Thursday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1916, No. 68 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 it talks about drinking causing poverty, and how prohibitionists were arguing that in states that were dry, there were less people in poorhouses, or almshouses, than in “wet” states where alcohol was still permitted. It’s weird to think that there were such places all over the country, and in fact one of my favorite author’s first novels — John Updike — was “The Poorhouse Fair,” is set in the fictional “Diamond County Home for the Aged.” But the statistics offered by the ad contradicted the prohibitionists’ arguments, showing that in at least four dry states, per capita residency in poorhouses was higher than in four comparable wet states. They go on to cite another series of studies that further contradict the prohibitionists, and showing that sickness is the most common cause of poverty in America, and not drinking, which is in fact a vert small percentage of the total.