[rayiner]

Prohibition obviously reflected the will of the people—it’s impossible to amend the constitution without supermajority support. The Volstead Act was approved by overwhelming majorities of both houses, and then ratified by 46 of 48 states.

It wasn’t “ridiculous.” It was one of the first things women did with the vote. It probably would’ve worked if it hadn’t been for Irish and Italian immigrants.

[throwway120385]

I think there's more to it than "immigrants love their alcohol so much they started whole criminal enterprises." It's probably coincidental that the biggest names in illicit alcohol during that era happened to be Italian crime family names.

In the south there were so many bootleggers that they used to race each other around tracks to see who had the fastest car. This would eventually become Nascar.

I think it's more accurate to say that there was overwhelming support for Volstead from people in power who were swayed by the narrative that alcohol was draining families of resources and dis-inhibiting otherwise good men from hitting their wives and children. But there were also a lot of people who didn't let alcohol ruin their marriages and family relationships, and those people would eventually get the act repealed.

[rayiner]

Prohibition wasn’t repealed because we determined “alcohol isn’t so bad.” To this day, alcohol remains tremendously damaging to women. 70% of sexual assaults involve alcohol use by the perpetrator. 55% of domestic violence incidents involve alcohol use prior to the incident. Obviously that doesn’t exculpate the perpetrators. But those bad people will exist no matter what—alcohol pours fuel on the fire.

We repealed prohibition because it proved unenforceable. And Irish and Italian immigrants had a tremendous amount to do with that, both because of their participation in organized crime and because of their cultural acceptance of alcohol. (To this day, the divide between people who supported temperance and those who got it repealed lives on in who serves grape juice at communion and who serves wine. Even a century of integration later, there’s a marked difference between evangelical Protestants and Catholics in terms of regular alcohol use.)

After all, it’s not like banning alcohol is impossible. Alcohol use is extremely restricted in many countries around the world.

[pfannkuchen]

Is German or English beer culture new? They may be culturally less prone to skirting the law than Irish or Italians (want to stress the word culturally here), but I don’t really see how we can attribute it to a cultural difference in the acceptance of alcohol.

[rayiner]

Temperance was an outgrowth of religious movements that occurred within American Protestantism in the late 1700s and through the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement. The seeds of this were sown back in Europe (John Wellesley for example) but those groups like Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers who opposed alcohol (and still do) had a lot more influence in America than they did back in Europe. And since the country was new they had a greater ability to reshape the culture.

So the relevant cultural difference is between these American Protestants, who had been diverging from Europe for 100+ years, and immigrants from continental Europe, who hadn’t experienced that cultural change.

[xeromal]

Speaking of Appalachian bootleggers, my great grandpa was one. There are ruins far in the woods outside my childhood home when you can see the old infrastructure and a pile of rusty cans that used to be 10 ft high. It's mostly disintegrated now. My great grandpa retired from it when he was visited by some rival Italians who wanted to have exclusive access to him. He was offered the choice to retire or serve them exclusively so he gave up the business and went back to farming.