How Prohibition backfired and gave America

an era of gangsters and speakeasies

Those behind Prohibition saw a ban on the sale of
'intoxicating liquors' as a crusade against a moral evil.
But the big winners were Al Capone and the mob

Dominic Sandbrook
Saturday 25 August 2012

PHOTO (R): During Prohibition, a woman adds

alcohol to her drink, poured from a hollow walking
stick.

On Saturday, 17 January 1920, the Manchester Guardian reported with mild incredulity on
one of the most extraordinary experiments in modern democratic history. "One minute after midnight
tonight," the story began, "America will become an entirely arid desert as far as alcoholics are
concerned, any drinkable containing more than half of 1 per cent alcohol being forbidden...

Across the United States, many bars and restaurants marked the demise of the demon drink by
handing out free glasses of wine, brandy and whisky. Others saw one last opportunity to make a
killing, charging an eye-watering "20 to 30 dollars for a bottle of champagne, or a dollar to two dollars
for a drink of whisky". In some establishments, mournful dirges played while coffins were carried
through the crowds of drinkers; in others, the walls were hung with black crepe. And in the most
prestigious establishments, the Guardian noted, placards carried the ominous words: "Exit booze.
Doors close on Saturday."

Prohibition's largely Protestant champions a large proportion of whom were high-minded

middle-class women were the do-gooders of the day. Often deeply religious, they saw Prohibition as
a kind of social reform, a crusade to clean up the American city and restore the founding virtues of the
godly republic. Many were involved in other progressive campaigns, too, notably the anti-slavery
movement of the 1850s. And as American cities boomed after the civil war, swollen with immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe, the campaigners' hatred of alcohol became steadily more
ferocious. They looked in horror on the new saloons of the expanding cities, with their card games and
fist fights, their bad boys and good-time girls. In particular, they became convinced that alcohol was a
deadly threat to the health and virtue of American womanhood not, perhaps, entirely erroneously,
since papers of the time were full of stories of battered wives and broken marriages.

Many activists felt they had no choice but to take the law into their own hands: a good
example was the ferocious evangelical Christian Carrie Nation, who stood almost 6ft tall. As Mrs
Nation readily accepted, she had a daunting appearance: she once compared herself to a "bulldog
running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like". Her activities ranged from
serenading the patrons of Kansas saloons to smashing up bars with rocks and hatchets, often
accompanied by dozens of hymn-singing women. Arrested more than 30 times before her death in
1911, she found the money for her fines from the sale of souvenir hatchets.

By the time of Carrie Nation's death, though, the campaign for Prohibition was gathering
momentum. This was the heyday of progressive reform: to a generation of Protestant reformers, using
the power of the state to regulate the anarchy of the industrial city and improve the lot of ordinary
workers seemed only natural and reasonable. Outlawing alcohol, which they associated with disease
and disorder, fitted nicely into this agenda. As early as 1916, some 26 out of 48 states were already
dry, and once the United States entered the first world war, Prohibition became identified with
patriotism not least because German Americans, with their brewing traditions, were often against it.
By December 1917, with the war in full swing, both houses of Congress had approved a constitutional
amendment to ban alcohol. In January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified by 36
states, and that October, the Volstead Act passed over President Woodrow Wilson's attempted veto
gave the federal authorities the power to stop the manufacture, sale or importation of "intoxicating
liquor".

Now prohibition was law. Unfortunately for its advocates, however, the federal government
was never really equipped to enforce it... Only 1,500 federal agents were given the job of enforcing
Prohibition that is, about 30 for every state in the union. On top of that, the new regime never had
unanimous public support, while neighbouring countries remained defiantly wet. Neither Mexico nor
Canada had any intention of clamping down on breweries and distilleries near the American border;
indeed, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, thought that Prohibition was "an
affront to the whole history of mankind".

