Friday, September 7, 2018

Beer becomes a casualty of the Great War and Villa resurgent. September 7, 1918.


Prohibition, which was rising prior to World War One, gained massive momentum during the war for a variety of stated reasons and a series or more significant unspoken psychological ones.

On September 6, 1918, it received a big boost in the form of an emergency agricultural bill that had been amended to include a ban on brewing on December 1, 1918.  There was a certain logic to the ban, in that resources were really tight and the brewing of beer consumed agricultural products that could go elsewhere. But that only provided part of the reason for banning brewing.  The more significant one was that the American public had been persuaded by the war to take the country dry, in part due to concerns that soldiers in hastily assembled Army camps would booze it up in nearby, formerly quiet, towns and in part by fears that soldiers far from home would be corrupted by drink outside the eyes of their families, both in the US, and away in wine laden France.

That can be seen in particular by the paper above, which not only noted the passage of the bill, but the mustering of dry forces that would seek to carry on Prohibition post war. . .a move that was successful. . . and not.

Meanwhile, the war in France itself was going well, but Villa was resurgent in Chihuahua.


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