Staff photo by Fritz Busch Denis Warta of New Ulm talks about Prohibition in the Brown County Museum Annex. He related many stories about what it was like to live in New Ulm at that time.

NEW ULM — Denis Warta talked about Prohibition to a roomful of people at the Brown County Museum Annex in no uncertain terms Thursday night.

“In conclusion, it was a stupid law that we still live with today, with smuggling, drug dealing and gangs,” Warta said.

He said it wasn’t uncommon to see steam coming from basement windows in and around New Ulm, as people, most often farmers, made moonshine that often wound up in Chicago if it wasn’t used to spike “near” beer to taste like real beer around here.

Warta told of local teenagers who drove new cars filled with small containers of moonshine all the way to Chicago on back roads, then return home on Chicago Northwestern Railroad passenger cars.

“A friend of mine said Al Capone was at his farm,” Warta said. “He wanted to ensure the moonshine he bought was not distilled with lead solder.”

“Prohibition passed on a wave of anti-German sentiment. New Ulm was more intensely targeted by federal agents,” Warta said. “Albert Steinhauser, publisher of the New Ulm Post and the New Ulm Review really had an anti-war stance. Federal agents arrested him in 1918 and charged him under the Espionage Act. The case was later dropped.”

“He wrote that people had the right to govern their own personal life. That Prohibition would not last, it would lose out to common sense.”

Warta told of how American temperance advocate Carrie Nation, known for using a hatchet to demolish barrooms, visited New Ulm and sold hatchets for 25 cents and left town with more than $30.

“She branded saloons and saloonkeepers as satanic,” Warta said.

He told stories of how Chicago mob members would meet light airplanes loaded with moonshine that flew from Detroit to Chicago, after getting it from Canada where there was no Prohibition.

Warta said pharmacists were licensed to handle alcohol because it was often used by doctors as medicine.

“I recall learning three things in third grade. First, everyone is born with a free will. Second, only God can and may judge. And third, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” Warta said. “Most people forgot that after third grade.”

Fritz Busch can be emailed at fbusch@nujournal.com.