“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.”   – Reverend Billy Sunday at the beginning of Prohibition.

 

Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, import, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that lasted from 1920 to 1933.

As the years in American History moved forward into the 20th century, the days of the Old West were winding down. Railroads replaced stagecoaches; the growth of cities brought culture to the West; most of the notorious outlaws were dead or in jail; and Wyatt Earp had settled down to tell his frontier tales to any and every book author and silent movie producer in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, as the savage West was slowly being tamed, a new movement had been emerging in the East to curb or stop the consumption of alcohol. Often associated with poverty, crime, corruption, social problems, and tax burdens, alcohol was considered the source of all evil by those behind the Temperance and Prohibition movements. Saloons were accused of being dens of iniquity by those behind the movements, a fact that was most often true.

Temperance advocates started in the 1830s. They didn’t initially support prohibiting alcohol consumption but rather moderation of beer and wine and abstention from hard liquor. In 1851, Maine prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. Four years later, in 1855, 13 of the then-31 states passed similar laws.

However, when the soldiers returned from the Civil War, many of whom had been exposed to alcohol for the first time, these hardened warriors wanted nothing to do with this movement, and it was given little attention for the next two decades. In fact, many saloons were gaining even more popularity among those very same soldiers and other men moving westward in search of fortune, land, and adventure. New saloons sprouted up by the hundreds in the mining camps and new settlements on the vast frontier. Here, where miners, cattlemen, and outlaws reigned, and the number of men far outweighed that of women, it was a “man’s world,” where saloons were often their only source of entertainment.

It wouldn’t be until women began to arrive in the West that the views of saloons would begin to change. Barred from these many drinking establishments, “proper” women began to see saloons as hotbeds of vice, where not only drinking was encouraged but also gambling, prostitution, dancing, and tobacco use. Becoming politically active for the first time, women joined the fight in the 1880s, and the cause was reborn.

A decade later, the views of the temperance movement changed from alcohol in moderation to total Prohibition, and many of its supporters were to be found in politics and on school boards, where they flooded young children with anti-alcohol materials. Supported primarily by the middle class and the very women that saloons had long disallowed, the movement gained national attention by the turn of the century.

Positive that alcohol was the bane of all evil and the main impetus for the fall of American morals, members of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union began to march in the streets, halting traffic with their demands that saloons close their doors. Within a few short years, the “frenzy” of these groups grew into a political movement in which large numbers of voters demanded that the government lead the country with a strong moral stance.

One of the movement’s first results was high licensing fees for taverns and a halt to issuing new permits in many areas. In many cities, bars were required to be located in designated areas, away from residences and other influential businesses.

In addition, some cities banned the “free lunch table” and eliminated mustache towels. As the movement gained momentum and restrictions became tougher, the traditional saloon saw a steady decline in the years before Prohibition.

By 1916, 21 states had banned saloons, and national elections returned more members to Congress who favored Prohibition than those favoring “wet” laws, outnumbering their opponents two-to-one. Immersed in World War I, the vast majority of the American Public favored the amendment and considered it unpatriotic to use much-needed grain to produce alcohol. Furthermore, many of the large brewers and distillers were of German origin, which provided additional support.

Business leaders believed their workers would be more productive if alcohol were withheld. John D. Rockefeller alone donated over $350,000 to the Anti-Saloon League, and Henry Ford boldly announced, “The country couldn’t run without Prohibition. That is the industrial fact.”

On December 18, 1917, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors,” was drafted and passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. Called the “noble experiment” by Herbert Hoover, 75% of the states approved the amendment, which was ratified on January 16, 1919. In 1920, the Volstead Act was passed to enforce the amendment.

The law devastated the nation’s brewing industry, closing large industries in St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and numerous other cities. But Prohibition advocates cared little about that, rejoicing in their initial “successes,” as arrests for drunkenness declined and medical statistics showed a marked decrease in treatments for alcohol-related illnesses. One of the first effects of the new amendment was placing thousands of people out of work, from brewery employees to bartenders to grape growers in California.

Statistics also showed that drinking overall decreased. However, the decline had been the trend for several years before Prohibition, and many felt that any further decrease was due to the high cost of bootlegged liquor rather than the law itself. Prohibition maintained some of its success for a time, especially in rural areas, though liquor continued to flow relatively easily in the cities.

However, with World War I ending and the nation in high spirits, the demand for liquor quickly increased. Another culture emerged among those who saw an opportunity and financial gain in thwarting the new law and meeting public demand. Bootleggers, illegal alcohol traffickers, and speakeasies began to multiply by the hundreds.

