The end of Prohibition in Washington state

April 6, 1933: New Beers Eve. That’s what people were calling it as Washington’s prohibition laws were repealed. The first drink was served at midnight on April 7 at a bar just off 4th Avenue in Seattle. The beer ran out by noon that day.

“It is a real occasion for thankfulness, marking a new found freedom for the American people made possible by the wisdom, foresight, and courage of our great president, with the cooperation of an understanding congress,” August Busch (of the Budweiser family) proclaimed on April 7. “There is a song in hearts: ‘happy days are here again’ – and they are here again. From out of a huge maze of confusion and anxiety comes a beacon light to guide a way to better times.”

“We tried regulating it, we tried outlawing it. It didn’t work,” historian Feliks Banel explains to Seattle’s Morning News about the decision to repeal the prohibition on alcohol.

Banel says Washington was one of the first states to prohibit alcohol in 1916, long before the constitution was amended. In 1932, the same year that FDR was elected, we passed a law here to repeal all liquor laws.

Banel says it makes sense that we were the first to outlaw and the first to repeal alcohol. Washington has always been a progressive place. It’s a state people often find themselves migrating to, says Banel. Before and during prohibition, people moved here to work in the plants built for World War I. They traveled from urban areas and the East Coast.

By the 1930’s, Banel explains, the people who had migrated here, during a time when the unemployment rate was near 25 percent, didn’t like Seattle’s back water feel. When it came time to vote in 1932, we were in the heart of the Great Depression and the voters wanted to get rid of Prohibition.

“We’re more open to things here and things change here because a lot of migration happened here,” says Banel. “People came from elsewhere with ideas – maybe they were leaving something in their past or other places they lived and they thought ‘let’s do something differently here.'”

According to Banel, we’ve always been labeled as a progressive state. There was even one man in the 1930’s that called us the ‘Soviet of Washington.’

Things didn’t change much. Most recently, we became one of the first states to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

Read more about Washington’s prohibition history:
Ken Burns features Seattle story in film, ‘Prohibition’