Drinking is one of the most frequent activities mentioned in Anna Christie—after all, the play is set in a bar. But this seemingly mundane activity is actually a lot more consequential than it may initially appear, as this play is set during Prohibition, America’s ill-fated attempt to prevent the buying and selling of alcohol. We will briefly explore this era, which may better elucidate the characters’ actions and personalities.
Prohibition began with the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919 and was not repealed until the passage of the 21st amendment in 1933. Its roots were far earlier than the 20th century however, as temperance campaigns were ubiquitous in the early and late 19th centuries. Reformers railed against the deleterious effects of alcohol on households, workplaces, and society in general, but there was also a thinly-veiled class element to their criticisms. Immigrants and the working class were most commonly targeted by the Volstead Act, the legislation Congress passed to try to carry out Prohibition’s enforcement.
President Hoover described the effort as "a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose" but in reality it was far from that. Reformers claimed that with the absence of alcohol, saloons would close and neighborhoods would improve. Instead, many businesses in the leisure and entertainment realms suffered. Ken Burns’ Prohibition documentary explains how “one of the most profound [economic] effects of Prohibition was on government tax revenues. Before Prohibition, many states relied heavily on excise taxes in liquor sales to fund their budgets. In New York, almost 75% of the state's revenue was derived from liquor taxes. With Prohibition in effect, that revenue was immediately lost. At the national level, Prohibition cost the federal government a total of $11 billion in lost tax revenue, while costing over $300 million to enforce.”
Enforcement of the laws, which prohibited only the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol, could not do much to stop people from possessing and consuming it. There were a myriad of loopholes, all of which led to pharmacists prescribing alcohol, people creating home stills, priests procuring wine for their congregation, and innumerable criminal elements endeavoring to figure out ways to create, attain, and/or disseminate alcohol, much of it increasingly dangerous to consume. Organized crime bloomed in major cities, resulting in violent gang wars for territory. The commissioners who were tasked with raiding and shutting down speakeasies were often “on the take,” meaning they were illegally taking the alcohol they were supposed to turn over and/or destroy. A scholar for the National WWI Museum explains that “States believed it was not their responsibility to assist with enforcement, thus giving ample opportunity to those who sought to flout the law. Men like Roy Olmstead of Seattle and George Remus of Cincinnati became millionaire bootleggers, while others like Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast increased their political influence by being able to keep a city ‘open.’” And finally, some of the most damning evidence suggests that Americans actually drank more during Prohibition. New York had over 30,000 speakeasies, by one estimate.
Support for the amendment’s repeal began the moment it originally passed, but gained steam in the late 1920s. When the stock market crashed in 1929, anti-Prohibitionists argued that the money for Prohibition’s enforcement was being misspent in a time of economic duress, and the lost tax revenue was even more problematic. Democrats who took over Congress in 1930 and the Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, elected in 1932, expressed support for the repeal.
