Cheers! 85 years since Prohibition was repealed

In packed bars, they sang and smiled while cocktails were shaken, champagne was popped, gin gushed, and frothy beer was poured. With glee and giddiness, they raised glasses, clinked and toasted: Prohibition was over.

For more than 13 years, the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol was illegal in the United States until December 5, 1933. Known as Repeal Day, Wednesday marks its 85th anniversary.

Rooted in the Temperance Movement of the 1800s, Prohibition, by its end, was not popular and people protested it with signs, such as ‘We Want Beer,’ and ‘I’m no camel I want beer.’

Prohibition, however, was a boon for bootleggers and the mob. In the 1920s, infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone was reportedly raking in an estimated $100 million a year - around $1.3 billion in today's money - in the illicit trade and from other illegal activities.

Moonshine and ‘bathtub gin,’ which turned some people blind, were some of what was on the menu at speakeasies where bartenders creatively came up with names – sidecar, whiskey sour, and the bees knees, for example - of cocktails to mask the liquors' taste. (Wood alcohol, which was sometimes used as additive to make the homemade liquor, is poisonous and can cause nerve damage, blindness and death when ingested.)

It is an era marked with flappers and jazz and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby.’

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