The executive board consisted of fifty members, including Alfred Sloan, Jr., Sewell Avery, Cleveland Dodge, and Wallage Alexander.
Clark would also say that he was personally motivated to organize the Crusaders due to the growing wealth of gangsters and the decline of societal law and order in the United States.
Organized crime flourished, everyday people became criminals (transporting, selling, and consuming alcohol became illegal yet everybody was still doing it and drug consumption rose.
The government officials turned a blind eye even when 33 people died over a period of just three days in Manhattan due to consuming homemade alcoholic drinks that contained lethal amounts of methanol.
This national organization formed before the 1920s in an effort to bring “prosperity” back to the United States and “save the constitution” by fighting for the repeal of alcohol prohibition.
The AAPA thought these national problems could only be solved by striking the 18th Amendment from the constitution, and it blamed alcohol prohibition for the country's declining economic state.
In order to spread their ideas, the AAPA was very active in nationwide propaganda and had the backing of breweries, wealthy individuals, and various politicians who supported repealing the 18th Amendment.
The organization controlled the policies of a large number of American periodicals, and it gave money to politicians and office holders who vowed to spread anti-prohibition propaganda to the people of the United States.
One author notes that the organization's name was a clear expression of the country's changing mindset of alcohol righteousness from dry to wet.
The Crusaders along with AAPA, Voluntary Committee of Lawyers, The American Hotel Organization, and the WONPR formed the United Repeal Council.
After the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, The Crusaders turned to other governmental issues that inhibited proper function of the Federal Government.
By January 1930, the Crusaders, drawn mainly from the ranks of the Republican Party, had acquired around 4,000 members in Cleveland, and the group decided to try to expand nationally as an organization dedicated to repealing the 18th Amendment.
[14] The Crusaders published a magazine called The Hot Potato, the name of which was meant to describe how prohibition was a political issue that politicians could not handle.
This served as both a "good luck" token of the general sort, as well as a political piece in the crusade to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.