In January 1920, when Eleanora Fagan Gough was four, Prohibition began in the United States. Across the country, more than 1,500 federal agents tasked with enforcing the 18th Amendment took to the streets, beginning a 13-year war on temptation that, like any war, had its share of unintended winners and losers. Within the first “dry” year, crime soared by a fifth; as new speakeasies opened and morals loosened, the jazz age erupted “with a bang of bad booze”, as Hoagy Carmichael once put it.
Eleanora lived in Maryland where, eight decades earlier, a bunch of reformed drunks had set up the Washington Temperance Society for something to do. But the state had remained a “wet” one in the face of the Volstead Act, which in 1919 outlawed the production, sale and transport of “intoxicating liquors”. Volstead, schmolstead. Baltimore people liked to drink.
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