Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [4]
Reformers saw Prohibition as a necessary instrument of social improvement—a way to help the poor and needy help themselves. They associated alcohol with urbanization, with violence, laziness and corruption, and with unwelcome immigrants. Sober men, thought Prohibitionists, would be better Americans. They would stop beating their wives, hold down jobs, go to church (preferably a Protestant church), save their pennies. A sober society would be patriotic, stable, pious and prosperous.
Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Republican President elected in 1920, viewed Prohibition in much the same light as most of his fellow Americans, who were virtuous enough to praise Prohibition but not quite virtuous enough to practice it. Harding may have voted in the Senate to ratify Prohibition but in private he had no intention of abiding by its strictures. He could see nothing wrong with his own fondness for whisky, especially when it was accompanied by a well-chewed cigar and a few poker-playing cronies. Prohibition was a little like an unpleasant-tasting medicine: people recognized its merits and uses, but if they did not think they were sick (and very few did) they were unwilling to swallow it themselves. As a New York World satire went, “Prohibition is an awful flop. /We like it . . . It don’t prohibit worth a dime, /Nevertheless we’re for it.”
The reformers had also failed to foresee that once alcohol was illegal it would take on an irresistible glamour. Rather than encouraging people to stop drinking, Prohibition made them want to drink. Writers like Scott Fitzgerald rhapsodized over forbidden cocktails like “the iridescent exhilaration of absinthe frappé, crystal and pearl in green glasses” or “gin fizzes [the] color of green and silver”; the sparkle of champagne suddenly gave drinkers a delightful new sensation of naughtiness; liveried bell-hops rushed up and down hotel staircases bearing soda, buckets of crushed ice and thrillingly discreet brown-paper packages. The popular 1920 song said it all: “You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea.”
On a visit to the United States in 1928, the English journalist Beverley Nichols observed that “Prohibition has set a great many dull feet dancing. . . . The disappearance of the “speakeasy” would be an infinite loss to all romanticists,” Nichols continued. “Who, having slunk down the little flight of stairs into the area, glancing to right and left, in order to make sure that no police are watching, having blinked at the suddenly lighted grille, and assured the proprietor, whose face peers through the bars, of his bona fides—who would willingly forfeit these delicious preliminaries? And who, having taken his seat in the shuttered restaurant, having felt all the thrill of the conspirator, having jumped at each fresh ring of the bell, having, perhaps, enjoyed the supreme satisfaction of participating in a real raid—who would prefer, to these excitements, a sedate and legal dinner, even if all the wines of the world were at his disposition?” Before Prohibition, alcohol had been a cheap high. In 1914, a highball might cost fifteen cents. Six years later a swanky speakeasy could charge $3—twenty times as much—for a glass of top-quality whisky and even at the bottom of the market that shot would cost about fifty cents (although it was free for the police). But despite the expense and the criminality associated with alcohol after Prohibition came into effect, people were still drinking “with a frantic desire to get drunk and enjoy themselves.” There were fortunes to be made for those who dared to flout the law.
During the winter, Sam Bronfman ran bootleg whisky on sleds across frozen Lake Erie from Canada into Detroit, where the illegal liquor industry was second only to the motor trade and, by the mid- 1920s, was worth an estimated $215 million a year. Bronfman later became head of Seagrams, the world’s largest distiller. Rum-runners like Captain Bill