History is amazing.
Below is a timeline of events I've compiled to tell the story about Rockefeller's involvement in the Prohibition, and the underlying motives.
"There's enough alcohol in one year's yeild of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years." - Henry Ford
1908: Ford Model-T comes out, and car sales begin to skyrocket. They run on either gasoline, kerosine or ethanol.
1913: Rockefeller Jr. (director of his family's Standard Oil ) begins pushing for prohibition.
1919: 18th amendment ratified -- no alcohol INCLUDING ethanol.
1919 - 1933: Purchase of cars with ethanol retrofitted engines plummets. Petrol infrastructure has 13 years without competition.
1929: great depression begins. Car sales decline. Petrol infrastructure firmly in place.
1932: Rockefeller pushes to stop the prohibition. From wikipedia: In a celebrated letter to Nicholas Murray Butler in June, 1932, subsequently printed on the front page of The New York Times, Rockefeller, Jr., a lifelong teetotaler, argued against the continuation of the Eighteenth Amendment on the principal grounds of an increase in disrespect for the law. This letter became the singular event that pushed the nation to repeal Prohibition.[5]
1933: 21st amendment ratified : end of prohibition.
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