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50 free Prohibition trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
46 free Prohibition trivia questions with answers. From January 1920 to December 1933 the United States tried to stop drinking, and mostly failed in ways that make for great trivia. This Prohibition quiz covers how the law happened (the Anti-Saloon League, Wayne Wheeler, Carrie Nation and her hatchet, the veto Congress overrode), how people got around it (medicinal whiskey, sacramental wine, grape bricks with helpful warnings, Detroit's river trade, the schooner captain who never watered his rum) and how it ended (3.2 beer, Pauline Sabin's repeal army and the only amendment ever ratified by state conventions). The gangsters are here too: Capone's tax conviction, the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, George Remus shooting his wife on the way to their divorce, and the Untouchables. So are the strange consequences: poisoned industrial alcohol, jake leg, moonshine cars that became NASCAR and the state that stayed dry until 1966. The early questions suit anyone who has seen The Untouchables or Boardwalk Empire; the later ones are for history buffs. Every answer was checked against a reference page and shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01National Prohibition took effect on 17 January of which year?
1920
The 18th Amendment was ratified a year earlier, on 16 January 1919, and by its own terms the country went dry exactly one year later.
Q 02Which amendment to the US Constitution established Prohibition?
Eighteenth
It passed Congress with a 68 percent supermajority in the House and was ratified by 46 of the 48 states; only Connecticut and Rhode Island opted out.
Q 03Prohibition's enforcement law was popularly named after which Minnesota congressman?
Andrew Volstead
Congress passed the National Prohibition Act on 28 October 1919 over President Wilson's veto; it banned beer at home but let families make 200 gallons of wine or cider a year.
Q 04Which president's veto of the Volstead Act did Congress override in October 1919?
Woodrow Wilson
Wilson objected on technical grounds; the same Congress had already banned wartime beer production before the war even ended.
Q 05Which pressure group, run by 'dry boss' Wayne Wheeler, did the most to push Prohibition through?
The Anti-Saloon League
Wheeler, an Oberlin graduate from Ohio, perfected single-issue pressure politics: back any candidate, of any party, who voted dry.
Q 06Which temperance activist, arrested more than 30 times, smashed saloons with a hatchet?
Carrie Nation
After wrecking 'the finest saloon in Wichita' in 1901 and serving two weeks in jail, she walked out and vowed to raid more.
Q 07In 1881, which state became the first to write a ban on alcoholic beverages into its constitution?
Kansas
Maine had passed the first statutory ban back in 1851, and a dozen states copied the 'Maine Law' before it was repealed in 1856.
Q 08The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the movement's grassroots base, was founded in which year?
1874
Its second president, Frances Willard, framed the goal as 'reforming the drinking classes' and pulled it into wider social reform.
Q 09Senator Sheppard said repealing Prohibition was as likely as a humming-bird flying to which planet?
Mars
He was one of the amendment's authors; it took just 14 years to prove him wrong.
Q 10By 1925, roughly how many speakeasies were estimated to be operating in New York City alone?
30,000 to 100,000
Other names for the illicit bars were 'blind pig' and 'blind tiger'; the modern speakeasy-bar revival started with Milk & Honey in 2000.
Q 11Roughly how much did doctors earn from legal whiskey prescriptions during Prohibition, 1921-1930?
$40 million
About 11 million prescriptions were written a year, and one doctor was cited for writing 475 in a single day.
Q 12Which drugstore chain grew from 20 to 525 stores in the 1920s, helped by medicinal alcohol sales?
Walgreens
In 1931 alone, 400 pharmacists and 1,000 doctors were caught in a scam selling signed prescription forms to bootleggers.
Q 13'Wine bricks' of grape concentrate carried a label warning buyers not to do what?
Leave the liquid in a jug for twenty days
Q 21Which motor sport openly traces its origins to Prohibition-era bootleg drivers racing for pride?
NASCAR
Bill France Sr. started organising races on Daytona Beach in 1935 and founded the sanctioning body in 1948.
Q 22Al Capone was finally sent to federal prison in 1931 for what crime?
Tax evasion
Charged with 22 counts, he was convicted on five and sentenced to eleven years; neurosyphilis left him debilitated before his release.
Q 23How many North Side Gang members and associates were murdered in the 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre?
Seven
Two of the killers were dressed as police; the intended target, Bugs Moran, had not yet arrived at the garage.
The 'warning' was really a recipe; California grape acreage grew about 700 percent in the first five years of Prohibition.
Q 14As many as how many people died drinking industrial alcohol 'denatured' on government orders during Prohibition?
10,000
New York's medical examiner Charles Norris said the government must bear 'the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes'.
Q 15'Canned heat', jellied alcohol that desperate Prohibition drinkers strained and drank, was sold under what brand name?
Sterno
The result was poisonous though rarely fatal; Prohibition also boosted output of legal grape juice, which quadrupled during the era.
Q 16'Jake leg', a paralysis that struck tens of thousands in 1930, came from an adulterated patent medicine made from what?
Jamaica ginger
The extract was 70 to 80 percent alcohol; a plasticiser added to fool federal testers turned out to be a nerve toxin.
Q 17What percentage of liquor smuggled into the US during Prohibition is estimated to have come through Detroit?
75%
The Detroit River, with Windsor, Ontario on the far bank, was almost impossible to police, and Canada's distillers boomed.
Q 18Rum-runner Bill McCoy's reputation for what practice is (falsely) said to have given us 'the real McCoy'?
Never watering his liquor
He sailed a Gloucester schooner renamed Tomoka from Bimini to just outside US waters, until the Coast Guard cutter Seneca caught him in November 1923.
Q 19Which Canadian founded the Distillers Corporation in 1924, then bought Seagram and profited from Prohibition?
Samuel Bronfman
He was born on a ship en route to Canada from Bessarabia; Seagram became the world's largest liquor distiller.
Q 20Home-distilled liquor was called 'bathtub gin' in northern cities. What was it called in the rural South?
Moonshine
Runners souped up their cars to outrun 'revenuers', and stock car racing traces its roots to those drivers.
Q 24What nickname did Eliot Ness's incorruptible Chicago Prohibition agents earn?
The Untouchables
Ness later became Cleveland's Safety Director during the Torso Murders; his memoir came out months after his death and made him famous.
Q 25Who won Best Supporting Actor for De Palma's 1987 film about Eliot Ness and Al Capone?
Sean Connery
David Mamet's script was loosely based on Ness's 1957 book, though most of the plot is invented.
Q 26New York agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith became famous for using what tactic to raid speakeasies?
Disguises
They racked up 4,933 arrests before being laid off in a 1925 reorganisation of the bureau.
Q 27"King of the Bootleggers" George Remus was acquitted in 1927 after shooting whom in a public park?
His wife
He had his driver run her taxi off the road on the way to their divorce hearing; the jury took nineteen minutes to find him insane.
Q 28George Remus based his bootlegging empire in Cincinnati because what share of US bonded whiskey lay within 300 miles?
About 80 percent
He simply bought the distilleries, then 'stole' the whiskey from himself en route to his pharmacies; a jury took under two hours to convict him.
Q 29Which justice wrote the 'right to be let alone' dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928)?
Louis Brandeis
Roy Olmstead's ring employed some fifty people and its own boats; the 5-4 ruling stood until Katz v. United States in 1967.
Q 30Which bootlegger fresh out of Sing Sing took over Harlem's Cotton Club in 1923?
Owney Madden
Boxer Jack Johnson had opened it as the Club Deluxe in 1920; under Madden it was whites-only in the audience despite its Black stars.