Magazine Article 2/13

Thinking about what article, from the 1930s, I wanted to write about was fairly simple. I wanted to write about something influential, something that affects us even today nearly a century after. While flipping through magazines, various ads for products that I didn’t even know existed provided mild entertainment but, soon I came across an article that I knew would be ideal to write about. The article encompassed the theme of a coming of age story on, not only an individual but, a cultural scale. I chose an article from 1928 depicting the last decade of life in America under prohibition.

                During the time this article was written, the prohibition era was coming to an end. The opening line of the article reads “National prohibition, with a total cost for enforcement of more than 170,000,000 to the federal treasury alone, will round the eighth year of existence tomorrow.” Clearly the writer, while trying to be unbiased, is failing and letting some of his true emotions show. This emotion seemed to come from a common thread of unrest during prohibition. The rest of the article goes into the other unseen costs of the prohibition era.

                The writer systematically goes through the other costs of prohibition, the cost for the department of justice, the cost for the federal court, the cost of the loss of revenue. Going through all these he seems to maintain an air ambiguity but, he doesn’t need to use any emotion. The numbers speak for themselves. Figures of exponentially increasing federal court costs and hundreds of millions in potential alcohol tax revenue lost, tell the story of what the climate was like in prohibition America. Then at the end of the article the writer highlights his last and most emotionally driven argument, the loss of life.

                The final section of the article depicts the toll of human lives, lost due to prohibition. The writer explains how 126 civilians have lost their lives due to the violence caused by a decade of prohibition. He then goes on to emphasize how, along with the civilians, forty-seven “officers of the law” lost their lives in prohibition. Also stated were the arrests made by prohibition officers during the era, 64,986 in just seven years of prohibition.

                Clearly this article was meant to make one point, prohibition was a mistake. The writer of the article tries to depict all of the detrimental aspects of prohibition in attempt to move his readers to action. The prohibition was essentially a coming of age story for us as a nation. We tried to limit a major freedom we’d had since our nation’s founding and we failed. We came out of prohibition losing hundreds of millions in federal dollars during some of the most financially unstable times in our nation’s history. But most importantly, we learned from our mistakes and gave up on prohibition, instead of mindlessly enforcing it like so many other nations of the time.