CENTENARY OF PROHIBITION IN THE USA

THE WORLD OF SPEAKEASIES OF THE USA

Ramesses III

The Sumerians are said to have discovered the beer fermentation process quite by chance. Their successors, the Babylonians, knew how to brew 20 different types of beer. The ancient Egyptians made note of Ramses III, the Pharaoh whose annual sacrifice of about 30,000 gallons of beer appeased ‘‘thirsty gods.’’The modern term bridal joins the words bride and ale; a bride’s ale was brewed by a young woman’s family in preparation for wedding festivities.

The significance of beer in the average person’s diet was demonstrated at the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth, in what is now the city of Massachusetts. The Pilgrims were headed for Virginia, but the ship was running out of beer. So they halted, went ashore and drank water that the seamen might have more beer.

Beer production and sales played colourful parts in U.S. history. The first American brewery was opened in Lower Manhattan by the Dutch West Indies Company in 1632. The crude streets of New Amsterdam (today’s New York City) were first paved to help the horse-drawn beer wagons make better progress, which were so often stuck in the mud!

Alcoholic beverages, often in combination with herbs, were considered the only liquids fit to drink, with good reason. Household water was commonly polluted. Milk could cause milk sickness (tuberculosis). But beer, ale, and wine were disease-free, tasty, and thirst-quenching, crucial qualities in societies that preserved food with salt and washed it down with a diet of starches.

In England the public house, or pub, developed during Saxon times as a place where people gathered for fellowship and pleasure. An evergreen bush on a pole outside meant ale was served. Each pub was identified by a sign with a picture of, for example, a Black Horse, White Swan, or Red Lion. These early ‘‘logos’’ were used because most people could not read.

When Europeans migrated to America, they brought the tavern with them. It was considered essential to a town’s welfare to have a place providing drink, lodging, and food.

Mowbray Tavern Massachusetts

In Massachusetts in the 1650s, any town without a tavern was fined! Often the tavern was built near the church so that parishioners could warm up quickly after Sunday morning services held in unheated meetinghouses. A new town sometimes built its tavern before its church. As towns grew into cities and roads were built connecting them, taverns followed the roads. 

It was also in the taverns that the spirit of revolution was born. These were the rendezvous spots for rebels, where groups like ‘the Sons of Liberty’ were formed and held their meetings. The Boston Tea Party was planned in Hancock Tavern, while in the Green Dragon, Paul Revere and 30 companions formed a committee to watch the troop movement of British soldiers.

When Americans pushed westward taverns sprang up along the routes west. As towns appeared the tavern was often the first building. Homes and merchants grew up around it. Drinking places without lodging started to appear. These kept the name tavern, while more elaborate inns adopted the term hotel. But the hotel kept its barroom; it was often a showplace, with a handsome mahogany bar and a well dressed bartender.

PROHIBITION

Four and twenty Yankees, feeling very dry,

Went across the border to get a drink of rye.

When the rye was opened, the Yanks began to sing,

"God bless America, but God save the King!”

Prohibition in the United States was a national ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol imposed on January 16, 1920, and repealed on December 5, 1933. One anomaly of the “Prohibition Act” (Volstead Act) was that it did not actually prohibit the consumption of alcohol; consumers quickly stockpiled liquor for their own use in late 1919, before sales of alcohol became illegal the following January. From Scotland's perspective, Prohibition was one of the best things that could happen to their whisky industry and they were quick to capitalise on it.

The production of alcohol, although not necessarily its consumption, remained legal in neighbouring countries. Canada imposed prohibition nationally from 1918 to 1920. Canadian provinces enacted their own prohibition for varying periods between 1901 to 1948. Distilleries and breweries in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean flourished as their products were either consumed legally by visiting Americans or smuggled into the United States. The Detroit River, part of the border with Canada, was notoriously difficult to police and control, and soon became a bootlegger’s highway. Nassau, in the Bahamas, became a major center for the stockpiling of hard liquor destined for the American market and a staging ground for “rum runners.” When Washington complained to the London that British officials in Nassau were undermining its law, London refused to intervene. The province of Ontario enacted a prohibition on alcohol consumption from 1916 to 1927. The Ontario Temperance Act was the opposite of the Volstead Act. It prohibited the domestic consumption of alcohol, but continued to allow its manufacture and transshipment for export outside the province.

The Volstead Act had broad exemptions for the use of ethanol or grain alcohol for “fuel, dye and other lawful industries and practices, such as religious rituals.” Ten licenses were authorised for the production of “medicinal whiskey”, but only six companies applied for them. All of the companies had been in production prior to Prohibition and had stocks to sell.

