Learn about 1920s Prohibition with these old magazine articles. Find information on Prohibition in the 1920s.
The attached article is composed of numerous newspaper observations that appeared in print throughout April of 1933; these perceptions all pertain to the goings on that followed in the joyous wake of Prohibition’s demise:
‘The return of beer has really been a remarkable phenomenon,’ says The New York Evening Post.
‘Not one of the bad effects predicted for it actually took place’.
This cartoon was created to mark April 7, 1933 – the day real beer was once again permitted to be sold across the country; from sea to shinning sea, one million barrels of the amber liquid was consumed by the citizens of a grateful nation.
Click here to see how weird the first car radios looked.
During the action-packed opening months of the F.D.R. administration, Congress addressed the option of repealing Prohibition and allowing each state to decide whether it wished to be dry or wet:
Now the people can decide, after more than thirteen years of Prohibition.
Surprising the country, the lame-duck Congress, hereto staunchly dry, reverses itself ‘in a stampede toward repeal,’ to permit the people to decide Prohibition’s fate.
During the summer of 1932, Democratic Senator Carter Glass (1858 – 1946) turned heads and dropped jaws on Capitol Hill when he introduced a piece of legislation that was intended to water-down the 18th Amendment. Glass, a devoted enemy of the swizzle stick, proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would continue to outlaw saloons nationally while permitting hootch to flow freely throughout the wet states – and cut off booze in the dry.
Having suffered the scourge of the noble experiment for over ten years, Dudley Cammet Lunt, an attorney, penned this essay about how the states could be done with that Federal edict:
In discussing Article V in The Federalist Papers [Alexander Hamilton] said: ‘We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.’
With the [Prohibition] Repeal, approximately one million people went back to work, making wine, beer and distilled spirits, bottles and barrels; transporting, selling and serving and advertising it. Innumerable industries indirectly connected with liquor, such as printing, building and machinery-making, received a sharp stimulus. With Repeal also, sorely needed tax money started to roll into the public coffers. Since 1933 more than two billion dollars in liquor taxes has gone into national, state and local treasuries…
Seven years after wine and spirits were banished from the land, the government in Washington felt pressured to discipline all those restaurateurs who failed to defenestrate their patrons who brought illicit drink into their establishments. This is an article about how an attempt was made to get restaurant owners to police their customers.
Two years before the Prohibition Amendment would be passed, the New York State Superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, William H. Anderson (1874 – 1959), wrote this piece defending a draft of the amendment that was, at that time, sitting before Congress.
In this 1919 cartoon from the old LIFE MAGAZINE, the cartoonist Paul Beny depicted personal liberty taking it on the chin.
Prohibition was in it’s second year when the cartoonist Norman Anthony made this ‘he said – she said’ gag for a popular American humor magazine.
