On October 28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act, which banned alcohol in the United States. Sort of. We remember prohibition as the 13 year period of the 1920’s and 30’s when alcohol was illegal and Americans seeking a drink would turn to moonshiners and rum-runners, or brew their own bathtub gin and spend hours at their local speakeasy. While this is all true, there were plenty of loopholes in the Volstead Act that allowed for perfectly legal at-home alcohol creation, continued industrial manufacture, as well as unlimited private stocks of booze.
Written right into the language of the act was the ability for Americans to brew their own “fruit juices” at home with an alcohol content of up to 0.5%. To achieve this homemade wine, people started contacting vineyards to buy not wine, which was illegal to sell, but the grapes with which they could legally make their own wines. Enterprising vineyards started drying out the grapes and forming them into bricks, which could be easily combined with a prescribed amount of water to create a smooth-tasting wine. These bricks, however, were sold with a warning to “not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine." Despite the fact that their main product had been banned, American vineyards grew rapidly during the days of prohibition.
While wine and beer production had been outright banned, whiskey and other much stronger alcohols were permitted to be made. At the time, it was a regular occurrence for a physician to prescribe whiskey as a treatment, and many whiskey makers were allowed to make product to be sold for exclusively medical purposes when the buyer presented a legitimate prescription. It can be assumed that much like today’s medical marijuana, some doctors were giving out whiskey prescriptions for less-than-legitimate concerns. Additionally, the makers of industrial strength alcohol for scientific and industrial purposes continued yielding their denatured stocks, but with a nasty twist. The original denaturing process, which had been mandated by the government, required that industrial alcohol makers put bitter tasting and other noxious chemicals in their product to make it undrinkable. Well-resourced gangsters hired their own chemists during prohibition to reverse the denaturing process, making the industrial stuff potable for consumption. The government responded to this by adding deadly poisons to industrial alcohol stocks. The number of Americans killed by this intentionally government corrupted booze is estimated in the thousands.
Perhaps the biggest loophole, and one that only advantaged the wealthy, was that prohibition ruled out the sale and manufacture of alcohol, but not he consumption. With the law passed in October, but not in effect until January of the next year, there was plenty of time for rich Americans to buy up vast stocks of their favorite alcohols which they could quite legally consume after prohibition became active. Many notable Americans did just this, including the sitting President Woodrow Wilson, and even the incoming president Warren Harding, who had his alcohol collection moved into The White House along with his other belongings.
One thing can be certain of prohibition: banning alcohol did not make people stop drinking, and in fact, may have even increased the number of drinkers, and drinking-related injuries and fatalities. Between organized crime, speakeasies, and the number of loopholes in the law, it was fairly easy for thirsty Americans to get their hands on the strong stuff. But it was a more dangerous environment for consumption, with poisoned government swill making the rounds and mobsters made rich and powerful by illicit alcohol networks. It is truly amazing that prohibition was passed given how widely unpopular it was, but its unpopularity eventually caught up with it when the amendment was repealed just 13 years after it had been tacked on to the Constitution.
