This day in history: Bank robber Baby Face Nelson was killed on this day in 1934. Nelson got his start in the criminal gangs when he was employed to bootleg alcohol throughout the Chicago suburbs. Alcohol was illegal thanks to Prohibition.
At the beginning of Prohibition, the Reverend Billy Sunday stirred audiences with this optimistic prediction:
"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
That was far from the truth. The golden age of bank robbers like Baby Face Nelson in the 1930's can be linked to Woodrow Wilson, the man who gave us both the Federal Reserve (which led to the great depression) and Prohibition. Organized crime got its first foothold in American life thanks to the lucrative black market in liquor. Overall crime increased by 24 percent during the first two years of Prohibition. "In fact, a study of South Carolina counties that enforced Prohibition versus those who didn’t found a whopping 30 to 60 percent increase in homicides in the counties that enforced the law." ~Brian Miller
"Prohibition did not achieve its goals. Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve and supplanted other ways of addressing problems. The only beneficiaries of Prohibition were bootleggers, crime bosses, and the forces of big government. Carroll Wooddy concluded that the 'Eighteenth Amendment . . . contributed substantially to the growth of government and of government costs in this period [1915-32].'" Source
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