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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcEqb5cgVUs

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In 1920, the 18th Amendment was passed and the sale and consumption of alcohol became illegal.  Though alcohol was outlawed in the hopes that crime and poverty rates would decline, Prohibition brought with it a new wave of crime and gang-related violence. Prohibition did little to deter people from consuming alcohol. If anything, the demand for the illegal substance increased. Speakeasies exploded around the country. Secret nightclubs and liquor stores popped up in buildings across the country. One could find jazz musicians playing through the night and flappers dancing in any speakeasy. People who supplied speakeasies with alcohol were often involved in gangs.  Though this was a very competitive and dangerous business, these suppliers often found themselves filthy rich. The Jazz Age was greatly affected by the Great War. Those who had served or had seen the true nature of war were scarred and wanted to live life to the fullest again. The Jazz Age brought an entirely new set of morals for women. They cut their hair short and wore short dresses while smoking and drinking in public. This created an entirely new and free generation that didn't play by the rules. As Scott Fitzgerald said, "the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser."

Though alcohol was illegal, the underground productions and speakeasies made millions of dollars through the sale of the illegal substance. After World War I left so many people wounded, both physically and mentally, from battle, people wanted to live freely again and redefine themselves. As speakeasies became more popular, morals became looser. Flappers redefined how women acted as a whole. Women dressed in short dresses and cut their hair very short. They smoked and drank in public and did scandalous things that women would not normally do.  Many people supported speakeasies and, because flappers were such a unique part of these underground bars, most people accepted flappers and their outlandish behavior. As women gained more rights, they began to be able to express themselves more. They were no longer modest housewives who did chores and cooked meals. They were out in bars, arousing men and redefining how a woman should act in public. Though the Jazz Age ended abruptly due to the Great Depression, its effects are deeply rooted in American society today. If the 18th Amendment had never been passed, speakeasies would have never become such a large business.  Flappers would never have become accepted and women would not have been able to express themselves as freely.

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Anti-Saloon League - the leading organization pushing for prohibition for the US in the early 1900s
Speakeasy - an illegal liquor store or nightclub during the Prohibition
Bootleg booze - illegally transported and sold alcohol during the Prohibition
Prohibition - the prevention by law of the manufacture and sale of alcohol between 1920 and 1933, made illegal by the 18th Amendment
Jazz Age - a period in the 1920s, ending with the Great Depression, that is marked not only by the popularity of jazz but also by Prohibition and changing morals

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The photo taken back in the 1920's best portrays prohibition and the booming bootlegging industry. Speakeasies was the best kept secret of their time, as it had been reserved in discrete locations wherein their alcohol demand was met by growing criminal groups. The photo represents the disregard for the whole entirety of the amendment itself, while mocking the means of the laws in place. Speakeasies were hidden sections of an establishment that were used to illegally sell alcoholic beverages during Prohibition. In order to gain entry into a speakeasy, one would need to know to say a password to the 'doorperson' so that they could ensure that they were not secret agents attempting to bust the speakeasy. The word "speakeasy" came from a bartender's term: people were encouraged to "speak easy" when at the bar to avoid any suspicion. Slang words were used in place of alcohol such as white mule, horse liniment, or monkey rum.

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The article begins with an initiation of the cleansing of cities, as well as villages. Anderson unleashes the burden of maintaining the law into the arms of the law enforcement. Mr. Anderson assumes the support of all mayors in Prohibition. He continues to state that the only fair method of testing the effectivity of the Amendment is through the complete compliance of citizens.

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How To Make Big City 'Dry' (primary source)

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How To Make Big City 'Dry' (primary source)

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The document here is of a daily newspaper in the time period. It discusses the means of enforcing the newly set laws and begs the question of a citizen's own common sense. It goes on further, questioning the rather drastic measures that pursues a product that is so widely used. It was recorded that numbers of officials being sent out into the field were increasing with every passing day. "They are working effectively and piling up convictions." Although the Amendment was enacted for the sole purpose of morality and 'good' publicity, it may have done more damage in the U.S. economy than it had done good. Millions were spent in order to maintain the laws that were introduced along with Prohibition.

