Myths of the Golden Era -- Exploded!

[LizzieMaine]

That's a difficult question to answer definitively, because there's no way to know for sure who was drinking how much when there was no way to keep official statistics during Prohibition. But there's a way to come up with a pretty reasonable guess.

Records exist for per-capita alcohol consumption both before and after Prohibition, and they show that in 1919 Americans consumed 1.96 gallons of alcohol per person. No records exist for 1920-1933, but they were resumed in 1934 and show per capita consumption at 0.97 of a gallon per person. That's a pretty dramatic drop from what it had been before the Noble Experiment --but if the Boardwalk Empire "everybody was boozing it up" image were true, you'd expect just the opposite, wouldn't you? It wasn't until 1942 that per capita alcohol consumption was back at pre-Prohibition levels. Whether this is due to the Depression or the lingering effects of the Volstead era or a combination is anyone's guess.

[Shangas]

I seem to recall from a book I read (several years ago) that during Prohibition, incidents of drunk-and-disorderly behaviour in...New York City I think it was...went up by 25%. Or I might be wrong.

[LizzieMaine]

There are a lot of random figures floating around the internet on such things -- I've seen citations for drunk-and-disorderly *dropping* nationwide by 50 percent, but it's difficult to trace these figures to their source and thereby determine if they're legitimate.

One thing I did find is this article from the American Journal of Public Health, which includes some very interesting statistics on cirrhosis of the liver pre-and-post Prohibition, which would suggest chronic alcoholism dropped significantly during the period. The article also notes that 42 percent of Americans surveyed in a 1939 poll were completely abstinent from alcohol -- by comparison, only 33 percent of Americans today abstain. Clearly there's a side to Prohibition which hasn't been told.

[Salty O'Rourke]

Related to this, I think there's another myth here, possibly. That everyone in 1920s U.S.A. was dying of dehydration from Prohibition. Was there such a huge drinking population in the U.S. as we're generally led to believe? I mean I guess there must've been, granted that speakeasys, booze-cruises and so-forth, were doing so wel, but did THAT many people drink THAT often, as we're generally led to believe from history & gangster-movies?

Prohibition changed the way alcohol was sold and consumed in this country. Before 1920, saloons catered almost exclusively to men, and American men consumed a LOT of booze. According to Ken Burns' excellent documentary "Prohibition", by 1830 the average American over the age of 15 consumed the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey per year - that's three times today's average. This persisted more or less unabated until the early 1900s. Alcoholism was rampant and was seen as a direct threat to the welfare of wives and children, and when the federal government moved from taxing alcohol to the income tax as its main source of revenue, the dry movement took off. Prohibition drove drinking underground and helped make it a social activity enjoyed by both genders. After repeal the men-only drinking establishments never returned and the per capita consumption of spirits declined.

[Stanley Doble]

Re: the effect of Prohibition on drinking. I have only seen one book that attempted to track down the facts about the effects of Prohibition. That was Booze by James H. Gray.

His research revealed that the law was obeyed for the most part, at least in western Canada where he did his research. And that the effects were almost entirely positive. If you would like to know the truth about prohibition I suggest you read his book.

On the subject of arrest for drunkenness. Before Prohibition a drunk had to commit some outrageous behavior such as slugging a cop or passing out in the middle of the street to be arrested. After Prohibition the smell of alcohol or possession of a teaspoon full of liquor in a flask was grounds for an arrest. So yes, the number of arrests went down drastically but the amount of drunkenness went down even more.

So why do so many people believe the opposite? I put it down to newspaper publicity. Given a choice between 2 stories "5000 husbands did not get drunk, 5000 wives not beaten last Saturday night" or " 20 arrested in speakeasy raid" which do you think they would go for? Plus the fact that almost all reporters were drinkers themselves.Newspaperman H.L. Mencken said that when he started working as a reporter around 1900 he only knew of 2 reporters on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States who did not drink, and one of them was considered insane. In the 1940s columnist Walter Winchell was pointed out as a curiosity, a newspaperman who never drank alcohol, although he drank up to 20 cups of coffee a day.

Another thing that bothers me is the number of people who still believe WW2 ended the Depression. Hogwash, it was over by 1934, 8 years before the US entered WW2.

