War on Germany, or war on booze?

Why did this never occur to me before? Perhaps too blatant. On December 18, 1917 the United States Congress passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification. This is generally known as the prohibition amendment. That date never dawned on me before. There had been a prohibitionist movement for over 60 years before this but it had only been enacted in a couple of states by 1917. Why that year?

         I was watching Ken Burn's video on prohibition and suddenly I saw it. Do the names of these big brewers at the beginning of the war sound vaguely similar: Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser, Pabst, Schlitz, Schmidt's, Berghof? Sound somewhat Germanic. They are. They often came over during the wave of German immigration in the late 19th century.
         We have all heard about the extreme anti-Germanism that happened during World War I; not allowing German to taught in schools, German newspapers closed, etc. Then it occurred to me; beer is the national German drink and the breweries here often had ties to over there. Budweis, for example, is a brewing town in Austria. It seems that the prohibition movement used that to their great advantage. Suddenly beer became not just an evil drink, but an enemy drink.

By banning alcohol, and especially beer, we were fighting the foreign foe. Interesting how one set of events can trigger another that seems unrelated. And how historians need to learn to look at big pictures and connections to truly understand the world.