This Day in American History (End of Prohibition)

March 22, 1933—With the backing of new President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress approved the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, anticipating full-scale repeal of Prohibition by legalizing sale of beer and wine with alcohol content of 3.2%. At the same time, the President—an enthusiastic if unskillful martini mixer himself—couldn't resist taxing the now freely-flowing beer and wine to fund his multitude of expensive New Deal programs.

(The Eighteenth Amendment instituting Prohibition would not be formally reversed until the 21st Amendment, which was approved in December.)

Why didn't more people complain then about how the government giveth and the government taketh away? Maybe they were so pleased not to be "dry" anymore that it didn't matter.

Or maybe it was a case of having something bigger on their minds, like how to find jobs in the middle of the worst Depression this country had ever seen. One-quarter of the nation out of work—now if that wasn't enough to drive a whole country to want a drink, I don't know what was.

In any case, the country celebrated with alacrity—probably none more so than the literati who made opposition to Prohibition practically a union card for admission into the ranks of the avant-garde. Leading the way was iconoclastic man of letters H.L. Mencken, who made sure that at midnight on April 6, when the new law went into effect, he was first at the bar of Baltimore's Rennert Hotel. The next day's issue of his paper, the Baltimore Sun, featured a photograph of its most famous columnist, the "High Priest of Brew," quaffing a nice cold one.

The groundswell against Prohibition represented a stunning turn of events from even a few years before. To be sure, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and its enabling legislation, the Volstead Act—twin measures constituting what Herbert Hoover termed, in his most harrumphing style, a "great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far reaching in purpose" —had provoked widespread circumvention of the law ever since it went into effect in 1920.

But as late as 1931, advocates of "Repeal," as the anti-Prohibition movement was called, expected that it would take another decade to achieve their goal. The sudden collapse of support for legislative attempts to enforce temperance, then, testified to the national revulsion against the hypocrisy and criminality (the Mafia got its big boost through bootlegging during the Roaring Twenties) engendered by Prohibition.

One of these Prohibition opponents was Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler. Andrew Sinclair's Prohibition: The Era of Excess quotes the Nobel Peace Prize winner and past Republican candidate for President in a typically stuffy moment: "My own feeling toward prohibition, is exactly the feeling which my parents and my grandparents had toward slavery. I look upon the Volstead Act precisely as they looked upon the Fugitive Slave Law. Like Abraham Lincoln, I shall obey these laws so long as they remain on the statute book; but, like Abraham Lincoln, I shall not rest until they are repealed."

(Let's leave aside the way Nick conflated opposing a racist, soul-destroying institution with sneaking around a misguided attempt at moral busybodyism, or with his almost comical injection of himself into the whole thing. No, if you ask me, Nick might have better spent his time by "not resting" until he had eliminated the quota system that drastically restricted Jewish faculty hires at his university. But that's a story for another day.)

Some years ago, a new kind of sport on college campuses was inspired by repeats of The Bob Newhart Show. Every time another character entered his apartment with the greeting "Hi, Bob!", some student would down a drink—presumably getting buzzed midway through one half-hour episode and well on his way to oblivion by the end of a TV Land marathon.

Imagine what some of these students could have done with the literature inspired by the Prohibition Era! Every time a character downs one, they drain one in response! Let's not even consider Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, since that featured expatriate imbibers. For our purposes, we'll stick closer to home—we'll have more than enough material to suit our purposes right there.

One contender for poet laureate of Prohibition might be Joseph Moncure March with his long poem The Wild Party (later adapted—twice—into a musical). Starting from its opening lines—"Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still,/And she danced twice a day in vaudeville"—it reads like a tabloid story come to life.

Lyricism so beautiful it makes you gasp at times also blinds readers of The Great Gatsby to the fact that, at heart, it is every bit as excessive and violent as March’s tale. Everybody knows that the eponymous “hero,” Jay Gatsby, is a hopeless romantic who decides that the best way to get the money to win his girl Daisy back is by becoming a bootlegger.

But it’s forgotten just how often the euphoric consumption of alcohol in the novel is followed by violence. Gatsby’s party begins with “yellow cocktail music” played by the orchestra and ends, several drunken hours later, with “women … now having fights with men said to be their husbands.” A party with Tom Buchanan’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, ends, several drunken hours later, with Buchanan breaking Myrtle’s nose. The last meeting with Gatsby and Daisy starts in West Egg, moves to a party and more drinking in Manhattan, and ends—several drunken hours later—with Daisy accidentally running over Myrtle Wilson.

But even more than Fitzgerald, the writer most associated with the speakeasy culture might be John O’Hara. The two early novels that won him his reputation—Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8—might have been published after the end of Prohibition, but they are set in that period. Moreover, many of his later short stories set down, with almost documentary accuracy, what it was like to live through that era.

In the novella "Imagine Kissing Pete," part of his woefully underappreciated trilogy Sermons and Soda-Water (1960), O'Hara, speaking in the voice of alter ego James Malloy—like himself, a middle-aged writer forced by circumstance to stop drinking cold—could still write sternly that Prohibition bred "a cynical disregard for the law of the land" and "made liars of a hundred million men and cheaters of their children." He even traced its malign influence on "West Point cadets who cheated in examinations [and] the basketball players who connived with gamblers."

O’Hara is a far more powerful voice against Prohibition than Butler, all the more so for being so disillusioned. But now, a word on behalf of the Prohibitionists.

As counterproductive as their legislation was, at the time of its enactment there had been no real effective way to counteract alcohol, a scourge that had destroyed families. Women such as Cary Nation and Frances Willard had been the driving forces behind the anti-saloon movement, and it was no coincidence that the amendments for Prohibition and women’s suffrage represented virtually the last hurrah of Progressive legislation.

It would take Bill Wilson, founder and longtime head of Alcoholics Anonymous, to create an organization and method for attacking alcohol abuse. The seeds of his idea, however, would not come until 1935—two years after repeal of Prohibition.