One Summer: America, 1927

threatening. It was only in the fine print that the world discovered that the Volstead Act defined intoxicating liquor as anything with an alcoholic content greater than one half of 1 per cent – about the same level as sauerkraut. Many of those who had supported the Prohibition amendment had assumed that beer and unfortified wines would be spared. It was only now that it began to dawn on people just how sweeping – how dismayingly total – Prohibition was going to be.
    That was perhaps the most remarkable feature of all in the introduction of Prohibition to America – that it took so many people by surprise. As Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in Only Yesterday : ‘The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.’
     
    Prohibition was so flawed, and in so many ways, that even many of those who supported it in principle were appalled by how it developed in practice. For a start, it brought an entirely new level of danger to American life. The national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced. Being a Prohibition agent was dangerous – in the first two and a half years of Prohibition thirty agents were killed on the job – but just being in the vicinity of agents was often dangerous, too, for they frequently proved to be trigger-happy. In Chicago alone, Prohibition agents gunned down twenty-three innocent civilians in just over a decade.
    Despite the hazards, Prohibition agents were paid less than garbage men, which all but invited corruption. A common ruse was for agents to confiscate liquor, then immediately sell it back to the original owners. Bribery was routine. The average speakeasy paid out about $400 a month to police and city officials, which worked out at about $150 million a year in bribes in New York City alone. In short, a lot of people made a lot of money from Prohibition.
    The temptations of corruption extended far beyond American shores. Canada, under pressure from the United States, made it all but impossible for its brewers and distillers to sell their products to Americans, but smugglers, ever resourceful, found an alternative in the form of the little-known territory of St Pierre and Miquelon, just off the southern tip of Newfoundland. Through an accident of history, these ‘two dots of gorse and granite’ in the North Atlantic had belonged to France since 1763, so were outside American and Canadian jurisdiction. Overnight, St Pierre and Miquelon became the world’s greatest importer of alcoholic beverages. It brought in three million bottles of champagne, making it France’s biggest overseas market, along with vast quantities of brandy, Armagnac, Calvados and other spirituous refreshments.
    When asked by American authorities to explain how 4,000 people had developed such a sudden attachment to alcohol, the governor replied, with Gallic aplomb, that he was unaware of any significant rise in alcohol imports and hadn’t noticed the two dozenlarge new warehouses that had sprung up around the main port at St Pierre, but promised to look into the matter. Subsequently, he confirmed to the Americans that there was indeed a little wine on St Pierre and Miquelon now, but it was all bound for the Bahamas, where drinking was legal. It was apparently just resting in St Pierre.
    Prohibition bred great volumes of hypocrisy, too. In the summer of 1926, Colonel Ned Green, Prohibition administrator for northern California, was suspended after it emerged that he held cocktail parties in the Prohibition administration offices in San Francisco. ‘I should have been suspended long ago,’ he amiably told reporters.
    Even when the government seized illicit liquor, it didn’t look after it terribly vigilantly. In Chicago, in the summer of 1920, 134,000 gallons of whisky – 670,000 bottles – vanished from a warehouse where it was being stored following seizure. The night-watchmen in charge professed – not altogether convincingly, it must be said – that they had not noticed anything amiss at any point in their recent shifts. Nationally, records showed that of 50 million gallons of whisky held in government warehouses at the start of Prohibition, two thirds was missing at the end of Prohibition in 1933.
    Prohibition laws were nearly impossible to enforce in any case because they were so riddled with loopholes. Doctors could legally prescribe whisky for their patients and did so with such enthusiasm that by the late 1920s they were earning $40 million a