The ingenuity of people in obtaining alcohol is hard to over estimate. A legend here in Arizona relates that right around 1900 selling alcohol to native Americans was prohibited. A shopkeeper started selling potatoes for $1 each, and you were given a free pint of whiskey with each purchase.
Everything went fine for a couple days until he ran out of potatoes. The natives brought their potatoes back and gave them to him.
Some bars sold saltines at fancy prices that included free drinks.
If there is demand for alcohol, someone will find a way to supply it. Although cider can only be made when there is available fruit, it can be made to keep a long time, no? If so, demand for other drinks was probably greater. Price for grapes went up something like twenty times in value.
A radio comedy show said there is a current TV show supposedly about backwoods moonshiners pretending to evade the law recently. The show claimed the premise made no sense as their activities were basically legal and it was the usual reality show fakery. Haven’t seen the show. Maybe it isn’t on anymore.
It’s called (unimaginatively, but descriptively) “Moonshiners.” It’s had 11 seasons on Discovery Channel here in the U.S., and has had new episodes air as recently as this past March, so it may well still be “in production.”
The Wikipedia article also notes the alleged lack of actual illegal activity depicted in the show.
A while back, I read a commentary about divorce that was written in the 1920s, and it said that (as is true now) most divorces are initiated by the wife, but unlike now, the most common grounds was desertion. It also added that in many, if not most, of those cases, she wasn’t sorry he left, because he was abusive and this was usually catalyzed by alcoholism. IIRC, quite a few of them had no idea where he was, and really didn’t want to know, but they had met another man in the meantime and wanted to be free to marry him.
At some time in the 00s, I was sitting with a group of elderly women at my church, and they were talking about how it used to be such a disgrace to be a divorced woman, and nowadays, when a woman announces she’s leaving a marriage, people basically throw confetti at her and they even have “Divorce parties” in some cases. I asked them what their observations were about divorced men, and they all stared at each other and one of them finally said, “I don’t remember that society had an opinion about them, or that it was supposed to.”
Hmmmmm…
I do think it was here that I told the above story, and someone replied that had Adlai Stevenson not been divorced, he would probably have been elected president in 1952.
I have also referred people who thought there was no drug or addiction problem “back then” to the “Prohibition” mini-series. If anything, it was probably worse than it is now, just in different ways.
Okrent’s book is very good and expands on everything in the series, since he was basically the writer of the series as well. It’s been over a decade but I’ll bet all of the OP’s questions are answered in it.
As a reader, I remember thinking that it’s main limitation was that Okrent tried to stuff huge amounts of history that he knew his audience wasn’t going to be as interested in, so it’s not as deep as some of the issues.
That got me going on to other books on the subject. In particular, Okrent takes a whole lot of information from Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City by Michael A. Lerner.
Yeah, it’s a very light and accessible history. I thought he did a good job describing the rural/urban divide at the heart of prohibition and how anti-immigrant sentiment and their drinking (Catholics and Jewish mostly) led to an alliance between women’s Terrance movements and the Klan to enforce the alcohol ban.
Yes, Terrance is extremely handsome.
Sorry. I know that was just a typo, but it was too good to pass up.
D’oh!
While I know that Okrent has written extensively on other topics, I always associate him with baseball; he invented “Rotisserie League Baseball,” which was likely the originator of modern fantasy baseball.
Nine Innings is the story of a single baseball game, written as a novel. Each inning is a chapter. The game was a forgettable mid summer game between, I think the Orioles and Brewers, it’s fascinating.
Another trivia tidbit offered was bars used to give away “free lunches” of salty salami, sardines and other salty snacks to encourage drinking. A few places have peanuts or chips. But even before Covid, I don’t remember seeing them since I was a student in Quebec, where supposedly some type of food HAD to be offered with drinks under certain circumstances.
That is, when was the last time you saw a “free lunch” offered? Is it legal? Why did the infamous Peel Pub have to offer food - was this just before a certain time of day?
To build on this point–
My family has lots of old books. One of them is a novel published in (I think) the 1880’s. The protagonist got trampled by a horse, or some such thing (it’s been a long time since I’ve read it). While in the hospital, he got addicted to morphine. Most of the novel is about his struggles with his addition, and how it affected his family.
Your story doesn’t add up. Addiction is better recognized today. But even in the 50s three hour business lunches were said to be commonplace, and people ignored but did not make a big deal about the executive everyone knew to avoid on Friday afternoons (according to an older business book, Managing, I enjoyed).
Long Day’s Journey into Night isn’t as familiar to modern mass audiences as, say, Game of Thrones, but it had a realistic depiction of drug addiction in 1912.
Readily available opiates, poisonous medicines, dangerous alcoholic beverages, tertiary syphilis, grief from multiple forms of everyday lethality, stress from boom and bust economics. Life was awful.
The Depression killed it. The lunch was worth much more than the price of a drink; it was offered solely because of the presumption - probably a good one - that people would buy many drinks. It was an early version of what today is called a “loss leader”. Get customers in and keep them there. A marketing axiom is that the longer people stay in a store the more money they spend.
Today’s world has happy hours instead.
One of the peripheral characters in “To Kill A Mockingbird” is a morphine addict.
When I was at community college in the late 1980s, we had to write an opinion paper about a social issue (abortion excluded for obvious reasons) and one of my classmates chose drug addiction. Just the nominal research she needed to do for that paper taught her that it was not a new problem, which was surprising to her.
Well one thing prohibition did was change the social drinking scene from saloon and "dancehall"s types of places to nightclubs and the modern dance clubs molded after the speakeasies and made “going out for a drink” more acceptable
And no prohibition and the jazz age didn’t decrease the divorce rates in fact many magazines and journals complained it actually increased them
Australian states enforced 6 pm closing of pubs and bars during the First World War, as a war workforce measure. This was only reversed after the Second World War. Early closing led to the phenomenon of the six o’clock swill, where men knocking off work at 5 had an hour to ingest as much beer as possible [wine and spirits were not common boozing drinks here in the 20th century]. Bars were extended to deal with the crush, and the walls of pubs were tiled to deal with the vomitory consequences.
We’ve never had Prohibition in the US sense.
Beat me to this observation. I suspect that Okrent was the primary author of the league’s annual preview/player rankings book, which was always very funny.
Also, ditto on his prohibition book; it was a great read.