Prohibition

On December 5, 1933, exactly ninety years ago, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, formally lifting the ban on alcoholic beverages that defined the Roaring Twenties. Of course, that wasn’t the first time someone tried to outlaw the world’s most popular drug, but it’s probably the best-known case study where the contrast between intended results and reality reached absurd extremes. And yet, the best part of a century later, the same mistakes haunt us.  Saloons had a reputation as pretty rowdy places, filled with whores, card playing and drunken cowboys. The Anti-Saloon League formed to shutter these dens of sin. The League’s leader, Wayne Wheeler, who spearheaded the movement towards Prohibition, told different parties what they wanted to hear.

It is not often these days that I get to return to the Beaumont, an old inn in the Kentucky Bluegrass first visited half a century ago. The cliché that time and distance make the heart grow fonder has truth in it, as I have relearned this season. The Beaumont has been in the food and lodging business since 1917. It is owned and operated by branches of the Dedman family whose roots reach back to the early days of trans-Appalachian settlement. The original building dates from the 1840s and was once a girls’ finishing school. The young ladies in crinolines are long gone, but not a certain air of gentility. The Beaumont has a worthy watering hole — the Owl’s Nest — refashioned from an old carriage shelter in 2003 when liquor-by-the-drink finally came to Harrodsburg.

There are many reasons to visit the magnificently storied and illustrious Broadmoor Hotel, in the Rocky Mountain resort town of Colorado Springs. It has a glamorously luxe and gleaming spa. They will do you a superb dry martini with its own cute little carafe. Prince Harry once nipped into this pink-stone Italianate palace for a cheeky pint. But it’s the fantastical history of the Broadmoor that really compels, and which also tells us something possibly rather important about the relationship between politics and alcohol. The owner-founder of the Broadmoor was a failed-at-Harvard bon viveur by the name of Spencer Penrose.