Prohibition: When America Went Dry

On January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect, and the country that had invented the cocktail made it illegal. What followed was not thirteen years of sobriety but thirteen years of the most creatively anarchic drinking in American history — and when Prohibition ended in 1933, the cocktail emerged transformed.

The 18th Amendment

How It Happened

The temperance movement had been building for a century before Prohibition became law. The Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, had methodically lobbied state and federal legislators. Their argument was partly moral, partly practical: the saloon was a site of working-class vice, domestic abuse, and political corruption. Brewery owners, many of them German immigrants, became particular targets during World War I, when anti-German sentiment gave the temperance movement a patriotic edge.

The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January 1919 and implemented a year later, prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act defined "intoxicating" as anything over 0.5% alcohol — a threshold that made nearly everything illegal. Sacramental wine and medicinal whiskey were exempted, leading to a remarkable boom in the number of Americans who suddenly discovered urgent spiritual and medical needs.

What Was Lost

The immediate casualties were the hotel bars, the saloons, and the professional bartenders who staffed them. Many of the finest bartenders in the country packed their kits and emigrated. Harry Craddock, who would become the head bartender at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London and publish the legendary Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930, was one of them. Ada Coleman, already at the Savoy before Prohibition, watched her American counterparts arrive and set to work. Golden Age ended not just for America but because America's talent left.

Speakeasy Culture

The Underground Bar

A speakeasy was an illegal drinking establishment, the name derived from the instruction to "speak easy" — quietly — when ordering, lest you attract unwanted attention. By 1925, New York City was estimated to have more than 30,000 of them. They ranged from filthy basement operations serving bathtub gin to elegant supper clubs with full orchestras and famous clientele.

The "21" Club in Manhattan, which opened in 1922, maintained a wine cellar behind a hidden door operated by a hidden mechanism. Police raids became almost routine, and proprietors developed elaborate systems to dispose of evidence: bar tops that tilted to send bottles sliding into catch basins, false walls, and tunnel networks beneath city blocks.

Bathtub Gin and the Art of Disguise

The quality of Prohibition liquor ranged from adequate (pre-Prohibition stocks held by individuals and institutions) to actively dangerous (industrial alcohol redistilled by organized crime). "Bathtub gin" — neutral spirits flavored with juniper oil and glycerin — was ubiquitous. It tasted harsh, sharp, and nothing like the London dry gins of the pre-Prohibition era.

This is where the cocktail as a concealment technology came into its own. If your base spirit was harsh and chemical, you added things: sugar, citrus, liqueur, grenadine, anything to disguise it. The Cosmopolitan's distant ancestor, the Long Island Iced Tea, and dozens of other drinks that seem designed to hide the alcohol they contain all owe something to Prohibition-era necessity. Sweetness and Acidity became tools of camouflage.

Cocktail Innovation Under the Ban

What Prohibition Invented

Not all of Prohibition's cocktail legacy is about concealment. Some genuine innovations emerged from the period. Rum ran freely from Cuba and the Caribbean, barely interrupted by the ban. American drinkers discovered the Daiquiri, the Mojito, and dozens of other rum-based drinks through trips to Havana — Ernest Hemingway being the most famous such tourist.

In New York, the speakeasy's mixed clientele — women now drank in public for the first time in respectable numbers, gay men and straight men shared the same illicit space — created social conditions that changed what cocktails meant culturally. Drinking had always been a somewhat segregated activity; Prohibition's illegality was a great equalizer.

The Clover Club and Women's Drinking

The Clover Club — gin, lemon, grenadine, egg white — predates Prohibition slightly, originating at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia around 1896. But it became associated with the Prohibition era partly because its complex, fruity, frothy character appealed to the new class of women drinkers entering bars for the first time. The Dry Shake technique, used to build the egg-white foam, was understood and practiced before Prohibition; the drink's popularity during the era helped preserve it.

Repeal

December 5, 1933

The Twenty-First Amendment, repealing Prohibition, was ratified on December 5, 1933 — a date still celebrated as Repeal Day by cocktail enthusiasts. The repeal was not driven by a sudden embrace of drinking's virtues but by economic desperation: the Great Depression had begun in 1929, and the federal government needed alcohol tax revenue. The argument was not that Prohibition was wrong but that the country could not afford it.

What returned was not the Golden Age. Many of the pre-Prohibition bartenders were dead or retired. Their recipe knowledge had been partially preserved in books published abroad — Craddock's Savoy Cocktail Book, Hugo Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1916) — but American bar culture had been interrupted for thirteen years. The cocktails that emerged post-Repeal were often rougher, simpler, and more reliant on soda water and sweet mixers than their Golden Age predecessors. The recovery of the Golden Age's sophistication would take another six decades and a craft revival that no one in 1933 could have anticipated.