Police Seize an Illegal Brewery in Detroit

Photograph

By: Anonymous

Date: circa 1925

Source: "Police Seize an Illegal Brewery in Detroit." National Archives and Records Administration.

About the Photographer: This image comes from the National Archives and Records Administration's American Cities Collection. The photographer is unknown.

INTRODUCTION

The January 1919 ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating beverages. In the wake of the ratification, Congress adopted the Volstead enforcement act to define an intoxicating beverage as any drink containing more than .05 percent alcohol, including beer and wine as well as distilled spirits.

Most Americans obeyed Prohibition. Alcohol consumption dropped by nearly two-thirds. Yet the public perceived Prohibition as a failure because of the difficulties in enforcing the law. Corruption, inefficiency, and lack of cooperation with other law enforcement agencies hampered the efforts of the Prohibition Bureau and its predecessors.

Prohibition enforcement underwent frequent reorganizations in an effort to make the law workable. The Volstead Act assigned responsibility for Prohibition enforcement to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in the Treasury Department rather than to the Department of Justice because Treasury agents had earlier collected liquor taxes. Tax collectors were not especially efficient or skilled at catching lawbreakers. Corruption was also widespread with many of the agents chosen for political reasons rather than competence. In 1927, Congress tried to remedy the problem by establishing the Prohibition Bureau within the Treasury Department and placing the agents under civil service regulations. The Bureau moved to the Justice Department in 1930.

Turnover was high among the Prohibition Bureau agents. Between 1920 and 1930, the Prohibition Bureau and its predecessors appointed nearly 18,000 agents for field positions that never numbered more than 2,300. The average turnover in the enforcement branch was nearly forty percent. By 1931, the federal government had dismissed 1,604 agents for cause, commonly drunkenness or bribery.

A lack of cooperation among law enforcement agencies further hampered enforcement of Prohibition. At the federal level, the Coast Guard and the Customs Service had shared responsibility for enforcing the ban on the importation of intoxicating beverages but no coordinated enforcement program was established. The states made few efforts to enforce Prohibition, despite bearing concurrent responsibility for enforcement.

Lured by the promise of high profits and little risk, moonshiners made homemade liquor. Home distillers commonly used a pot still. This device consisted of a closed copper kettle placed above a source of heat. A copper pipe at the top of the pot led to a coiled pipe, or worm, contained within a water-cooled chamber. The "wash," initially grain or potatoes, was placed in the kettle and heated. The alcohol rose into the worm and cooled back to a liquid. Spirits then dripped through the end of the pipe at the bottom of the con-denser to be collected. The product was generally of poor quality. Repeating the procedure removed impurities and increased the alcohol content.

PRIMARY SOURCE

POLICE SEIZE AN ILLEGAL BREWERY IN DETROIT

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

By 1930, the federal government had spent $15 million to enforce Prohibition. The enforcement effort generally succeeded in stopping the consumption of intoxicating drinks. Between 1921 and 1929, Prohibition agents made 539,759 arrests and seized 45,177 vehicles. The number of Prohibition cases in federal courts increased from 29,114 in 1921 to 65,960 in 1932. For the period of 1921 to 1933, Prohibition cases constituted 64.6 percent of all cases in federal district court.

Enforcement of the law helped to bring about its demise. To catch criminals, Prohibition agents searched automobiles without warrants, wiretapped telephones, and engaged in gun battles that sometimes sent bullets flying into terrified bystanders. The excesses caused a backlash from an angry public that increasingly sensed a breakdown of respect for law and order.

The lawlessness created by Prohibition sparked a public outcry for changes in policing. In response, President Herbert Hoover commissioned an unprecedented study of law enforcement. The resulting Wickersham Commission report, issued beginning in 1931, summed up the prevailing wisdom about crime and criminality, police, prosecutions, prison, and parole. In response to Wickersham, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began something that chiefs of police had been requesting for years: the collection of Uniform Crime Reports based on the number of incidents reported to police departments across the country.

The Great Depression that began in 1929 focused attention on the economic effects of Prohibition, particularly the enforcement costs. Arresting violators of the law consumed police time, jammed federal and state courts, and dramatically increased the prison population. By 1930, two-thirds of those found guilty received only fines but federal prisons bulged with twice the number of inmates for which they were designed. The overflow of federal inmates filled state and local jails.

The liquor trade had once been the seventh-largest industry in the United States. When the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933 repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, brewers and bottle-makers returned to legal work.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.

Sinclair, Andrew. Prohibition: The Era of Excess. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Unintended Consequences of Constitutional Amendments, edited by David Kyvig. Athens Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2000.