Prohibition history

Repeal Day.

On 5 December 1933 Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the 21st Amendment, and national Prohibition ended that afternoon. It had lasted thirteen years, ten months and nineteen days. Most of the country still had no legal drink for weeks, because the states had not finished writing their licensing laws.

A celebratory street at night seen from above, bunting and gold lamplight along a row of shopfronts
5 December 1933, and the first legal drink in fourteen years for most of the country. AI-generated editorial interpretation; not an archival photograph.

The day itself

Three state conventions met that day. Pennsylvania ratified, then Ohio, and then Utah — the thirty-sixth — in the late afternoon, Eastern time. The Acting Secretary of State certified it that evening, and President Roosevelt issued a proclamation asking Americans not to buy liquor from anyone who had not paid the tax on it, and not to let the saloon come back.

Utah supplying the decisive vote is one of the small ironies of American history and was noted at the time. Roosevelt had reportedly let it be known that he would be glad if the honour fell there.

What did not happen

A national party. The photographs of crowds at bars that evening come overwhelmingly from New York, Chicago, San Francisco and a few other cities that had prepared, and even there the supply was thin and mostly imported.

Elsewhere there was nothing to buy legally. Repeal returned the question to the states, and most states had no licensing system, no liquor board, no retail law and no stock. Some took weeks, some took months, several took years, and Mississippi did not get there until 1966. A good proportion of Americans celebrated 5 December 1933 with liquor from exactly the same bootlegger they had used the week before.

Beer had already come back

Eight months earlier. The Cullen–Harrison Act redefined “intoxicating” upward to 3.2 per cent by weight, and legal beer went on sale at midnight on 7 April 1933. That was the night the crowds queued at breweries, the trucks ran all night, and the photographs that get captioned “the end of Prohibition” were mostly taken.

Brewing towns still mark 6 April as New Beer’s Eve, and it has better claim to being a genuine folk anniversary than 5 December does.

Cut crystal coupe and brass shaker on black oak
AI-generated editorial interpretation; not an archival photograph.
Near beer and the breweries that survived

What repeal actually set up

Fifty systems. Section 2 of the amendment made shipping liquor into a state in violation of that state’s law a federal matter, which handed the states authority over alcohol stronger than they hold over almost any other product.

Seventeen became control states, where the government owns the wholesale trade or the shops or both. The rest built the three-tier system — producer, wholesaler, retailer, legally separated, none allowed to own another — specifically to prevent the return of the brewery-owned tied house the temperance movement had hated. Both structures are substantially intact today.

Dry counties are the third inheritance, and there are still hundreds of them.

The 21st Amendment and Repeal

How it became a holiday

It mostly was not one for seventy years. Repeal Day as a marked occasion is a revival, pushed from the mid-2000s by the American cocktail trade — writers, bartenders and distillers — at the same moment the craft cocktail movement was rediscovering 1920s and 1930s drinks.

That is not a criticism. It is a trade holiday with a real date behind it and a genuinely good reason to be marked, which is more than several better-established ones can say. But it is a modern invention, and anyone telling you their bar has celebrated it since 1934 is improvising.

How to mark it, if you want to

Drink something that was actually being drunk. The published cocktail books of the period are full of them — the Sidecar, the Last Word, the Bee’s Knees, the Southside — and they are better now than they were then, because the gin is better.

Or go to a room with a door you had to be told about, which is the other thing the period left us. There are rather a lot of them.

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Where it survives in the directory

5 December is a marketing date now. 7 bars we list carry a year from the era in their name, which is the same instinct.

They are spread across 6 states, concentrated in California (2), New Jersey (1), Arkansas (1), Nevada (1).

These are not the historic rooms — almost none of them is — and we say so on every listing. They are what the history turned into, which is its own thing worth knowing.

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