On December 5, 1933, sailors at the port of Saint-Pierre in Trinidad lowered the flags of America and France to half-mast, mourning the burial of Prohibition.
During the fourteen years from its enactment in 1920 to its repeal in 1933, the whole world learned just how "thirsty" Americans were. First came neighboring Canada. Although the Canadian Parliament had passed legislation in 1918 banning the interprovincial transport of alcoholic goods, with medical use as the sole exception, millions of gallons of liquor still made their way into American speakeasies.
There had been struggles even before Prohibition was enacted. At the time, supporters of prohibition used food waste and the ongoing war as reasons to ban beer brewing. Many American men had gone to Europe to fight in World War I. With local infrastructure severely damaged, the French could not provide their allies with clean drinking water, so the soldiers could only replenish their fluids by drinking wine.
Although beer companies tried to counter outside attacks with statistics, claiming that the entire brewing industry consumed less than 0.75 percent of America's total grain production, their opponents still accused them of occupying railways and squeezing out supplies of fuel and other wartime necessities.
What was more, many American beer companies were run by Germans, so the American public felt that shutting down a few distilleries and breweries was hardly a big deal.
While Canadians used oxen to pull sleds and had men and women haul small sleds over mountains to transport liquor into America, the French also shipped wine there for sale. Under the laws of the time, as long as ships did not dock and remained more than three miles from the coastline, the United States Navy had no authority to drive them away. Then coastal residents would set out in vast