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Bars, Taverns, And Night Clubs

The Hallelujah Trail (1965) Outrageous western satire about a Cavalry-guarded wagon train that must battle temperance union women, sandstorms and Indians to get its precious cargo, 40 wagons of whiskey, to Denver before the onset of winter. The Hallelujah Trail is based on Bill Gulick's novel, "The Hallelujah Train."

On June 2, Gov. John Hubbard of Maine signed an act prohibiting the sale, manufacture, or “keeping for sale” of alcoholic beverages anywhere in the state. The law’s enactment culminated two decades of tireless campaigning by Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, and James Appleton, the author of a lurid and influential 1837 report on the effects of drinking. Five years earlier, they had persuaded the legislature to pass a first attempt at prohibition, but it was ridden with loopholes and had little enforcement machinery and weak penalties. The 1851 act was much tougher, though drink sellers still found myriad evasions, legal and illegal.

In the early days of the temperance movement, its advocates had shunned politics in favor of “moral suasion,” but the success in Maine led to a change in tactics. Within four years, a dozen more states had adopted Maine-style laws, with others banning taverns or allowing localities to do so. In the opposite of the pattern that would prevail in the next century, prohibition found its strongest support in the North and was rejected in the South. The reason was simple: As industrialization spread, Northerners worried about alcohol’s effects on the laboring classes, many of whom were immigrants. The South, by contrast, had little industry, few immigrants, and its own peculiar institution for keeping laborers under control. Many Southerners saw prohibition as an example of Yankee decadence, especially since most active prohibitionists—including Dow and Appleton—were also fervent abolitionists.

The movement suffered a sharp setback in 1855, when Dow’s violent suppression of a pro-drink rally in Portland brought unwelcome publicity. In other states, legislatures repealed their acts or courts threw them out. At the same time, the sectional crisis grew to overshadow temperance as a cause for reformers. By the Civil War, only Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut still had prohibition laws on the books.

Carry Nation was loony, but she was committed. Sure she was unorthodox, but she had a heart. The heavyweight-boxing champion of the world ran from her. Saloon owners boarded up their establishments when she came into town. She was the first true superstar of temperance, and it all started on that day in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, when she was browsing through a hardware store and happened to pick up a hatchet. The hatchet-wielding Carry Nation used "Smash! Smash! For Jesus' sake, smash!" as her mantra.

She began life as Carry Amelia Moore, her first name spelled like the verb instead of the female because her father did not know any better. He was ‘a thoughtful but restless Irishman,’ it has been said, a cattle trader and tobacco farmer who had never spent much time in school. Some years later, tired of questions and wisecracks and puzzled expressions, Nation changed the spelling herself to the more conventional Carrie. But by the turn of the twentieth century, having taken as her second husband a vagabond of a minister named David Nation and become convinced that alcoholic beverages were the express route to perdition, she returned to the original spelling, telling people that, as things turned out, her father had been prescient, not unlettered; her name was a sign that she had been put on this earth specifically to ‘carry a nation’ for temperance.

Her first encounters with alcohol came as a young girl in her birthplace of Garrard County, Kentucky. She would sit at the breakfast table and watch her grandfather filling his tank for the day. As Nation later described the scene, the old man put in a glass some sugar, butter and brandy, then poured hot water over it, and, while the family were sitting around the room, waiting for breakfast, he would go to each member, and give to those who wished a spoonful of this toddy, saying, ‘Will you have a taste, my daughter, or my son?’

But he was not as generous as he sounds. No one got more than a single spoonful from grandpa, and he poured the rest of the cocktail — and a substantial quantity it was — down his own throat. Then he ‘went for a rather aimless ride on his horse, after being wrestled to the saddle by his colored servant, Patrick.’ Young Carrie would look after him quizzically, asking herself why he seemed like one man before he drank and like another, far less pleasant sort by the time he mounted up. What was it about the toddy and why did he need it so badly?

Before Carry Nation came along, women in the temperance movement would sometimes assemble in front of saloons and try to pray them shut. A group of women uttering prayers and singing hymns in front of a gin mill seemed to shame at least some of the habitués into modifying their behavior for a night or two or three. But there were also occasions when the establishment fought back. Sometimes bartenders ‘baptized’ the women with buckets of warm, sudsy beer, dumping the liquid over their heads so that they would return home from the labors smelling not of triumph but of conversion to the other side.

One out of every five people admitted to a hospital for treatment of alcohol abuse was a woman. Most histories do not record this fact, but they were also susceptible to the same enticements and pleasures as men. And a sad irony: Many women took to drink in the mid- to late-nineteenth century in an attempt to escape the abuse of their drunken sons and husbands.

You can't regulate people's tastes unless you can regulate the actual distribution of the product. And as a father of a college student in Boston, I know that even if you close down the bars in Kenmore Square, there are plenty of ways to get booze, whether you're under 21 or not. Besides, history shows that prohibition is not only ineffective, but that it leads to a profound disrespect for both the wisdom and efficacy of law.

- Eric Burns

Prohibition sped the rise of organized crime and, even more important, led millions of Americans to a profound disrespect for both the wisdom and efficacy of law. The Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited alcoholic beverages, remains to this day the only constitutional amendment ever repealed. Illegal alcoholic beverages that Americans drank during Prohibition were far more dangerous than the legal ones available previously. "Yack Yack Bourbon” contained iodine; "Soda Pop Moon” had a base of rubbing alcohol; the ingredients of Squirrel Whiskey were a secret, but its name, it is believed, comes from the tendency of people who had taken a few sips to try to dig their feet into the sides of trees and try to run up to the top branches. Then there was the woman in Atlanta who got her kicks during Prohibition by imbibing a combination of mothballs and gasoline.

