Alcohol Screens, Prohibition and April 7

The Volstead Act was modified 75 years ago and April 7, 1933 marked the first time that Americans could legally drink beer in more than a dozen years. The lesson of Prohibition is surely that the objections to neighborhood saloons were eclipsed by the gangsters that arose when government attempted to prevent alcohol being sold.

While some religions may prohibit alcohol use among their members, and may indeed wish to screen out companies involved with the sale of alcoholic beverages, for most people the moderate consumption of alcohol is not sinful or even unhealthy. Prohibition of alcohol was a failed experiment and alcohol screens by non-religious organizations may fall into the same category.

The heyday of opposition to alcohol in the United States was in the years leading to the Prohibition Amendment, i.e., 1920-1933. The law was enacted by Congress in 1917 as a constitutional amendment in 1917, ratified 13 months later as the 18th Amendment, and took effect in 1920. The goals of the amendment were to end the saloons that religious leaders viewed as an open challenge to them and they associated with unhealthy living, social problems, crime and corruption. Advocates of Prohibition believed that eliminating traffic in alcohol would usher in a new era in which Americans would become more productive, prisons would empty out and the populace would become healthier.

The enforcing law was introduced by Republican Senator Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota. It was much more draconian than many voters had expected, putting the maximum alcoholic content at one-half of a percent. It forbade the manufacture, transport, export, sale or possession of alcoholic beverages anywhere in the United States. Any beverage with more than 0.5 percent alcohol was forbidden. The Act was to be enforced by Federal agents. In October 1919 it passed over the veto of Democratic President Wilson.

Prohibition was, the record is clear, a disaster on just about every conceivable front. In the 1929 New York City Republican mayoral primary, the dry candidate complained that there were 100,000 alcohol-serving speakeasies in New York including one in the “shadow of the Police Department.” (His defeat by the wet candidate, Fiorella LaGuardia, was by a lopsided margin.) Highly concentrated alcohol was easier to transport, so amateur production of moonshine, home-still-brewed spirits and patent medicine thrived, raising the number of illnesses and deaths from adulterated alcohol. Organized crime flourished and Al Capone seemed beyond the reach of a growing and expensive army of Feds. The law became a sad joke, creating more social problems than it solved.

After FDR’s election and inauguration, on February 20, 1933, Congress passed a bill repealing the 18th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. As an interim mini-repeal measure, on March 21, 1933, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cullen-Harrison bill, permitting again the manufacture and sale of 3.2 percent (by weight, about 4 percent by volume) beer, along with light wines, in the states that allowed alcohol. FDR signed it on March 23 and said to bystanders – “I think this would be a good time for a beer."

New Beer’s Day was scheduled for April 7, 1933. The day before, on “Brew Year’s Eve”, parched customers lined up outside brewery gates with conveyances of every description. Anheuser-Busch – which had sold the nation’s most popular beer, Budweiser, before Prohibition – announced on radio “Beer is back!" The Times Square Budweiser clock played FDR's campaign song, “Happy Days Are Here Again," and the Clydesdale horses clip-clopped down Fifth Avenue to bring the new beer to awaiting politicians and newspapers at the Empire State Building.

From April 7 to December 5, 1933, only 4.2 percent beer and light wines were permitted. In the interim, repeal was fast-tracked by the New York lawyers working in each state, with the last required state ratifying the 21st Amendment on December 5. Prohibition has become an object lesson for Americans on the limits to trying to legislate morality.