Prohibition

18 Pages 4418 Words

oons to savor the last day of legal alcohol. Many hotels and restaurants held elaborate, funeral-like events. At the Park Avenue Hotel in New York, a farewell party was given where the walls were draped in black cloth, the tablecloths, napkins, utensils, and glasses were black, and an orchestra played funeral dirges through the night.1 The Cafe de Paris held a successful Cinderella Ball and "when dawn came, there wasn't enough salable alcohol left in the place to jingle a six-year-old child."2
At the same time, the prohibitionist, or "dry" citizens gathered in churches and meeting halls to hold prayer vigils and to give thanks for the end of the saloon era. Many dry leaders gave enthusiastic speeches full of confidence and hope for the future. Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas stated that "there is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."3 Billy Sunday, the famed evangelist, said that "the reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."4
However, nearly fourteen years later, on December 5, 1933, Prohibition ended when Utah became the necessary thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment which repealed the Eighteenth. The reason for this fairly rapid turnaround in the legal scheme of things was because of the change in public opinion. This changing of the collective American mind was the basis of the reversal, and the fact that some of the reasons influencing them were invalid does not matter. In fact, Prohibition was a success as far as improving the state of the lives of the middle and lower classes. The fact that the United States was in its most successful and opulent period during Prohibition mattered...