Wednesday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1916, No. 64 in series they did from 1915-17 called “Facts Versus Fallacies.” I have no idea how many were done but some of the them are numbered into low triple digits, suggesting there were a lot of them, all in an effort to stop Prohibition from happening and win over support for beer. This ad, marked “64,” is another interesting one because I has always been under the impression that studies showing that people who drink moderately will, on average, live longer than either people who overindulge and, importantly, total abstainers, were fairly recent, within the last few decades at the earliest. But as this ad makes clear, there was scientific evidence even before prohibition to that effect. But perhaps even more interesting was their argument that “the moderate drinker adds most to the world’s knowledge.” What they mean by that is moderate drinking makes many people more creative, rather than less, as prohibitionists insisted. But this is the true gem. “One need have no hesitation in saying that if all the intellectual products of the world’s abstainers could be put into one scale, and all of the products of the world’s drinking men could be put into the other, we should be amazed at the meagerness of the total abstainers’ product.” Which is slightly more polite way of saying sober people can’t make shit.
