Extract from ABC News
The 1920s may have been defined by Prohibition in the United States but many Americans still found a way around it. (Getty: Hulton Archive)
America's roaring 20s were an era of flappers, frivolity, prosperity — and Prohibition.
Not long after the ink was signed on the Armistice, officially ending World War I, the United States went through a long dry spell thanks to the 18th amendment.
The sale, transport and manufacture of alcohol for pleasure was banned, saloons were shuttered, and mock funerals were held for a fictional character by the name of John Barleycorn, a personification of the "demon drinks" of whisky and beer.
Prohibition represented the triumph of the "drys" over the "wets", the moral teetotallers over the dishonourable men and women who fancied a tipple.
But by the end of the decade, America had turned its back on the "noble experiment".
Prohibition had given rise to a seedy underground of corruption and debauchery. This was the period of bootleggers, speak-easies and gangsters.
Violent crime bosses like Al Capone ran the illegal trade of alcohol, unchecked, through major city hubs until America's leadership finally declared enough was enough.
Prohibition was officially repealed on December 5, 1933.
But the beginning of its end can be traced back years earlier — to a highly-publicised massacre by firing squad.
Al Capone was one of the most identifiable gangsters of the Prohibition era. (Wikimedia Commons: Pennsylvania Department of Corrections/FBI)
The 'drys' vs the 'wets'
When the proverbial gates of Prohibition closed with a clamour in January 1920, locking out America's burgeoning alcohol industry along with its many beer-making German-Americans, evangelists heralded it as the dawn of a new age.
"Men will walk upright, women will smile, the children will laugh and hell will be forever for rent," one of them claimed.
For almost a century, this had been the dream of anti-alcohol groups across the country.
Since 1826, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance had argued the regular consumption of alcohol was bad for physical and mental health — and a moral failing.
The "drys" linked alcohol and the places that sold liquor to fractured family dynamics, particularly the societal ills of domestic violence and child neglect.
The temperance movement's solution was a simple one: put a stop to it altogether.
The first state to outlaw alcohol entirely was the protestant stronghold of Maine, in New England, which introduced Prohibition in 1851.
But it was WWI that hastened the prospect of a nationwide ban.
The Wartime Prohibition Act, which was passed by Congress in 1918, halted the sale of most alcoholic beverages until after the war ended.
Giving up booze was, at that time, seen as a patriotic act. The ingredients in beer, such as grain, were conserved and diverted to nobler causes, like feeding the troops and allies risking their lives on the front line.
When a ban on alcohol was considered at a federal level, however, it was not the army that stood to benefit the most.
It was gangsters.
Prohibition didn't create these criminal syndicates, but once passed, a window of opportunity was opened on a lucrative black market for booze.
And one of the era's most famous figures, Al Capone, typified how America's underworld swiftly moved to corner the market — and how authorities were powerless to stop it.
How gangsters capitalised on Prohibition
The exuberance of the 1920s took on a darker edge as the end of the decade approached.
Americans were still spending big on the assumption the good times would keep rolling on, fuelled by post-war riches and the rise of easy credit.
But the ban on alcohol was having a negligible effect, and turning the many Americans still interested in a drink into criminals.
"I find that people expect more [liquor] at a dinner party than before Prohibition," one socialite noted according to author Daniel Okrent in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
What appeared to be an innocent truckload of lumber was in actual fact a bootlegger's vehicle loaded with prime scotch. (Getty: Bettman)
Bootleggers adopted creative methods to smuggle foreign-made booze onto ships and across American borders, using everything from hidden compartments to false-bottomed shopping baskets, camouflaged flasks and hot water bottles.
Closer to home, there was a thriving trade in bathtub distillery operations in major US states.
The alcohol it produced wasn't necessarily safe, with tens of thousands of Americans dying from tainted liquor during Prohibition.
But still they clambered into basement speak-easies to satisfy their taste for the forbidden spirits.
Police officers and agents tasked with enforcing Prohibition could not keep up with the level of illegal activity going on under their noses.
