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U.S. Prohibition and Smuggling from Cuba I n 1914, the U.S. Congress received a flood of petitions, signed by 6 million people, urging it to ban alcoholic beverages.1 Six years later, a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages across the United States went into effect. With these actions, the era of Prohibition had arrived in the United States; it lasted for nearly a decade and a half. Yet civic and religious campaigns against alcohol consumption were hardly new to the country. They had flared sporadically since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Protestant ministers began to preach against the practice of imbibing liquor. The first national group to take up the call was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.2 Workers and labor leaders alike also condemned the consumption of alcohol when it was carried to the extreme .3 On the state level, Michigan approved an amendment to its constitution in November 1916 that prohibited the sale of liquor, an action that half of the state’s counties had already taken some five years earlier. Prohibition’s early success in Michigan resulted from well-orchestrated campaigns carried out by civic and religious leaders, supported by the region’s major business figures—most notably, Henry Ford. Ford supported Prohibition in the interest of efficiency and profits (alcohol consumption lowered workers’ productivity ), and his company featured a department responsible for overseeing workers’ family lives and controlling their drinking habits.4 Ford’s crusade against alcohol spread to other groups of business leaders.5 The idea of regulating the lives of human beings both at work and at home to create an abstemious, more productive workforce thus gained strength among U.S. business owners during the first decades of the twentieth century .6 As a consequence of the country’s entrance into the First World War, the federal government accrued greater powers, and the nation developed an Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 :: Prohibition and Smuggling outlook that emphasized austerity and unleashed feelings against whatever sounded German, including most of the country’s large breweries.7 A further source of support for Prohibition came from Big Tobacco. Cigarette manufacturers with well-known brands and national markets found that Prohibition worked to their advantage, since the sale of tobacco and cigarettes manufactured on a local scale by small companies generally took place in bars and saloons.8 Michigan’s implementation of Prohibition immediately fueled a very lucrative trade in contraband alcohol from neighboring Ohio.9 When Prohibition subsequently went into effect across the United States in January 1920, however, Canada became the principal source of contraband liquor in the United States, and the city of Detroit, strategically located on the border between Michigan and Canada, emerged as the focal point for the illicit trade. The business of smuggling liquor attracted a wide range of participants—entire families; secretaries who crossed the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, every day on their way to work; elements of organized crime, often operating with official complicity. Boats and ferries of every type crossed the river with contraband aboard, and during the winter, when the river froze over, caravans of automobiles made their way across. To transport the contraband liquor, cables were even extended from one bank of the river to the other. Indeed, contraband alcohol and its distribution (including the thousands of illegal distilleries and home stills that sprang up to help serve the trade) trailed only the automobile industry in importance among businesses in Detroit and its environs.10 Similarly, other entrepreneurs set up plants in the Mexican border cities of Piedras Negras and Ciudad Juárez to manufacture whiskey for shipment to the United States. The owners of the Ciudad Juárez distillery were in fact natives of Colorado. An island near the Yucatán Peninsula and the port of Ensenada in Baja California functioned as transit points for shipping liquor to Florida and to the U.S. West Coast, respectively.11 Alcohol was also funneled into the United States through the Bahamas, where it was legally imported from Great Britain.12 Although the United States and Canada signed an agreement to clamp down on contraband liquor, the document had little practical effect. U.S. officials wanted a total embargo on the export of alcohol from Canada, but Canadian leaders were not inclined to shut down all distilleries and breweries, particularly in Ottawa, where the industry had become a major pillar of the local economy. Moreover, as the Canadians...

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