Bootleggers, bondage and law-breaking bashes! The scandalous history of the wild party

For more than a month now, the press has been full of stories of “illegal” parties in Downing Street. The government, we are told, has almost ground to a halt because of the scandal.

Given the coverage, one might easily get the impression that the law-breaking bash is a recent invention, something that could only happen in lockdown, driven by privilege and an unhealthy sense of entitlement. Yet the modern party began life as a crime just over a century ago, when the Volstead Act banned the production and sale of alcohol in the US. As the New York Times explained in 1920:

You cannot carry a hip flask.
You cannot give away or receive a bottle of liquor as a gift.
You cannot take liquor to hotels or restaurants and drink it in the public dining rooms.
You cannot buy or sell formulas or recipes for homemade liquors.
You cannot …

It was not technically illegal to drink at home – but procuring the booze for a party meant breaking the law. Not that that stopped everyone.