The Brew Deal: How Beer Helped Battle the Great Depression

Published by EH.Net (July 2026).

Jason E. Taylor. The Brew Deal: How Beer Helped Battle the Great Depression. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. x + 274 pp. $32.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-3031731327.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Eric Rauchway, University of California, Davis.

 

Jason E. Taylor’s The Brew Deal is a highly readable and enjoyable account of the beer industry’s recovery from Prohibition and its contribution to economic recovery, focusing chiefly on the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Roosevelt ran on the repeal of Prohibition in 1932. After his election but shortly before his inauguration Congress passed the 21st amendment, reversing the 18th, and sent it to the states for ratification, which came in December of 1933. While the nation’s drinkers waited for full repeal, the Cullen-Harrison Act, which took effect on April 7, 1933, allowed the sale of low-alcohol beer. For the next eight months beer—albeit a light beverage with only 3.2 percent alcohol by weight—had a special place in the American tippler’s diet, and in the early recovery from the Great Depression.

Readers familiar with Taylor’s existing scholarly articles will know that, together with his co-authors, he has explored various aspects of the beer economy of 1933—notably the geography and financing of its revival. Breweries returned in many of the same places they had thrived before Prohibition began in 1920, and the capital-intensive process of restarting breweries depended on small-scale investors’ willingness to buy stock in the newly re-emerging alcoholic beverage industry. He has documented how entrepreneurs leapt to anticipate the end of Prohibition so they could be ready to begin brewing as soon as it was legal, and how hiring in the industry played a marked role in relieving unemployment, accounting for perhaps 5.6 percent of jobs gained in the spring of 1933. Elsewhere in his work he has offered a nuanced take on the New Deal. In one paper he argues that the immediate effects of the New Deal in sparking recovery were remarkably positive, leading to a strong upswing in economic activity in the spring of 1933, but that the policies of a few months later—especially the higher wages mandated under the National Industrial Recovery Act—reversed this trend toward recovery.

Taylor recapitulates all these arguments in The Brew Deal but without the theoretical and mathematical apparatus perusers of economic journals rightly expect: this is not that sort of book. Indeed, Taylor at one point puts “econometric” in what could be described as bashful scare-quotes; he introduces the book saying he was looking for a different, more enjoyable way to approach the topic than his usual search for “statistical significance”—the quotes are, again, his. This book aims at a more general readership less comfortable with regression coefficients and confidence intervals.

I hope it finds one: Taylor writes exceptionally well and tells a good story—or rather, one good story after another about how beer returned swiftly to the nation’s mugs in 1933, after brewers cleared out the mushrooms that thrived in disused facilities. He cheerfully recounts in detail the knock-on effects of legalized beer: demand increased for necessaries like barley and hops, or lumber for cooperage; but also for delectable accompaniments like smoked fish and other salty treats.

This is not only an enjoyable story, it is an important one, or at least a piece of an important one. While there is much scholarship about Prohibition, there is relatively little about repeal. Most accounts treat repeal as the end of something—the tragic end of the Noble Experiment or the welcome curtain on a foolish farce—rather than the beginning of something else. As Taylor notes, the era after Prohibition—the era we are still living in—is not an era of mere legality. It has for nearly a century been an era of patchwork regulation as states and localities carve out their own rules for making, moving, selling, and drinking alcohol. If you live in the United States and have ever sought out a particular kind of alcohol—rather than just picking up whatever’s locally available—you will have suddenly realized how omnipresent and even prohibitory the nation’s alcohol laws can still be in stopping you from getting what you want if it has to cross state lines, let alone international borders.

Indeed, Taylor’s book is so easy and pleasant to read I found myself wishing it were a bit more difficult, or at least complicated, because there are plenty of reasons to talk about the post-Prohibition era in more rigorous terms. Some years ago Harry Gene Levine pointed out that even after repeal, governments kept such power over intoxicating beverages that the period is better understood as one of alcohol control, during which officials still sought to shape the consumption of alcohol to serve their purposes (Levine, “The Birth of American Alcohol Control: Prohibition, the Power Elite, and the Problem of Lawlessness,” Contemporary American Drug Problems, January 1985). New Dealers worked actively to promote the recovery of the wine industry—which probably required more assistance than beer, owing to the specialized nature of wine-grape viticulture—in part by promoting wine as a healthful and moderate alternative to beer and liquor. Beer had a specific cultural and political meaning in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s and, as Lisa McGirr points out, control over certain kinds of alcohol served some political interests (McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, W.W. Norton, 2016). The US government also actively promoted, and indeed itself undertook, rum manufacture starting in the 1930s, which also entailed promoting its consumption. Some future scholar could put Taylor’s story alongside these and produce a more systematic account of alcohol’s political uses immediately after decriminalization.

Taylor’s research appears chiefly to have used online sources, especially the invaluable Newspapers.com archive which has so many and such local periodicals it is an excellent resource that is sadly—I suspect because it is marketed principally to amateur genealogists rather than to research libraries—underused by historical scholars. Still, inasmuch as Taylor counts himself “pedantic,” I hope he will not think me unfair if I point out some other sources he might profitably have examined. He correctly argues that the case for repeal was in 1932 partly an economic one, but he might have noted how important this case was to Roosevelt’s campaign. The Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee distributed innumerable flyers laying out a program of “sound industrial recovery,” the first point of which was “immediate modification of the Volstead Act [the federal law implementing Prohibition] which will give back jobs to thousands.” This “modification” was exactly what the Cullen-Harrison Act did. (The other two explicit points in the flyers were reduced working hours and lower tariffs. The flyers are reproduced following page 63 in “An Aid to the End,” an unpublished memoir by Mary Dewson in her papers at the Radcliffe Library, Harvard University.)

As another example: it is always risky, especially in the absence of in-depth archival research, to assert a negative, but Taylor does it when he says “Roosevelt didn’t make a peep about beer legalization, or or much else for that matter regarding policy, during the four months between his November election and March inauguration.” (150) To the contrary, President-elect Roosevelt intervened at a critical moment in the debate over repeal, after the House of Representatives failed to pass a resolution for a Constitutional amendment. Balky congressional Democrats were largely willing “to go back on the Democratic campaign pledge as to beer,” wrote one Roosevelt staffer of the president-elect’s assessment: “to ‘welch’ was the word he used” (Celeste Jedel diary, entry for 1/5/33, Raymond Moley Papers, Hoover Institution.) Roosevelt did not propose to allow any retreat and told Democratic leaders they must deliver a resolution that would “conform to the platform,” which they did (Ernest K. Lindley, The Roosevelt Revolution: First Phase, Viking, 1933, 48).

I enjoyed this book. To say that I wish Taylor had devoted more time to archival research and to develop his thesis does not detract from what is here, which is a breezy but important read, accessible to nonspecialists, on the minor but important role played by 3.2 beer in restoring happy days over the course of 1933.

 

Eric Rauchway is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His publications include “A New Deal for Wine,” with Kathryn Olmsted (Journal of Policy History, 2024), and he is currently researching the New Deal in the US territories.

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