Prohibition Speakeasies: How America’s Dry Law Built an Underground Nightlife

America tried to abolish the saloon in 1920. The saloon responded by taking the sign down, locking the front door and asking whether you knew the password.

National Prohibition was supposed to remove intoxicating liquor from American life. Instead, it produced an enormous illegal market populated by bootleggers, rum-runners, corrupt officials and clandestine drinking rooms known as speakeasies — or, particularly around Detroit and parts of the Midwest, blind pigs.

The world behind Hellwood’s Blind Pig Speakeasy T-Shirt was therefore considerably more than flappers and jazz. It was an accidental experiment in what happens when a government bans a popular commodity while millions of customers remain perfectly willing to buy it.

America Goes Dry — Technically

The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquor, while the Volstead Act supplied the machinery for enforcement. National Prohibition took effect in January 1920.

It did change drinking habits. The National Archives records substantial early reductions in alcohol consumption. What it did not do was eliminate demand.

Instead, legitimate breweries, saloons and liquor distributors were replaced by an illegal supply chain. Alcohol crossed the Canadian border, arrived by boat, emerged from illicit stills and was manufactured in homes. At the other end of that chain sat the speakeasy.

Just How Many Speakeasies Were There?

Nobody knows, which rather suits an industry whose business model depended upon not appearing in official directories.

The National Archives gives an extraordinary estimate: by 1925, New York City alone may have contained anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs. Even the bottom end of that range suggests Prohibition had not so much eliminated the drinking trade as hidden it behind several thousand doors.

Establishments varied enormously. Some were fashionable nightclubs with entertainment, elaborate interiors and wealthy customers. Others were back rooms, basements and apartments where the décor consisted mainly of chairs and plausible deniability.

The term “speakeasy” was associated with the need to keep quiet about an illicit establishment. “Blind pig” or “blind tiger” became another American name for illegal drinking places; Detroit Historical Society material records speakeasies being commonly known locally as blind pigs.

Prohibition's Criminal Business School

Supplying tens of thousands of illegal bars required considerably more organisation than stealing a crate of whisky and running quickly.

Bootleggers needed suppliers, transport routes, warehouses, drivers, protection and distribution. They also needed police officers and public officials willing to become selectively inattentive. Rival organisations wanted the same customers and territory.

That created an extraordinary business opportunity for existing gangs. Criminal-justice historian Howard Abadinsky has argued that Prohibition forced neighbourhood gangs to become businessmen: hiring lawyers and accountants, coordinating transport, protecting breweries and negotiating with other criminal organisations across city and state lines.

The result helped transform American organised crime. Figures such as Al Capone became enormously wealthy not because Prohibition stopped people drinking, but because it transferred a huge legitimate market to anyone prepared to break the law efficiently.

The Noble Experiment Develops a Hangover

Prohibition enforcement faced an almost impossible arithmetic problem. Every illegal bar closed could be replaced. Every confiscated shipment existed because another customer was waiting to pay for it.

The Library of Congress notes that criminal gangs grew more powerful through alcohol trafficking, while the National Archives acknowledges that federal and local authorities simply would not commit enough resources to enforce the law everywhere.

By the early 1930s, the experiment had become increasingly unpopular. The Twenty-First Amendment repealed national Prohibition in December 1933, restoring legal alcohol sales to the states.

The speakeasy should have become obsolete with it. Instead, it became mythology: passwords, hidden doors, jazz, illicit bottles and the delicious suggestion that the interesting party was always happening somewhere the authorities did not want you to enter.

For more beautifully disreputable American history, explore Hellwood’s Prohibition T-Shirt Collection, Mobsters & Gangsters T-Shirts and wider American History T-Shirts.

Prohibition succeeded in closing the legal saloon. Its rather larger problem was that America immediately opened another one round the back.