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Nobody could hazard a guess at how many thousands of mugs of beer had been served over the old mahogany bar at Weis Brothers Saloon. Bartender John Mich, who had manned the beer taps at the Milwaukee watering hole since the 1890s, probably could have come closest in his estimate if he had tried. But it seemed only a matter of trivia now for the 20 or so patrons gathered in the back room of the establishment. After all, there was a funeral at hand. They had come together to pay their final respects to their beloved old friend, John Barleycorn.

None in attendance was consoled by the fact that the dearly departed was a mere character of fiction, immortalized in song as the mythical personification of beer. On the contrary, as the ceremony began, some stifled tears, including Mich, whose moans and gurgles were loudest. With hands folded and heads bowed, the somber group encircled the casket, which was artfully decorated with floral tributes placed inside beer mugs and lit candles stuck in liquor bottles.

Saloon employee William Graf delivered the eulogy. "John Barleycorn was foully murdered," thundered Graf, "and his body found in the back yard of legislation!"

The black-dressed pallbearers then carried John Barleycorn's earthly remains out of the saloon to the nearby banks of the Milwaukee River. Accompanied by a soft chorus of "Sweet Adeline," they lowered the casket into the water. (That his final resting place be eternally wet seemed only fitting.)

Empty beer bottles, for lack of roses, were tossed in after the sinking casket. The loud splash of the saloon's cash register being hurled into the river punctuated the ceremony's conclusion.

The passing of John Barleycorn, of course, meant the demise of Weis Brothers Saloon and thousands just like it all over America. For beer drinkers everywhere, the taps would soon run dry. The year was 1919 and the nation had just ratified what later historians would call "the noble experiment." Within one year, National Prohibition would officially be under way.

Dry Roots Run Deep

Though culminating on January 16, 1920, National Prohibition was not, by any means, a 20th-century invention. Efforts to curb, if not eliminate, the national thirst for alcoholic beverages are nearly as old as America itself. Most of the earliest temperance initiatives were born of religious circles, the salvation of the individual drinker being at the heart of their objective. By the early 1800s, however, a more organized approach had emerged. Temperance societies sprang up in virtually every city in America, and their collective enrollment reached more than 1 million members by 1840.

A group known as The Washingtonians gained particular notoriety. The organization's strength lay in the fact that its membership was composed entirely of "reformed drunkards," thus adding a certain potency to its admonitions against drink. Ironically, few found any significance in the well-known truth that the club's namesake, old George Washington himself, was a homebrewer and a lover of good porter.

Indeed, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the beer drinker was not a priority target of the temperance crusade. Rather, most of the crusaders saw whiskey and other distilled spirits as the primary menace. Many activists even pointed to beer as a possible solution to "the drink problem," as they called it. In 1784, when Dr. Benjamin Rush published An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors upon the Human Body and Mind, he preached that, while distilled spirits were a sure path to self-destruction, the daily consumption of beer promoted good health and nutrition.

But the temperance advocates' distinction between the various grades of alcoholic beverages would soon begin to wane. By the mid- to late-1800s, activists had almost unanimously shifted their efforts away from the individual drinker, focusing instead on what they viewed as the epicenter of the problem: the American saloon. After all, the saloon was ground zero, the very "gateway to hell." It was where a man went in sober and came out drunk. Gambling, prostitution, under-age drinking⎯they were all products of the saloon, according to the new temperance gospel.

In 1874, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland, and with it was born "the visitation band." Much feared by saloon keepers and beer drinkers alike, the visitation band was an often vicious mob of Bible-swinging women assembled to descend upon saloons and verbally accost their patrons. The goal, of course, was to empty the place and cause financial ruin for the owner. With the patronage sent scrambling, a team of women was sometimes left behind to block the saloon's entrance, much to the chagrin of would-be regressors. Only three months after its founding, the WCTU proudly claimed that it had "called on" more than 1,100 establishments, doing untold damage to the saloon trade.

