Berkeley’s premature Prohibition

It was a different Berkeley then. Flip through newspaper articles from 100 years ago and you’ll see. Stray dogs roaming the streets. Gypsy camps throwing all-night parties. Yet divorces made the paper (scandal!) and you could be arrested for riding your bicycle on the sidewalk. And let’s not touch the “Negro question” and how Berkeley used to treat its Asian immigrants.

So the Berkeley of the early 1900s lacked social progressiveness — to be fair, so did the entire rest of the country — but it did have a boatload of beer. Berkeley was home to a thriving bar culture and (at least) two successful local breweries. It was all gone by 1912. Keen booze historians will note that federal Prohibition didn’t curse our land until 1920, so what killed the bars and breweries?

It was the neighbors.

Go West, young beer drinker

Berkeley is polarized in some ways today, notably by income. There was a similar dynamic at work in the early days. Ocean View, which we now know as West Berkeley, was where most of the saloons were and was dominated by manufacturing. East Berkeley was steered by university life, which meant something different back when the college president was a minister. There were farms in between.

West for manufacturing, east for the college, even years later. Image credit: Berkeley, A City in History and the Berkeley Historical Society.

UC Berkeley, then called the College of California, moved to its current spot from Oakland in 1873. The state legislature was nervous about putting impressionable youngsters in easy reach of alcohol, especially students at a college with a lot of clergymen in powerful positions, so they enacted a law banning the sale of liquor within two miles of the university.

The businesses of rough ‘n’ tumble Ocean View obeyed this law about as well as Cal students obey the federal drinking age today, and the restriction was shrunk to one mile in 1976. A few places in the one-mile dry zone managed to quietly serve alcohol, especially beer, since the one-mile revision failed to mention “malt liquor” by name. The eastside watering holes were no match for the 22 saloons in Ocean View serving thirsty railroad workers and UC students capable of traveling two miles. It surely added to the allure that when you barhopped on the westside you were more likely to find gambling, cockfighting, and other pastimes not encouraged downtown.

West Berkeley was even was having proto-beerfests in the 1870s, in a park where Spenger’s is now. The book Fermenting Berkeley notes, “San Franciscans came over on the ferry for beer-drinking fests and sometimes became so intoxicated that they had to stay over.” It makes sense that two breweries were located on San Pablo amid all this free-flowing beer (more on them in future posts).

A saloon at the corner of University and San Pablo. Photo credit: Fermenting Berkeley.

In 1878, all of Berkeley was united by incorporation despite the big cultural differences between east, west, and farms. Everybody wanted things like schools and sewers (go figure) and the only other option was getting annexed to Oakland. This unity would not end well for saloon owners.

The East strikes back

The first president of UC Berkeley was a reverend, and the next prez also emphasized religion. East Berkeley was full of church groups and conservative social clubs. They all thought West Berkeley needed its soul saved, and that was even before the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union came to town wearing white ribbons and singing hymns in the street. These groups and their movement wielded a huge influence culturally and later legally. Trivia: Berkeley’s Willard Middle School (then Willard Junior High) was named after a well-known temperance crusader, Frances Willard.

The temperance movement had the local papers as a mouthpiece while local bar, restaurant, and brewery owners were rarely consulted or quoted. In addition to the usual morality-based arguments against hooch, there was a lot of iffy science and sketchy reporting going on at the time. Scientific American claimed “beer drinking produces the very lowest kind of inebriety, closely allied to criminal insanity. The most dangerous ruffians in our large cities are beer drinkers.” It was also reported in the media that bartenders’ fingers were falling off due to frequent contact with beer. Pre-prohibition beer likely wasn’t great, but chances are it wouldn’t dissolve your hand, either.

There were class implications in the anti-saloon movement. Saloons were the gathering places of the working class and immigrants, while more affluent and WASP-y drinkers tended to partake at home. Alcohol was demonized overall, but public drinking was considered the worst offense. Eventually all alcohol would be prohibited, but the bad influence of saloons was always a talking point for the white-ribbon crowd.

The predominantly-female temperance movement in and around Berkeley, which I wish had spent its energy on the women’s suffrage movement happening at the same time, spent the 1890s lobbying for anti-saloon laws. Berkeley’s town trustees passed an anti-saloon ordinance in 1899 but repealed it a year later because everyone missed the boozy tax revenue. They banned saloons again in 1906 but enforcement was sketchy. Third time was a charm for the temperance folks: Berkeley officially went dry in January 1909. The vote was 3724 to 3178.

Bootlegging, speakeasies, code words, and all the usual prohibition dodges continued and increased. Parts of Berkeley already had practice with that thanks to the two- and one-mile rules. The fact remained that people could (and were) arrested for drinking, and legitimate breweries and bars went out of business.

By the time federal prohibition rolled around, Berkeley had already been legally dry for a decade.

To be continued…

Further reading
If your curiosity is piqued, you might want to read the following books that informed much of this post.

• Berkeley 1900, a collection of newspaper articles that’s more fun than it sounds.
• Fermenting Berkeley, a booklet on the history of alcohol in Berkeley. Available from the Berkeley Historical Society.