Made In America - Bill Bryson [133]
Wine growers to their dismay were reduced to producing harmless grape concentrate, which of course almost no one wanted. They recovered their composure, and their fortunes, when they discovered that there was nothing illegal about pasting a prominent label on each bottle announcing boldly, ‘WARNING: WILL FERMENT AND TURN INTO WINE’, and providing step-by-step instructions on how a careless consumer might inadvertently convert this healthful beverage into something with the power to make his legs wobble. Sacramental wine, excluded ftom the strictures of the Eighteenth Amendment, also showed a curious leap in sales, with some cynics suggesting that not all of it – or even much of it – was ending up in devout stomachs. In the years 1925 to 1939 American wine consumption actually trebled, and California’s vineyards expanded from less than 100,000 acres before Prohibition to almost 700,000 acres afterwards.29 Seldom has any law anywhere led to greater hypocrisy or been more widely flouted. People not only continued to drink, but in greater numbers than ever. Before Prohibition New York had 15,000 legal saloons; by the end of Prohibition it had over 30,000 illegal ones. Detroit had no fewer than 20,000 speakeasies, as illegal drinking establishments became rather curiously known. Boston was rather primmer with just 4,000 illicit watering holes, but that was four times the number of legal saloons in the whole of Massachusetts before Prohibition. Hardly anyone took the law seriously. In 1930, a journalist testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he had attended a lively party at a Detroit roadhouse where he had seen the Governor of Michigan, the chief of police of Detroit, and four circuit court judges drinking lavishly and enjoying the entertainment of a troupe of young ladies who were dancing the hootchy-kootchy (another new word of the age, based on the earlier coochee-coochee) without benefit of clothing. They couldn’t even have been wearing G-strings since this device of minimal attire would not become known to strippers until 1936. Although the term is often said to have arisen as a jocular allusion to the thinness of the G-string on a violin, it actually has a more noble pedigree. In the nineteenth century it described the leather string Indians employed to hold up their loincloths and was spelled geestring (probably a folk translation of a more complicated, and now forgotten, Indian term).
All this is by way of reaching the point that Prohibition – or more correctly the Volstead Act – was a law without teeth. Congress appropriated just $5 million to enforce the act and employed just 1,520 agents to protect America’s frontiers from smugglers – or one man for every twelve miles of border.30 A small but curiously durable myth is that President Herbert Hoover stoutly defended Prohibition as ‘a noble experiment’. In fact, he called it ‘a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose’, which isn’t quite the same thing and actually falls considerably short of a ringing endorsement. He wasn’t praising Prohibition itself, but merely the motives of those who had foisted it on the nation. In point of fact, by the election campaign of 1928, when Hoover made his utterance, Prohibition was an obvious disaster.
Prohibition may have been an inconvenience to drinkers but it enriched the vocabulary. Bootlegger, speakeasy, hip flask and many other terms associated with illicit behaviour became part of the common parlance. So, too, did the expression the real McCoy. Although often supposed to date from a much earlier period, it is a Prohibition catch-phrase. No one knows who or what this McCoy was – explanations range from its being the name of a now-forgotten but presumably talented bootlegger to its having some connection with opiates from Macao – but there