Thursday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1916, No. 83 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 “83,” is interesting because it’s such a specious argument that it addressed, that alcohol, and especially the tavern or saloon where people buy it, is the cause of poverty and therefore shutting them down will erase poverty in America. As you can probably guess, that’s not entirely accurate. According to the ad, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average worker spends four cents per day on alcohol. The ad argues that the luxury of a drink is no more pernicious than many other luxury goods, and suggests jewelry, diamonds, perfumes, laces, candy, silks and satins are equally unnecessary items that people spend money that they don’t have on, rather than on the necessities that they absolutely need to live. The root cause of poverty they claim are “poor wages and lack of employment,” which is probably the same today. If those same people saved the $15 per year they spend on drinking, it would take them thirty years to by a Ford automobile, but even then they’d only have enough money from not drinking for an entire year to buy gasoline to operate it for just one month.