German immigrants took particular offense to this type of temperance activity, viewing it as an assault on their right to practice the customs of their heritage. In many cities, bands of Germans took to the streets waving steins and carrying beer barrels on their shoulders in protest. Booming oompa bands usually led the procession, ensuring that the spectacle was observed by everyone in the vicinity. Often, the passionate nature of the demonstration was too much for temperance onlookers to bear, and a confrontation ensued, sometimes boiling over into violence. Few things were as dear to the German heart as beer.

Prohibition on the Horizon

The long-term effectiveness of the visitation bands and similar tactics was questionable at best. But, it was from this movement that came a pivotal development in the temperance movement⎯the founding of the Anti-Saloon League.

Established in 1893, the League ultimately proved to be the single most important force in bringing about National Prohibition. Its organizers understood that good old-fashioned politics was the only sure path to victory for their cause. The League conducted no saloon raids, led no prayers for the drunkard's salvation, and beleaguered no one into sobriety. Its singular goal was sheer political might. The League's 5 million members worked relentlessly to support any candidate for office who proclaimed himself a "dry." But they worked twice as hard against any office-seeker on the "wet" side of the fence.

The Anti-Saloon League's first real test of strength came in 1913 when thousands marched on Washington and presented Congress with petitions calling for a Constitutional Amendment for National Prohibition. The petitions made their way through the governmental labyrinth, surfacing in 1915 as a bill to be voted on by the House of Representatives. The vote was 197 in favor, 190 against. Though not the required two-thirds majority, the outcome astonished everyone. It was a clear indication that Prohibition was, for the first time, well within reach. The League soon proclaimed itself "the strongest political organization in the world."

Despite the political successes, it was generally well known that the majority of Americans did not support Prohibition. The beer-drinking, saloon-going population simply had no equally potent organization working on their behalf. There was no wet political machine to lobby government, publish literature, raise funds, or campaign for political candidates⎯all of the activities in which the League was so proficient.

One of the few potentially viable contenders that did challenge the League was the German-American Alliance, whose members numbered 2 million by 1914. Seeking to preserve the German immigrant's right to have his beer, the Alliance appealed to the American sense of freedom, stressing to lawmakers that Prohibition took away the individual's choice. War in Europe, however, ultimately sent the organization down in flames. Amid growing anti-German sentiment in America, the Alliance was charged by Congress with conducting itself in an unpatriotic manner and was ordered to disband in 1918.

Of course, the brewers themselves mounted a vigorous assault on the dry campaign. Their vast financial resources and strong voice in Washington were formidable weapons. But the brewers' message lacked a sense of sincerity, and their efforts often came off as blatantly self-serving. Then, too, introduction of the federal income tax in 1913 dealt the brewers a serious blow. The new tax removed government's reliance on revenue from beer taxes, thereby obliterating one of the brewers' most compelling defenses against Prohibition. Woman suffrage and World War I also conspired against the brewers. Naturally, the Anti-Saloon League exploited these opportunities with insidious precision.

In the end, the power of the dry juggernaut simply could not be matched by any wet faction. On January 16, 1919, Nebraska became the required 36th state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. National Prohibition began exactly one year later.

To Obey, or Not to Obey

Prohibition has been called "the noble experiment"⎯experiment being the key word. Among the most enduring arguments against a nationwide dry law was that enforcement would be problematic at best, impossible at worst. And so, even the most ardent supporters of the Amendment, whether they admitted it or not, awaited those first dry weeks with bated breath. The big question: Would Prohibition actually prohibit?

The beer-drinking population of America was one group that was particularly disinclined to bow to unpopular legislation. In Milwaukee, the very beer Mecca of the nation, fear of disobedience on the eve of Prohibition was so great that the city's Prohibition commissioner ordered all remaining outdoor beer advertisements to be painted over, so as not to incite temptation. Indeed, the fear of rampant civil disobedience was justified. The public consensus, after all, was that beer ought to be excluded from the dry law, particularly beer of low alcohol content.

Colonel Jacob Ruppert, a New York beer baron and owner of the New York Yankees, led the charge on this conviction. He asserted that beer that contained 2.75 percent alcohol or less could not be considered intoxicating. The colonel took his argument all the way to the Supreme Court but was ultimately defeated.

