How did we get from Prohibition to the Great Recession? Let’s examine the decades in between

Why are we in the news business so enamored by historic-anniversary stories, especially those measured in 10-year increments?

It can’t just be that counting by 10s is one of the first higher-math skills we master, nor is it that they’re a tradition in this industry or popular with readers — not solely anyway.

Time travel is also educational and enlightening for understanding our present predicaments. What happened the last time we faced a problem like this? Did the solutions work or make the situation worse? Did we learn anything? If so, how’d we wind up back in this mess?

So we’re going to use a centennial anniversary of an event you might have read a word or two about as a starting point for a mad dash through the intervening years, in leaps of 10, to consider what was going on that had implications for business and economic life in this region and state. As our primary resource we’ll use the terrific online encyclopedia of Washington’s past, HistoryLink.org.

We’ll start with Prohibition.

While the banning of the production and sale of alcoholic beverages was a big deal nationally and locally (including some trade in booze smuggled from Canada, an activity organized by a Seattle cop), the specific date of 1919 (ratification of the 18th Amendment and passage of the Volstead Act) is a little less so. Washington had already turned on the lights and shooed the partygoers out the door with a “bone-dry” law passed in 1917.

“Washington’s wine industry was one of the major outgrowths of the state’s irrigation projects in the central and eastern areas of the state,” HistoryLink notes. “When Washington went bone-dry in 1917, the state’s fledgling wine industry disintegrated almost overnight.”

In 2019 Washington has a wine industry that is far more than fledgling, but it also has many of the same debates that inspired Prohibition in the first place — the personal and societal costs of its abuse vs. the apparent futility of controlling its use and the potential economic gain from legalization. The contemporary debates involve not just alcohol but marijuana and even cigarettes, a currently legal substance being pushed toward controlled or even banned status.

We’ll likely be having those same debates in 2119.

In the meantime, let’s see what else was going on in years ending in 9:

1929 — Historians and economists tend to agree on the stock market crash as the signal of the onset of the Great Depression, an event whose impact and import can hardly be overwritten, either for Washington or the United States.

Here’s an interesting footnote to history, courtesy of HistoryLink: “In 1929, the Tacoma Water Department drills the first of its ‘A’ Series wells. Well 1-A near South 63rd Street and Clement Avenue produces 4.4 million gallons of drinking water a day. A total of 12 wells will be dug in South Tacoma over the next 20 years.”

Why does this matter?

“During the 1920s, Tacoma got its water from the Green River and from some wells drilled in the 1900s. The Tideflats area could not be exploited for its industrial potential until the city provided more water,” according to HistoryLink.

Hmm, water availability and industrial uses of Tideflats land — headlines from 1929 or 2019, or both?

1939 — The start of World War II in Europe. The United States officially wouldn’t enter for another two years, but the war to come was already spurring industrial production. The production of planes, ships, aluminum and other material in the Northwest would substantially transform the region.

1949 — Dedication ceremonies for the new terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Seventy years later, Western Washington is about to get another commercial-passenger terminal, in Everett.

1959 — Final phase of Alaskan Way Viaduct — the one they’re now tearing down — opens, and the state enacts a minimum wage, $1 an hour.

1969 — The anniversary of the first moon landing will get a lot of attention later this year. The Puget Sound region had a limited role in the 1960s space industry. It could wind up playing a bigger part in the space industry now being built.

1979 — Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping visits Seattle, signaling its emergence from political and economic isolation. Think the emergence of China had any ramifications for the economy here?

1989 — OK, we’re a bit thin for this one. Maybe history takes a year off every now and then.

1999 — Microsoft declared a monopoly, a ruling that now seems almost quaint given what happened to the company and its industry in the intervening years.

2009 — The trough of the Great Recession we’re still trying to shake off. Maybe this is too fresh and raw to be counted as history.

No doubt there are stories bubbling out there that will erupt into conversation-dominating, space-consuming controversies. Some will fade just as quickly, while others will have implications for decades to come. Check this space in, oh, 2049 or so to find out which were which.

This story was originally published January 26, 2019 at 8:00 AM.