Category File
Prohibition
9 documented theories filed under this subject.
- Airmail Spy NetworkThis theory claimed that the expanding airmail system was serving a covert surveillance role. Rather than simply carrying letters and navigating by beacon, pilots were allegedly scanning fields, barns, and backyards for illicit stills and reporting what they saw to authorities. The rumor flourished in the overlap between the growth of commercial aviation and the Prohibition era, when Americans knew both that aircraft were traversing the country at low altitude and that federal enforcement agencies were trying to stop illegal alcohol production and smuggling. In that environment, routine mail flights could be reimagined as aerial intelligence missions.
- Prohibition as a Health ResetProhibition as a Health Reset was the theory that the ban on alcohol was not only a moral or public-order reform, but a biological purification project. In its strongest form, the theory claimed that the state sought to clean and harden the national bloodstream for a future militarized program, sometimes imagined as a super-soldier initiative grounded in eugenics and selective fitness. The historical basis beneath the theory was real enough to sustain it: prohibitionist rhetoric often linked alcohol to degeneration, heredity, and “racial poison,” and eugenic language circulated openly in early twentieth-century reform culture. The conspiracy version converted temperance into biomedical pre-conditioning for a future state warrior class.
- The Chicago Underground WarThe Chicago Underground War was the theory that Chicago’s hidden freight-tunnel railway, including the small underground electric trains that later folklore sometimes called “Bunnies,” formed a covert logistics network for gangland operations during Prohibition. In the specific St. Valentine’s Day Massacre version, the theory claimed that bodies, weapons, or participants were moved through these tunnels to conceal routes of travel or dispose of evidence after the killings. The historical tunnel system was real: a freight and utility tunnel network built under downtown Chicago, with an early but short-lived mail contract and long-running freight service. The conspiracy version arose by combining that genuine underground infrastructure with the city’s gang mythology and then stretching the tunnel system beyond what is clearly documented in the massacre itself.
- The Beating of the DrysThe Beating of the Drys was a rumor complex from the late Prohibition era claiming that prominent dry politicians and Anti-Saloon League leaders were not true abstainers at all, but secret drinkers whose private habits were known to organized crime. According to the theory, the mob preserved incriminating evidence, supplied discreet liquor, and used that knowledge to blackmail supposedly upright reform leaders into silence, selective enforcement, or behind-the-scenes compromise. The theory grew in an atmosphere where “drink wet and vote dry” had become a widely recognized accusation, and where scandal, hypocrisy, and corruption were increasingly associated with Prohibition politics. In its strongest form, the story recast the dry movement not as morally rigid but as privately compromised and therefore governable by the criminal underworld.
- The Liquor Re-EducationThe Liquor Re-Education theory held that Prohibition was not primarily about sobriety, morality, or crime reduction, but about testing how quickly a mass population could be conditioned to obey a law that large numbers considered irrational or intrusive. In this reading, the ban on alcohol became a national behavior-modification experiment: an attempt to measure compliance, shame, habit disruption, and the social power of repeated enforcement. The theory took on a more psychological tone in later retellings, especially when linked to Pavlovian conditioning, Progressive reform, and the language of the “noble experiment.” Its core claim was that the real subject of Prohibition was not liquor, but obedience itself.
- The Secret Speakeasy SubwaysThe Secret Speakeasy Subways theory was the rumor that beneath New York City there existed a parallel underground rail system, or at least a hidden network of special-use tracks and tunnels, reserved for bootleg transport, VIP movement, and clandestine visits by powerful gangsters and politicians during Prohibition. In its most dramatic form, the story claimed that Al Capone and senior political figures could travel underground between protected locations without using the public subway. The theory drew power from the city’s real subterranean complexity: abandoned lines, service tunnels, freight tracks, old pneumatic-transit remnants, and concealed rail connections such as the later-famous Waldorf-Astoria platform. These real underground spaces gave the rumor enough physical plausibility to endure as a New York Prohibition legend.
- The Grape Juice Church PlotThe Grape Juice Church Plot was the belief that national Prohibition represented not only a moral and political victory for temperance reformers, but a hidden commercial victory for Welch’s and other grape juice interests that stood to benefit from the weakening of wine culture in the United States. In its strongest form, the theory argued that Protestant temperance activism, church adoption of unfermented grape juice, and Prohibition-era regulation combined to displace sacramental wine, damage the domestic wine trade, and normalize grape juice as the respectable religious and social substitute. The theory drew strength from the real pre-Prohibition rise of Welch’s as an alcohol-free communion product and from the real damage Prohibition did to American wine production, even though parts of the grape and wine industry adapted through legal concentrates and “wine bricks.”
- The Poisoned Alcohol GenocideThe Poisoned Alcohol Genocide was the belief that during Prohibition the U.S. government did more than enforce alcohol bans: it knowingly made industrial alcohol lethally toxic in order to kill off drinkers, especially poorer, immigrant, urban, or politically unruly citizens who continued to defy the law. The theory grew from a very real federal policy of requiring denatured industrial alcohol to contain poisonous additives, including methanol, even though officials knew bootleggers were stealing and redistilling that alcohol for beverage use. As deaths mounted in the mid-1920s, critics described the policy as something closer to chemical punishment than public regulation. In its strongest form, the theory treated the poison program as a deliberate campaign of social killing rather than a deterrent policy with deadly consequences.
- The Prohibition "Liquor-Poisoning" PlotThis theory held that the federal government intentionally poisoned industrial alcohol during Prohibition in order to kill or disable people who drank illegal liquor. Unlike many panic narratives, this one rests on a substantial documentary foundation: federal policy did require more dangerous denaturing formulas for industrial alcohol, and those formulas contributed to deaths when bootleggers reprocessed or diverted industrial spirits for drinking. The conspiracy form of the theory extends this into a broader claim that the state knowingly accepted mass death as an enforcement strategy.