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History Brief: Speakeasies (Roaring Twenties)

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Historic buildings that stood during the 1920s are being refurnished and transformed into throwback speakeasies. This website shows how in the 1920s, speakeasies could be found in nearly every building across the country. Today, bars across the nation are recreating these speakeasies with 20s throwback themes.

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The door is wood. Thick. There's an iron handle. Next to the door is an intercom. Silver. One button. There are no windows on this building. The facade is gray. Except for a sign hanging high above the street - Anti- Saloon League, it says - there's nothing to distinguish this building from its tumbledown plaster and brick and cracked granite neighbors somewhere between the Tenderloin and the heart of Union Square.

I push the button.

The intercom screams and there's a voice. Sudden and electric.

"Password? Do you have the password?"

During Prohibition, San Francisco swarmed with speakeasies. Izzy Gomez's. Monk Young's. Coffee Dan's. The House of Shields and Cafe Du Nord. Speakeasies at the St. Francis Hotel and Sir Francis Drake - one underground and one lodged between floors - were popular among smugglers and movie stars alike. The Kentucky Barrel House and Hoffman Grill and Hotel D'Oloron. For a dry era, San Francisco was all wet.

Prohibition, during which the sale of alcohol was illegal, ran from 1920 to 1933, yet in San Francisco, where the thirsty, working-class populace refused to hop on the temperance wagon, spirits flowed in hotels, dance halls, coffee shops, clandestine rooms and underground tunnels.

"There were hundreds of speakeasies. They were everywhere, just everywhere. Take a look around North Beach, and almost every building you see used to have one," says Charles Fracchia, founder and president emeritus of the San Francisco Historical Society. "They literally littered the streets."

Now, Bourbon & Branch on the edge of the Tenderloin and an elegant clutch of new bars and dance clubs - including one with a replica slide to a speakeasy basement - are referencing that period of passwords and passageways, gin mills and juice joints, flappers, flyboys, dolls and molls and gammed-up hooch stands.

"San Francisco has a rich tradition in drinking that goes back to the Gold Rush, runs through Prohibition and remains today," says Todd Smith, bar director at Bourbon & Branch. "What we wanted to do was more or less our version of what a speakeasy would be like today."

Housed in an anonymous gray building at Jones and O'Farrell streets, the two-story bar requires reservations for the main drinking room. More precisely, it requires a password. It can be "shiv" one night, and "Evelyn" the next.

"It's all computer-generated nowadays, rotating between 50 words or so from the 1920s," Smith says. "And sometimes the day's password will pop up and we'll say, 'What the hell does that mean?' " While the main room offers plush booths and elbow room at the bar - the genius of taking reservations for a drinking establishment - there's something else hidden behind a bookcase, something secret, something that offers a portal to a different time and gives visitors a glimpse of what a real speakeasy might have been like.

It's known as the Library.

"Password? Do you have the password?"

I lean into the crackling silver intercom. I push the button. I whisper "books," and the thick wooden door opens.

It's warm inside. Dark. The walls are covered in red velvet. There's a tin-stamped ceiling and a blown-glass, icicle-like chandelier suspended from the ceiling. Louis Armstrong plays.

"Welcome," says the woman behind the electric voice. She is poured into a black dress. "Right this way."

She leads me to the back. Up a squat stack of stairs. She approaches a bookshelf and glances behind her. She grabs the shelf. Pulls.

"The Library is through here," she smiles. The bookshelf swings open and reveals another room. Bigger. Just as dark. Just as warm. Tin-stamped ceiling. Soft jazz. There are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and exposed brick walls. Another delicate, dripping chandelier.

The woman leads me to the bar. "Enjoy," she says, and closes the bookshelf behind me.

"Isn't this place so cool!" says Dan Moore, a 39-year-old property manager from San Clemente who put the bar on a must-see list during a recent visit, "My wife was so excited she wanted to jump on the table and do a little flapper dance - the atmosphere, the environment, it's just phenomenal."

