Chapter . . . . . 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . U.S. Prohibition and Smuggling from Cuba
I
n 1914, the U.S. Congress received a flood of petitions, signed by 6 million people, urging it to ban alcoholic beverages.1 Six years later, a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages across the United States went into effect. With these actions, the era of Prohibition had arrived in the United States; it lasted for nearly a decade and a half. Yet civic and religious campaigns against alcohol consumption were hardly new to the country. They had flared sporadically since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Protestant ministers began to preach against the practice of imbibing liquor. The first national group to take up the call was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.2 Workers and labor leaders alike also condemned the consumption of alcohol when it was carried to the extreme.3 On the state level, Michigan approved an amendment to its constitution in November 1916 that prohibited the sale of liquor, an action that half of the state’s counties had already taken some five years earlier. Prohibition’s early success in Michigan resulted from well-orchestrated campaigns carried out by civic and religious leaders, supported by the region’s major business figures — most notably, Henry Ford. Ford supported Prohibition in the interest of efficiency and profits (alcohol consumption lowered workers’ productivity), and his company featured a department responsible for overseeing workers’ family lives and controlling their drinking habits.4 Ford’s crusade against alcohol spread to other groups of business leaders.5 The idea of regulating the lives of human beings both at work and at home to create an abstemious, more productive workforce thus gained strength among U.S. business owners during the first decades of the twentieth century.6 As a consequence of the country’s entrance into the First World War, the federal government accrued greater powers, and the nation developed an
