In 1492 Christopher Columbus, being too proud to stop and ask for directions, took a wrong turn and wound up on the completely wrong continent. He knew how to polish a turd so he planted a flag and claimed he discovered the new world. Christians have a long and bloody history of poking each other with sharp objects over who worships the lord the best so all the batshit religious nutbags in Europe flocked to the Americas so they could roll around on the ground speaking in tongues and do other weird ass shit without getting stabbed. The thirty-year bloodbath called the Protestant Reformation drove even more religious refugees to the New World. And that’s why you get to legally bang hookers in Germany, but not Texas.
The founding fathers knew all too well that when people wearing funny hats and a frown make the rules they take the stick shoved up their ass and try to shove it up everyone else’s too, sometimes literally, so they made sure to scribble some lines in the constitution about separation of church and state. People were pretty spread out so everyone got along well enough until the industrial revolution, advancing technology, and a growing population brought people closer together. By the roaring 1920’s crusty old bitches were seeing way too many people have fun and decided that shit had to stop.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had been bitching at their husbands not to enjoy themselves after a hard day’s work since 1874. “At its founding… the stated purpose of the WCTU was to create a "sober and pure world" by abstinence, purity, and evangelical Christianity.”
"It'd take at least a twelve pack to fuck any of them"
They made a lot of noise but without a man in charge, the women just ran around bitching and gossiping about each other and throwing rocks at saloons. That man was Wayne Wheeler. Wheeler had a lifelong aversion to alcohol after a drunk farmhand accidentally stabbed him in the leg with a pitchfork. Wheeler and his white knighting pussy whipped Anti Saloon League joined forces with the WCTU and worked tirelessly to ignore the constitution and use churches to get pro-prohibition politicians elected. On January 29, 1919 they succeeded in passing the 18th amendment to the constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, or distribution of intoxicating liquors.
Unfortunately, the amendment didn’t really spell out any specifics about how that was supposed to work. Realizing they just passed a lame duck, Wheeler used his political clout to ram through The Volstead Act, which laid out the actual rules for not letting people have any fun. President Woodrow Wilson said, “Fuck that shit!” and vetoed the bill, but the house and senate overrode his veto.
Interestingly, drinking or owning booze wasn’t actually illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Before the law went into effect rich people bought out entire liquor stores and filled their basements with booze so they could ride out the impending boozeoaclypse.
The next thirteen years were a carnival of unintended consequences. Physicians were allowed to write prescriptions for alcohol, which they did with gusto. Walgreens pharmacy grew from twenty locations to over five hundred during the 20’s. It was still legal to produce industrial alcohol for things like solvents and whatnot. Desperate alcoholics took to drinking the swill despite side effects like blindness and death. Bootleggers would water down the jugs of alcohol to make it somewhat drinkable. The jugs were too big to fill in the sink so they would do it in the bathtub, giving the drink the nickname “Bathtub Gin.” The government forced producers to start adding things like quinine and methyl alcohol to deter folks from drinking it, which they didn’t, leading to the deaths of some 10,000 people.
What should have been a completely expected rise in illicit alcohol sales started immediately, making millionaires out of Al Capone and other nefarious gangsters. Prohibition officers were in a unique position to accept bribes to turn a blind eye to criminal activities, which they unsurprisingly did considering they were paid less than the average garbage man. One group that actually did work to enforce prohibition was the KKK, because hey, being dicks is kind of their thing. The hillbillies who weren’t in the KKK became redneck automobile innovators, who came up with ingenious ways to supercharge their cars to outrun the cops to deliver moonshine. This automotive arms race would continue after prohibition, eventually becoming NASCAR, which is ironically endorsed by Klan members everywhere.
Despite the overwhelmingly religious motivation behind prohibition, hypocritical church goers made sure to leave an exception in the rules to allow sacramental wine. This led to a curious boom in the number of new priests and rabbis running around. In 1925 alone, the number of gallons of sacramental wine produced increased by 800,000 gallons.
Back in those days, people didn’t take their children out to eat because nothing ruins a romantic evening of food and drinks like a bunch of whining little shitheads throwing rolls at people. In 1921 the Waldorf Astoria invented the children’s menu to try to make up lost revenue from not being able to sell alcohol. It totally worked… unfortunately.
Speaking of kids. In 1925 Theodor Geisel was having a blast at Dartmouth College, drawing funny pictures for his fraternity’s humor magazine “The Jack O Lantern.” That is until him and some homies got busted drinking gin in his dorm room. The school kicked him off the magazine as punishment. He kept publishing cartoons anyway, because damn the man, but Instead of using his name he started signing the drawings using his middle name Seuss. After he graduated and moved to Oxford to work on his doctorate he adopted the moniker... Dr. Seuss.
Historically alcohol sales skyrocket during Recessions and Depressions because nothing says, “Fuck I need a drink” like being poor and hopeless. In the 1930’s the Great Depression was in full swing. Not only was the need to get drunk at an all-time high, so was the need for the 11 Billion dollars in lost tax revenue from alcohol sales. To make matters worse, not only had none of the benefits to society promised by prohibitionists materialized, it had made everything worse. In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated incumbent president Herbert Hoover in a landslide election, running on a platform to repeal prohibition. On March 22, 1933, FDR signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, allowing the sale of shitty 3.2% alcohol beer. This paved the way for Congress to ratify the 21st amendment that same year, repealing prohibition. FDR is quoted as saying, “What America needs now is a drink.” Then he slammed a martini and had a truck full of Yuengling beer delivered to the White House.
