Prohibition History - Repeal
 "With the [Prohibition] Repeal, approximately one million people went back to work, making wine, beer and distilled spirits, bottles and barrels; transporting, selling and serving and advertising it. Innumerable industries indirectly connected with liquor, such as printing, building and machinery-making, received a sharp stimulus. With Repeal also, sorely needed tax money started to roll into the public coffers. Since 1933 more than two billion dollars in liquor taxes has gone into national, state and local treasuries..." "Americans on December 5 [1943] will look backwards to a dramatic night 10 years ago - many will be surprised that a whole decade has passed since the nation abandoned Prohibition... In the early '30s, Congressman LaGuardia found authorities siphoning an estimated million dollars a day in graft from bootleggers. Cost of the 'Noble Experiment' to the government hovered around a billion dollars a year. In the last 14 Prohibition years, the public was figured to have spent more than $36,000,000,000 for bootlegging and smuggled liquor!" During the summer of 1932, Democratic Senator Carter Glass (1858 - 1946) turned heads and dropped jaws on Capitol Hill when he introduced a piece of legislation that was intended to water-down the 18th Amendment. Glass, a devoted enemy of the swizzle stick, proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would continue to outlaw saloons nationally while permitting hootch to flow freely throughout the wet states - and cut off booze in the dry. Having suffered the scourge of the noble experiment for over ten years, Dudley Cammet Lunt, an attorney, penned this essay about how the states could be done with that Federal edict:
"In discussing Article V in The Federalist Papers [Alexander Hamilton] said: 'We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.'" This cartoon was created to mark April 7, 1933 - the day real beer was once again permitted to be sold across the country; from sea to shinning sea, one million barrels of the amber liquid was consumed by the citizens of a grateful nation.
Click here to see how weird the first car radios looked.
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