The Prohibition Era: How America's 13-Year Alcohol Ban Created the Speakeasy

How the Prohibition era (1920 to 1933) created the speakeasy, from the Anti-Saloon League and Volstead Act to the 21 Club, Capone and repeal.

A Silverfox Studios Perspective ON

5 min read

^{THE NATIONWIDE ALCOHOL BAN OF 1920 TO 1933 AND THE HIDDEN BARS IT PUSHED UNDERGROUND}

Prohibition-era photograph of a No Intoxicating Liquor sign and barrels removed from a bar — A No Intoxicating Liquor sign and barrels of alcohol being removed from a bar during Prohibition.

The Prohibition era (1920 to 1933) was the period in which the United States banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The ban took effect on 17 January 1920 under the 18th Amendment and its enforcement law, the Volstead Act, and ended when ratification of the 21st Amendment was completed on 5 December 1933. Legal saloons, breweries and distilleries closed, and drinking moved into speakeasies: illicit bars entered by password or membership card. The Mob Museum estimates that New York alone had 32,000 at the height of Prohibition in the late 1920s. The word itself predates the ban: the New York Times reported its use around Pittsburgh in 1891. Since the 1990s, the format has returned in New York as a style of legal cocktail bar.

^{WHERE PROHIBITION CAME FROM: THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT AND THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE}

Large group of Woman's Christian Temperance Union members posing outside a building — Members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union posing outside a building. Image: State Historical Society of Missouri, via Ozark County Times

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Americans drank increasing amounts of distilled spirits from the 1790s to the early 1830s. The American Temperance Society, founded by Christian clergy in 1826, first urged abstinence from 'ardent spirits' and by the late 1830s called for total abstinence; it gained more than a million members. At least 14 states had adopted some form of prohibition by 1855, though many were repealed or weakened during the debates over slavery. Industrialisation and urban growth revived the movement after the Civil War. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1874, staged pray-ins outside businesses selling alcohol and, under its second leader, Frances Willard, pressed for compulsory temperance education in schools.

The organisation that turned the cause into federal law was the Anti-Saloon League, founded in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893 by the clergyman Howard Hyde Russell. It worked with Protestant churches and with both major parties, and the CRS identifies it as the organisation most responsible for the proposal and ratification of the 18th Amendment. Its lobbying and fundraising, run by its counsel Wayne B. Wheeler, targeted politicians at every level of government. The CRS also records that some League campaigns exploited First World War hostility towards German Americans and racism towards African Americans and other minorities.

^{THE 18TH AMENDMENT, THE VOLSTEAD ACT AND WHAT STAYED LEGAL}

Congress passed the 18th Amendment in December 1917, and it was ratified by the required three-quarters of the states in January 1919; the National Archives dates the ratified amendment to 16 January 1919. It prohibited the 'manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors', and its first section set the ban to begin one year after ratification, on 17 January 1920. Enforcement was set out in the National Prohibition Act of 28 October 1919, known as the Volstead Act after Andrew Volstead, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who championed it. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the act, and Congress overrode his veto. The act placed enforcement under the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in the Treasury Department.

Legal routes to alcohol remained. Breweries could make near beer of no more than 0.5 per cent alcohol by volume. Licensed doctors could prescribe whiskey, other spirits and wine, limited to one pint every 10 days. Clergy could make and sell wine for religious rituals, and a Treasury statement of October 1920 let a registered head of a family make 200 gallons of wine for family use, provided it was not sold or transported. Grape growers sold 'grape bricks', ostensibly for non-alcoholic juice; shops legally sold home-brewing equipment, and the Mob Museum estimates that Americans brewed 700 million gallons of beer at home in 1929. Small stills were sold to home distillers, who mixed high-proof alcohol with glycerin and juniper oil to make bathtub gin.

