Prohibition in the context of "Radical Republican"

An alcoholic beverage is any drink that contains alcohol, a central nervous system depressant. They are typically divided into three classes: beers, wines, and spirits; with alcohol content typically between 3% and 50%. The exact amount on which a beverage is considered alcoholic differs by country, with some considering drinks containing less than 0.5% to be non-alcoholic. These beverages are primarily consumed for the psychoactive effects that they produce.

Many societies have a distinct drinking culture, in which alcoholic drinks are integrated into parties. Most countries have laws regulating the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Some regulations require the labeling of the percentage alcohol content (as ABV or proof) and the use of a warning label. Some countries ban the consumption of alcoholic drinks, but they are legal in most parts of the world. The temperance movement advocates against the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The global alcoholic drink industry exceeded $1.5 trillion in 2017. Alcohol is one of the most widely used recreational drugs in the world, and about 33% of all humans currently drink alcohol. In 2015, among Americans, 86% of adults had consumed alcohol at some point, with 70% drinking it in the last year and 56% in the last month. Several other animals are affected by alcohol similarly to humans and, once they consume it, will consume it again if given the opportunity; however, humans are the only species known to produce alcoholic drinks intentionally.

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also earned him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles.

As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, Prohibition, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.

The Radical Republicans were a political faction within the Republican Party originating from the party's founding in 1854—some six years before the Civil War—until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their goal of immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery in the United States. The Radical faction also included strong currents of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and support for the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. These policy goals and the rhetoric in their favor often made it extremely difficult for the Republican Party as a whole to avoid alienating large numbers of American voters of Irish Catholic, German, and other White ethnic backgrounds. In fact, even German-American Freethinkers and Forty-Eighters who, like Hermann Raster, otherwise sympathized with the Radical Republicans' aims, fought them tooth and nail over prohibition. They later became known as "Stalwarts".

The Radicals were opposed during the war by the Moderate Republicans (led by President Abraham Lincoln), and by the Democratic Party. Radicals led efforts after the war to establish civil rights for former slaves and fully implement emancipation. After unsuccessful measures in 1866 resulted in violence against former slaves in the former rebel states, Radicals pushed the Fourteenth Amendment for statutory protections through Congress. They opposed allowing ex-Confederate politicians and military veterans to retake political power in the Southern U.S., and emphasized equality, civil rights and voting rights for the "freedmen", i.e., former slaves who had been freed during or after the Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.

The temperance movement is a social movement promoting temperance or total abstinence from consumption of alcoholic beverages. Participants in the movement typically criticize alcohol intoxication or promote teetotalism, and its leaders emphasize alcohol's negative effects on people's health, personalities, and family lives. Typically the movement promotes alcohol education and it also demands the passage of new laws against the sale of alcohol: either regulations on the availability of alcohol, or the prohibition of it.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the temperance movement became prominent in many countries, particularly in English-speaking, Scandinavian, and majority Protestant ones, and it eventually led to national prohibitions in Canada (1918 to 1920), Norway (spirits only, from 1919 to 1926), Finland (1919 to 1932), and the United States (1920 to 1933), as well as some provinces in India (1948 to present). A number of temperance organizations promote temperance.

The Free-minded National Association (Swedish: Frisinnade Landsföreningen) was a political party in Sweden. The party was in government from 1905 to 1906 and from 1911 to 1914 under the leadership of Karl Staaff, from 1917 to 1920 under the leadership of Nils Edén, from 1926 to 1928 and from 1930 to 1932 under the leadership of Carl Gustaf Ekman and briefly from August to September 1932 under the leadership of Felix Hamrin.

Established in 1902, in 1923 the party split over the issue of alcohol prohibition and the anti-ban minority formed the Liberal Party of Sweden. The two parties reunited again in 1934 as the People's Party.

William Jennings Demorest (1822–1895) was an American magazine publisher, prohibition leader, and businessman from New York City.

Rum-running, or bootlegging, is the illegal business of smuggling alcoholic beverages where such transportation is forbidden by law. The term rum-running is more commonly applied to smuggling over water; bootlegging is applied to smuggling over land.

Smuggling circumvents alcohol taxes and outright prohibition of alcohol sales.

Alcohol laws are laws relating to manufacture, use, as being under the influence of and sale of alcohol (also known formally as ethanol) or alcoholic beverages. Common alcoholic beverages include beer, wine, (hard) cider, and distilled spirits (e.g., vodka, rum, gin). Definition of alcoholic beverage varies internationally, e.g., the United States defines an alcoholic beverage as "any beverage in liquid form which contains not less than one-half of one percent of alcohol by volume". Alcohol laws can restrict those who can produce alcohol, those who can buy it (often with minimum age restrictions and laws against selling to an already intoxicated person), when one can buy it (with hours of serving or days of selling set out), labelling and advertising, the types of alcoholic beverage that can be sold (e.g., some stores can only sell beer and wine), where one can consume it (e.g., drinking in public is not legal in many parts of the US), what activities are prohibited while intoxicated (e.g., drunk driving), and where one can buy it. In some cases, laws have even prohibited the use and sale of alcohol entirely.