Raise a glass to FDR & Repeal Day: Column

I don't always drink on a Friday, but when I do, I check to see if it's Repeal Day.

That's right. If you are meeting friends at your favorite watering hole, take a minute to raise a glass to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was on this date — December 5th, 1933 — that FDR gleefully put a stake through the heart of something that had once been called "the Noble Experiment."

Prohibition — chiefly driven by the Women's Christian Temperance Union platform and the Anti-Saloon League — was enacted on January 16, 1919, when Congress passed the 18th Amendment, overriding President Woodrow Wilson's veto.

But even by 1925 (not yet halfway through its reign), H. L. Mencken, the acid-penned newspaperman, was declaring Prohibition an utter failure:

"Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect; they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished."

We tend to think of Prohibition as a 1920s phenomenon, but, in fact, it had been lurking in some corners of American philosophy and culture — puritanical and matriarchal at its roots — for decades.

As enemies of Demon Alcohol attempted to push their position forward as early as the mid-nineteenth century, President James Buchanan (himself a prodigious and enthusiastic drinker of wine and whiskey) prophetically stated in 1867:

"In [Prohibition], I think they will entirely fail," Old Buck predicted in a letter. "Lager beer, especially among the Germans, and old rye will be too strong for them. Still, intemperance is a great curse to our people, but it will never be put down by laws prohibiting the sale of all intoxicating liquors…"

And the Prohibitionists eventually did fail, but not before they subjected the rest of the country to essentially thirteen years of repression. And there were those in power — FDR being one — who believed that Prohibition also contributed to the Great Depression, due to lost jobs and lost revenues.

A master of hypocrisy, President Warren G. Harding (president from 1921 to 1923) was not bothered by Prohibition in the least. Harding habitually stashed a fifth of whiskey in his golf bag when he hit the links, and took occasional pops from it. (Which may explain why he rarely broke 100.)

In addition, President Harding had First Lady Florence Harding scurrying about smoke-shrouded poker games at the White House, freshening the drinks of the president's cronies.

Never mind that Harding had unabashedly courted the "dry" votes in his 1920 presidential election. As one Washington, D.C., socialite noted: "I knew that Warren Harding was counted as a dry senator, but that in moments of relaxation he was ready to drink … Indeed I often heard him boast that he could make a champagne cocktail just like the Waldorf bartender."

Herbert Hoover was the last president to embrace the Prohibition platform, but he never got a free pass on the issue. When he was running for President in 1928, H. L. Mencken (who liked to imbibe himself, it should be noted) was dubious that Hoover was a true believer, but insisted he was merely a candidate for office "willing and eager to do or say anything" to get votes.

"He [Hoover] came from London, the wettest town in the world, to sit on the Harding cabinet, the wettest since the days of Noah. No one ever heard him utter a whisper against the guzzling that surrounded him. He was as silent about it as he was about the stealing."

But the fall of 1929 — the country suffering in the depths of the Great Depression, without a legal drink to ease their suffering — the country's sentiments were changing. When President Hoover was announced at a World Series game in Philadelphia thousands of fans began to chant: "We want beer! We want beer!"

There is no doubt that FDR's platform to bring back legal drinking helped him win the 1932 election. True to his word, Roosevelt — on a March night in 1933 when he was scheduled to make one of his broadcast "fireside chats" — turned to his dinner guests, with an obvious gleam in his eye and proclaimed:

"I think this would be a good time for a beer!"

That simple sentence might just be the most understated presidential words in history.

But apparently America's brewers agreed: when repeal did finally pass, Budweiser sent its sturdy Clydesdales thundering down Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver a wagon-load of beer to the White House. (Not to be outdone, the Yuengling brewery of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, also sent some special suds to the chief executive.)

With that in mind — and regardless of political party — lift your glass to FDR! It's Repeal Day! Just say: "Yay!"

Mark Will-Weber is a journalist and author of the recently released "Mint Juleps with Teddy Roosevelt: The Complete History of Presidential Drinking."

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