1919: Chapter Six–A Year That Changed America

As food historian Michael Pollan has written, “Virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which literally thousands of gallons of cider were made every year.”

A few of the saloons were elegant establishments, but most were dirty, boisterous, rowdy places that became extraordinarily popular, meeting the need, as one group of Washington State citizens put it, “for fellowship, or amusement and recreation.”

Many saloons also had the only washing facilities or public toilets in the neighborhood. But the biggest amenity of all was the free lunch that almost every saloon offered in order to lure customers and increase the sale of beer.

The typical lunch menu varied, but all had one thing in common: whatever the bill of fare, it was dominated by foods salty enough to make customers as thirsty as possible for another beer.

As the historians of the Library of Congress have stated, “Of all the liquor haters stationed along the steep and twisting path from temperance to Prohibition, none quite hated it with Carrie Nation’s vigor or attacked it with her rapturous glee.”

As Nation’s fame spread, songs were written about her and reporters vied with one another to interview her.

By this time, getting arrested was routine for Nation, who never remained in jail long after regaling her keepers with stories of her wild escapades.

In the weeks between these two dates, frenzied Americans went to great lengths to obtain as much liquor as possible before the act went into effect.

Those who had stored their supplies carted their haul into private residences in any conveyance they could.

In order to get their liquor, men and women took advantage of every loophole in the law.

But it was one of the clearest indicators that, during Prohibition, people would go to any length to get their wine, beer, or liquor. And the different ways in which illegal liquor was smuggled into people’s houses and illegal drinking establishments were positively ingenious.

It seemed that the fishermen's lucrative bootlegging activities might be in jeopardy, until a mechanic named Jimmy McGhee, who lived near Southampton, New York, saved the day for the smugglers.

Along with allowing passengers to flout Prohibition and drink to their heart’s content, the “booze cruises” were the precursors of the luxury cruise business.

Along with allowing passengers to flout Prohibition and drink to their heart’s content, the “booze cruises” were the precursors of the luxury cruise business.

Traveling at high speeds, often in the dead of night, to evade authorities, drivers became adept at navigating winding roads and making hairpin turns.

Of all these ways, none came to symbolize this national evasion of the anti-drinking laws more dramatically than a brand-new and illegal type of drinking establishment that replaced the closed-down once-legal saloons.

While speakeasies became enormously popular everywhere, nowhere did they spread in more profusion than in New York City.

In order to confuse any agents that might be inside, you never used the word “liquor.” Instead you used a code word such as “coffee varnish” or “white mule” or “horse liniment” or “monkey rum” or “panther sweat” or “rot gut” or “tarantula juice” when ordering your drink.

The African American magazine The Messenger described the racially mixed speakeasy as “America’s most democratic institution...[where] we see white and colored people mix freely. They dance together not only in the sense of both races being on the floor at the same time, but in the still more poignant and significant sense of white and colored people dancing as respective partners.”

The African American magazine The Messenger described the racially mixed speakeasy as “America’s most democratic institution...[where] we see white and colored people mix freely. They dance together not only in the sense of both races being on the floor at the same time, but in the still more poignant and significant sense of white and colored people dancing as respective partners.”

Much to his chagrin, it was discovered that the speaker of the United States House of Representatives owned and operated an illegal still.

On a congressman’s yearly salary of $7,500, Representative John Langley, in a three-year period, deposited $115,000 in his bank account. He obtained the windfall by arranging the release of a million gallons of liquor to bootleggers in New York.

At exactly the same time, another group of criminals stole four casks of grain alcohol from a government warehouse.

One of the main reasons it failed was because the federal government never allotted anywhere near enough resources to make it work.

To make matters worse, despite the amount of smuggling that took place almost from the day Prohibition began, Congress did not add any meaningful appropriations to the Coast Guard’s budget for the first five years that Prohibition was in effect.

Another reason why Prohibition never met the expectation of its proponents was that, from the beginning, those in charge of prosecuting offenders of the act were overwhelmed by the number of cases they were forced to handle.

None of the great boons and [benefits] that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass.

Hotels and restaurants became mobbed with patrons enjoying the first legal drink they had had in what seemed ages.

At first, fierce arguments and confrontations arose between gay rights activists and public officials when proposals were made to make it compulsory for the names of all persons infected with HIV to be reported to public health registries and for all those suspected of having AIDS to be tested for the disease.

But in a nation where the organized crime that impending Prohibition had spawned had inserted itself into almost every area of American life, even baseball would not be spared.

Although, according to most accounts, the Reds never suspected the White Sox were throwing the series, the Sox, beginning with Game 1, played well below their usual standard, with pitchers known for their control walking batters at key times, fielders celebrated for their defensive skills making errors when they counted the most, and some of the leading hitters in all of baseball mired in batting slumps.

According to the Chicago Herald, after Shoeless Joe Jackson confessed to taking part in the fix, a young boy, heartbroken over the downfall of his hero, came up to his idol and in plaintive tones pleaded, “It ain’t so, Joe, is it?”

1906 JUNE 30: President Theodore Roosevelt signed both the Meat Inspection Act, ensuring that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions, and the Pure Food and Drug Act, banning the production, sale, or trafficking of adulterated or mislabeled food and drug products.

2005 AUGUST 8: President George W. Bush signs the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which provides tax incentives and loan guarantees to companies to encourage the development of alternative energy sources.

The twelve months that comprised 1919 were extraordinary. One year made momentous not only by the number of vital and transformative events and developments that took place, but by the fact that almost all of them were inexorably connected.