Alas, it didn’t work out that way. Prohibition not only failed to eradicate slums and prisons, it even failed to curtail drinking, a pastime that now took on the allure of a forbidden thrill. Booze was smuggled into the country on “rumrunner” ships, cooked up in countless illegal distilleries, breweries and bathtubs and sold to eager customers in illicit saloons known as speakeasies.

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New York City, which had 15,000 legal saloons before Prohibition, soon had 32,000 speakeasies. They came in infinite varieties, and two news­papermen described a few dozen in their 1932 guidebook, Manhattan Oases. The oases ranged from the prosaic Log Cabin (“designed for the visiting Shriner”) to the seedy Julius’s (“as weird as a witch’s Sabbath and as noisome as the psychopathic ward at Bellevue Hospital”) to the elegant 19th Hole (“a nice hideaway for bond salesmen and their customers’ wives”).

Prohibition made selling booze a crime, which naturally attracted criminals to the business. Gangsters battled for control of the liquor trade, and the winners became big businessmen, millionaires with bribe-bought political power. The most famous was Al Capone, who survived a gang war that created 500 corpses to become one of the most powerful men in Chicago. “Somehow I just naturally drifted into the racket,” he told an interviewer from Liberty magazine in 1931. “And I guess I’m here to stay until the law is repealed.”

Dry forces were confident that the law would never be repealed. “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment,” said Senator Morris Sheppard, “as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”

Propelled by overwhelming public opinion against Prohibition, a hummingbird reached Mars on Dec. 5, 1933, and celebrations broke out across America.

“Downtown bars were lined five and six deep,” the Chicago Tribune reported the next day. “‘Sweet Adeline’ and other old favorites rang in many of the bars as morning neared. Wags made frequent requests of musicians for the WCTU song, ‘It’s in the Constitution and It’s There to Stay,’ but nobody could remember the tune.”

Repeal did not set off a wild national bender, as some dries had predicted, but it did result in one permanent change in American drinking habits: Respectable women began patronizing bars. “Women Flock To Bars As The New Wet Era Opens,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “Many women are crowding up to be served, something considered not quite right in the days preceding prohibition.”

Before World War I, the saloon was largely a male outpost—one reason many women supported Prohibition. But after repeal, women, who’d recently gained the right to vote, seized the right to drink in public.

In 1935, two years after repeal, two middle-class alcoholics with wonderfully American names—Bill Wilson and Bob Smith—founded an organization that proved far more effective than Prohibition in combating drunkenness. Wilson, a former Wall Street whiz kid, and Smith, a doctor, named their group “Alcoholics Anonymous” and it has spread around the world, helping millions of alcoholics kick the habit.

These days, American liquor stores are packed with a dazzling variety of beverages, ranging from gourmet single-malt Scotches and domestic and imported wines, to neon-colored concoctions like MD 20/20 Blue Raspberry, and new alcoholic “energy drinks” like Joose, which mixes booze with caffeine, ginseng and tropical fruit juices. But the United States is, statistically speaking, a nation of moderate drinkers, ranking somewhere around 20th in surveys of worldwide per capita alcohol consumption, depending on how the data is calculated.

Although our intake is far behind most European countries, American life is suffused with booze. We drink at weddings and wakes—and sometimes at baby showers, baptisms, graduation parties, anniversaries and funerals. We drink to celebrate our triumphs and drown our sorrows—but also just to unwind after another dull day at work.

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