(01-16-2023, 11:19 AM)mikesez Wrote: I still struggle to understand this one.
Amending the US constitution is one of the hardest things to do in all of politics.  Yet this got done in a nation that largely wasn't ready to give up drinking...

I'm sure there's some research out there which explains why a country would deign to ban alcohol consumption completely. Cary Nation, and other prohibitionists, were on a tear at that time influencing public opinion. But why? I think it has to do with the industrial revolution, the elevated standard of living with more free time on the average worker's hands, the migration of the U.S. population from agrarian to urban, and the processes of alcohol manufacture becoming more productive thus making alcohol cheaper and more accessible. Rampant alcoholism and broken families were becoming an issue of prominence never experienced before.

It's certainly an interesting sociological study.

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