While the password for the main drinking room changes daily, the Library password is always the same - "Books." It says so on the Web site, which is also curiously devoid of a phone number or an address. Find the number through Google and call for a reservation, and all you'll hear is a hushed "Hello?" instead of a cheery "This is Bourbon & Branch, how may I help you?" It's a nice touch that sets the speakeasy mood long before you arrive.

"You're always welcome," Smith says, "As long as you can find the place."

Bourbon & Branch is just one bar looking to the Prohibition-era past for a new take on the present.

A few blocks away at 430 Mason St., Slide nightclub and lounge also offers no flashy signs. Looking from the sidewalk, there's just a stout wooden door nestled inside the marble frame of the California Native Sons building.

Step inside, however, and you're presented with a replica of a twisty wooden slide like the one once found at Coffee Dan's - the ham-and-egger that served hotcakes and coffee upstairs and whiskey down below (and also made an appearance in Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer," one of the first talkies).

Clubgoers can either take the slide - as a stay-at-home dad who regularly visits the city's playgrounds, I'd term it the fastest, creakiest, most dangerous contraption in all of San Francisco - or, if they're not in the mood, the stairs. Once in the basement lounge and dance floor, clubgoers are greeted with a Gatsby-as-DJ vision of the 1920s: turntables hidden behind a baby grand piano, a backlit honey onyx bar, even cracked porcelain tiles in the bathroom. The DJs mash Armstrong and Duke Ellington tunes with modern-day techno.

"The way I look at it is you see all these ultra lounges today - real high-tech and digital, sleek and cold, and these other clubs are just the opposite," says Jared Rivera, spokesman for Slide. "Everything goes real retro and old school with a real sexy appeal that captures the whole Prohibition feel - big cars, big cigars."

Passwords are reserved for special guests, allowing quick entrance instead of a long wait in a Saturday night club line.

"These places are doing really well, and I think people are responding to the old-school feel," Rivera says, "Slide is a difficult place to get into."

Around the corner on Powell Street, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, built in 1928 during Prohibition, is also capitalizing on its history with the reopening of Bar Drake - a lobby lounge that serves old-timey, knock-you-for-a-loop drinks like the Tommy Gun and the Heated Affair under a vaulted ceiling.

Hidden from view, however, is the secret room built to house hooch for hotel guests and offer a speakeasy for smugglers and bootleggers.

"That's it," says Bar Drake manager Robert Robinson, pointing somewhere just above a bank of elevators, "Right about ... there."

The speakeasy is between the lobby and the second-floor mezzanine and can be accessed only by elevator car No. 2 - the only car with an "M" button. Robinson turns a security key and presses the button. The elevator door opens and reveals a metal sliding door with a chicken-wire mesh window.

"Right this way," Robinson says, pulling on the door.

It's a cramped room, hot. The walls are concrete and scribbled with the names of onetime guests and bootleggers. The hotel kept the 1920s wooden shelves and stacked them with paper-shrouded bottles - and even included mannequin "guests" to complete the scene. There are a few bottles of newer wine for events about which Robinson will only shrug his shoulders and smile.

Robinson points out the hard-shell luggage that was used to smuggle in the booze and says the hotel offers tours from time to time for special guests or special events, but because the speakeasy can be accessed by only one elevator and has no exits, it is deemed a fire hazard. And it feels like it.

"We're working with the city to try to open it up somehow," Robinson says. "We want to share this history."

While the warm, hushed ambience of Bourbon & Branch, the cozy lounge at Bar Drake and the Art Deco-turned-techno vibe of Slide all offer exciting, romanticized glimpses of the past, they are created for modern-day thrill seekers - the speakeasy by Disney, if you will. So just how accurate are they when it comes to replicating San Francisco's gin joint history?

Pretty close on a lot of counts, it turns out.

Passwords were required at some places, and secret rooms and tunnels were used in others, even though, for the most part, the city was considered open for business. After all, in 1914, San Francisco voted 83 percent against going dry, according to the book "San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development" by William Issel and Robert W. Cherny.

"The fact is, no one went thirsty in San Francisco," says historian James R. Smith, author of "San Francisco's Lost Landmarks."

