Successes+and+Failures

A major failure that the movement had to encounter was just when the movement began to pick up steam as a major national movement, the Civil War began. During this time people were much more concerned about the economics effects that the war would inflict on America and many people simply didn’t care about alcohol when the nation was in a horrible war. The Civil war lasted from 1861-1865. Once the war ended people started to focus more on the social issues of America such as the rising poverty levels and high crime rate. With this attention toward the social problems America was facing at the time, Americans began to go back to blaming these problems on the high consumption of alcohol. So just like that the Temperance Movement was back in full force. As the years went on, the Temperance Movement began to pick up even more momentum as they were being endorsed by many religious groups and other organizations. Another failure that the movement faced was the growing disapproval for the movement in the south. Many people who lived in the south believed that it wasn’t the government’s job to regulate how much or if someone should drink alcohol. They believed that it was a right that Americans had that allowed them to consume whatever they wanted as long as they don’t endanger someone else. Many people up North especially in New York and Connecticut were concerned for their increasingly high poverty and crime rates in their cities. So people in the industrialized Midwest and Northeast supported the movement more than those in the agrarian South. This difference in views between the North and South just shows how America started to become more and more divided in the later 1800s and remained that way even after the Civil War. The main success that the Temperance Movement encountered was in 1919 when prohibition became the 18th Amendment. But the main failure that marked the end for the Temperance Movement was when Prohibition came to an end in 1933. The Temperance Movement only got its wish for a complete ban on alcohol for 13 years, (1920-1933).
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