Courtrooms and jails overflowed as a backlog of cases slowly built up while some poorly paid agents succumbed to offers of bribes to look the other way.
Even the ban's toughest enforcers became disillusioned.
Judge John F McGee had been a vigorous pursuer of Prohibition, earning the moniker "The Bootleggers' Terror", but five years into the alcohol ban, he claimed "the end not in sight" as the list of cases mounted.
"I started, in March 1923, to rush that branch of the litigation and thought I would end it, but it ended me," he wrote.
Detroit police inspecting equipment found in a clandestine underground brewery during the Prohibition era. (Supplied: Archival Research Catalog of the US National Archives and Records Administration)
Law-abiding citizens were suffering but the gangsters overseeing the trade of booze, and their many patrons, thrived.
No-one attracted more attention than a street brawler from Brooklyn known as "Scarface Al".
"I'm just a businessman," Capone once said.
"Giving the public what they want."
The "business" was a big one, with bootleg liquor sales in 1926 alone amounting to $US3.6 billion.
Cash payoffs to corrupt police officers, judges and politicians kept Capone's illegal activities away from prying eyes, while he dazzled the public with appearances at soup kitchens and sporting games.
But his desire to be the top dog in Chicago, along with the violence that followed wherever he went, eventually caught up with him — and ushered in the end of Prohibition.
The Valentine's Massacre
On Valentine's Day, 1929, four men toting machine guns and shotguns entered a shed in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighbourhood and surprised a group of men from a rival bootlegging outfit.
The armed men, some dressed as police officers, lined the unarmed group against a wall and shot them all at point-blank range during a deadly turf war in the Windy City.
Capone's Chicago Outfit was widely suspected of ordering the hit to take out his competition, though no-one was ever prosecuted.
The slaying did, however, make front page news and elicit public anger.
Americans could no longer ignore the link between Prohibition, gangsters and rising violence on their streets.
Months later, when the Great Depression hit and brought the good times to an end, support for a ban on alcohol nosedived.
More than 1,500 union men marched against Prohibition in New Jersey on October 30, 1931. (Wikicommons)
The tide had turned against the "noble experiment" and when 1932 rolled around, debate over its end became a key issue in the presidential election campaign.
Franklin D Roosevelt won by a landslide and pushed for the immediate legalisation of beer and wine, which went into effect on April 7, 1933.
A cascading list of states ratified the agreement over the next few months until the gates of Prohibition were officially thrown open on December 5, 1933.
Was Prohibition a failure?
Despite the hopes of the Temperance movement, the bizarre episode that was America's Prohibition has gone down in the history books as a failed experiment.
Bartenders at Sloppy Joe's were among countless bars pouring a round of drinks as the 18th amendment was repealed. (Getty: American Stock)
The very thing it hoped to achieve, the stamping out of liquor and vice, did not result in any lasting drop in alcohol consumption.
Drinking levels returned to their pre-Prohibition rates in the years after it ended, and the repeal of the 18th amendment remains the only constitutional amendment in US history to ever be rescinded.
But that is not to say America's decade-long dry period didn't have an enduring impact.
Almost 100 years later, the lingering effects of the US's alcohol-free fling are evident in the homes of many modern-day Americans.
Before the ban on alcohol, social drinking mostly took place in saloons, clubs and bars, places that were, in large part, hostile to women.
Once the 18th amendment was in effect, however, many places that sold alcohol were forced to close and Americans who were so inclined had to find somewhere else to drink.
A loophole in the law meant folks could consume alcohol at home, giving rise to special dinner parties and other domestic gatherings, a tradition that grew throughout the latter half of the 19th century.
"Prohibition helped to bring about this major change in American drinking patterns by killing the saloon," researcher Jack S Blocker wrote in an article for the American Journal of Public Health.
While likely unintended, drinking became normalised in the decades after Prohibition ended, especially among women and "polite society", a phenomenon that continues to this day.
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