"You go into just about any place in North Beach and you could get a glass of grappa," Smith says. "Some places had a password or you had to know someone who knows someone, but in most places it wasn't like you got in somehow and then the whole world of alcohol was available to you. It was much more under the table than that - slip a waiter 50 cents and get a shot in your coffee or soda. The San Francisco Police Department did a very good job of looking the other way."

"One of the reasons it was so open in San Francisco is you never really had organized crime here like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles," the historical society's Fracchia says. "Hollywood stars came up here to let loose and party."

That's not to say speakeasy operators weren't on the lookout for the "feds," who busted many a popular establishment.

Hotel D'Oloron near on Columbus between Jackson Street and Pacific Avenue was busted so many times that when one address was closed down, the owner simply cut a new door in the wall, slapped on a new address and continued pouring drinks.

"Shanty" Malone moved his popular newspapermen's dive every time federal agents raided. And "soda stand" operator Izzy Gomez - who was later immortalized in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Time of Your Life" by William Saroyan and has a chain of Bay Area chophouses named in his honor - did three months in jail rather than pay a fine when the feds discovered he was slipping grappa into ginger ales, according to Smith.

Cafe Du Nord on Upper Market Street has a rough intercom system between the bar below and the street-level door to warn of raids, and House of Shields bar at Market and New Montgomery is rumored to have underground tunnels once used for customers looking for a little more than its "dry bar" offerings.

Check into the Sir Francis Drake and hooch was delivered to your room from the between-floors speakeasy-storehouse. The same goes for the St. Francis Hotel just across from Union Square.

"During Prohibition," says St. Francis Hotel historian Howard Mutz, pointing at a bank of three elevators in the hotel's lobby, "You'd enter one of these and give the elevator operator - in those days they had operators - you'd give him the password. He'd key you down to the basement and there you'd find a door. You had to give the password again there, and then there you were - in the speakeasy."

The basement speakeasy is the hotel carpenter's storage room now, filled with copper pipes and sagging lumps of drywall. But back in the 1920s, this is where hotel guests, Hollywood movie stars and gentlemen about town came for their "panther sweat" and "giggle water" - or at least where it was stored for use in other parts of the hotel.

"It was quite literally bathtub gin," Mutz says.

Just the elevator bell housing and the door remain now. And like its modern-day progeny, the door is wooden. and thick.

And it offers a portal to a different time.

Bourbon & Branch: 501 Jones St., www.bourbonandbranch.com.

Bar Drake: 450 Powell St., www.bardrake.com.

Coffee Dan's: See a YouTube recording of Frank Shaw's "A Night at Coffee Dan's" circa 1928 at links.sfgate.com/ZBQA.

St. Francis: 335 Powell St.

Izzy Gomez's: 848 Pacific St.

Hotel D'Oloron: Columbus between Jackson and Pacific.

House of Shields: 39 New Montgomery St.

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market St.

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Except for a sign hanging high above the street - Anti-Saloon League, it says - there's nothing to distinguish this building from its tumbledown plaster and brick and cracked granite neighbors somewhere between the Tenderloin and the heart of Union Square.

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The Jazz Age glorified city life as many people were moving from the suburbs to the city. The 1920s blew up into an age of new morals. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser." This website draws comparisons between the effect the war had on people and the thirst to live life freely again. Many people let loose and enjoyed life as the Great War had left deep scars in their minds. Though the stock market crash of 1929 brought the Jazz Age to a screeching stop, many social walls were torn down and the people who lived through it were forever changed. As Heywood Broun said, "The Jazz Age was a wicked and monstrous and silly. Unfortunately, I had a good time."

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In 1925 the Jazz Age was in full swing. It was the year Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington made their first recordings.The Phantom of the Opera opened at movie theaters. The Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington, D.C. People sat on flagpoles, danced the Charleston, read a new novel called The Great Gatsby. And a young man named John Scopes went on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in defiance of a Tennessee law.

The Scopes trial was a signature event of the Jazz Age. It had that "ballyhoo" spirit so typical of the 1920s. In one way, however, it was atypical. The Scopes trial took place in a little town in the South, far from the roar of the metropolis.

The Jazz Age glorified city life. Americans - including many African American sharecroppers from the South - were leaving their farms in record numbers to live and work in places like Chicago and New York City. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it a time when "the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser."

