The Booze Cruise
Advertised as a “cruise to nowhere”. As liquor became illegal in 1920, people quickly realized they could drink and sell liquor outside the 3-mile territorial limit Where people could legally consume alcohol as soon as the ship entered international waters where they would typically cruise in circles
George L. Cassiday
walked through the halls of Congress making deliveries of illegal booze daily while Capitol Police allowed him in at all hours
Speakeasy
The term “speakeasy” did not originate during Prohibition. It came from the two-word phrase “speak easy,” coined by American journalist Samuel Hudson back in 1889. Hudson, in his 1909 book Pennsylvania and Its Public Men, recalled that while in Pittsburgh in 1889, a new city liquor licensing law reduced the number of taverns there to only 96. That encouraged a rise in illegal bars all over town. Hudson asked Tim O’Leary, a local Democratic Party politician, to show him one. O’Leary explained that an elderly Irish widow who sold illegal beer and whiskey once warned her patrons, in her brogue, to “spake asy, now, the police are at the dure.” So, Hudson said, “Spake asy” became the moniker for the hundreds of unlicensed taverns in Pittsburgh.
During Prohibition, chances were that a door painted green meant it fronted a speakeasy. In Chicago, that tradition lives on with two of the town’s well-known bars dating from the 1920s.
Green Doors
Bill McCoy was a bootlegger well known for selling quality imported goods. His alcohol was always the “real McCoy.”
The Real
McCoy
The 18th Amendment only forbade the “manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors”—not their consumption
It wasn’t illegal
to drink alcohol
during Prohibition
means that the moonshine in the jug has been distilled three times!
“XXX”
Moonshiners fixed their cars to out run the coppers! Eventually someone got the idea to run the cars on a racetrack.
NASCAR
connection
If it weren’t for shiners doing their best to keep the white lightning flowing during Prohibition, the Constitution may never have been amended to outlaw the outlawing of liquor
Something to
consider
got the speakeasies jumping and the thirsty patrons coming back for more