It was 1922, and a group of young friends decided to play the 1920s version of SimCity or Civilization. They built a city out of sticks and boards in the garden (the girls, of course, pretending to be men because women can't do construction) and assigned roles--mayor, pastor, and so forth. But then Ray announced that HE was going to be the SALOON keeper.

Unthinkable! His friends threw him out of the game.

So Ray, still wanting to play, quietly decided that he was going to be an out of business saloon keeper...and built a mock brewery.

His friends threw him out of the game again, this time with a lecture. A long lecture. A lecture that made Ray cry.

...And decide that instead of a saloon, he was going to build a very big church.

Of course this didn't really happen. It's a 1922 children's pamphlet from the Anti-Saloon League. But it's my favorite piece of Prohibition propaganda because it's aimed at children. Yet has no qualms about telling children a story in which the reaction of a once-legal alcohol salesman to Prohibition is...to sell alcohol illegally.

Temperance crusaders weren't worried about putting dangerous ideas in children's minds. Even kids knew alcohol consumption and sale was still going down.

But looks can be deceiving. And in this case, they were in pop culture at the time, and they are in legend today. Obviously we can't know how much alcohol was sold, how much of that was drunk, and how much private distilling occurred. Nevertheless, Prohibition did have a marked effect on drinking in America.

In a working paper from 1991, however, Jeffrey Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel gathered data from reported deaths by cirrhosis, reported deaths due to alcoholism, reported hospital admissions for "alcohol-related psychosis," and arrests for public drunkenness. By using all four (admittedly problematic) measurements instead of just one, they argue, they can calculate the decrease in drinking during Prohibition. Towards the beginning of the period, alcohol consumption dropped by two-thirds; by the end, it was back up to 60-70% of pre-Amendment levels.

I suspect (and so to Miron and Zwiebel, although for different reasons) that both of these numbers are too optimistic on the side of the anti-alcohol bunch. Straightaway, they're measurements of alcohol abuse, not use. But if anything, the difference between them points to the decent effectiveness of the 18th Amendment's first years.

There are plenty of reasons why it seems like Prohibition barely worked at all, besides modern cynicism ("My drinking club has a D&D problem"). The ongoing propaganda campaigns are pretty minor on the list. Widespread media hang-wringing over WOMEN DRINKING IN PUBLIC NOW OMG because some speakeasies were infamously co-ed (not, however, the ones who advertised openly in the newspapers of Ivy League colleges) was a big one.

The number of federal agents specifically tasked with hunting down bootleggers was another, regardless of whether they were actually doing their jobs. Some establishments rather famously managed to stay open because authorities looked the other way.

Anheuser-Busch stayed in business partially due to brilliant business management, partially due to moving into the non-alcohol market, and partially due to selling very, very, very diluted beer. And also because, well, because New Orleans existed.

But the biggest reason we have such an impression of weaksauce Prohibition all along? Glamour. The people writing accounts of Prohibition, of Prohibition violations--and the people of whom the stories are told--are the glamourous, the famous...the rich.

Obviously my favorite example here are the people who literally sailed--and for the first time, flew--to literal other countries to drink. If the alcohol didn't come to them (and increasingly, of course, it did), they would go to the alcohol.

Or go with the alcohol. Cruise ships could sell drinks, and the 1920s were the era when white-people tourism of the tropics increased dramatically and became a racialized status symbol.

But you can also talk about the--publicized--closures of high-class restaurants. Their former patrons took their business for a whole lot more than just pre-dinner cocktails to speakeasies whose owners could afford to pay premiums for smuggled liquorous liquids.

Middle and lower class people certainly continued to drink, of course. Middle and lower class people drank things that put them in the hospital (or worse) for far more things than "alcohol-related psychosis." Could I interest you in a "Coroners' Cocktail", perhaps?

And yes, of course there were downscale speakeasies that we might think of as Saloons Redux. Very downscale, hence the dangers. But we're definitely talking about new establishments here, not pre-existing grime-crime backrooms. (Closure of saloons was actually the primary target of prohibition crusaders in the 1900s and 1910s). And given that their purposes were specifically drinking, I'd be really interested in a study of the social lives of non drinkers during this decade, versus today's bars where we've got our choice of hot wings or...hotter wings.

This is where I think Miron and Zwiebel's stats don't cover enough--I rather figure that rates of seeking medical care (cirrhosis, deaths from alcoholism, &c) differed significantly among different class and location populations.

In fact, "because it's illegal now" had basically nothing to do with why people drank less. Even temperance activists knew it. What good was a law, what good was a Constitutional amendment, if the public at large cared more about alcohol than about someone else's moral standards?