I have a little sympathy for old-timey prohibitionists before we got a good hard systemic look at what Prohibition meant in practice. They weren’t imagining the massive, MASSIVE problems they attributed to alcohol–much worse than what we see today. You’re not especially likely to stumble into your factory job today blind drunk, and if you do they’ll probably send you home or fire you, and if they don’t the heavy machinery you operate is probably a lot less inherently likely to take your arm off. But that was a pretty common story back in the day.
I’m not saying they had the right solution (they absolutely didn’t!), and I’m not saying I love the attitude a lot of them took, but the way drinking worked in practice for most of the 19th century was legitimately scary.
