Judge — December 11, 1926 — page 14: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This Judge magazine cartoon satirizes Prohibition's implementation by interrogating "Liberty" (personified as a woman wearing a liberty cap and labeled "LIBERTY") about her whereabouts when Prohibition became law. A judge perched on a tall bench demands to know: "Where were you the day Prohibition became a law?" and asks "Has she an alibi?" The satire suggests that Liberty was absent or complicit during Prohibition's passage—implying the law violated American freedoms. The cartoon criticizes Prohibition as fundamentally un-American, incompatible with liberty itself. By treating Liberty as a suspect requiring an alibi, the cartoonist mocks the government's restriction of personal choice, suggesting Prohibition represented a failure to protect constitutional freedoms.