Us Vs. The Rumrunners

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution had a profound effect on the lives and liberties of all Americans that would choose to violate it. Even if one wasn't willing to attempt breaking the law, they were undoubtedly touched by it's presence in one form or another. There are always those few in society who will test the long arm of the law. During the 1920's, with the temptation of fast and easy money supplying the wants of the American people, those few became many. Even the simple working man got a great thrill out of breaking the law by having a drink. The strengthening of lawless behavior in all forms seems to be the only outcome it consistently produced. Like the ever widening ripple in a quiet pool of water, it became a law enforcement nightmare that would only end with its repeal.

Taking away the freedom of a state, in this union of states, to choose its own objectives and moral placement dates back to the Civil War. The southern states, having the weight of the federal union authority guiding them, were forced to emancipate the slaves against their own wants. The prohibition movement was alive before these times, and Abraham Lincoln was quoted in 1862 on the consumption of intoxicating liquors 'used by everybody, repudiated by nobody' and that it came forth in society 'like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay if not the first, the fairest born in every family'.

In the United States the first laws to prohibit the manufacture and sale of liquors date back to 1838 in Tennessee and to 1846 in Maine. Prior to 1906, 18 States had adopted State-wide prohibition, but the temperance wave had receded by that year so that only three states: Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota, remained in the prohibition column. Campaigns for State laws and constitutional provisions were renewed and the movement progressed rapidly from the enactment of the Georgia law in 1907. Ten years later, when the so-called Reed Amendment went into effect, there were 23 "bone dry" States. This law was directed against the shipment of liquors into the dry States. The entrance of the United States into the World War materially strengthened the prohibition forces. First the sale of liquors to soldiers and sailors was forbidden. Next, under the food control act, the President was authorized to prohibit the use of grains and fruits in the distillation of liquors for beverage purposes. More ammunition for the movement then followed by the passage on November 21, 1918 of the war-time prohibition act, prohibiting after June 30, 1919, the sale, during the European War and thereafter until the termination of demobilization, of any intoxicating liquors except for export.

The most powerful organization against the consumption of alcohol beverages was the so-called 'Anti-Saloon League' which was founded in Washington D.C. on December 18, 1895. One of its leaders had said, promoting his organization, 'It has not come simply to build a little local sentiment or to secure the passage of a few laws, or yet to vote the saloons from a few hundred towns. These are mere incidents in its progress. It has come to solve the liquor problem.' The Eighteenth Amendment was devised by Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League and was presented to Congress on January 16, 1919, by Andrew Volstead, congressman from Minnesota. At midnight one year later all saloons were closed down throughout the United States climaxing a long campaign to forbid the use of liquor within America's boundaries.

Written during this time of prohibition: "How different if, instead of crude and wholesale compulsion, resort were had--as it had been had before the Prohibitionist mania swept us off our feet--to well-considered measures of regulation and restriction, and to the legitimate influences of persuasion and example! The process is slower, to be sure, but it had accomplished wonderful improvement in our own time and before; what it gained was solid gain; and it did not invite the resentment, the lawlessness, or the other evils which despotic prohibition of innocent pleasure carries in its train."

The criminals had a whole year to set up their new enterprises. The federal government could not