Prohibition’s Effects on American Society
On the morning of February 14, 1929, a Cadillac rolled slowly up to a warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago. Four men in police uniforms emerged, two carrying sawed-off shotguns, and stepped inside. Inside, a small group of men had been waiting in a line against the wall, expecting to receive a shipment of hijacked whiskey from the Canadian border. The men in police uniforms raised their weapons and fired. Seven men were killed; one survived. The massacre, which became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was the most spectacular episode in the long war between the criminal gangs that Prohibition had created — and the most visible single moment in the slow-motion disaster that the Eighteenth Amendment had become.
The wider story of Prohibition and speakeasies is told in the parent section, the law itself is described in what was Prohibition, and the underground bars that sprang up in response are described in how did speakeasies work.
The Rise of Organized Crime
The most lasting consequence of Prohibition was the rise of organized crime on a scale the United States had never seen. 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 a 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 (1882–1957). By 1927, Capone’s organization was grossing an estimated $60 million a year (about $1 billion in 2024 dollars) from bootlegging alone, plus another large sum from gambling. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 14, 1929, in which seven members of a rival gang led by Bugs Moran were gunned down by men dressed as police officers, was the most spectacular of dozens of gangland killings of the era. The massacre is generally attributed to Capone’s organization, although no one was ever convicted for it.
Capone was only the most visible of the era’s major crime figures. In New York, the major bootleggers were Lucky Luciano (1897–1962), Meyer Lansky (1902–1983), Bugsy Siegel (1906–1947), and Dutch Schultz (1902–1935). In Detroit, the Purple Gang controlled the smuggling routes from Canada across the Detroit River. In Kansas City, the boss was Owney Madden (1891–1965), who ran the city’s bootlegging and took over the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1926. In Boston, the dominant figure was Charles “King” Solomon (1884–1933).
The Castellammarese War of 1930–1931, fought between two factions of the New York Mafia, was the bloodiest of the gangland wars. The war pitted the older Sicilian faction under Salvatore Maranzano (1886–1931) 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 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 from speakeasy operators. By the late 1920s, the phrase “Prohibition agent” 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, found that the law had become a political liability. The election of Herbert Hoover in 1928 on a “law and order” platform did not solve the problem, and the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 on a repeal platform signaled the end of the Noble Experiment. The wider political context is treated in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
The Public Health Disaster
The most shocking unintended consequence of Prohibition was the public health disaster caused by the federal government’s policy of denaturing industrial alcohol. In 1906, the federal government had begun requiring industrial alcohol to be “denatured” — mixed with poisonous chemicals like methyl alcohol, kerosene, and chloroform — to make it undrinkable. The policy continued under Prohibition, on the grounds that the small amount of denatured alcohol that bootleggers stole and resold would discourage use.
The policy had the opposite effect. Bootleggers did not stop stealing industrial alcohol, and the denaturing chemicals did not stop people from drinking it; they just made the drinkers sick. By 1927, the New York City medical examiner estimated that about 10,000 people had died from drinking denatured alcohol during Prohibition. Many more were blinded or permanently injured. The policy was finally reversed in 1928–1929, after Herbert Hoover ordered a less poisonous denaturing formula.
The Death of an Industry
The legal alcohol industry was essentially destroyed by Prohibition. Between 1920 and 1925, more than 1,000 American breweries closed their doors. The distilling industry, centered in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, was effectively eliminated. The wine industry in California survived only because of the loopholes for sacramental and medicinal wine; by 1925, doctors were writing an estimated 11 million prescriptions for medicinal whiskey a year. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
The Transformation of American Drinking
Prohibition transformed American drinking culture in ways that persisted long after repeal. Before 1920, the American middle class had generally not drunk cocktails. After 1920, the cocktail became the drink of choice in the speakeasies, and the cocktail party — a new social institution, an invention of the 1920s — replaced the older tea party and dinner party. The martini, the Manhattan, the Sidecar, the Bee’s Knees, and dozens of other cocktails became permanent features of American life.
The shift from beer and wine to hard liquor had lasting public health consequences. Beer and wine are difficult to conceal and produce illegally; hard liquor is much easier. The result was that Americans drank more hard liquor in the 1920s than they had before, and the rate of alcoholism and alcohol-related disease rose. The drinking that took place in the speakeasies was also more discreet and more private than the drinking that had taken place in the older saloons. The saloon — the male-dominated public drinking establishment of the 19th century — never came back.
Women, Race, and the Long Shadow
Prohibition had complex effects on women. The new woman of the 1920s — the flapper — drank and smoked in public, and the speakeasy was one of the few public spaces in which she could do so. The story of these women is told in the flapper movement.
The speakeasy was also one of the few genuinely integrated public spaces in 1920s America. The Harlem speakeasies, in particular, were among the few places where Black and white Americans could mingle as customers. The music played in these integrated spaces is treated in jazz age music.
The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 did not end the cultural changes that the law had set in motion. Organized crime diversified into gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and labor racketeering. 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 debate ever since. The deeper legacy of Prohibition is the lesson about the limits of federal moral reform: laws that try to do something a large minority of Americans do not want tend to fail, especially when they create criminal incentives that overwhelm enforcement. The history of the Noble Experiment, and the speakeasies that gave the era much of its iconography, is one of the most important cautionary tales in American history.