it didn’t banned consumption of it which lead people to find loopholes around it (Burns and Novick). The one thing that was not banned was that pharmacists were aloud to sell alcohol to people who truly needed it. One thing that occured from it was bootlegging and rum runners which was the illegal business of selling and transporting alcoholic beverages. Bootleggers thought it was a good idea to run pharmacies because they could get ahold of alcohol easily (“Prohibition,” Encyclopedia Britannica). Another thing that started to happen was Speakeasies which are stores and nightclubs selling alcohol, and smuggling it across state lines. They also started to make their own liquor at their homes. Prohibition started to encourage criminal activity and raised gang violence. The cost of law enforcement, jails, and prisons increased. The poor and working class were way more affected by this than the middle and upper class was (Graham). Even though prohibition had good intentions, the negatives outweigh the

Daniel Okrent’s “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” provides to the reader a detailed background of the Prohibition movement from its small beginnings up to its repeal by President Roosevelt in 1933. Like most readers, I only had a small lexicon of names and terms associated with Prohibition. Like most individuals have garnered their limited knowledge of Prohibition from screen and TV. My undergraduate course in American history only covered the generic names of Carrie Nation, Al Capone, bootlegger and “speakeasy”; acting more as a few paragraphs for filler between World War One and the Great Depression.

During the 1920’s, in an attempt to reduce the amount of alcohol consumption in the United States, Congress passed The Volstead Act, prohibiting the use and sale of alcohol. Quickly, unforeseen consequences made themselves very apparent. The effects of Prohibition were vast and negative, covering a wide spectrum of social ills. Between the increases in crime, an encouragement of organized crime, and the rise of alcohol use, Prohibition was deemed a disaster.

The Prohibition was offensive to and harmful to many people morally, financially, and emotionally. Thousands of people, who owned family businesses which involved selling alcohol, lost their jobs and a lot of

Because liquor was no longer legally available, the public turned to gangsters who took on the bootlegging industry and supplied them with liquor. Because the industry was so immensely profitable, more gangs participated. As a result of the money involved in the bootlegging industry, there was much

“Shrunken perhaps by the vicissitudes and exigencies of the times, Broadway presented itself admirably throughout the Thirties. It not only managed to preserve the best, but also nurtured and expanded them. At the brink of the new decade, Broadway stood smaller but brighter”

Prohibition, which was also known as The Noble Experiment, lasted in America from 1920 until 1933. There are quite a few results of this experiment: innocent people suffered; organized crime grew into an empire; the police, courts, and politicians became increasingly corrupt; disrespect for the law grew; and the per capita consumption of the prohibited substance—alcohol—increased dramatically, year by year. These results increased each of the thirteen years of this Noble Experiment, and they never returned to the levels that existed before 1920. Prohibition did not happen instantly, it settled on the country gradually, community by community, town by town, and eventually state by state for almost a century. The onset of National

In 1920’s America, many Americans found themselves on the wrong side of the law for nothing more than having a nice cold beer after a long day of work. Many Americans in the 1920s went from being ordinary citizens who took pleasure in drinking alcohol to criminals who had to get what they wanted by going through the black-market. The so called “dry’s” had good intentions, wanting to create a better functioning society. But prohibition caused more harm than good, with increasing crime rates and alcohol related deaths, with prohibition only to be repealed a decade later.