Prohibition in Illinois.

Illinois ratified the 18th Amendment in January 1919 and then produced the most completely corrupted enforcement environment in the country. Under Mayor William Hale Thompson, Chicago city government was accommodating to the point of partnership, and the suburb of Cicero was effectively run by the Torrio–Capone organisation after the violent municipal election of 1924.

What made Chicago different was that the business was beer rather than spirits. Breweries kept running under new ownership, made real beer, and delivered it on standing accounts to thousands of speakeasies — a wholesale distribution business with an enforcement arm, which is less cinematic and more accurate than the usual account.

Territory was worth killing for and was. The North Side gang under Dean O’Banion and later Bugs Moran fought the Outfit for five years; the St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 was the point at which public tolerance broke. Nobody was ever convicted of it. Capone was convicted in 1931 of tax evasion, by accountants.

The Library of Congress has digitised a large slice of the American press, and it is searchable. Between 1920 and 1933, papers published in Illinois used the word “bootlegger” 3,533 times, “speakeasy” 163 times, “blind pig” 96 times. Every link below goes to the scanned page itself, free and in the public domain — you are reading the primary source, not our summary of it.

One caveat worth stating plainly: these counts measure what has been digitised as much as what happened. A state whose papers were scanned in bulk will out-score a state whose were not, and a low number here is evidence about an archive rather than about how dry anybody was.