Long before Prohibition, religious preferences and practices divided Americans into those who drink and those who don’t. Wherever the Bible belt buckles into the bourbon belt the two wrap themselves into a double helix that marks American culture with equal parts jollity and intolerance. The roots run deep, reaching into the seventeenth century when Scottish, Irish and German settlers came ashore in New England with their pot stills and brewing skills and ran headlong into Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock filled to the brim with ideals, none of which involved distilling. Since then the drinking and non-drinking cultures, the wets and drys, have traded dominance over decades and regions,burning themselves out with excessive zeal only to emerge again from the ashes, renewed and ready to begin another cycle.

As these cycles have evolved, so have Americans’ considerations about the appropriate conduct of drinkers. In the colonial era all the responsibility was with the drinker. Distilled and fermented liquors were a staple of daily living, considered invigorating and restorative. Wine and sugar or whiskey and mint were served with breakfast, beer and hard cider with lunch, and toddies for supper and evening. And there might be a fillip with morning and afternoon work breaks as well. In spite of what sounds like a bottomless cup, public drunkenness was considered a personal failure and drunkards were chastised from the pulpit, humiliated in the stocks, and made to wear red placards bearing the letter ‘D’.

The next 150 years started the pendulum in the other direction as the temperance movement spread in influence and rank, shifting the focus from the drinker to the drink itself. The mainly middle-class and female members of organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the World League Against Alcoholism, and the Anti-Saloon League, campaigned to save drinkers and, in their eyes, the American family itself by doing away with the drink. Members prayed, lectured, and legislated their way into the Eighteenth Amendment, which made the sale of liquor in the America against the law.

Supporters were confident that America’s taste for liquor would simply dry up when there was none to be had. Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919 and it became law at midnight on January 17, 1920. Very little money was designated for legal enforcement because proponents were convinced that without liquor to fuel it, crime would disappear.

Paradoxically, Prohibition brought with it far greater harm than any it had intended to prohibit. Some estimates indicate that the consumption of liquor increased from 140 million to 200 million gallons annually, all bootleg except for limited medicinal prescriptions and merchants leaned toward the criminal type, intent on selling any alcoholic concoction they could rustle up and eliminating all obstacles. Literally. In 1930, the Director of the Prohibition Enforcement Bureau estimated that the production of moonshine was more than 800 million gallons a year, most of which went into synthetic gins and semi-lethal cocktails.

Thousands of industry-related jobs were lost as the big distilleries, rectifying factories, bars and saloons were shut down and dismantled. Millions in tax money levied on alcohol products that had previously flowed into the government coffers ceased overnight.

Toward the end of Prohibition the Great Depression shifted public attention from temperance protests to bread lines. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned on the platform that making liquor legal again would fill government coffers with badly needed tax dollars and put people back to work. Once in office, he pushed repeal and in December of 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment ended what some called the Noble Experiment and what Roosevelt called the “damnable affliction of Prohibition.”

Since then our view of drinking has slowly evolved into something different from that held by either the colonists or the prohibitionists. Distillers encourage patrons to drink responsibly and Mothers Against Drunk Driving raised public consciousness about the dangers of drinking and driving. The American public knows more about alcoholism and now seeks to help those for whom drinking is not a pleasure but a curse rather than forcing them to wear a “D” placard around their necks.

In a slim, acerbic but mostly humorous volume written in 1930 and titled The Future of Drinking, writer and historian Gilbert Seldes writes: “If a law or custom makes drinking a crime, the question becomes social, national, economic—anything but personal. So long as drinking itself remains innocent, its future depends on the drinker; it is as personal as taste or happiness or a headache.”

The drink itself continues to be the perfect taxable item—not necessary but highly desirable.