When Prohibition fell
As crowds greet legal pot era, here’s how Chicago reacted to return of booze
Shortly after noon on Dec. 5, 1933, John Burke, vice president of the Congress Hotel, and H.L. Kaufman, the owner, went down to the hotel’s wine cellar. The keys to the padlocks on the cellar’s outer door having been lost, Burke smashed the door with a sledgehammer. The inner door was unlocked by Joe Mack, once again the Congress’ wine steward 14 years after the 18th Amendment had put the kibosh on alcoholic beverages.
Inside the wine cellar was $250,000 worth of liquor, encrusted “in cobwebs and crusty molds,” the Tribune reported.
Mack was poised to resume advising the hotel’s guests on which wine went with fish and which complemented a tenderloin steak. The hotel’s cache of liquor would soon start flowing into glasses once more — respectably over the counter.
Prohibition was expected to pass into the history books before the day was done. But what good — and what bad — would follow? Such a burning question is once again on Illinoisans’ minds as another form of prohibition ends. Sales of recreational marijuana have begun in earnest — respectably over the counter — in 2020. Will an acrid cloud mark the partisans of pot celebration?
In 1933, some “drys,” as prohibitionists were dubbed, thought repeal would be followed by binge drinking. In New York, “Police Commissioner James S. Bolan assigned 90 extra policemen to the Times Square section to handle crowds gathering there,” the Tribune reported.
But the chairman of New York state’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board, Edward P. Mulrooney, predicted “the rush for liquor will be somewhat dampened because … there will be a shortage of liquor for some time.”
In fact, repeal dealt a crippling blow to the network of suppliers and distributors that had enabled Americans to get a buzz on during Prohibition: Moonshiners operated backwoods distilleries; bootleggers parceled out their products; rum runners brought in surreptitious imports from Canada and Cuba, where the 18th Amendment didn’t apply. Say the right thing into a peephole, and the door to a speakeasy, an illicit bar, opened a crack.
The Tribune’s “A Line O’ Type Or Two” columnist predicted that repeal would trigger a power shift between alcohol’s retailers and consumers.
“Bootleggers will be glad to get the job of washing our family auto instead of sneering haughtily at us from the plush lined seats of their own twentyfour cylinder imported cars,” the columnist wrote. “And we can stop lying to the doctor to get him to write us a whisky prescription.” Then as now, the medicinal use of intoxicants was legal when using for pleasure wasn’t.
Theorizing about post-Prohibition America was subject to empirical verification once Utah ratified the 21st Amendment. Congress had provided that the feds would stop impeding the free flow of booze when three-quarters of the states signed on.
Sometime after 3:32 p.m. Mountain Standard Time on Dec. 5, 1933, the leaders of Utah’s legislature notified President Franklin Roosevelt that their state was on board. Roosevelt had championed repeal, and because the nation eagerly awaited the news, a special telegraph line had been installed.
When word reached Chicago, glasses were lifted, not all in moderation.
“The first tipsy tippler was seen in the new Palmer House bar at 6:35 p.m.,” the Tribune noted. “After making a speech, he revealed a prohibition hip flask, largely empty, on which he had had a head start.”
In some Loop bars, celebrants couldn’t resist getting in a last dig at their defeated opponents, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. “Wags made frequent requests of musicians for the W.C.T.U. song, ‘It’s in the Constitution and It’s There to Stay,’ but nobody could remember the tune,” the Tribune reported.
Some bartenders were uncomfortable with some social mores born in the Prohibition era. Danny Monahan, who was head barman at the Hotel Sherman on Dec. 5, 1933, told the Tribune he was OK with ladies drinking in public. But he regretted there wasn’t at least one bar “where men can get away from the ladies.”
Maryland’s legislature marked the historic crossroads by firing the bootlegger who had “been quenching the thirst of legislators for several sessions.” And the New York Police Department put in a bid for its own historical footnote.
Finding the body of smalltime mobster Anthony Russo in the back seat of a car, the cops nominated him for the title of “the last man to be ‘taken for a ride,’ ” or executed, in New York during Prohibition.
One of the forces behind the push for Prohibition was Frances Willard, longtime head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She had preached that men were leaving their pay in taverns, money that could have bought groceries for their families. She described the tactics of the group’s Save the Home crusade in her 1883 testament “Woman and Temperance”:
“While they brew beer we are brewing public sentiment; while they distill whisky we are distilling facts; while they rectify brandy we are rectifying political constituencies; after ere long their fuming tide of intoxicating liquor shall be met and driven back by the overwhelming flood of enlightened sentiment and divinely aroused energy.”
Willard didn’t live to see the drys’ victory, perhaps fortunately. Prohibition quickly blurred the line between honest citizens and otherwise up standing Americans who patronized bootleggers and frequented speakeasies. “The country wanted booze and I organized it,” Chicago mob boss Al Capone observed. “Why should I be called a public enemy?”
Well, it was because his administration of the liquor trade was enforced with guns. Disputes over gangster distribution rights led to the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, when Capone’s henchmen are said to have slaughtered seven mobsters affiliated with his Chicago rival, Bugs Moran.
That and other gang wars brought new support for the cause of the “wets.”
“Everybody agrees that prohibition is to blame for the present high crime rate in the United States,” said Anton Cermak, the Democratic Party’s successful candidate for Chicago mayor in 1931. His Republican opponent agreed.
On the drys’ side, the W.C.T.U. soldiered on, cutting a cake in Chicago’s Morrison Hotel to mark Prohibition’s 10th birthday. But the temperance movement no longer had a monopoly on women’s take on the issue. The Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform was organized by a former W.C.T.U. member and drew a sizable membership that felt Prohibition had done more harm than good.
And then came Dec. 5, 1933: Folks throwing down a whiskey sour or nursing a martini became a tourist attraction. “The Bismarck’s new taproom, which fronts on La Salle street, served its first drink at 4 o’clock, through erroneous information that liquor was then legal,” the Tribune reported. “Crowds gathered on the sidewalks outside to watch.”
Twenty-four states still had laws outlawing booze. But the rest of America slowly but steadily resumed its relationship with alcohol. The Union League Club, a favorite of Chicago’s movers and shakers, drafted a plan for a state liquor commission. Though the legislature initially sat on it, Chicago decreed that those speakeasies that didn’t get a city license by Jan. 2 would lose their chance to become legitimate taverns. In New York, the feds sold off 39,000 cases of confiscated bootlegged liquor, easing that city’s shortage of alcoholic beverages.
And in a Puget Sound shipyard in Washington state, the Navy revived a hallowed tradition that had been in limbo for 14 years. At the launch of the Navy’s latest cruiser, a descendant of a founder of the Oregon town for whom it was named took a good, hard swing at it.
“I christen thee Astoria,” said Miss Lella C. McKay, as she shattered a bottle of California sparkling wine on the vessel’s steel prow.