(Remember: A text without a context is a pretext). The primarily root of the Prohibition movement is the Temperance movement. It is a popular 'attack' strategy, when a more liberal alternative is advanced, for an advocate to automatically claim to be 'progressive' and 'enlightened' while its more conservative opponent is criticized as archaic and suppressive. The individual is urged to embrace the more progressive and shun the suppression that is synonymous with anything conservative. Real 'tolerance' means that one is cordial and civil regarding another person's views, though they may not accept or hold them personally. False (and modern 'Tolerance') suggests that we must affirm and even accept the other person's views (after all, Truth has been put up into the attic to gather dust and eventually fade into nothingness completely).
In 1920, the 20th amendment (Prohibition) was passed. Often opponents are hasty to shovel out blame and thus misunderstand (that is, if accurate understanding was actually their intent rather than merely propogating their agenda even if their agenda called for re-writing history to 'make it so') the issue. Let us continue by sorting the facts from P.C. re-written myth.
In 1794, the federal government imposed a tax on whiskey, thus prompting the Whiskey Rebellion among many farmers. Many of these farmers often made just enough for their families and some possibly for bartering purposes particularly in areas where steady employment was scarce. In response, many farmers began to defiantly increase their production of those who had not produced whiskey began to do so. As much as it may seem that the Whiskey Rebellion was about whiskey, it was not, it really was about the audacity of a new government that treated the new Americans in the same way as the government they had escaped. The rebels were vindicated in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson repealed the whiskey excise tax. As use grew, so did misuse. By the time of the second great awakening, Lyman Beecher was growing concerned with the problem of intoxication and alcohol misuse. Beecher's style was characterized by a balance between evangelical fervor and social reform.
Beecher condemned beverage alcohol because of the harm it did to 'the health and physical energies of a nation' to the 'national intellect' to the 'military prowess of a nation' and the 'civil liberty.' But Beecher's greatest concern regarding liquor was 'the moral ruin of it works in the soul.' Believers at this time faced a dilemma: Should reform be directed toward moderation or total abstinence? As early as 1780, American Methodists sided with total abstinence, though the first temperence society in Connecticut argued only for moderation. This direction, however, changed to total abstinence by the 1840s. Thus, whenever Beecher spoke, he did not mention wine or beer since most believers had no problem with them. As the abstinence movement began to grow, the practice of the Lord's Supper changed. The wine was exchanged for grape juice which was considered 'unfermented wine' by many denominations. The notion of 'unfermented' wine, to anyone familiar with wine-making and the process of fermentation know how rediculous this is, putting it on par with a married bachelor- there is no such thing. Either it is one or it is the other, but it cannot be both. Also Jesus' first miracle was to turn water into wine (gasp!). Even the theologian B.B. Warfield attempted to ground this abstinence bias by stating that anti-alcohol interpretations of 'unfermented' wine is based on an attack upon the infallibility of the Bible. But his efforts fell on deaf ears. It seemed, that by this time, the practice of eisogesis unseated the more orthodox exegesis. By the time of the civil war, moonshine had become a prominent fixture within American culture. Not only was it a solution for the farmer who sought a remedy for the problem of the storage of wheat, barley or corn in barns after the harvest but before taking the crop to market. at times, following a hard rain, (and barns were not often water-proof) water would often seep in and mold would then settle in if it were not covered. This problem was solved when farmers began to 'liquidify' their crop. Those farmers found a new market for this new formatted stored crop. Not only was this new format desired for drinking purposes, but also to barter for items. The barter system was a common economic trading system in which currency was not alreadily available thus an alternative symbol was created to trade for goods and services. It was its recreational misuse thatgot it into trouble, being associated with domestic violence, familial abandonment, unemployment, crime poverty and public intoxication. Not one to learn from its past mistakes, the federal government, again sought to i,pose excise taxes on whiskey and tobacco in order to finance the union army during the civil war. This move was met with no uprising because it was deemed a worthy cause. After the war ended, the government kept the tax in place. At this time the Treasury department was formed and under the leadership of Comissioner, Green Raum, the department began to police, harass, and hunt down moonshiners who had by this time realized that with all of the minute regulations, the only way to make moonshine turn a profit, was to manufacture, sell and deliver it illegally.