Tuesday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1915, No. 75 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 “75,” is another odd one talking about one of the tactics of prohibitionists at the time, where they wanted to make it illegal to sell beer and other alcohol, while leaving the right to consume it and purchase it perfectly legal. Which seems weird, but from what i can glean from the ad, it was apparently a strategy that prohibitionists believed would allow them to achieve their ends through “roundabout” means. But there is a modern version still, as many prohibitionists continue to attack anyone in the alcohol industry, accusing us of all manner of moral failings and being terrible people. They’ve come out and said we’d do absolutely anything to make a sale, even to minors, and that we even target kids, hate women and lie about everything. Even if we do something good, like ship canned water to Haiti after their earthquake, they criticized the gesture because the brewery in question told people they did it and included information on the can about where the water came from. No matter what we do, we’re bad people. So this ad doesn’t seem at all far-fetched to me. But in 1915 they didn’t think they had the votes to get the national prohibition they wanted, so then, just as today, they’d do or say anything to further the agenda of prohibition.
