People forget that the history of the Prohibition movement was already 100 years old when it finally won constitutional prohibition in 1919 (and people literall

People forget that the history of the Prohibition movement was already 100 years old when it finally won constitutional prohibition in 1919 (and people literally empowered the Italian and Irish mafias to get around it; so empowered we got a President and an US Attorney General out of it). The Whiskey Rebellion started over a tax that was backed by lots of reformer types who wished to leverage a de facto 'sin tax' to control drinking. People use to drink all the damn time. My grandfather was a silent generation career man for GE, worked there 40 years, fought in WWII by lying about his age and fought in Korea, raised a family, bought a house, the very type one would venerate as a true adult man... and he drank a lot. He didn't stop drinking until I was 8 or 9 and had suffered a heart attack.