BY STEVEN JUPITER
The December 22, 1922 edition of The Brandon Union described a failed smuggling run from New York to Vermont over the frozen waters of Lake Champlain.
The “Roaring Twenties” coincided with one of the most famously misguided social experiments in American history: Prohibition.
From the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 to its repeal by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, the production, transport, and sale of alcohol was prohibited in the United States. Rather than eliminate the consumption of alcohol, though, Prohibition simply drove it into the shadows, where organized crime operated a robust black market in booze.
Networks of “Rum Runners” began to smuggle liquor from Europe and Canada into the U.S. almost immediately. Clandestine drinking establishments — the infamous “speakeasies” of the 1920s Jazz Age — popped up in cities around the country. Newspapers were filled with images of federal law enforcement agents pouring barrels of illegal hooch into city sewers.
On December 19, 1922, two smugglers loaded a car with ale in New York and attempted to drive over the frozen surface of Lake Champlain. According to the December 22, 1922, edition of The Brandon Union, however, they fell through a patch of thin ice mere feet from the Vermont side of the lake.
The car sank into the frigid waters while the smugglers managed to flee back across the ice to New York. According to The Union, the car and ale were both salvaged, the former taken back to New York and the latter carted off to Middlebury. The fate of the ale remains unknown.
