The National Anti-Saloon League and the Development of the Prohibition Movement in the United States 1893-1920

Abstract

The problem of addiction to alcoholic beverages and the economic, political, and social effects of alcohol and its connection to problems such as poverty, crime, and disease have been of interest to a large number of reform movements, especially those led by the Protestant Church. Because of this importance, this topic was chosen for study in order to shed light on the development of the temperance movement in the United States, until it was led by the National Anti-Saloon League, which was founded in 1895, and its most prominent successes in the approval of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1918, and to reveal the reasons for this success, which many at the time considered unattainable due to the spread of drinking alcohol in all American states and within the social fabric of American society. The League's organizational style and tactics, such as its focus on the liquor trade, not its drinkers, in order to gain everyone's support and its focus on the legislative aspect of imposing prohibition, as well as the fact that the League's activity coincided with the reformist mood of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its reformist goals were unified, The events of World War I (1914–1918) and its developments played an important role in the prohibition of alcohol under the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution.