Prohibition and Speakeasies: America’s Noble Experiment

On January 16, 1920, the day before the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect, the city of Baltimore held a dramatic ceremony. Thousands of men and women, led by Reverend Dr. Donald Guthrie of the city’s Methodist churches, paraded to the harbor and poured their whiskey, gin, and wine into the Chesapeake Bay. A small navy ship fired a 21-gun salute, and a choir sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The crowd cheered. They were confident, these Baltimoreans, that they were witnessing the birth of a new, sober America.

Thirteen years later, on December 5, 1933, Americans celebrated the repeal of Prohibition, an experiment in social engineering that most historians now regard as one of the great policy disasters in American history. The years in between were a long, instructive lesson in the limits of federal moral reform. Prohibition did not, by and large, make Americans drink less. It did make millions of them criminals. It gave rise to a national organized crime syndicate that did not previously exist. It made millionaires of small-time thugs, corrupted the police and the courts, transformed American political culture, and gave the Roaring Twenties some of their most iconic institutions, including the speakeasy, the cocktail, the bathtub gin, and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The story of the flapper movement (covered in the flapper movement) and the jazz age music that played in the illegal clubs of the era (covered in jazz age music) cannot be told without Prohibition; “

The Long Road to the Eighteenth Amendment

Prohibition was not a sudden 1920s phenomenon; it was the result of a temperance movement that had been building for more than a century. The American Temperance Society had been founded in 1826; the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had been founded in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, by Frances Willard and would become the most powerful women’s organization in the country; the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 by Howard Hyde Russell, would become the most effective lobbying organization of the early twentieth century. The movement was unusually broad — Protestant, Catholic, business, labor, nativist, women’s suffrage — and it had a simple message: alcohol was the cause of most American social problems, and the only solution was to ban it.

The movement’s most colorful early activist was Carry A. Nation (1846–1911), a Kansas woman who became famous for taking a hatchet to saloon interiors in the early 1900s. Nation was an embarrassment to many temperance leaders, but she was also a powerful symbol of the righteous anger that the movement could mobilize. The more politically sophisticated organizations like the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League focused on legislative action rather than direct action, and by 1913 they had convinced enough state and local governments to pass dry laws that more than half of the U.S. population lived in “dry” territory.

The arrival of World War I in 1914 gave the dry cause a major boost. Anti-German sentiment, which had been building since the outbreak of the war, was directed partly against the German-American brewers who dominated the American beer industry; Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz, and Miller were all owned by German-American families. Wartime concerns about grain conservation (grain was needed for food, not for beer and spirits) made the brewers’ industry politically vulnerable. The Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917 gave the federal government the power to restrict the use of grain for the production of alcoholic beverages, and the wartime Prohibition Act of 1918 banned the sale of beverages with more than 2.75 percent alcohol, effectively nationalizing the dry laws for the duration of the war.

The Eighteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress in December 1917 and ratified by the requisite 36 states on January 16, 1919. It would take effect one year later, on January 17, 1920. The amendment was simple: “After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” It was the first amendment to the Constitution ever ratified with the explicit intent of restricting, rather than expanding, the liberty of American citizens.

The Volstead Act

The Eighteenth Amendment forbade the sale, manufacture, and transportation of intoxicating liquors; it did not define “intoxicating liquors,” prescribe penalties for violations, or describe the enforcement mechanism. All of that would be handled by the Volstead Act, named for its sponsor, Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The Volstead Act, also known as the National Prohibition Act, was passed by Congress in October 1919 over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, who complained that it encroached on states’ rights and overburdened the federal courts. The act defined “intoxicating liquor” as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol, a threshold so low that it covered not only whiskey, gin, and wine but also beer and many kinds of cider. (Light wines and beer would remain illegal for the duration of Prohibition, despite multiple attempts to legalize them, most notably the Beer and Wine Revenue Act of 1921 vetoed by Warren G. Harding.) The act also criminalized the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating liquors; provided for searches and seizures; and set penalties of up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines for violations.

The act created the Bureau of Prohibition, an enforcement arm of the Treasury Department that would eventually employ about 1,500 federal agents, supplemented by thousands of local and state enforcement officers. The bureau was overwhelmed from the start. There were not nearly enough agents to patrol the country’s coastlines, borders, and cities, and the salaries of the agents were so low that corruption was endemic. The result, as the journalist Will Rogers put it, was that “Prohibition is better than any of my premises. I had nothing to do with it being put over but I enjoy seeing the great cities of America, that used to be wide open, now as dry as a prohibition convention in Texas.”

The Immediate Effects of Prohibition

The first effect of Prohibition was a sharp drop in the legitimate alcohol industry. Between 1920 and 1925, more than 1,000 American breweries closed their doors. Most of the larger ones turned to producing “near beer” (a beverage with less than 0.5 percent alcohol) or soft drinks; the smallest simply went out of business. The distilling industry, which had been centered in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, was essentially eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The wine industry in California survived, but only because the Volstead Act permitted the production of “sacramental wine” for religious use and “medicinal wine” for medical use; by 1925, doctors were writing an estimated 11 million prescriptions for medicinal whiskey a year, a loophole so wide that the alcohol industry was happy to exploit it.

The second effect was an enormous rise in the production of illegal alcohol. Almost every American city, and many rural areas, had a thriving underground liquor industry within months of the law’s passage. The liquor came from three main sources: smuggling from abroad (especially Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe), diversion from the legal medicinal and sacramental markets, and home distillation. The third of these became, for a time, a national pastime: the “bathtub gin” was a high-proof liquor, usually made by mixing industrial alcohol with water and flavorings, that could be made in a kitchen. The quality was notoriously bad, and many people were poisoned or blinded by the impurities; the federal government eventually ordered industrial alcohol producers to add poisons like methyl alcohol and kerosene to make it undrinkable, a policy that historians estimate killed about 10,000 people before the end of Prohibition.

A third effect was the rise of the speakeasy, the illegal bar of the 1920s. The New York Police Department estimated that there were between 30,000 and 100,000 speakeasies in New York City alone by the late 1920s, and there were probably similar numbers in Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and other major cities. The speakeasy is treated in detail in how did speakeasies work, but the basic operation was simple: a bar or club, often hidden behind an unmarked door in a basement or a back room, that sold alcohol to customers who had learned the password or who were known to the door. A good speakeasy was harder to find than to enter; some were decorated as elegantly as any pre-Prohibition saloon, and many served food, employed bands, and stayed open until dawn.

The Rise of Organized Crime

The most lasting consequence of Prohibition was the rise of the American organized crime syndicates that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. Bootlegging was the most profitable criminal enterprise in American history up to that point, and it required exactly the resources — money, muscle, distribution networks, political protection, and willingness to use violence — that the existing ethnic criminal gangs of the 1910s already had.

The most famous bootlegger was Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone (1899–1947), the Brooklyn-born son of Italian immigrants who moved to Chicago in 1920 and built a criminal empire in partnership with the older gangster Johnny Torrio. By 1927, Capone’s organization was grossing an estimated $60 million a year (about $1 billion in 2024 dollars), and he was the most powerful figure in Chicago. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 14, 1929, in which seven members of a rival gang were gunned down in a Clark Street warehouse by men dressed as police officers, was the most spectacular of the dozens of gangland killings of the era; it is generally attributed to Capone’s organization. The story of how Prohibition remade American society, including the rise of the major crime syndicates, is told in Prohibition’s effects on American society.

Capone was not the only major bootlegger. In Detroit, the Purple Gang, a group of mostly Jewish and Italian gangsters who had taken their name from the color of the suits they wore, controlled the smuggling routes from Canada across the Detroit River. In New York, the major figures were Lucky Luciano (1897–1962), the Sicilian-born gangster who would later be credited with reorganizing the American Mafia into a national commission, and Dutch Schultz (1902–1935), the Bronx-born gangster who controlled the Harlem numbers racket and a large share of the city’s bootlegging. In Kansas City, the boss was Owney Madden (1891–1965), an English-born gangster who ran the city’s bootlegging, took over the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1926, and eventually retired to Hot Springs, Arkansas, with a fortune. In Boston, the dominant figure was Charles “King” Solomon (1884–1933), who controlled the city’s bootlegging until he was gunned down in 1933. In Chicago more broadly, the “Outfit” run by James “Big Jim” Colosimo and then Johnny Torrio was the larger organization; Capone was a lieutenant who took over the Outfit after Torrio retired.

The Castellammarese War of 1930–1931, fought between two factions of the New York Mafia for control of the rackets, was the bloodiest of the gangland wars. The war pitted the older, more traditional Sicilian faction under Salvatore Maranzano against a younger, more assimilated faction that included Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese (1919–1969). Luciano’s side won, and Maranzano was murdered in September 1931. Luciano is generally credited with creating the modern Mafia Commission, the national body that divided up the American underworld into territorial fiefdoms and that remained the governing structure of the American Mafia for the next fifty years.

Corruption of Law Enforcement

The corruption that accompanied Prohibition was not limited to the criminals. The Bureau of Prohibition was notorious for the number of its agents who took bribes; the corruption was so widespread that in 1930 the bureau was transferred from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice. The local police were even more thoroughly corrupted. A 1930 survey of New York City police officers found that more than half of them admitted to taking bribes. The famous cases — the “Padlock Act” prosecutions in New York, the corrupt judges in Chicago, the “Prohibition Bureau” agents in Detroit — were only the visible part of a much larger pattern. By the late 1920s, “Prohibition agents” was a euphemism in some cities for hired thugs who would shake down the smaller bootleggers and let the larger ones operate.