The Prohibition Amendment itself made no reference to alcohol content, citing only "intoxicating liquors...for beverage purposes" as being illegal. But the resulting Volstead Act (the actual set of laws drafted by Congress to enforce Prohibition) set the legal alcohol limit at one-half of 1 percent. Brewers and beer drinkers alike bristled at the low limit, which, according to one frustrated observer, was "less than the alcohol content of sauerkraut." The debate escalated when it was revealed that Congress had not selected the legal limit based on any chemical or scientific data on the properties of intoxication. Instead, the figure was simply borrowed from the Internal Revenue Service, which used it to distinguish a taxable malt beverage from a nontaxable one.

Organized protests among the nation's beer drinkers were inevitable. Led by Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, thousands marched on Washington in June of 1919 to demand the exemption of beer from the Prohibition laws. Gompers pointed out that the Eighteenth Amendment represented the first instance in American history when the United States Constitution actually denied rights, instead of granting them. A similar demonstration was held in New York City, where some 20,000 protesters marched down Fifth Avenue on July 4th. One banner read, "Dempsey knocked out Carpenter in four rounds. Let's knock out Prohibition in four weeks!"

Troops returning home from Europe were particularly vocal in their cries for beer. While off fighting for liberty in foreign lands, their freedoms at home had suffered a brutal attack. In March of 1919, a soldier transport ship arrived in New York harbor with its troops all chanting, "We Want Beer." A sympathetic brass band playing on one of the welcome vessels answered the chant with a rendition of "How Dry I Am."

Ultimately, however, all of the protests and objections went unheard, and beer containing more than one-half of 1 percent of alcohol remained illegal throughout Prohibition. America's beer drinkers, it seemed, would be forced to find new ways to have their beer. And that they did.

Thou Shalt Have Beer

Homebrew, or heimgemacht as the Germans called it, became all the rage during Prohibition. Manufacturers of malt syrup (an essential ingredient for homebrewers) reported torrential sales, and many former breweries found financial refuge making it as well.

By 1929, the Prohibition Bureau estimated the illicit production of homebrew at 22 million barrels (31 gallons per barrel) annually, nearly the same amount of legal beer sold in 1919. In some cities, so much homebrew was being made that sewer systems were choked beyond function by the onslaught of spent hops.

One clever poet painted a colorful, though not too inaccurate, picture of the typical Prohibition-era household:

Mother's in the kitchen, washing out the jugs;
Sister's in the pantry, bottling the suds;
Father's in the cellar, mixing up the hops;
Johnny's on the porch, watching for the cops.

Alternatives to the Real Stuff

For the man not too handy with the homebrew, there were other alternatives. Hundreds of brewers across the country were licensed to produce "near beer"⎯made by brewing real beer, then boiling off the alcohol to conform to the one-half of 1 percent limit. Not surprisingly, a goodly share of the real stuff never made it to the de-alcoholizer, either by clever deceit of the brewer or by greed of the crooked Prohibition agent.

Even when de-alcoholized according to the letter of the law, near beer was often delivered to customers with a separate package containing a portion of the raw alcohol boiled off. The drinker then squirted the alcohol back into the near beer with a syringe, thus making what was commonly called "needle beer."

Plain old near beer, after all, appealed to no one. A popular quip of the day said it best: "Whoever called it near beer was a poor judge of distance!"

While homebrew and spiked near beer quenched the thirst of households, it was bootleggers and smugglers who lubricated the booming "speakeasy" trade. In New York City alone, about 32,000 speakeasies were open for business in 1929, compared to half that number of legal saloons before Prohibition. The flow of real beer from old-time breweries now controlled by organized crime was never in short supply. Chicago, in particular, saw little slowdown in beer production at the onset of Prohibition. Notorious mob figures like Johnny Torrio, and later Al Capone, kept Chicagoans knee-deep in beer for the duration of the dry (or not so dry) years.

