History: Wartime Prohibition

On December 5, 1917, then Wyoming Governor Frank Houx asked for the closing of saloons in Wyoming as a part of the war effort. The Wartime Prohibition Act, a temporary Federal Law passed in 1918, to restrict the sale of alcohol as an effort to conserve food, grains and fuel as a part of the war effort. The act prohibited the sale of beverages with more than 2.75% alcohol and the production of beer and wine.

This story was in the Park County Enterprise, Cody, on May 9, 1917 – Food Or Drink? – We must conserve our food supply. The great war is being fought on both sides on short rations, and the pinch of privation will sooner or later be at our own vitals. The world’s food crops were lamentably short at the fall harvest, and they promise to be no better this year.

Our first great duty of co-operation in the war is to feed our allies; for it would be fatuous to refuse to admit that the German submarine campaign is forcing the British and French peoples to tighten their belts. What must we do to meet this obligation without imposing too great suffering or unnecessary sacrifice on our own people? We must raise every pound of food we can. We must eliminate every ounce of waste and extravagance we can. We must save food by abolishing drink.

Drink is made from food. Beer is made from barley and sugar, whiskey and rye are corn. What we drink we cannot have to eat. England out cut her production of beer in half and saved five hundred and seventy million pounds of barley, seventy two million pounds of sugar, and thirty three million pounds of other food products a year. If the United Stales were to cut its consumption of drink only in half, enough bread stuffs would be saved to provide eleven million loaves of bread a day.

In this great national crisis, shall men drink, or women and children eat?

Many of those wishing to stop people from drinking completely undertook to make sure that alcoholic beverages were banned altogether.

This from The Riverton Review, July 23, 1918– Prohibition Won A Decisive Victory In The Senate Last Week – By a vote of 36 to 25 the senate overruled its presiding officer who had declared the prohibitions amendments were not germane to the food stimulation bill,. His decision meant that prohibition would have been shelved. Dry forces securing most of their votes form the Democrats and some from the Republicans.

The prohibitionists now will try to drive thru the senate a bone-dry amendment attached to food stimulation bill which is under discussion. It is believed very generally that prohibition will win.

The prohibition amendment now pending prescribes stopping the manufacture of beer and wine after Nov. 1, 1918 and the sale of beer, wine and whiskey after Dec. 31, 1918. This is the “perfected” Norris Amendment recently authorized the agriculture committee’

Senator Kendrick voted to sustain the prohibition amendment and Senator Warren voted against it.

Of course, not everyone was in favor of prohibition, especially the brewers.

Sheridan Enterprise Thursday December 13, 1917 – “Temperance and Prohibition-” In this time of war, when every national energy is directed to thoughts of national protection, it is inevitable that the country should be confronted with the problem of Intemperance. It is more insistently necessary than ever before to recognize that it is a paramount public duty to preserve the highest qualities of American manhood unimpaired by any form of Intemperance.

In the anxious, almost hysterical desire to do something first, and to consider later its wisdom, there was much clamor for National Prohibition. Russia, afore time the Land of Vodka and of Misery, and then the Land of Prohibition by Ukase, was cited as the Exemplar of man’s readiness to become abstinent by Fiat.

Russia today, in her riot of License and Anarchy, is the Exemplar of the swing of the human pendulum to violent extremes. Life, as Men in their ignorance seek to make it, is a pendulum, swinging forever to extremes. Life, as Wisdom knows it, avoids all excesses. Life’s pendulum cannot hold fast at either extreme. Prohibition is the pendulum’s extreme swing from Intemperance.

In steady equilibrium stands Temperance moderating the extremes of both madnesses.

Prohibition makes abstainers only of those who WILL to abstain, and more eager drunkards of those who WILL to be drunken.

True Temperance makes no abstainers by coercion and encourages no drunkards. “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” wrote Thomas Jefferson out of his wisdom and knowledge, “and no one sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.”

Thus he enunciated a Universal Principle. Whether we say wine or beer—with less than one-third the alcoholic content of wine—the Principle is the same and is known to the Experience of the Ages. This Principle is now firmly fixed in our federal laws—and will produce a more truly National Temperance than the coercion of Prohibition. . . The United States Brewers Association.

No matter what side of the issue one was on 107 years ago, Prohibition became the law of the land for several years, which lead to moonshiners, bootleggers, illegal booze and ‘speak easy’ saloons. A number of breweries, including the Sheridan Brewery went from beer to soft drinks during that time.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but during WWI, due to the war effort to save grain for food, prohibition became the law of the land.

Photos taken of displays at the Hot Springs County Museum in Thermopolis, with thanks.