PROHIBITION ENDS

First Night

At 5:32 P.M. EST on 5 December 1933, the "noble experiment" called Prohibition came to an end when the state of Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment, which had been passing feverishly through state legislatures across the country since 10 April, repealed the Eighteenth Amendment (1919), which had barred sales and consumption of alcohol nationwide for nearly fourteen years. As expected, there was dancing in the streets, but only a little dancing. The police in Los Angeles and New York had put their entire forces on call to combat the anticipated celebrations, but Prohibition passed away more quietly than expected. Both The New York Times and the Los A?igeles Times reported subdued celebration, though patrons of the St. Moritz Hotel in New York did dance their way single file to the lake in Central Park for a symbolic drowning of Old Man Prohibition. Similar effigies were burned, drowned, buried, and shot nationwide.

Call for Restraint

One reason for the subdued party was the late-afternoon ratification. Although liquor was distilled and loaded, ready to be delivered at the crucial hour of repeal, the timing of Utah's vote was too late for many deliveries in the East. Only a few of the larger hotels and clubs in New York were able to procure the now-legal beverages. Essentially, Prohibition was to last another night for many people, though that did not necessarily mean abstinence. The fact that Prohibition had failed and was by 1933 being essentially ignored in many states also dampened the party. Procuring a drink at one of New York's thousands of speakeasies had been commonplace for years. The small detail of its new legality meant very little. It was business as usual that Tuesday night. President Roosevelt requested cooperation in a nationwide address. He called for restraint, asking consumers to buy only from legal dealers. He asked that the saloon atmosphere that had preceded Prohibition not return to American life. Roosevelt, while running for office the previous year, had asked for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. It had come even more quickly than he had imagined.

Prohibition's Demise

That Prohibition would end was a foregone conclusion. The rapidity with which the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed only emphasized the unpopularity of the Volstead Act, the legislation passed subsequent to the Eighteenth Amendment that had provided the enforcement authority to bar the sale and consumption of alcohol. Prohibition ended for several reasons, all of which had appeared within a year or two of its inception in January 1920. Through the 1920s the problems of Prohibition were well known, but political timidity in the face of strong, mostly rural Protestant support kept Prohibition alive. Enforcement of the law was Prohibition's greatest problem. In 1920 Congress appropriated a measly $2.2 million enforcement for the entire nation. That amount tripled in 1921 and by 1926 had reached $10 million. Yet enforcement remained impossible. In 1929 Prohibition commissioner James M. Doran estimated that strict enforcement would require at least $300 million annually. Congress never appropriated more than one-tenth of that figure. The result was that the liquor industry continued to flourish, though now underground. Besides the expenditures for the ineffective enforcement, Prohibition cost the nation millions in unearned revenue. Instead of money flowing to the federal government in the form of taxes on alcohol sold and tariffs on alcohol imported, the money remained in the hands of a new class of criminal, the bootlegger. Men such as Chicago's Al Capone and Cincinnati's George Remus made millions of tax-free dollars by producing and distributing alcohol. Prohibition was a boon to organized crime.

Speakeasies

Private speakeasies flourished, providing customers with good, cheap food because alcohol was so expensive and profitable. The federal war to support Prohibition had cost a lot of money and many law officers' lives but all for naught. Prohibition failed for political as well as economic reasons. Increased taxes to account for the lost revenue from alcohol turned some Prohibition supporters into ardent opponents. Most notable was Pierre Samuel du Pont, who was a staunch Prohibitionist until 1926, when he became the leader of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), a group founded in 1918 by Capt. William H. Stayton. Other members of the AAPA included business leaders Elihu Root, Herbert Pratt of Standard Oil, Charles Sabin of Guaranty Safe Deposit Company, and Percy S. Straus of R. H. Macy and Company. Clearly, a business and industrial elite, fearing the economic fallout of Prohibition while citing concern for constitutional freedoms, began to oppose Prohibition and to influence debate about it. By the mid 1920s newspaper polls showed an immense majority of the population interested in either repeal or modification of the Eighteenth Amendment. By 1929 a women's anti-Prohibition group had been founded by Pauline Sabin, wife of Charles Sabin. The Republican Party had been staunchly "dry" earlier in the decade, but at the Women's National Republican Club in 1929, Pauline Sabin shocked her audience by announcing her opposition to Prohibition. Women were a new political force in the 1920s due to the Nineteenth Amendment of 1919, which finally gave them the right to vote. By election time in 1932, more than a million "Sabin women" had joined Sabin's Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. The consolidation of the "wet" vote across party lines helped send Franklin Roosevelt to the White House in 1932, though Prohibition was not the major issue of the campaign. After the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression that set in, repealing Prohibition became important to stimulate the economy. Upon his inauguration in 1933, Roosevelt called for a change in the Volstead Act to allow beer consumption. Congress enacted changes within nine days, just before the Twenty-first Amendment began its roll toward repeal in Michigan on 10 April. By year's end the noble experiment would be over, a victim of economic and political forces, but also of simple public demand for the freedom to drink.

CONSUMERISM

The consumer movement, long a minor fixture in American economic life, became increasingly important during the 1930s. One catalyst was the Depression, which convinced many consumers that businesses were practicing price gouging and other forms of consumer fraud. Another stimulus was the books of writer Fred J. Schlink, whose 1927 study, Your Money's Worth, and 1933 sequel with Arthur Kallet, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, exposed a host of fraudulent practices and merchandiser chicaneries. In the early 1930s the Federal Radio Commission also turned up glaring examples of medical fraud by radio advertisers. Consumer cooperatives were also instrumental in the rise of consumerism. Various groceries, meat markets, pharmacies, gas stations, and medical clinics were run cooperatively, meaning that members of the coop contributed cash or labor toward the maintenance of the coop. The coop in turn cut out middlemen as much as possible and brought goods to the consumer for a cheaper price. The most important factor in the rise of consumerism in the 1930s, however, was the host of new, processed foods being introduced onto the market. Manufacturers such as Birdseye wanted to reassure consumers that their frozen foods and newly canned products were safe for use. Their support was instrumental in getting Congress to revise the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1938—an act that did much to police the marketplace, to the benefit of both large food processors and consumers.

Source:

Cabell Phillips, From the Crash to the Blitz, 1929-1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

Sources:

John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Putnam, 1973);

Cabell Phillips, From the Crash to the Blitz, 1929-1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1969);

Page Smith, Redeeming the Time: A People's History of the 1920s and the New Deal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987).