Indeed, it did not take long for Prohibition's darkest legacy to emerge. Organized crime syndicates permeated cities throughout the nation. Turf wars, vengeance killings and rampant political corruption made daily headlines everywhere. It soon became clear to everyone that the "noble experiment" was failing miserably, worse than even its harshest critics had predicted.

Angry Americans⎯most of whom had sat idly by while Prohibition became reality⎯now took up arms against it. The tide was turning, and the days of National Prohibition were numbered.

Next issue: the road to Repeal.

Carl Miller
Carl Miller is a freelance writer, long-time beer historian, and host of the American Brewery History Page at www.beerhistory.com. Special thanks to Will Anderson for his pioneering works on the history of beer in America.

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Nobody could hazard a guess at how many thousands of mugs of beer had been served over the old mahogany bar at Weis Brothers Saloon. Bartender John Mich, who had manned the beer taps at the Milwaukee watering hole since the 1890s, probably could have come closest in his estimate if he had tried.

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Art Responds to Women's Suffrage: Pro and Con

the allegorical bugler, calling her "troops" to battle: a popular image on both sides of the Atlantic

Names of Suffrage cartoonists and Organizations
American:
Nina Allender: (1872-1957): studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; became the official National Woman's Party cartoonist
Winsor McCay: (1869-1934): a self-taught artist who made comic strips and animated cartoons; also worked as an editorial cartoonist
Ida Proper Sedgwick (1873 - 1957): studied art at the Art Students' League and in France; became the art editor of Woman Voter
Boardman Robinson (1876 - 1952): cartoonist for the New York Tribune and the Masses; taught art at the Art Students League
Lou Rogers (1879-1952): studied art in Massachusetts and at the Art Students League; became a cartoonist and published widely in newspapers
Heterodoxy: a club for professional women in NYC; members were writers, artists, theorists, educators and social activists; all the members supported suffrage and cartoonists such as Sedgwick and Rogers were members
British:
Artists Suffrage League (ASL) and the Suffrage Atelier (workshop) (SA): these were groups of artists who organized specifically for the purpose of providing visual materials for the suffrage campaign.
National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)
National League for Opposition to Women's Suffrage (NLOWS)

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Just as the battle for suffrage attracted women who were unconventional and boldly challenging the status quo, the women who became cartoonists were likewise engaged in unconventional activities. Cartooning was considered a masculine domain–it was not decorative, it was not always pretty, it was political, and it was aggressive. But women did become cartoonists, and the suffrage movement was the impetus for their entry into this field. Many of the women who became cartoonists had already decided to study art and they transferred their styles to the political images they cartooned. Others were self-taught and their only involvement with art was through cartooning.

The similarities between British and American suffrage cartoons are strong enough to allow us to consider them as an example of the same phenomenon: political art, for and against women's suffrage. Whether British or American, cartoons related to the suffrage movement generally followed one of two paths: either they portrayed the female as (1) weaker, victimized, suffering from oppression and therefore in need of the vote in order to get the protection she needed, or as (2) morally superior, someone who would sweep corruption out of government, and therefore deserved the vote in order to protect the country.

Regardless of nationality and which group the artists belonged to, they all recognized the importance of using visual imagery to reach larger audiences. So did the anti-suffrage campaigners who very quickly created their own visual propaganda and stereotypes. Stereotypes are implicitly negative (although positive stereotypes can also exist, they are usually used for negative reasons): they take an idea or object or person which in real life exists in various forms and they impose a single form which essentially denies those variations. The challenge for the suffragists was the challenge of subverting anti-suffrage stereotypes which already existed and creating equally compelling new stereotypes which would be recognizable but communicate an opposing message.

anti-suffrage stereotypes

When we examine these stereotypes, it is immediately obvious that the idea of women voting presented the same threat to men on both sides of the Atlantic. An illustration in Life magazine depicted three rows of faces of feminists: "as they are" (the top row)--they are hags, dowagers, with masculine features; "as they think they are"--saints, heroines, angels; "as they appear to the police and shopkeepers" (the bottom row)--bestial, with horns and pointed ears, baring their teeth. The usual approach to mocking these women involved showing them in the vicinity of a woman who was visibly feminine, attired in billowing and lacy clothing, with a fancy hairstyle and probably blond hair, and a fan in her hand. These images became less useful in both England and the U.S. as more women began to work outside the home, and they weren't all ugly or spinsters, and clothing styles began to change.

