PROHIBITION

History

REAL AMERICANS DON'T NEED SALOONS

Chris Sullivan gallops through the dark days of the Volstead Act, which kept America involuntarily dry for thirteen years, with mostly disastrous consequences and a few rays of light

“It is prohibition that makes anything precious” MARK TWAIN

oday is an apt time to look at that great

TAmerican mishap named Prohibition, which banned the sale and consumption of alcohol across the whole of the USA for 13 long, dry years. Not only because it came in the wake of a deadly pandemic, but also because the movement was initiated, implemented and kept alive by small-minded extremists from the sticks. But to understand the 1917 Volstead Act, we need to look a little further back to America’s relationship with booze. George Washington imbibed at least half a pint of 50% proof rum every day, and President John Adams had a few pints of the strongest cider every morning with his breakfast. Doctors advised drinking beer instead of the often-foul river and well water and men drank an innocuous 2% beer all day, every day. Some might

“Overnight a million alcohol related workers were unemployed. Overnight gangs of armed men started hijacking liquor lorries and warehouses. Overnight mobsters in every city were rubbing their hands with glee. The Roaring Twenties had begun, but for many the only roaring was the sound of machine guns”

Prohibitionists with their version of getting totally smashed

say alcohol is as American as the hamburger. But of course the hamburger originated in Germany.

In 1826, the average whisky consumption per man, per annum in America was 88 large bottles. Yet only 10% of the country had a drink problem, and still do, but still the Prohibitionists believed that its absence would heal every social ill that had ever existed. Reverend Lyman Beecher, of the First Presbyterian Congregational Church of Litchfield, Connecticut, was one of the first to stand up in his pulpit and demand national Temperance. His wish was temporarily scuppered by the American Civil War, which caused quite a few folk to take to the bottle.

THE ANTI-ALCOHOL CRUSADE

Post Civil War, one of the first anti-alcohol crusaders was Eliza Jane Thompson, who in 1873 gathered 200 women to sit outside saloons singing, praying and attempting to prevent men from entering. They overlooked the true role of the saloon, where you could cash cheques, find a job and make deals. The saloon was the working man’s equivalent of a private members’ club.

Next up in the crusaders came Carrie Nation, who dressed like Queen Victoria, had a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, a Ho Chi Minh style wispy beard and thick wire-framed glasses.

Carrie Nation: one nation under a booze hatchet

Initially, she entered bars with bricks and smashed the mirrors, windows and bottles. After a few brushes with the law, she adopted a hatchet for her endeavour and brazenly described her destruction as a ‘hatchetation.’ In 1893 the Anti-Saloon League was formed. It soon became one of the country’s most powerful political organs, forcing politicians to side with them or lose the powerful Southern and Mid-Western vote. Its leader Wayne Wheeler was indefatigable in his quest to close every bar in the US. He and his League soon controlled 10% of the electorate.

By 1900, mainly Catholic and Jewish new immigrants had flooded into the country, as per the invitation. They brought with them their customs and their drinks and their evil un-American ways – smiling, dancing and singing – and settled mainly in the big cities. The newly arrived men populated the saloons as a place of refuge from the hovels they lived in. The League boomed ‘Real Americans don’t need saloons!’

The first big march on Washington was on 10th December 1913 and comprised hundreds of mid-western small-town termagants dressed in black, angrily demanding that the now drafted 18th Amendment should be implemented. They were met with astonishing support.

Nobody with any sense even considered that

31st July, 1917: last orders until closing time for the next 13 years

“Not everyone lost out. Private members’ clubs were allowed to sell any booze that they’d bought before the Act was passed. Since the bill had taken three years to get through the Senate, clubs such as The Yale Club in Manhattan had amassed enough hard liquor and wine to keep them going for 14 years, while the beer in the saloons simply went off”

such a ludicrous notion would see the light of day. Apart from anything else, tax on alcohol provided 70% of all internal government revenue. The Prohibitionists upped the ante. Failed statesmen used Temperance as a leg-up. Consequently 50% of the states, including West Virginia, Maine, Ohio Tennessee and Kansas, turned dry overnight.

THE VOLSTEAD ACT

On August 1st 1917, the senate voted for the 18th Amendment, AKA the Volstead Act, named after the man who’d drafted it, Andrew Volstead. On January 16th 1920, the bill went into effect, enforcing a ban on the production, importation, transportation, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Overnight a million alcohol related workers were unemployed. Overnight gangs of armed men started hijacking liquor lorries and warehouses. Overnight mobsters in every city were rubbing their hands with glee. The Roaring Twenties had begun, but for many the roaring was the sound of machine guns. Boozing went underground, swelling the coffers of politicians, judges, policemen, speakeasy owners, call girls, producers of bathtub gin and organised criminal gangs, who made enough money and power to establish a crime network that still exists today.

Prohibition had created a nation of criminals, from the humble worker having a swift beer to the producers who made thousands of gallons a week. In 1924 the Boston Herald ran a competition for a new name to describe this new class. 25,000 people entered. The prize money was divided between two entrants who had both come up with the moniker

Secret signals and passwords were required to enter speakeasies

‘Scofflaw’. The term ‘bootlegger’ entered the dictionary, derived from small-time liquor pushers who concealed the bottles of booze down their trouser legs and often in their boots.

What surprised many was the severity of the bill. The act criminalized anything that was over 0.05% alcohol, which meant that Worcestershire Sauce was illegal. Possession of a hip flask came with a higher sentence than possession of a firearm. However, not everyone lost out. Private members’ clubs were allowed to sell any booze that they’d bought before the Act was passed. Since the bill had taken three years to get through the Senate, clubs such as The Yale Club in Manhattan had amassed enough hard liquor and wine to keep them going for 14 years, while the beer in the saloons simply went off.

Doctors were allowed to prescribe three bottles of distilled booze per month, so the prescriptions increased a hundredfold to six million in the first year. Sacramental wine was permitted, so church orders increased by millions of gallons.

THE RISE OF THE SPEAKEASY

Those who pushed Prohibition through had allocated just $698,855 to its enforcement – one eighth of the funds apportioned for the protection of fish and game. Only 1500 untrained agents were drawn from the streets and given a badge and a gun and the right to shoot on sight to enforce the new law. Innocent bystanders were killed or arrested, while the guilty simply lined the agents’ pockets. Soon agents were turning up in brand new cars, sporting diamond rings, tailor-made suits and luxurious furs. A survey in New York in 1922 found that citizens were drinking three times as much as before the Volstead Act.

But not everyone who made a name for themselves was a bootlegger or a killjoy. In 1925 Lois Bancroft Long began writing a nightlife column for the recently launched New Yorker Magazine under the pseudonym Lipstick. With sexual innuendo and ribald wit, she wrote about the world of the New York speakeasies (also known as ‘blind pigs’ or ‘blind

SPEAKEASIES

The term ‘speakeasy’ had been coined by saloon owner Kate Hester, who ran an unlicensed bar in the 1880s in McKeesport, supposedly telling her rowdy customers to “speak easy” to avoid attention from the authorities. Such women now led the fight against Prohibition.

It wasn’t just New York that had never been wilder than during Prohibition: all the big cities of America were roaring with all-night black and tan (racially mixed) juice joints and barrel houses (speakeasies) packed with cake-eaters and Tom cats (ladies’ men) and bearcat dolls (frisky flappers), getting fried on the giggle water (alcohol), the giggle smokes (marijuana), the nose candy (cocaine), some even kicking the gong around (opium) or at the black tar (heroin). They danced the Black Bottom to a cat’s pyjama (extra fine) jazz band, or beat their gums blotto (talking when drunk) after too much horse linament (cheap booze).

