Repeal

The Road to Repeal

National Prohibition ended with the ratification of the 21st Amendment on December 5th, 1933. Fourteen years earlier–seventeen in Virginia–Prohibition had succeeded with support from the temperance movement and political pressure from groups such as the Anti-Saloon League. However, resistance began almost immediately and grew steadily. As rural economies slowed in the later 1920s, many began calling for Prohibition’s repeal. Bringing alcohol production and sales out of the shadows could mean legitimate jobs and taxable commerce. Voters and politicians soon added their calls for repeal as they began to back the movement to make alcohol legal again.

During the 1932 Presidential Campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran on a platform supporting the repeal of Prohibition. As the 21st Amendment worked its way through each state’s legislature, Roosevelt and his congressional allies sought a way to quickly make the repeal of Prohibition a reality. Their efforts resulted in an intermediate step. Effective April 7th, 1933 the Cullen-Harrison Act, legalized beverages containing no more than 3.2 percent of alcohol, which was comparatively weak. (By comparison, the popular Bud Light of today is 4.2 percent.) Millions of Americans celebrated the return of legal beer.

The Raid

According to the Cullen-Harrison Act, each state was tasked to pass their own legislation to legalize the sale of low-alcohol beverages. Virginia did not enact its own legislation until August 17, 1933. For Rockingham County the few months of difference mattered.

Harrisonburg Chief of Police, J.H. Boice, approached the rear entrance of Friddle’s Restaurant located on Court Square in Harrisonburg, Va on June 17th, 1933. Finding the building locked, Boice and his men forced the door off its hinges and then proceeded to enter the building in their search for illegal liquors.

Boice’s forced entry into the Friddle’s Restaurant was part of a choreographed raid staged across the city of Harrisonburg that targeted six properties suspected of housing illegal spirits. The highly visible raid attracted a local crowd of hundreds, who watched as officers confiscated cases of ardent spirits from the restaurant and hauled them away.

The public attention garnered from the raids was likely the point Chief Boice was attempting to make, as he hoped that the raid would serve as a “test case” for Virginia, in regards to the legality of 3.2 percent beer.

The Trial

Numerous complaints lodged by the citizens of Rockingham concerned about the significant presence of beer in Harrisonburg, prompting Chief Boice to carry out the raid. Seemingly unsure of its legal status himself, Boice reported to a reporter for the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record that “the police want to know where we stand on the 3.2 beer proposition.”

Harrisonburg businessman E.L. Klingstein, perhaps sensing the winds of change, decided to take advantage of a business opportunity. Owner of the popular Friddle’s Restaurant located on the Courthouse Square, Mr. Klingstein found himself in court defending his possession of thirty-four bottles of “amber fluid” confiscated during the raid of Friddle’s Restaurant. Klingstein was not arrested during the raid, having been on his way to a V.F.W. Convention in Roanoke. After returning to Harrisonburg and being made aware of the raid, Klingstein notified the police that the beer was his property and vowed to “carry the case to the highest courts.” Mr. Klingstein’s connections to the business elites of Rockingham was established during the trial as Klingstein argued that he attempted to determine the legality of the 3.2% beer, by consulting four members of the Harrisonburg City Council and the City Attorney. Klingstein appealed to the economic situation of the times, “[I] told them as the United States had legalized 3.2 beer that I did not see why the council did not get together and get some revenue out of it for the city.”

The willingness of council members to look into the matter regarding Klingstein suggests that a moderate view of Prohibition and Temperance was evident among some of the Rockingham elites by 1933.

In the end, Boice got his answer from the jury as the court issued instructions to them: if the defendant did not intend to violate the prohibition law but had done so inadvertently, the jail sentence could be dropped. The Jury found Mr. Klingstein guilty as charged and handed him a $500 dollar fine for violation of the Virginia Prohibition Act, but served no jail time.

The Verdict

Whether Mr. Klingstein gambled on the hope that the will to carry out enforcement had run dry or was simply misinformed on the legality of the issue is unknown. Certainly though, a fog of ambiguity surrounded whether federal or state law should be observed in regards to Prohibition laws and regulations. The trial of Mr. Klingstein suggests that Rockingham County citizens were mixed in their acceptance of legal alcohol’s return to the public sphere. This is shift in attitudes demonstrates that not everyone was celebrating the imminent repeal of national prohibition.