PART 1

This is a good question and something I may be able to answer. I primarily study saloons and prohibition in the late 19th to early 20th century but I have looked at the issue of alcoholism at a broader level. As you may be aware, the history of alcohol in the United States has always been tenuous at best.

----Background----

Prohibition has always been a more fragmented process than people usually understand. I have written a similar response about prohibition here. I have taken the position that prohibition did work initially, probably more so than a lot of people think, but it was not able to sustain this effect long term. As historians point out that while the effects of alcoholism were initially going down, by the late 1920s they were going back up.

I wrote in that post that national prohibitions' greatest success was "killing the saloon" which was the main source of alcohol in the mid-19th to early 20th century. Saloons were considered to be the dens of social evil during this period. Most of the concern came from women as they feared men wasting wages, dying from alcohol-related illnesses, being arrested, or spousal/family abuse. How we as a society talk about alcohol use and abuse is very much tied to our social perceptions. During the Progressive era and into the 1920s, alcoholism was undoubtedly an essential concern for society and universally tied to the saloons. Even though we have a long history of trying to figure out prohibition, you have to remember too that there was an immense amount of political power put behind national prohibition during this period- much more than anything we have ever seen before in our country. The biggest proponents were the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. These groups, and others like them, were very effective in the political sphere. After all, they turned this crisis into an amendment!

In 1933, when prohibition was repealed it did not do so evenly across the states. As before, some states and counties took a lot longer to repeal prohibition but it had very little effect at that point. However, we still deal with the ramifications of prohibition as some states forbid alcohol being sold in grocery stores. In some states, you can't buy liquor on Sunday and some have it where you cant buy liquor before noon on Sunday (clearly a religious motive behind these). Although these "holdouts" are goofy when you think about it, it is still incredible to think of the political and societal impact prohibition had on our country. The difficulty in assessing this period comes from the fact that immediately following its repeal we are dealing with the Great Depression and World War II which were much more pressing issues. I see the move to repeal as concerning two facts: economic and health. The liquor industry was crippled as a result of prohibition and during the Depression, it made no economical sense to keep the industry that way. People were also concerned with organized violence that stemmed from prohibition as well as unregulated liquor proliferating local economies.