Complex Numbers

Speakeasy

Grab a drink. Sit back. Relax. It's time for Adventures in Prohibition.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/the-secret-lines-of-speakeasies/521865/

The Secret Lives of Speakeasies

Decades before Prohibition, the unlicensed saloons of Pittsburgh flouted state liquor laws, fomented social movements, and started a national trend.

Dark days in our country's history, to be sure. I mean, it's not exactly on the abyssal level of slavery or Native genocide, but still... dark.

The story goes like this: Hester owned a saloon in McKeesport, just southeast of the city, that sold booze in defiance of a state law that upped the costs of licenses for alcohol so much that it was nearly prohibited. When customers got too rowdy, Hester would hush customers with “speak-easy, boys!” to avoid attracting the attention of authorities; the expression soon spread to the city, and the nation.

Which would have attracted the attention of authorities, so I'm calling bullshit. Sounds like every other fauxtymology. I just made that word up, so if it takes off, just remember it was me and not some Instawhore.

Still, I don't doubt the saloon existed. And I'm pretty sure McKeesport exists, because I've been there.

While the Volstead Act, which prohibited the production, sale, and transport of liquors, would not be enacted until 1920 in anticipation of the Eighteenth Amendment’s passage, the temperance movement in the U.S. began to get dry laws on the books in the late 19th century.

It's a cliché in time travel stories: "Let's go back and kill Hitler!" Doctor Who even had an episode titled similarly. The idea is, think about the worst person in history and stop that person from doing what they did before they did it.

Leaving aside the potential paradoxes and/or impossibility of time travel, I, of course, have thought of whose career I'd nip right in the bud, and that's Carrie Nation  . (My assumption is that someone else can do Hitler.)

I'm not sure offing that smug bitch would keep Prohibition from happening, but it's worth a try.

The saturation of the booze-slinging market suggests the importance of these public spaces in 19th-century cities. Christine Sismondo, author of America Walks into a Bar, says that saloons and speakeasies provided hubs for networking and space to build social and political movements, especially among immigrant newcomers.

It goes deeper into the past than that. The American Revolution was planned, largely, in taverns, alehouses, and inns: in short, it was booze-fueled. Our country was literally founded on booze; turning our backs on that was like abandoning our parents at a shitty nursing home and then "forgetting" to pay the bill.

From those connections, political organizing can trace a long tradition back to the American tavern. This was especially true during the Progressive Era from the 1890s to the 1920s, Sismondo says, when bars served as “centers of resistance.” That’s why so many Gilded Age industrialists wanted to shut them down: Margaret “Mother” Finch, the proprietor of the Rolling Mill House saloon on Fourth Avenue in Pittsburgh, was one of the key organizers of the 1892 Homestead Strike, battling Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick’s union busting.

In our current condition of late-stage capitalism, we find ourselves with an abundance of choices once again: bars, breweries, wineries... places for people to gather and, one hopes, foment the next revolution.

So of course I expect some Puritanical monster to try to shut them down any day now. I must remain vigilant.

While the drinks seemingly never stopped, Prohibition did bring about one big change: It brought men and women together in drinking establishments for the first time.

I choose to trace the modern search for gender equality to that. I suppose even in the darkest of nights, some light must glimmer.

I ask Schalcosky what he thinks is behind the renewed allure of speakeasies today, given the absence of legal prohibitions on alcohol. “I think it has to do with trying to connect with our communal past,” he says. “People appreciate a good tale and location to go along with it. That, and our timeless love for alcohol.”

It's important to remember the past. Especially if we can learn from the mistakes it made. And Prohibition was a huge one.