re: #142 HappyWarrior

Stupid question here guys but would I be off in saying that Nativism helped fuel Prohibition and the rise of Organized Crime in the 1920’s? Some guy is totally bickering at me on FB for saying that. Got really nasty too about it. Likened me to Bluto’s Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor and accused me of crying bigotry. Sigh.

I think Prohibition had more to do with a strain of Protestantism that saw drunkenness as a grave sin. There was also a strain of Progressivism that saw it as generally bad for society, in part because saloons had political influence back then.

There might have been some nativism, particularly anti-Irish bias. But I don’t think it was much of a driving force.

And Organized Crime was more a result of Italian immigration, than anything else. They basically just brought their old world system to the new world.