When it comes to saloons in America, Grinspan says, “we have this misconception that they’re broken up by ethnicity and Irish people only drank with Irish people and German people only drank with German people. But there’s a great deal of mixing, especially by the 1910s of these populations.”
Slogans like “All Nations Welcome but Carrie,” he says, were “making an argument both against prohibition and for a kind of diversity within their community that the people who are opposed to alcohol and supporting prohibition are coming after.”
Indeed, part of the reason Prohibition passed was that it elicited unusual alliances—organized women who would go on to fight for suffrage worked alongside anti-immigrant hate groups as well as industrialists who didn’t like how saloons were causing drunkenness among their workers and becoming centers of power for unions and political parties.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/bitter-aftertaste-prohibition-american-history-180969266/#:~:text=When%20it%20comes%20to%20saloons,the%201910s%20of%20these%20populations.%E2%80%9D
damn, of course it was literally just the war on drugs of its era
