The local press are making a big deal out of the fact that 75 years ago today, the United States repealed the single greatest mistake in the history of the republic. Even bigger than the Iraq War. Even bigger than praising the Shah of Iran as an "island of stability." Even bigger than the "3/5ths compromise" and other inclusions of slavery in the original Constitution. Hands down, the single dumbest thing that the US ever did to itself was outlawing the manufacture, import, distribution, and sale of alcohol without criminalizing possession or use, and 75 years ago today, with the repeal of Prohibition, we started the process of repairing the damage that we did to ourselves with that stupid, stupid mistake. Of course, the anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition is a local news story here in St. Louis because the city's largest remaining employer is Anheuser Busch. Everybody in the St. Louis metro area knows somebody who works for, or used to work for, the brewery. When Prohibition came along, the Busch family kept as many of the employees and brewmasters on as they could afford, kept them employed in money-losing make-work jobs, betting that Prohibition wouldn't last long, and they won that bet. But that's not the reason why the story interests me. The reason the story interests me is that I've been looking for an excuse to bring up Prohibition again for a while now.

Lest you forget, or weren't here the last time I went over this subject, here's what was so pathologically stupid about the way that Prohibition was implemented: it normalized, it legitimized, doing business with the Mafia. It certainly didn't create the Mafia, let alone the far older and far more ubiquitous broader concept of ethnic organized criminal gangs, the kind we call lower-case-m mafia nowadays. Ethnic mafia are a well-studied phenomenon; they provide the only available employment for discriminated against ethnic immigrants who are shut out of legal employment and/or denied protection by police and the courts. During Prohibition, and in the years leading up to it, that was mostly ethnic groups that weren't considered "white" at the time, as silly as that sounds now: Italians, Irish, Jews, and to a lesser extent Poles. But whatever country you're studying, in whatever time period, the rackets that ethnic mafia go into are entirely predictable: gambling, prostitution, smuggling, loan sharking, blackmail, extortion, violence for hire, and brokering stolen goods for and money laundering for other criminals. But there's always been a limitation on how big a mafia can grow. All of those are businesses where the customers are criminals, too, and where nobody in government really sympathizes with them. That's a built-in limit to how big their markets can grow, and how safely they can operate.

Always, that is, except this once. And that was the problem. As Al Capone once told a reporter, when he sold it, it was called bootlegging, but when his customers served it at their parties, it was called hospitality. There was no stigma for almost anyone, no risk to them, from being known to do business with a bootlegger. As a result, everybody, and I mean everybody in America, had what reporters spent most of my life calling "mafia ties." Even the law-abiding citizens who never touched a drop of liquor during Prohibition could be "tied" to at least one friend, family member, employer, employee, or member of their church or of one of their clubs who "did business with the Mafia," as journalists liked to put it. Everybody. You could tar whoever you wanted with that brush. Which, for decades, meant that you couldn't really tar anybody with it. And that had two horrific effects on the democracy itself. First of all, it made the top mafiosi fabulously wealthy, by giving them legally unhindered access to a huge market for a monopoly product. And secondly, it legitimized them in the eyes of all too many police, judges, and elected officials. It gave them something that only one other mafia in all of history has ever had, the Russian mafia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and that's upper class social acceptability.

And of course, we know what they did with all of that money and all of that access to politicians. They went out and bought themselves a political party. They could afford to buy the biggest and the best, the party that every American was going to vote for after blaming the Republicans for the Great Depression, the Democratic Party. So they funded huge campaign contributions, and gave numerous other favors, to any Democratic nominee for office who'd take them. And all they wanted in exchange was one thing: immunity from prosecution. No mafia member must ever be arrested; if he has the ill fortune to run into a cop that isn't on the take, no prosecutor must indict, no judge must allow charges to be pressed without dismissing them. And if at first in some places that only applied to Volstead Act violations (the Volstead Act was the implementing legislation for Prohibition), it didn't stop there. Especially not once politicians were, themselves, subject to blackmail if the amount of money they took from the Mafia ever got proven, as opposed to merely suspected. No, it meant that in the "machine controlled" cities of the US, in New York and in Los Angeles and in Chicago and in Kansas City and in New Orleans and in Miami and (perhaps to a lesser extent) in every other large city of the US, it meant that criminals who were accepted into the Mafia, who submitted themselves to the jurisdiction of New York City's "five families" Crime Commission, could run numbers rackets, run prostitution rings, smuggle heroin, shark loans, blackmail politicians and wealthy businessmen, extort smaller businessmen, fence stolen goods, and hire out their enforcers to murder people for modest cash payments, with near total impunity.

In 1946, an awful lot of the GIs who came home from the War looked at this setup with grown-up eyes for the first time, read what the crusading journalists were documenting, and collectively asked themselves, "Did we put our lives on the line, did we watch our buddies get slaughtered like hogs in the mud, to remove the fascists from German and Japan, only to come home to a country run by mobsters?" And since the Republicans were still completely discredited, politically and economically, the result was something called the Reform wing of the Democratic Party, or the Reform Democrats (as opposed to the Machine Democrats) for short. It took a decade to get any serious number of Reform candidates into office, especially higher office. The real process of de-mafiazation of America didn't really get started until 1961, when mob-installed President John F. Kennedy's little brother Bobby, once appointed Attorney General of the US, turned out to have quietly been a Reform Democrat. Which, of course, famously is what got both him and his brother whacked by the Mob, but the writing was on the wall. By the time Reagan swept into office in 1981 on a platform that included ridding America of the last of the Mafia-controlled cities and Mafia-controlled labor unions, there wasn't really much of a Mafia left for his Attorney General to go after. But it still clings grudgingly to life in a couple of cities, bribing politicians and judges to look the other way as they run a variety of small-time scams, and still gets away with it all too often.

Which is to say that criminalizing the sale and production and import of alcohol while decriminalizing the purchase and use created a nation-wide culture of corruption that went almost all the way to the very top, and which permeated almost all levels of society. And once a culture of corruption got that thoroughly ingrained into American life, once being a gangster and being above the law and having politicians in your pocket was even briefly made acceptable, it will have taken an entire human lifetime to root it out.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this, probably tomorrow.