Prohibition Party

During Prohibition, alcoholic psychosis admissions to state mental hospitals dropped sharply. These were people who had been destroyed by drinking and ended up institutionalized. Prohibition kept them out.

The 18th Amendment was not imposed by elites on regular people. It was demanded by regular people, organized through churches and women's groups and labor unions, and ratified by their elected representatives.

Grant is correct.

@GrantCardone Thank you for seeing the light. 🙏🏻

Alcohol has no real value to mankind.

Wayne Wheeler was called 'the strongest political force of his day' by the Cincinnati Enquirer. A man who grew up poor, got injured by a drunk, and turned that into a constitutional amendment. American story.

@kirsty1138 And we are proud of YOU! Keep up the great work!

I've passed 300 days sober! So proud of myself. ☺️

The temperance movement and abolitionism overlapped enormously. Frances Watkins Harper, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony. The same people fighting for freedom from slavery fought for freedom from alcohol's tyranny.

Prohibition cut cirrhosis deaths by nearly two-thirds. If any other public health intervention achieved that result, we'd call it a triumph. We'd build monuments. Instead we buried it under wet propaganda.

The WCTU published temperance textbooks, lobbied school boards, and put temperance education into public schools. They understood that the culture had to change as well as the law.

By the time the 18th Amendment passed, 23 of 48 states had already enacted some form of alcohol restriction. The country was going dry on its own. The federal amendment just completed the work.

The Eighteenth Amendment was the product of decades of work by the most dedicated reformers in American history. To call it a failure is to ignore everything it accomplished in the years it was in force.

Before Prohibition, the saloon-keeper was often the political boss of his neighborhood. He delivered votes, distributed patronage, and kept local politicians in his debt. Closing the saloon was democratic reform.

@ProhibitionUS By contrast, the Prohibition Party was the first national political party to support women’s suffrage unite platform; going back to its national platform in 1872.

For God and Home and Native Land. Those three commitments drove millions of women into the streets, into politics, into confrontations with the most powerful industry in America. They won.

The liquor industry funded campaigns against women's suffrage. They knew women would vote for prohibition. When the wets opposed giving women the vote, they showed exactly whose side they were on.

Frances Willard raised the age of consent in multiple states. She linked temperance to every form of protection for women and children. You cannot separate the WCTU from the broader fight for women's safety.

13 states had statewide prohibition laws in the 1850s. The movement was legal, democratic, and winning before the Civil War interrupted everything. This was always a mainstream American value.

Alcohol is estimated to cause 30% of motor vehicle accidents. That number was far higher in an era before seatbelts, airbags, or drunk driving laws. Prohibition was a traffic safety measure.

The American Temperance Society was founded in Boston in 1826 and within 12 years had 8,000 local groups. That kind of growth doesn't happen unless people desperately want what you're offering.

Benjamin Rush didn't just call drinking a disease in the abstract. He traced it through the body, documented the symptoms, mapped the progression. This was science in 1784. The drys were on the right side of medicine.