Despite the apparent unwillingness of Michigan citizens to forsake the "demon rum," temperance crusaders did not cease their efforts: Prohibition didn't work, but taxation might. On August 2, 1875, a newly passed state liquor tax law, which became even more stringent over the years, levied an annual tax of $40 on beer retailers and a tax on brewers ranging from $50 to $300 a year depending on their output.

     Even these measures aimed at controlling the liquor traffic did not satisfy the "drys," who persisted in their attempts to create a nation of teetotalers and finally met with success. Michigan voted to go dry as of May 1, 1918, and the Eighteenth Amendment, turning the whole nation dry, was ratified on January 29, 1919.

     Passage of Prohibition was in some measure tied to the entry of the United States into World War I on the side of the Allies. The outbreak of war with Germany precipitated a vast wave of anti-German hysteria in the United States, which in turn kindled a hatred of all things German. Many Americans even tried to link German-American brewers with some mysterious plot to use beer to corrupt innocent American youth and thus aid the nefarious Kaiser.

     Grand Rapids, too, had its anti-German sentiments. The nearby town of Berlin changed its name to Marne, the teaching of German was banned in the local schools, and because so many of the city's brewers were of German ancestry, support for Prohibition was much stronger than might otherwise have been the case.