Prohibition: Thirteen Awful Years of the Noble Experiment Zoom Lecture given by Garrett Peck

Park City Museum will host a Zoom lecture called Prohibition: Thirteen Awful Years of the Noble Experiment given by Garrett Peck on Wednesday, May 4 from 5-6 p.m. Mountain Time.

The “noble experiment” of Prohibition in America began on January 16, 1920, after a century of agitation by the temperance movement to create a dry, sober nation.

What started as a measure during World War I to prevent soldiers from drinking quickly became a constitutional amendment to ban the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol, and the Anti-Saloon League spun beer drinking into treason. Americans supported it with patriotic fervor as part of the war effort, not considering the consequences or how difficult it would be to enforce. An idealistic public soon turned cynical as bootleggers emerged to supply the brisk demand for booze, while organized crime dramatically undermined the noble experiment.

Prohibition lasted less than 14 years before the 21st Amendment repealed it in 1933—marking the end of what literary critique H. L. Mencken called the “Thirteen Awful Years.”

Garrett Peck is an author, historian and tour guide living in Santa Fe who specializes in Prohibition history. His eighth and latest book is A Decade of Disruption: America in the New Millennium. Garrett is currently working on a book about how novelist Willa Cather composed Death Comes for the Archbishop. See www.garrettpeck.com for more information.

Register for this lecture