One such speakeasy was the dingy Krazy Kat Klub in Washington DC, situated in an old stable with a tree house at the back, and catering to all manner of sexual proclivities, where queer was more than accepted and free love encouraged. The entrance bore a hand-painted sign reading ‘The Krazy Kat’ along with a chalk-written warning that read, ‘All soap abandon, ye who enter here’.

Many gin joints were behind green doors – a common secret cypher among the hep cats, unbeknownst to the cops (coincidentally, the man who supplied booze to congress was known as ‘the man in the green hat’). Speakeasies went to great lengths to conceal their purposes. Passwords and false doors were common; the 21 Club on West 52nd Street, New York had a custom-built camouflaged door, a secret wine cellar behind a false wall and a bar that, with the push of a button, would collapse to drop the bottles of hooch into a chute to the cellar below.

Cocktails were invented during Prohibition simply to hide the taste of the often-foul bathtub gin and poor quality bourbon; jazz music established itself in speakeasies, which became the first-ever venues where black and white folk mixed. Italian food became the main cuisine of inner cities, as mafia-ruled Italian owners served it in their bars paired with illegally imported wine.

tigers’) of which there were an estimated 38,000, with names such as The Cave of The Fallen Angel and Club Pansy. Open until 7am, they allowed beautiful, young, sexually liberated flappers like Bancroft Long to have a ball. Her columns offered women a glimpse of a glamorous lifestyle, where they could enjoy many of the freedoms and vices of their male counterparts such as alcohol, cocaine and sex, but all illegally.

“They had a great blues orchestra and the most inferior collection of white people you’ve seen anywhere, possibly hired by the management to give the coloured people some magnificent dignity by contrast,” she wrote of one whites-only Harlem club. Most young people, unblinkered by prejudice, religion or some twisted version of patriotism, disagreed with Prohibition entirely.

THE DARK SIDE OF PROHIBITION POLITICS

In 1928, governor of New York Al Smith became the first Catholic to be nominated for president. Half Irish, half Italian, he was fiercely and vocally anti-Prohibition. The Ku Klux Klan worked hand in glove with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). Together they marched on Washington, financially backed ‘dry’ politicians, kidnapped Catholics and tortured them to renounce their religion, burned down their businesses and proclaimed themselves the enforcers of the Volstead Act. The Klan attracted some four million new members in the 1920s.

When Al Smith’s campaign train rolled into Oklahoma City, the Klan amassed next to the

The repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933 led to the country’s biggest party ever

station and burned a 20-foot cross to welcome him. With the aid of the WCTU and the ASL they distributed leaflets stating that, if Smith was elected, the Pope would have a residence in the White House, that Smith was building a tunnel to the Vatican and that he would pronounce all Protestant children illegitimate. Smith responded with admirable sangfroid: “I’d rather be a lamppost in New York City than a senator in California.”

In the end, Hubert Hoover won the election. This new victory spurred on the head of the ASL to usher in the 5 and 10 clause, which gave anyone caught drinking alcohol a five-year sentence and a $10,000 fine, along with another new law that punished with imprisonment those who didn’t inform on their boozy neighbours.

On 29th October, 1929, Wall Street crashed. ‘The most expensive orgy in history was over,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. The resulting depression caused the foreclosing of 5000 banks that took people’s life savings with them, 1000 families were evicted from their homes per day and six million were left unemployed. President Hoover claimed that the problem would soon blow over. In 1932, riding on the wet ticket, democrat Franklyn Delano Roosevelt won the Presidential Election by a bigger landslide than his predecessor. One of the first things he did was to repeal Prohibition on 7th April, 1933.

Prohibition had lasted 13 years, 10 months and 18 days. Described by Hoover as “a great social experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” it blew up in the face of its creators, eventually causing more harm and death than Chernobyl. 100 years ago it was easier to drink all night in the USA than it is now. Banning alcohol meant no age or class restrictions, no licensing laws, unregulated drinks were stronger, and the speakeasies gave rise to jazz, racial integration and women’s emancipation. So in the end, it wasn’t all bad. n