The Domino Effect of the Second Great Awakening and the Rise of Prohibition

Prohibition (1920-1933) had its origin story in the Second Great Awakening of roughly 1790–1840. This was not an A to B relationship. It was more of a domino effect. The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant, highly emotional religious movement. Especially in the North, it tended toward ideas of collective salvation through institutions. One of those ideas was the Temperance movement. In the middle of the Second Great Awakening, the collective wives of various men decide to make their loser husbands stop drinking. After some time, they got a lot of people to swear on the Lord's name, they would stop drinking. They even wanted the government to ban drinking, so they started lobbying.

We all know the Prohibition Era had a lot of crime, but that didn't start until it was actual prohibition through law instead of just social pressure. But there were a lot of people taking a moral high ground because of their "purity," and they used that to control people's lives.