It was an era famous for its bootleggers, mobsters and hidden speakeasies. On on Jan. 17, 1920, the 18th Amendment of the US Constitution came into force, ushering in Prohibition in America.
A century later, the country has yet to fully turn the page on that raucous chapter in its history.
Back in the day, two large owls adorned the bar of the luxurious Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore. Without anyone ever saying a word, clients of the hotel knew to keep a close eye on the birds.
photo:AP
If the owls were blinking, the party could start: the signal the bar had just taken delivery of a new stock of illicit booze, there were no police around and thirsty patrons could wet their beaks. Prohibition left behind a plethora of such stories and has long been romanticized by Hollywood in movies such as The Untouchables and The Road to Perdition as well as any number of black-and-white gangster flicks, while US literature was deeply affected by the era.
More recently there has been a revival of bars modeling themselves on the classic speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties, those concealed watering holes where clients could down bootleg liquor and beer away from prying eyes.
“There is a nostalgia for the 1920s. You’re talking about the mythology of it. Some of it was romanticized, the gangsters, the organized crime aspect of things,” said historian Michael Walsh, sitting in the Owl Bar, which still features one of the famous owls. Walsh said the significance of Prohibition went way beyond the need to tackle what was then rampant alcohol abuse — to touch on a whole range of facets of American life.
“It’s religion, politics, gender, ethnicity, race,” he said. “There was a huge amount of spousal abuse, so you have the women forming movements, one of them being the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that really kind of spearheads this fight against alcohol consumption and abuse in America at the time.”
‘NOBLE EXPERIMENT’
The “noble experiment,” as president Herbert Hoover called it, ended in 1933 after Franklin D Roosevelt became president of a country in the depths of the Great Depression.
The 18th Amendment, which banned the production, sale and transport of alcohol, is the only constitutional amendment ever to have been repealed. Organized crime had hit epidemic proportions across the country, led by mob bosses like Al Capone. But for Walsh, who has written a book on the subject, Prohibition was far from being a total failure. “It’s much more ambiguous than just saying it’s all black or white. There’s a lot of gray, as everything is,” he said.
He said the “divorce rate goes down, which implies hopefully that the home life is getting better. Cases of liver cirrhosis go down, intakes at asylums are down during that decade.”
After repeal, the regulation of alcohol was left to individual states, which themselves sometimes delegated rule-making to local jurisdictions. That resulted in a patchwork of laws that sometimes varied from county to county, parish to parish and even from town to town.
There are to this day hundreds of “dry counties” and “dry towns” across the US, most of them in Bible Belt states like Kentucky and Arkansas, where sales of alcohol are banned or restricted.
That is even the case in Moore County, Tennessee, home to the distillery of world famous whiskey producers Jack Daniels.
PHIL COLLINS FOR PRESIDENT
Another hangover from that bygone era, though a less well known one, is the temperance movement known as the Prohibition Party.
Founded in 1869, it is the third-oldest US political party and has a camel as its symbol, just as the Democrats have a donkey and the Republicans an elephant. This November, it will field a presidential candidate, just as it does every four years.
“After Prohibition was repealed, there were still some people agreeing with the party’s principles of trying to remind people that alcohol can have harmful effects on people, diseases or drink and driving related deaths,” said the party’s presidential candidate, Phil Collins.
Collins — not to be mistaken with the British singer who gave up the sauce after developing pancreatitis from excess drinking — hopes to beat the 5,000 votes won by his predecessor in 2016, far behind the successful candidate Donald Trump. Trump, whose elder brother Fred died of alcoholism, says that he never touches the stuff. He has not, however, suggested reintroducing Prohibition.
Or at least, not yet.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su