What is a speakeasy? It was a bar where alcoholic drinks were illegally sold during the era of prohibition.
From 1920 to 1933, alcohol was illegal in the United States of America. This was brought into law by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment says, “After one year from the ratification of this article, the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” The 13-year period was called “prohibition” and it was a peculiar time for the USA.
The movement for prohibition started in the 1820s and it was spurred on by a huge growth in Protestantism. This period was called the Second Great Awakening and there was something of a religious fervor taking over. It appears to have started in reaction to the growth of science and rationalism that was spreading around the world following the Industrial Revolution. Church congregations grew exponentially and religious ideas started to spread through communities. Among these was the idea of temperance. The ideas spread and in 1838, Massachusetts banned the sale of alcohol in amounts less than 15 gallons. It only survived two years but then, in 1846, Maine banned all alcohol. A few other states followed, but prohibition was still far away. Women were heavily involved in campaigning for prohibition because they saw alcohol as the main reason why families fell apart. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union campaigned extensively.
By the start of World War 1, several states had banned alcohol, but the push was given when Congress voted to ban alcohol through the war. The reasoning was that there was a greater need to use the grain for food instead of alcohol. And this was the initial reasoning behind the 18th amendment. The 18th amendment was ratified in 1919 and went into law in 1920.
So, what is a speakeasy? Policing the alcohol ban was extremely difficult. It is not like the ban on drugs because it is extremely easy to make alcohol in pretty much any location. An illegal market in alcohol sprang up and speakeasies were illegal bars where people could go to drink alcohol. Gangsters like Al Capone rose to fill the need in the market and they imported alcohol from Canada or made it themselves. People who couldn’t make or buy alcohol went to speakeasies to drink it. Most of the speakeasies were operated by organized crime because it made sense to sell the alcohol they were importing, meaning they controlled every part of the process.
The word “speakeasy” comes from smuggling parlance in Britain from 1823. A “speak softly shop” was a smuggler’s house and a place where you could buy illegal things. You were supposed to speak softly about it in town so no one else heard. This evolved into a “speak easy house” which had the same meaning but was more commonly used for an unlicensed alcohol shop. The word came into America by 1880 and when prohibition started it was used for the illegal alcohol shops.
People had become tired of prohibition by the 1930s. Alcohol was too expensive for working-class people and there were far more alcohol related injuries and deaths because people were drinking homemade moonshine. Violence from organized crime had also risen drastically. Far more money was being spent on the police and prisons. The United States was in the middle of the Great Depression and states didn’t have the money to spend. They were also losing enormous amounts of tax money that they would have earned from legal alcohol sales. On top of that, the temperance movement had had its day and was seen as being far to fundamentalist. There was growing demand to recall prohibition, which Franklin D Roosevelt did when he was elected in 1932. The last state to fully repeal prohibition was Mississippi in 1966.
As a interesting extra piece of information, a lot of the cocktails that we enjoy today were invented during the time of prohibition. Before prohibition, cocktails emphasized the taste of the alcohol they were made with. During prohibition, a lot of the illegal alcohol tasted pretty bad and a lot of cocktails were invented to mask the taste of it. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Rachel Claire: https://www.pexels.com/photo/stylish-interior-of-bar-in-restaurant-5490965/
Sources
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/08/16/what-is-a-speakeasy/10302088002/
https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/prohibition
https://www.loc.gov/rr/program//bib/ourdocs/images/18thamendment.pdf