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Prohibition sign in store window

Maryland Historical Society

National prohibition did not begin until January 17, 1920, but the prohibition era in Maryland really started on June 30, 1919, when the Wartime Prohibition Act took effect. Intended as a way to conserve grain for the troops, Congress did not finally pass it until November 18, 1918, a week after the war had ended. Under this belated patriotic banner prohibition came quietly to Baltimore and the state.

With twenty-one out of Maryland's twenty-three counties already dry by 1917, the strength of the Anti-Saloon League and other temperance groups was evident in the General Assembly. With almost unanimous support on the Eastern Shore and in Western Maryland, the dry forces overpowered and outvoted overwhelmingly wet Baltimore City, where 72 percent of voters had rejected prohibition in a 1916 referendum. Thus Maryland became the sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment in February 1918, by a vote of 18-7 in the Senate and 58-36 in the House of Delegates.

H. L. Mencken, defying Prohibition

Maryland Historical Society

But while the General Assembly of 1918 ratified the Eighteenth Amendment with the support of Governor Emerson C. Harrington, there was substantial political turnover between ratification in 1918 and the beginning of enforcement efforts in 1920 (12 of 27 Senators and 90 of 102 Delegates). Equally important was Harrington's loss to Albert C. Ritchie in the 1920 gubernatorial election. Ritchie was a steadfast opponent of prohibition, on the grounds that it was an invasion of states' rights. These lawmakers proved their opposition to prohibition early on by making Maryland the only state in America that did not pass a state prohibition enforcement law.

Prohibition Approaches
Meanwhile, the January 17, 1920, deadline approached, cheered by temperance organizations and much of Baltimore's Methodist Episcopal congregation, but opposed by, among many others, James Cardinal Gibbons (and later, Archbishop Michael Curley) of the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore and lambasted by local newspapers. Cardinal Gibbons declared that he could never convince himself that total abstinence was essential to morality, and his opinion was a powerful one. The Baltimore Sun decried the Eighteenth Amendment as a danger to the Tenth Amendment protecting states' rights.

Private citizens bought up all the available alcohol and built storage closets in their basements, as the new Volstead Act permitted alcohol that was already stored in private residences. Wholesalers scurried to load ships at Sparrows Point with millions of dollars in liquor, including some of Maryland's heralded rye whisky, all bound for warehouses in Nassau. While many of Baltimore's twenty breweries closed their doors, others began producing "near-beer" at the legal limit of .5 percent alcohol. The night of January 16 was bitterly cold, and brought little celebration as alcohol was officially already out of the city.

Maryland Resists
Resistance to prohibition existed at several levels in Maryland, from countless acts of individual defiance to the highest levels of state government. The Baltimore Sun and H.L. Mencken damned the law and its dry advocates through repeated editorials, while Congressmen Vincent Palmisano, John Philip Hill, and Millard E. Tydings hounded the legislature with repeal and reform legislation, gave speeches, and even wrote books on the ineffectiveness of the prohibition laws. Congressman Hill went so far as to bait the Federal Prohibition Bureau by inviting the press over to watch him brew cider in his back yard. Over four terms in office, Governor Ritchie blasted the dry law as a dangerous violation of states' rights and decried its enforcement for the creation of an abusive and expanding federal police power. Ritchie raised the ire of "drys" when he said that although the Eighteenth Amendment gave the state concurrent power to enforce prohibition, the state was not compelled to use that power.

Speakeasies and so-called "candy stores" abounded in downtown Baltimore, particularly between Calvert Street and Broadway in one of the most heavily immigrant wards of the city. Smuggling, bootlegging, and theft were common between Baltimore and Philadelphia and Washington, including a robbery of the federal warehouse for seized liquors in June 1925. Federal agents regularly raided Baltimore speakeasies, sometimes making up to fifteen raids in one day, only to make eighteen the next week in the same area. Unaided by police, these agents sometimes found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, pelted with bottles, and occasionally beaten.

Homebrewing plants and distilleries of all sizes were discovered in cities and on farms throughout the state, from Bowley's Quarters to St. Mary's County, where stills of several thousand gallons were found. Even with the Eastern Shore's strong support for prohibition, the area was not immune to rum-runners coming up the Chesapeake Bay to offload their cargo to waiting bootleggers.

Repeal
In short, Baltimore, the center of political, cultural, and economic power for the entire state, turned its back on prohibition. As crime rose and respect for law and order seemed to drop, support for repeal swelled, aided by groups like the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, both of which had active chapters in Maryland. What supporters there were in the city and the state, including the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Methodist Episcopal Church, never gained or maintained significant public support. On September 12, 1933, voters everywhere except Dorchester County voted by clear margins for repeal, and by December 7 of that year, beer was back in Maryland.

Histories of prohibition often mention Maryland, along with New York, as being among the "wettest" states in America. And although Maryland's prohibition history lacks some of the sensationalism of New York's or Chicago's, its opposition to the experiment was as strong and as deeply entrenched as anywhere in America.

—Evan Rea