Washington D.C. Prohibition repealed!

An advertisement published in the Washington Herald on 7 February 1913, promoted Heurich Home Brew, a beer brewed by the Christian Heurich Brewing Company. At less than 2% alcohol-by-volume, this was pretty much a 'near beer,' and possibly a test of what the Washington, D.C., brewery might have to produce if Prohibition were ratified.

Which, regrettably, it was.

National Prohibition began on 17 January 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, and would continue through 5 December 1933, when it was repealed by the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, an interregnum that H.L. Mencken, Baltimore-based literary reporter/satirist, referred to as those "Thirteen Awful Years."

In Washington, D.C., it was even more awful.

There, local Prohibition had begun nearly three years earlier, when on 1 November 1917, Congress, under its Constitutional authority over the city, enacted the Sheppard Act, prohibiting the manufacture, distribution, and sale of intoxicating beverages within the District Of Columbia. Congress wouldn't repeal the city's Prohibition until 1 March 1934, three months after the rest of the nation.

However, although tardy, that repeal legislation would become a model for other jurisdictions in the U.S. on how to regulate, license, and control alcohol sales, as opposed to dispensing it directly.

In place of unfettered bootlegging would be alcohol licensing, regulation, taxation, and a control board. [Anti-Prohibition crusader] Rufus Lusk proposed a drinking age at eighteen, except for any alcohol with 14 per cent alcohol by volume, or higher, in which case you had to be twenty-one. It established licensing for bars, hotels, restaurants, and retail establishments to sell alcohol. ... Most states adopted similar licensing as they established Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) boards
— Prohibition in Washington, DC: How Dry We Weren't. Garrett Peck.

How dry we were. How inchoate we remain.

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• Top reproduction courtesy Ghosts of DC blog.
• Pronounced "Hi-rick", the Chr. Heurich Brewery closed in 1956. The land on which it stood is now the site of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
• Bottom photo: the cover of "Prohibition in Washington, DC: How Dry We Weren't," 2011, by Washington, D.C.-based historian Garrett Peck.


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