The political consequences were also significant. The Republican Party, which had passed the Eighteenth Amendment and had championed Prohibition, found that the law had become a political liability by the late 1920s. The election of Herbert Hoover in 1928, in part on a “law and order” platform, did not solve the problem; the public increasingly associated Prohibition with hypocrisy, corruption, and waste. The Democratic Party, which had been divided on the issue, gradually came to favor repeal, and the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 (on a platform that included repeal) signaled the end of the Noble Experiment. The Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth, was ratified on December 5, 1933.

The Cocktail Culture

One of the most lasting cultural consequences of Prohibition was the rise of the cocktail. Before 1920, the American middle class had generally not drunk cocktails; the middle-class drink had been beer or wine at the table, with an occasional whiskey on the rocks. After 1920, the cocktail became the drink of choice in the speakeasies, partly because the bad quality of the bootleg liquor made mixing essential, and partly because the elaborate ritual of the cocktail was a kind of consumption luxury that the new middle class could afford.

The bartender, now called a “mixologist”, became a minor cultural hero of the 1920s. The most famous was Harry Craddock (1875–1963) of the Savoy Hotel in London, whose 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book became the standard reference for the new drinks. American bartenders invented or popularized dozens of new cocktails in the 1920s: the Sidecar (cognac, orange liqueur, lemon), the Bee’s Knees (gin, lemon, honey), the French 75 (gin, champagne, lemon, sugar), the Tom Collins (gin, lemon, sugar, soda), the Gimlet (gin and lime), the Gin Rickey (gin, lime, soda), and the Harvey Wallbanger (vodka, Galliano, orange juice, popularized in the 1950s). The martini, a mix of gin and dry vermouth, became the signature American cocktail of the twentieth century, in large part because of the 1920s.

The cocktail party became a new social institution. Before Prohibition, the social gatherings of the middle class had centered on the tea party, the church social, or the family dinner. After 1920, the cocktail party — a gathering of friends and acquaintances, usually in the late afternoon or early evening, for drinks and small talk — became the standard form of middle-class entertaining. The cocktail party, along with the cigarette and the lipstick, became one of the visual symbols of the flapper and the new middle-class life of the 1920s; the iconic image of the flapper in a drop-waist dress, with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other, is the visual shorthand for the decade.

The Repeal of Prohibition

The campaign to repeal Prohibition began almost as soon as the law took effect. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), founded in 1918 by a group of wealthy New Yorkers, was one of the first national repeal organizations. The Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), founded in 1929, drew on the membership of the old WCTU and brought middle-class women into the repeal movement. The economic crisis of the Great Depression, which began in 1929, made the case for repeal even more attractive: legalizing the liquor industry would create jobs, raise tax revenue, and free up federal enforcement resources for other purposes. Franklin D. Roosevelt made repeal part of his 1932 campaign platform.

The Twenty-First Amendment was proposed by Congress in February 1933, after Roosevelt’s election but before his inauguration, and was ratified by the required 36 states on December 5, 1933. It was the only amendment to the Constitution ever ratified by convention rather than by state legislatures, a process that the amendment’s supporters believed would be quicker than the traditional route. The amendment was also the first amendment in American history to repeal a previous amendment.

The Beer and Wine Revenue Act, passed in March 1933, legalized the sale of beer with 3.2 percent alcohol by weight (about 4 percent by volume) in anticipation of the amendment’s ratification, and the first legal six-pack was sold in Greenwich, Connecticut, on April 7, 1933. The first legal whiskey after repeal was sold in the lobby of a Chicago hotel on December 5, 1933, at 12:01 a.m., to a crowd of reporters and well-wishers. The Stiegel glassware company of Pittsburgh reportedly held a competition to design a glass specifically for the event.

What Prohibition Left Behind: Crime, Cocktails, and Constitutional History

The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 did not end the cultural changes that the law had set in motion. Organized crime, having made fortunes in bootlegging, diversified into gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and labor racketeering; the Mafia, the Purple Gang, the Outfit, and the other Prohibition-era organizations remained powerful forces in American life for another half century. The speakeasy disappeared, but the cocktail culture that Prohibition had created remained; the cocktail party was still a fixture of middle-class life in the 1950s and beyond. The Eighteenth Amendment was the only amendment ever to be repealed in its entirety by the Twenty-First Amendment — a constitutional curiosity that has been a topic of legal and political debate ever since.

The deeper legacy of Prohibition is the lesson that the United States learned about the limits of federal moral reform. The dry laws had been passed with the best of intentions, supported by an extraordinary coalition of religious, social, and political leaders, and supported by a clear majority of the American people in 1920. They failed because they tried to do something that a large minority of Americans did not want, and because they created criminal incentives that overwhelmed the enforcement capacity of the state. The history of the Noble Experiment, including the rise of the speakeasies that gave the era much of its iconography, and the long-term effects of Prohibition on American society, is one of the most important cautionary tales in American history, and one of the most consequential episodes in the cultural history of the 1920s American culture.