2020 not only marks the 200th anniversary of Maine’s statehood, it is also the 100th anniversary of the 18th Amendment that banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. The National Prohibition Amendment was later repealed, but did you know Maine was a leading force in the passage of this law? In fact, on June 2, 1852 Maine was the first state to ban alcohol.
What led Maine to start this crusade against alcohol, you ask? Well like most states in the nineteenth century, Maine had a drinking problem. According to some estimates, Americans drank three times as much as they do today. In fact, the leader of Maine’s temperance movement, Neal Dow, claimed that along a one mile stretch of road in Portland, from Congress Street to Munjoy Hill, there were approximately 300 drinking establishments. Multiply that by communities across Maine, and Dow was convinced he had to do something to stop its intoxicating consumption.
Neal Dow was a politician who made a career through the temperance movement. At age 23 he co-founded the Maine Temperance Society. Here he made a name for himself through fiery speeches that passed moral judgement on those who drank, especially immigrants. This perspective gained momentum and Dow was eventually elected as the Mayor of Portland. As Mayor he had the power to move beyond a moral argument to an outright legislative ban on the consumption of alcohol.
On June 2, 1851 the state of Maine passed “An Act for the Suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling-Shops.” This law prohibited both the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. However, it also made exceptions for industrial and medicinal alcohol. Even more interesting, it did not prohibit imported alcoholic beverages. That’s because of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution granted only Congress the power to regulate trade with other nations and between the states, and they asserted that it was legal to import alcohol. Thus Maine could not prohibit the importation of alcohol, just the production and sale. Nonetheless, Dow’s war on alcohol quickly gained notice, with Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as others, enacting similar laws.
However, needless to say, Mainers early on found ways to circumvent this new law. Farmers brewed their own hard cider and wine out of fruit, and sold it to their neighbors. Bootleggers found ways to smuggle it across the state, which was especially easy to do along the many nooks and hiding places along the state’s miles of rugged coast and backcountry roads through dense forests. Let us not forget either that pharmacies and grocery stories could continue selling “medicines” that contained alcohol, and that doctors were able to prescribe it as a cure for a variety of ailments. Also many businesses continued selling it, and simply justified the fines as the cost of doing business.
Through it all, Dow’s battle continued. Well that is until he got caught with his own stash of alcohol. Four years to the date of the passage of the “Act for the Suppression of Drinking Houses and Tippling-Shops,” on June 2, 1855 an angry mob gathered outside Portland’s city hall demanding Dow’s arrest. For you see, like his fellow citizens, Dow also found a loophole in the law. The Maine law allowed towns to appoint an individual to buy alcohol for medicinal purposes. In the spring of 1855, Dow had gone ahead and authorized the city to buy $1,600 worth of “medicinal and mechanical alcohol” for distribution to pharmacists and doctors. But technically, he broke his own law, because it required the appointment of a committee, which he did not do. A search warrant was obtained for the alcohol stored in the city hall’s vaults, and by that night the Portland Rum Riot would result in the death of one man, the wounding of seven others, Dow’s political career in shambles, and ultimately the eventual repeal of Maine’s temperance law in 1858.
The story of Maine’s push toward the National Prohibition Amendment does not end here though. Following it’s repeal, Maine replaced it with a law that limited sale of alcoholic beverages, and eventually in 1885, Maine included prohibition in the state constitution. Of course bootleggers continued making it, rum runners found ways to distribute it, and loopholes on enforcement were used. This turmoil continued within the state until ultimately in 1920 when the 18th Amendment of the United States Constitution declared the production, transport, and sale of intoxicating liquors illegal; and the Volstead Act defined what an intoxicating liquor was as well as the penalties for breaking that law. However, thankfully logic returned and the 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933. Three months later Maine reluctantly stopped being a “dry” state, by allowing the sale of alcohol once more.
To learn more about this intoxicating chapter in Maine’s history, we recommend Kellianne Dolan’s “Maine’s Prohibition: 82 Years In The Making,” and the Maine Historical Society’s “Rum Riot and Reform.”
