Friday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1916, No. 84 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 “84,” is interesting because it shows a problem that’s still with us with modern prohibitionists. As they point out, a majority of people were not originally in favor of removing alcohol from society. For example, the state of Ohio rejected a referendum to restrict it twice, and both times by wide margins. But that didn’t deter the fanatical prohibitionists from continuing to agitate for it and cajole people, even resorting to manipulating the system from behind the scenes. To say the will of the people carries any weight to such people is a joke. All that matters is what they want, as true today as it was in 1916.

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.

Wednesday’s ad is another one for the Pennsylvania State Brewers Association, from 1915, No. 81 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 “81,” is a fairly innocuous one, detailing the history of taverns and inns from biblical times to the present, basically just making the argument that they’ve been around so long, making people happier, that they can’t be bad.

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.