Is it true that Memorial Union served beer during Prohibition?

The Union did indeed serve beer during Prohibition, but the UW wasn’t a bootlegger operation. In Wisconsin, Prohibition wasn’t always as prohibitive as people think. In 1919, the United States ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States, and in 1920, the Volstead Act gave the amendment legal force. It also provided a definition of which liquors were intoxicating: ones with more than 0.5 percent alcohol. Although Wisconsin had voted for the amendment, many Wisconsinites were far from keen on that definition; they had thought Prohibition would only apply to hard liquor, not beer and wine. Then, as now, Wisconsin was a national leader in brewing: Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz, and Miller were all headquartered in Milwaukee. In 1926, Wisconsin governor John Blaine put forward a referendum calling to legalize beerwith a 2.75 percent alcohol content. He was then elected to the Senate and urged Congress to let the people chugalug, and in early 1933, the Cullen-Harrison Act legalized beer with a 3.2 percent alcohol level. On March 23, the UW Board of Regents allowed the Union to begin selling 3.2 beer, the first American university to serve booze on campus. A month later, on April 25, the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified, repealing Prohibition. So yes, for 33 days, the Union sold beer — legally — during Prohibition.