Definitions of the 1920s reflect the extreme nature of the era itself. Playwright Elmer Davis said, "Today Croesus is King. Not thinkers but rich men rule the world." Looking back on the 20s, Kevin Rayburn wrote, "It was the first truly modern decade and, for better or worse, it created the model for society that all the world follows today."

The 20s in all its lighthearted excess grew from a great darkness. No one who survived what was then known as The Great War could imagine that anything like this cataclysm would happen again. The war opened eyes to unimagined horrors and when it was over people simply wanted to live again. Those who could afford it lived with a vengeance.

It was best to be young during the roaring 20s. Many people born in the 19th century felt threatened by a culture that seemed to have lost its moral compass. William Jennings Bryan, a political and religious leader of the day, had campaigned hard for Prohibition and in 1919, it became the law of the land. But the law meant nothing to a wild new generation. Surveys showed that young people were losing their faith in God. In his attempt to bring America back to the Bible, Bryan chose to attack a single idea - Darwin's theory of evolution.

Not everyone saw the problem in such a simple light. Writer Willa Cather said that for her, the world broke in two around 1922. Like Bryan, Cather had grown up in a less frantic America - before the automobile, the talking pictures, and the phonograph. Cather thought the modern world was an uglier place than the one she remembered. In 1921 she said in a speech, "We now have music by machines, we travel by machines - soon we will be having machines to do our thinking."

Iconoclast H.L. Mencken turned forty-five the year of the Scopes trial, yet he, more than anyone else, epitomized the era. Americans who wanted to be "in the know" read his magazine, The Smart Set. His boisterous sense of play, his hatred of the "pieties" of the past, and his outrageous reporting at events like the Scopes trial, made him the quintessential modernist. When asked what he would do if on his death he found himself facing the twelve apostles, the agnostic Mencken answered, "I would simply say, 'Gentlemen, I was mistaken.'"

The excesses of the Jazz Age came tumbling down with the stock market crash of 1929. Yet everyone who lived through it had been forever changed. In the words of Heywood Broun, "The Jazz Age was wicked and monstrous and silly. Unfortunately, I had a good time."

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The Jazz Age | American Experience | PBS

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In 1925 the Jazz Age was in full swing. It was the year Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington made their first recordings.The Phantom of the Opera opened at movie theaters. The Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington, D.C. People sat on flagpoles, danced the Charleston, read a new novel called The Great Gatsby.

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This website discusses how Prohibition sparked the Jazz Age in America. Though the goal of Prohibition was to reduce crime and poverty, crime dramatically increased and more alcohol-related deaths sprung up across the country. Speakeasies, illegal nightclubs and liquor stores, replaced saloons across the country. Speakeasies could be found in nearly every building in large cities. With the Jazz Age came a new set of morals for women. Women cut their hair short and worse short dresses while drinking and smoking in public. This view of women was entirely foreign until the Jazz Age. There were few speakeasies in which flappers were not found. Many people blame the rise of popularity in music of the 1920s for the new behavior of people during the twenties.

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Prohibition jump-started the Jazz Age. As songwriter Hoagy Carmichael put it, the 1920s came in "with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bare legs, jangled morals and wild weekends." According to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, during Prohibition, "The parties were bigger...the pace was faster...and the morals were looser."

At the stroke of midnight January 16th, 1920, America went dry. There wasn't a place in the country (including your own home) where anyone could legally have a glass of wine with dinner without breaking the law. The 18th Amendment, also known as the Volstead Act, prohibited the manufacture, sale and possession of alcohol in America. Prohibition lasted for thirteen years.

The idea behind Prohibition was to reduce crime and poverty, and generally improve the quality of life in America-by making it impossible for people to get their hands on alcohol. This so-called 'Noble Experiment' was a colossal failure. People drank more than ever during Prohibition, and there were more deaths related to alcohol. No other law in America has been violated so flagrantly-by so many decent law-abiding people. Overnight the law made almost everyone in the country a criminal. Ordinary people hid illegal liquor in hip flasks, false books and hollowed-out canes. In speakeasies, patrons drank bootleg liquor out of tea cups-just in case there was a police raid.

