50 Fun Facts About Prohibition

Under federal law, what stayed legal throughout Prohibition?

Drinking liquor was never a federal crime: the ban covered making, selling and transporting alcohol, so many people stockpiled wine and spirits in 1919 before sales stopped.

Which amendment to the US Constitution established Prohibition?

Eighteenth, and the only amendment ever repealed: the Twenty-first struck it out in December 1933, less than fourteen years after the country went dry.

Which salad was first tossed in 1924 at a Tijuana restaurant that drew Americans dodging Prohibition?

Caesar salad comes from Caesar's, the Tijuana restaurant that Italian-born Caesar Cardini ran just across the border so that he could serve alcohol to visiting Americans.

Which president's veto of the Volstead Act did Congress override in October 1919?

Woodrow Wilson's veto lasted barely a day: Congress had overridden it by 28 October 1919, and Prohibition began on schedule the following January.

Which pressure group, led by lobbyist Wayne Wheeler, did the most to push Prohibition through?

The Anti-Saloon League cared about a single issue: under Wheeler it turned alcohol into a wedge in elections and got one dry candidate after another into office.

Which temperance activist, arrested some 30 times, smashed saloons with a hatchet?

Carrie Nation called her raids 'hatchetations' and paid her fines from lecture fees and the sale of souvenir hatchets.

Maine banned liquor by ordinary law, but in 1881 which state first wrote a ban into its constitution?

Kansas voters approved the amendment in 1880, it took effect in 1881, and the state kept its ban until 1948, fifteen years after national Prohibition ended.

Frances Willard led which temperance organisation?

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union changed course under Willard, who in 1879 replaced a president set on alcohol alone and tied the dry cause to winning votes for women.

Senator Sheppard said repealing Prohibition was as likely as a humming-bird flying to which planet?

Mars was the boast of Morris Sheppard, the Texas senator called 'the father of national Prohibition' for introducing the dry amendment, which was repealed within fourteen years of taking effect.

What were Prohibition's illegal bars called, tens of thousands of which operated in New York City alone?

Speakeasies got their name from the need to speak quietly about them so the police would not hear; the same illicit bars were also known as 'blind pigs'.

Which spirit could Americans still buy legally at a drugstore during Prohibition if a doctor prescribed it?

Whiskey was the standard 'medicine': doctors wrote an estimated 11 million liquor prescriptions a year in the 1920s, and one was cited for writing 475 in a single day.

Which drugstore chain's boom from about 20 stores in 1919 to hundreds by 1930 is often put down to medicinal alcohol sales?

Walgreens tells it differently: founder Charles Walgreen credited the growth to the malted milkshake his soda fountains introduced in 1922.

Grape 'wine bricks' sold during Prohibition carried a label warning buyers not to do what?

Leave the jug in a cupboard for about three weeks, the label warned, and the juice would turn into wine: the 'warning' was really the recipe.

During Prohibition, federal officials ordered poison added to what, a policy blamed for thousands of deaths?

Industrial alcohol was being stolen and redistilled by bootleggers, so officials made it deadlier; New York's medical examiner Charles Norris said the government bore 'the moral responsibility' for the deaths.

'Canned heat', jellied alcohol that desperate Prohibition drinkers strained and drank, was sold under what brand name?

Sterno drinking left its mark on the blues: Tommy Johnson's 1928 'Canned Heat Blues' laments the habit, and the 1960s band Canned Heat took its name from the song.

'Jake leg', a paralysis that struck tens of thousands in 1930, came from an adulterated patent medicine made from what?

Jamaica ginger extract, or 'jake', was mostly alcohol and legal to sell; bootleggers added a plasticiser to slip it past government tests, and the additive turned out to attack the nerves.

An estimated three-quarters of the liquor smuggled into Prohibition America crossed from Canada by way of which city?

Detroit lay just across the river from Windsor, Ontario: in winter smugglers simply drove over the ice, and by 1929 liquor smuggling was the city's second-biggest trade.

Rum-runner Bill McCoy's reputation for what practice is popularly, but wrongly, said to have given us 'the real McCoy'?

Never watering his liquor did make McCoy's cargo a byword for the genuine article, but the phrase was already in print by 1881, when he was a small child.

Which Canadian founded the Distillers Corporation in 1924, then bought Seagram and profited from Prohibition?

Samuel Bronfman also planned for the day the ban ended: when repeal came, Seagram had huge stocks of aged spirits ready for the reopened American market.

Home-distilled liquor was 'bathtub gin' in northern cities, but what was it called in the rural South?

Moonshine, a word for illicit liquor since the 1780s, points to work done under cover of night, the hour when Prohibition-era stills were fired to avoid discovery.

Which motor sport openly traces its origins to Prohibition-era bootleg drivers racing for pride?

NASCAR's roots lie with drivers who tuned ordinary-looking cars to outrun federal agents on back roads and then raced each other at weekends; Bill France organised the sport in the late 1940s.

Al Capone was finally sentenced to federal prison in 1931 for what crime?

Tax evasion was the charge that stuck: prosecutors showed Capone had paid no tax on his illegal income, and he was sentenced to 11 years, part of it served on Alcatraz.

The seven men shot in the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre belonged to which gang boss's organisation?

Bugs Moran was not in the garage when gunmen dressed as policemen lined seven of his men against a wall; the killings were widely blamed on his rival Al Capone.

What nickname did Eliot Ness's small team of Chicago Prohibition agents earn?

The Untouchables got the name from the press after Ness's agents turned down bribes from Capone's organisation.

