Prohibition Info

Prohibition was a fourteen year period in America's history when the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquor was illegal.

This period of time was hard to live in. There were less jobs because everyone who had been making, selling, of transporting alcohol lost there jobs.

It made it very easy for Franklin Roosevelt to run for president because, by the time he did, an estimated 3/4 of American voters and 46 states favored repeal.

Fun Facts about Prohibition

Al Capone was one of the most infamous bootleggers of them all and he built his criminal empire largely on profits from illegal alcohol.He earned a staggering $60 million annually from bootleg operations and speakeasies.

These operations fueled a rise in gang violence.At the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, a group of several men dressed as policemen shot and killed a group of men in an enemy gang.

The lessons of prohibition remain important today because they apply to the debate over the war on drugs, to the mounting efforts to reduce access to alcohol and tobacco, and to issues like censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.