Mob-controlled liquor created a booming black market economy. Gangster-owned speakeasies replaced neighborhood saloons-and by 1925 there were over 100,000 speakeasies in New York City alone. Mob bosses opened plush nightclubs with exotic floor shows and the hottest bands. At Small's Paradise in Harlem, waiters danced the Charleston, carrying trays loaded down with cocktails. Popular stars like Fred and Adele Astaire entertained at The Trocadero. And at the Cotton Club, Duke Ellington led the house band as tap dancer Bojangles Robinson and jazz singer Ethel Waters packed the house. Out in rural America, on Midwestern college campuses, kids drank 'bathtub gin' and danced to the hot jazz of Bix and the Wolverines in lakeside pavilions.

Join us to take a look at the light and dark side of the Prohibition Era on a show we call Speakeasies, Flappers and Red Hot Jazz. The Jim Cullum Jazz Band and their friends celebrate the high-flying party music of the roaring '20s-with tunes from the playing of jazz violinist Joe Venuti, bandleader Duke Ellington and cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

Only six months after Prohibition became law in 1920, women got the right to vote. Suffragettes were on the front line of this landmark battle, but flappers became the most visible heroines of the Jazz Age.

The only grown women sporting short skirts and bobbed hair, flappers were easy to spot. They dared to smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails in public. They turned down their hose, powdered their knees and painted their lips bright red. They hung out in speakeasies and nightclubs where they danced the Tango, the Black Bottom and the biggest dance craze of all-the Charleston-with bare arms and legs flying. Parents, teachers and pastors were scandalized by flappers and their boyfriends. These fellows wore knee-length raccoon coats and always kept their hip flasks full of illegal gin. Everyone blamed it on the music. An article in the August 1921 edition of The Ladies' Home Journa l posed the question, "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?"

Among other crimes, jazz took the rap for being a "Bolshevik element protesting against law and order"-and "an influence for evil in society."

The real issue seemed to be that jazz dances inspired young women to leave their corsets at home-and loosen up.

Prohibition was a joke to many Americans. So many speakeasies flowed with bootleg booze that New York was known as the "City on a Still."

One of the stars of the speakeasy racket was a brassy, bold, peroxide blond who called herself "Texas" Guinan. She'd been an actress in silent film westerns, a bare-back circus rider, and a singer in vaudeville before fronting speakeasies for the mob. Famous for greeting her patrons with the line "Hello, sucker!" her clubs were raided and padlocked by the police so often that she wore a necklace made of padlocks as her trademark. Another trademark was her chauffeured armored car.

Prohibition broke down old social barriers. In many New York speakeasies rich people and ordinary folks, men and women all rubbed shoulders. They had two goals in common-getting their hands on the best illegal liquor around, and avoiding a ride to the police station in a paddy wagon.

The stock market crash of 1929 signaled the end of the party.

The Roaring 20s came to a close in economic chaos, and the lighthearted atmosphere of the Prohibition Era fizzled out with the end of the decade.

In 1931 Jazz Age cornetist Bix Beiderbecke died alone in a small hotel in Manhattan at the age of 28, destroyed by alcohol. The same year Al Capone landed in jail-for income-tax invasion, though not murder or racketeering. In 1933 Prohibition was officially rescinded.

Riding down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, F. Scott Fitzgerald wept at the loss of what was to him a magical era. He said, "I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."

Photo credit for home page teaser image: 1920's flapper.

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Riverwalk Jazz - Stanford University Libraries

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Prohibition jump-started the Jazz Age. As songwriter Hoagy Carmichael put it, the 1920s came in "with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bare legs, jangled morals and wild weekends." According to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, during Prohibition, "The parties were bigger...the pace was faster...and the morals were looser."

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This website reveals the nature of speakeasies in the 1920s. Speakeasies were sparked by Prohibition, and the people involved in supplying speakeasies were often also involved in gangs. As alcohol became illegal, the desire for it increased. People who supplied speakeasies with alcohol quickly became rich. This website talks about the origin of the name "speakeasy." The word came from the common knowledge that people were supposed to "speak easy" when at a bar to avoid drawing attention to any alcoholic drinks. Many regulars at speakeasies used slang words for alcohol, including white mule, monkey rum, and coffin varnish.

