How did animosity towards German beer brewers help the ratification of the Prohibition amendment?
“This was the final thing that enabled the ratification of the Prohibition amendment. You needed 36 states to approve it, and this was happening just as the U.S. was entering World War I. And the great enemy was Germany — and the brewers were seen by the Prohibitionists as tools of the Kaiser. [Or] if they weren’t actually seen as them [by the Prohibitionists], they were used for that purpose to make their political point. So you have a rising tide of strong anti-German feelings sweeping across the country, [and] the brewers got swept away with it.” Gross: Tell me more about the connection between the suffrage movement and the temperance movement. Okrent: “It largely had to do with the fact that in the 19th century, women had no political rights or property rights. So as the saloon culture began to grow up and we would see men going off to the saloon and getting drunk … Susan B. Anthony, in the late 1840s, makes her first attempt to make a speech in public life at a temperance conventi