The law allowed physicians to “prescribe” up to one pint of whiskey per week to their patients for “medicinal purposes.” The American Medical Association subsequently lobbied the U.S. Congress to remove the limit on the amount of whiskey that could be prescribed on the basis that physicians were “better qualified to determine the therapeutic value of a substance and the proper rate of its prescription.” In addition, there were a variety of liqueurs, especially bitters, which were successfully reclassified as “medicines” and thus exempted from the Volstead Act. The Scotch malt whisky Laphroaig, a heavily peated, smoky, phenolic whisky from the Isle of Islay, a whisky that is often described as being “medicinal” in flavour, successfully had itself reclassified as a “medicine” by the Bureau of Alcohol, Fire Arms and Tobacco. So too did the blended Scotch, White Horse, which prominently features another phenolic, single malt from Islay, Lagavulin. The two Scotch brands were the only ones that could be legally imported during Prohibition and were available for sale at pharmacies. Their purchase required a prescription from a doctor.

Prohibition had predictable results on the Scotch whisky industry.The copious  quantities of home brewed “bathtub gin” notwithstanding, demand for hard liquor remained strong. This demand was met largely by bootleggers, many of whom were part of organized crime rings that flourished during this period. A combination of British and Scottish liquor producers, domestic Canadian spirit producers, and various Caribbean rum producers, largely met the bootleggers demand. The Scotch whisky industry, far larger than their Canadian and Caribbean competitors, and already far more sophisticated in its marketing and distribution than their foreign rivals, was ideally positioned to capitalise on the burgeoning American demand.

Whisky producers stockpiled inventory in locations convenient for smugglers. Whisky exports to the Bahamas, for example, increased from 944 gallons in 1918 to more than 386,000 gallons in 1922, and they continued to increase as Prohibition progressed. Similar Scotch “depots” were established in Havana, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and on Grand Cayman. Comparable warehouses were set up in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Scotch was also shipped to the province of Ontario for transshipment to the United States. The Detroit River was a major thoroughfare for the smuggling of illicit liquor. It was difficult to police despite the number of revenue agents assigned to patrol it. In 1927 for example, records from the Ontario provincial government show that boats carrying a total of 3,388,016 gallons of “hard liquor” had left Windsor, Ontario for Detroit. In that year, US agents were able to seize only a paltry 148,211 gallons—roughly four percent of what was shipped.

The economics of bootlegging were not unlike those of the contemporary drug trade. Smugglers would pick up stock in an offshore “depot” like Nassau and proceed to the mainland where they would wait just outside the US 12-mile territorial limit. As long as they remained outside of US territorial waters they were technically exempt from US jurisdiction. In reality, aggressive Coast Guard patrols often stopped and boarded smugglers and seized their goods as contraband.

Fast motorboats from the mainland would go out to the “mother ship” to pick up cargo and deliver it to shore. Landed on the coast, prices would double again. Delivered to a warehouse in a major city and from there to a local “speakeasy” would see another doubling at each stage. By the time a bottle of Scotch had traveled from Nassau to a “speakeasy” in New York, the price could have increased by a factor of 16 times. If the liquor was diluted the profits were even larger.

Most Scotch whisky exports were in the form of bottled stock. That made it more difficult to tamper with the contents and to adulterate them. The result was that of all of the illicit liquor being smuggled into the United States, Scotch whisky consistently had the higher quality. Exports from Canada and the Caribbean were usually in barrel form and were bottled after arriving in the United States. This made it easier to dilute the contents and the quality of the resulting product suffered accordingly. The Scotch whisky industry was fully set to increase production to meet the American demand. The superiority of Scotch among the other smuggled hard liquors would serve the industry well when Prohibition was repealed, and led to an immediate increase in the market share enjoyed by Scotch whisky in the American market. To this day Scotch whisky has maintained a dominant market position in the United States.

How Prohibition Backfired and Gave America an Era of Gangsters & Speakeasies

Those behind Prohibition saw a ban on the sale of 'intoxicating liquors' as a crusade against a moral evil. But the big winners were Al Capone and the mob.

One minute after midnight tonight," said the media on 16 Jan 1920, "America will become an entirely arid desert as far as alcoholics are concerned, any drinkable containing more than half of 1 per cent alcohol being forbidden." In fact, the Volstead Act – which prohibited the sale of "intoxicating liquors" – had come into operation at midnight the day before, on 16 January, 1920. But the authorities had granted drinkers one last day, one last session at the bar, before the iron shutters of Prohibition came down.

Today we often think of Prohibition as a deluded experiment, instinctively associating it with images of Al Capone, the mafia and the Valentine's Day Massacre.

