Prohibition by W. J. Rorabaugh

Author:W. J. Rorabaugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

Art Janik opened his speakeasy in Milwaukee in 1931, but he also operated legally after repeal until 1937. Art Janik, Arthur S. Janik Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-01862

Female public drinking was associated with looser sexuality. In the 1920s, young women who wore short skirts, drank alcohol, and lived hedonistically were called flappers. Variety claimed that flappers were “as free with their persons . . . as a longshoreman.”20 Of the flapper, Helen Lowry wrote in the New York Times, “She is the first woman in history that has not been checked at home when man went forth alone in search of his pleasures. And because of her we have with us the most merry, the least jaded night life yet.”21 Freer sexuality may have led to a decline in prostitution. Many drinking houses expected barmaids to sell sex. In 1926, the old-fashioned moral reformers who belonged to the Committee of Fourteen found 360 of 392 speakeasies in New York harboring prostitutes, but skeptics doubted these numbers because it was hard to tell a prostitute from a woman expressing sexual liberation.

The New Yorker, launched in 1925, celebrated night life by promoting high-end nightclubs such as the Palais Royal, Moulin Rouge, Bal Tabarin, and Montmartre. Such clubs featured liquor, music, and dancing. Cabarets provided professional entertainment. New Yorkers had many choices, including bohemian cafes in Greenwich Village, mixed race “black and tan” spots in Harlem, and exclusive Fifth Avenue clubs. Nightclubs were lavishly decorated to encourage big spending, and they were expensive. Nightclubs projected an exclusive image but actually mixed different types of people, including wealthy stockbrokers, Broadway stars, celebrity writers, fashion models, flashy hucksters, scam artists, and sinister gangsters. “Never before has there ever been such a meeting ground of the very highest and the very lowest of human society,” noted the Smart Set in 1927.22

Harlem had many speakeasies and nightclubs. Ninety percent were white-owned and white-operated. Half of the rest were white-owned but run by African Americans, and the rest were black-owned and operated. Most were restricted either to white patrons, like the famous Cotton Club, or to blacks, but both races mingled in some places, which probably could not have occurred without prohibition. Breaking the racial taboo was as defiant as breaking the liquor law. Whites and blacks drank together, listened to jazz together, danced together, and occasionally slept together. Older black leaders in Harlem favored prohibition, opposed interracial nightclubs, and feared that the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment might lead to the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but young African American writers like Langston Hughes frequented Harlem speaks.23

While whites used Harlem as a playground, poor black residents were regulars at neighborhood hootch joints or rent parties. Because rents were high in Harlem, and because few African Americans had good jobs, paying rent was always a problem. Resourceful tenants temporarily removed furniture from their apartments to hold a party with free food, music, and space for dancing. Guests paid a small admission charge, which went toward the rent.

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