220509 Sentinel, Prohibition, the great depression and returning veterans

Prohibition began in the USA in January of 1920 and ended in 1933.
The great depression began in 1929 and ended for the USA with the start of WW-2 when Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The war put this country in full employment.

Did prohibition end drinking alcohol, absolutely not! It made more people drink. I think the citizenry liked the idea of breaking the law in this little way and it made drinking a cool way of rebelling. Drinking in speakeasies was fun for them and when the joints were raided, most of the time the owners and staff were hauled away to jail, but the customers were sent home. Smuggling alcohol into this country created large networks of jobs. One prominent family who created a president of the United States in later years, made a ton of money smuggling Canadian whiskey into our country. Technically prohibition made millions criminals from distributors to those who consumed the alcohol. My grandfather worked indirectly for a gangster delivering bootleg whiskey to bars when the great depression began in 1929. So did many grandfathers and fathers in order to support their families when there were no jobs to be had. Sometimes a man has to do things he wouldn’t normally do to support his family. That was my grandpa in those days.

The great depression was caused by 2 things. One was wild speculation in the stock market. People were buying stocks that were overpriced and they were buying them on margin. At the time, you could buy stocks with 10% of your money and 90% of the brokerage’s money, which was fine as long as stocks went up in price, but when they toppled people lost their money and everything else they owned, including their homes. Many wealthy brokers jumped out the windows of their brokerages, falling to their deaths. Working men and their families ended up living in shacks by the river and standing in bread lines to survive.

The second reason for the depression was during the roaring twenties inflation began and President Hoover influenced the federal reserve to raise interest rates and stop the inflation. European countries still had more realistic interest rates, so American money went over there to take advantage of lower borrowing rates. That drained almost all of the big money from this country, which led to the depression.

In 1932, the veterans from WW-1 marched from all over the country to Washington DC. They had been promised a war bonus payable by the latest in 1935. By 1932 these same veterans and their families were starving, so they gathered across the country to head to Washington and ask for their bonuses a little earlier than the deadline for payment. They camped across the Potomac River and went daily to the capitol to protest. President Hoover was embarrassed by this action. He called General MacArthur to disburse them from the capitol and their campgrounds. MacArthur called on Major Dwight D Eisenhower to raid the camp one night and drive the veterans out of DC. Eisenhower went in with the army, using fixed bayonets and mounted cavalry and even tanks to shove the veterans and their families away and then burned all of their tents and shacks.

That was the first time I know of when the army was used to fight its own citizens and worse their veterans of a horrific war just over a decade earlier. This leads me to wonder what would happen today should the army be called up to fight against its own citizens on a grand scale? Would our current army go to war with the citizens who pay their salaries and perhaps their own families? I want to say they would not follow an order like that, but in this age, I’m not sure. After WW-2 veterans came home to a grateful country, with parades and honors. Every conflict (war) since then has been an entirely different story. Veterans have not been accepted or glorified since then. Vietnam was the worst for returning veterans and those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have not been brought home to cheering crowds, but rather to complete apathy. Those veterans deserve better, but they haven’t been given it yet.