A New Era?

In 1919, the United States embarked on the country’s boldest attempt at moral and social reform: Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol around the country. This “noble experiment,” as President Hoover called it, was intended to usher in a healthier, more moral, and more efficient society. Nowhere was such reform needed more, proponents argued, than in New York City — and nowhere did Prohibition fail more spectacularly. In Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, Michael A. Lerner provides a full history of Prohibition in the era’s more vibrant city. Here is an excerpt.

As national Prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920, a jubilant William Anderson sent a message to the New York Herald. Still savoring the Anti- Saloon League’s victory in the campaign for the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, the dry boss proclaimed, “It is here at last! Now for a new era of clean thinking and clean living! The Anti-Saloon League wishes every man, woman and child a Happy Dry Year, and a share of the fruits of prosperity which are bound to come with National Prohibition.” Anderson’s optimism was unfounded. Had he and his colleagues acknowledged the nature of their victory, or recognized how the patriotic hysteria of wartime had been used to silence their opponents, they might have greeted the final arrival of Prohibition with a dose of humility, or perhaps a cautious understanding of how much work remained to be done to implement the dry agenda. Instead, the drys congratulated themselves, confident that the Eighteenth Amendment’s place in the Constitution spelled the permanent and irreversible demise of the alcohol trade in the United States. If any American believed that the Anti-Saloon League’s experiment would fail, the dry response, bluntly summarized in a 1920 editorial in the magazine Current Opinion, was “Don’t fool yourself.”

The unlikely success of the Anti-Saloon League’s crusade, and its victory in New York in particular, blinded drys to the problems ahead of them. Since 1890, when the National Temperance Conference had held its annual convention in New York City, the dry movement had depicted the city as hopelessly wet. Now drys quixotically expected to make New York the trophy city of national Prohibition. As Reverend Dr. Rollin O. Everhart of the Anti-Saloon League told local papers in 1919 immediately after the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, “Successful administration [of Prohibition] here will be an answer for all time to those who say, ‘it can’t be done.’”

In fact, once Prohibition finally arrived, many drys spoke of New York as the starting point of an even more ambitious campaign — the implementation of worldwide Prohibition. As Anderson explained to the New York Times, the Anti-Saloon League expected to use the example of New York to convert thousands of foreign visitors and tourists to the dry cause each year. All it would take was a firsthand look at how well Prohibition worked in New York City for these guests to return to their native countries and spread the dry gospel, sparking an international crusade against the liquor trade. As Anderson put it, “The failure or success of Prohibition as far as the world is concerned is its failure or success in New York.” Emphasizing the visibility and prominence of the city in international circles, he argued that “the people of Europe are not concerned with Kansas or California, Oregon or Alabama. To them New York City is America.”

Dry leaders gave little thought to the possibility that Prohibition might fail. Some conceded that the initial enforcement of the law might prove difficult, but, backed by the force of a constitutional amendment, they believed, the dry mandate would unquestionably prevail in New York as well as the rest of the nation. As Anderson and his colleagues issued these rosy predictions, they failed to foresee the eventual, and in many ways inevitable, emergence of opposition to the dry experiment in the city. Angered both by the Anti-Saloon League’s tactics and by the glimpses they had caught of William Anderson’s bigotry during the campaign for ratification, many New Yorkers now finally found the resolve to stand up to the dry lobby. Their opposition came too late to prevent the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, but it would seriously challenge Prohibition enforcement ef- forts and keep the debate over the alcohol question alive for years to come. According to the terms of the Eighteenth Amendment, national Prohibition would begin at midnight on January 17, 1920, one year after the amendment’s ratification. Thanks to the aggressive maneuvering of the dry crusade, however, Prohibition actually came to the city incrementally through a series of wartime restrictions on alcohol consumption designed to put the dry agenda in place and get Americans accustomed to life with- out alcohol before the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. In 1917, Mayor John Purroy Mitchel’s declaration of a 1 a.m. curfew in the name of wartime sacrifice made the city noticeably drier. By the winter of 1918, additional wartime regulations forbidding the use of grain for the manufacture of alcohol resulted in widespread beer shortages in the city and in the entire Northeast. In February 1919 those restrictions became so severe that local breweries were forced to pool their grain supplies to stay in business. By April 1919 the city’s beer supply had dwindled away almost entirely.

The biggest advance for the dry crusade came in the form of the War- time Prohibition Act, a temporary federal measure passed in September 1918 that barred the manufacture of beer and wine in the United States after May 1919, and prohibited the sale of beverages containing more than 2.75 percent alcohol anywhere in the nation after July 1, 1919. These restrictions, which essentially allowed only the sale of weak “war beer” and diluted wine until national Prohibition went into effect, were enacted under the guise of conserving national resources and fostering national sacrifice until the demobilization of American troops was complete. But many critics argued that wartime Prohibition, even as a temporary measure, was completely unnecessary, as it was enacted ten days after the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918. Calling it “a dishonest, hypocritical, and superficial law,” the New York Times argued that there was no reason for it, adding that even “the drys themselves confessed [the reasons for wartime Prohibition] were humbug.” Though opponents of the measure denounced wartime Prohibition as a political favor to the Anti-Saloon League from Congress, aimed at pushing the nation into the dry era six months ahead of schedule, the dry lobby prevailed. Despite the opposition of President Wilson, who doubted the need for the measure, drys forced wartime Prohibition into law by attaching it to an emergency agricultural appropriations bill, signed by a reluctant Wilson in November 1918.

