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April 1918 — 5 December 1933
The law: Indiana enacted its own prohibition in 1917 and went dry in April 1918 under state law, ahead of the federal amendment — the crime record of this history carries the statute's course. In Mishawaka the law fell on the city's signature industry: brewing had anchored the city's economy since the nineteenth century, and Kamm & Schellinger were its brewers.
The answer: The brewery's response was compliance as commerce. In May 1920 it converted its product to a nonalcoholic cereal beverage — The Arrow, "It Always Hits the Spot" — and a line of soft drinks; the building kept working, the crews kept working, and the city's thirst was answered, at legal strength, with near-beer and chicken dinners at the roadhouses. This is the honest shape of Mishawaka's moral-regulation fight: it was not a council fight. The city's saloons and its brewery were regulated from Indianapolis and Washington, and at home the argument was fought as business — what a brewery could lawfully make, and what a thirsty county would drive to Canada-side substitutes, bootleggers and stills to get. The shadow side stands where it belongs, in the crime record: the still raids northeast of the city in October 1921, and the Midway at 810 West Fourth Street — tavern and dancehall both — padlocked after its operators' arrest in 1930, at the strength of the house-history record the crime file carries. National repeal came 5 December 1933, and the brewery's lawful course after it is the business record's.
The negative, printed whole: No Mishawaka dance-hall ordinance fight, Sunday-closing fight or saloon-license controversy stands in the record reached — the searches run for this section surfaced other Indiana cities' ordinances, not Mishawaka's. The city's documented moral fight was over drink, and its paper is the statute, the brewery's conversion, and the enforcement record. The settling sources for any council-level fight are the council and Board of Public Safety records at the Hesburgh Libraries and the Enterprise
Sources:
- The crime record, Crime History — Indiana's dry law of April 1918 and the July 1917 act's "for beverage purposes"; the still raids of October 1921 (News-Times, 19 October 1921); the Midway padlocking (the 2009 house history of 810 W. Fourth Street).
- The culture record, Culture — Kamm & Schellinger's conversion to The Arrow, May 1920, "It Always Hits the Spot."