1933 Fifty Years Ago (December 1983 | Volume: 35, Issue: 1)

1933 Fifty Years Ago

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December 1983 | Volume 35, Issue 1

“I say to you that from this date on, the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed!” These prophetic words were spoken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he accepted his party’s nomination in 1932. Even Herbert Hoover, the incumbent, had grudgingly—and with much hedging—admitted that the Eighteenth should be repealed. It was only a matter of time.

The time arrived on December 5. Utah was the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment (Repeal) and it went into effect immediately. Prohibition, the “noble experiment,” was over.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find anyone today with a good word to say about it. To Prohibition is attributed the birth of large-scale organized crime: it created the gangster. The scope, wealth, and murderousness of mobs like Capone’s were the direct result; there were more violent deaths in Chicago alone, for each year of Prohibition, than in all the British Isles.

Some of the immediate effects of Repeal were predictable. The stock market went up, and the price of drinks was cut in half. The Society of Restaurateurs published a guideline of suggested prices for cocktails to be consumed on the premises: gin and whiskey cocktails, thirty cents; an Old-fashioned, forty cents; Scotch whiskey, forty-five to sixty cents. The French expressed their pleasure, but their vintners muttered about competition from American upstarts in California and elsewhere. The German press called Prohibition “one of the most gruesome farces any civilized nation ever undertook to stay civilized” and congratulated Roosevelt on its demise.

When the President signed the proclamation notifying the country that Repeal had been ratified, he asked “the whole-hearted cooperation of all our citizens to the end that this return of individual freedom shall not be accompanied by the repugnant conditions that obtained prior to the adoption of the 18th Amendment. … I ask especially that no State shall by law or otherwise authorize the return of the saloon in its old form or in some modern guise. ” The word saloon clearly had demonic powers, and in many states Alcoholic Beverages Control Boards refused to license any premises so called. But it was quickly discovered that bars, taverns, cafés, night clubs, and cocktail lounges served much the same purpose.

DECEMBER 6: John W. Woolsey, a federal district judge sitting in New York, decided that the novel, Ulysses , was not pornographic and could be admitted into the United States.

Joyce had published his book in Paris in 1922; its fame grew and it was hailed by American intellectuals but banned from the country by customs officials dismayed by the explicit sexual passages and the vulgarity of some of the language.

Random House chose to challenge the government’s power to censor by importing Ulysses and selling it. The federal authorities responded by taking the case to court under the Tariff Act of 1930.