Wartime Prohibition gave New York City its first glimpse of life under a legal ban on alcohol. William Anderson and the Anti-Saloon League optimistically looked at this moment as an opportunity to prepare New York for its dry future, but if wartime Prohibition offered a preview of what was to follow once the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, it should have served as a warning to drys of trouble ahead. What wartime Prohibition demonstrated was that no amount of legislation could by itself succeed in changing the social mores of a city. Though New Yorkers had been open to some elements of the dry argument, their response to wartime Prohibition indicated that they were not ready to submit en masse to the demands of the Anti-Saloon League.

Less than six months after the “dry fashion” had narrowly swept the Eighteenth Amendment through the state legislature, New Yorkers greeted the impending arrival of wartime Prohibition with what the New York Evening Post could only describe as a “liquor stampede.” With liquor prices soaring and advertisements in the newspapers warning, “Protect Yourself against the Dry Days” and “Buy Liquors and Wines in Bulk NOW,” New Yorkers spent the months leading up to wartime Prohibition buying every last bottle of liquor and wine to be found in the metropolis. Liquor stores did brisk business holding liquidation sales, while other merchants plied soda waters and mixers as means of extending personal caches of alcohol well into the upcoming “long, dry spell.”

The frenzy culminated on June 30, 1919, with what the newspapers colorfully described as “New Year’s Eve in June.” Amid threats from the Justice Department that wartime Prohibition would be strictly enforced, New Yorkers crowded into bars, restaurants, and saloons for a final evening of legal merriment, drinking well past the deadline of midnight and into the morning. As dawn broke on the supposedly dry city, Leonard Steinberg of Brooklyn, the eighteen-year-old son of a hotel manager, earned the dubious distinction of being the first New Yorker to be arrested for violating wartime Prohibition after he sold a pint flask of whiskey to a New York City detective. The same night, the Evening Post reported, the Special Services division of the Police Department arrested four more Brooklynites for selling hard cider in the German-American Stubes of Bushwick. With the city hardly living up to the spirit of the new law, the Evening Post joked that New York could not stay dry for even one day.

With no clear mechanism yet in place to enforce wartime Prohibition, the number of arrests for liquor violations remained relatively low. Within weeks, however, widespread resistance to the new alcohol regulations had emerged. Despite threats of an impending crackdown, many saloon owners simply ignored wartime Prohibition. According to a report published in the New York Times, a great number of the city’s bars continued to engage in the “more or less open sale of harder liquors, including whiskey,” figuring they had little to lose before the Eighteenth Amendment took effect and put them out of business for good. Only New York’s hotels readily complied with the wartime dry regulations, unwilling to risk their entire businesses for the sake of liquor sales.

With wartime Prohibition off to a rocky start, numerous questions remained over what exactly the new law prohibited. The Wartime Prohibition Act as passed by Congress barred the sale of “intoxicating beverages,” but Congress had failed to legally define the term “intoxicating.” Although “war beer” containing 2.75 percent alcohol was widely understood to be legal under the new regulations, the Anti-Saloon League insisted on a stricter threshold, arguing that the law banned any beverage containing more than 1/2 of 1 percent alcohol. When the Justice Department agreed to this stricter standard, New York’s saloon keepers protested vehemently, declaring their intention to continue selling war beer to force a courtroom challenge to the law. In the meantime, demand for war beer remained strong in the city, especially with a heat wave gripping New York in July 1919. As temperatures in the city soared over one hundred degrees, New Yorkers broke records for beer consumption at Coney Island as bar keepers “worked almost to exhaustion.” With questions over the legality of war beer lingering, the Justice Department dropped the issue in the hopes of avoiding a public outcry.

Not until after the passage of the Volstead Act in October 1919 did it become clear to Americans exactly what Prohibition outlawed. Named after the bill’s sponsor, Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota, the act defined the federal government’s role in enforcing both wartime Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment. Working in close consultation with the general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League, Wayne Wheeler, Volstead sought to put a quick end to the violations of wartime Prohibition occur- ring in New York and elsewhere. The Volstead Act outlined “air tight” provisions for the enforcement of national Prohibition and defined the federal standard of “intoxicating” in accordance with the Anti-Saloon League’s preferred standard of 1/2 of 1 percent alcohol. It charged the U.S. Treasury Department with the task of Prohibition enforcement, and it outlined penalties for the violation of the law, beginning with six months in prison and a $1,000 fine as the maximum penalty for first offenses, and increasing penalties for subsequent violations.