speakeasy (old) is an illegal business that sells alcoholic beverages. The term, an Irish one, is derived from the need to speak “easily” or softly in an illicit drinking house to avoid drawing the law. It was current in the United States from the 1880s, when it began to replace the earlier terms “blind pig” or “blind tiger” (the establishments would charge admission, ostensibly to view one of the animals in question, but would instead pour the customer a drink once the admission charge was paid and the customer safely inside). “Speakeasy” only became widely used in America during Prohibition (1920–1933), when illegal drinking places became ubiquitous.
Every city had some form of speakeasies, though no city is more associated with the illicit bars than New York, which may have had up to 35,000 speakeasies during Prohibition. Hollywood movies encouraged the myth that these speakeasies were armed with a narrow sliding window at eye level and that consumers had to know a password to get in. The reality was often different. Access was gained through knowing the owner or a regular customer, or by simply swearing that one was not a police officer or a Prohibition Bureau agent.
Speakeasies came in many varieties. At the high end were swanky cocktail bars or jazz clubs such as New York’s famed Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington led the band. Others were in dingy cellars or upstairs rooms, hidden in plain sight by a legitimate business, or even in someone’s living room. A cigar shop or a lunchroom might have a “little back room” that was only accessible to those in the know. Not all speakeasies were places to get a drink: often it was just a place to buy an illicit bottle for home consumption—say, out of the basement of a candy store.
The saloon was a man’s domain before Prohibition, but the speakeasy quickly changed that. American women earned the right to vote in 1920—the same year that Prohibition went into effect—and now that it was illegal to drink, women could break the law in a speakeasy just as equally as men could. Many women owned and operated speakeasies, the best known being Texas Guinan, the brash hostess of the high-end 300 Club in Manhattan, who greeted her well-heeled guests with “Hello, suckers.”
bathtub gin. Whisky could be genuine bourbon, Canadian, or scotch—or it could be grain alcohol with caramel coloring, creosote, and iodine for that peaty flavor. Prohibition-era consumers had no way of knowing what was actually in their glass.A popular speakeasy drinking arrangement was known as a “setup.” A customer would receive a glass of ice and a bottle of ginger ale or soda. Upon request, a waiter would discreetly fetch a bottle of booze. Drinks were sometimes served in a coffee mug or a teacup as a disguise, should the police raid the joint.
The famous Prohibition Bureau agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith never carried guns but used countless comical disguises to gain entry to speakeasies, then slapped the cuffs on nearly five thousand people. It was easy to find speakeasies, they discovered: in Baltimore, Izzy wrote, “All I had to do was get on a street car and ask the conductor to let me off at a place where I could get a drink. He pointed one out to me almost the first block.”
Speakeasies played a significant role in undermining Prohibition. An anti-Prohibition group, the Crusaders, published maps in 1930 and 1932 of where police raided speakeasies in Washington, DC—all to show how widespread law breaking was among the American public. The 1932 map showed 1,155 raids where alcohol was discovered, including a number at federal offices.
See also Prohibition and Temperance in America; speakeasy (new)
Davenport, Walter. “Bartender’s Guide to Washington.” Collier’s, February 16, 1929.
Einstein, Izzy. Prohibition Agent no. 1. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1932.
Gately, Iain. Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol. New York: Gotham, 2008.
Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Peck, Garrett. Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011.
By: Garrett Peck