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By Jen S. and Ceyana A.

Many things happened in the 1920's. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly, the invention of bubble gum occurred, and many other exciting events and happenings made headlines. However, after a certain law was set into place, a rebellion began, one that was dark and devious. What was used to bring crime rates DOWN resulted, ironically, in the sky rocketing of gang activity and other criminal offences. This was the prohibition of alcohol in the United States and Canada, commonly referred to as Prohibition. People were not willing to accept these terms, and so the birth of the "speakeasy" came forth.

Speakeasies were hidden sections of an establishment that were used to illegally sell alcoholic beverages during Prohibition. Some speakeasies were similar to today's clubs, as there was singing and jazz performances. To enter a speakeasy, one would need to say a password to the doorperson so that the doorperson would know whether or not they were really secret agents. It has been said that for every legal saloon before Prohibition, at LEAST half a dozen speakeasies were put up AFTER Prohibition. This was most likely because being the manager of a speakeasy was easy money. The word "speakeasy" came from a bartender's term: people were supposed to "speak easy" when at a bar, meaning not to draw any suspicion towards buying alcoholic beverages by looking nervous or talking quickly. Slang words used for alcohol included, among others:

*coffin varnish
*white mule
*horse liniment
*monkey rum
*panther sweat
*rot gut
*tarantula juice

These code words were used so that people could fool law officials and the government from finding out about the speakeasies.

The people involved with speakeasies mainly revolved around gangs, who supplied the liquor, in particular Al Capone and his gang. People went to these speakeasies, or "blind pigs", as a means to get alcohol after Prohibition came into effect. Speakeasies often featured jazz bands playing within their walls, and the flappers would dance the night away to the tunes of the twenties. The bartenders were often in cahoots with gangs, as well as the owners of the establishment, in concealing these hidden saloons. The owners often acted as doormen to the speakeasies, accepting the passwords to enter within the walls of the hidden bar, and got paid a fine profit for their efforts.

Speakeasies were found everywhere in the United States of America and Canada. Whether they were established underground, or hidden within stores and other businesses, in every urban establishment you entered, you were most likely not far off from an illegal party. These "secret gin joints" were most common in New York, especially in between 45th and 52nd street on 5th and 6th avenues, where almost every single building contained illegal liquor. Manhattans "21" club was probably the most secure club, with four safety switches that could be used during a raid to short circuit and cut the access to all of the doors that contained alcohol.

These establishments came into distinction in the United States during the period known as Prohibition, which was from 1920 to 1933. This lasted even longer in some states. Speakeasies became much more numerous as the Prohibition years progressed. The Volstead Act, which was passed on October 3, 1919, was the act stating that beverages over a 0.5 alcohol volume were illegal. After that day, more and more speakeasies started popping up all over the United States.

Speakeasies were established because of the Volstead Act. The Volstead Act was the act in which the prohibition of alcohol was enforced. Not long after the Act was put in place, people started hustling alcohol into illegal and concealed saloons. The provider of the alcohol would become very wealthy, as many people felt the need to indulge in alcoholic beverages. Therefore many gangsters and criminals or even just regular people found hustling illegal beverages a very profitable act.

To transport liquor to the speakeasies, they used hip flasks, false books, coconut shells, hot water bottles, and garden hoses. People stored the illegal liquor in carriages with babies perched on top and in carpenter's aprons. There were even men caught hustling liquor over the border in boxes of eggs. They had drained the eggs of the original contents and refilled them with liquor.

In between all of the wild parties going on behind closed doors, the illegal transportation of liquor, and the skyrocketing of gang activities, Prohibition and the Speakeasies that resulted were definitely some of the most secretive and rebellious things to happen in the 1920s.

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By Jen S. and Ceyana A. Many things happened in the 1920's. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly, the invention of bubble gum occurred, and many other exciting events and happenings made headlines. However, after a certain law was set into place, a rebellion began, one that was dark and devious.