^{ENFORCING PROHIBITION: PROHIBITION AGENTS, IZZY AND MOE}

Agents pour seized liquor into a New York sewer as Commissioner John A. Leach watches — New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach (right) watching agents pour liquor into the sewer following a raid, c. 1920. Image: Library of Congress, via Britannica

The Internal Revenue Service created a Prohibition Unit to enforce the Volstead Act. Its agents were exempt from Civil Service examinations, which critics blamed for corruption. The government first funded 1,500 agents, rising to about 3,000 late in the era, on salaries of $1,200 to $3,000 a year. Cases ranged from organised smuggling to single sales: National Archives records show that James Dorsey of Lynn, Massachusetts, was indicted in July 1921 for selling half a pint of intoxicating liquor, and pleaded guilty. Federal agents took about 577,000 suspects into custody between 1920 and 1930.

Bribery was a constant problem. By late 1921 the unit had fired 100 agents in New York alone for taking bribes, and by 1930, 1,587 of its 17,816 employees had been dismissed for offences including bribery and perjury; that year it moved to the Justice Department as the Bureau of Prohibition. The best-known agents were Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, a former cigar shop owner and boxing manager. Einstein made more than 4,900 arrests, sometimes 30 in a night, in disguises that included a woman, a Texas oil man and a football player, and the pair posed as firemen, gravediggers and gas meter inspectors. Their superiors ended the partnership in 1925, citing the publicity it attracted.

^{WHAT WAS A SPEAKEASY? THE NAME, THE PASSWORD AND THE 21 CLUB}

Painting of a man and a woman seated at a speakeasy table — Speakeasy, painting by Guy Pène du Bois, 1925. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A speakeasy was an illicit bar. The Mob Museum explains the name by the need for patrons to speak quietly when giving the password at the door, so that police would not overhear; other names were blind pig and gin joint. CityLab traces the word to a story published in the New York Times on 6 July 1891 about Kate Hester, a hotelkeeper who ran an unlicensed saloon in McKeesport, near Pittsburgh, after state law had raised liquor licence fees so high that the trade was close to banned. According to the story, she told rowdy customers to 'speak easy, boys' to avoid attracting the police. CityLab notes that the tale may be apocryphal.

New York's speakeasies ranged from a Bowery dive called O'Leary's and Chumley's in the West Village to the Stork Club on West 58th Street, run by Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger. In Harlem, liquor was also sold in 'hooch joints' inside apartments. Entry depended on a password, and some speakeasies issued membership cards to identify genuine, possibly dues-paying, members. Owners paid low-paid police officers to look the other way, to join them for a regular drink or to warn them of planned federal raids.

The 21 Club, at 21 West 52nd Street, shows how far concealment could go. According to the Mob Museum, its owners installed a camouflaged door, a secret wine cellar behind a false wall and a bar that could drop bottles down a chute into the cellar to hide the liquor during a raid. The club's predecessor was the Puncheon Club on West 49th Street, a speakeasy favoured by the writers Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, which moved to the 21 Club's address in 1930. In Washington, DC, the Krazy Kat was a speakeasy hangout for the city's bohemian crowd in the early 1920s.

^{WOMEN, JAZZ AND GANGSTERS IN THE SPEAKEASY}

Young 1920s jazz musicians posing with banjo, saxophone and trombone — Young jazz musicians of the 1920s posing with a banjo, saxophone and trombone.

Speakeasies changed who drank in public. The Mob Museum notes that organised criminals welcomed women as customers and that men and women drank together, which had not been usual before Prohibition. Restaurants that served alcohol offered table service to attract women who were uncomfortable sitting at a bar. Competition between speakeasies created demand for live entertainment: jazz bands were common, and the grander clubs added ballroom dance floors. The best known was the Cotton Club on 142nd Street in Harlem, owned by the gangster Owney Madden, which presented African American performers to a wealthy white audience.

Gangsters supplied, owned or protected much of this trade. The Mob Museum estimates that Al Capone earned $60 million a year in the late 1920s by supplying beer and liquor to the thousands of speakeasies he controlled. Federal agents targeting his liquor business were led by Eliot Ness, a 26-year-old University of Chicago graduate who handpicked nine agents, all under 30. In June 1931 a grand jury indicted 69 people, Capone among them, on 5,000 Volstead Act counts. Prosecutors held those charges in reserve and convicted him of federal income tax evasion instead; he was sentenced to 11 years and fined $50,000.

