Laramie Republican, 16 January 1920, page 1: Old J. Barleycorn is out of business

Front page of the Laramie Republican, a Friday evening paper, 16 January 1920. The left-hand lead is an Associated Press dispatch headed “Old J. Barleycorn Is Out of Business,” with the deck “National Prohibition Amendment Takes Effect at Midnight and Legislation Has Been Provided to Carry It into Force.” The League of Nations story shares the top of the page.

The dispatch is datelined Chicago, 16 January. It says that national prohibition at midnight would “mark a time of mourning at Chicago hotels, clubs and cafes,” and that with a single exception the hotels announced no festivities. It then recounts the measures that came first: a law against providing liquor to men in uniform and the wartime food-control act that stopped the making of beer and whisky. It also summarizes the amendment’s passage through Congress and the states.

This archive files the page as a same-day record of how the start of Prohibition was reported in a Mountain West paper. The legal history in the dispatch, including its vote counts, is not taken from it. The Library of Congress OCR splits the word “effect” in the headline; it is printed here as one word.