The most deadly tinctures contained industrial alcohol originally made for use in fuels and medical supplies. This illicit hooch had a famously foul taste, and those desperate enough to drink it also ran the risk of being struck blind or even poisoned. Thousands died from drinking tainted liquor.Įnterprising bootleggers produced millions of gallons of “bathtub gin” and rotgut moonshine during Prohibition. Winemakers followed a similar route by selling chunks of grape concentrate called “wine bricks.”ħ.
The lion’s share of brewers kept the lights on by peddling malt syrup, a legally dubious extract that could be easily made into beer by adding water and yeast and allowing time for fermentation. Others produced “near beer”-a legal brew that contained less than 0.5 percent alcohol. Yuengling and Anheuser Busch both refitted their breweries to make ice cream, while Coors doubled down on the production of pottery and ceramics. While many small distilleries and breweries continued to operate in secret during Prohibition, the rest had to either shut their doors or find new uses for their factories. Winemakers and brewers found creative ways to stay afloat. According to Prohibition historian Daniel Okrent, windfalls from legal alcohol sales helped the drug store chain Walgreens grow from around 20 locations to more than 500 during the 1920s. This pharmaceutical booze often came with seemingly laughable doctor’s orders such as “Take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated.” Many speakeasies eventually operated under the guise of being pharmacies, and legitimate chains flourished. With a physician’s prescription, “patients” could legally buy a pint of hard liquor every ten days. Sacramental wine was still permitted for religious purposes (the number of questionable rabbis and priests soon skyrocketed), and drug stores were allowed to sell “medicinal whiskey” to treat everything from toothaches to the flu. The Volstead Act included a few interesting exceptions to the ban on distributing alcohol. Drug stores continued selling alcohol as “medicine.” “National prohibition went into legal effect upward of six years ago,” Maryland Senator William Cabell Bruce told Congress in the mid-1920s, “but it can be truly said that, except to a highly qualified extent, it has never gone into practical effect at all.”ĥ. New York followed suit and repealed its measures in 1923, and other states grew increasingly lackadaisical as the decade wore on. Maryland never even enacted an enforcement code, and eventually earned a reputation as one of the most stubbornly anti-Prohibition states in the Union. Governors resented the added strain on their public coffers, however, and many neglected to appropriate any money toward policing the alcohol ban. Some states refused to enforce Prohibition.Īlong with creating an army of federal agents, the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act stipulated that individual states should enforce Prohibition within their own borders. For most, this amounted to only a few bottles, but some affluent drinkers built cavernous wine cellars and even bought out whole liquor store inventories to ensure they had healthy stockpiles of legal hooch.
By law, any wine, beer or spirits Americans had stashed away in January 1920 were theirs to keep and enjoy in the privacy of their homes. The 18th Amendment only forbade the “manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors”-not their consumption. It wasn’t illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition. “And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller.” 3. “We have German enemies in this country, too,” one temperance politician argued. Dry advocates argued that the barley used in brewing beer could be made into bread to feed American soldiers and war-ravaged Europeans, and they succeeded in winning wartime bans on strong drinks.Īnti-alcohol crusaders were often fueled by xenophobia, and the war allowed them to paint America’s largely German brewing industry as a threat. Prohibition was all but sealed by the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, but the conflict served as one of the last nails in the coffin of legalized alcohol. World War I helped turn the nation in favor of Prohibition.
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