![]() ![]() You could sell alcohol to anyone at any time of day. When it was illegal, you just needed to bribe a cop on a beat or a Prohibition agent, and that was easy to do. The great irony of repeal is that it became harder to get a drink when it was legal after Dec. ![]() People of means never really had a problem paying for alcohol. ![]() By the end, it had become closer to what it had been before, but didn’t get back to pre-Prohibition levels until 1939 to 1940. The general belief is that drinking dropped by about 30% at the beginning of Prohibition. Once Prohibition started, to what extent did people keep drinking anyway? The South also wanted to keep alcohol away from black men, that was a very strong motivator. People in the middle of the country thought alcohol was fueling that political movement in the cities, so that’s another reason to cut it off. There was also great anti-immigrant feeling in the northern and eastern cities, where political machines were dominated in most cities by tavern owners delivering votes to Congressmen. If this problem dates to the 1830s, why did Prohibition happen a century later? What else was going on that explains why Prohibition went into effect when it did? Men and women didn’t drink together in public, except for the wealthy, so the tavern was a male retreat and a place for an unhappy man to really tie one on. Wine wasn’t a big element in the drinking diet at the time, so there was more pure alcohol, substantially more. The average consumption of alcohol in the 1830s and 1840s was three times what it is today. ![]()
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