Liquor Ban Quotes

But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.

the same time, gangsters seized on what they saw as the perfect sales opportunity. “The business of manufacturing alcohol, liquor and beer will go out of the hands of law-abiding members of the community, and will be transferred to the…criminal class,” warned Yale professor William Taft, the former president who soon would be appointed as Chief of the Supreme Court.

In 1913, the Anti-Saloon League attempted a constitutional amendment prohibiting liquor, but the movement didn't gain momentum until World War I, thanks to America's anti-German hysteria and the amount of beer imported from Germany.

The day before alcohol prohibition was introduced, the most popular drink in the United States was beer, but as soon as alcohol was banned, hard liquor soared from 40 percent of all drinks that were sold to 90 percent. People responded to a change in the law by shifting from a milder drink to a stronger drink. This seems puzzling. Why would a change in the law change people’s tastes in alcohol? It turns out it didn’t change their tastes. It changed something else: the range of drinks that were offered to them. The reason is surprisingly simple. One of the best analysts of the drug war, the writer Mike Gray, explains it in his book Drug Crazy. When you are smuggling a substance into a country, and transporting it in secret, “you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package,” he writes.

According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread. The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations. Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside. In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population. Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear" and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second.

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution— proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917— prohibited the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Don’t you believe it. The Eighteenth—or, as it was popularly known, the Prohibition Amendment—made no restriction on drinking or possessing liquor, or on serving it to friends, or even to mere acquaintances. Nor was the purchase of alcoholic beverages declared illegal. All it prohibited was “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” used for “beverage purposes.” Under the amendment, it was illegal to sell liquor but not against the law to buy it or own it. Nor did the amendment define what “intoxicating liquors” were. That was left to the National Prohibition Act (popularly known as the Volstead Act, not to be confused with the constitutional amendment) which defined an offending potable as any beverage that contained at least one-half of 1 percent of alcohol by volume. The Volstead Act—which was passed in October 1919, becoming effective on February 1, 1920—went beyond the amendment to extend the ban to purchase or possession. Medicinal application was excluded, as was sacramental use in religious rites. The Volstead bill had been vetoed by President Wilson, but his veto was overridden by Congress. The amendment, after approval by thirty-six states, was declared ratified on January 29, 1919, and remained in effect for almost fifteen years. It was finally repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment, which was adopted December 5, 1933. And, one bit of collateral information—which imbibers will laud but prohibitionists will grieve—the Eighteenth was the only constitutional amendment ever to be repealed.

I am particularly fond of John Lindsay’s suggestion that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials.

These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs.

In The New York Times, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (of the famous cereals) wrote that “the liquor interests are conspirators against the public welfare” since its production used “more fuel than all schools and churches combined.

In 1830, a historic level of 7.5 gallons of absolute alcohol per adult was reached, nearly three times the current average consumption. In 1860, there were 1,140 distilleries in the United States, producing more than 88 million gallons of liquor for 15 million American adults[ii]—an average of 5.8 liters per adult per year.

In the late nineteenth century, alcohol and drinkers were the targets in the United States. It was asserted that the drug “takes the kind, loving husband and father, smothers every spark of love in his bosom, and transforms him into a heartless wretch, and makes him steal the shoes from his starving babe’s feet to find the price for a glass of liquor. It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot.”2 These negative narratives became so plentiful that Congress was persuaded to amend the Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages.

Capone once famously said, “All I do is to supply a public demand…somebody had to throw some liquor on that thirst. Why not me?”  He brilliantly coordinated the importation of liquor from all across America while in charge of the operation of hundreds of distilleries. To do so, he had his own distribution system, which involved hiring delivery drivers, salespeople, and of course, armed bodyguards—his own “miniature army” riding beside his bullet-proof limousine—to protect his investments. Capone ingeniously bought immunity by paying off politicians, law enforcement agents, and even the Mayor of Chicago, William H. Thompson, whom he helped with thousands of dollars and votes enough to win the seat.