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Part II: No brewers
While there appears to have been very little if any commercial brewing in Maine after 1910, such was not the case across most of the rest of America. Brewing existed; even flourished.
But not for long. The dry juggernaut was sweeping across the land. Fueled by the rhetoric of the W.C.T.U. (Women's Christian Temperance Union) and the Anti-Saloon League, state after state fell into the dry column. The extreme anti-German emotions caused by World War I didn't help, either. After all, names like Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, Schaefer, Rheingold, Blatz, Pabst, Yuengling, etc,. etc. were decidedly German. Things got so bad that the German Brewing Company of Cumberland, Maryland changed its name, in 1917, to the Liberty Brewing Company.
The 18th Amendment
The 18th Amendment to the Constitution - the Prohibition Amendment - was submitted to the states by Congress on December 18, 1917. The first state to ratify it, Mississippi, did so on January 8, 1918. The necessary 36th state (thirty-six was three-quarters of the then 48 states), Nebraska, ratified it on January 16, 1920. The Volstead (or Prohibition Enforcement) Act was passed by Congress on October 28, 1919. It, too, went into effect on January 16, 1920.
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