Who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for De Palma's 1987 film about Eliot Ness and Al Capone?

Sean Connery won the Oscar as an Irish-American cop, yet a 2003 Empire magazine poll named the performance the worst film accent of all, his Scottish burr intact.

New York agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith became famous for using what tactic to raid illegal bars?

Disguises and put-on foreign accents got the pair through doors that stayed shut to other agents, and between them they made thousands of arrests.

"King of the Bootleggers" George Remus was acquitted in 1927 after shooting whom in a public park?

His wife, Imogene, had begun an affair with a federal investigator while Remus was in prison, and the pair set about stripping his fortune.

Chicago lawyer George Remus, the 'King of the Bootleggers', moved to which city to be close to America's stores of bonded liquor?

Cincinnati put Remus within reach of the distilleries he bought up, along with pharmacies, under cover of making and selling medicinal liquor: a loophole that made him a fortune.

Which justice wrote the 'right to be let alone' dissent in the 1928 wiretapping case of bootlegger Roy Olmstead?

Louis Brandeis lost by five votes to four, but his dissent won in the end: in 1967 the Supreme Court abandoned the Olmstead rule and treated wiretapping as a search.

Which bootlegger took over boxer Jack Johnson's Harlem nightclub in the early 1920s and renamed it the Cotton Club?

Owney Madden limited the audience to white patrons even as Black stars such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway made their names on its stage.

What was Anheuser-Busch's Prohibition-era 'near beer' called?

Bevo was the best-selling near beer of the era, yet it could not carry the brewery alone: Anheuser-Busch also turned to making ice cream to get through Prohibition.

Which president called Prohibition 'a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive'?

Herbert Hoover's 1928 line, 'noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose', was boiled down to 'the noble experiment', the label that stuck to the whole era.

What is the common name of the 1931 federal commission report that found Prohibition widely evaded?

The Wickersham Report catalogued how widely the law was flouted and then came out against repeal anyway.

Pauline Sabin rallied over a million American women by 1932 to campaign for what?

Ending Prohibition: Sabin, a Republican committeewoman who had once backed the ban, switched sides in 1929 and showed that American women were not all dry.

Which president signed the Cullen-Harrison Act of March 1933, bringing back legal beer?

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it within three weeks of taking office; brewers marked beer's return that April by sending the first Budweiser Clydesdales to deliver a case to the White House.

Which crisis strengthened the case for repealing Prohibition?

Great Depression hardship turned repeal into an economic cause: with public revenues collapsing, legal drink promised governments new income and workers new jobs.

The 21st Amendment is the only one approved by what method?

State ratifying conventions were chosen because many state legislators still feared the temperance lobby, and conventions kept them out of the vote.

Which state cast the decisive 36th ratification vote for the 21st Amendment?

Utah voted on 5 December 1933, after Pennsylvania and Ohio had done the same earlier that day, and at 5:32 p.m. Eastern time its vote made repeal official.

Which was the last state to repeal its statewide prohibition law, holding out until 1966?

Mississippi had spent two decades taxing the liquor it outlawed: from 1944 the state took 10 percent of bootleg sales, and in 1966 it finally let each county choose.

Which two states never ratified the constitutional amendment that brought in national Prohibition?

Connecticut and Rhode Island both voted it down, but with 46 of the 48 states in favour their refusal changed nothing.

HBO's Prohibition drama Boardwalk Empire is set chiefly where?

Atlantic City really was run by a man called Nucky: Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson is based on Enoch 'Nucky' Johnson, the politician who controlled the resort's rackets.

Which 1925 novel's millionaire hero is exposed as a bootlegger selling alcohol through drugstores?

The Great Gatsby saves the reveal for a hotel-room row, where Tom Buchanan sneers that Gatsby 'bought up a lot of side-street drugstores' and sold alcohol over the counter.

Which Nordic country adopted national prohibition in 1919 and voted to scrap it in a 1931 referendum?

Finland's ban, in force from 1919, was voted down by a wide margin in a referendum held in the last days of 1931, and legal sales returned the following year.

Which country kept full-strength beer illegal until 1 March 1989, decades after it had re-legalised wine and spirits?

Iceland still marks 1 March as Beer Day; during the ban, drinkers got round it by spiking legal light beer with spirits.

Which Canadian province kept prohibition the longest, from 1901 all the way to 1948?

Prince Edward Island was first in and last out: it went dry in 1901, years before the wartime bans elsewhere, and held on long after most provinces repealed theirs in the 1920s.

Besides a doctor's prescription, the Volstead Act's other big exception let alcohol be supplied legally by whom?

A clergyman, whether priest, minister or rabbi, could obtain wine for religious rites, and the exemption was soon abused as one more way for ordinary drinkers to get a bottle.

America's wartime prohibition took effect in July 1919 on a day nicknamed what?

The Thirsty First was 1 July 1919, and it came by a quirk of timing: the wartime ban, meant to save grain, was not enacted until after the armistice.

What nickname was given to the line of liquor-laden ships anchored just outside US waters to supply bootleggers?

Rum Row sat in international waters, three miles out at first and twelve from 1924, while fast 'contact boats' ran the cargo ashore.

George Cassiday, 'the Man in the Green Hat', was chief bootlegger to which institution?

The US Congress was his patch for ten years: Capitol Police waved through the man in the trademark green hat, and his first customers were two House members who had voted for Prohibition.

Which New York governor ran for president in 1928 as an avowed 'wet' and lost in a landslide?

Al Smith lost in 1928 with dry voters lined up behind his opponent, but he was only early: four years later his party ran on a repeal platform and won.