^{THE WICKERSHAM COMMISSION AND THE 21ST AMENDMENT: HOW PROHIBITION ENDED}

Marchers carry Beer for Taxation banners along a Manhattan avenue, 1932 — A 'beer for taxation' rally led by Mayor James J. Walker makes its way through mid-Manhattan, New York, 14 May 1932. Image: AP Photo

In 1929 Congress created a commission at President Herbert Hoover's request, chaired by the former Attorney General George Wickersham, to study enforcement and whether repeal was needed. Its report, released in January 1931, found that federal agencies had been badly organised and inadequate from 1920 to 1926. Seizures of stills had risen from 32,000 in 1920 to 261,000 in 1928, and the bureau had 1,786 agents against a recommended minimum of 3,000. One commissioner, Henry W. Anderson, wrote: 'We have prohibition in law but not in fact.' The commission still opposed repeal and the return of the saloon.

Opposition was growing outside government. In April 1929 Pauline Sabin, the first woman on the board of the Republican National Committee and until then a supporter of Prohibition, resigned to found the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, which had more than a million members by 1932. After the crash of October 1929, many believed repeal would bring jobs and tax revenue. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Hoover in 1932, and on 22 March 1933 signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, legalising 3.2 per cent beer and light wine from 7 April. Congress had proposed the 21st Amendment in February 1933. To stop dry legislatures blocking it, ratification went to state conventions. Ratification was completed on 5 December 1933, the first time the Constitution had been amended to repeal an earlier amendment. States that wished to stay dry could do so.

^{THE SPEAKEASY REVIVAL IN NEW YORK: FROM ANGEL'S SHARE TO PDT}

Time Out New York traces the city's speakeasy-concept resurgence to Angel's Share, an East Village bar, in 1993. Milk & Honey followed on 31 December 1999, in a former mahjong parlour at 134 Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. Writing in Punch, the drinks writer Robert Simonson records that it had no sign, no menu and no published telephone number, and that its founder, Sasha Petraske, was at first its only bartender. After a customer bothered two women, Petraske wrote rules of conduct that hung in the bathroom.

Simonson calls Milk & Honey the most influential bar of the current century. It served classic drinks such as the Old Fashioned, Manhattan and Tom Collins, and popularised jiggers, large ice, chilled glassware and fresh juices; Petraske died in 2015, aged 42. PDT, which opened in 2007, made the hidden entrance the main event: guests reach the East Village bar through a telephone booth inside the hot dog shop Crif Dogs, and Time Out calls it the platonic ideal of the form. A new wave followed in 2021 and 2022, including Nothing Really Matters, entered through a door in a subway station.

^{PROHIBITION BAR: A SEMI-HIDDEN BAR AT MANDARIN ORIENTAL SHENZHEN}

Prohibition Bar (MO Bar) at Mandarin Oriental Shenzhen — Prohibition Bar, Mandarin Oriental Shenzhen

Prohibition Bar is the MO Bar of Mandarin Oriental Shenzhen, on the 79th floor, with interiors designed by Silverfox Studios and completed in 2022. It is described as a semi-hidden bar that recreates the intrigue of Prohibition. As with the speakeasies of the 1920s, the bar takes some finding: guests take a separate lift from Level 78 and walk a long corridor to reach it. The corridor is a storage-style passage with aged, hand-painted liquor adverts, crates of bottles and exposed ductwork.

In the 1920s the 21 Club hid its stock behind a false cellar wall and could send bottles down a chute during a raid; at Prohibition Bar, crates of bottles line the arrival passage in plain view. The main bar has a long bar top with an integrated DJ booth and cocktail station, set among distressed timber planks and steel beams that give the room a warehouse feel. The lounge is furnished with Chesterfield sofas and iron screens, and looks out over the Shenzhen skyline.