After tremendous pressure from Minnesota Women’s groups, who coincidentally didn’t yet have the right to vote, Andrew Volstead passed the Volstead Act, paving the way for Prohibition.
The three distinct purposes of the Act were:
- to prohibit intoxicating beverages such as liquor, beer and alcohol;
- to regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of high-proof spirits for other than beverage purposes;
- to ensure an ample supply of alcohol and promote its use in scientific research and in the development of fuel, dye, and other lawful industries.
It further provided that, “No person shall on or after the date when the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States goes into effect, manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish, or possess any intoxicating liquor, except as authorized in this Act, and all the provisions of this Act shall be liberally construed to the end that the use of intoxicating liquor as a beverage may be prevented.
The act defined intoxicating liquor as any beverage containing 0.5% or more alcohol by volume and superseded all existing state prohibition laws in effect in states that had such legislation.
This banned wine and beer and frankly astonished many as Federal Government overreach.
This is an incredible feat for a movement of people who are alleged to have been completely powerless without the vote. As a political group the Women of the Temperance movement were never held to political account for pushing for this legislation blaming it on the men who passed the bills.
This is a pattern we will see over and over that we don’t really talk about.
In another astonishing, meticulously researched and sourced video, Dr. Janice Fiamengo talks about the “anti-male jihad” that was the Women’s Temperence Movement.
Both pure and impure moral suasion were used to manipulate society into what this minority group of women wanted.
Their “Social Purity” campaign undermined masculine authority, consititionality, and used sexual shame to impune men as weak, indecisive, unclean, dangerous, wayword, and unruly.
Women by contrast are cast as morally superior, sincere, incorruptible, omniscient, and beyond reproach.
While the Act was originally vetoed by Woodrow Wilson, his veto was overturned by the Senate the very next day and 13 years of organized crime, violence, and an actual increase in alcohol-related issues and deaths ensued.
The Government overreach of Prohibition and iatrogenic effects can not be overstated.
Yet we never talk about the emotional manipulation that disrupted the nation.