The womanly woman versus the suffragist--poster made for the NLOWS in 1912

Modern types: illustration which appeared in the Bystander, in 1913

Boardman Robinson: The type has changed (NY Tribune, Feb. 24, 1911)

Robinson's cartoon is not an anti-suffrage cartoon--it is part of the suffrage attempt to associate a more modern woman with the suffrage campaign, just as Nina Allender did. Yet there might still be something disconcerting about the image of the woman who appears dressed for both housework and a day on the town, carrying her suffrage banner over her shoulder.

Instead of associating physical types with pro or anti-suffrage positions, another strategy was to suggest that women's brains (and personalities) were not equipped to deal with making decisions for the country.

The stereotypes did not completely disappear, although they were softened or modified to be more in tune with present-day realities.
Meanwhile, a new image appeared: the husband of the suffragist. Nothing, apparently, was more amusing than the man who tried to do the housework–that was funny back in the mid-19th century when Spencer painted the young father doing the marketing. But where she showed some tenderness in her portrayal of the poor inept father, the anti-suffrage cartoons did not. The closely related cartoon was the house which the husband of the suffragist came home to: disheveled, grimy, obviously the home of someone who didn't care about her wifely duties.

Currier and Ives, "The Age of Iron," lithograph, 1869

The suffragists' task was to take already existing images of women and recast them in terms that showed the importance or benefits of suffrage. They also had to take the image of the problem woman and banish her by producing an image which could become associated with their cause and serve as a unifying flag, as it were. Two strategies might serve this goal: rather than creating stereotypes, such as the anti-suffragists did, the suffragists could try to depict images of individual but recognizable social types depicting women working in the public domain. The second strategy was to avoid both stereotypes and images that approximated the real world and to promote allegorical personifications in their place.

Re-framing stereotypes and allegories

One of the social groups that the suffragists used in images was the working woman. These posters attempted to demonstrate that an alliance existed between suffragists and workers, that work was not a glamorous activity pursued for vain or idle reasons but a necessary aspect of the woman's life, that oppression of the worker resulted at least in part from the fact that women did not have the vote. This set of beliefs tended to support the ideological position that politics alone would not change the status of lower-class workers but that a new voice needed to be added to the political realm and that the voice of women would bring about these changes. If they were able to make this argument successfully, then people who looked at the posters would interpret women's suffrage as helping more than women–it would benefit all workers and in doing that, it would benefit the economy.

1912, by Mary Lowndes, for ASL

1910, by Alfred Pearse (signed A. Patriot)

another example of the allegory of the militant woman (pro-suffrage)

In the next example, a pro-suffragist created a direct response to the anti-suffrage image of the Greek goddess who doesn't want to vote. Brinkley, meanwhile, takes a different allegorical image (the three graces) and re-dresses them as suffragists and icons of suffrage, preparedness and Americanism.

NLOWS poster

Louise Jacobs, for SA, 1912

Nell Brinkley: The Three Graces (International News Service, 1916)

The New Woman was another image which the suffragists tried to adopt. She was not only an American development: there was a new woman in Britain, France and in Russia, although she wasn't the same thing in all these places. Suffrage arguments which drew on the image of the New Woman tended to argue from an evolutionary position–that she represented a higher form of evolution and would therefore be a better mother and contribute more to society; that the earlier images of the womanly woman were based on outdated images of life and did not correspond to reality; and that the New Woman, because she did represent evolution, incorporated the best of all the traditions of womanhood which had come before.

Nina Allender was probably one of the key artists to develop this new image of the suffragist as someone who was younger and active, who represented a new generation of women, who was not afraid to let the shape of her body show through her clothing–in a sense, her image of the suffragist was as popular an image as Gibson's image of the new woman had once been. Meanwhile, other women created suffragists who were older, who were workers, who represented a range of types or no types of all, and these various women generally appeared at the same time in individual cartoons of crowds working for suffrage.

