Speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink are just one small part of the global story of prohibition. The full story of prohibition—one you’ve probably never been told—is perhaps one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. The call for temperance motivated and aligned activists within progressive, social justice, labor rights, women’s rights, and indigenous rights movements advocating for communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that had become rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world.
From the slums of South Asia, to the beerhalls of Central Europe, to the Native American reservations of the United States, discover 20 key figures from history that you didn’t know were prohibitionists.
Mahatma Gandhi
Full name: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Lived: 2 October 1869-30 January 1948
Nationality: India
Occupation: lawyer, activist, nationalist politician
Temperance and prohibitionism were crucial to Gandhi’s decades-long nonviolent struggle for political equality and independence from Britain’s narco-military empire. Abstinence was not only beneficial for individual health and morals, but the abkari revenues from the sale of liquor to Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent were the primary financial pillar of British domination. Subsequently, Gandhi’s nationwide protests frequently involved picketing liquor stores. The Indian National Congress had its own temperance organization, the Prohibition League of India, with overlapping membership. Virtually every time the INC was outlawed by the British for political activism, those members who weren’t already jailed retreated into the Trojan Horse of the Prohibition League as “social activism” for the betterment of the Indian people against the exploitative liquor trade was seen as more palatable.
Recent Comments
There are currently no comments.