Thursday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1917, No. 97 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 “97,” is about two things, the revenue lost from closing saloons and how it would lead to illegal speakeasys. There was already proof of that, as the few New England states that had already imposed a state prohibition have seen just that occur, and in fact a couple of them quickly repealed them as being “impracticable.” And in 1913, taxes on alcohol accounted for 48.68% of the “total revenue of the government.” And indeed, the industry honestly believed that politicians would not vote for a national prohibition because of how much money they paid into it, but income tax became permanent in 1913, and that balance began to shift, allowing the federal government to not worry too much about the loss of revenue from prohibition. At least not until the depression.
