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prohibition

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Legal, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.03 sec.
prohibition, legal prevention of the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, the extreme of the regulatory liquor laws liquor laws, legislation designed to restrict, regulate, or totally abolish the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages. The passage of liquor laws has been prompted chiefly by the desire to prevent immoderate use of intoxicants, but sometimes also by the
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. The modern movement for prohibition had its main growth in the United States and developed largely as a result of the agitation of 19th-century temperance movements temperance movements, organized efforts to induce people to abstain—partially or completely—from alcoholic beverages. Such movements occurred in ancient times, but ceased until the wide use of distilled liquors in the modern period resulted in increasing
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. A number of states passed temperance laws in the early part of the century, but most of them were soon repealed. A new wave of state prohibition legislation followed the creation (1846–51) of a law in Maine, the first in the United States. Thus, emphasis shifted from advocacy of temperance to outright demand for government prohibition. Chief of the forces in this new and effective approach was the Anti-Saloon League Anti-Saloon League, U.S. organization working for prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquors. Founded in 1893 as the Ohio Anti-Saloon League at Oberlin, Ohio, by representatives of temperance societies and evangelical Protestant churches, it came to wield great
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. Prohibition had now become a national political issue, with a growing Prohibition party Prohibition party, in U.S. history, minor political party formed (1869) for the legislative prohibition of the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages.
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 and support from a number of rural, religious, and business groups. The drive was given impetus in World War I, when conservation policies limited liquor output. After the war national prohibition became the law, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution forbidding the manufacture, sale, import, or export of intoxicating liquors. In spite of the strict Volstead Volstead Act. Officially the National Prohibition Act of 1919, the federal law (passed over the veto of President Wilson) made provisions for the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment. The act defined an intoxicating beverage as one containing more than .5% alcohol by volume.
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 Act (1919), law enforcement proved to be very difficult. Smuggling on a large scale (see bootlegging bootlegging, in the United States, the illegal distribution or production of liquor and other highly taxed goods. First practiced when liquor taxes were high, bootlegging was instrumental in defeating early attempts to regulate the liquor business by taxation.
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) could not be prevented, and the illicit manufacture of liquor sprang up with such rapidity that authorities were unable to suppress it. There followed a period of unparalleled illegal drinking (often of inferior and dangerous beverages) and lawbreaking. In 1933 the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing prohibition, was ratified. A number of states, counties, and other divisions maintained full or partial prohibition under the right of local option. By 1966 no statewide prohibition laws existed. Prohibition laws were passed in Finland, the Scandinavian countries, and most of Canada after World War I, but were repealed, partly because of serious consequences to the countries' commerce with wine-exporting nations.

Bibliography

See Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws (1931) by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (Wickersham Commission); C. Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition (1932, repr. 1969); H. Asbury, The Great Illusion (1950, repr. 1968); A. Sinclair, Prohibition, the Era of Excess (1962); J. H. Timberlake, Jr., Prohibition and the Progressive Movement (1963); J. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade (1963); H. Waters, Smugglers of Spirits (1971); J. Kobler, Ardent Spirits (1973).


Prohibition

Legal prevention of the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages. In the U.S., the Prohibition movement arose out of the religious revivalism of the 1820s. Maine passed the first state Prohibition law in 1846, ushering in a wave of such state legislation. The drive toward national Prohibition was fueled by the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893. With Prohibition already adopted in 33 states, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect in 1920. Prohibition was embraced with varying degrees of enthusiasm in different parts of the country, and enforced accordingly. In urban areas, bootlegging gave rise to organized crime, with such gangsters as Al Capone. In part because of the rise in crime, its supporters gradually became disenchanted with it. The 21st Amendment repealed the 18th in 1933, and by 1966 all states had also abandoned Prohibition.


prohibition
1. (esp in the US) a policy of legally forbidding the manufacture, transportation, sale, or consumption of alcoholic beverages except for medicinal or scientific purposes
2. Law an order of a superior court (in Britain the High Court) forbidding an inferior court to determine a matter outside its jurisdiction

Prohibition
the period (1920--33) when the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors was banned by constitutional amendment in the US

Prohibition
resurgence of American puritanism (1920–1933). [Am. Hist.: Allen, 14–15]

Prohibition
(1919–1933) period when selling and consuming liquor was against the law. [Am. Hist.: NCE, 2710]


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And when they come to vote, they will vote for prohibition.
We were not, replied I, in danger of being stabbed or poisoned, but are doomed to a more lingering and painful death by that prohibition which obliges your subjects to deny us the necessaries of life; if it be Your Highness's pleasure that we die here, we entreat that we may at least be despatched quickly, and not condemned to longer torments.
And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine.
 
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