100 years of the dry law and the birth of modern cocktails
In January 1920, the Congress of the United States of America approved the Eighteenth Amendment or Volstead Law, better known throughout the world as Dry Law or Prohibition, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, distribution and importation of alcoholic beverages of all kinds.. This law was promoted by the citizen movements that advocated the prohibition of alcohol, since they considered it the source of all the ills of society at the time.
The Dry Law contemplated some exceptions, such as in the case of doctors who could prescribe to their patients the use of alcoholic beverages as a remedy or that of religious acts, such as wine in the case of Christian priests and in Jewish rituals. of the Sabbath.
How could it be otherwise, the Dry Law was controversial from the beginning. Many citizens installed plates in favor of prohibition with the slogan “Uphold”, while others did so with messages against such as “Repeal 18 th Amendment”. On January 16, 1920, when the Act passed Congress, the Reverend Billy Sunday gathered a crowd of 10,000 to celebrate the funeral of John Barleycorn, which was nothing more than the name given to whiskey in street slang. At the funeral, the reverend proclaimed that with this law, the gates of hell were closed and all men would return home erect and smile at their wives and children.
During the time of the prohibition, exemplary performances were common, which used to be carried out publicly. For example, it was normal for law enforcement officers and members of civil organizations to destroy beer boxes and whiskey barrels, while photographs of these acts with propaganda intent were published.
The breweries of the time were greatly affected by the Prohibition Law, since most worked with a franchise system, through which the brand provided all the furniture in exchange for only serving its brand of beer in the bar.. With the prohibition, the breweries were doomed to ruin, luckily in 1920 a beer brand found an ingenious solution: to make alcohol-free beer, similar to the grape must that was drunk around the world. Unfortunately, that primitive non-alcoholic beer was not well received by the public, who still preferred traditional beer.
But, despite the efforts of society and contrary to what Reverend Sunday thought, Prohibition had the opposite effect to what was intended and during the 13 years that it was active, it managed to make alcohol consumption in the United States United States skyrocketed, at the same time that it caused the appearance of organized criminal gangs that controlled the importation, distribution and sale of alcohol, giving rise to figures that have gone down in history such as Al Capone, who earned billions of dollars in a short time through alcohol trafficking, expanding its activities from the main American cities to the entire territory and involving the authorities in corruption cases, which ended up undermining the efforts of the Dry Law.
Of all American cities, Chicago was the one that brought together the largest number of criminal organizations. This was due to its proximity to the Canadian border, where alcohol was legal. The smuggling of alcohol from the Chicago border unleashed a wave of violence that shook society at the time and has survived to this day thanks to films like Eliot Ness’s The Untouchables. In the 1920s, Al Capone reigned in Chicago and he did it with an iron fist and a lot of lead, as in the well-known St. Valentine’s Massacre, in which the mafia leader organized a costume party to which he invited the rival mafia boss, George Bugs Moran just to assassinate him.
Along with these mafia organizations, clandestine bars also flourished in which alcohol was served, often from their own distillation, which they called “bathtub whiskey”. These bars were known as Speakeasy, which literally means “Speak Low” something that was necessary to avoid attracting the attention of the police, and they were hidden throughout New York and Chicago, inside basements, in urinals, behind secret doors or even behind of a curtain These speakeasies had secret passwords that changed daily or even membership cards, necessary to get through their ever-guarded doors. One of the best known was the Cotton Club, in the Harlem neighborhood and which Francis Ford Coppola himself immortalized in the cinema with a film that took his name.
But not everything in this era had to be bad. Although, even the best whiskey that was made in bathtubs and underground distilleries was. Those homemade liquors were so bad and had such a strong taste that people had to mix them with other drinks to be able to stand the taste. And not only was its taste terrible, but its consumption was also dangerous, since these clandestine liquors were made without respecting any sanitary measures. From this turbulent time came some of the best-known mixes and cocktails such as the Whiskey Sour, the famous Tom Collins, the classic Manhattan or the Mint Julep.
In New York, speakeasies like the Old Town Bar Restaurant had speakeasies where writers like Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank. Other celebrities of the time, such as Buster Keaton or the Duchess of Windsor, preferred the Riviera or Capri hotel in Havana, where the laws were less restrictive and where it was common for these artists and the European jet set to rub shoulders with dark figures. like that of the gangster Lucky Luciano or Frank Costello.
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