I was surprised myself. I read the same books and articles you read. It was only when I read some books and magazine articles published in the thirties that I found it out. One that struck me was a description of a party right after Repeal, at which the celebrants wore paper hats with funny mottoes like "It's hell when your wife is a widow" and "Wasn't the depression awful?"

Then I did some research and found out the US economy held up pretty well through 1930, bottomed in 1931 and 32, began recovering in 1933 and was back on track in 1934.

By 1936 the recovery was so strong, the government put the brakes on the economy fearing another "boom and bust" cycle. This resulted in the "Roosevelt Recession" of 1937 and 38.

[Espee]

" If 1.2 million people were "excited" by WOTW, that amounts to less than one per cent of the total population -- and by no stretch of the imagination can that be considered a nationwide panic. Cantril's estimate includes everyone who "reacted" to the broadcast, whether they picked up the phone to call a neighbor or ran screaming into the street -- so the number of people who took the latter extreme would be substantially less than one percent of the total population."

One thing about it, if you're going to panic and head for the hills, it's nice if the roads are clear of the 99% of people who are uninformed or unconcerned!
Not many were in the habit of listening to Mercury Theater-- but they were mostly Smart People, right?

[Stearmen]

I remember talking to a couple of old Doctors back in the 70s, and they told me that when there was some one in the 1920s and 30s dying of lung cancer, they would get calles to come in from all the surrounding state because it might be the only time in their careers that they would see this rare phenomenon. WWI Was when cigarets became more wide spread, and WWII really put them in most houses. The 50s through the early 80s were the hay day for smoking, even yours truly took up the nasty habit, quite in the late 70s. On a side note, the American Revolution and our Founding Fathers was fuelled by coffee, hence The Age Of Enlightenment. Before then, most city dwellers went around with at least a buzz thanks to beer, even children. The water was so bad, there wasn't much choice! It was said, the Pilgrims landed some where neer Plymouth rock because they ran out of beer!

[HodgePodge]

I might be jumping in where I don't belong, but after prohibition was repealed were there not areas that remained "dry" that could have had an influence on the lower per capita consumption? I would hope that someone would have stopped and said "hey, wait, of course that person isn't drinking in 1934, it's still illegal where they live!"

edit: "reply with quote" still isn't working for me. :S

[Stearmen]

That the 20s and 30s were strictly the Jazz Age!

[Flicka]

. On a side note, the American Revolution and our Founding Fathers was fuelled by coffee, hence The Age Of Enlightenment. Before then, most city dwellers went around with at least a buzz thanks to beer, even children. The water was so bad, there wasn't much choice! It was said, the Pilgrims landed some where neer Plymouth rock because they ran out of beer!

I don't know much about the Prohibition, but I do know the 18th century, and so I must object to the above. First, the 'Age of Enlightenment' isn't an American phenomenon. Exactly what it was or if it even existed is up for debate, but generally it is taken to mean the questioning of established political and scientific theories that had hitherto been taken as 'truth', usually by the application of logic (which still hailed back to Aristotle) and the application of empirism. Thus, such diverse things as secularism, smallpox inoculation and a general spread of ideas of the 'Rights of Man' are often clumped together. You can quite often see Voltaire mentioned side by side with Linneaus and Mary Wollstonecraft when the Age is discussed.

All in all, the 18th century was probably one of the hardest drinking periods in history. In England, it was the time of the 'Gin Craze', when gin was sold by the pint in pubs so cheaply that the infamous slogan was 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence.' While the coffee houses of London are often mentioned as playing a part in the spread of the liberal ideas behind the American Revolution, that's because they were places where people gathered to read the papers and discuss politics, not because the frequenters never drank anything but coffee. There were, in English politics, a faction of more puritanical liberalists (most often Dissenters) but many of the most liberal activists were hard drinkers. John Wilkes and Fox naturally spring to mind, but if you look at someone like William Pitt, the fact that he was a 'five bottle man' was generally counted in his favour rather than the opposite. Here, people drank like never before or after and that brought us confessional freedom and the world's first Freedom of Press Act.

18th century myth busted?