Before the amendment, women drank very little, and even then, perhaps just a bit of wine or sherry. Just six months after Prohibition became law in 1920, women got the right to vote, and coming into their own, they quickly “loosened” up, tossed their corsets, and enjoyed their newfound freedoms. The “Jazz Age” quickly signified a loosening up of morals, the exact opposite of what its Prohibition advocates had intended, and in came the “flapper.” They flooded the speakeasies with short skirts and bobbed hair, daring to smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails. Dancing to the tunes of such soon-to-be-famous jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bojangles Robinson, and Ethel Waters, their powdered faces, bright red lips, and bare arms and legs displayed an abandon never before seen by American women. Quickly, both Prohibition and jazz music were blamed for the immorality of women, and young people were attracted to the glamour of speakeasies and began to drink in large numbers. Songwriter Hoagy Carmichael described the new era as coming “with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bare legs, jangled morals and wild weekends.”

The organization was required to supply numerous illegal establishments with beer, wine, and liquor, thereby fueling organized crime. Into this crime-ripe environment walked such characters as Al “Scarface” Capone in Chicago, the Purple Gang of Detroit, Lucky Luciano in New York, and hundreds of others. The majority of speakeasies were established and controlled by organized crime, which operated everything from plush nightclubs to dark, smoky basement taverns.

When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging.
When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lakeshore Drive, it’s hospitality. 

— Al Capone

 

Though raids became a daily federal pastime, law enforcement couldn’t keep up. When the enforcers successfully targeted a “gin joint,” the club owners who anticipated the raid often disguised the true intent of their businesses, installing elaborate alarms and hiding their illegal contraband in drop shelves and secret cabinets. Other establishments didn’t even bother with hiding or disguising the liquor, as they paid out part of their profits to Prohibition agents and police officers, leading to a monumental amount of political corruption.

Increasingly, organized crime groups controlled the liquor industry, which led to turf wars and gang murders, the worst of which was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 in Chicago. Blamed on Al Capone, seven men were killed in the increasingly violent war over liquor control. Though gaining the most attention, this was just one violent event of the era, as, by the late 1920s, Chicago authorities reported as many as 400 gangland murders each year. Chicago was not alone in its high crime rate, as virtually every city across the nation was rife with illegal liquor trafficking, speakeasies, and the violence that they bred.

Bootleggers were crafty, finding all sorts of ways to transport and hide liquor as boats laden with hooch from Mexico and Canada lined up along the coasts. Hidden under produce, in crates labeled with other products, in coconut shells, and garden hoses, the liquor moved inland. While most breweries shut down operations, others continued to produce what was nicknamed “near beer,” which had an alcohol content of less than one-half-of-one percent and was still legal. Amazingly, a monumental amount of “real beer” came from these same breweries.

California grape growers were even more creative, as many stopped making wine and began producing a grape juice called Vine-Glo. The literature provided with the juice carefully warned buyers not to do certain things with it, as doing so would turn it into wine within a couple of months. Between 1919 and 1926, land used for grape cultivation in California nearly tripled.

On a smaller scale, individuals also found creative ways to hide their liquor in hip flasks, hot water bottles, hollowed-out canes, and false books. At the same time, medicinal alcohol was still legal, and the sale of patent medicines, elixirs, and tonics dramatically increased. Overnight, thousands of otherwise “decent, law-abiding” citizens became criminals.

Another setback for prohibitionists was the loss of control over where drinking establishments could be located. Previously, ordinances and licensing laws were used to limit alcohol sales on Sundays, election days, and in specific neighborhoods, while illegal speakeasies sprouted up everywhere with no limits on their hours. Serious crime rates, which had been falling during the first part of the century, gradually reversed themselves during Prohibition, as homicides, burglary, and assault increased, and the prisons became overcrowded due to those incarcerated for alcohol-related crimes. In no time, American prisons were suffering from extreme overcrowding.

As the newspaper headlines across the country screamed violent headlines, the public increasingly blamed Prohibition for the violence, as well as the political corruption that had become rampant across the country. Placing the matter within the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department for enforcement meant its untrained Prohibition officers faced considerable challenges due to budget constraints and little public support. Before long, groups began organizing to repeal Prohibition, especially after the Great Depression, when people were looking for jobs that would be created if breweries, distilleries, and taverns could reopen. Even Herbert Hoover was forced to admit that the 18th Amendment offered more harm than good.

By 1932, both presidential candidates, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, favored repeal. When elected, Roosevelt backed the repeal, and on December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution officially repealed the 18th Amendment, ending the “Noble Experiment.”

When prohibition finally ended, the word “saloon” virtually disappeared from American vocabulary, and legal establishments once again opened in abundance, referring to themselves as “cocktail lounges” and “taverns.”