Sure, but before that most taxes were in the form of excise taxes and import duties, at least in the US. Alcohol taxes were a big portion of that. When the prohibition amendment was enacted in 1919, that money went away -- in theory because people were no longer purchasing alcohol, in reality because they were purchasing untaxed bootleg alcohol. The effect was the same: a big hole in Uncle Sam's revenue stream.
Enter the shiny new income tax, passed just a few years before (1916). This had been sold to the public using Bernie Sanders-style "millionaires and billionaires" rhetoric, but, as is the inevitable way with such things, it was soon being applied to thousandaires and hundredaires. :-)
