“Nobody believed it would happen,” David Wondrich, the cocktail historian, said. “Prohibition was a small-town, rural movement, and people in the cities resented it. They really thought until the very end that there was going to be a way out of it, and then, suddenly, it became clear there wasn’t.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/us/100-years-ago-the-booziest-january-suddenly-dried-up.html