Many of those who had supported the Prohibition amendment had assumed that beer and unfortified wines would be spared. It was only now that it began to dawn on people just how sweeping—how dismayingly total—Prohibition was going to be. That was perhaps the most remarkable feature of all in the introduction of Prohibition to America—that it took so many people by surprise. As the social historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in Only Yesterday: “The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.”
Like Brexit.
