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1918–1933
Indiana went dry on its own law in April 1918, nearly two years before national Prohibition, and South Bend's saloons — the geography of the 1870s killings — closed their legal trade. What replaced them, in the record of the decade, was a layered economy: family saloons reborn as "soft drink parlors," stills and resale pipelines behind them, and the Chicago road as the city's supply line. South Bend sat close enough to Chicago to be served from it and far enough to hold a market of its own, and the trade ran at every scale from the basement wine-press to the wholesale lot. The decade's one fully documented South Bend figure operated at that top scale, and her case — told next — shows the economy's distinguishing local feature: at its documented center, the sellers of confiscated liquor were the men who had seized it.
Enforcement, in the record reached, appears less as raids than as that corruption's exposure. No South Bend raid of the Fort Wayne scale — federal sweeps jailing dozens in a night — stands in the sources reached for this page, and none is invented. The city's documented Prohibition story is the Szabo case and the small township speakeasy that follows it; beyond those, the dry decade's local texture survives in the county's saloon-to-parlor conversions and in claims, like Szabo's own, that are printed below as claims. Repeal came December 5, 1933, and the legal trade resumed over the same counters it had left.
Sources:
- Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana History Blog — the Szabo account and its newspaper base, read in full (see the following entry)
- Dorothy V. Corson, A Cave of Candles (Notre Dame) — the Talley/Chirhart house (see the entry following Szabo)