Prohibition in the Flapper Era
Repeal of Prohibition On March 22, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eased the restrictions imposed by the 18th Amendment by passing the BeerWine Revenue Act, which legalized alcoholic beverages with relatively low alcohol content. It is said that, upon signing this legislation, Roosevelt remarked that it was a great day for a beer. In December 1933, the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition, returning the authority to ban alcohol to state and local governments via ‘‘dry’’ statues. Since the repeal of the 18th Amendment, the temperance movement has not regained its previous momentum and, to date, no other amendment to the Constitution has been repealed, giving the 18th Amendment a unique place in the history of our country. As a humorous side note, in a book titled Prohibition: Its Economic and Industrial Aspects, author Herman Feldman discussed how challenging bartenders found their situation to be after dispensing alcoholic drinks was no longer a legal profession. Some of them, Feldman explains, learned another trade, while the ‘‘less scrupulous’’ worked in ‘‘speak-easies.’’ He then adds that still others found employment working soda fountains, which proved a failure. The men who had been ten or fifteen years at fine bars could not adjust themselves to the kind of trade the soda fountains had. The one thing that all complained of most vociferously was having to deal ‘‘with fussy women who changed their minds four or five times.’’ The tactfulness that might have been shown in dealing with financiers and sportsmen was not adequate in dealing with flappers.9
Notes 1. Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 47. 2. Ibid., 5. 3. Ibid., 29.
51