Above all, many Americans with a taste for liquor were determined to get hold of a drink one
way or another. Illegal drinking dens had long flourished in big cities; indeed, the word "speakeasy"
probably dates from the late 1880s. But now they bloomed as never before; historians estimate that by
1925, there were as many as 100,000 illegal bars in New York City alone, many of them tiny, spit-and-
sawdust joints, others catering to the rich and well-connected. In Detroit, tantalisingly close to the
Canadian border, smugglers used "false floorboards in automobiles, second gas tanks, hidden
compartments, even false-bottomed shopping baskets and suitcases, not to mention camouflaged
flasks and hot water bottles", as one account has it, to bring alcohol into the city. And somehow it
speaks volumes that when the Michigan state police raided one Detroit bar, they found the local
congressman, the local sheriff and the city's mayor all enjoying a drink.

The big winners from Prohibition were, of course, the nation's gangsters. The law had only
been in operation for an hour when the police recorded the first attempt to break it, with six armed
men stealing some $100,000-worth of "medicinal" whisky from a train in Chicago. From the very
beginning, criminals had recognised that Prohibition represented a marvellous business opportunity;
in major cities, indeed, gangs had quietly been stockpiling booze supplies for weeks

By far the most celebrated gangster of the day, though, was Al Capone, a New York-born
hoodlum who controlled much of the Chicago underworld in the mid-1920s. Living in splendour in
the city's Lexington hotel, he was said to be raking in some $100m a year from casinos and
speakeasies. To many people, he seemed a real-life Robin Hood, opening soup kitchens for the
unemployed and giving large sums to charity. Unlike Sherwood Forest's finest, however, Capone had
a pronounced taste for the good life, wearing smart suits and drinking expensive Templeton Rye
whisky. "I'm just a businessman," he used to say, "giving the public what they want." But when, in
1929, Capone ordered the brutal machine-gunning of seven Chicago rivals in the Valentine's Day
Massacre, public sympathy evaporated. That same year, Prohibition agent Eliot Ness began to
investigate Capone's affairs, and in October 1931 after Capone's efforts to nobble the jury had been
defeated he was sentenced to 11 years for tax evasion. He eventually died in prison of a heart attack;
appropriately, perhaps, for the nation's most famous vice baron, his health had been eroded by
syphilis.

By the time Capone went down, support for Prohibition was already ebbing away. With
newspapers alleging that as many as eight out of 10 congressmen drank on the quiet, it was obvious
that the attempt to outlaw alcohol had failed. In March 1933, just weeks after he had been
inaugurated, President Franklin D Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Volstead Act permitting the
sale and consumption of beer with no more than 3.2% alcohol content. The Depression was in full
swing, national morale was at rock bottom and, as Roosevelt put it, "I think we could all do with a
beer." And on 5 December 1933, Utah approved the Twenty-first Amendment, providing a majority
for ratification and consigning national Prohibition to the history books.

Yet although the age of Prohibition now feels very remote, the idea lives on. Alcohol is not,
after all, the only drug to have been prohibited by law; many people who regard Prohibition as bizarre
and misguided think nothing of outlawing, say, heroin or cocaine. We often forget, too, that many
states chose to remain dry after 1933. Mississippi, the last entirely dry state, only repealed Prohibition
in 1966. Even today, more than 500 municipalities across the United States are dry, often in strongly
evangelical states. In a famously delicious irony, they include Moore County, Tennessee, the home of
the Jack Daniel's distillery, although visitors are allowed to buy a "commemorative" bottle.

The truth is that in many corners of the United States, opposition to alcohol dies hard. When
Barack Obama was photographed with a very weak beer in hand at a Washington Wizards game, the
phone-in lines smouldered with anger. "The president is the president 24 hours a day," one caller
said. "I don't think he should drink on the job."

Post Reading Questions:

1. What groups were responsible for creating prohibition? Why did they want to outlaw
alcohol? (paragraphs 3-5)
2. What made prohibition so hard to enforce? (paragraphs 6-7)
3. How did the prohibition of alcohol lead to a rise in organized crime? (paragraphs 8-9)
4. The author connects prohibition to the outlawing of heroin and cocaine. Do you agree
with this comparison? (paragraph 11)