Ida Sedgwick Proper: The Anti-Suffrage Parade (Woman's Journal, Sept. 21, 1912)

Suffragists also developed cartoons which were reciprocals of the anti-suffrage caricatures of suffragists: caricatures of the anti-suffragists. in response to the attacks against women who wanted suffrage–attacks which depicted her as unwomanly, as undesirable, as a nag, as bitter, as someone who couldn't get a husband–the suffragists began to caricature the anti-suffragists, whether male or female. Ida Proper's Anti-Suffrage Parde depicts the anti-suffragists marching in lock-step and chained together by their dogmatic and false beliefs. The female anti was generally seen as being locked in some old-fashioned, distant past or as a frivolous woman who gave nothing back to society and dressed in silly and inappropriate clothing; the male anti was usually upper class and therefore fashionably dressed, but his posture and face became symbols of vacuous stupidity. Proper's cartoon captures all the caricatures in her fifteen characters who are chained together by such qualities as selfishness and indifference. The men are fat, smoking cigars, and wearing hats–they don't want anything to disturb the order of things since it has obviously been good for them. Some of the figures can be identified as real people while some of them are clearly invented.

There will always be some equivocations about calling cartoons art, especially when the person who makes them does not have a history of making any other form of art. But there are some writers and historians who consider the cartoon a pointed form of political art and who likewise point to suffrage cartoons as the earliest examples of feminist art.

Alice Sheppard. Lisa Tickner. References:
for the American suffrage movement:
Cartooning for Suffrage. (Albuquerque: Univ of New Mexico Press, 1994).
for the British suffrage movement:
The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-14. (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1988).

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Art Responds to Women's Suffrage: Pro and Con the allegorical bugler, calling her "troops" to battle: a popular image on both sides of the Atlantic American: Nina Allender: (1872-1957): studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; became the official National Woman's Party cartoonist Winsor McCay: (1869-1934): a self-taught

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There was a journal article titled "Suffrage and Prohibition" that explained why the brewers were against women's suffrage and the opinions of different groups of people

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There was a journal article titled "Suffrage and Prohibition" that explained why the brewers were against women's suffrage and the opinions of different groups of people

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/25108710?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

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Another example of a pro suffrage postcard:

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Another example of a pro suffrage postcard:

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Brewers were against women's suffrage because they knew that they would vote for the prohibition of beer, liquor, etc.

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Brewers were against women's suffrage because they knew that they would vote for the prohibition of beer, liquor, etc.

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Brown, L. Ames. “Suffrage and Prohibition.” The North American Review, 1 Jan. 1916, www.jstor.org/stable/25108710?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

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Pro-Suffrage Propoganda Postcard: 1910, Women's Social and Political Union.”Museum of London Prints, www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/218033/womens-social-and-political-union-alfred-pearse-pro-suffrage-propoganda-postcard-1910.

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Many people did not realize how much of an impact the females voting could make, even some of those fighting for it.  

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Many people did not realize how much of an impact the females voting could make, even some of those fighting for it.  

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"To the Women of Colorado," 1893, womhist.alexanderstreet.com/colosuff/doc20.htm.

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This picture shows how much of an unexpected impact female's votes can make.

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This picture shows how much of an unexpected impact female's votes can make.

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“Today in 1911: Suffragists Celebrate Their Victory in California.” Feminist Majority Foundation Blog, feminist.org/blog/index.php/2014/10/13/today-in-1911-suffragists-celebrate-their-victory-in-california/.

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Women of Colorado, do you know the opportunity that is before you this fall? Do you know that on November 7 the voters of the state will decide whether or not you are to have the ballot hereafter? Do you know that there is a possibility you may rise to legal equality with man?

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"Anti-Woman Suffrage: Don't Fail to Read This," 1893

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Document 19: Anti-Woman Suffrage: Dont Fail to Read This, Leaflet, 1893 (Women. Suffrage. Newspaper clippings), Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado.