Prohibition on campus: The roaring drunk ’20s

“By the end of the decade the polls  of the Congressional Hearing on the Repeal of the Prohibition Amendment presented overwhelming evidence that men and women students drank in a proportion close to two drinkers to every non-drinker….. At the University of North Carolina, of the 944 students who voted, 67 percent admitted drinking to some extent…. and 85 percent favored repeal or modification…..

“At Duke, the [campus newspaper] editor casually suggested that the most considerate senior gift to the college might be ‘a large room about the size of the new gym, with several hundred beds in it, where the Saturday night drunks might go when they come in Sunday morning so that they might not disturb their roommates….

” ‘A dance among the younger set can hardly be called a success nowadays unless most of the boys get “high,” not to mention the occasional girl who cannot be outdone….’ ”

— From “The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s”  by Paula S. Fass (1977)