Far from being repressive authoritarians, Prohibition's largely Protestant champions – a large proportion of whom were high-minded middle-class women – were the do-gooders of the day. Often deeply religious, they saw Prohibition as a kind of social reform, a crusade to clean up the American city and restore the founding virtues of the godly republic. And as American cities boomed after the civil war, swollen with immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the campaigners' hatred of alcohol became steadily more ferocious. They looked in horror on the new saloons of the expanding cities, with their card games and fist fights, their bad boys and good-time girls. In particular, they became convinced that alcohol was a deadly threat to the health and virtue of American womanhood – papers of the time were full of stories of battered wives and broken marriages.

Only 1,500 federal agents were given the job of enforcing Prohibition – that is, about 30 for every state in the union. On top of that, the new regime never had unanimous public support, while neighbouring countries remained defiantly wet. Neither Mexico nor Canada had any intention of clamping down on breweries and distilleries near the American border.

Many Americans with a taste for liquor were determined to get hold of a drink one way or another. Illegal drinking dens had long flourished in big cities; indeed, the word "speakeasy" probably dates from the late 1880s. But now they bloomed as never before; historians estimate that by 1925, there were as many as 100,000 illegal bars in New York City alone, many of them tiny, spit-and-sawdust joints, others catering to the rich and well-connected.

The big winners from Prohibition were, of course, the nation's gangsters. The law had only been in operation for an hour when the police recorded the first attempt to break it, with six armed men stealing some $100,000-worth of "medicinal" whisky from a train in Chicago. From the very beginning, criminals had recognised that Prohibition represented a marvellous business opportunity; in major cities, indeed, gangs had quietly been stockpiling booze supplies for weeks. The first gangster to grasp the real commercial potential of Prohibition was racketeer Arnold Rothstein, whose agents had been responsible for rigging the baseball World Series in 1919. Establishing his "office" at Lindy's Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, Rothstein brought alcohol across the Great Lakes and down the Hudson from Canada, and supplied it – at a handsome profit – to the city's gangsters.

By far the most celebrated gangster of the day, though, was Al Capone, a New York-born hoodlum who controlled much of the Chicago underworld in the mid-1920s. Living in splendour in the city's Lexington hotel, he was said to be raking in some $100m a year from casinos and speakeasies. To many people, he seemed a real-life Robin Hood, opening soup kitchens for the unemployed and giving large sums to charity. Unlike Sherwood Forest's finest, however, Capone had a pronounced taste for the good life, wearing smart suits and drinking expensive Templeton Rye whisky. In Oct. 1931, Capone was arrested and sentenced to 11 years for tax evasion. He died in prison of a heart attack; the nation's most famous vice baron's health had been eroded by syphilis.

By the time Capone went down, support for Prohibition was already ebbing away. With newspapers alleging that as many as eight out of ten congressmen drank on the quiet, it was obvious that the attempt to outlaw alcohol had failed. On 5 December 1933, national Prohibition was consigned to history. Not really. 100 years later, there was no squeak or mention of Prohibition in the USA! Well, their President, D J Trump, was being impeached, so that was probably more historic than the centenary of Prohibition! A damning indictment of a country that plays Globocop and considers itself the foremost on propriety. Sad.

Many states chose to remain dry after 1933. Mississippi, the last entirely dry state, only repealed Prohibition in 1966. Even today, more than 500 municipalities across the United States are dry, often in strongly evangelical states. In a famously delicious irony, they include Moore County, Tennessee, the home of the Jack Daniel's distillery, although visitors are allowed to buy a "commemorative" bottle. Cheers, indeed!

• The cost of a 75cl bottle of standard blended Scotch on a ship anchored in international waters, 12 miles off the coast was $4.00, though bought at $1.25 in Great Britain.
• The motorboat runner sold his stock bought from the ship to a shore-based agent $6.00.
• The shore-based agent sold it to a booze-runner for $10.00.
• The booze-runner sold it to a speakeasy for $20.
• The speakeasy sold it for $40.
• Barrels of Scotch were often diluted on opening, increasing profit margin.

The Real McCoy: One man who regularly sailed between Nassau and Rum Row was Captain William McCoy, of Scots origin and living in Florida, who began running liquor in 1921 using a schooner named Arethusa. By this time suppliers and distillers were often meeting the immense consumer demand with very poor quality liquor, and McCoy decided to make his reputation by supplying high quality products, chiefly Scotch whisky. This strategy worked well, to the considerable financial benefit of McCoy, whose name entered the English language as a result of the reputation he acquired. The idiom, “The real McCoy”, means “it’s genuine.”