Prohibition

Much of America greeted Prohibition with great enthusiasm. San Francisco hasn't joined the party.

Temperance movements led by crusading Protestants, women’s groups and progressive reformers had been popular since the 19th century. So when the 18th Amendment was passed last year, making the production, distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal throughout the United States, “drys” rejoiced. Religious and civic leaders proclaimed that a new era of national moral regeneration was at hand.

But San Francisco doesn't seem to want anything to do with moral regeneration, especially not if it means giving up booze. The once-brawling frontier settlement has grown up, but it still cherishes its reputation as the “Paris of the West,” a wide-open town that winks at naughty behavior. Eliminating alcohol in hard-drinking San Francisco has about the same chance of success as persuading the Forty-Niners to abandon the diggings because greed was a sin.

California in general is not hospitable to the temperance movement. It's the hardest state in which to enforce the ban, both because of its vast size and long coastline, leading a state senator to call it a “bootlegger’s paradise,” as well as the lack of public support for Prohibition.

The Anti-Saloon League, the leading dry advocacy group, argues falsely that California supports Prohibition outside of the Bay Area “whiskey strip.” That may be true in rural counties, but not in the cities.

Even by California’s wet standards, however, San Francisco is dripping.

What makes the San Francisco situation so painfully shocking to the drys is the ready connivance of the San Francisco government in the blatant nullification of the law.

Just one month after the beginning of Prohibition, the Board of Supervisors unanimously repealed two ordinances against illegal saloons, serving notice that the city will not interfere with the liquor trade.

This year, the board reprimanded two police captains for enforcing Prohibition laws. Five years later the supervisors went even further, passing a resolution opposing the use of San Francisco police “on any basis” in the enforcement of Prohibition. It sent copies of the resolution to the chief of police, the federal Prohibition administration and the state Senate, “that the people of California may know our attitude.”

Ordinary San Franciscans treat the law as a bad joke. A San Francisco assemblyman has said that “everybody in the city was violating the Constitution and rejoicing in the violation.” Small wonder that the *California Liberator*, an Anti-Saloon League publication, has called San Francisco “hilariously wet,” and that the league ranked the city second only to New York as the nation’s biggest booze scofflaw.

Raids by federal, state and local officers are routine despite the city’s brazen flouting of Prohibition. But enforcement consists mainly of spectacular cafe raids, which merely round up the little fellows and left big offenders alone.

Before one Big Game between Stanford and Cal, for example, authorities announced that agents would be standing by to arrest people carrying hip flasks. After the game they proudly declared that the mission had been carried out, and that five violators had been arrested.

Yet despite this devastating blow against raccoon coat-wearing evildoers, lawmen somehow find themselves unable to smash big smuggling rings or seize vineyards.

Still, the authorities are not lacking in zeal, and they are succeeding in forcing drinking underground except in poorer parts of the city. Hotels like the St. Francis and the Sir Francis Drake are starting to use secret passwords and hide their booze between floors.