Rum, Riot, and Reform

Triumph and Disappointment

The dream of outlawing the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages begun by Neal Dow was realized in 1919 and tested from 1920 to 1934. Pushed forward by the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the 18th amendment was submitted in 1917. The first state ratified the law in January 1918 and the crucial 36th state gave the law the required three-quarters majority in January 1919. Prohibition went into operation on January 16, 1920. The Volstead or Prohibition Enforcement Act, passed by Congress on October 28, went into effect with Prohibition.

As Prohibitionists imagined an age of peace and domestic tranquility, their opponents were learning to dodge the law. Statistically, legal drinking declined sharply while illegal drinking became so popular that it helped stimulate new heights of crime and evasion. Underground brewers, distillers, and merchants found new opportunities to flourish as they had after the Maine Law was passed 70 years before. With its proximity to Canada and vast coastline, Maine became a major smuggling route for booze during the 1920s and 1930s. Liquor was smuggled from Quebec, St Pierre and Miquelon (French Islands off Newfoundland). For Maine and Massachusetts residents, buying a bottle was as easy as driving across the boundary into Canada—and bringing the booze back into Maine was only slightly trickier. Commercial cargo vessels also illegally smuggled liquor into Maine ports. Rum continued to come from the West Indies in small Maine-made vessels built specifically as rumrunners.

The young, who had not experienced the earlier temperance crusades, largely rejected Prohibition. Many men and women of the 1920s, appalled by the carnage of World War I, were anxious to experiment and enjoy themselves after the war ended. To them, the aging membership of the W.C.T.U. appeared as narrow-minded, humorless busybodies, a far cry from the respected temperance heroines of the 1870s. In the minds of many Mainers and other Americans, Prohibition opponents like New York native Pauline Sabin, leader of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, represented the new ideal for the modern woman.

By the 1920s and 30s, Mainers were becoming a far more homogeneous part of the United States as radio, telephones, movies, and the automobile became more commonplace. Indeed, when National Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Maine's legislature also repealed the state amendment, which was similarly approved by the voters. The Portland Press Herald noted the general feeling: "There never was a time when Maine's annual liquor bill has not amounted to several million dollars, even when both state and federal officers were exerting themselves to the utmost to prevent the sale of liquor."

GALLERIES: Bootleggers vs. Police | Society Copes | Reform and Repeal