I posted this on my Facebook page on December 5, 2021, in observance of Repeal Day – the anniversary of the end of nationwide Prohibition in the United States. 

Among the less fractious barroom debates Americans could have, I propose this question: “What was the biggest celebration the United States has known yet?” Our bicentennial? V-J Day? Some long-ago Super Bowl?

I nominate January 16, 1920 – the evening before Prohibition, in the form of the Volstead Act instituted to enforce the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, took effect across the nation. Some friends have nominated December 5, 1933 – the day that Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the “Repeal amendment”) ending national Prohibition 13 years, 10 months, and 19 days after it began. Not that anyone was counting.

Of the two Prohibition-related dates, most historians would say Prohibition eve in 1920 was the bigger party, although we grieve that anniversary more than we celebrate it. News accounts describe bars and public squares thronged with revelers having one last fling and a wake for the “death of John Barleycorn,” but in 2021, toasting the onset of Prohibition would be ironic at the least. Repeal. Now, there’s a party.

The Truth About America on Repeal Day

Repeal Day in 1933 looked less like a national bacchanal and more like a sighing admission that Prohibition created more problems than it solved. A lot of Americans were still drinking, and now we had national organized crime syndicates as well. Yippee.

The tone of the day is audible in President Franklin Roosevelt’s proclamation on ratification of the Repeal amendment. True, FDR is widely and accurately quoted as saying around then that, “What America needs now is a drink,” and he famously enjoyed his Martinis throughout the Prohibition era, not to mention that he won the 1933 presidential election in part on a promise to repeal Prohibition. But in announcing repeal of the 18th amendment, he did his best to offer a buzz kill:

“I ask … that this return of individual freedom shall not be accompanied by the repugnant conditions that obtained prior to the adoption of the 18th Amendment and those that have existed since its adoption. …

“ … I trust in the good sense of the American people that they will not bring upon themselves the curse of excessive use of intoxicating liquors, to the detriment of health, morals and social integrity.

“The objective we seek through a national policy is the education of every citizen toward a greater temperance throughout the Nation.”

I would have rewritten that to, “Folks, we’re repealing Prohibition in the name of temperance. Stick with me on this. … ” That was the politically and morally astute position for FDR to take.

In 1919, when the 18th amendment was ratified and Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce it, most Americans favored Prohibition. The campaign for national Prohibition was an idealistic marriage of many causes, some noble and some notorious. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, railed against the affinity of Italian immigrants for wine and German immigrants’ domination of the U.S. beer industry, and it openly argued that Black Americans could not “hold their liquor” and became threats to White women and children when drunk. But not-so-hidden agendas aside, there was objectively no doubt that alcohol abuse and addiction were a national issue among all ethnicities and had damaged countless families during the era when America had no social safety net for households whose primary breadwinner became disabled or died.

By 1933, public opinion had shifted. Government had proven impotent against bootlegging and the proliferation of organized crime that profited hugely from illegal trafficking of alcohol. There were measurable, unintended economic and fiscal consequences of stifling the alcoholic beverage industry, and most Americans now favored repeal.

But Roosevelt ever had his finger to the political winds, so he was cautious. As was their right, several states and many counties representing more than one-third of the U.S. population retained some form of local prohibition for years after repeal of national Prohibition. Fervent opponents to Repeal, mostly preachers and politicians, were as effective in their use of radio broadcasting as Roosevelt was; they had a large audience – not as cohesive, but otherwise very like today’s Fox News and its audience. FDR had an ambitious legislative agenda in Washington to sell, and Repeal Day was no time for him to spit gin in the Prohibitionists’ eyes.

Although Prohibition is judged a failed social experiment for other reasons, Americans in 1933 were in fact drinking less because of it than they did in 1919. Per capita consumption of alcohol dropped 70 percent by the mid-1920s, and it began to climb back before Repeal, but it would not reach pre-Prohibition levels again until the early 1970s. Due to shuttering of the libation supply chain from breweries, wineries, and distilleries down to local watering holes, there simply wasn’t the opportunity to party like it was 1919.

In any case, by December 1933 the nation was in a deep economic depression, with fully one quarter of its workforce jobless. Most of the country was not in a partying mood.

What Prohibition Changed

For starters, The Volstead Act was also the Full Employment for Law Enforcement Officers Act, as it created a Bureau of Prohibition in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. That agency passed briefly over to the Department of Justice in early 1933, under J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation, but it seems Hoover had no thirst for prosecuting alcohol violations and allowed the prohibition agency to function on its own. After Repeal, the Bureau of Prohibition went back to Treasury as the Alcohol Tax Unit in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Socially, Prohibition backfired completely. Drinking became tantalizing forbidden fruit during Prohibition, elevating it to utter social acceptability after Repeal – and not just for the mostly White and male clientele that dominated American saloons before 1920. In most speakeasies of the Prohibition era, women were welcome, too – and not only women of ‘flexible’ morals, but ‘respectable’ women as well. They were great for business. So were people of color, as speakeasies became a musical melting pot. And since there was nothing illegal about drinking alcohol at home (only producing and selling it were illegal), Americans grew fond of the cocktail party, with our most well-to-do community pillars setting the example – and all the cool kids wanted to be there. Never mind where that hooch came from.

Regional tastes in liquor today still reflect what was available to localities during Prohibition, whether it was smuggled or homemade. Americans in the northern tier of states are fond of Canadian and domestic rye whiskies, Scotland’s whiskies are especially popular in the Northeast, Caribbean rum rocks along the East and Gulf Coasts, and bourbon rules in the deep South and West. Here in the Rochester area, some of us have grandparents or great-grandparents who owned boats and may have carried a few cases of Canadian rye across Lake Ontario, shaping their palate with samples of their freight.

Gin, mostly imported and of the Old Tom style, had taken a back seat to domestic whiskies in pre-Prohibition tippling and cocktail recipe books. But as enforcement of Prohibition bit more deeply, gin – or white spirits vaguely resembling it – became all the rage because it required no aging and was relatively easy to … well, imitate. Much bootleg gin was not gin at all, and in some cases it proved deadly because of what bootleggers used to flavor it – turpentine, for example – just as others used creosote to lend its smokey aroma to fake Scotch.

Few Americans or speakeasies could afford the price of genuine whiskies or rum smuggled into the country, so cocktails evolved during Prohibition to compensate for the generally lower quality of black-market, homemade spirits. Speakeasies often watered down their booze, mostly for profit’s sake, but also to dampen the flavor. Cocktails such as the Bee’s Knees, the Last Word, the Southside, the Scofflaw, and the Mary Pickford emerged and became standard fare for their use of sweeteners, juices, bitters, and herbs to cloak the awful taste of the base spirits.

Thankfully, it turns out that Prohibition-era cocktails are outright delicious when assembled with safe, well-made spirits, so their recipes are more appealing now than ever.

Prohibition is still echoing

The craft cocktail revival, birthed in the 1980s and still growing, is less about invention than about rediscovery of Prohibition and pre-Prohibition mixology, and it gives bartenders a more creative role to play than simply opening a bottle and pouring warm liquor over ice to chill it before serving.

With American distilling now fully revived and hundreds of small and craft distilleries in or entering the market, producers are digging back to find the mash bills and distilling instructions of more than 100 years ago. Those antique whiskies and gins, batch-produced in pot stills, were more flavorful and complex than many of the modern, high-volume spirits that are produced in mammoth stills – sometimes in continuous stills – and filtered before bottling. Craft distillers seek to differentiate their products with distinctive flavors, and consumers can sip in delight.