Roosevelt & The End Of Prohibition: The Beginning Of American Cultural Decline & The Rise Of Secularism

More crap we didn't know that is not entirely uninteresting. This time the crap concerns the connection between Prohibition & suffrage. As well as the economic interests involved.

You call Wayne Bidwell Wheeler "the genius behind the Prohibition movement." Who was he?
Wheeler helped found the Anti-Saloon League, in 1893. And their first effort was to go state by state. We'll get a law here. We'll get a law there. He was an extremely effective, absolutely sincere, somewhat ruthless, and indefatigable political manipulator who realized that if you control the margins, you could create a majority. So if you had 10 percent of the people in a given district, if you could deliver those 10 percent to one candidate or another based on their position on Prohibition, you could win elections, and in fact take over Congress, which he did in the 1916 election.

You write that another Constitutional amendment—the 16th Amendment, which passed in 1913 and provided for an income tax—helped spur Prohibition.
In 1913, when the income tax amendment is passed, things suddenly change. The federal government up until that point got as much as 40 percent of its annual revenue from the excise tax on alcohol. After the income tax was passed, reformers realized there was a replacement for the revenue that came from taxing alcohol, and they started to push for a Constitutional amendment.

At the time, beer was becoming a major industry. Didn't the beer and spirits industry fight back?
They shot themselves in the foot. What they really fought more than anything else was suffrage, because they knew that women would vote against the saloon. And the more public they were about fighting suffrage, the more it guaranteed that women would vote against the saloon because it was very clear what the brewers were up to. In World War I the Anti-Saloon League was able to paint the brewers as the tools of the kaiser, because they had names like Pabst, Blatz, and Anheuser-Busch. And that almost guaranteed the ratification of the prohibition amendment. It was ratified in 1919, to go into effect one year later on Jan. 16, 1920.

Fucking Krauts! And the Kaiser!