In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that cleared the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans in U.S. confinement camps. Men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were evicted from the West Coast of the United States and held in sites across the country.
Issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, this order authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers further inland. In the next 6 months, over 100,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were moved to assembly centers. They were then evacuated to and confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded relocation centers, known as internment camps.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been ratified in 1868 during the period of Reconstruction, guaranteed ‘equal protection of the laws’ to all American citizens. This included almost 4 million former slaves who had been freed by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
In 1890 the state of Louisiana introduced the Separate Car Act that required separate railway cars for black and white passengers. Two years later, in a challenge to the Act, the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) civil rights group recruited Homer Plessy to purchase a first-class ticket from New Orleans to Covington and board a ‘Whites Only’ car. Plessy was an ‘octoroon’, which meant he had seven-eighths white and one-eighth black ancestry. Yet, despite his fair skin, under Louisiana law he was still classified as black.
The railroad company was aware of, and supported, the challenge as they opposed the need to purchase additional railway cars. Consequently Plessy was arrested after being asked to move. Having challenged the law as unconstitutional under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court after the Louisiana courts found the Act was legal for railroads operating within the state.
The Supreme Court delivered its verdict on 18 May, 1896, in which a 7–1 decision upheld that Louisiana’s train car segregation laws were constitutional. This effectively legalized racial segregation by permitting separate but supposedly equal facilities.
By the late 19th century the temperance movement in the United States had grown to include a number of organizations that sought to dramatically reduce and, in some cases, completely stop the consumption of alcohol. It was seen as the root cause of a number of the social problems that activists who flourished in the Progressive Era sought to address.
Although some individual counties and states had begun to introduce alcohol controls, the emergence of the Anti-Saloon League as a national organization saw the arrival of powerful and coordinated lobbying. In 1906 the ASL began a major campaign to encourage states to ban the sale of alcohol by making speeches, taking out advertisements, and staging public demonstrations. All these methods sought to promote the view that prohibition would improve society by eliminating poverty, violence, and antisocial behavior. The campaign also saw occasional violent action by more radical campaigners such as Carrie Amelia Moore Nation who became well-known for vandalizing saloons and smashing kegs of alcohol.
By 1916 almost half the states in America had already introduced laws against saloons. In December the following year the Eighteenth Amendment, which would prohibit the manufacture, sale, or transport of alcoholic beverages, comfortably passed both chambers in Congress. However, it would need to be ratified by at least three-quarters of the states in order to pass into law. It wasn’t until 16 January 1919 that Nebraska became the 36th to ratify the amendment. Nationwide prohibition began on 17 January the following year, and existed until its repeal by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.
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On 15 December 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment which had made the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol illegal.
Prohibition was introduced in 1920 as a result of the Eighteenth Amendment. This ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages was greeted with delight by members of the temperance movement. Meanwhile many law-abiding Americans who had previously been drinkers were angry at the government for criminalising what they saw as a harmless activity.
Some members of the public were consequently willing to break the law, and this ushered in a period of criminal activity focused around the production of illegal bootlegged alcohol. Al Capone, one of prohibition’s most famous gangster bosses, made around $60 million a year from bootlegging alcohol and selling it in so-called ‘speakeasies’.
Izzy Einstein, one of the government’s best-known prohibition agents, demonstrated the scale of the problem facing the authorities who were trying to enforce the ban on alcohol. When visiting New Orleans it took him just thirty-five seconds to obtain liquor after his taxi driver offered him a bottle of whisky.
Combined with the problem of police officers being paid by the criminals to turn a blind eye to illegal activity, prohibition brought lawlessness and corruption to America. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash, repealing prohibition also made sound economic sense as alcohol taxes created a new revenue stream for the government. However, the introduction of the Twenty-first Amendment ensured that individual states were still able to enforce their alcohol laws.