Drinkers (the "wets") and prohibitionists (the "drys") changed the American life with the Volstead Act. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), were famous anti-drinking crusades. Frances "Frank" Willard, the Rev. Billy Sunday, Pussyfoot Johnson, Neal Dow ("Father of Prohibition") and "Lemonade Lucy," wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes, and television-made-famous Eliot Ness and his Untouchables were anti-drink crusaders.

Prohibition forces were approaching a tremendous victory when on December 17 the Senate passed a resolution to send an amendment to the states that would outlaw the “manufacture, sale or transportation” of beverage alcohol. The proposed Eighteenth Amendment, which originated with the dry, godly Sen. Morris Sheppard of Texas, soon whipped through thirty-six state legislatures. The coincidence of wartime strictures, strong sponsorship in the Congress, and prejudice against the high proportion of brewers with German names gave the movement its peculiar strength. The amendment’s passage came as an ugly shock to those wet lawmakers who had voted for it certain that it could never clear the necessary three-quarters of the states in the allotted seven years. In fact, it was the law of the land within thirteen months. (Only thirteen states were completely dry at the time the amendment was proposed.) Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, an abstainer himself, predicted that the latest addition to the Constitution would “last as long as the preamble.… The saloon is as dead as slavery!”

The formal date for enforcement—midnight, January 16, 1920—did not turn into the farewell drunken festival it might have become, mostly because various wartime Prohibition measures had already ruined the surprise. The American temperance movement was nothing new; Michigan had been dry from 1856 to 1875. In the 1880s schoolchildren wore blue ribbons and signed pledges showing their contempt for the Cup of Death. “There is a happy time, not far away,” children were taught to sing, “When Temp’rance truth shall shine bright, bright as day.” Similarly, saloon patrons sang “Good-bye, whiskey, good-bye, gin” when the Prohibiion Amendment finally triumphed.

In addition to being impossible to enforce and flagrantly abused by thriving rumrunners and bootleggers, the law made millionaire celebrities out of mobsters like Al Capone and coincided with that time of staggering public drunkenness later called the Jazz Age. By 1927 Edmund Wilson could give a “Lexicon of Prohibition” of well over a hundred circulating euphemisms for drunkenness, from “full as a tick,” “slopped to the ears,” “scrooched,” and “spifflicated” to “loaded to the muzzle,” “lathered,” “fried to the hat,” “organized,” “squiffy,” “over the Bay,” “Wapsed down,” and “to burn with a low blue flame.” Old terms like “bender” and “spree” were heard less often under Prohibition, according to Wilson, since these words implied quaintly that heavy drinking was a break from the ordinary. “Fierce protracted drinking” had grown “universal,” he wrote, and enriched the language (even as it damaged its practitioners) so that “more nuances are nowadays discriminated than was the case before Prohibition.”

Amusing is the amazing adventures of Izzy Einstein, "master hooch hound and the most famous Prohibition agent," who "looked like a keg of beer" standing barely 5 feet plus at 225 pounds, prohibition agent extraordinaire, a master of disguise and droll wit, and a man who probably did more to enforce the early twentieth century law against alcohol consumption than Eliot Ness and the rest of his Untouchables put together.

Prohibition lived imperfectly on into the Depression, when on April 7, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt had perhaps the easiest night a new Chief Executive ever had, toasting the return of legal drink with a beer. “I say to you that from this date on, the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed!” These prophetic words were spoken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he accepted his party’s nomination in 1932. Even Herbert Hoover, the incumbent, had grudgingly—and with much hedging—admitted that the Eighteenth should be repealed. It was only a matter of time. The time arrived on December 5. Utah was the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment (Repeal) and it went into effect immediately. Prohibition, the “noble experiment,” was over.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find anyone today with a good word to say about it. To Prohibition is attributed the birth of large-scale organized crime: it created the gangster. The scope, wealth, and murderousness of mobs like Capone’s were the direct result; there were more violent deaths in Chicago alone, for each year of Prohibition, than in all the British Isles.

Some of the immediate effects of Repeal were predictable. The stock market went up, and the price of drinks was cut in half. The Society of Restaurateurs published a guideline of suggested prices for cocktails to be consumed on the premises: gin and whiskey cocktails, thirty cents; an Old-fashioned, forty cents; Scotch whiskey, forty-five to sixty cents. The French expressed their pleasure, but their vintners muttered about competition from American upstarts in California and elsewhere. The German press called Prohibition “one of the most gruesome farces any civilized nation ever undertook to stay civilized” and congratulated Roosevelt on its demise.

When the President signed the proclamation notifying the country that Repeal had been ratified, he asked “the whole-hearted cooperation of all our citizens to the end that this return of individual freedom shall not be accompanied by the repugnant conditions that obtained prior to the adoption of the 18th Amendment. … I ask especially that no State shall by law or otherwise authorize the return of the saloon in its old form or in some modern guise. ” The word saloon clearly had demonic powers, and in many states Alcoholic Beverages Control Boards refused to license any premises so called. But it was quickly discovered that bars, taverns, cafés, night clubs, and cocktail lounges served much the same purpose.

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