On 5 December 1933, Heber J. Grant's Utah of the Mormons, the long season of American prohibition, opened in 1919 with the approval of the 18th Amendment, which had banned the consumption of alcohol. That day, at 5.27 p.m. (New York time), America took back the freedom to drink and the less noble thing to get drunk by rising to the sky twinkling toasts of beer mugs and glasses of whisky.
Thus ended the obsessive crusade against alcohol, or as many considered it a disastrous experiment. Born in 1919, the prohibitionist movement, driven by the so-called temperance societies, fought, supported by religious political movements, against the era of the mythical roaring twenties of great jazz, the lost generation, the emerging gangsterism of Al Capone, or against the period of speakeasies and the greatest mass transgression in American history.
It was in this context that the government imposed a ban on the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol in the country. While the level of alcoholism was lowered, the business of organised crime, which made a golden business out of smuggling alcohol, increased.
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This scenario also led the prohibitionists who pushed President Roosevelt to promise an end to the ban in the 1932 election campaign. After the collapse of Wall Street, America turned the page. The state needed money, new taxes on the alcohol trade as well, and the alcohol industries themselves could be useful to the cause of economic revival and provide jobs.
Democrats and Republicans agreed: Prohibition had "miserably" failed, the 18th amendment had to be repealed. However, the majority of three-quarters of the states were obliged to make it official. And the seal came from Mormon Utah, where abstinence from tobacco, coffee and alcohol is still preached today.